Apple (AAPL.US) WWDC focuses on AI innovation, delayed Siri upgrade triggers stock price decline

The Zhitong Finance App learned that on the first day of the 2025 World Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple (AAPL.US) launched a series of functional updates related to artificial intelligence (AI) and released a new design language “Liquid Glass”, bringing the greatest degree of interface innovation to its latest iOS 26 operating system. However, since the market has been looking forward to progress in the AI field for a long time, and the most popular Siri upgrade is still missing, investors reacted lukewarm, and Apple's stock price fell 1.5% to $200 during the press conference.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said at the conference that the company is “continuously improving to make Siri more personalized,” but also acknowledged that “this work will take more time to meet our high standards of quality,” and promised to announce more information next year. Previously, Siri, as one of the core of Apple's AI strategy, was widely criticized for being lagging behind in functionality, making it difficult to compete with smart assistants in the market today.

In terms of visual design, the “Liquid Glass” interface style introduced by Apple is one of the highlights of iOS 26. Alan Dye, vice president of user interface, called it “the biggest design update ever.”

In addition to interface innovations, Apple also announced several new AI-driven features, including iMessage real-time translation, FaceTime automatic captioning, and real-time phone conversation translation. These features all run locally on the device to avoid uploading private data to the cloud. Apple emphasizes its privacy priority principle: “Keep your personal conversations private at all times.”

On the Apple Watch side, the new “Workout Buddy (Workout Buddy)” function also uses AI technology to provide voice incentives during exercise and prompt users to complete personalized goals.

CEO Cook announced that all new systems will be open to developers for testing on the same day. The public beta version will be released next month, and the official version is expected to be launched this fall.

However, analysts pointed out that although WWDC has outlined a vision for the future of the developer ecosystem, there is no major breakthrough in the progress of “Apple Intelligence.” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives pointed out after the press conference that Apple is “still quite conservative” in terms of AI this time, assessed that its stock price still maintains a “outperforming market” rating, and the target price will not change for the next 12 months.

The market had anticipated this for a long time. Last year, although Apple first publicly proposed the “Apple Intelligence” strategy, the core features, including the launch of the new Siri, are constantly ticketing. Most of the AI features announced at WWDC in 2024 are common to the industry, such as text generation, image generation, and notification summary organization, and did not form a significant differentiating advantage. The promised “cross-application Siri Assistant” has yet to be delivered. The existing AI experience is lackluster, and user feedback is generally disappointing.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Apple has faced questions about the AI competition “starting half a beat slower”. Although it has already applied AI in depth in fields such as image, video, and audio processing, it has not been possible to integrate it into a practical intelligent assistant in time. High standards in terms of privacy and security are also slowing down the pace of feature development.

Currently, Apple Intelligence is divided into a three-tier architecture: the first layer is the device's local AI, which emphasizes that the data does not come out of the machine, but the effect is limited; the second layer is the private cloud “Private Cloud Compute” developed by Apple. Although it enhances privacy, other technology companies do not yet rely on the powerful computing power of Nvidia (NVDA.US) chips; the third layer integrates OpenAI's ChatGPT function to make up for the shortcomings of the first two. However, in this part, Apple cannot fully guarantee user privacy .

Apple emphasizes that all AI conversation content is processed in a private cloud, and no one can view it. But this “end-to-end private control” system also means that it temporarily lags behind its peers in terms of computing power and service experience.

Apple currently has more than 2 billion active devices worldwide, and every operating system update means direct access for billions of users. However, in the face of the AI wave, Apple's trade-off between “steady and steady play” and “leading technology” made it appear conservative in the eyes of some investors. Since 2025, Apple's stock price has dropped 20% cumulatively, and WWDC has failed to reverse market sentiment this time.