In September 2024 Apple ran a campaign called “More Personal Siri”. It showed an iPhone 16 with an assistant that understood your personal context, dug through your messages to answer questions and acted across apps. It was a good advertisement for a product that, it turned out, did not exist yet. Months later Apple conceded that the promised Siri upgrade would not arrive on the timeline it had implied. Now the company has agreed to pay $250 million — about Tk 3,075 crore — to settle a class action brought by US consumers who say they bought iPhones on the strength of those claims.
The case
The lawsuit, filed in the federal court for the Northern District of California, argued that Apple’s advertising highlighted multiple Siri capabilities that did not exist, and that buyers were induced to purchase iPhones on the basis of false advertising. Apple has agreed to settle rather than fight it out; a settlement is not an admission of guilt, but it is a recognition that the argument was strong enough to be expensive.
Who is eligible
According to the court filings, compensation goes to people who bought one of these models in the United States between 10 June 2024 and 29 March 2025:
- iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max
- iPhone 16, 16e and 16 Plus
- iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max
Roughly 37 million buyers are estimated to qualify. Claims must be filed within a set window, and Apple has 45 days to publish the notice explaining how. Spread across that many phones, the individual payout will be small — a few dollars each unless most buyers never claim, which in class actions is usually what happens. Buyers outside the US, including everyone who imported an iPhone 16 into Bangladesh, are not covered.
Why it matters beyond the money
$250 million is a rounding error for Apple. The significance is the precedent: a court-backed penalty for marketing an AI feature before it works. Every phone maker, laptop brand and software company is currently advertising “AI” capabilities of varying reality, and many of them are demonstrated with pre-rendered videos rather than shipping code. This settlement gives consumer lawyers a template. Expect the fine print under AI demos to grow, and expect “coming later this year” to appear in larger type.
Where Siri stands now
The personalised Siri has still not arrived in the form the 2024 ads showed; Apple has since reorganised the team responsible and been reported to be considering outside AI models to power it. For iPhone owners the practical upshot is unchanged: the assistant you have is the assistant you bought, and any upgrade should be judged when it ships, not when it is announced.
