Of course I’m dying to have Siri on my iPad 2. But Apple’s official line, reiterated in a report on Cult of Mac, is that Siri will only be available on the iPhone 4S. Responding to a query from the website, an Apple engineer said. “Siri only works on the iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices.” Of course, the optimists among us focus on the word “currently,” hoping that it’ll happen in the future. Despite Apple’s rationale that older devices aren’t powerful enough to run Siri, hackers have been able to show that it can run on older phones. Also, my iPad 2 uses the same chip as the iPhone 4S, so I don’t see the problem with making it available on that device.
My theory is that, as a new technology, it’s going to have bugs that need to be worked out. Also, it requires a huge amount of processing power on Apple’s servers, and Apple may
not be geared up to handle a larger influx beyond the iPhone 4S. I think it was a good choice to roll it out in a limited fashion, just to make sure that everything is working as it should. And of course Apple’s withholding it from other devices makes it more likely that people will buy the iPhone 4S.
But it’s obvious that Apple will eventually make Siri available on everything they sell. This is the future, this is Apple revolutionizing the human-computer interface one more time. It won’t be long until we’ll all be using Siri.
Also, you have to expect that Siri competitors will start popping up soon. Apple has a big lead, because their Siri technology is the product of a huge development team, and a research effort that began in 2003 as a military project. It will be hard for competitors to catch up, but they’ll certainly try.

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