[zach]

Apple has clearly had a difficult time keeping up with early demand for Siri services as it is.

I think keeping it limited to the 4S looks a lot more like a operational necessity at this time.

Given that, If Siri appears on the Mac between major OS releases, I imagine it might be only for new hardware (i.e. a Macbook Air with an exterior Siri button and purple LED) at first as well.

Eventually (once they can scale Siri well enough), it could be released as a modestly-priced Mac App Store app. I bet it would be more pricy than FaceTime ($0.99 US) though.

I presume that's what they'll end up doing for existing iOS customers, pegging Siri for iPhone 4 and recent Touches at a price that keeps 4S customers satisfied to get early access and/or "free" Siri for the life of their phone.

[philwelch]

> an exterior Siri button and purple LED

That's really gross, and exactly the kind of design choice Apple never makes.

[zach]

Ha! Very true, I didn't even picture it and indeed I can't. I don't think they would actually put any Siri hardware features on a MacBook in the first place, so I went off the deep end there.

[mkjones]

What makes you think thy've had a tough time scaling with early demand? I'd think that this scales horizontally pretty well, given that each request is largely stateless and there's no interaction between users.

[philwelch]

> each request is largely stateless

Negative. Siri remembers the context of your conversation.

[sovok]

But according to this article, the server seems to only translate speech to text, with the whole natural language processing and AI happening on the device.

[zach]

I'm talking about the Siri outages at peak times, which seem to have subsided for now but indicate that they weren't ready for even the demand they've had.