Ahead of the WWDC 2025 keynote, Apple decided to give its New York billboards a new look. Instead of the punchy but controversial “Imagine it. Genmoji it” slogan, the company decided to take a more classic approach to promoting the iPhone 16 Pro’s recording capabilities.
PMC’s Parker Ortolani spotted that Apple has been altering promotional billboards to say “iPhone 16 Pro. Cinemasterpiece.” While the company aimed to highlight Apple Intelligence features before their official release on the iPhone 16, Apple is now facing more significant challenges due to long-delayed features. They even had to address the previously announced on-screen awareness Siri feature, which has since been postponed indefinitely.
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After that statement a few weeks ago, BGR has been reporting a strategic shake-up for several Apple teams. Siri now has new bosses, and Apple is rushing to deliver the on-screen awareness capabilities as soon as this fall—even though the company might have to delay them until 2026.
Since this Siri feature was the last one missing from the original Apple Intelligence announcement, the company has nothing else to promote. In addition, the already available features aren’t anything groundbreaking. Writing Tools barely worked, and Summarize Notification got an update to stop summarizing news articles’ headlines as it was getting the information wrong.
Besides that, Apple Intelligence is still in beta while OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and so many others rush to introduce more advanced LLMs, conversational AI, and even agentic functionality. Finally, Apple decided to focus on what the iPhone does best: Record videos and take photos.
If the company had followed that ad strategy initially, it might have avoided all the Siri drama. The company revamped the cameras on the iPhone 16 Pro, and when it launched, Apple promoted The Weeknd’s latest music video.
Now, it seems even worse since the company keeps admitting that its AI strategy failed. It’s now trying to clean up this lousy image by removing YouTube ads and billboards. Let’s see what WWDC 2025 will bring.
