John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.)
I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category.
Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years.
John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time.
Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly every single one of them were walked back to Steve Jobs era. Mainly by Deirdre O’Brien who has been with Apple for 20+ years.
Changes of Direction in PR. Which leads to Katie Cotton leaving.
Forced out Scott Forstall. Tim is suppose to be the mediator.
Promote Craig Federighi, after all these years I am still not convinced he is the right person for the job. Especially after merging iOS and macOS team together.
Putting too much trust on Eddy Cue and sidelined Phil Schiller. Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Fitness, Apple Books, News, All these services are Eddy Cue. The committee that ultimately ruled for Apple's 30% cut? Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously.
You can imagine how it usually works out ... after a few years of zero or negative progress, they'll move on to somewhere else, claiming victory on their LinkedIn profiles. Meanwhile the employees who actually built the company continue to get passed over in favor of another round of impostors.
So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted very far as you'll "never have had the big company experience that we need". Meanwhile, the company starts to stagnate.
“Big Company Experience” is a fucking plague. Smaller companies hire from them thinking they will bring magic sauce but all they bring is toxicity and political baggage. Meanwhile the people who went against all odds to get the company to where it is are pushed out, because “they’re not the right fit for this scale”. Nobody who says this ever talks about growing people into those roles.
Big Company Experience means you can thrive Roman style bureaucratic power plays, not actually build things. It does take a different kind of person to bootstrap something out of a garage into a company, and then continue that fledgling company to the next phase, but instead of going BCE, they should be tapping back into the Founder Energy, not the BCE people.
I'm not a Big Company person or a Founder. From my perspective, it's the "continue to the next phase" that is the whole problem.
Not everything needs to be expanded to it's logical extreme. I've worked in a lot of places, and the ideal employer is probably one who is in the middle, and planning on staying there.
The concept of "grow until you've eaten everybody" is sickening, and tiring. Especially for your non-C-suite employees who don't give a fuck about the logo on their shirt. I'm talking of course about most people the second they are no longer within earshot of their boss.
That "momentum, oomph, pizzazz" is not normal all the time. In the words of Mark Meadows, "if everything is sacred; then nothing is sacred." Meaning if you don't prioritize what is truly important, and simply assume that everything is of equally critical importance, then chances are you will fail at many more things than if you focused on the one most important thing.
But companies don't think that way. They see missed anything as missed opportunity. That is rarely the case.
Here's an example; Imagine a machine shop that has 10 customers and 65% on-time delivery. The top 3 customers drive 75% of the businesses revenue. Now lets assume that they are in negotiations with a potential 11th customer who will be their new 5th largest customer.
The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer. And then the rest of the customers will notice that their 65% on time delivery decreases to 55% as a result. Now the 3rd largest customer is quoting their parts elsewhere because they need a second supplier to cover how unreliable your deliveries are.
Do you believe that had the business not taken on the additional customer that they would have "missed a revenue opportunity"? Is that big picture stuff, small picture stuff, or just humans who live in a real world stuff?
In how I view my relationships with customers, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my relationship with customer 3 to get customer 5. My main concern would be in building a stable resilient org, not in growth unless we had a reason for growth.
I understand where you are coming from, but the archetypes I am describing are just as valid for non-profits. The scrappy person who starts something is different than the person that creates a functioning long term org with structure and delegation. The person who is good at launching from zero has a different set of skills than the person to who takes something that has launched into something that is sustainable.
I am not talking about the growth at all costs mindset. I think we agree, it is the growth at all costs mindset that replaces that builder to creates that stable org with a carpet bagger that has BCE that claims they are going to build the business 2x or more but all they bring in is politics. These are the snake oil salesmen that fail up.
If an org needs to be revitalized, rather than bringing in BCE, they should go back and bring in Founder Energy.
> The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer.
This is an oversimplification. People specialize. There are people in Sales roles, and people in Operations roles. Yes, I absolutely expect the people in Sales roles to pull all their strings to get this customer. Their compensation (including commission) also incentivizes them in that direction. Naturally, closing the sale makes the company look better to its Board and shareholders.
The question is, who is the incompetent guy in Operations who is struggling with 65% on-time delivery? Maybe he's not executing well, maybe he needs to be replaced, especially if OTD slips to 55% and is turning into the weak link in the chain. And where is the executive who is supposed to be overseeing all this, to invest in and buff up Operations so that it will match the momentum of the rest of the company?
Exchangeable but not interchangeable, the conversion ratios are all wrong now. Even in the early 90s, you could have a part time job and not live with roomates. This is no longer possible even for many people making "good money".
Or are they looking for someone who can navigate the legality of extending the American stock option scheme to the new office in El Salvador?
Maybe they want someone who knows how to implement a proper system of financial controls, which they've realised they need after a guy brought himself a canoe with the company's credit card?
I can see a founder wanting to hire people to take care of the growing compliance workload that comes with a growing company.
I read a very interesting theory in a great book called the Sovereign Individual.
The optimum firm size will go down as the cost of communications goes down. Back when messages had to be delivered on horseback, you wanted all your people in one office building.
But now you can send an email in 10 seconds for $0, so it becomes practical to have many spread-out firms cooperating.
Obviously this is not the only factor, but still.
There's another interesting idea in Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind: when many agents with approximately the same processing power cooperate, the higher-level agents must necessarily be out of touch with the details, and will make big policy decisions that look stupid to many of the lower-level agents who have more of the details but less of the big picture. His agents were all part of the same mind, but it seems eerily similar to politics and big-company management.
So maybe startups should try to hire people with startup experience from the same industry since big-picture politicking is less valuable to a startup.
>> So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted
Some anecdotal evidence I've seen of this.
I worked at a large publishing company. One of the VP's had been there some ten years. Seven of those as the second in command as the senior VP. Three different times, they hired an outside CEO, passing him over and each time the CEO left after less than two years, they didn't even consider him. He's still there and its clear they have no desire to promote him to CEO. Even knowing this, he continues to stay there which also has a down stream effect where nobody below will be promoted into his position or a parallel VP position, so by him staying? It just stagnates everything below him. Managers leave because they know there's nowhere to go but laterally or out of the company.
More recently, I worked at a huge health care company. One of the senior directors recruited me to join a new AI team he was standing up to do various projects with some emerging AI tools. I felt honored he would seek me out. Turns out, this was his gamble to get promoted into a VP position that he had coveted since being a director for the last five years. Our team kicked ass for about a year, but apparently, it wasn't enough. During our afternoon team meeting, he just announced out of the blue that Friday (it was Wednesday) would be his last day and our manager would be taking over the team after he left. He pulled me into his office a few hours later and explained what had happened. He said his boss (a VP) had told him last month that no matter what our team accomplished, he wouldn't be getting his VP spot at this company. If he really wanted to be a VP, he would have to leave the company since herself and several other VP's, didn't see him as "VP material" which is crazy if you knew what the guy did in his tenure at the company. Unironically, he joined an AI startup as one of two of their VP's. He was there for three years and they got acquired for $300M of which he got a good chunk of.
> "When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have 'worked at big companies'."
Microsoft's revitalization occurred only after Steve Ballmer was ousted and Satya Nadella pushed out much of the old guard who were set in their ways.
This really eloquently summarizes my experiences working at a “rocketship startup” that tried this - went from a team of 500 shipping like a team of 50 to a team of 1,000 shipping like a team of 50,000.
One thing to note about "big companies" is that everyone involved at the upper levels are rich enough to engage in recreational lawsuits. So if you say anything true about their performance, you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, possibly in a speech-hostile venue like England. The end result is a conspiracy where it's in everyone's best interest to lie about their peer's performance.
These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".
[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"
Do you have any examples of defamation lawsuits? I've sold two companies, and have plenty of rich and upper-level exec friends, and I have never heard of a defamation lawsuit amongst tech execs.
There is definitely a stupid game where people don't tell it like it is, but in my experience it's because people don't want to deal with HR at all, and so don't do or say anything that might bring a tut-tut from HR. Because people in HR are beyond annoying...
And HR fears a wrongful-termination lawsuit, not a defamation lawsuit.
This is all in the US, though. The UK has quite different libel laws and so maybe lawsuits are more common there.
Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.
Yeah, agree with your take. I think it's especially odd to describe Apple as suffering from this "big company problem" given that it seems like the execs there have tenures much longer than the norm. Cook has been at Apple since 1998, shortly after Jobs' return. Federighi originally worked at NeXT when it was acquired by Apple. Eddy Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and his Wikipedia page says he was instrumental in creating Apple's online store in '98.
Sure, Jobs was such a unique visionary and it was inevitable that things would change after his death, but I still find folks tend to minimize his missteps (the Cube, antenna-gate), while somehow shitting on Cook despite Cook managing the giant ship that is Apple extremely well for nearly 15 years.
Seems more like a political problem. Once a founder leaves, the leadership team no longer has a mandate. Things that were once "my way or get fucking lost" become "I need to justify this decision with the Board, McKinsey, Blackrock, etc".
Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 years and knows every employee by name, but instead went to San Jose State.
Very much agree. The Wikipedia page on Forstall says as much:
> Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public. Forstall had such a poor relationship with Ive and Mansfield that he could not be in a meeting with them unless Cook mediated; reportedly, Forstall and Ive did not cooperate at any level.
> After Jobs' death in 2011, it had been reported that Forstall was trying to gather power to challenge Cook.
Cook has been exceptional for the stock. But we would likely all agree that on the product end (take Siri for example), it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did, I do not believe they would be ok with it being horrendous for over 10 years. Also Apple has had a lot of mishaps under Cook (the wireless Air charger that never got made, butterfly keyboards, Vision Pro, Siri, an OS that is riddled with bugs, iPhone battery slowdown, touchbar on a pro device). I might be missing a few, but he is very clearly not a product guy
>it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did
I am absolutely sure they do. The problem is taste. And they are as you said not product people. A high bar for quality expectation. If we remember 50% of people cant taste the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi, while some others could taste which Coca Cola they were manufactured.
And that is what Steve has been saying, you need to care about the product way beyond normal people do. And have the energy to try and push things forward.
The expectation are exceptionally high because we compared it to Steve Jobs era. But even if we lower the standard modern Apple is still not good enough as it is.
To quote Steve Jobs. Stop chasing the bottle line which is what Tim Cook is doing, and start making sure your Top line is done correctly.
Also curious to have chosen John Giannandrea who was behind the failure of Google Assistant and from the era where Google was late in AI, to repeat the same failure with Siri
If I had a nickel for every time someone complains about Apple's monopolistic bullshit with the equivalent of "Steve Jobs would have never done this", I'd buy out enough Apple stock to impose myself as the CEO and demand they allow root access on iPads.
The biggest thing that Ahrendts did was merge the online and physical stores. People forget that before she came around there was very little overlap. If you bought something online and you wanted to return it you had to ship it back instead of going to a store. It was one of the things that Cook wanted to get done by retail.
Katie Cotton’s departure was in no doubt at least partly to do with her health. She died not too long after leaving Apple.
It also isn’t clear to me how much Phil Schiller was “sidelined” vs him just wanting to retire.
The "idea" to merge online and physical stores was way before even Ahrendts arrival. I remember it was a common topic during even Steve Jobs era. But it wasn't done because I think it wasn't a priority. People forget iPhone could lose out to Android like how Mac lost to Windows.
Katie Cotton passed away in 2023. She left in 2013/2014. I think that is quite some time after Apple.
Funny how that seemingly forgettable caveat is seen as a huge achievement for an executive. As a customer my biggest issue with the apple store is not the return process. It is the lack of them for the population of apple customers given how long it takes to get attended to and the difficulty of securing genius bar appointments. It worked alright 15 years ago but the stores needed to expand along with iPhone market share and they did not at all.
