Apple plays catch-up at WWDC

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday started off with an apology of sorts. Instead of jumping right into the headline news about a revamped AI-powered Siri, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi spent the first stretch of the keynote on a list of repairs. For the past two years, Apple has been racing to catch up in AI while frustrations with its core software quietly added up: a design overhaul users hated, a search function that barely worked, a file-sharing feature that routinely failed, and a Health app that ignored half its user base. Apple didn’t say any of that on Monday. But the structure of its WWDC keynote said it for them, leading with fixes before…