Apple's Gemini Deal, Tesla Robots & My Switch to Samsung Fold 7

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

You're listening to Peterborough's Community Radio, Salam Radio. Salam Radio, 106.2 FM.

Akil (0:16)

As-salamu alaikum, and good evening. You are listening to The Tech Factor, live on Salam Radio, 106.2 FM. Streaming at salamradio.co.uk, and yes, we're also live on YouTube. I'm Akil, and tonight we are going right into one of the biggest tech plot twists of last year. Apple, the company that made It Just Works, a religion, had a very public wobble in AI. But I'm joined in the studio, as ever, with my co-host, Joel. How are you, my friend?

Joel (0:49)

I'm most excellent, my dude. How are you?

Akil (0:51)

I'm very good. Very good indeed. It's been interesting. Should we say build up to the show today?

Joel (0:57)

We're here. We're here. That's what matters.

Akil (0:58)

We're here. That's absolutely the most important thing. So tonight's main story, Apple Intelligence, the Siri problem, the marketing mess, and now the big headline. Apple reportedly doing a gemini deal with Google to help people power the next phase of Siri. And if you're an Apple fan, don't panic. We're doing this fairly, but we're doing it properly, aren't we, Joel, tonight?

Joel (1:23)

We are. We are doing this properly tonight, yep.

Akil (1:25)

I have to say, before we get into the meat of this subject, Joel, I was flabbergasted, but then I wasn't.

Joel (1:33)

Flabbergasted at what?

Akil (1:34)

The fact that we're about to see Google rescue Apple, a trillion dollar company that can literally buy up any organization in the world if it wanted to, has gone hand in cap to a competitor and said, well, can you help us out here?

Joel (1:50)

I don't know, you see, because they're already paying Google billions of dollars to be the default search engine on Apple products.

Akil (1:56)

Oh, you mean the other way around?

Joel (1:58)

Yeah, Apple are paying Google, yeah. So the thing is, they could have back in the day made their own Apple search engine as well, but they didn't.

Akil (2:08)

This is a business model thing, isn't it?

Joel (2:09)

They outsourced that because Google, again, had already got an amazing search engine that they could put into their product. So the fact that that sort of happened again, massively not that much of a surprise. There are some surprises around it though, so we can start tucking in a little bit more to this big juicy story.

Akil (2:31)

We sure will. So Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in June 2024 and positioned it as a personal intelligence system built into iPhone, iPad and Mac. The pitch was helpful generative AI with Apple style privacy and deep integration across apps, writing tools, summaries, image generation style features, smart Siri. I mean, I could go on. And I remember seeing this in their keynote thinking, okay, this is going to be brilliant. And then Apple also announced something really important. When needed, Siri could tap into ChatGPT, but only with the user's permission. So Apple's narrative was at that time, we'll do what we can privately and we'll partner for the frontier stuff. And, you know, at the time, it was a sensible strategy if you ship it on time. That's a key word, if you ship it on time.

And I've gone back to 2024 here. So at that time, the iteration of the phone would have been the 15

Joel (3:30)

Yep. And they had TV adverts for AI, Apple Intelligence, and the whole shebang. Yeah. The whole ChatGPT sort of pop up that you'd get, it did seem a bit like putting a bit of a plaster on it. Yeah. Because I don't think they quite delivered the Apple Intelligence that they promised or they wanted to. So then they were just like, okay, well, ChatGPT sort of taken off. And we're going to sort of just anything that you ask Siri to do that it can't quite do yet, but needs a little bit more of a boost. We can sort of outsource that straight away to ChatGPT sort of thing. So it did seem a bit of a plaster. And I think that you're going to tell me a little bit more about this.

Akil (4:11)

Yeah.

Joel (4:11)

It seems that you got Apple guys and sort of that's what you've had, you know, and the rest of the world's kind of moved on. But that's kind of still where you are.

Akil (4:22)

It's true. It's true.

So the real problem is that the useful Siri didn't actually arrive. And here's the bit that actually hurt. So Apple later said some AI improvements to Siri were delayed until 2026 And now Apple has every right to delay features because obviously quality matters to them. You know, but Apple is not judged like other companies. When Apple announces something, people assume it's imminent, not two iPhones from now. And the reporting around this got spicy at WWDC 2025 Apple exec Craig Federighi reportedly acknowledged that Apple's first attempt at the upgraded Siri wasn't reliable enough and they didn't want to ship something that wasn't up to standard. Which kind of makes sense, but in plain English, Joel, it was like Apple saying, look, we're not saying we got it, we forgot. We are saying we tried, but it wasn't good enough. But here's the irony of it all. AI as a category often ships messy and improves later, right? And Apple historically does the opposite. It ships late but polished. And so there's a culture clash, and that's why this story matters. It does, yeah.