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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.