Apple's latest artificial intelligence models and design overhaul unveiled at the company's annual developer conference Monday received a lukewarm reception from analysts and early users, highlighting the tech giant's ongoing struggle to match competitors in the AI race.
The company's own performance benchmarks showed its newest AI models trailing behind year-old offerings from OpenAI and Meta, while a visual redesign called "Liquid Glass" drew criticism for readability problems. The announcements at the Worldwide Developers Conference also confirmed that promised upgrades to Siri have been delayed indefinitely.
Apple acknowledged in a blog post that human testers rated its new "Apple On-Device" model as only "comparable" to similarly-sized models from Google and Alibaba1. More concerning, testers ranked Apple's server-based model behind OpenAI's year-old GPT-4o, according to the company's own evaluation1.
In image analysis tests, human raters preferred Meta's Llama 4 Scout model over Apple's server offering1. "That's a bit surprising," noted TechCrunch, since "Llama 4 Scout performs worse than leading models from AI labs like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI"1.
Software chief Craig Federighi confirmed that Siri's AI upgrades, originally previewed at last year's conference, need "more time to reach our high quality bar"2. The features are now expected in 20262.
The new Liquid Glass interface, described by Apple as its "broadest design update ever," emphasizes translucent materials and depth effects inspired by the Vision Pro headset1. While some designers praised the "fresh" look2, widespread concerns emerged about readability.
"There are parts of the interface where various elements are simply too hard to read," according to TechCrunch, citing early user feedback about light gray fonts on translucent backgrounds1. Even Apple's own press materials showed examples where text was difficult to discern1.
Allan Yu, a product designer at Output, called the aesthetic "beautiful" but noted "major readability issues" in current form2.
UBS analysts described the announcements as "in-line with our more modest expectations" and predicted "negligible impact on iPhone sales"1. Melius Research analysts said the event "didn't have anything groundbreaking that would change the narrative" about Apple lagging in AI1.
The analysts suggested Apple "still needs to reignite confidence" and proposed potential acquisitions like search company Perplexity to accelerate its AI strategy1.
