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A long-awaited Siri update is coming—and Apple has the cash to get opportunistic if its rivals start running low.

The Takeaway

As AI has completely consumed the tech industry, Apple has held back from the colossal investments in the technology its peers have been making. Wall Street, pundits and media outlets have criticized and chronicled Apple’s stumbles and seeming lack of urgency in the AI arms race. That includes us.

But I would like to propose another possibility: that 2026 could vindicate Apple’s decision to stay out of the fray.

Already, the market is turning skeptical of the AI game. Even as OpenAI, Meta Platforms and others commit hundreds of billions to data center build-outs, doubts are emerging over whether the AI business can justify spending on this scale.

This is the first piece in our 2026 Predictions series. These are educated guesses of what could happen next year based on reasoned analysis, deep prior reporting—and a dash of amused speculation.

Apple, in contrast, has kept its spending in check and has not made any splashy AI acquisitions or investments. Its core iPhone business remains stable—lately it has shown surprising signs of growth, despite the lack of major AI innovations coming to the product.

In 2026, the market could very well continue to turn against businesses that burn through cash on AI without showing much revenue in return. Apple could be uniquely poised to take advantage of the moment. It has some of the deepest pockets around, with more than $130 billion in cash, which would position it well for a bargain-hunting expedition if valuations of AI startups shrivel.

Apple will also have an opportunity to finally show it can do AI right. In the spring, it’s expected to release an overhaul of its Siri voice assistant that is more conversational and able to complete complicated tasks for users. Its decision earlier this year to delay the release of that overhaul and shake up the team responsible for it is one of the big reasons opinions about Apple’s AI efforts are so low.

To get the new version of Siri up to snuff, Apple may end up partnering with the best outside AI model makers—it’s testing Google’s Gemini at the moment. Apple still has a team working on its own internal models that it could take advantage of in the future. But some Apple leaders hold the view that large language models will become commodities in the years to come and that spending a fortune now on its own models doesn’t make sense.

Apple’s strength in smartphones could also give it a leg up over its AI competitors by providing a powerful vehicle for distributing AI to its users. While Apple can seamlessly integrate AI into its devices, AI companies can only develop stand-alone apps for the iPhones (unless they partner with Apple). Many of these companies, such as OpenAI and Meta, hope to build competing devices to get around hardware gatekeepers like Apple. But they face long odds in competing with Apple’s hardware capabilities.

“Apple plays to where its core competencies are,” said Tony Wang, portfolio manager of the science and technology fund at T. Rowe Price, one of the 10 largest shareholders in Apple. “They’re not throwing down tens of billions of dollars to train an AI model. They’re focused on what they’re really good at and integrating AI with their ecosystem.

“They’ve earned a reputation to be trusted with what they’ve built,” Wang added. “Investors trust them.”

That said, Apple could still botch this. It has a long history of fumbling its AI efforts. In 2011, the company was an early entrant into consumer AI with the launch of Siri, which came out of an acquisition the company had made the prior year. While Apple was out in front, it fell behind in the years that followed. It struggled to update Siri and keep up with new voice assistants, including Amazon’s Alexa, released in 2014. With the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, Siri’s lagging capabilities became even more apparent.

But none of these AI missteps ended up being a big deal for Apple. Amazon, for instance, found that after a few years in which it saw an initial explosion of Alexa-enabled devices, most consumers didn’t want to do all that much with Alexa outside rudimentary commands like setting timers or playing music. And while LLMs like ChatGPT have transformed the tech industry, there appear to be serious limits on how broadly useful the technology might be.

Apple has taken steps to put its AI operations in order. Earlier this year, after delaying the new Siri, the company placed the voice assistant under Mike Rockwell, who previously launched the Vision Pro headset at Apple. Although Rockwell doesn’t have a background in AI, he’s a technologist at heart and can quickly get up to speed on any new technology, people who have worked with him say.

And earlier this month, Apple’s AI leader, John Giannandrea, announced his retirement. With his departure, Apple distributed a chunk of his team across several groups, including software and service teams. One complaint internally about Giannandrea was that he ran the AI group without a clear product focus. With those teams now reporting to product-focused leaders, Apple may finally have a shot at delivering something useful in AI.