Apple's week February 13: Eternal crazy season

Apple's had another rough week with news of supposed AI delays, though things aren't what they seem.

Apple Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence continue to be sticking points for pundits

It seems the closer we get to Apple revealing some long-awaited new product, the wilder the speculation and doom-casting gets. I'm sure this isn't a new phenomenon, but it's reached a tipping point that's become quite annoying in the tech space.

Here's the news of the week:

Extreme media narratives driving the perception of Apple

I could copy and paste everything I said in last week's newsletter about some publication's incessant need for Apple to fail. Of course, that escalated with this anonymous tip about Apple possibly delaying some AI-related Siri features.

I went at length about this in the AppleInsider Podcast this week, but in case you're not a listener, I'll do the short version here. When reading these kinds of reports that are colored by an obvious narrative, it is important to distill them down to their base parts and sift the facts from the opinion.

At the most basic level here, all we know is someone or some group of people at Apple with enough of an axe to grind reached out to complain about perceived problems. What's more odd is the timeframe of these reports suggesting that the issues occurred "as recently as December" or January.

That's not exactly recent in the scale of internal development and testing, especially in software. We have no idea what breakthroughs may have been made in the meantime, if all of the teams were having the same issues, or what part of the project these people even belong to.

There's some absurd number of people within Apple, like 12,000, dedicated to AI, and while I wasn't the one vetting the individual as I'm sure the publication did, it's still odd to think one or even a few people can have a broad view of how it's going. Especially in a company as secretive as Apple.

Anyway, Apple did its usual thing and shrugged the day after the report, much like it did when the same publication suggested Srouji was heading to retirement soon. I'm going to lean towards Apple here, and literally every other sign, that says iOS 26.4 will have new AI features that we'll see built upon in each subsequent release through the year.

Let's see what is announced and what releases in iOS 26.4. I'm reserving my judgement until then.

Apple Vision Pro isn't dead and, I'm tired of hearing about it

I'm aware that I come off defensive when I discuss some of Apple's more controversial products, but to be honest, it's often because I'm confused by the wider sentiment. I get it, Apple Vision Pro is expensive, heavy, and lacks developer support – things are a bit rough.

However, a lot of the general discussion I see around the platform treats it as abandonware. I think this comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the point of this product is and the need for every product to become some kind of societal revolution.

Yes, there might be just 1 million or so Apple Vision Pro models in the wild altogether. That doesn't automatically mean Apple miscalculated or has some kind of flop on its hands.

Something I repeat frequently is that we don't know Apple's success metric. I think this is an important part of the discussion that people often forget.

We don't know Apple's goals and we don't know if they were met. What we do know is that Apple continues to make and sell Apple Vision Pro, and updates to the software and apps are still coming. Immersive experiences and new pipelines for those experiences are also being formed.

It's still early days for the platform, yes, even after two years. Of Apple's products, very few were actually instant hits. Even the original iPhone was somewhat niche at first sales-wise because of it being locked to T-Mobile. While technologically impressive, it was years before it set the world on fire.

Apple Vision Pro needed to launch and it has been quite successful at helping Apple and developers find early pain points in the platform. visionOS 2 and 26 are evidence of that. Plus, there wouldn't be an M5 model if this was some kind of one-off experiment.

I expect it will be some time before we get another hardware iteration, which will inevitably lead to more "Apple Vision Pro is a failure" discourse. I'm excited for visionOS 27, though it might be a rather light year given Apple's focus on AI.

We're buying a house!

I'm swamped with paperwork and phone calls about buying this silly little thing, but it's all going well so far. I'd love to write a bit more today, but after a busy week and a tiny story I wrote for the blog earlier, it's time I step away and focus on a romantic Valentine's weekend with my wife.

While our offer has been accepted and our loan application approved, we've got one final hurdle – a VA appraisal. Wish us luck!

A Maine coon mix cat curled up with her tail partially covering her face, brown and black fur and green eyes — Marble doesn't care about moving, just food and cuddles