Insider reveals what went down in Apple’s ugly meeting over your iPhone’s Siri
Insider reveals what went down in Apple’s ugly meeting over your iPhone’s Siri
Publish Date: 2026-06-07 12:45:00
Source Domain: www.phonearena.com
The new Siri that is supposed to make your iPhone 17 Pro Max feel less embarrassing next to a Pixel 10 Pro almost didn’t get a clear owner at all. Before any of the reorganization news you have already read about, there was one meeting where Apple’s most powerful executives sat in a single room and argued over who should be trusted to clean up the company’s AI mess. We now know how tense that room got.The account comes from Bloomberg’s lead Apple reporter Mark Gurman, in his latest Power On newsletter.
What happened in that room
The contextual, cross-app Siri Apple promised is the gap users keep pointing to. | Image by Apple
Around early 2025, Apple’s senior leadership gathered in a conference room near Craig Federighi’s software engineering group. The senior vice presidents were there, along with the COO, the CFO, design chief Alan Dye and Vision Pro lead Mike Rockwell. Tim Cook was not. Then-COO Jeff Williams, who has since retired, called the meeting to order, and the task was blunt: recommend to Cook how to fix AI.
The backdrop was ugly. Apple Intelligence had flopped, the Siri overhaul was about to slip again, and Meta, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic were all sprinting ahead. Cook had largely lost confidence in his AI chief, John Giannandrea, who sat right there as the group concluded Apple had a leadership problem on AI.
Federighi ran much of the discussion, but the voice that carried was Rockwell’s. Fresh off the Vision Pro launch, a technical win even if it bombed commercially, he volunteered to become Apple’s fixer for AI and Siri. Federighi and chip chief Johny Srouji recommended Cook hand him Siri, and by the Top 100 retreat in March 2025, Cook was close to signing off.
The fight nobody saw
Here is the part that never made it into the restructuring we covered earlier. Rockwell thought…
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