According to the New York Times, if you bought an iPhone 16 or certain iPhone 15 between June of 2024 and March of 2025, you may soon be eligible to receive a check for as much as $95 per device as part of a class action lawsuit related to Apple Intelligence and Siri. The allegedly flawed Apple Intelligence features that were part of the suit originally shipped on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in June of 2024. The Apple Intelligence-native iPhone 16 line shipped later that year.
On Tuesday, Apple settled claims in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California over alleged false advertising. The suit argued that Apple led consumers to believe the Apple Intelligence suite of features was more capable than it actually was. The total settlement amount, still awaiting a judge’s approval, is $250 million.
Apple maintains that it did nothing wrong. Marni Goldberg, an Apple spokesperson gave a statement to the Times, claiming that beginning with “the launch of Apple Intelligence,” Apple has “introduced dozens of features across many languages that are integrated across Apple’s platforms,” and that the company had “resolved this matter to stay focused on doing what we do best, delivering the most innovative products and services to our users.”
This lawsuit was “fallout,” according to Axios, from Apple’s acknowledgement last year that AI upgrades to Siri were not going to be released on schedule. A statement to Daring Fireball at the time said Apple had “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps,” but added, “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
The next day, it was reported that Apple had pulled a now-notorious ad starring Bella Ramsey:
The ad is a nice summary of the “more personal” Siri concept that still has not been realized. We see Ramsey notice a person whose name they know they should know, so they quickly ask Siri “the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” It’s up to the viewer to presume this beefed-up version of Siri is able to use this prompt to draw on, say, an email, and produce the right answer. It immediately replies, “You met Zac Wingate at Cafe Grenel a couple of months ago.”
To put this class action settlement in context, Apple had been struggling mightily with Siri ever since—deservedly or not—ChatGPT created new consumer expectations for an AI-powered assistant. “AI is what most investors are really excited about. Almost all momentum in the market in general is being fueled by AI,” a portfolio manager named Brian Mulberry told the Wall Street Journal in February of 2024. Mulberry lamented that “Apple really hasn’t made a big splash in the AI space yet.”
So the Apple Intelligence rollout was perceived as coming late, but it was also, it seems, too early—given that it was sued and ended up settling for $250 million. In an interview with TechRadar last year after the smoke cleared around Siri’s underperformance, Apple software chief Craig Federighi explained that the company was working on a “version 2” of the new Siri that would work in all the personalized ways consumers had come to expect, but that Apple was no longer publicly offering a speculative release schedule for that version.
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