Apple Live events were better because, you had to deliver.
Wayne Ma from The Information came out with a new revealing piece discussing why and how Siri got left behind due to poor leadership, complacency, and clashes between the Siri and AI/ML teams at Apple.
Interestingly, the Apple engineers themselves were surprised by the Siri demo at WWDC 2024 where Siri could gather your personal context and give you the information you needed without jumping through multiple apps:
The report claims that the demo of Apple Intelligence's most impressive features at WWDC 2024, such as where Siri accesses a user's emails to find real-time flight data and provides a reminder about lunch plans using messages and plots a route in maps, was effectively fictitious. The demo apparently came as a surprise to members of the Siri team, who had never seen working versions of the capabilities.
This wouldn’t fly during live events and would have kept Apple in check because you have to demo a working product.
I’ve heard many analysts and influencers talk about software promises, and the golden rule still applies:
Never buy a piece of hardware with the promises of future software features. Buy a product for what it has today.
Apple used to be the exception to this rule, but now it seems that even Apple isn’t immune from software challenges.
The detailed analysis is paywalled, along with another New York Times piece, but you can get other tidbits from these sites: