To be fair I am not all that confident in Apples long term either. I think they are playing a dangerous game by not using user data to improve their AI. They could end up being left behind in the AI world, and that is not a world you want to be left behind in as a tech company. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft could all end up having better voice recognition and assistants, and they'll only get more powerful over the next 5 years to the point I think they will be indespensable for a lot of people. I already use Google Assistant a tonne. But Apple are prioritizing privacy above all else, and while admirable, that is going to cost them big time, as it stops them feeding their 100's of millions of users worth of data into their datasets. And data is basically the 2nd maybe 3rd most important thing in improving AI, it's critical.
Plus their lack of enthusiasm around their scientists publishing research publicly makes them undesirable to work at for a lot of academics. So most talent out of top comp sci. colleges like Mellon and Stanford are not going to Apple, they are going to Google and Facebook, because they want to publish their work for other scientists and the public to see.
I think they will keep on top of the hardware game, but I think the technologies that are powered through the hardware like Siri will slowly fall behind competitors and that will be very problematic for them as they become more important.
