Apple’s WWDC AI demos looked more real after $250M false ad settlement

The vibe of Apple’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference felt like a spouse proudly listing all the items on a honey-do-list they’d finally completed. Rather than showcase something exciting and new, Apple launched the keynote detailing fixes to last year’s “Liquid Glass” design; an overhaul of its awful search function; improvements to its Playground feature, and so on.

Perhaps most importantly, two years after promising but failing to launch a smarter Siri, Apple finally showed off an overhauled version of its AI-powered voice assistant.

But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response.

These weren’t live on-stage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company first unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise than product.

This demonstration style was noticed, with comments on X on Monday comparing today’s keynote to those 2024 so-called “vaporware” demos.

Apple said at that time that the features would be available soon to those who upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices with M1 chips or better. But by March 2025, Apple admitted to Daring Fireball that rolling out the features shown via production video was “going to take us longer than we thought to deliver.” Not long after, the Cupertino company faced a lawsuit in federal court alleging false advertising over the features shown at that 2024 event — a case that carried real reputational risk for a company whose brand has long been built on the promise that its products just work.

Last month, Apple agreed to pay a $250 million settlement on the suit, without admitting wrongdoing.

Monday’s presentation appeared designed, at least in part, to avoid a repeat. There were still plenty of fully produced videos of features, like the one showing how to adjust Siri’s voice and another demonstrating improved voice-to-text transcription. But many of the AI features were shown in this “live-like” format, with someone using the feature on an actual device. The implicit message being that these features work on actual devices, and you will soon have them.

Apple also is not requiring users to buy the latest iPhone to get these features. The new Siri will be available through the new iOS 27 on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max and all iPhone 16 models and later, according to the company. The current model is the iPhone 17, meaning most users who upgraded in the past couple of years won’t need to buy new hardware to get access.

It’s a concession, perhaps, that Apple won’t lock the features behind new devices to create upgrade pressure when it promised, two years ago, that such features would be available on iPhone 15.

Apple also said the new features will be available across its broader hardware lineup, including the iPad mini (A17 Pro), iPad models with M1 or later, MacBook Neo (A18 Pro), Mac models with M1 or later, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 10 or later, Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, and Apple Watch SE 3 when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone nearby.

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