It’s interesting to note that Siri, Apple’s new AI/voice recognition software, came to the iPhone first, and not the Mac.

If you think about it, most features that came to the iPhone first in the past have been related to the unique hardware and mobile platform, but there haven’t been really any major software features that aren’t available on Mac OS X. Think about maps, music, email, word processing, various games — all of those were on the Mac first in a similar form. Yes, of course there are some applications unique to the iPhone, but generally those are applications that take advantage of the iPhone’s unique hardware and/or form-factor.

Now think about Siri. This is a very processor intensive piece of software which would run without issue on the Mac. Software companies have been putting this kind of software on desktop computers for decades. Most macs have built-in microphones, so this technology would have instant utility. Yet, Apple chose to release this on iOS first—and maybe even exclusively. It’s easy to argue that Siri is more useful on a mobile device, but it’s obviously much more of a technical challenge to implement (apparently some of the processing is done on remote servers) and could easily have been running on Mac OS X long before it was released on iOS.