Apple’s “Siri 2.0” Is Real, Says Evercore. Ok, But Who’s Left to Ship It?

Apple’s senior talent appears to be fleeing while analysts cheerlead from the sidelines. Evercore calls Siri 2.0 “real” as if that’s news, ignoring that Apple is now renting its AI brain from Google. This isn’t a comeback story but a leadership vacuum dressed as optimism, with pom-poms.

Tommo_UK

07 Dec 2025 — 7 min read

Tim Cook seems to have gone “Back to the Future,”for inspiration, but unlike Gil Amelio who bought in a new brain, Tim is just renting one from Google because his Siri-OS is a flop.

I notice Gurman on one hand peeling back the layers of a “mass exodus” of Apple senior talent, and now, on a weekend, Evercore stampeding out in defence of AAPL (they have to; they’ve been selling it to their clients for months).

Gurman says talent is fleeing Apple.

And in contrast,

Evercore say “Siri 2.0 is REAL”

Well “no sht!”

And IS HAPPENING (again, no sht),
and that Gemini will now pave the way to glory for Apple AI (erm… we’ll see).

But hang on: wasn’t AAPL up on iPhone sales, not AI?

I thought AI didn’t matter?

So it now matters enough to raise a PT to $325?

As someone who put a $400 PT on AAPL if they got AI right, back in June 2025, I’m not exactly anti-AI.

**Amit, $325, with AI, I pinned $400 on AAPL six months ago. But they haven’t delivered AI yet, so hold your horses, mister.**

But ‘Amit at Evernote’ (sorry, Evercore) is really “bashing the bishop” (quaint English expression - look it up) on this one, sprinting from one straw man to another without respecting his own baseline thesis (or frankly the intelligence of investors).

We knew Siri 2.0 was coming in 2026.

This is hardly news. Amit, string an upgrade on something we don’t know, and respect the negative newsflow too.

You’re meant to be an analyst, not an a$$-licker.

This isn’t deserving of a PT upgrade. It deserves some serious debate in contrast to the overall newsflow and not in isolation.

It’s deserving of a cautious “wait and see” given Apple’s fifteen-year epic fail. Siri 2.0?

**Siri 2.0? Not by a long shot.. More like Siri out of 15 years of beta versions, and still lobotomised by sandboxes and privacy shields.**

More like Siri 15.0 - guys like Amit have zero understanding of Apple, even while they cheerlead the stock.

Siri was agentic in 2011 and multi-platform. Apple stripped it back and lobotomised it.

Here’s the truth: Apple fucked up. And they know it. And they’re desperate.
Hence the “second guy from Google” they just hire to get rid of and fix the mistakes the “first hire from Google” left them with from 2018.

But let’s point the finger where the blame really lies for this mess and stop giving out passes for it: Tim Cook.

Apple has literally lost its mind, and is renting it from Google via Gemini.

I notice the scepticism, and almost comically in-denial comments across the web about Apple’s executive turmoil. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The company is shedding more talent than in 2017–2019, when its silicon efforts nearly collapsed from brain drain to AI start-ups, delaying silicon by years (conveniently forgotten in history, but not by me).

Pathetic is the only word for the world’s most successful company, with the world’s first agentic assistant 15 years ago, having to pay Google $1B a year to rent its brains.

Now the same drain is hitting not just silicon but interface design (good riddance to Liquid Glass), hardware, and software engineering.

This is not an accident. This is not random.

This is a systemic failure to retain top talent. Sure, some may simply be moving on, but you do not get a mass exodus like this unless “there’s trouble at t’mill,” as the old saying goes.

“Trouble” barely covers it.

The house feels on fire, and the firemen are too busy blaming each other and sprinting to the exit to save the building.

**“Captain, the warp drive can ‘nai take any more stress! She’s going to blow!”**

Who’s coming to the rescue?

It seems the company needs a giant Vapour Cooling “Chill Chamber” to cool the egos and tempers overheating the place.

The “Tim’s got this” chorus is humming away while half the senior org is openly interviewing.

The same people who spent a decade parroting “It just works” now trying to spin “It’s just turnover.”

Sure.

If it gets any worse, Apple might as well license Android and re-skin it. It already works with AirDrop after all.

And if hardware teams evaporate as quickly as the design ones, maybe just buy Nothing and call it the youth strategy. Octogenarian boomers out; Gen-Z in. It’d be the first real innovation in 15 years.

**Gen-Z have little time for Apple’s Whacky Antics - and frankly, who can blame them.**

Anyway, somebody needed to say this: the draught in the Spaceship isn’t just the empty seats.

It’s the leadership vacuum

The longer everyone pretends otherwise, the colder it gets.

Vapour-chamber cooling is at full blast in the Spaceship Campus.
No wonder the atmosphere in there is chillier than Siberia.

Brrrrr….

As for “Amit at Evercore,” good luck cheerleading with pom-poms.
You and Dan Ives are mixing Hollywood with Bollywood - a veritable troop of Vogue dancers having a face-off, failing to notice the cracks in the dancefloor beneath you as you stomp.

Only time will tell, not this marathon dancing. We know how those used to end: exhaustion and collapse, even the band dropping dead from a coronary.

Will it be different this time?

Let’s wait and see, but remember,:

this is not Siri 2.0.
Or even Siri 3.0.

This is Siri 15.0 - 15 years after acquisition and still dead from the neck up until Gemini is transplanted to power Apple’s brains.

Is that really the fate we want to see for Apple?

Apple - run on Google’s Gemini, renting brains, and dependent on Google? Pretty sad ending. A bit like Apple, if they hadn’t bought in NeXT and Steve Jobs to build their own solution to their then “brain problem” - OS 9 - with OS X and had instead proceeded with the doomed Copland project but replaced it’s kernel with something bought in from, say, oh I don’t know, Be Inc and their Be OS?

Tragic.

Sometimes, we need to look past shareholder value, and:

Remember why we loved this company to begin with.

Because it broke the narrative.
It broke the rules.
It was daring.
It took risks.
It launched products live on stage.
People felt it. They loved it.
We loved it.

And we bought shares in it.

Now? The shares are for rent, and the dividends are free. Rock on? More like this rolling stone is gathering moss, if you ask me.

In the meantime, while we wait for the “Amit and Ives” show to pom-pom AAPL to “Infinity and Beyond,” Buzz Lightyear style, we watch Tim Cook pilot Apple as a company and an ethos, into the ground - a Buzz Killer and a sad fate for a company with a spaceship for a campus.

Know any PDF designers to help me with a 20,000 word, 30-year restrospective on Apple from Amelio to Jobs to Cook - via Ballmer (you’ll understand when you read the Final Opus)?

**Opus planned, and new take. More Apple, less AAPL.**

HMU on the discreet contact form:

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Tommo_UK, Sunday 7th December, 2025