At yet another splashy event, Apple on Tuesday introduced its latest lineup of iPhones: the iPhone 17 , 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, and a new slimmer version dubbed the iPhone Air. The “Air” branding is meant to bring to mind other lightweight — and sometimes less expensive — Apple products like the MacBook Air and iPad Air. But it also recalls a time when smartphone makers were chasing an ever-thinner phone. In the AI era, however, it’s not necessarily the device’s size that matters; it’s what the software it runs can do.\n\nOn this front, Apple has lagged its competitors.\n\nAt its iPhone 17 event , the company only referenced AI technology a few times: to rehash some updates announced in June at WWDC , like Visual Intelligence and its on-device models, and in some aspects of its camera upgrades, like the iPhone 17’s front camera, which it calls Center Stage.\n\nThe most compelling use of AI wasn’t even introduced as a phone upgrade; it was the AI-powered Live Translation feature coming to Apple’s AirPods 3 .\n\nThere was no mention of Siri at all, AI-powered or otherwise.\n\nMuch has been made about how Apple’s miscalculation on AI could negatively affect its industry standing and future success. Meanwhile, Google last month rolled out its latest release of an AI-powered Android phone with its Pixel 10 , as iPhone owners still await an AI Siri, which has been delayed until 2026 .\n\nUntil now, Apple has only released what could be considered baseline AI features for its devices, like AI writing tools, summarization, generative AI images (which some complain are not very good), live translation, visual search, and Genmoji , among others. Yet a digital assistant that understands a wide range of questions — without deferring to ChatGPT — or one that can provide further context from your iPhone apps remains overdue.\n\nRecently, it was reported that Apple is looking to third parties to help it catch up in the AI race. An AI-enhanced Siri could be running some other techno