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Hey Siri? No, I didn’t mean you.
We’re about to enter the Apple Intelligence era, and it promises to dramatically change how we use our Apple devices. Most importantly, adding Apple Intelligence to Siri promises to resolve many frustrating problems with Apple’s “intelligent” assistant. A smarter, more conversational Siri is probably worth the price of admission all on its own.
But there’s a problem.
The new, intelligent Siri will only work (at least for a while) on a select number of Apple devices: iPhone 15 Pro and later, Apple silicon Macs, and M1 or better iPads. Your older devices will not be able to provide you with a smarter Siri. Some of Apple’s products that rely on Siri the most—the Apple TV, HomePods, and Apple Watch—are unlikely to have the hardware to support Apple Intelligence for a long, long time. They’ll all be stuck using the older, dumber Siri.
This means that we’re about to enter an age of Siri fragmentation, where saying that magic activation word may yield dramatically different results depending on what device answers the call.
Fortunately, there are some ways that Apple might mitigate things so that it’s not so bad.