Siri’s non-answers to non-subscribers are strange, but her responses to paying customers like myself are even weirder.
I asked Siri the same question Conrad did, and instead of getting the runaround for not being a subscriber, Siri confessed that she just didn’t know the answer. The Verge noticed that Siri was responding to all music-related questions from non-subscribers with the same answer, so I asked her one of their questions, too, about the top song in the U.S. in March 1983. I didn’t really get a satisfactory response, though:
There’s no reason why Siri can’t refer all users to web searches for questions like that, if she’s not going to actually dig into Apple Music for answers.
Why this matters: Some are speculating that this is Apple’s way of pushing people to subscribe to Apple Music, but Apple has had no trouble onboarding new users without resorting to hard sells. NBC News put Siri’s answers to the test by phrasing questions in different ways, and found that she responds to some queries with a web search, like she does for subscribers, depending on how you ask the question. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this story if the company responds.