The Apple – Perplexity rumor that won’t go away

This is a longer think piece from the quick post I had on Mastodon the other day.

Every time someone floats the idea that Apple should acquire Perplexity to “supercharge” its AI efforts, I get whiplash, not just from the sheer strategic laziness of the suggestion, but from the deeper cultural misalignment it completely ignores. The very idea is a perplexing thought.

Perplexity isn’t some misunderstood innovator quietly building the future. It’s a company fundamentally unsure of what it is, what it stands for, or how to exist without parasitizing the open web. It’s been posing as a search engine, an AI-powered Q&A tool, a research assistant, and lately, some vague hybrid of all three, depending on who’s asking and what narrative sounds hottest that week. The only throughline is this: a constant need to justify its own existence, retrofitting its product pitch to whatever the industry is currently foaming at the mouth about.

And then there’s the CEO.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has made a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud, and not in a refreshing, brutally honest way, but in a way that suggests he hasn’t thought them through. Case in point: TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, where he was asked point blank to define plagiarism and couldn’t answer. Not didn’t answer. Couldn’t. That wasn’t just a missed PR opportunity. That was a red flag, flapping violently in the face of a company that scrapes content from other publishers, slaps a “summarized by AI” badge on it, and tries to call that innovation.

When you can’t define plagiarism as the CEO of a company built on other people’s work, that’s not strategic ambiguity, that’s an ethical void. And it’s telling. Perplexity has made a business of riding the razor-thin line between fair use and flat-out theft, and they want the benefit of the doubt without the burden of responsibility.

Which is where the Apple comparisons get absurd.

Yes, Apple stumbled. For more than a decade, Siri was a rudderless ship, a clunky commuter train in an age where everyone else was racing to build maglevs. The company completely missed the LLM Shinkansen as it rocketed past, leaving Siri coughing in the dust. What followed was a scramble, an engine swap mid-ride, and the painful attempt to retrofit a creaky voice assistant into something worthy of generative AI expectations.

That failure — public, prolonged, and still unresolved — gave the impression that Apple had no idea what was coming. That they were too slow, too self-contained, and too arrogant to evolve. And to some extent, that criticism landed. The year-long silence after ChatGPT’s breakout moment painted Apple as unprepared, reactive, even out of touch.

But here’s the thing: while Apple still hasn’t shown much of anything tangible since the Apple Intelligence announcement at WWDC 2024 (Genmoji? Really? Messed up email and notification summary?), the signals are clear. The company has changed course. They’ve acknowledged they’re behind and now they’re moving, quietly but with force. Once Apple has its engineering machine locked onto a target, the company doesn’t need to acquire noisy, erratic startups to plug the gaps. What it needs is time. And direction. And both are now in motion.

Which brings us back to Perplexity. Apple doesn’t need it. Not for the tech — which is just a UX layer on top of open models and scraped data. Not for the team — which seems more interested in testing the boundaries of IP law than building products people trust. And definitely not for the culture — which is allergic to accountability and powered by vibes over values.

Apple’s entire value proposition is control: of the user experience, of the ecosystem, and of the narrative. Perplexity brings chaos. Unapologetically so. It doesn’t have a sustainable moat, a mature product, or a north star. It has hype. It has press. And it has the moral compass of a company that thinks citation is a permission slip to republish everyone else’s work for free.

If Apple wants a better search experience, it can build one, with privacy built in, on-device processing, and full-stack integration. If it wants a smarter assistant, it can leverage its silicon and software in ways that Perplexity simply can’t touch. What it doesn’t need is a cultural virus from a startup that treats copyright like a rounding error and ethics like an optional plugin.

So no, Apple shouldn’t buy Perplexity. Not because it can’t. But because it finally knows what it needs to build, and it’s building it the Apple way. At least that’s what I think they’re doing.

The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.

To reduce system cost and eliminate the extra package required for the Audience chip, Apple cut a deal to integrate the noise-reduction technology directly into its A5 processor, which appears in the iPhone 4S. This technology is critical for the new phone because not only does it improve call quality, it blocks out background noise when users provide voice commands to Siri, the intelligent assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Without this noise reduction, Siri would be unusable even with a modest amount of background noise.

Recently I had installed Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation on my 3GS. While the underlying software that power these apps and Siri are from Nuance, the above finding by The Linley Group could be a reason why Nuance’s Dragon software titles have difficulties in a crowded room in my phone.

Apple is of course known to refrain from introducing or featuring technologies and abilities that have yet to meet its own threshold of acceptable performance in its products.

Another reason that have come up in the past for the lack of Siri in older products was the possibility that because Siri is still in beta, the company may be testing and collecting data to eventually deliver a more complete experience.

Of course, should Apple offer Siri in older iPhones, the value of iPhone 4S will be diminished greatly, and Apple certainly doesn’t want that to happen given that the company still sells the 3GS and 4 for the lower end of the market.

Internationally though, it makes little difference since Siri doesn’t offer much of an assistance beyond dictation and personal reminders outside of the United States at the moment anyway. Additionally, its linguistic limitations makes Siri practically unusable in many markets.

/via @charlesarthur

The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.

The LA Times brought up the issue that Scottish people have with Siri. Despite being part of the UK, the Scots clearly have such thick accents that Siri has trouble understanding them. The results are obviously unfortunate for the Scots and for Apple but make for some humorous exchanges. At least Apple knows it has a wee bit of problem over the Atlantic.

Thoughts on Siri

Tim Bajarin for Time:

Indeed, it’s pretty clear to me that Apple has just scratched the surface of the role Siri will play for them in driving future revenue. At the moment, we are enamored with its ability to enhance the man-machine interface. But that’s just the start. Siri is actually on track to become the first point of entrance to “search” engines of all types tied to major databases throughout the world. It will become the gatekeeper to all types of searches, and in the end control which search engine it goes to for its answers.

Apple may not have to compete directly with Google and Microsoft on the search engine front to be a force in search. With Siri, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper to the hundreds of specialist search engines if it manages to pull off deals with databases such as Craigslist, OpenTable, Apartment Finder, AirBnB, Edmunds, IMDB, and the like.

The key to this is being able to pull off the deals. Right now, Siri works with Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. Many (but not all) of those database or search sites make money off display advertising, which will be completely bypassed by Siri users. To have Siri scour their databases and deliver the results directly to users would undermine the very lifeline of their existence.

Not all of those sites will agree to what Apple may propose but Apple could do two things; buy out enough range of specialist search sites to further legitimize Siri, or convince them that Siri will eventually be the preferred way for millions and millions of people around the world to look for information that they will bypass websites and search apps anyway, thereby depriving the sites of visitors. Apple could say that turning down Siri would mean turning away customers.

If Apple were any other company, it might tack on iAds on Siri but at the moment, it doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps one could think of Siri as iTunes, a unified place to seek out relevant bits of information from many different sources. Of course, the business model would be different. People wouldn’t pay for premium search options, or would they?

Ever thought of Siri operating in a similar way to a cable TV service offering a multitude of subscription packages of search databases with a free basic set? Might have crossed the minds of people in Cupertino but given how iTunes is there to disrupt that very business model, it might seem unlikely for Apple to adopt it, not to mention putting people off.

Siri might not be fully working around the world at the moment and whether Apple will earn revenue out of it remains to be seen, after all, Siri is still in public beta and it might take Apple a while before it’s ready for a proper roll out.

It’s a bit difficult to imagine Apple allowing the next iPhone to be released while still carrying a beta version of Siri.

[update] Or Apple could add ability to purchase things online from Siri.

Thoughts on Siri