Hi, I’m Siri! Your virtual assistant!
The iPhone 4S, released in 2011, brought with it a virtual assistant that is still alive and kicking to this day: Siri. The device also signaled Apple’s eventual dominance over both personal and professional device markets, upending the mobile device market thanks to improved connectivity, processing power, and graphical capabilities.
In a press release from Apple the day of the iPhone 4S’s launch in October, the company called the product, “the most amazing iPhone yet,” pointing to the device’s dual-core A5 chip for improved graphics (which had made its appearance previously in the iPad 2, according to remarks made by Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Philip Schiller).
Amélie Koran, chief enterprise security architect for the Department of Interior at the time and self-proclaimed “Apple fan-girl,” told IT Brew that the multimedia capabilities of the iPhone was a big “sea change,” since Apple was known for iPods then—which were eventually rendered obsolete by the capabilities of the iPhone.
Koran was in charge of understanding the security risks and potential implications of government use of the iPhone 4S and other Apple devices, specifically for DOI.
“I always loved the usability of that over Android,” Koran said. “The idea of speech to text, or an assistant in some fashion or another, was just really freaking cool.”
They continued: “I was super excited about it, to be honest. I just realized it’s gonna be a management nightmare.”
Hey, Siri? In the product release announcement, Apple introduced the “intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.”
The company described Siri as understanding context, which allowed it to speak naturally when asked questions. Users could ask Siri if they needed to use an umbrella outside, and the assistant could pick up the conversational cues about weather.
Additionally, the tool at the time was capable of setting reminders, sending text messages, searching the internet, finding facts, performing complex calculations, and more.
Some, however, were underwhelmed by the natural language processor and speech recognition-powered tool.
Almost a month after the iPhone 4S launch, TechCrunch’s then-deputy editor, Jordan Crook, released a piece detailing Siri’s shortcomings, stating that, “Siri isn’t perfect, and perfect is what I expected.”
Crook detailed that, “The disappointment can all be traced back to the hype, which began with Apple’s demo. I don’t blame Apple for this—I guess it’s just a product of success—but with each new capability introduced, hope grew.”
Siri also presented security concerns. Koran told IT Brew that in conversations with Apple about making the 4S friendly for professional use within the government, Siri had to be turned off for the time being, “Because we couldn’t get a straight answer out of Apple, how that was processed.”
Koran pointed to the device’s use of iCloud, which Apple stated in the release was a “breakthrough set of free cloud services that work with your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices.”
“The idea of everything’s [becoming] cloud based, everything’s being updated on demand, really forced a lot of organizations to change their risk and threat models,” Koran said. “So, for Siri, it was like, what’s being sent out to Apple and how are they processing it?”
Philip Schiller, Apple’s then-SVP of worldwide product marketing, said in the release that the 4S, with the iOS 5 model and iCloud, was, “a breakthrough combination that makes the iPhone 4S the best iPhone ever.”
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Wired, in a review of the iPhone, said that the device’s camera, antenna, and processor were “minor” compared to the addition of Siri, and that “Siri is the reason people should buy this phone.”
Others focused their attention to the speed of the phone, instead.
Keeping up with the processors. While the iPhone 4S was, externally, almost identical to the previous iPhone 4,Schiller said, in his remarks, that the inside was brand new.
“[A5] is an Apple-designed chip that’s remarkable, it’s a dual-core processor, it delivers performance that’s up to twice as fast at CPU tasks,” Schiller said. “It’s also dual-core graphics, which means the graphics can be up to seven times faster than they were in the previous iPhone. This is going to help across all the kinds of applications you might use.”
“The one area we really see it screams are games,” Schiller said.
Eurogamer reported that Donald Mustard, chair entertainment creative director of Epic at the time, acknowledged that the company was working with Apple—of the A5 chip, he said that, “Having that much power in a device that small—really, there’s a lot we can do with it.”
“I’m still shocked that, with the iPhone 4S, I’m literally running around with a 1080p video camera in my pocket, with an eight megapixel camera, 64GB of hard drive space and an A5 chip with 512MB of memory,” Mustard told Eurogamer in 2011. “This is a really powerful computer, right?”
AppleInsider shared Eurogamer’s reporting, and iterated on the speed of the device, calling it the “fastest phone on the market.”
The A5 processor, according to Apple, allowed for “blazing fast performance and stunning graphics,” all while the battery life is preserved.
Siri, be more secure. The benefits to having the iPhone as a device were agreed upon, and it reached the federal level, too.
Koran said that, during their time at DOI, an agency official had come back from a meeting at the White House and saw other officials using tablets and decided that instead of pen and paper, they wanted tech available for the agency.
There were, of course, security concerns to hammer out—Koran being the lead for DOI to figure out how the new device, along with others, could be implemented into workflows. They
pointed to security concerns involving a lost device or being able to authenticate a user’s identity.
“There was the requirements for being able to authenticate to a government device at the time, [which] required multi-factor authentication,” Koran said.
While the government had verification cards at the time, “there was no such thing as derived credentials, which came a couple of years later,” using a soft certificate. Koran said that the problem at the time was trying to find ways to make multi-factor authentication work.
“We’re also looking at remote-wipe capabilities, that was also something new for iOS at the time, through the carriers to allow you to block or wipe a lost device,” Koran said.
Koran said that there were growing pains with iOS at the time, starting in 2011 and lasting until 2014.
“It was a lot of fun, but I got to explore how to do that in a large-scale environment,” Koran said. “It was an interesting time, just to see that level of innovation. Now when you get iOS, you get that new Android release, it’s not a big deal. It’s just like, oh, there’s a couple other features, there’s nothing blockbuster like there was back then.”
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
