Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off on Monday with what appeared to be a form of apology. Rather than diving straight into the buzz about a revamped, AI-powered Siri, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, opened the keynote by focusing on a series of fixes. Over the past two years, while Apple has been scrambling to catch up in AI, frustrations with its core software have been steadily building: a widely disliked design overhaul, a barely functional search tool, a file-sharing feature that constantly broke, and a Health app that largely overlooked half its users. Apple remained silent on all of that during Monday’s event. The WWDC keynote’s structure said it all for them: it led with fixes rather than features and treated the improved Siri as just one item on a lengthy list of enhancements, not the centerpiece. The sequencing implies that Apple feels it must first strengthen its foundations before it can realistically expect users to entrust it with something as important as AI. “Rather than simply rolling out a bunch of flashy new features, we’re also taking the capabilities you already depend on and making them substantially better,” Federighi said, “because we believe the best operating systems aren’t built solely on major breakthroughs—they’re built on obsessing over every detail.” It’s the sort of remark that would pass without notice from most companies, but from Apple, it was about as close to an admission of error as you’re ever likely to hear. Critics had accused the company of no longer sweating the details. Federighi soon had the chance to demonstrate exactly that.
