WWDC 2025: Apple's AI Half-Measures Feel Like Déjà Vu

Here we are again, watching Apple present its annual "intelligence" showcase like a magician who keeps pulling the same rabbit from increasingly bedazzled hats. WWDC 2025 delivered exactly what we expected: Live Translation; updates to visual intelligence; and enhancements to Image Playground and Genmoji, wrapped in their shiny new Liquid Glass interface. We've seen this playbook before—take last year's promises, add a coat of translucent polish, and call it revolutionary.

Don't misunderstand us. These updates aren't terrible. They're just... fine. Predictably, competently fine.

The Translation Game: Too Little, Too Late

Live translation is coming to iOS 26, bringing real-time conversation translation to Messages, Phone, and FaceTime. In 2025, this feels less like innovation and more like Apple finally showing up to a party that Google Translate crashed years ago. While the on-device processing preserves privacy—Apple's eternal marketing trump card—the functionality barely moves the needle for businesses already embedded in global communication workflows.

For marketers managing international campaigns, this feature offers modest convenience rather than transformational capability. Apple Intelligence features will be coming to eight more languages by the end of the year: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (traditional), and Vietnamese. This expansion suggests Apple is finally taking localization seriously, but the timeline still trails competitors who've been offering robust multilingual AI support for years.

Genmoji Gets a Remix, We Get a Shoulder Shrug

The centerpiece of Apple's creative AI push remains Genmoji, now with the thrilling ability to create a Genmoji by combining a pair of existing standard emoji. Picture this revolutionary breakthrough: separate basketball and trash can emoji into a single Genmoji that shows a basketball going into a trash can. Earth-shattering stuff, truly.

Genmoji and Image Playground provide users with even more ways to express themselves. In addition to turning a text description into a Genmoji, users can now mix together emoji and combine them with descriptions to create something new. The marketing applications feel limited—unless your brand strategy revolves around custom emoji mashups for TikTok comments, this enhancement won't revolutionize your creative workflows.

Image Playground receives similar incremental updates, now offering brand-new styles with ChatGPT, like an oil painting style or vector art. The ChatGPT integration feels like Apple admitting they need external help to make their own image generation compelling, while maintaining their privacy theater with assurances that nothing is shared with ChatGPT without their permission.

Developer Access: The Most Interesting Yawn

Perhaps the most substantive announcement—though hardly groundbreaking—is developers will be able to access the on-device large language model at the core of Apple Intelligence, giving them direct access to intelligence that is powerful, fast, built with privacy, and available even when users are offline. This represents Apple's attempt to create an ecosystem play around their AI infrastructure.

For marketing technology developers, this access could enable more sophisticated on-device personalization and content generation. However, the practical limitations remain significant. Apple's on-device models, while privacy-preserving, can't match the capabilities of cloud-based alternatives from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic. We're trading power for privacy in a way that may leave developers—and ultimately marketers—wanting more.

Visual Intelligence: Screenshots with Ambition

Visual Intelligence receives updates that let users ask ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence to identify products, analyse visuals, or extract information like event details from messages and web pages. For e-commerce marketers, this could theoretically streamline product discovery workflows, but the feature feels more like enhanced Google Lens than transformative commerce AI.

The integration with shopping platforms like Etsy suggests Apple recognizes the commercial potential, yet the implementation feels tentative—more proof-of-concept than platform-defining feature.

Missing in Action: The Siri We Were Promised

What's most telling is what Apple didn't announce. Gurman said that those features remain "far off." He does not expect any significant new Siri features to be announced at WWDC 2025. The conversational, context-aware Siri promised last year remains conspicuously absent, relegated to the same "coming soon" limbo that has defined Apple's AI strategy.

The Verdict: Apple Intelligence Remains Artificially Limited

Apple's 2025 AI strategy feels like someone playing it safe when the game demands bold moves. While competitors push the boundaries of what AI can accomplish, Apple continues refining the edges of features that were barely cutting-edge when they launched.

Apple's installed base of more than 1 billion iPhones, the data on its device and its custom-designed silicon chips were advantages that would help the company become an AI leader. Yet those advantages feel squandered when the resulting AI experiences feel more like modest upgrades than platform-defining innovations.

For marketers evaluating where to invest AI budgets and attention, Apple's WWDC 2025 announcements suggest continued reliance on external AI platforms for sophisticated marketing automation, content generation, and customer insights. Apple Intelligence remains a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.

The real question isn't whether these features will work—they probably will, adequately. It's whether "adequate" is enough when your competitors are swinging for the fences.

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