Halftime Report Live from Apple's WWDC 6/8/26

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**Scott Wapner** (1:00)
I'm Scott Wapner and you're listening to Cnbc's Halftime Report, the podcast, the most profitable hour of the trading day. We record this live weekdays at 12 Eastern. Listen in.
Carl, thank you very much. Welcome to Cupertino, California, where in less than one hour, Apple will begin its most important annual event. It's Worldwide Developers Conference. It's a critical moment for this company and its outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, who presides over his last WWDC.
Welcome to this special Halftime Report. I'm Scott Wapner. We are live today from Apple Park. The question hanging over this year's gathering. After two years of delays and disappointments, will Apple finally deliver on its AI strategy? And how will it be received by investors?
Stock's been surging to new highs lately, close to another new high yet again today, which makes the events here all the more important. Our team is at the ready. Here on site, our Apple reporter, Mackenzie Segalos, star analyst, Dan Ives of Wedbush, CNBC contributor, Big Technologies' Alex Kantrowich is in San Francisco for us today, and the committee is standing by as well. Joe Terranova, he's been aggressively buying Apple shares lately. Jim Laventhal and Bryn Talkington own the name as well. They are with us as well. We bring it out and we welcome you live today to Cupertino. It's good to have you with us. Mac, it's great to have you. Dan, of course, great to have you here as well. Mac, why don't you tell us what you think we should expect today after what we suggest are two years worth of delays and some would say disappointments.

**Mackenzie Segalos** (2:39)
We're looking at a revamped Siri. And I'm thinking about this in four different buckets. They teamed up, Apple teamed up with Gemini. So we're going to see a Siri powered by Gemini. We're talking about capitalizing on this flywheel of data inside the iOS ecosystem, personal context, on-screen awareness, things that they pitched two years ago.
Separately, multi-command support. We're talking about an agentic experience through Siri. Third, they're going to potentially open up Siri to other models. They've already had that relationship with OpenAI, potentially opening that even wider beyond Gemini, maybe Anthropic, plug in whichever chatbot you prefer to use. And then a standalone Siri app, something that Apple previously said that they wouldn't do. This is something that would compete with ChatGVT. Of course, this is a big debut for John Ternus, now the incoming CEO, and he has to sell developers on Siri as the ideal platform to build these new agentic AI capabilities, because they really need to get devs on site.

**Scott Wapner** (3:30)
Okay, so what you're telling me is today's gonna be all about Siri. And we should have known as much by the invitation that Apple had sent out. It had a bit of a glow, I guess, to it, which some would say was pointing in these directions.
Why has it taken so long? Why are we saying two years after they first talked about Apple Intelligence, are we at this moment today?

**Mackenzie Segalos** (3:55)
And if you really want to backdate, it's 16 years since they acquired the company that became Siri. They were really first on this voice command tech. When you look at the delays of the last two years, a lot of it can be chalked up to management, right? We saw this huge changing of the guard in the AI team. And as much as we talk about the Vision Pro not succeeding in a commercial sense in terms of sales, we did see Mike Rockwell, the architect there, come in, take over this AI project under Craig Federighi, the software chief, bring in a lot of his Vision Pro team to help rebuild what's going on there. And we saw John Giandrea, the former AI chief out, Amar Subramania, in who led engineering at Gemini. So just this really thoughtful re-org, Tim Cook reportedly more involved in this AI reboot than he had been in any other project in the last decade, really getting hands-on usually yields more to his lieutenants. And then the last thing that I'd say is that they gave up on this fight to be an LLM that's competitive, right? They are licensing this tech from Gemini, reportedly for a billion dollars a year, which is nothing against the 20 billion that Google pays them for search.