The ever-elusive “Siri, But Make It Actually Good” is not just a quirky side project at Apple that’s not going well, according to the claims in some anonymously sourced new reporting. From the sound of it, new Siri is more like a white whale dragging a huge group of Apple’s product engineers to the depths along with their ship, loaded with what were supposed to be exciting new Apple gadgets.
Last year, anonymous sources leaked to Bloomberg’s Apple scoop guy Mark Gurman about three novel products in Apple’s pipeline that were meant to be released in 2025, but delayed—at the time—until spring of this year.
Two of those products were reportedly codenamed J490 and J491. The J490 reportedly would have been Apple’s answer to the Amazon Echo Show 8—or a HomePod mini with a screen featuring an Apple Watch-like interface. Gurman says the J491 was (or is?) a wall-mounted J490. Gurman’s report also notes a third and considerably more whimsical product that seems to fit into this family: essentially another J490, but on a little robot that moves around your tabletop.
The personality, if you will, that you would be interacting with when you use any of these theoretical products would be Siri. Specifically, “The new Siri, currently planned for this coming March,” Gurman wrote at the time, which would be “useful for a device aimed at controlling appliances, music and communications within a home.”
That is, if the cool version of Siri Apple started hyping in 2023, and started overtly advertising in 2024 had ever become reality.
But it still hasn’t.
And according to a fresh new Gurman report, these products are in suspended animation because of Apple’s slow-motion Siri disaster. The ambition to release a great smart home product represents Apple trying to “create its next big moneymaker,” in Gurman’s telling, but Apple’s struggle to cook up an AI model of its own, followed by its embarrassing decision to just rent one from Google, followed by hype for the new model, followed by more delays, mean no new moneymaker, other than all the company’s other new moneymakers, I should say.
Whatever the J490, its sibling, and its robot cousin are actually going to be called, they were supposed to be launched approximately right now, Gurman’s sources say, alongside the new “personalized” version of Siri attached to iOS 26.4. That obviously isn’t happening, so now those sources are saying we’ll all have to wait until September. But to be safe, maybe don’t lock in any plans that involve having a new-Siri-powered smart home assistant this fall.
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