Apple’s troubles with AI, antitrust, tariffs loom over annual company confab

(Originally published June 9 in “What in the World“) Hey Siri, what’s a buzzkill?

Apple’s mounting troubles are vexing shareholders and threatening to kill the buzz at its big annual developers conference this week. The company’s Worldwide Developer Conference starts today at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. And so the tech press is publishing timely analyses of its myriad hurdles.

That includes a report in the Financial Times that recently departed executives say Apple is having trouble getting Siri, the famously fickle voice assistant on its iPhones, to master the large language model behind its long-awaited AI upgrade, Apple Intelligence. And while Apple admitted last year that its upgrades to Siri were taking longer than expected, its AI troubles are worrying shareholders and are likely to cloud an event that is ordinarily a celebration of the company’s innovation and industry leadership.

For its part, Apple released the results of a study touting the benefits of its App Store. Apple’s App Store and the commissions it charges developers selling products there are under scrutiny in several legal cases in the U.S. and abroad. Apple sought to set the record straight in its publication of a report by Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University’s business school and Dr. Jessica Burley from Boston-based economic consultancy Analysis Group.

Their study, apparently conducted for (and presumably paid for by) Apple, found that the App Store facilitated almost $1.3 trillion sales in 2024. But, since Apple only charges commissions on sales of digital products sold through apps on its App store but not on physical stuff, ads, or digital products sold outside apps such as newspaper subscriptions, 90% of those sales paid no commissions to Apple. So, not a monopoly?

Falling smartphone imports, meanwhile, helped slash the U.S. trade deficit in April, as Americans recoiled at higher tariffs. U.S. consumers bought fewer cell phones from China, The New York Times reported, citing the latest Commerce Dept. trade data and a Moody’s analysis. Tables released by the Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis showed that imports of “cellphones and other household goods” fell by almost 29% in April from March. These imports rose 1.4% on a year-on-year basis, however.

Nevertheless, the month-on-month decline is reportedly the result of a rush in the first three months of the year to stock up on imports before Trump’s tariffs hit. The import surge in the first quarter was so large it helped drag GDP lower. The ensuing slump resulted in a drop of overall imports in April by 16.3% compared to March.