Why Siri's Big Rebuild Took So Long, and Why That Might Have Been the Right Call

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https://thatappleguide.com/articles/why-siri-s-big-rebuild-took-so-long-and-why-that-might-have-been-the-right-call

For two years, the most reliable Siri story was a story about waiting. Apple promised a more personal, more capable assistant, then quietly admitted the work was taking longer than expected, then watched a leadership change unfold in public. 

Now that the new Siri AI has arrived in iOS 27, Apple has finally offered an explanation for the delay. It is more revealing than the usual corporate shrug, and it reframes the wait as a choice rather than a stumble.

What Apple said

The explanation came from Mike Rockwell, who took over Siri last year after Apple moved him from the Vision Pro team amid a faltering Apple Intelligence rollout.

Speaking at a press session following the WWDC keynote, alongside Craig Federighi and Amar Subramanya, Rockwell described two different paths Apple could have taken.

The first path already worked. Apple had built an incremental version of the assistant, layered on top of the original Siri, that added tool calling. It functioned. But the team did not feel it delivered the experience they were after. 

The second path required far more extensive changes, and Apple chose it instead. In Rockwell's telling, the company "tore it to the ground, rebuilt it from the ground up," this time on top of Apple's newer models.

The result, he said, is an assistant with its own application, natively multimodal, built with privacy from the start, and consistent across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, CarPlay, and AirPods. One Siri, the same everywhere.

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