There’s probably some threshold they’ve reached at which just adding more stores doesn’t generate any incremental revenue. So you’ve got to wait a bit longer, well, where else are you going to go?
And that is exactly the difference between old Apple and New Apple. Old Apple uses Apple Store as experience and services. It is part of the Apple ecosystem. It is not another "real estate property" like other Retail brands that is solely measured by incremental revenue.
To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the trashcan Mac Pro.
Those devices looked beautiful but they weren’t good at actually being used. Jobs let Ive design for a museum, not for the people using his creations. Cook let that continue for a while but finally reined it in and gave us useful designs again.
Which isn’t to say that Cook hasn’t made or isn’t making mistakes. I just meant that as a reminder that it wasn’t all wine and roses under Jobs.
I'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.
I never met Steve. I met Cook and on a separate occasion Forstall. Cook always struck me as a shy business bean counter. Forstall is an engineer through and through. Such a shame we never got to experience an alternate timeline where Apple was under his leadership.
I think Ive has burn out issue at the time and has clearly thought about departing Apple. ( A book chronicling 20 years of Apple's design in 2015 ) He wanted to design the perfect and final thing and so MBP was rushed. Steve Jobs would have worked him and likely said hey this is good but we must do it incrementally so our user can adopt to changed. How about the Keyboard keys goes to 1.2mm instead of straight to 0.7mm key travel.
It took us 20 years for humans to adopt from the good old 2.5mm keyboard to 1.5mm. And you want to cut in half again in one go?
I think it is best summarised as Steve Job's quote in the movie;
"Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."
that being said, Ive was important in asking why physical form factors should make sense in human terms. Big computers w/ a lot of ports make sense to comp sci/ee ppl in the lab but people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive. Without Ive challenging the design, Apple wouldn't have even tried.
> But people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive.
Funny how the latest Macbook brought back the Magsafe connector, HDMI port, and SD card port. Apparently the people in the real world have rediscovered priorities that Ive's design had made them forget
I kinda wonder how that design would play nowadays, after the Apple Silicon transition. They were stuck because of Intel's thermals, but their own chips seem to be a lot better in terms of performance/watt...
I remember using consumer grade netbook and normal laptop and those have way fewer ports than a workstation. But all were useful ones. Mainly hdmi, ethernet, sd card reader, and usb.
It is just funny how this hyper lean design philosophy ushered in an era of littering your desk, school, and workplace with random usbc dongles from storied $5 chinese brands like iKLingKing or Daehoo and whatever else. So much for the minimalism in practice. At least they created a great deal of work for these chinese producers on amazon.
> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it
I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.
Sorry, what's the advantage here? People are going to unplug the mouse anyway when it doesn't need charging because it feels much more natural. _Forcing_ people to stop using the mouse to charge is a braindead decision
The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision.
I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is what makes it a viable career to the people here)
This is ugly. User behavior modification as a product goal. The reverse of how you should build products. You need to start with "The user wants to do X." rather than "I want the user to do X." Who is Apple to dictate the "correct" way for me to use a mouse?
Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.
If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged cause of their battery anxiety from every other device. Then you try it unplugged and you realized you have to plug it in for like an hour every couple months and it's way better than tethering yourself with a cable.
I've used a Magic Mouse daily for work for years and it's literally never been an issue once.
> Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.
First, I definitely know what I want from my computer.
Second, flipping my mouse over and being forced to stop using it is an objectively worse experience than plugging it in for charging while using.
I have an MX Master 3 which is also wireless and charges with a cord. While it's charging, I definitely have a degraded experience relative to the wireless one, so I unplug as soon as I can (I sometimes don't even wait for the full charge!) to go back to the better experience. Never once have I considered keeping it connected indefinitely.
> If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged
So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer. My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too? Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?
> So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer.
If the user has a worse experience, that's a lose/lose situation. Of course they should care about things that affect the experience.
> My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too?
A cable doesn't impact a keyboard because it's not moving.
> Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?
The chance of a phone being left plugged in forever is minimal to begin with, and the hassle of not being able to use it while it charges would be much larger.
How is using a peripheral while plugged in a worse experience? It's a better experience: I've had many more problems with wireless peripherals than wired ones. Bluetooth disconnecting randomly, batteries discharging while I'm working. Wireless is a worse experience in almost all ways.
If you make a wireless peripheral and everyone keeps using it while plugged in, the solution is not to force them to use it wirelessly. The solution is to make the wireless experience actually better so the user voluntarily chooses to use it.
This is about charging, not how it sends data. And the batteries last a long time for this particular device, so there's minimal downside to unplugging. The downside to staying plugged in is there's a cable dragging around that makes the experience of moving the mouse a little bit worse all the time.
A user has to be thinking about something to make a choice. Depending on the user to think about all these little aspects degrades the experience all by itself.
I guess we have to agree to disagree. To me, it's not about charging at all. It's about wireless vs. wired, and wireless is a buggy, defective user experience. I want to use my mouse full time while plugged in due to poor reliability when unplugged, and only Apple's devices say no--for reasons that don't make sense.
I've never been bothered by a cable sticking out of my mouse.
>I want to use my mouse full time while plugged in due to poor reliability when unplugged, and only Apple's devices say no--for reasons that don't make sense.
The reliability would not be affected since it moves data wirelessly. The data will never go over the charging cable so your reasons for keeping it plugged in don't make sense.
I don't know how much users "want" to have a cord dangling off the mouse and doing nothing.
If your starting premise is "the user wants to use the mouse and have a good experience", you can see how a designer can get from there to a feature that causes/encourages an unplug. Even if you disagree, they're not going backwards.
No, it's utility that turned computing from a niche activity to what it's now. Apple is a fashion statement and it's okay for them to market to that effect, but don't credit the growth of computing to Apple's aesthetic but oft-ill-designed stuff.
> don't credit the growth of computing to Apple's aesthetic but oft-ill-designed stuff.
I'm not; I'm crediting the activity of marketing.
It's an engineering blind spot to think utility = adoption. Emacs is more powerful than MS Word; which one has more users? Which one has an organization dedicated to going around and pointing out how and where it is useful?
It's when you have utility + marketing that you get something like the computer revolution.
The problem is the software. macOS could remind you to charge the night before, but it always ends up needing charging in the morning as you're ready to start working. One engineer could fix the problem in under an hour if anyone at Apple cared about user xperience.
I’ve used one of those for years and there’s never been any impact on the user experience. Every few months, the low battery warning pops up. At that point, it will still work for hours and it only takes a few minutes to charge so even if it popped up first thing in the morning I’d plug it in the next time I got coffee, went to a meeting, walked the dog, etc.
I've never heard from anyone who likes the Apple Mouse enough to use it, but doesn't like the charging from the bottom. It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use it, this has become a bit of conventional wisdom. In reality it's a non-issue.
I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shape for my hand, and I prefer a trackball.
I think it's fine for Apple to have one peripheral which appeals to a minority taste. We're not short of mouse designs and they all work with the operating system. It's not even the main peripheral Apple sells for the purpose, that's the trackpad and everybody likes it. I still prefer a trackball, Tim Cook uses some kind of oddball vertical mouse with a bunch of buttons. It's a big design space.
If they wanted to please the maximum amount of people, they'd need to clone Microsoft's mouse, and that would be boring.
I actually like the charging port design. It stops normal user from using the mouse plugging in. Which is not what it was designed for. They could have designed the USB-C port in the mouse does not come with Data Pin. But given it is a wireless mouse it would still work plugged in as wireless mouse powered by cable.
In the end I really think it is a non-issue. The shape still sucks though.
But for a small or medium flaw, you'd expect a bunch of people that complain but keep using it. Only a really big flaw would prevent users entirely and find no complaints among the people that keep using the product. I find it hard to believe it's that big of a flaw. It seems much more likely that the people that started off against the charging decided after trying it that they didn't care very much.
I'm sorry no amount of mental gymnastics can convince me that location is user friendly.
Reminds me of Zoolander haha. Either that or what you describe is Stockholm syndrome.
A port on the side is harmless. In an alternate world, it would have become the design zeitgeist and a port under would've seemed just as preposterous as it actually is.
Ouch, yeah. I loved the idea of it. I mean, I have a Stream Deck sitting on my desk as I type this, and that's basically a large, freestanding Touch Bar.
But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.
The real problem with the Touch Bar was that they never made an external keyboard with it. So I could never actually build it into my habits, since it was only actually available to me half the time.
(I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external Touch Bar keyboard...)
There were so many problems with the Touch Bar to pick any one as the ‘real’ problem. As a software developer, I’m used to resting my finger on the F5 key when I’m thinking or in the few seconds before a build finishes. Can’t do that with the Touch Bar.
Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t.
There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.
So every other iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, AirPods and the Watch were not useful because of one bendy phone and a bad keyboard? What great feat of design did Tim Cook bring us?
With all this talk about reining Ive under control, I can’t help but be reminded of that CollegeHumour skit implying Ive is a HAL9000-esq robot holding Tim Cook hostage[0]
Going to hard disagree with most of this. At any giant company with tons of executives (the article talks about the "Top 100" alone), if you didn't have at least some misfires then it probably means you're being too conservative. If anything, I give Apple props for making management changes relatively quickly when things aren't working out.
For example, I have the exact opposite view of the forcing out of Scott Forstall, which after reading what I think are fairly accurate descriptions of what went down was absolutely the right thing to do IMO. Forstall refused to own up to failures under his watch, which is an absolutely toxic trait in leadership (side note, when you're at that level it doesn't matter if the failure was "your fault", you still need to take responsibility for what happened, identify the root cause and make changes to reduce the possibility of it happening in the future). I am not an iPhone user, but every time the issue of Apple Maps comes ups, people say they love using it and that it's improved leaps and bounds over the years since Forstall was forced out.
> Forstall refused to own up to failures under his watch
Own up for what? Has anyone from Apple own up to Apple Intelligence or other design failures? Even in antenna gate Steve Jobs was defending it as holding it wrong. The firing of Scott was simply a power play. No one expected Maps to be perfect on first try. And it took Apple another 8-10 years before it was useable. But the Map Fiasco, if you could call it that. Was brown out of proportion with zero damage control from PR. A company that perhaps has the best PR department in history of cooperate America. If people are not reading between the line, Apple wanted him out, and very publicly.
>(the article talks about the "Top 100" alone)
Top 100, if that is indeed what it is has also completely changed. It used to be the 100 people Steve Jobs hand picked that if the company failed who he would recruit again for the next venture. And it is nothing "Top". You could be an engineer or doing some other lower level work but still included in the 100.
Now from that article Top 100 becomes management level meetings.
The epic failure that was the launch of de-google’d Apple Maps. Apparently Tim didn’t like putting his signature on the apology letter apologizing to customers.
Bullshit, because I don't even know what "the McKinsey kool-aid" is on this topic.
But the best companies/teams I've worked at realized that some mistakes are inevitable, and they had a culture that quickly remedied those mistakes, learned from them, and moved on. The worst companies either (a) had "analysis paralysis" issues or (b) made lots of the same mistakes over and over and refused to learn.
> Promote Craig Federighi, after all these years I am still not convinced he is the right person for the job
Yeah I wonder about Federighi. He doesn't seem to catch much criticism from the Apple pundits—I assume because he's one of the few SVPs that seems like a real human in interviews and videos and not a stilted robot like the rest of them. But Apple's software, and macOS in particular, seems to be rotting from the inside out. Changes ship and everyone says "boy this is a step backwards, I hope they iterate quickly" and then it sits, almost entirely unchanged, for years on end. e.g. new Settings in macOS, Stage Manager on the iPad.
With how much the hardware team has been knocking it out of the park since the ARM transition it's really starting to feel like the software is the weak link. This rumoured massive redesign this year has me feeling very anxious.
