In an unusual all-hands meeting Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook assured employees that Apple won’t drop the ball when it comes to artificial intelligence. Calling AI “as big or bigger” than the internet, Cook said the company will rise to the occasion.
“Apple must do this,” he said. “Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it.”
In addition to hyping the company’s AI efforts, Cook expressed excitement about all the “amazing” new Apple products in the pipeline. And Apple software chief Craig Federighi told his colleagues not to worry about the long-delayed smarter Siri — a key component of Apple’s AI-infused future.
Apple AI hype after a record-breaking earnings report
While Apple’s revenue train chugs along, seemingly unstoppable, the company’s slow and underwhelming entry into the AI game remains worrisome to many observers. But Tim Cook doesn’t seem worried about the company’s growing suite of AI tools, known collectively as Apple Intelligence. Apple is simply following its own playbook, established with other late — but incredibly successful — arrivals that took the tech world by storm.
“We’ve rarely been first,” Cook told employees during the hourlong meeting. “There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod.”
But each of Apple’s late entries redefined product categories and ultimately proved best-in-class.
“This is how I feel about AI,” Cook said, according to a Bloomberg report that cited “people aware of the meeting.”
The all-hands pep talk place Friday inside the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. It came a day after Apple reported record-breaking quarterly revenue, based on strong Mac sales and subscription services. Apple’s stock price, like those of many other tech companies, fell Friday amid renewed fears of tariffs’ impact on the economy. Apple said Thursday during its earnings call that tariffs put in place by President Donald Trump’s administration could cost the company $1.1 billion in the upcoming quarter.
Slow start for smarter Siri
At some point, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, addressed the elephant in the room: the sorry state of Siri in a world filled with incredibly capable AI chatbots.
He once again explained the failed strategy that delayed the smarter Siri. Apple originally planned to roll out a hybrid Siri that would use two systems. One would handle simple commands the usual way; the other would tap large language models for AI-enhanced features.
“We initially wanted to do a hybrid architecture, but we realized that approach wasn’t going to get us to Apple quality,” Federighi said Friday.
That high-profile failure led Apple to go all in on a totally new Siri architecture that should arrive in 2026.
“The work we’ve done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the results we needed,” Federighi told Apple employees. “This has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned. There is no project people are taking more seriously.”
Federighi also said management changes, including tasking Mike Rockwell and the Vision Pro team with fixing Siri, “supercharged” the effort.
Tim Cook on Apple’s ‘amazing’ product pipeline
AI wasn’t the only topic on the agenda during Apple’s all-hands meeting. Execs addressed topics as varied as the retirement of Apple COO Jeff Williams, Apple TV+ viewership and the impact of government regulations on the company’s business.
Cook also expressed unbridled excitement about Apple’s upcoming blitz of new products, which reportedly will include the first folding iPhone, new smart home products and smart glasses, as well as updates to existing product lines.
“The product pipeline, which I can’t talk about: It’s amazing, guys. It’s amazing,” Cook said. “Some of it you’ll see soon, some of it will come later, but there’s a lot to see.”
Lewis Wallace is the managing editor of Cult of Mac and author of our weekly newsletter, The Weekender.
He’s a San Francisco-based writer and editor specializing in technology and culture. He loves his iPhone, hates Siri, and appreciates any hardware that combines form and function.
Prior to Cult of Mac, he juggled words and ideas as culture editor at Wired.com, homepage editor at TechTV, news product manager at NBCi, copy editor at PC World, reporter at The (Hayward) Daily Review and editor in chief of EveryBody’s News in Cincinnati.
He earned a bachelor of general studies degree with a journalism certificate from the University of Cincinnati. While in school, he worked as the entertainment editor of The News Record and as editor in chief of Clifton Magazine.
He’s also a bass player, who’s recorded and performed around the United States with Those Darn Accordions, The Electric Boogie Dawgz and The Mad Maggies. When not writing, editing or laying down bass lines, he plays darts and serves on the board of the San Francisco Darts League.
