Google’s Gemini Is So Far Ahead, Apple’s Siri Looks Like A Fossil

Apple baked some AI into iOS. Google just rebuilt the oven.

At Google I/O this week, the search giant announced a ton of new AI features. In fact, it spent about two hours talking about many different AI features across its entire portfolio of products. From search, to development to Android and everything in between. And it really showed just how far behind Apple is.

Last year at WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence. This is their suite of AI services and features that began rolling out last fall. However, many of the more interesting features have yet to be available, even as a beta. In fact, Apple recently announced that its much-anticipated upgrade to Siri was delayed by a year. A year. That’s insane. And it’s also the issue with demoing services and features well before they are ready. A lesson that Apple has apparently learned the hard way now.

Slow and Steady

Google was admittedly a bit late to the AI war. Despite having been using AI for many years, and demoing it quite a bit, every chance they got. But when ChatGPT debuted, Google was behind and had to scramble to get Bard out the door. Now it has renamed that chatbot to Gemini, and it is on pace, if not ahead of ChatGPT in a lot of areas.

At Google I/O 2025, the company announced Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as a number of other features like generative AI video. Upgrading from Veo 2 to Veo 3. It also introduced Flow, which is a video editor for generative AI video. Among many other things. It’s really hard to keep track of everything that Google announced at I/O.

Meanwhile, Apple is struggling to release small AI features. As we learned last week from the Bloomberg piece, a big issue for Apple has been its privacy stance. Because Apple prides itself on not collecting its users’ data like Google and almost every other company does, it makes it much harder for them to train their AI, as they can only use data that they are able to license, which isn’t a whole lot of data.

Typically, Apple is able to sit back and let other companies try and fail with new technologies before they jump in. But that might not be possible with AI. Every day, AI is getting better and better. Hell, we’re just two years removed from that awful Will Smith eating Spaghetti video, and now it looks almost real. Meanwhile, Apple struggles to just do notification summaries well.

Why Apple is struggling in AI

In addition to Apple’s privacy stance, another reason why Apple is struggling in AI so much is, their executives didn’t believe in AI until 2023. That’s nearly a decade after Google started investing and working on AI. It wasn’t until Craig Federighi from Apple used ChatGPT to make an application that a light bulb went off for him, telling him how great AI would be in Apple’s products. Then he ordered Apple’s software engineers to put as many AI features into iOS 18 as possible. Which was definitely the wrong approach.

This approach left Apple with multiple AI features, and none of them working really well. Instead, Apple should have worked on Siri first, and improved that, before moving onto other AI features.

Apple also learned that not all AI can be done on-device. Which is another issue that hits at their privacy philosophy. So instead of simply doing things in the cloud, Apple went ahead and built the Privacy Compute. This essentially creates a bubble for your privacy data, so that Apple is still not technically collecting it. While it’s cool and all, it doesn’t really matter when your AI features barely work.

Of course, we can’t forget the fact that Apple poached Google’s head of AI over eight years ago. Which has resulted in almost nothing for Apple in the AI race. Which also likely means that he’ll be headed out the door pretty soon.

Google didn’t just kill Apple in AI, it’s also taking the fight to XR

While everyone else was focusing on AI, Apple was focusing on XR, and in 2023, it announced Vision Pro. This was a $3,499 virtual reality headset that then launched in early 2024. It didn’t sell that well, as expected given its hefty price tag. But even those who bought the headset have said that it barely gets used these days. It almost seems like Apple has forgotten about Vision Pro and is now focused on AI entirely.

But Google hasn’t forgotten about XR. In fact, last year it announced Android XR. A new platform was being developed with Samsung for Extended Reality devices. It announced Project Moohan with Samsung, which is a new Android XR headset (and looks a lot like Vision Pro). It’s set to go on sale later this year.

On top of that, Google also formally announced its own pair of XR Glasses at Google I/O this week and let attendees try them on. Android XR not only has virtual and augmented reality included, but it is also running on Gemini. Giving you immersive visuals and ambient intelligence.

Now, Apple is not only going to fall behind in AI but also in XR.

Google’s AI lead might be permanent

Google has a huge advantage over other AI companies, and that is Google Search. Since everyone in the world uses Google Search to find things on the web, it allows Google to have a ton of data that it can feed it’s AI. Which is also a problem.

You see, by using all of this data that Google’s search engine has crawled and indexed, it’s able to provide to users in Gemini or Google Search’s AI Mode, which also takes traffic away from those websites that made that content and data. This is going to be a real problem for Google, in fact it actually already is. As Google is decimating publishers like yours truly, so that it can win in AI.

If Google puts publishers out of business by no longer sending them traffic, this also means that Google will no longer have this data to feed to its AI. Making publishers a necessary evil for Google, something they’ve said behind closed doors already.

Google’s open ecosystem allows its AI features to run great across all of its products. From Gmail, to Google Docs, to Android and everything in between. Something that Apple is opposed to, for privacy reasons. And that could be Apple’s letdown.

While Apple does make some great hardware, it’s clear that AI is not their forte. So how can Apple comeback? Well, the only way I can see Apple making a comeback now is if they buy an AI company (or two). While they are partnering with OpenAI for ChatGPT with Siri, I doubt that they would buy OpenAI. Considering Microsoft has already invested a ton of monay into OpenAI and uses ChatGPT for Microsoft CoPilot. But they could buy something like Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI.

Does Apple have a chance? In 2025? No. In the next 5 years? Possibly.