Siri suddenly has a whole lot of company in being terribly late

As we all know, Apple is famously late to the AI party. So late, in fact, that it missed everyone doing keg stands and Kevin jumping off the roof into the pool. Also, the cops showing up. It’s missed all the fun.

Some who were at the party seem to be having less fun the day after, though.

Take OpenAI and star designer Jony Ive, who are grappling with a series of technical issues with their secretive new artificial intelligence device, as they push to launch a blockbuster tech product next year.

OpenAI: “Okay, yes, this is a pig, but just look at that $6.5 billion lipstick!”

Despite having hardware developed by Ive and his team … obstacles remain in the device’s software and the infrastructure needed to power it.

Ars Technica, Oct. 6, 2025

OpenAI: “We have this beautiful brick, now we just need to get it to do something.”

Really, how hard could that be? Someone send them a few more billion dollars.

These include deciding on the assistant’s “personality,”…

Just tell it to turn down its sarcasm level. Easy peasy.

“The concept is that you should have a friend who’s a computer who isn’t your weird AI girlfriend…”

HEY, DON’T CALL THE MACALOPE’S CAT-EARED KAWAII ANIME AI WAIFU “WEIRD”! She hardly ever demands that he build her an indestructible android body anymore. At least while he’s awake, anyway.

Huh. Why is the Macalope holding this soldering iron and where did all these parts come from?

…privacy issues…

Oh, there are privacy issues with AI? Seriously? You. Don’t. Say. Very shocking, indeed, if true.

It’s almost as if these companies care more about rushing things to market than they do about privacy. And as if the tech press is tired of trying to evaluate privacy as a buying criterion because it’s so serious and boring, and can’t we just talk about the fun stuff?

… and budgeting…

And here the Macalope thought AI was a perpetual motion machine of venture capital. If you run out of money, you just get acquired by the company that you acquired last year. Duh. C’mon, this is not that hard.

Multiple people familiar with the plans said OpenAI and Ive were working on a device roughly the size of a smartphone that users would communicate with through a camera, microphone and speaker. One person suggested it might have multiple cameras.

So, the only difference between it and a smartphone is it won’t have a screen. Maybe the Macalope is wrong but this sounds like another swing at trying to make a device that weans humans off their screens. The negative effects of people being immersed in their screens all the time is something Ive has lamented of late, after making big bank at Apple getting people addicted to devices with screens on them.

Well, if it is that, the Macalope says good luck to you. People seem to really like their smartphones and if your solution is a device that will talk to you instead… well, good luck with that. Also, saying screens are bad and then trying to substitute a technology that ignores copyright in order to generate questionable answers seems like a lateral move at best.

One person said the device would be “always on”…

Can we go back to those privacy issues again for a sec?

OpenAI overtook Elon Musk’s SpaceX to become the world’s most valuable private company this week, after a deal that valued it at $500 billion. One of the ways the ChatGPT maker is seeking to justify the price tag is a push into hardware.

Don’t call it a bubble, though!

“The concept is that you should have a friend who’s a computer who isn’t your weird AI girlfriend,” said one source.

Surely all these problems will get sorted in time for OpenAI to ship… something next year.

Hey, totally unrelated, but remember the Humane pin? After the company’s acquisition by HP for less than half the amount it had raised in capital, former CEO Imran Chaudhri now has the coveted job of… let’s see here… touting the battery life of HP laptops in keynote videos.

Apple may have missed shipping an enhanced Siri, and that is a legitimate issue the company needs to address sooner rather than later. But it’s not the only one stumbling in the rush to ship AI products.