I have met Craig a couple times. The man radiates charisma like a god damn movie star. The whole vibe in the room changes when he enters. Something about it, man.
I'm told he has the superpower of memory. Someone told me they had an eng review with him on a year prior, which ended with action items for the team to fix XYZ. Then a full year they had another review, and Craig came in and right away asked, "Did XYZ get done?"
I've never understood the love for Eddy Cue. Apple pundits all seem to love him. Personally, I am really unimpressed by everything he's done. My understanding is he's been really good at negotiating big contracts.
I just don't think his execution or vision are exciting and, as you are hinting at, I don't think his moral compass points in the right direction. That said, despite some early pushback, my understanding is that Schiller was ultimately on-board with holding to the 30% cut.
Eddy Cue did an amazing job with the original Apple.com online store in the late 90s, the first version of the iTunes Music Store, and the early App Store. Interestingly these were all big WebObjects apps.
I wonder if there’s some interesting server-side technology culture story here and how it trickles down to the way services operate for consumers on the client side. Just pure speculation.
This is a fantastic comment, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment on Angela Ahrendts. What was once a magical experience going to a apple store has devolved into a nightmare. A few reasons why:
- The complete removal of spontaneity of the shopping experience. You wander over to look at a laptop and decide you want to buy it. Asking a employee is disagreeable as most have a ear bud in their ear receiving instructions or messages from who knows what, they hurriedly ask if you made an appointment or placed the order online and then rush away and sometimes return.
- Such a heavy emphasis on online booking for every conceivable issue. If you want a genius bar appointment you are angrily told you need an appointment and such an appointment is only available days or weeks away and at a inconvenient time for someone with a 9-5 schedule(Tuesday at 2pm work?).
- Last years accessories are gone. Try finding a iphone case that was made for a phone you bough 7 months ago and an employee looks at you like you are trying to buy a model T - (Wait you are looking for a iphone 15 case, wow thats a really old model, I don't think we have anything for that anymore).
- Insane levels of crowds, I can't think of the last time I saw a apple store open in the past 6-7 years that didn't have crowds inside the store like disneyland with service dogs, screaming kids and grumpy boomers yelling about how to transfer their grandkids photos from a phone to computer, just a terrible experience to deal with.
I bought the first iphone in 2007 and have had a model for almost every two years and have been going to the apple stores since then, and the past few years have seen a huge drop in customer experience due to alot of the issuses I listed above.
It does not bother me I’m hundreds of miles from an Apple Store because every time I look into one it is so crowded. Shopping online feels like a luxury experience in comparison (so blown away my M4 mini came in a tiny box!)
I don't see that being a strong case against Eddy Cue. Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue, and as a whole those services probably make bank. Apple TV+ especially funds good television. Even if it loses money, funding the arts carries intrinsic value.
Compared to? All taxes mean fewer transactions – and purchases that never happen don’t generate revenue. This is not easily measurable. Most SaaS or similar services probably go through other devices or email to handle transactions.
Apples payments and subscriptions are excellent products but how much goes through there of say revenue for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix? Is that even supported? As an iOS user, I would never dream of trusting that the IAP prices are a good deal, and especially if I want to support the company I would sign up on their website.
I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason.
> I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason.
The users aren't the issue, the developers are. Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS in order to get users into their dark patterns where you have to call to unsubscribe; can you imagine what shady game developers would do?
Just to clarify, you are referring to companies, not necessarily their developers.
> Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS
No they don’t? I just check their app listing and you can use Apples own IAP. In either case, NYT can have reputable reporting while still being complete slimes when it comes to subscriptions. And even so, it strengthens the argument that Apple and other subscription aggregators deliver value (relatively - our CC centric payment world is abysmally bad), meaning users are willing to pay, meaning merchants are willing to use it to get sales they couldn’t otherwise.
> can you imagine what shady game developers would do?
If what, they could do whatever they wanted? Apple (or any other curator) could still police against fraud and misleading consumers. What does that have to do with the 30% tax?
I am sure plenty of people, if not majority of people will happy pay the 10% premium just because the subscription goes through Apple and have a peace of mind. That allows them to easily unsubscribe.
That is the thing about the whole 30%. It is not flexible, stringent and does not adopt to market. Even Tax by state have more flexility than they do.
And I have been saying this since 2013 but every time I get downvoted to oblivion for it. If Apple had move their Game into a Separate Store. They would have kept 75% to 80% of their App Store revenue at 30% cut. They could then charge 10% on top of all subscription and 15% for downloads. Once you include all the payment processing fees, fraud and additional services and value Apple offers the 10% extra meant for example Netflix actually earns more from an Apple's sign up. That create incentives for other companies to work with this Model. While Apple would still keep ~90% of their current App Store revenue. And I assume without much of the backlash and regulation that they had to fight and costing them hundreds of millions in operation, PR and brand damages.
As an ex Apple engineer myself, I've got to say the Angela Ahrendts thing was profoundly disgusting, and a partial reason i quit, despite thriving in a great team. They gave her 75 million dollars vesting over 3 years, as i recall, she did jack shit, and quit the day after all the money vested. Total failure of character judgement not only of the Burberry lady but of the hardcore engineers who believed in Apple (and I still do, but quit for cancer research work, another hobby).
I don't know if Ahrendts is in this category she did transform Burberry into a high-end luxury online sales+retail company. She really was the exact opposite of the old head of the Currys boss, John Browett. I think she was responsible for how the Apple Watch is sold. For example, trying it on and having that experience. It's a tricky thing to get right, and I think she's got it spot on. Also, the watch strap business must have one of the highest margins ever, and I feel like she must be in part responsible for those sales and how you try on the straps. That Apple Store feels a lot like going into a Burberry where you can just experience stuff and people are happy to talk to you about anything and not try and sell you anything, so I'm not sure she should be in the category of everyone else you have here because in that respect, the stores do feel very good.
Probably an agreeability thing? The iconoclasts who get things done tend to be disagreeable, but success at a reality scale is different than success in a large company.
You get promoted and go up because of your peer coworker group's support, which creates a strong incentive to not rock the boat and go against sacred cows that work well enough. The person who succeeds in big company post a hypergrowth phase is a very different person than one who made the hypergrowth happen.
granted, this is me just speculating, but personality type of Tim Cook dreaming up highly precise supply chains and generating precise business numbers quarter to quarter might make him vulnerable in terms of the character judging side of things...
In the absence of someone giving you a better answer, my hazy memory says 2015 or early 2016?
Given what we know about Apple's hardware platform direction, on hindsight, it seemed like a good strategy. Note: I am talking about the team merging, not merging macOS and iOS themselves.
I am reminded that the day he told over macOS team. They have been shipping features for features sake. And I dont remember a single new useful thing about from continuity. We are now 10+ years, macOS apart from facelift isn't all that better than before. If anything it might have gotten slower.
Yeah, Apple maps is my default, too. No ads and is accurate. Google maps is still better for finding businesses and streetview is still much, much more comprehensive.
JG is famous for research teams doing "hillclimbing" but the organizations doing this seldom thought deeply about where they were hoping to end up, what would be good-enough, or when it would be time to find a new hill.
Is there an example, at a very large company, of an individual who “failed up” actually creating a hit in their next act?
So many folks will tell you “I learned so much from my previous failure and without that I never would’ve succeeded blah blah blah.” I personally believe in that sentiment a bit, but just wondering if anyone’s aware of a well-known case where that’s happened.
> Is there an example, at a very large company, of an individual who “failed up” actually creating a hit in their next act?
If someone is successful their past is viewed differently. I doubt you’d “failed up” success stories because anyone who had great success would have their previous failures lost to history.
I think you are being downvoted a bit unfairly, but you're also not fully right either.
I'm pretty sure that who you are friends with matters much more for failing upwards. Who you know is very overvalued in today's business climate unfortunately
Your post-secondary really only has influence because it somewhat influences who you wind up being connected to
DEI stuff like race and sex... Might matter sometimes. It shouldn't be controversial to say that companies in general take that into account more nowadays than in the past.
It's not a secret that if a company in 2025 has a very white male executive team, then a board of directors has some incentive to try and hire women and minorities into the executive team when they can to balance that out
My point was about the original DEI. All the diversity and inclusion and affirmative action sometimes helped minorities get a foot in the door, but they had to have all the credentials checked twice needed for the job.
But they could never tank the company, run unsuccessful or soon to fail projects and get a golden parachute or be promoted for it. They just got fired.
Very interesting! I literally heard people defend him in my circles as being the mind behind Google Assistant. I should have done my homework to see if timelines aligned with its recent success. I believe Siri needs to be completely redesigned from the grounds up. It is absolutely awful, and Steve would be rolling in grave if he saw what it amounts to. They're polishing a turd.
It’s not the person, it’s the culture at Apple. They are too PG rated, privacy focused culturally and AI currently is impossible to have full control of these things. Starting from early Siri, there is almost no change, it’s still randomly stupid af. I’m willing to bet the new guy will not able to steer them either unless he makes some really bold moves to extract themselves from this loop.
IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell.
There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half. It’s not a big deal if it remains so for another half a decade. Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it.
Edit: On a related note, this leak seems to be significant. The Apple I know of would fire the executives (among the “top 100”) who leaked this and probably make sure they’d pay some hefty monetary penalties too.
Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else in charge of software who will actually change the way they do things.
Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS X 10.5.8. There were some really bad bugs in those early Snow Leopard releases.
The Snow Leopard that everyone remembers and loves was not version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0.
Major OS updates invariably introduce more bugs than they fix. That's an iron law of software development. What Apple used to do, which they no longer do, is spend a long amount of time just fixing bugs in minor updates to the operating system. Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule. Worse, Apple doesn't just fix bugs between those yearly updates; instead they keep introducing new features even in the "minor" updates. So we never get a "stable" version. It's constant change for the sake of change.
As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish).
The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different.
Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?".
AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs.
The Apple v1.1 software updates always fixed critical bugs, because:
1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in v1.1...which was developed concurrently with the end of v1.0 (hence why v1.1s came out right away)
2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested.
A v1.1 was always needed, though the issues they fixed became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices.
Do you mean Mac OS X 10.6.8 v1.1? Otherwise, I don't know what you mean by "v1.1".
In retrospect, I'm guessing that you meant N.1, e.g., 10.6.1. But 10.6.1 certainly didn't solve all of Snow Leopard's problems. Like I said before, the "stable" Snow Leopard everyone loves was the result of almost two years of minor updates.
> you are wrong(ish).
> So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8.
In other words, as you admit, I'm 100% right. ;-)
Every new major OS update introduces new bugs, that didn't exist in the previous OS, some of them horrible, and Snow Leopard was no exception.
Yeah, I personally remember "10.6.0 utterly fucking sucks" (though it got better) — hard to remember the details, which is probably in my personal best interest, but I remember fairly vividly shouting that to friends over beers somewhere.
And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use.
However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (that yes, ran Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1[1] for the last decade of its service life) until 2021 for a bunch of long-timeline server functions, so I guess Snow Leopard was pretty good overall, in the end...
I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective.
I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working."
It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one.
Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.
I agree. About a year into the Intel transition, around 2007, it was incredibly stable.
I was doing hardcore computation 24/7 on a MacBook, including model checking real-time systems, and I vividly remember the exact day I experienced one kernel panic.
The rest of the time, everything was rock solid. It's sad both quality and aesthetics degraded during the 2010s, where the system somewhat converged to iOS UI patterns and lost skeuomorphism.
Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard. No idea why they moved to flat designs, which are easy to copy by competitors.
> Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule
I cannot think of anything that less needs yearly major updates than macOS. It's a mature, 25 year old OS that, unlike iOS, is used for an enormous range of professional work. I need to it be fast, stable, and predictable. The last thing I want is change for the sake of change, which largely describes the last 5-10 years of the OS.
