Which is the Siri delay gonna be: the C1 modem or AirPower?

Let’s talk about Severance.

Perseverance.

See what the Macalope did there? It’s a little play on words. Wordplay is a delightful way to draw a reader in. By tricking them. Anyway, the horny one doesn’t actually want to talk about Severance right now because he hasn’t seen last week’s episode yet.

Instead let’s talk about Apple’s new C1 modem, which is almost like talking about prestige television but more boring.

Look, not every column is going to be wall-to-wall thrills and spills.

Still, you have to hand it to Apple. The company’s travails with this modem were the butt of many jokes. Not that the Macalope ever stooped to making any. Cough. He doesn’t know what column you were reading.

After acquiring Intel’s modem division in 2019, the company seemingly struggled to ship a modem worthy of the C1 moniker. After repeatedly being rumored to appear soon, it took six years before it finally shipped in the iPhone 16e. But ship it did and the results are pretty good, considering.

It seems that maybe it wasn’t so much that Apple was struggling to get the modem to work, it’s that it was struggling to get it to work really well. While it doesn’t support mmWave 5G in the U.S., it’s still a processor that can proudly sit next to its M-series relatives at Easter dinner. (The Macalope knows St. Patrick’s Day is closer, but when looking for a timely reference, “Drink itself blind next to its M-series relatives on St. Patrick’s Day” isn’t quite the image you wanna go for.)

IDG

The company could have pulled the plug like it did with Project Titan but it stuck with it. This is an interesting and timely example of Apple’s perseverance at a time when another project is facing its own delays: Apple confirmed that the can full of highly anticipated “conversational” version of Siri was being kicked down the proverbial road.

It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.

Apple PR’s Jacqueline Roy in a statement to John Gruber (March 7, 2025)

Since the company seemed to think it would be able to release chatty Siri relatively soon, it seems like this is probably more like the modem project than Project Titan. But, then, it actually showed a picture of AirPower, and look how that turned out.

Apple’s chip development is obviously a different beast than its software development. Still, perseverance has paid off for the company in software, as well. Remember Maps? Sure you do, you used it earlier today to find that place with the thing (hospital specializing in fungal treatment). When Maps first relaunched with Apple’s own data it was, as the French like to say, a bit of an el disastro (disclaimer: that is not French, no French person says that). Now while you can have a reasonable argument over which is better, Apple Maps or Google Maps, there’s no denying that Apple’s offering is pretty good, certainly Good Enough™.

Honestly, if it can get “conversational” Siri to be Good Enough™ they should just go with that. You may have noticed the quotes the Macalope puts around that modifier. That’s because no LLM can really have a conversation with you. They’re all just faking it until they make it.

Or they tell you to eat rocks and glue.