Apple pays $250m for a Siri it shipped 813 days late

Apple is paying $250m to settle a claim that it sold phones on an AI feature it did not ship, and eligible owners can now file. The company denies wrongdoing. The payout is an estimated $25 a device, and the arithmetic behind that number is worth reading before filing.

The terms in brief:

• Who qualifies: US buyers of an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16, bought between 10 June 2024 and 29 March 2025.
• What it pays: an estimated $25 per device, rising toward $95 if few people claim.
• When it closes: 21 December 2026, which is 91 days from today.

Those two payment figures in the Siri settlement are the same pot divided differently. At $25 the fund covers 10 million devices; at $95 it covers 2.63 million. The higher number is not a bonus for being early, it is what each claimant receives if fewer than about 2.6 million people bother to claim at all. Against the phones in question the base payment is 2.5% of a $999 iPhone 16 Pro and 3.1% of a $799 iPhone 16.

813 days from promise to feature

The dates are the sharper part. The class window opens on 10 June 2024, the day of the WWDC keynote that showed the features, and closes on 29 March 2025, when the delay became public knowledge. That is 292 days in which the phones were sold against a promise. The Siri rebuilt on an LLM arrived with iOS 27 this month, 813 days after the keynote and 711 days after the iPhone 16 went on sale labelled built for Apple Intelligence.

“Clear and reasonable consumer expectation.”

— Class action complaint, Quoted by The Verge

From the class action complaint, on what the 2024 keynote created

What the shape tells you

This is what applying existing law to AI marketing looks like when someone actually does it. Nvidia's chief executive argued this week that AI firms are already covered by the laws on the books and that those should be applied before anyone writes new ones. Here the laws on the books were applied, and the result is a consumer-protection settlement that prices an undelivered feature at roughly the cost of a phone case, two years after the promise.

The pattern matters more than the sum. A feature is announced, the hardware ships branded for it, and the capability arrives when it arrives. We ran into the same shape with a recording ring whose software rollout lagged its hardware. The useful question before any AI-branded purchase is not what the device will do eventually, but what it does on the day it arrives, because that is the only part a court can measure afterwards.

Informational material, not investment advice. Settlement terms are as published by The Verge on 21 September 2026; Apple denies wrongdoing. The ratios here are ours.