Wanna make Notes.app compatible with the new features in this year's iOS? Just update Notes. I don't need a whole new OS to get new features for a notepad.
> Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence.
My argument is that they were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse.
A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time.
More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later.
And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later.
This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.
This is far from isolated to Apple, too. It's a cancer that's infested virtually every single software company in the entire world at this point, and it's endlessly frustrating. If they don't have some New Shiny Version to show off to the tech media and blogosphere everyone starts acting like the software itself is a dead man walking. I also think it's partially down to all these same companies trying to justify subscription billing with a constant trickle of "new stuff" that the application in question does that you're meant to feel like you'd be missing out on.
I don't ascribe to this notion whatsoever. I in fact far prefer my software that barely changes at all over time. My most reliable and useful computer is my huge Ubuntu box that lives in my laundry room which handles... I mean frankly it would be easier to say what it doesn't handle, which is anything Apple adjacent because that's all proprietary, and it doesn't handle my security cameras because I couldn't find a linux-based solution for that. Literally every other automated function outside those two categories is handled by that machine, with a mix of software I've downloaded and configured and a fair bit that I've written myself.
I say all this to say that machine barely changes at fucking all. I do security updates of course and occasionally have to tweak something but the apps on it are the same, it serves the same internal websites, it runs the same scripts, like clockwork. I LOVE that thing and my life would be in an utter shambles if some overpaid tech executive had the power to randomly change how it works to justify his salary.
The way I see it is like fashion or fashion-adjacent, at least on the consumer side. One of the big accomplishments of Jobs direction is that they made computing cool, something you'd want to display instead of a functional beige box you hide away. It's not in the background, you have these colors, elegance or attention to detail on computing you want to be seen, and new major models need to be different to keep customers engaged along with being the status symbol.
With further progression on integration/miniaturization and lower power consumption/heat output for general computing, the devices have shrunk to their bare minimum as slabs, there's very little physical to display so the fashion needed to move to software (and what online services it can be a client for). Stasis is death when you rely on selling, and maintenance is a constant cost which no one really wants to pay for.
As a side note, it's interesting to compare attitudes to the physical side to PC, where for years there was almost a pride that PC was a minimalist functional box (besides the occasional fun/weird exception), but that contrasts against now where it's hard not to get components with windows or embellished with LEDs and logos on display (and there's another weird contrast, where on one hand you have internals on display, on the other trying to minimize or hiding away the cables as though the inner workings were ugly)
2 years ago I built an AI workstation (aka gaming PC) with all the RGB bling because it would have been harder to find parts that didn’t have the bling.
I think of Microsoft’s bad habit of introducing meaningless superficial changes to the interface but they also keep legacy software working for a long long time. (Office ‘97 works fine on Win 11)
The strangest thing about this is in the system configuration dialogs where they have a set of really gee whizzy modern configuration screens but you still have to go into 15 year old screens to do many common tasks —- they updated some but kept the old ones that they did not have time to update which is a little ugly but fine because they old ones work 100%.
I used to have “who moved my cheese?” moments all the time with Windows circa 2005 when I was admining Windows and having to deal with configuration screens in ‘98, 2000, XP and various versions of Windows Server, they couldn’t resist making superficial changes that annoyed me to no end.
>The strangest thing about this is in the system configuration dialogs where they have a set of really gee whizzy modern configuration screens but you still have to go into 15 year old screens to do many common tasks
I much prefer the older screens. They are so much easier to use.
Lots of people in this thread (correctly!) pointing out Apple's struggles with releasing high quality user software on MacOS. But at least when they changed the System Settings UI in MacOS Ventura (10.13) they managed to stick the landing. Not that I necessarily _like_ the new Settings UI, but there's no jumping into old UIs to configure things.
Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, and here we are 13 years later using interaction panels that have only gotten minor chrome updates since their original release in Windows 95 (looking at you, Advanced System Settings and Device Manager).
It really is the worst of both worlds. I don't like change for change's sake which we seem to agree on (though I do like the newer MacOS but we can agree to disagree there, that's strictly a matter of subjective taste) but it is INFURIATING and frankly should be embarrassing what a mess Windows is now. Change for change's sake is bad enough, they're currently doing... change for change's sake but not changing the whole thing because either they can't be fucked to finish the job or it was, for whatever reason, technically infeasible to complete it but they released it half-done anyway, in Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10 and now 11. How fucking embarrassing.
Yeah, but the fear I have is that if they put somebody like you in charge they'd prioritize visual consistency over functionality and things would just get dropped.
On some level it's an embarrassment, on the other level I never run into a "can't get there from here" experience though I had an awkward experience the other day when I brought home a bargain monster TV from the reuse center and found I had to look across a several different screens to find all the settings to get the video output properly matched to the TV.
> Yeah, but the fear I have is that if they put somebody like you in charge they'd prioritize visual consistency over functionality and things would just get dropped.
But the thing is functionality is already being impacted! I had an experience the other day where I was trying to manually configure an IP address for an ethernet interface to configure a piece of hardware, one of those situations where it lacks DHCP but I knew what the IP scheme was and so I just had to configure an address, gateway and subnet in order to be able to talk to this damned thing, which I was eventually able to do. But, crucially as I'm trying to do this, Windows pushes me towards a Modern/Metro UI version, which, fine, whatever, but when I entered my information it would then show a series of "in progress" dots across the bottom of the screen, presumably because it was attempting to verify it had internet access on this interface, which it obviously didn't and wouldn't, but it did have internet access via the WLAN card. This contradiction seemed to confuse the shit out of the Settings app, as it presented no error and eventually seemed to just... shrug and do the thing I'd asked.
Except it didn't work, and I spent an hour troubleshooting why I couldn't yet communicate to the thing, only to eventually out of exasperation go to the control panel to see if the old UI version of this (right click interface, properties, ipv4, properties) only to find out it NEVER SET THE ADDRESS I SPECIFIED AT ALL! Presumably because it couldn't verify it now had internet with those settings, or maybe because the UI was just broken, I don't know.
(Also interestingly CMD thought it had the address configured, but no subnet or gateway, and the old UI had none of it and it was still configured as DHCP)
And like, this is just bad software design, bordering on incompetent software design, for several reasons:
* We have an in-progress "I'm doing something" indicated from the OS, and I'm assuming it was in fact doing something, but it was not indicated at all what was being done, or why, or the result of what was done or what went wrong, which is simply horrendous.
* It was, I'm guessing, attempting to verify connectivity, but that was not explained to me, nor was it presented as an option as it is in the old UI (there's a checkbox that says "validate this when I'm done" and you can leave it off, which I did which then worked as I thought it would)
* Somehow, these three functions to show an interface's state (CMD, old UI, new UI) are all producing different outputs to one another about the same interface, which is just BONKERS in terms of software designed to manage a system, and implies severe fragmentation in the core of the OS.
So, just so I'm understood, I don't think Windows 11 is embarrassing because it has different UI conventions present simultaneously. I think it's embarrassing because of what that fragmentation means for lower, more important parts of the OS. It's a less important thing that points at a more important thing.
Oh my god, as a UI designer by trade, the sheer STATE of the Windows OS will send me into a rant far too long (and that I'm far too sober for right now) for a hacker news comment. It's a TRAVESTY. If you try and modify certain system settings you will see, in no particular order, the slightly cleaned up Metro ala Windows 11 (I honestly don't know if this got a name), remnants of the original Metro from 8/10, the modified refreshed control panel from windows 7/vista, and as you point out, dialogs that are seemingly ported directly from as old as Windows 98.
I don't know who if anyone really is heading the UX department at Microsoft, but they should either be empowered to their job properly or fucking fired, and I couldn't tell you which.
Imagine that the last Major OS release was going to be a bug fix release ... but then AI happened. And imagine this happens every year with some new feature demanding it be shipped.
Having said that, here's the reality of bugs that are assigned to a team. Feature work comes first. The (older) engineers don't want this — they want to fix bugs, refactor code, get rid of tech debt. But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features.
So, the slippery part is this: once you defer a bug for an OS release and ship your product, deferring that bug in the next OS is a no-brainer. You already shipped with the bug, why is it so important this time around? So users/devs learn to work around the bug.
Occasionally, as an old-timer, I would on a whim just fix an arbitrary bug that was "bugging" me. Sadly though, the process had become so top-down though that I would also need: 1) someone to code-review the changes (and so already you are encountering your first obstacle requiring "buy in") and then 2) get permission from "management" (this might be the BRB, bug review board) in order to submit the fix and the Radar. (There are periods though when they are lax and bugs can be submitted with little justification — or we would just make up some bullshit to get the bug fix in).
I recall the early days with fondness when a dev just checked fixes in.
Me: Craig, are you working on the Crop tool in Photos?
Craig: Yeah, why?
Me: How does it pick the default for whether to use Portrait or Landscape? Half the time I think the default it picks is wrong. Why not look at the image bounds and default to Landscape if it is wider than it is tall?
Craig: Good idea. I'll make the change now and write a Radar for it later.
Also, a shout out to Brendan who would push back when in a feature meeting with something like, "Okay, which of these features can we drop? Because we have some serious technical debt we need to address that was not own your feature list."
> But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features
Were you using Macs before Jobs came back? The entire operating system for PowerPC based Macs was technical debt with parts of the OS running under emulation.
Yeah I had that game on my Mac LCII back in 1992 and Parena was great too.
The point still stands though. The operating systems were horrible back in the mid 90s and both Macs I had back then - the Mac LCII and PowerMac 6100 - were cripple by being a half speed bus. Back before it was necessary.
You're objectively right. I have been running emulators recently with System 6.0 and was surprised at how much crashing I must have just tolerated. I shouldn't have made it appear that I was defending the quality of pre-OSX Mac OS. (Although we were talking about how quality has come down of late.)
As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineers could call the shots with their own frameworks/apps. Copland, Pink, all that — you can dismiss them as failures but they were engineering trying to toss off the "technical debt" of no true multitasking. So, again, it was bottom up and was at least a joy to be an engineer working on the OS at the time.
As I say, for a few years Jobs let engineering call the shots as NeXT became integrated in the OS. I was on the Graphics team then and a whole new graphic architecture and window server were created more or less from scratch (heavily borrowing from NeXT of course since most of the graphics engineering team were NeXT).
At some point though the major changes were in and management began to take over. "Quality" was eventually measured in unit-test code coverage, for example. (Sigh.)
I was in college in the mid-late 90s. There was this brief period where all of a sudden it became painfully aware how much Mac OS was crashing. I was regularly using SGI, Sun, and IBM Unix workstations and Linux had just become available. I don't think I ever saw any commercial unix workstation "crash" and Linux the crashes were usually my fault.
If you were only using Windows you barely noticed, but if you used much Unix Mac OS got pretty painful. I mostly remember this from taking a digital music/video class and that was basically the only thing I used Macs for at that time. You never really got through an hour or two editing video or audio without a crash or two. We had Avid workstations where they controlled this by tightly controlling the software on the Macs, but I never actually got permission to use them.
There were also behavior patterns. If you only used Mac you were in a behavior pattern where you'd crash the machine less. If you were using Unix workstations a lot your behavior subtly changed and you tried to do more stuff at the same time. If you then went back over to the Mac and overloaded the Mac the same way it was a bad time.
> As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineers could call the shots with their own frameworks/apps
That’s a bug not a feature. Engineering led companies rarely ship good consumer products. What happened to Apple before there was a product guy at the top is a prime example.
Another recent example is Google. Google has the best technology in the industry but can’t ship and sustain a good product to save its life.
When your customers are nerds like you, I think engineers do fine.
