Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Two things happened to Siri this week that have nothing to do with each other on paper and everything to do with each other in practice. Siri AI — the "new" Siri that shipped with iOS 27 — is rolling out wider, still labeled beta, still gated behind a waitlist. And this same week, notices started going out for the $250 million settlement over the Apple Intelligence promises made back in June 2024. Apple is now simultaneously shipping the thing it promised two years late, still visibly unfinished, while paying people for having promised it in the first place. Let that sit for a second. What's Actually Wrong With Siri AI Right Now 9to5Mac ran the numbers on what's showing up in user complaints since the wider rollout, and it sorts into five buckets: Network errors with no explanation. Repeated "Sorry, something went wrong" failures, apparently tied to backend connectivity issues — sometimes fixed by toggling a VPN or switching Wi-Fi — but the interface never tells you what actually broke. Indexing regressions — and indexing that just doesn't finish. New Siri is supposed to be better at finding things on your device. Users report the opposite: it can't locate Reminders lists by name, can't find HomeKit accessories it used to recognize, and in one case told an Apple Watch owner it couldn't set a timer because the Clock app "isn't installed" on the device. What makes this doubly frustrating is that the on-device indexing this all depends on is slow to begin with, and it can flat-out hang. Apple's own developer forums have threads of the Siri & Search indexing percentage stuck for 24+ hours with no progress, and at least one report of it sitting stalled past 65 hours across a hard restart, airplane mode, and diagnostics — with the only real fix being "wait and hope." A hard unlock requirement. Even with "Allow Siri When Locked" switched on, plenty of requests now fail unless the phone is unlocked — a requirement classic Siri never had, and one that lands hardest on exactly the situations people use Siri for: driving, AirPods, hands full. Latency, especially on Apple Watch. Because much of the processing routes through Private Cloud Compute rather than staying on-device, a slow connection makes Siri slow — and on watchOS 27, something as small as "start a 5 minute timer" can reportedly take several seconds where it used to be instant. Missing or regressed capabilities. Health app queries aren't supported yet. The old "Use ChatGPT" prefix for routing requests is gone. And some phrasings classic Siri understood now confuse the new, broader-scoped model — a side effect of Siri AI having so much more surface area to get ambiguous about. There's also a setup gotcha that isn't obvious and isn't really documented anywhere. In my case, either the "Hey Siri" toggle had gotten flipped back off on its own, or something in a disable/re-enable cycle I'd gone through left it in a state where the system just wasn't listening — Siri sat there completely ignoring me until I manually hit the button. Once I found and re-hit that toggle, things actually started moving. This isn't just an isolated fluke, either: Apple's own developer forums confirm the underlying model won't report itself as available unless "Siri" / "Hey Siri" or "Press Side Button for Siri" is switched on — otherwise it silently returns "not enabled," with no indexing, no waitlist movement, nothing. So the actual first troubleshooting step for most of this — before indexing, before waitlist status — is going into Settings and confirming that toggle is actually on, not just assuming it is because you set it up once already. Add the interface complaints on top — an "Ask Siri" button plastered everywhere, no visible transcript of what it heard you say, and the swipe-down-for-notifications gesture now hijacked to open Siri & Spotlight instead — and you get a beta that reads like a beta. Apple hasn't published a fix roadmap beyond a note that more languages are coming in October. For what it's worth, if this is driving you up the wall: Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → Siri, and switch "Allowed Siri Version" back to Siri Classic. You can flip it forward again whenever you want to give the new one another shot. Meanwhile, The Checks Are Moving This is the same $250 million settlement I covered back in May — the one over Apple advertising Siri capabilities for the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 line that, per the lawsuit's own language, "did not exist at the time, do not exist now, and will not exist for two or more years." Today is the date the court filing flagged back in August for notices to start going out and claims to open — assuming the judge's approval of the proposed schedule held, which by the timing of this post, it evidently did. MacTrast has the same dates: roughly a 90-day claims window, closing around December 21, 2026, with the final approval hearing set for February 24, 2027. Payouts, if approved, won't land until sometime after that. I already walked through eligibility and how to find your device's serial number in the original post — short version, iPhone 15 Pro through 16 Pro Max, purchased in the U.S. between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025. If you're in that window, the notice should be heading to the email on your Apple ID now, and the filing process is open as of today. The Irony Doesn't Need My Help The lawsuit's core claim was that the features "did not exist at the time" and "will not exist for two or more years." June 2024 plus two years is June 2026. It's now September 2026, and the thing that shipped is labeled beta, ships with a five-category bug list on day one, and comes with a built-in "how to turn this back off" instruction set in the same article announcing it. The lawsuit's timeline undersold it, if anything. This is the same pattern as always: sell the keynote version, ship the engineering version whenever it's actually ready, and treat the gap between those two dates as an acceptable cost of doing business — sometimes a legal cost, sometimes just a "beta" label that buys another few release cycles of goodwill. Apple isn't hiding that Siri AI is unfinished. It says so right in the settings menu. It's just that "beta" and "the thing we advertised at WWDC 2024" are doing a lot of the same marketing work while meaning very different things. What I Actually Use It For Worth being honest about scope here. In practice, my own Siri usage boils down to timers and alarms, hands-free texting in CarPlay, and the notification summary that pops up on its own once a thread hits three or four unread messages — sure, a slight privacy risk having it summarize your texts unprompted, but my wife and I find them hilarious more often than not. Beyond that, I'm not actively invoking Siri for anything. I'm well past the "open the pod bay doors" phase everyone went through when this stuff was new and every request was really just poking it to see what it would do. Which is the part that makes this whole exercise feel a little silly in hindsight: I went through the waitlist, the indexing, the toggle-hunting, all of it, purely to test Siri AI for this post — not because I actually needed any of it for the three things I use Siri for day to day. Classic Siri already handled timers, alarms, and CarPlay texting fine. Given how much friction the new version added just to get running, I'll probably just revert once I'm done poking at it. That's not a ringing endorsement for something Apple settled a quarter-billion dollars over. What To Actually Do Two small, unrelated actions, both worth taking: If you're in the settlement class, watch for the notice and file when it lands, or check the claims portal now that the window is open. The number Apple actually pays out scales with how many people bother — same math I laid out last time. If Siri AI is actively getting in your way, drop back to classic Siri through Screen Time. It's not a protest, it's just the assistant that currently works — at least until Apple gets courageous and removes the option entirely, same as the Liquid Glass toggle. Same company, same assistant, same underlying habit of shipping the marketing before the engineering — just two different bills coming due in the same week. I'll keep documenting them as they land. 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