Just after the start of 2026, Google parent Alphabet has become more valuable than Apple for the first time since 2019, a technically meaningless, but symbolically powerful step. And it’s still true that Apple is the least valued company, and Google’s AI partnership with Apple is seen as one of the main reasons why.
NOW, according to Bloomberg, Apple’s machine gun picks up Mark GurmanApple is a few weeks away from presenting the product resulting from this partnership: its revamped version of Siri. For Apple’s sake, it better not suck.
Next month, we should expect “feature demonstrations” of Siri at some sort of Apple event, perhaps a small one, Gurman says. This new Siri will be powered by an AI model built by Googlebut Apple will not notify users about it while they are using it. In fact, even internally it’s called “Apple Foundation Models version 10,” notes Gurman. This new Siri, if all goes as planned, will work much better than what iPhones and other Apple devices are currently equipped with.
Siri is perhaps best understood as the organizing “personality” of the Apple Home software and hardware ecosystem, and it’s sort of… good as a smart home assistant. It is comparable to similar products from Amazon and Googlewith a few other tendencies that slightly irritate, like how he can answer basic informational questions with info-dumps that start with phrases like “Here are two options!” Or it’ll just say a bug and say something like “Uh-oh! There’s a problem.”
When used on an iPhone, Siri feels a bit like having a smart home assistant in your pocket, and why? If your phone is in your hand and you want to set a timer, you look directly at the Clock app icon and you’ll probably use it. If you want something that can answer questions conversationally, you can just use a product like Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, or, hell, Microsoft Copilot.
With all this in mind, Gurman subtly describes the new version of Siri as a productivity beast. The new version “should be able to leverage personal data and on-screen content to accomplish tasks.” This is nothing like the current iteration of Siri, which seems like a naive being summoned into existence in the moment without any context about what’s happening. It would indeed be powerful to have a Siri capable of responding nimbly to what the user is doing and incorporating the data already present in their phone to provide real help. Based on descriptions like this, I can imagine looking at an event’s website, for example, and saying “Hey Siri, do I have time for this?” » and then get a decent response.
And Gurman says this Siri will be “conversational, aware of relevant context, and capable of sustained dialogue,” which also means it’s meant to take a real share of the chatbot market. Where Siri once relied on ChatGPT (probably too much), it will now, in theory, compete with it.
But the Apple-Google partnership driving the new Siri is an interesting anecdote at best, and most people won’t care or notice it, because, as Gurman notes, “Apple is a product company” and “where the technology comes from is virtually irrelevant.” This means that if the take-home message between now and March is “Lol, Siri still sucks,” Apple is going to pay the price in terms of public perception, not Google. And Google gets his billion dollars anyway.