I should qualify it somewhat though — I mean I was, for a spell, working on the ColorSync framework. So the "customer" was also an engineer using our API.
At the same time, when I worked on Preview initially I added features that I wanted and I think it dovetailed what users wanted. I am also a user I rationalized.
Further, many of the old timers like myself, were hung up on Tog and his Human Interface Guidelines. We would argue over lunch the Right way to handle UI for a specific feature, etc.
Jobs comes along and with Design at his side, and they decide that the address field in Safari should also be a progress bar (that appears to select the text as it loads?). Some poor engineer was told then to implement that. (I hated what I came to call one-off UI.)
Framing Snow Leopard as a "bugfix release" didn't happen for enlightened reasons, it happened because they cannibalized the Mac OS team and sent everyone to work on iPhone. The skeleton crew left behind lost the capacity to do anything but bugfixes.
This is why Snow Leopard was so buggy on release but unlike previous releases actually did get better: management stopped pushing new features, and even a skeleton crew was able to polish it over time. If you look at a map of tentpole Mac OS features, you can see that the ambition vanished with the iPhone's release and didn't recover for a decade.
I have no idea how Apple prioritise their bug fixing, but it really looks to me like bugs only get fixed when adding new features, if at all.
This is such a trivial big win as well, create a software dev team to focus on the outstanding bugs. Head it with one or two senior developers, make it the first step in onboarding new developers. What a great way to learn, and make a difference.
This is not rocket surgery, and Apple really do have a bad reputation here, even with the muggles.
> This is such a trivial big win as well, create a software dev team to focus on the outstanding bugs. Head it with one or two senior developers, make it the first step in onboarding new developers. What a great way to learn, and make a difference.
Sounds nice on paper. In practice, the seniors assigned to the team will see it as a career dead-end (because fixing bugs doesn't get management attention, but flashy new features do), juniors lack the experience to avoid edge cases or to navigate the project structure, and the seniors/intermediates on the "actual" development team don't have time to waste on reviewing and aiding code of juniors and bugfixes because then they have ownership over that...
They aren't even doing hardware well in some cases, their bread and butter.
Bluetooth has been broken on both editions of their Pro Max Phone (15 & 16). It cuts out and has all kinds of weird issues, but no fix has come for years now. This was why I always paid a premium for their phones, they did hardware and software well. Not anymore, their so focus has been on their processors.
Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such.
This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will have a degraded experience in some way
Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f?
Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..
You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt?
Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.
It's wild but my own issue free MacOS era was OS9 on my iBook G3 clamshell. Had to replace a harddrive (bounced down a stairwell, but held together) and upgraded the ram, but other than that fine experience.
My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves)
To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. Especially the M1 iMac with the cut down graphics that they only gave one fan and a smaller heatsink. Watched it break 100C regularly.
The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. I don't see a reason to let an SoC hit 98C even if its rated to do so.
I skipped most of the x86 era. I had the first Intel Mac mini connected to my TV running Front Row in 2006. But after that I didn’t buy another Mac until the M2 MacBook Air in 2023.
At the end of the day, I was just not that impressed with the x86 based Macs. They had all of the drawbacks of x86 with all of the added disadvantages of Ive inspired design which led to poor heat dissipation, not enough ports and butterfly keyboards
When I started at Apple it was to work on Quickdraw GX.
It was very cool tech. Closer to what Apple would get from NeXT years later.
My guess is as to why it failed (and this was also the common sentiment at the time) — it was an optional install and not a default. It's hard to imagine anyone writing an app around a component (extension) that few people had in the OS.
> Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it.
Well, apparently some people have at least some expectations, after Apple pushed ads touting Siri's new abilities (and Apple AI) but failed to launch them on time, and now Apple been hit with a federal lawsuit against them: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/apple-suit-false-advertisin...
I was hoping for more from the new Siri, but its just awful for me. Latest example:
My wife and I were watching Jeopardy late at night, and Pol Pot came up. I asked Siri something like "Siri, tell me about Pol Pot" and instead, it heard "Siri, Call Scott", and rang my friend at 1am.
I’m one of them. I saw demos at _last year’s_ WWDC that I’ve been excited to get. And now with this announcement I don’t think that will happen before this year’s event.
Never mind this year's event - it's going to be multiple years before they have something of the quality they 'demoed' last year. They rushed some great concept videos and then thought they could actually build them in less than a year. And sold $1k+ devices based on it. I'd honestly say this is a bigger disaster than Apple Maps. At least in that case they were forced into doing something really big really quick (because Google was crippling the iOS Maps app). In this case Apple didn't need to do any AI. Absolutely nothing they have shipped is useful or innovative. It's one of the rare times they've followed the market instead of waiting to do it right. At the minute, it's not any better than the co-pilot rubbish MS have shoved into Windows.
Edit: I wonder if this will force them back to live events? Live demos are at least more believable and might win them back some trust.
Last year’s “demos” weren’t demos, but concept videos. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t happen this year nor next year, to the level implied by the ads. Incidentally, what the original Siri ads showed also never materialized.
They need to stop shooting for the moon and just release some incremental improvements.
Like you say, Siri is borderline completely useless. Just timers for me.
Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement. They even have this ChatGPT integration that Siri seems totally incapable of using in any meaningful way.
I might be completely wrong, but by making “pro-privacy bets”, they shot themselves in the foot. Average customer ended up really not caring about the benefits that we try to promote, which hinders the development and features in some sense. Also, it’s still a pain for them to integrate AI in their second biggest market — China.
Apple doesn't care about privacy in China. Even iCloud data on China was held by a Chinese custodian. The pain they experienced to integrate AI in China was because of the rule that Apple must choose a Chinese partner to integrate with. So they cannot choose OpenAI like they did in the rest of the world. They also couldn't choose Google Gemini or Anthropic obviously. They evaluated at least Alibaba's Qwen and DeepSeek and maybe some more.
Maybe go all in on local on device low latency LLMs? They make their own hardware so they could probably do it and do it well with enough focus and investment.
8GB of RAM is not perfect for this. The M chips are only known for AI because unified memory allows you to get huge amounts of "VRAM", but if you're not putting absurd amounts of RAM on the phone (and they're not going to) then that advantage largely goes away. It's not like the NPU is some world-beating AI thing.
That seems like the opposite of what they were suggesting? Unless by “edge compute” you meant user’s devices, but I assume you intended the usual meaning of CDN edges.
I care about privacy but Siri is so immensely frustrating and terrible that at this point I'd rather just prefer a competent integration with an AI that actually works.
I care about privacy too, that’s one of the reasons why I’m within Apple garden. But it definitely adds some hurdles when you want to do stuff like “literally take all of my data from every possible place and do stuff with it”.
> Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement.
I don't think Apple will ever use LLMs, given the offensive output they can generate sometimes. There is just no way to make them safe for all audiences.
Don't you think that maybe the issues are rooted in the Apple's attempt to do everything by itself?
All things considered Apple actually delivers some great software, Apple is one of the few companies that built their own operating systems, their software UX is considered to be the gold standard. They pulled architecture transition processes that required great software engineering alongside with the hardware engineering and they did it amazingly well.
Apple's success in some areas suggests that the failure in other areas doesn't have to be about software development culture but simply wrong bets or policies.
Apple tomorrow can become the best platform for anything AI, they just have to open up their platform and let people on the cutting edge of AI to take over some functions.
IMHO Apple's greed is failing them. That revenue growth in the "Services" category on their quarterly reports is their Achilles heel. Locking down users on their platforms allows them access to a "market without competition" but there's actually a competition happening outside of this walled garden and that competition is fierce. People in the garden start thinking that maybe the grass is greener beyond the fence.
Ironically, there's a possibility EU saving them from themselves if they stop being just compliant enough to hold up in court and embrace the spirit of what DMA is trying to do. Throw a tantrum on EU and say that the lost revenue was because of the evil EU thingy and save this great brands and great company.
They've been very good at marketing, but it was often backed by good products. I still remember the feeling of getting my first MacOS X machine and what a breadth of fresh air it was. No drama or window focus stealing and a stable OS with relatively modern software that even had access to a POSIX shell! Wireless networking was simple, but you could still do advanced stuff!
But in those days apple was the underdog and HAD to do good by their users or there was no reason people would switch. Now it feels like their first thought is how they can monetize every step of the way - they're turning into Disney in that sense. There's often little money in fixing bugs anymore.
> Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half.
The concrete value-measure for me is whether I would feel any loss as a user if Siri simply disappeared. The answer is no, I would feel no loss.
But this is also true for me if the subject is Gemini, CoPilot, Alexa, &c. For all the money and energy burned, for all the advertising babble and grotesque valuation, I would not as a user be one jot less productive if the invisible Thanos hand of the market made them all disappear at the end of this sentence.
As an Android user I have to disagree, at least if we're comparing apples to apples (could not resist the pun).
Google Assistant with Gemini (or whatever its name is this month) is really remarkable at helping with mundane tasks, and I would really miss it if it were gone. Circle to search, asking questions about my agenda, and setting up new events on my calendar based simply on taking photos of documents or posters is so convenient that I really buy the concept of having an AI personal assistant.
And because this is a very sticky feature when delivered properly, if Apple is not involved it gives a very strong competitive advantage to Android flagships.
It's not so much a question of disagreement. The fact that you have found value as a user is fine by me, of course! Maybe your use-cases should be captured by the Siri development team.
If Siri has been useless for more than a decade, that also means that many users are barely using it, if at all. I'm not the only user of a system containing such applications that has found zero concrete value in them.
I use Siri for about three things: timers, reminders, and asking about the weather. But the reminders are mission critical. I use the watch, and any time my flighty brain hits on something, I set a reminder for it on the spot.
I literally couldn't get along without it. The only killer feature of Siri is accurate voice transcription, and that's all I need (and it could be more accurate, I just get used to comical translations when I use a rare word).
I guess I wouldn't mind if it were better, but I don't need it to be. Reminders are enough.
The fact Apple Music has notifications advertising it on my lock screen, or splash screens advertising it once a month when I open Music.app would have been unthinkable pre-Tim Cook.
None of my Samsung phones have ever advertised anything to me. Unlike iOS,there are any number of music player apps on Android that stay out of the way and don't try to be a "platform".
Galaxy S8 came out in 2017, almost a decade ago. I understand some budget and mid-range phones have ads, but I (in Canada) have used everything from S7, S8, S12, A51, Z Fold 3, and have never gotten one. There was a "Samsung Hub" app on the midrange A51 (similar to Google Discover), but that can be disabled.
This is also one of my only uses of Siri, and the only one it gets right the large majority of the time. I also try to use it to se reminders in the future, but it’s a crapshoot whether it will get the date and/or reminder text correct.
I may be remembering incorrectly, but I honestly think it was better when it was released years ago than it is today.
> I may be remembering incorrectly, but I honestly think it was better when it was released years ago than it is today.
I think you're remembering correctly. Siri used to work much better for basic tasks, and didn't seem to randomly fail for no discernible reason. I can't remember what iOS updates changed things, but there were at least a few that absolutely degraded Siri's functionality. One that stuck out to me was when Siri was one day suddenly unable to correctly respond to "play all songs shuffled" - it worked fine for years, but after an update, just decided it couldn't do that anymore.
My favorite is asking it to set a timer for n minutes, seeing the timer start and assuming it’s good, and only later realizing that it actually started a timer for n hours or n days. Learned that lesson with some burnt cookies.
Especially embarrassing when OpenAI's Advanced Voice can easily understand mixed-language contemporary slang on arbitrary topics, and even convincingly simulate it in the output. It can also do this at any volume, with "uhs" and "ahs", interruptions, corrections, and ignoring the accent.
Apple doesn't fix bugs†, they just eventually replace the feature or ship a different way of doing the same thing, whose bugs hopefully don't overlap those of the first feature.
