No AirPods Max 2 on the way (but not at all)
According to Mark Gurman – journalist from Bloomberg and eavesdropper within Cupertino-, Apple has no concrete plans for a significant AirPods Max update in the near future. There will therefore be nothing planned for 2025.
Despite a slight revision in September (Lightning to USB-C) and new colors, the helmet has not benefited from any major developmentssuch as the integration of the H2 chip or features like adaptive transparency or voice isolation. An update so weak that it didn't fail to make more than one person complain.
The journalist implies that the low sales of AirPods Max (and their price!) make it difficult to justify a greater investment in their development. For users hoping for a version 2 of AirPods Max with substantial improvements, it is advisable to be patient for the moment.
Another absent from 2025: the real intelligent Siri
Last year – well before the presentation of Apple Intelligence at WWDC – conversations were going well on Apple's AI projects. In January 2024, Cupertino even discreetly published an artificial intelligence model responding to the sweet name of Ferret (ferret in French). This is an MLLM (for Multimodal Large Language Modelor large multimodal language model) capable of processing texts and images.
Recently, Mark Gurman suggested that Siri could finally be equipped with new functions, but its intelligent version would not be for now, or even for next year.
Apparently, Apple is preparing an advanced version of Siri, nicknamed in VO LLM Series
to compete with tools like ChatGPT. The latter – which uses large multimodal language models – will allow conversations continues and more complex tasks, going well beyond Siri's current capabilities.
But, Cupertino could choose to do an announcement in June 2025 during WWDC with iOS 19. But the official launch would rather be planned for the spring 2026as some additional features would have been carried over to iOS 19.4. I'm told that a larger than usual number of features planned for iOS 19 (beyond the new Siri) are already delayed until spring 2026 (when iOS 19.4 debuts)
This major overhaul is supposed to – finally – position Siri as a serious competitor against assistants powered by AI from OpenAI or Google. But if it only arrives in a year and a half, it could prove far too late in the face of increasingly fierce competition. Unless Apple has only bet on the bursting of the AI bubble, companies having reached a plateau in view of the investments necessary for the development of chatbots.
