Inside story of Apple's AI overhaul: Rockwell, head of Vision Pro, crosses boundaries to put out fires, iron fisted cleaning of Siri team According to Beating monitoring, in early 2025, a closed door executive meeting was urgently held in a conference room next to Apple's software engineering department without CEO Tim Cook in attendance. Due to the poor market response of the first generation Apple Intelligence, Siri's key restructuring is facing delays, and competitors such as Google and OpenAI are rushing at full speed. Executive Eddy Cue even warned internally that "AI may disrupt the iPhone business within ten years". At that time, Cook had lost confidence in the then AI leader John Giannandrea, and other executives decided to bypass the leader and directly discuss the plan, submitting suggestions to Cook. The meeting not only prompted Cook to break away from his long-standing "hands off shopkeeper" style and personally intervene and fine tune the details of AI development, but also opened up a comprehensive self rescue and restructuring of Apple's AI business. During the meeting, Mike Rockwell, who had just completed the development of Vision Pro, stepped forward and volunteered to serve as an "AI firefighter". Rockwell hopes to report directly to Cook and be promoted to Senior Vice President, while software director Craig Federighi firmly defends the control of the software engineering department and insists that the AI business cannot be separated from this department. Although Rockwell initially wanted to back down due to his belief that Federico lacked a sense of urgency, he ultimately accepted a compromise and became the head of Siri reporting to Federico. After taking office, Rockwell quickly cleaned up the original leadership of Siri, introduced the core backbone of Vision Pro, and faced reality on the technical route: realizing that its self-developed model was lagging behind the industry level, Rockwell, together with Federighi and Kui, reached an agreement with competitor Google to directly use the Google Gemini model and Google Cloud technology to support the operation of the new Siri. The self rescue plan incorporating external models will make its debut at WWDC 2026. Apple will release an independent Siri application and generative photo editing feature that will benchmark against ChatGPT, completely overturning the previous attitude of the executive team towards chatbots and generative photo editing. WWDC 2026 is also Cook's final battle before officially stepping down and handing over the baton to new CEO John Ternus on September 1st. The success or failure of the new Siri not only affects the evaluation of Cook's career, but also directly relates to the future of the Tenas era. Due to the bottleneck of underlying AI technology, hardware such as desktop robots (postponed until 2028), smart screens (postponed until the end of 2026), and AI glasses (postponed until the end of 2027) have all been forced to be postponed, which will determine whether Apple can regain the dominant position in the next generation of computing. [Original link]