Apple’s going to unveil iOS 27 during its WWDC on Monday, and there’s a good chance that half of you are going to hate it.
The single biggest change in this update is that Siri is going to evolve from an out-of-date phone assistant that doesn’t seem to work half the time to a full conversational chatbot, with hooks throughout the OS. Whether it works great or not, it’s going to make a lot of people mad. AI blowback is real, and it’s here, especially among younger generations. Listen to these college graduates boo at the mere mention of AI at their graduation:
The fact of the matter is, Apple is going all-in on generative AI at a time when AI is increasingly associated with massive layoffs, huge data centers using tremendous amounts of water and power, chip shortages driving up costs, misinformation, abuse, suicides, you name it. A lot of people feel that generative AI is dangerous, unhelpful, and often confidently wrong, but it is being forced on them by a billionaire extraction class that just wants the stock to go up.
At the same time, the current Siri is genuinely out of date, doesn’t work well, and needs a modern replacement. Plus, there are lots of people, not just the tech investors, who genuinely like AI and use it frequently. And they feel, perhaps rightly, that Apple is way behind and needs to catch up.
So Apple is in a bit of a no-win situation. It has to delicately thread the needle of convincing the AI lovers and shareholders that with iOS 27, the iPhone is no longer years behind the competition in the biggest tech trend since the internet. But at the same time, it also needs to convince a large and growing group of AI haters that they’re not about to infect a billion iPhones with harmful, soulless slop.
Apple has spent decades cultivating a reputation as the one big tech company that cares about privacy and security, respects creative artists, and protects the environment. And now it’s going to come out swinging with the very technology that is most strongly associated with the very opposite of all of those things.
Can Apple pull off this delicate balancing act and make everyone happy? We’ll find out on June 8 but I think there’s a really good chance that no matter what Apple shows us at WWDC, half of the audience is going to be really unhappy.