At WWDC 2025, how is Apple going to spin what can be objectively seen as a year of AI promises unkept?

Leading up to WWDC 2024, AI had broken into the mainstream, capturing the imagination of early adopters and the general public. Services like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT showcased features that used large language models and generative AI to write, search the internet and create near-photorealistic artwork in a way that only books and movies had imagined before. AI was the future, and all the major tech companies needed to be pointed in that direction.

But Apple, being secretive by nature, kept its AI plans closely guarded. By the time Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, took the stage during last year’s WWDC keynote presentation, analysts and financial experts thought the company had fallen way behind on AI, especially after Google featured nothing but AI at its Google I/O event.

When Cook introduced Apple Intelligence at WWDC, the collection of features was a more modest approach to incorporating AI into the iPhone and Mac. Far from seeming like a straggler, Apple had us praising a measured, practical rollout.

Instead of throwing more slop against the wall, Apple Intelligence promised to focus on practical features like notification summaries and removing distractions from photos. Siri was going to be the loom that wove together various threads of your personal information and become a true virtual assistant.

But after a slow rollout of Apple Intelligence features, we learned about Siri’s internal struggles, and Apple acknowledged that progress was “going to take us longer than we thought.” Now it’s unclear whether Siri will advance significantly at all this year.

So how will Apple deal with this AI-generated elephant in the room? Will the presenters hype what’s been accomplished so far? Or maybe ignore the issue altogether and focus on whatever is coming next? That seems like the most likely — the most Apple — way for this to go.

However, let’s not forget that WWDC as a whole is still primarily an event for developers, treating them like members of an exclusive club even as the keynote event serves to showcase technologies that will dominate the rest of the year for everyone else. Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, has consistently delivered news with a light touch. As just one example, the fabulously coiffed exec, sometimes referred to as “Hair Force One,” even donned a silver hair-shaped helmet during the introduction to WWDC 2024 in the guise of parachuting over Apple’s Cupertino, California, campus.

And even though tech giants like Apple and Google are laser-focused on competing to own the AI future, they’re not always so serious that they don’t poke fun at each other, as Rohan Shah, senior product manager, Android platform, did during this year’s Google I/O Android Show when he mentioned that Gemini “isn’t just an app,” and continued out of the side of his mouth, “like on some other phones.”

I’m guessing Federighi will have a few clever lines acknowledging that Apple’s aspirations were higher than the state of the art, give the audience a “we all know what I mean” knowing wink, and then push through to what’s new in the next versions. Because honestly, we’ll all be wondering how Apple is going to move forward to make up the ground it’s lost so far.

We’ll know for sure during the WWDC 2025 keynote presentation on Monday, June 9, which Apple will stream live starting at 10 a.m. PT. Members of the CNET team are attending the event to report on developments as they drop — hopefully not from the sky by parachute this year.