Apple's March 4 Event and the AI Siri Problem Nobody Is Talking About

On March 4, 2026, Apple is staging simultaneous "Apple Experience" events in New York, London, and Shanghai — the first time the company has run a multi-city live event in years. The press has been predictably focused on the hardware lineup: iPhone 17e, a budget MacBook powered by an A18 chip, refreshed iPads, M5 MacBook Pros.

But the story almost nobody is setting up ahead of this event is the quiet unraveling of one of the most recognizable brand names in consumer technology.

Siri — the voice assistant Apple has spent 15 years building into a household word — is being rebuilt from the ground up, powered by a competitor's AI, potentially restructured under an entirely new internal architecture, and simultaneously the subject of not one but three active legal actions in US federal court. And the March 4 event? It is expected to have almost nothing to do with any of it.

That is the problem worth talking about before Wednesday.

What Apple Is Actually Announcing on March 4 (And What's Conspicuously Absent)

Let's be direct about something the hype cycle is already muddying: March 4 is a hardware event. A deliberate one.

Apple has staged press hands-on sessions — not a global livestream, not a keynote — across three cities. That format choice alone is a signal. When Apple skips the livestream, it is telling Wall Street to expect incremental hardware refreshes, not a moonshot. Analysts at NAI500 put it plainly: "The conspicuous absence of an AI Siri launch tells you where Apple wants the spotlight in March."

What is expected across the March 2-4 announcement window includes the iPhone 17e, the A18-powered budget MacBook (reportedly priced around $599), M5 MacBook Air, M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros, and a refreshed iPad lineup. These are real, solid announcements — particularly the budget MacBook, which signals a genuine push into a price segment Apple has long ignored.

What is not expected: any meaningful AI Siri reveal. For the second consecutive major event cycle, Apple's AI ambitions are being held back in favor of safer hardware.

This is not an accident. It is a strategy. And understanding why reveals something important about what is happening to Siri as a brand, as a product, and as a legal liability — right now, before the event even happens.

A Timeline Apple Would Rather You Not Read In One Place

The Siri delay story has been told in fragments. Nobody has put the full arc in one place. Here it is:

June 2024: Apple unveils Apple Intelligence at WWDC. Siri is reimagined with on-screen awareness, personal context, cross-app actions. Celebrity ad campaigns run. Bella Ramsey appears in an iPhone 16 ad demonstrating AI Siri features. Excitement is genuine and loud.

October 2024: iPhone 16 ships. Most of the promised Apple Intelligence features are not on it. Apple says they are coming.

March 2025: Apple officially acknowledges the advanced Siri features will not arrive as planned. Statement issued: "It's going to take us longer than we thought." Bella Ramsey ad is quietly pulled. The new target is sometime in 2026.

March 2025 (same week): First class action lawsuit filed. Plaintiff Peter Landsheft argues Apple induced consumers to buy iPhone 16 models based on AI features that "did not exist then and do not exist now."

June 2025: Shareholder lawsuit filed. Tucker v. Apple Inc. names Tim Cook, CFO Kevan Parekh, and former CFO Luca Maestri as defendants, alleging misleading statements to investors about Siri's readiness that contributed to a stock decline wiping roughly $900 billion in market value from Apple's peak.

February 11, 2026: Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Siri is hitting fresh internal testing problems — slow response times, falling back on ChatGPT instead of Apple's own models, inability to handle complex queries. Apple's stock drops, erasing approximately $202 billion in market cap in a single session.

February 12, 2026: Apple issues a statement to CNBC: "Still on track to launch in 2026." Note the timing — this comes one day after the $202 billion loss, not as a product update.

February 17, 2026: A brand new class action — Accardi et al. v. Apple — is filed in federal court in San Jose. iPhone 16 users accuse Apple of misrepresenting the availability of advanced AI Siri features that were "a primary reason for customers to buy the iPhone 16." This filing is less than two weeks old and has received almost no mainstream coverage.

March 4, 2026: Hardware event. No confirmed AI Siri launch.

That is not a delay. That is a full restructuring of a product roadmap Apple sold to consumers and investors as imminent — twice.

The Three-Tier Rollout Nobody Is Mapping Clearly

Here is the part that current coverage is failing users on. The Siri situation is not a simple "delayed, coming soon." It is a three-layer release structure that the tech press has not explained cleanly in one place:

Layer 1 — iOS 26.4 (March/April 2026): A partial release. Some Gemini-powered features may arrive, but the two headline capabilities — Personal Context Awareness and In-App Actions — are reportedly still not ready. Think of this as a foundation layer, not the product Apple demoed in 2024.

Layer 2 — iOS 26.5 (May 2026): Personal context features begin entering beta. Internal builds already include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for these capabilities. This is where the product starts to resemble what Apple showed at WWDC 2024.

Layer 3 — iOS 27 / Campos (September 2026): The complete rebuild. Internally codenamed "Campos," this is a ground-up AI chatbot powered by Google's Gemini models, embedded into iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. Bloomberg describes it as "a fresh architecture and interface designed from the ground up for the chatbot era." It supports conversational threading, context memory across sessions, multi-step app control, and follow-up questions — none of which current Siri can do reliably.

The critical detail about Campos: it keeps the Siri wake word. Users will still say "Hey Siri" and hold the side button. Externally, the name stays the same. Internally, everything underneath it has been rebuilt by a competitor's technology.

