CUPERTINO, June 9 -- Craig Federighi did not mean it as a concession. But when Apple's senior vice president of software engineering told reporters Monday that agentic AI involving "long-horizon tasks" represents "very early days" for the industry, he described, with unusual precision, the distance between where Apple now stands and where its most serious rivals have already gone.

The rebuilt Siri that Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference is not a bad product. In demonstrations, it surfaced a podcast someone had recommended in a text message and pulled camping suggestions from an email to populate a Notes list. These are things Siri could not reliably do before Monday. They are also not what the developers Apple most ne...