We're on Sequoia 15.3.2 now and the keyboard shortcuts of the big new window tiling feature still don't work on non-Apple keyboards (or Apple keyboards, if you happen to have remapped the globe key to something else, like Caps Lock).
His delivery is too perfect and makes him sound like a really good text to speech program. It’s off-putting. The only other person I’ve heard that has this presentation style is David Miscavige. Perhaps some analogies could be made…
> It’s not a big deal if it remains so for another half a decade. Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it.
But when Apple advertises literally all their new devices as "Built for Apple Intelligence" without actually delivering on that promise, that's just false advertising.
John "JG" Giannandrea was hired over to Apple around 2018 to head Apple's new AI/ML division, which would include the Siri organization that predates Giannandrea's tenure at Apple. Giannandrea was previously the executive in charge of Google's Research division.
Mike Rockwell was hired into Apple from Dolby Labs around 2015 to head a group called "TDG" that would be the R&D and the product group for what we know today as Apple Vision, an AR/VR headset. The same organization had its own AI/ML applied research teams focused on computer vision problems, and had hired in folks from Microsoft's Hololens team.
From what the article describes, the Siri organization is being moved from Giannandrea's scope to sit under Rockwell, and Rockwell will be moving away from the Apple Vision organization.
Apple hired Giannandrea to build an organization like the one he led at Google, and appears to have found that that the AI/ML organization built at Apple struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins despite the massive financial investment. It's worth noting that at Google, Giannandrea was succeeded by Jeff Dean, and the organization was more recently reorged to become the "Google Deepmind" we know today also had the same struggles.
> "appears to have found that that the AI/ML organization built at Apple struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins despite the massive financial investment"
I would contest this statement very vigorously. Siri has been a disappointment but nearly every single Apple product has a load-bearing reliance on an AI/ML feature.
I'm continually frustrated by the (relatively recent, since LLMs) tic where just because a ML model isn't conversing with you or otherwise making its presence impossible to ignore, that it isn't delivering a massive amount of value. It is frustrating from laypeople, it is extra frustrating from industry insiders.
Just a few examples off the top of my head:
- AirPods with ANC and spatial audio. Both headline features of these products that are 100% AI/ML.
- Watch with heart arrhythmia detection, automatic workout detection, fall detection, etc. All are headline features (some literally life-saving) and are 100% AI/ML.
- iPhones have high-profile features that are 100% AI/ML: automatic car crash detection. Others are more subtle but IMO substantial differentiators - such as automatic image enhancements out-of-camera.
Again, I know in the age of ChatGPT we seem to have twisted ideas of what ML is, but "AI/ML" is not synonymous with LLM.
1) This appears to be what Apple has concluded by the action they're taking and implied by the premise of the article, versus my personal opinion.
2) The examples given may have been produced by AI/ML-based technologies developed at Apple, but may not have been the work of Apple's AI/ML Organization. Many "groups" (divisions) within Apple have their own teams using AI/Machine Learning (e.g. AI/ML Org coexisting with AI/machine-learning work and teams in TDG/VPG, SPG (special projects group: the one previously working on a car), etc.
It feels like Apple had a dream of a granting easy AI integrations for many different apps and workflows, only to discover that very few people wanted any of those integrations from apple intelligence. At least, not the current iteration of apple intelligence.
I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition. Apple just doesn’t have anything like that with AI.
Furthermore, the challenge with AI is that even though it can deliver some shockingly impressive results, it also generates some bafflingly stupid responses, as well as answers that are seemingly correct but are never less wrong in ways that are hard to determine. Those hallucinations really shatter the illusion of quality and reliability, which ultimately undermines confidence in the functionality as a whole.
Given that, Apple is stuck trying to catch up to the rest of the products in the AI space while also realizing that everyday AI is nowhere near as polished as Apple would expect it to be. So the more Apple pushes AI, the more customers are likely to pick up on the errors and inadequacies of the product.
Even though other AI assistants suffer from the same fundamental problems, the ones from Apple Intelligence are going to seem more embarrassing because of Apple’s brand image.
That 'wow factor' is a thing of the past, very firmly. When I put next to each other say Iphone 16 pro max and Samsung S25 ultra, none sticks out, none has anything 'wow' for regular users. Just different styles of working with device and small + and - all over the place. Same for tablets, notebooks, and so on. Vision pro seems like a failed product even according to Apple.
Its doesn't mean that each product doesn't have something a bit special but competition caught up long time ago, sometimes went ahead (better batteries, bigger cameras etc). These days there is much more 'yawn factor', and its across whole industry.
Gemini has access to your Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Keep, and Tasks, as well as Flights, Hotels, Maps, YouTube, YouTube Music, OpenStax, and of course the entire web more generally.
At the end of the day, personal context is king for useful AI.
Which means Google or Apple. Or Microsoft on the business side.
Nobody sane is going to share all their personal data (about everything) with a fly-by-night random AI app/company.
Apple has time, in the same way it did with Maps, because despite the marketing push no one is buying phones solely because of AI features these days. They're still an "Oh, that's nice."
>I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition.
I don't remember them ever doing that. Usually they start with something lacklustre then incrementally improve it until it is strong.
Maps is a great example, it was poor on launch compared to Google Maps but has now got to a level where most people don't bother with Google on the iPhone.
Google Maps largely exists because of Apple.
Do you remember when the iPhone was released?
AirPods? The iMac? The Mac? The Apple II?
Broaden scope a bit to understand what this comment meant. You’re right that Apple botches things in the small scale and especially in software, but they’ve been a great aggregator of amazing tech in the total lifespan.
Google Maps had already launched and had really surprised everyone at how much better it was than any other mapping tool a few years before iPhone launched. and just the interactivity of it in general independent of it being a “map” was a paradigm shifter.
Yes, the iPhone put it in everyone’s pocket, but if Apple had built a handheld device that was powerful enough to run any interactive mapping tool Google Maps was already the obvious choice.
It’s a minor quibble, but to say Apple played a majority role in Google Map’s success doesn’t ring true to me. In 2007 Google Maps was easily overtaking all other mapping tools with or without the iPhone.
It was great when I was visiting China. I only tried it because Google Maps was unavailable (nothing Google worked at all except push notifications, because those come from Apple), and was pleasantly surprised. Every train station and mall had detailed maps.
Apple Maps is also pretty good here in Canada, although I would never trust it to tell me with any accuracy what a given business's hours are, or whether it even still exists. Google is much better at that.
They could add some “wow factors”, but the rate of error is still too big to ship it. Like, I don’t think it would be impossible for them to have a live language converter using LLMs when you call somewhere in a different language. But being responsible for stuff is just a can of worms that nobody wants to sign up for.
That is now, there was very little wow factor when Copland was being developed and they were at the edge of bankrupcy, long were the days of Mac Classic and LCs.
What is saving them this time around is the way they have been priting money with iDevices.
The devil is in the details – you do shit clippy-like integration = nobody will use it, you do it well – everybody will, even though nobody currently does in any meaningful way beyond setting a timer.
Well, the current iteration of Apple intelligence doesn’t enable personal context or 3rd party app related features at all. (https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/07/apple-intelligence-siri...) So who knows whether people people want it or not; it’s not even out in the world! What Apple has actually discovered is that this is a hard problem to solve. But people do want a smarter Siri; they complain about it constantly.
Given the size of Apple and these orgs, plausible. Siri also had a bunch of folks that came in from outside, through acquisitions, and did their own thing or tried to identify themselves and their roles as something different from Apple norms.
Apple had teams involved with AI/ML in several divisions also, from AI/ML (including Siri), TDG/VPG, SPG...
„[…]struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins […]“
working in AI/ML, is there any recommended literature one may read on how to ensure efforts result in products? Would be interested to access more experience to benefit both an engineer and a manager pathway.
My Google Maps experience has gone downhill over the past two years. It has gotten bad enough that I started using Apple Maps. I was blown away by the difference, not just from how far they have come along since launch, but that how the navigation gives directions in a way that matters to me while I am driving.
I don't know why Siri has had a bad user experience, but if there is one company that can do a better job at AI-as-a-product than OpenAI or Google, I think it would be Apple.
I find Apple Maps to be a much more pleasant app to use, though that's at least partially down to it being permitted to do things Google aren't on iOS (nav on the lock screen, syncing with the Watch etc.)
In my experience it also has more accurate lane guidance and, as you say, better delivery of audible driving directions ("go through these lights then, at the roundabout, take the first exit"). Google Maps also has an annoying habit of choosing the quickest route at all costs which, in certain parts of the country, involves going miles down single-track country lanes (which legally have a speed limit of 60 but more than 30 would put you through a hedge or into an oncoming tractor) when a dual carriageway A-road would be only 2-3 minutes slower. I can't say Apple Maps doesn't do this, but anecdotally it seems to do it less.
However the business info is still way behind Google, particularly regarding things like temporary closures.
Could Apple Maps on WearOS work as well as Google Maps, or does Google Maps there get special integration with something like Google Play Services?
WearOS in general seems to be much more restricted than Android with things like sideloading and restricting third-party stores, but I don't know if there are also things like the Google Play Services system privileges of google-Android proper.
I don't do live navigation, but sometimes I prefer searching Apple Maps because it gives me results, not ads.
If I search for pizza, both will give me results for restaurants that serve pizza. But if I zoom in on Google Maps, I get other, unrelated restaurants like big chains and a donut shop.
That's not to say Apple Maps is better overall for searching for businesses - they often have incorrect hours, or have closed completely.
I was a defender of Google
Maps last week. Then I had to drive some roads I was unfamiliar with at the weekend to get to a familiar funeral.
Google Maps gave me instructions to turn off a junction right at the turn off, resulting in me missing it. Worst still, it did this not once but twice. And the detour was via road works.
Google Maps added a considerable amount of time onto what was already a 3 hour journey.
Thankfully I had planned for problems so there wasn’t any negative outcomes aside time lost and a considerable amount of additional stress when I was already in an emotionally bad place.
On the journey home I used Apple Maps and the difference in the directions were night and day.
Apple Maps gave me ample warning before each junction. It described the junctions (eg “right turn 100 yards after the traffic lights”) so I knew exactly where I was going. Even told me what lane I needed to be in.
Google Maps did do this on occasions to be fair. But it was highly inconsistent. Hence why I got stung so badly when its instructions were last minute. Whereas Apple Maps was 100% reliable 100% of the time.
It will be a long time before I rely on Google Maps for satnav again.
I've had a similar experience as well. I had sort of hand waved it as being better due to tighter CarPlay integration (i.e. that there is usually, IME, higher-detail UX - which ostensibly leaves less room for interpretation).
> It will be a long time before I rely on Apple Maps for satnav again.
My wife doesn't have that problem with Google Maps on her iPhone, so I'm aware of that counter-point. It might have something to do with that I use offline maps. Things started breaking -- points of interest doesn't load, or maps freezes, etc. I have not been able to unbork it. And it had been noticeably getting worse.
But even when it had been working, I had started noticing navigation errors started creeping in. It was nice that I hear things like, "at the next McDonald's, turn left" ... but I also get other strange navigational errors. Even just last year, my wife and I hear the directions, and it is having us go in a confused way. I don't trust it as much. (And there is a lot I can say about this using Promise Theory to analyze all of this).
Last night, at a town I do not reside in, I'm making an errand to got to the grocery store, and Google Maps breaks again. So I use Apple Maps. Apple Maps navigation tells me to turn in, and that I am in the parking lot for my destination. I have never heard Google Maps doing that. Another time just last night, it told me that I am crossing this light, and to turn at the next light. I also never heard Google Maps tell me that. Those were literally the kinds of things I would ask my human navigator to tell me in addition to the standard Google Maps navigation (on my wife's phone).