The Brand and IP Question Nobody Is Asking

This is where things get interesting from an intellectual property perspective — and where the tech press has been almost entirely silent.

Apple has held the trademark for "Siri" since 2010. The original application was filed in January of that year and covers Class 009 (hardware, software, voice recognition) and Class 045 (personal concierge and social networking services). Over 15 years, Siri has achieved something rare: genuine generic recognition. People say "ask Siri" the way they say "Google it" or "Uber there." That level of brand saturation does not appear on a balance sheet, but it represents enormous accumulated equity.

Now consider what is actually happening:

Apple is replacing Siri's architecture entirely with a Google-powered system. The product underneath the name is categorically different from what the trademark was originally built around. The wake word and button gesture are staying. The engine, the interface, the conversational model, the cloud infrastructure — all changing.

This raises a question that nobody in tech media has asked yet: has Apple filed any new trademark application for "Campos"? As of this writing, no public USPTO filing for Apple under that name exists. Which means one of two things — either Apple is keeping the codename intentionally quiet ahead of a WWDC reveal, or the "Siri" brand name is simply too valuable to relinquish publicly, even as the product it represents is rebuilt from scratch.

There is also the Google question, which has not been resolved. Apple has consistently said that Gemini-powered Siri will run on-device or through its own "Private Cloud Compute" infrastructure. At a Q1 earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described Google as Apple's "preferred cloud provider" for this collaboration. Those two descriptions are not obviously compatible. Macworld and AppleInsider both flagged the contradiction in January. It has since disappeared from mainstream coverage without resolution.

For any brand or founder watching this space: when the product changes but the name stays, and when the infrastructure promise conflicts with what the partner company is saying publicly, you have a brand identity and IP exposure problem that goes well beyond a product delay.

Three Lawsuits. One Pattern.

The legal dimension of this story is being underreported partly because it is complicated and partly because new filings keep arriving.

Here is the current landscape as of February 24, 2026:

Landsheft v. Apple Inc. (consumer class action, Northern District of California): 69 plaintiffs argue Apple misled iPhone 16 buyers with AI Siri promises that did not and could not ship. Apple filed a motion to dismiss, arguing it delivered over 20 Apple Intelligence features and that the plaintiffs are focused narrowly on two delayed capabilities. The motion to dismiss hearing was scheduled for January 7, 2026 before Judge Noel Wise. The outcome of that hearing has not surfaced clearly in any search result reviewed — which is itself a gap in current coverage.

Tucker v. Apple Inc. (shareholder securities fraud, June 2025): Names Tim Cook and two CFOs as defendants. Argues that misleading investor statements about Apple Intelligence contributed to a stock decline that wiped roughly $900 billion from Apple's peak market cap.

Accardi et al. v. Apple (new consumer filing, February 17, 2026): Filed by Pomerantz LLP in Los Angeles. Claims Apple Intelligence was "a primary reason for customers to buy the iPhone 16" and that Apple "had no reasonable basis" for its 2024 WWDC promises. Some sources cited in the complaint suggest next-generation Siri may not be ready until 2027.

Bloomberg Law has called the Apple cases "the first foray into consumer deception litigation targeting exaggerated AI marketing." That framing matters. If any of these cases survive dismissal and proceed toward trial, the precedent they set will affect how every AI company brands, names, and markets future capabilities — not just Apple.

Legal analysts interviewed by Bloomberg recommended that companies marketing AI products establish internal governance boards covering legal, marketing, engineering, and business development — specifically to prevent the gap between what the technology does and what the marketing promises. That is an organizational IP and brand protection recommendation, not just an Apple problem.

What This Means Before Wednesday

The March 4 event is expected to be a good hardware show. The iPhone 17e and the budget MacBook are genuinely interesting products that expand Apple's addressable market. None of that is in dispute.

But the larger story of this product cycle — the one being set up right now, before the event happens — is what "Siri" means as a name, as a trademark, as a brand promise, and as a legal exposure, when the product underneath it has been rebuilt by a competitor and is heading into at least three federal court proceedings simultaneously.

Every major tech outlet will cover what Apple announces on March 4. Almost none of them will connect the hardware story to the brand and IP story happening in parallel. That connection is worth understanding before the event recap cycle drowns it out.

The Practical Takeaway for Founders

There is a direct lesson here that has nothing to do with Apple's stock price or whether Siri catches up to ChatGPT.

Brand names carry legal and reputational weight the moment you attach them to a product promise. The gap between what you name, what you demo, and what you ship is not just a PR risk — as Apple's situation shows, it is a litigation risk that compounds across consumer, investor, and regulatory audiences simultaneously.

The smarter play, and the one Apple's original 2011 Siri launch actually modeled well, is to name a capability only when you can deliver enough of it to anchor the brand promise in reality. The 2011 Siri was limited. It was also honest about what it was. The 2024 Apple Intelligence Siri was demoed as something it could not yet be — and that gap, between the name and the product, is where three separate lawsuits currently live.

Watch the iOS 26.4 beta this spring. Watch whether Apple files new trademark registrations around its AI assistant naming. Watch the Landsheft and Accardi cases for rulings. And watch how Apple's marketing language shifts — or carefully does not shift — as Gemini quietly becomes the engine underneath a product that still carries a name built over 15 years.

The March 4 hardware story will dominate Wednesday's coverage. The brand and IP story around Siri is the one with longer consequences.