Apple has finally done what once seemed unthinkable: it has cut a deal with Google to use Gemini as the AI engine behind a revamped Siri. For a company that built its legend on owning its products end-to-end — hardware, software, and services — this is more than a partnership. It’s an admission that after more than a decade of missteps, false starts, and executive reshuffles, Tim Cook has effectively conceded that Apple failed at AI.
Siri should have been Apple’s crown jewel. It arrived before its competitors and was deeply integrated into the operating system. Apple acquired Siri with its founders and engineering team in 2010 from Stanford Research Institute, giving it an early lead and a talented group of AI pioneers. Apple had every advantage.
Instead, the Siri team was gone by 2012. The founders and key engineers didn’t leave quietly. In interviews over the years, they described deep frustration with Apple’s bureaucracy, risk aversion, and lack of a long-term AI vision. What could have become the leading AI technology was reduced to a secondary feature that never evolved and became a joke.
After that, Apple cycled through AI leaders, repeatedly reorganized teams, and continued promising that “next year” would be the breakthrough. In 2024 Apple announced that the iPhone 16 lineup was “Built for Apple Intelligence,” but the AI never arrived and Apple is being sued for misleading its customers.
Now Apple has turned to its chief rival and licensed Gemini from Google, because Apple has nowhere else to go but outside the company. While they considered ChatGPT, there were good reasons not to use them. The company is falling behind Google, it’s less financially stable, and they have partnered with Jony Ive to build hardware. There is no love lost between Cook and Ive. Once close partners at Apple, Ive has criticized Apple for not staying true to his vision, while many at Apple blame Ive for many product miscues including demanding the use of thin keyboards for MacBooks that never worked.
This moment echoes earlier Apple stumbles that might have served as warnings.
Apple Maps launched in 2012 as a replacement for Google Maps and was so deeply flawed it forced a rare public apology from Tim Cook. Apple eventually fixed it, but only after years of embarrassment and enormous investment.
Then there was the Apple Car. After a decade of rumors, leadership churn, and billions of dollars spent, Apple quietly walked away. The electric vehicle project wasn’t delayed — it was abandoned. Once again, all of Apple’s money couldn’t create a product because of their dysfuncionality.
This deal most closely parallell’s Apple using Google Search for Safari. It was easier to buy than make.
What makes this latest announcement so troubling is that AI is not just an app like Safari or Maps — it’s a foundation. It underpins search, messaging, productivity, creativity, and how people interact with their devices. By outsourcing that foundation, Apple risks turning the iPhone into exquisitely designed hardware powered by someone else’s brain.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: why buy an iPhone at all if Android phones have the original and most advanced version of Gemini? Especially since Apple charges more for iPhones because they’ve convinced its customers that they are more advanced.
But Android users will get Gemini first, integrated more deeply — not as a licensed layer filtered through Apple’s constraints. Google will always prioritize its own platform. Apple customers may get a polished, privacy-scrubbed version of Gemini, but it will inevitably lag. That undermines one of Apple’s core value propositions: paying more to get the best experience. One can only hope Apple continues developing its own AI in parallel rather than surrendering the field entirely.
Looming over all of this is another issue: Google’s monopolistic power. If Gemini becomes the intelligence behind both Android phones and iPhones, a single company effectively controls the most important cognitive layer of the world’s smartphones. Regulators have already scrutinized Google’s dominance in search; AI may prove even more consequential.
Apple, the company that once told the world to “Think Different,” is now thinking the same — using the same models — as its biggest competitor. Siri may finally get smarter. But Apple’s mystique just got a lot dimmer.
