I mean it's a self fulfilling prophecy: people only use it for that because it's incapable of doing anything else.

If Siri didn't suck big time I would use it all the time.

All the voice assistants have the same problem though. What would you do with it that they can make money from? Are you going to trust their judgment when you ask to buy something?

Apple phones are full of features. Most of them cost nothing beyond the cost of entry (iPhones are expensive). Presumably all these well engineered features contribute to some holistic image of a “quality product”, whatever that means.

You might as well say “the camera does not bring revenue to Apple so they intentionally didn’t develop it any further”, which is nonsense.

I know people who bought their iPhone specifically for the camera. I never heard of anyone buying an iPhone because of Siri.

I have, when it came out, though I can’t say I’ve heard of anyone being excited about enhancements to it since.

The camera has one time cost (well, and r&d).

Siri has ongoing costs to run the servers.

It’s really easy to exhaust the free photo storage and then pay an iCloud storage fee for the rest of time so I see a clear way in which the camera brings in revenue.

Not if you get a phone with enough local storage for your photos and then download them to your computer. The 5 GB of free cloud storage are a joke anyway.

If you ever actually connect your phone to your PC for syncing files between the two you are an outlier power user and not representative of the average user at all.

There are easier ways to avoid the Apple tax, like uploading photos through Dropbox or Google Drive.

But even those are outliers. Most people like the built in convenience of Photos and automatic cloud sync to other devices and it "just works".

For some (Alexa) that's true, but for Apple and Google, voice is/has the potential to be part of the OS itself. You might ask why Apple puts all that effort into developing iOS when they don't charge for it.

As an aside, Apple used to charge for OS updates. Then they decided supporting multiple versions of the OS was idiotic (maybe they had other reasons as well) and reduced the cost/then went free.

Ars ran an article about Alexa layoffs that suggested Google was having the same troubles and reaching the same conclusions so it seemed like a reasonable surmise that that would also be true of Apple.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

> We have to wonder: Is time running out for Big Tech voice assistants? Everyone seems to be struggling with them. Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There's an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google's attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven't worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division.

> While Google and Amazon hurt each other with an at-cost pricing war, Apple's smart speaker plans focused more on the bottom line. The original HomePod's $350 price was a lot more expensive than the competition, but that was probably a more sustainable business model. Apple's model didn't land with consumers, though, and the OG HomePod was killed in 2021. There's still a $99 "mini" version floating around, and Apple isn't giving up on the idea of a big speaker, with a comeback supposedly in the works. Siri can at least be a loss leader for iPhone sales, but Apple is also hunting around for more continual revenue from ads.

Amazon likely sells their hardware below cost and hopes to make it up in orders using Alexa. From reports that didn’t seem to be adding up.

Apple’s strategy is different where Siri is a convenience feature for the devices that they sell for a premium. I doubt that Apple has invested anywhere close to $10B in Siri.

We haven’t heard of Google is bleeding to the degree that Amazon is on the Google assistant. I suspect not.

I’ve had a very different experience with Siri while driving hands free.

“Siri, put on my focus playlist”

“Okay, playing your focus playlist on Deezer”

“Siri, take me home”

“Getting directions to home”

“Siri, take me Cornish Pasty Co.”

“Okay, getting directions to Cornish Pasty Co.”

“Siri, play DefCon Radio on Soma FM”

“Okay, playing DefCon Radio on Soma FM”

It integrates with Apple Car play too. Nearly everything I’d interact with the center console for before, Siri does for me now.