I used to trust Google Maps, but in the last year it has given me some very bad directions that not only were wrong, but were sometimes dangerous. I've started to very much not trust its directions, which is unfortunate, because it used to be so great.
I've been using Apple Maps exclusively for a few years now, as I like the turn by turn directions much better, and the UI is more readable to me, as others have noted.
My wife seems to like Google Maps better, so we tried it on a recent trip. I ended up going around in circles in an unfamiliar area, and it kept telling me to turn where no road existed. I was flabbergasted it was so bad, as the last time I used it, I didn't remember it being so unreliable.
I've been an iPhone user for about ten years and have largely had the same relationship with Apple Maps for that time. Indeed, for the first time in a long time, I'm seriously considering switching back to Android later this year over a handful of annoying interop issues— chief among them the stuff recently surfaced by Pebble around APIs for wearables.
Not sure if that means I should try Apple Maps again at the 11th hour or not— maybe if it's finally gotten good it would be better to not know and just remain in blissful ignorance.
Google has it as the first hit, but Apple doesn't even show it. None of the hits match, they're all either searches (which... what does that mean? If I do a search and one of the hits is "search nearby", why does it want me to another search?) or some kind of IKEA office, not the warehouse.
At the time I didn't know the address, so I couldn't infer the right one from the list. And I was in a car. I tried to zoom in near where I knew it was:
Apple Maps keeps doing this. I can trust it 95% of the time, but the last 5% is a garbage heap of wrong or missing addresses, or outright wrong directions.
Before you say this is a Norway thing, I've had the same thing elsewhere in Europe, and it once gave me some very wrong turns in New York that put me in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of night.
I was one of the defenders of Maps when it first came out, but every time I try to commit to using it, it fails in some way that drives me back to Google. Google's UX is horrific (when you've searched, selected an address, and asked for directions, why does it take five "X" taps to get back to the main map view?), but it almost never gives me the wrong thing.
I think Siri has had a bad user experience because it hasn't been a priority for the company, at least since launching it the day before Steve Jobs died.
It has been more than a decade of them kicking the can down the road, so I don't expect Apple to provide a good user experience with Siri any time soon.
Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in.
From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot.
Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dream. Empathy is increasingly trivial.
So Siri.. and voice UIs generally. The bottlenecks have been in unexpected places.
In general, we just don't have very good UI paradigms for voice. Voice recognition is finally good. LLMs theoretically add a lot of capability. But... there just isn't a great UI.
It's like trying to use a smartphone with a nipple mouse instead of touch. You can slowly hack your way to making specific tasks/features work... but there is no radiation event where lots of tasks become possible.
The thing is though, nothing progressed in Siri since the original demo in 2011. Despite boasting desktop-level CPUs and never-before-seen dedicated "neural engine" co-processors.
It has only become worse in the past couple of years.
The inability to know that bedroom means bedroom [1], or the impossible task of adding several items to a list [2], or failing to answer what the current month is [3] have nothing to do with slow progress or UI.
Siri's voice recognition has gone down a lot over the last 5 years actually, it used to be far more accurate, its speech has certainly improved to be more natural sounding. Its capabilities though... yikes
They spent more time polishing voices than they did on actual features, if anything, regressing them to the stone ages in terms of its primitive form.
Plus, there’s no more humor. Trying to crack jokes at it used to give funny responses. Even old things like “I need to hide a body” — “I don’t know how to respond to that”. Insult it and it’s a “I won’t respond to that”. Lots of old funnies are now gone and stripped away.
Siri wasn’t great but it was way, way more usable before the “machine learning” update whenever that was. Before it was a verbal command line, but at least you could learn some commands.
I think the problem is adding on to a clunky paradigm.
It wasn't a good verbal command line. It was usable because even an imperfect command line UI is inherently usable if use cases are limited. Building on to that though... you always overreach.
Personally, I always thought voice+screen interface was an under-explored. That (for example) would let you go from command line to command line navigator... a natural progression.
Voice UI kind of needs to be "one shot" to be pleasant: Play "Fortunate Son." Once you have to go back and forth, listen to list of options... it's no fun anymore. The Windows/Mac/Xerox GUI paradigm required a mouse, keyboard & screen. Voice only is limiting... perhaps.
All of them feel to me like they went backwards. In the beginning you could say you killed someone and it'd show you the nearest park/forest to bury them in. Now you can't even get them to play X on Spotify half the time.
I guess development is driven by military and commercial needs, rather than altruistic needs.
The futuristic ads were made for the consumer to feel safe and sound.
The actual money flowing went into military applications (drones, guidance systems, etc) and commercial applications (car factories)
For the above systems, they don't have to be physically capable, just have a restricted set of actions / outcomes, for example, flying a missile. But, they need to be mentally strong, to take decisions at split seconds.
I was unaware of Apple’s military drone and missile programs. Could you point me to more information on those? I’m having trouble even imagining what an Apple drone would cost.
Apple needs a major change in the way they do software overall. AI is one concrete manifestation of their issues but it runs much deeper. They still produce great hardware but it's held back by their software. Would love to see them rethink the entire stack from the OS APIs and SDKs, dev tools, WatchOS, to features like extensibility, Shortcuts, and of course, how they leverage AI. At this point, they should probably retire the name Siri and introduce their next gen AI under a new name. They also need to really step up their approach to testing and software quality across the board.
There’s no easy answer here, starting from scratch and rethinking everything carries a very high risk of disaster.
They just need to start giving a shit. Care about bugs for once. The whole software org needs to take the time to go through their (clearly) enormous backlog of bugs, and shore up what they have.
The problem isn’t the architecture or vision or rethinking their stack, it’s that what they have is barely holding together under its own weight. They need to do the unsexy work of going through and shoring it up.
As for Siri, just give the job to OpenAI. Let them write the new thing, they’ll probably be done in a month.
People keep talking in this thread about iOS / macOS being bug-ridden messes. I have to wonder if this is from users still on Intel chips.
My work MacBook with a now 3+ year old M1 Max? Rock solid. Rarely run into any problems at all. My iPhone? Also rock solid. Rarely run into any problems.
My Intel-based MacBook? Buggy mess. Like Apple has left the Intel side of the house to die on the roadside. As someone who still uses that at the time expensive device, I find this annoying. But I understand why they’re not investing resources into Intel bug fixing.
It's not processor dependent. The OS is just buggy. Actually the only thing that is processor dependent is dtrace failing on Apple silicon and not fixed for years.
Other bugs are very generic. I get focus bugs, password input box broken on lockscreen, search just not working in settings app, xcode crashing if I even look at it wrong, and lots more...
Agree that they can't start from scratch. But they could acknowledge their shortcomings wrt to software and start moving things in the right direction. I had never seen so many complaints about software quality at Apple than the last release of MacOS with their networking issues and many other.
They are in a decent position where they already set expectations that they will deprecate and retire old stuff on a regular basis compared to Microsoft which is trying to preserve backwards compatibility forever.
Giving it to OpenAI won't solve their problem with Siri (although some of that expertise could help). Part of it has to be engineered into their platform with better extensibility while also preserving privacy, security, etc. And that work could also enable their platform APIs, Shortcuts and such to have access to a much more powerful set of things.
Maybe the problem is how the goal and objectives are set up which results in maligned incentives - "innovating" for the sake of innovation instead of fixing existing problem. The first results in nice power point presentations, the second doesn't.
Crazy, given that they are so good at marketing, that they haven't thought about retiring the name Siri, a name which now, has connotations of being an inept and unskilled assistant.
Maybe for the next one they need to do a 180, and give the AI a name seems like she would be on top of everything and runs a tight ship and conveys that old school cold, calculating, no nonsense image.
Like Frau Farbissina or Geraldine or Gertrude.
I would trust a Geraldine with my books.
Kinda like how they use Afred or Jeeves for butlers.
Really? Software is currently why I prefer Apple products. I prefer iOS to Android and I prefer macOS to Windows.
There is always room for improvement, but I never got the feeling they need to drastically change things or start fresh. They just need to squash some of the big bugs IMO.
I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal):
"Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked:
'Can we make the phone smaller?'
The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it'
Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank.
As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and said 'I see air bubbles coming out of the phone. That would lead me to believe there is still unused space in the phone!' "
I wonder if anyone at Apple these days has that intersection of:
- attention to small details
- able to communicate which details are the most important
- has the sway to be able to do the above an make changes
Obviously a made up scenario because systems engineering (as the discipline most likely to be involved in the provided scenario) is all about balancing competing requirements and dealing with design constraints such as available choice of materials, or acceptable cost to consumers, or any other number of criteria.
Systems engineers would have responded by informing this hypothetical Steve Jobs that if he wanted to make the phone smaller by 20%, the phone would lose 10% processing power and lose 30% battery capacity, 9 months and $50m would need to be expended to retool the factories, and 12 months and $40m would need to be expended to redesign software UI for a smaller screen. And for an accurate answer, those systems engineers would have needed to have been able to consult with materials scientists, software engineers, engineers designing factory tools, and dozens of other different types of disciplines.
He actually publicly did just this with the first iPhone. At introduction in January 2007 it had a plastic screen. He noticed the screen scratched easily in his pocket and they moved to a glass screen (and announced it) before it shipped in July.
I heard a Steve story from a relation that was a high level exec during his tenure. They were running a meeting about failure rates of (Macbooks, phones, I can't remember which exactly). They knew their stats well, parts, how to source, costs, etc. They spent months on research. They presented it to him from an operations nature, e.g. the costs and such. His response was along the lines of: TV's are amazing technology, they've improved in every way, and are cheaper than ever. But when is the last time your TV broke? They don't break. They never break. And they always work. That's our strategy. Make it happen.
Obviously it didn't quite work out that good (although I guess in my personal use cases, it has). But the point of telling me the story anyways, which I think matches here, is he had a way of pattern matching the average persons expectations based in reality, and applying it to their technology, and then aligning people towards ambitious goals that were on some level based in reality (i.e. people use TVs, they are similar technology, people don't expect them to break). I don't know how much credit is him or others and all. But I know from these kinds of stories, and from my own experience elsewhere, that some people just regularly and instantly "get it", and Steve Jobs seemed to be one of those people, and to also have the station to force others to go along.
Here I think its pretty obvious Apple is both the worst performer in AI, and also the best positioned to capitalize on it. In that sense their current state is clearly demonstrative of some major failure. Its hard to imagine someone like Jobs being in the same position in today's rate. LLM's are phenomenal technology and their use cases are vast. And we've all got these devices ready to take advantage of them, ready to listen, to respond, to coordinate, etc. And here i am asking Siri to turn down the volume and it either turns it up, gets confused, or misinterprets and goes on some tangent. There's a wildly large gap in what Siri does now, and what we 100% know it could do based on the existing tech many of us are using every day.
> But the point of telling me the story anyways, which I think matches here, is he had a way of pattern matching the average persons expectations based in reality, and applying it to their technology, and then aligning people towards ambitious goals that were on some level based in reality (i.e. people use TVs, they are similar technology, people don't expect them to break).
Not relevant to what you are discussing related to attention to detail (which I agree with).
This is my imaginary scenario -- if Steve Jobs were to tell me in a meeting, "I see air bubbles coming out of the phone", I (as an engineer) would reply to him, "Dude, that air is carrying excess heat out of the phone via convection. If you don't leave any space in between hot electronic components, your phone will be a toaster or a clothes iron".
It's fine to explain why it is the way it is, but at the end of the day that's still just an engineering problem you need to try and solve. Sometimes Apple made mis-steps in that size/heat scenario but they've done it a hell of a lot better than anyone else for a long time. Sometimes you need demanding product types to force you to put serious effort into an engineering challenge you don't deem worthwhile.
