even though I have installed os 27 on my MacBook Air m3, I discovered after the below response in gemini that I now have to be in a waitlist for the core feature upgrade in os 27.
here goes:
why is it when I ask Siri AI the question: "When will the temperature drop below 70F today?" Siri's response is to show me a weekly weather report rather than looking at the hour by hour forecast and telling me 9pm (I had to do that)?
gemini:
That frustrating behavior comes down to how voice assistants like Siri are architected under the hood. Instead of acting like a true logical agent that parses data points step-by-step, Siri usually relies on a mix of rigid UI intents and pattern matching.
1. Entity and Intent Mapping (The "Default View" Trap)
When you ask a question containing a keyword like "weather" or a time horizon like "today," Siri's natural language parser maps your phrase to a broad Intent (in this case, GetWeatherIntent).
- The Shortcut: Apple’s design philosophy for Siri heavily prioritizes visual, glanceable UI cards over direct text answers.
- The Fallback: When triggered, the system's default behavior for weather queries is to fetch the primary Weather app UI container for the current day—which defaults to the standard multi-day or daily summary view—rather than executing a conditional search query over raw data arrays (like scanning an hourly JSON payload for the first index where temperature < 70).
2. Lack of Conversational Logic Layers
Siri often treats queries as static lookups rather than analytical questions. To give you "9 PM," the assistant would need to:
- Pull the hourly forecast array.
- Filter/iterate through the timestamps.
- Find the exact logic condition (temp < 70).
- Extract the associated time string.
Historically, Siri's backend has struggled with these types of dynamic, relational data filtering tasks on the fly, defaulting instead to dumping the raw source dashboard into your lap and letting you do the data processing.
3. Visual-First vs. Voice-First Conflict
Apple's assistants are built with a "screen-first" mindset. Siri assumes that showing you the app interface is more helpful because you can look at the visual graphs yourself. Ironically, this creates a worse user experience for voice or hands-free interactions, forcing you to dig through the hourly chart manually just to answer a simple threshold question that an AI should be able to calculate instantly.
so even though my m3 air has dedicated neural processing, it isn't used in Siri AI to answer that question
Even though your M3 MacBook Air has a powerful 16-core Neural Engine capable of running heavy on-device machine learning models, it isn't being used to solve that specific query.
That limitation comes down to how Apple splits processing between on-device hardware and cloud infrastructure:
1. Siri's Neural Engine Tasks Are Restricted
Apple Intelligence does use the M3 Neural Engine for specific on-device features (like writing tools, notification summaries, image generation, and a smarter natural language understanding layer for Siri). However, core system actions—like fetching real-time weather data—rely on traditional APIs and structured backend queries rather than local generative AI reasoning.
2. The Bottleneck is Logic, Not Computing Power
Answering "When will the temp drop below 70°F?" doesn't actually require heavy neural compute or a massive language model; it just requires a basic conditional filter on a dataset (WHERE temperature < 70 ORDER BY time ASC LIMIT 1).
The failure isn't that your M3 chip lacks the muscle to process it. The bottleneck is that Siri's software framework lacks the agentic workflow to take a natural language conditional question, query the underlying weather database logically, and return a synthesized string. Instead, it hits a rigid fallback path: Weather keyword detected $\rightarrow$ Launch Weather App UI view.
Until Apple transitions Siri into a true LLM-backed assistant that can dynamically parse app data and execute programmatic logic on the fly, local silicon horsepower won't change how it handles conditional data lookups.
so once Siri AI is out of beta (in beta since October 2024) and I've made it past the waitlist, will my m3 chip be too old by then or will it instead rely on servers?