Apple promised a smarter Siri. It wasn’t. Now it’s paying for it.
| Source: The Hindu | Author: John Xavier | Date: May 7, 2026 |
You see the ad, you feel the excitement, you spend the money, and then you wait. And wait. Eventually, quietly, you stop waiting as the thing you were promised simply never showed up.
That’s precisely what happened with Apple’s much-hyped AI overhaul of the voice assistant, Siri. And now Apple is paying a quarter of a billion dollars for misleading buyers.
In September 2024, Apple made a marketing pitch that its Siri was reinvented. That meant the voice assistant could understand context, take actions across apps, and integrate with ChatGPT. The company’s ads were slick, the keynote moments were dramatic, and the message was clear: the iPhone 16 was an AI phone, and that Siri was, finally, the assistant it always should have been.
But there was just one problem. None of it was ready at that point. And as it turned out, not for a very long time.
What Apple marketed as imminent never materialised. The company quietly confirmed the features were indefinitely delayed, pulled its own ads, and hoped the noise would die down. It didn’t.
A class action lawsuit followed, accusing Apple of having promoted AI capabilities that did not exist in its device at the time of launch, and until several months later. According to a Reuters report, even the U.S. advertising watchdog, Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division, concluded that Apple had falsely suggested the new AI-powered Siri was “available now.”
That was a damning finding as an enhanced Siri was the single most anticipated feature among potential iPhone buyers at the time. Apple knew people were buying phones because of what they were being told Siri could do. And it sold them anyway.
On Tuesday (May 5, 2026), Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle the lawsuit, without admitting any wrongdoing.
The settlement covers roughly 36 million eligible devices, specifically the iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max purchased in the United States between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. Each eligible user might receive anywhere between $25 to $95 per device, depending on how many buyers make the claim.
The settlement still requires final approval from Judge Noel Wise of the federal district court for the Northern District of California, with a hearing scheduled for June 17, 2026.
Apple, in a statement said: “We resolved this matter to stay focused on what we do best: delivering the most innovative products and services to our users.”
The tech industry has spent the last two years drowning consumers in AI hype. Every product, and every update, has been dressed up in the language of transformation and intelligence. Apple’s Siri settlement is a rare moment where that rhetoric met actual legal consequence. It won’t be the last.