Apple says the rebuilt Siri now handles 2.5 billion requests a day, but warns AI ramp will pressure margins

Apple used its Q4 earnings call to put a number on its Siri overhaul: more than 2.5 billion requests per day. That is roughly 1 billion more than its 2024 baseline. The rebuilt assistant, still labeled beta, handles personal context, on-screen awareness and actions across apps on iPhone, Mac and Apple TV 4K.

The quarter itself beat expectations on iPhone and services revenue. But Apple flagged two margin headwinds: higher memory costs and the expense of ramping Siri's AI backend. Running models at that request volume is a large inference bill, even with much of the work done on-device.

For context, 2.5 billion daily requests puts Siri in the same league as the largest chatbots, though most Siri requests are short commands rather than long conversations. The China rollout using Alibaba's Qwen, coming with iOS 27.3, should push the numbers higher still.

Other items: a $299 HomeView smart display ships November 13, and Apple says more 2026 launches are still coming. The open question for investors is whether Siri's improvements translate into upgrade cycles or service revenue, or whether the assistant is simply a defensive cost of keeping up.