There aren't a lot of phones that have air vents, except for the ones that also have fans. Convection doesn't work at those sizes and power levels. Thermal design for phones is all about conduction, getting the heat out to the surface of the device and spread evenly enough that there's no hotspot that would be uncomfortable for the user holding the device.
I really hope it's not true, because that would just mean he doesn't understand how elements are placed on boards - there will always be some air unless you add extra filler. (and make everything run hotter)
> there will always be some air unless you add extra filler. (and make everything run hotter)
Adding filler is how you make a passively-cooled device run cooler. Air that's not moving doesn't transport enough heat to be useful, and convection doesn't do anything in the narrow spaces between and above components on a circuit board. Thermal paste, graphite sheets, and vapor chambers are what phones these days do with volume that's not needed for circuitry or structural support.
It depends on the filler and whether you want other things around to get warmer or not. Radios for example are normally kept away from too much heat, then any temperature difference is monitored/compensated in configuration. Anyway, what I mean is - that heat is going somewhere - any extra filler will change where / how quickly.
In the context of how phones today are built, air gaps are pretty much never the right answer to a thermal concern. At best, an air gap is what you allow when the budget cannot accommodate a better solution. If you have a component you need to keep cool, it's probably because it puts out a fair bit of heat on its own, so you want to thermally couple it to its surroundings. If you have a component you don't mind getting warm, you use it as part of the path for heat to be conducted from the big heat generators out to the surface of the phone.
Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer?
The engineers know that the phone isn't literally a solid brick of electronics and "can't be made smaller" is normal human speak for "can't be made smaller without time and money we don't have to do it." The smart thing would have been just saying he wanted the iPhone to be smaller, money and resources is no object and we're willing to dedicate time/people to this project to get proposals put together.
Jobs was very good at his… uhh job but stuff like this isn't an example of it.
>> "can't be made smaller without time and money we don't have to do it."
If the CEO is telling you it is important to him, then he's telling you he'll give you the resources. Telling him it "can't be made smaller" when you admit it can is silly.
Either extreme is silly. A serious answer is: "if it's a priority, we'll produce estimates for size-vs-cost". Resources are never infinite, reasonable options are not always available. "just do it", "can't be done" is just cringe linkedin style drama.
Not sure if he did it, but from what I heard from friends who worked with him, wouldn't be surprised if he did. Really love the guy as someone who combined creativity and tech, but these kind of things is one of least things I liked about him. It is one these Trumpisuqe quality playing hard ball, etc. Very US business like tend to be very off putting.
The Isaacson biography has a section where Jobs speaks to the CEO of Corning (glass screen vendor, CEO was a materials engineer) with absolute Trumpian ignorance ("You don't know what you're doing!"). Corning wanted the business and thus had to coddle him like a baby to get him to see reality.
It's tragic that so many business leaders in the US see this kind of bloviating as something to emulate. Reminds me of Altman telling TSMC to gear up to spend $7tn on fabs and them just snickering about his cluelessness [0].
Except this led to Corning repurposing a Kentucky plant and ramping manufacturing to meet the original iPhone launch. And Weeks (Corning CEO) has publicly praised Steve for helping him better assess risk as a leader.
Well yeah, this kind of ass-kissing is what is expected of you if you want to keep their business. Our great leader is so wise and insightful. I don't doubt that Weeks could take some lessons from Jobs in the areas of business he was actually good at.
Hence the 'coddled like a baby' portion of my comment. Zuckerberg, Cook and US tech leadership are doing the same to government currently, and chucking in $1 million each for good measure.
> The smart thing would have been just saying he wanted the iPhone to be smaller, money and resources is no object and we're willing to dedicate time/people to this project to get proposals put together.
That's just bland business-speak. Jobs had a knack for illustrating things in unexpected ways and this was it. I have no doubt that whoever saw the fish tank thing had the same takeaway as if Jobs simply said he wanted the iPhone to be smaller and there would be resources dedicated to it.
I worked at Apple for a couple years and it wasn't uncommon to see org level dysfunction.
But Siri is such a terrible product that it amazes me that the org hasn't been deleted, and that Siri hasn't been ripped out of products.
I have seen Apple delete bad orgs a couple times before so I find it strange they let Siri survive. It does not "have good bones," it is not a good product and it never will be.
It is actively frustrating to use and I deeply regret migrating to HomeKit as well, primarily because of the usage experience via Siri.
Truly a total/spectacular failure of an org and product. It ought to be a case study for how not to product manage.
While this all falls under the same product umbrealla, I'm of the opinion that the intractable problems around Siri have more to do with the lack of nuance in the underlying APIs.
Starting a specific album at a specific song, for example... well Siri handles it, to a point, but it has to interface with Spotify, and there you hit a wall of hot garbage, along with the sequencing and process-management/integrity issues of integration software. Garbage meets a money fire, in other words. High cost, brittle, constantly changing, glue code that is mostly depending on third parties also requires session management? Not a winning product formula.
Sprinkle in some inhuman HCI nightmares like not pausing speech appropriately when reading an album title and you've got a recipe for an expensive turd that annoys your customers, oh my, by a lot.
When I was hired at Apple/siri more than 10 years ago as a Data Scientist, I was SHOCKED to find that the system beyond speech recognization was rule-based. My team and I attempted multiple times to introduce statistical learning models to siri, so it can improve it with more data. After one year, I was disillusioned and I left Apple.
Several years later former colleagues told me the system was still rule-based! I would not be surprised if it is still that way. That organization was like a mini-dinosaur. There was very little flexibility or openness to new ideas. I am supper happy I left.
Siri is less than 50% useful when asked a simple question. My kids and I make a joke about it whenever we ask it something in the car. I don't understand how Siri is so exceptionally bad and why Apple didn't do something earlier. It's embarrassing in 2025.
Because there was no competition. Alexa similarly gave up trying to improve theirs after it launched. I've never tried Google's voice assistant but I assume it wasn't very interesting before GPT either.
I'm not convinced it was a technical limitation, even stuff like voice parsing was not improved or basic functionality expanded horizontally.
As a user of all, Google Assistant and Alexa are miles ahead of Siri. Initially I just had Siri, and like you assumed they were all like that. Not the case. No more 'here's what I found on the web' or just not being able to help. Are they integral to my daily life, no, but definitely save time. Siri is just for timers and reminders for me.
I've been a long term Alexa user and kinda hard to get out of the ecosystem, but it's gone downhill fast in the last few years in terms of the UX.
* It forgets about my configured routine ("good night" -> "turn off all lights", now it would randomly reply "good night" and does nothing).
* It keeps trying to push down other services/products on top with long winded follow up question. There's no way to turn this off
* Keep asking if it's answering from the correct room
* Its ability to understand my command has gone downhill - and I'm just ordering it to turn the lights on and off in certain rooms. Now it keeps saying "cannot find bedroom" for example even though there's clearly a group called "Bedroom" set up in Alexa
Alexa sold 500 million devices. Before layoffs, they had 10K staff doing something. Their LLM product recently launched and is rolling out soon, lead by former head of MS Surface.
Yes I own 3 Alexas and still like them. But it's the same device it was when I bought them a decade ago, just occasional new hardware with nicer speakers + more TV/3rd party device integrations. Just like Siri it's software entered total technical stagnation post-launch. Not even the incredibly confusing Alexa settings/management app has improved nor the 3rd party extension marketplace. There's been no strong competition to improve it's technical capabilities as the entire market plateaued and stopped trying very hard.
Plenty of companies have thousands of employees working on stuff that never gets better and at best efficiently maintains status quo, until some competition eats their lunch.
Looking forward to seeing who wins Alexa+ w/ Claude vs Google's Gemini devices, or whoever does ChatGPT voice assistant
One new thing was custom silicon for local, cloud-free audio processing, https://www.slashgear.com/amazon-skips-the-cloud-with-local-.... When combined with US-firmware Zigbee on Echo 4, it allows local device control by voice, without any internet connection. But now they are sadly dropping that to send all audio to the cloud for LLMs.
The failed Alexa software ecosystem was such a lost opportunity, as the device even ran Android. Their hardware ecosystem was more successful, e.g. voice-controlled microwave sold many units with happy customers who still complain about discontinuation of the affordable device. They experimented with niche devices, e.g. make or answer calls on an existing landline, using any Alexa device. Also sadly deprecated, for much weaker VOIP limited to 10 correspondents and random outbound caller ID.
For the elderly (TAM ~= 100% of US humans.. eventually) and disabled, Alexa is life changing. Sadly, Amazon has not invested in those use cases. It's an ideal market for Apple voice control + HomeKit privacy + local LLMs, if and when they get their act together.
I have to say that while I’d somewhat like to have a better Siri, it’d make more of a difference in my daily life if they would put those engineers on fixing text input so I didn’t have to change “snd” to “and” dozens of times a day or deal with bizarre and ungrammatical suggestions.
It's still weirdly hard compared to Android, though. It somehow makes decisions about whether to snap to different words or lines when you release the cursor, and I still don't understand the algorithm it uses for that, and I wish it just wouldn't.
Apple Intelligence was a massive letdown. I'd love to read the post-mortem. They had a huge opportunity to leap ahead, but instead we got some fairly underwhelming, AI-generated images. I’m guessing the models they built—both on-device and in Apple’s cloud just aren’t very good? The integration should’ve been the easy part; they control both the OS and the apps.
Imagine what the usage data shows internally. While they can frame the statistics publicly any which way, it must be god awful low in a lot of their less prominent apps and features.
Now consider the Billions they've spent not only integrating, licensing, but also in opportunity cost towards other projects they could be working on.
I wonder if it will meaningly hurt Apple's reputation to the general public... they were doing so good with the m1 chip lines and to me it is fairly tarnished after chasing leprechauns for two years.
Totally -- I signed up for the beta/preview when it was announced, and TBH after it was enabled, I couldn't (and still can't!) really tell what's different! If they just had Siri ask Claude or ChatGPT, it'd be way better!
I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”.
I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles Law of Bureaucracy remains on full display, these shuffling of the titanic deck chairs will continue.
I wish it could be otherwise. I wish a company could introspect on itself and say “hey, our doer/decider balance is out of whack, let’s correct” but that just never seems to happen.
What do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ?
I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'.
Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?
In this context, a "doer" might commit to an agenda, making ongoing decisions that furthered accomplishment and success on that agenda. While their nominal role is to decide, the decisions they make are organized to effect some end.
In contrast, a "discusser" or "decider" makes decisions in order to satisfy the social role of making decisions, but often with a lack of surety, clarity, follow-through or commitment. Perhaps in fear of missing some greater opportunity, or fear of being credited with some failure, their decisions are not organized in a way that actually effects some end.
I don't know why anyone believes that the push for Apple Intelligence was driven by middle management. Sure, engineers could have pushed back because they knew more about the limitations of the tech, but engineers aren't one to understand the macroeconomics driving industry-wide demand and long-term growth.
Well, that is the problem with them making Siri useful for everyone - it is made for discussers and deciders.
Summarise a meeting here.
Summarise the report there.
Summarise the email from marketing.
Schedule a meeting with Jim.
Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper.
While yes, there is some usefulness in having something summarise things for you, most people in their day to day lives don't handle a "100 emails from everyone" and "30 meetings with 40 different department heads" or whatever these people do.
Quite a big gap from the market they are targeting with Siri.
> Summarise a meeting here. Summarise the report there. Summarise the email from marketing. Schedule a meeting with Jim. Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper.
Isn’t that what administrative assistants and hired help do? To handle the minutia of triage and actually doing the stuff you’ve decided upon? And they actually have to do their job well because (reputation loss, employment, and legal)?
> Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake.
Yes, faking that really well is basically equivalent to actually doing it for real.
Of course, there are many good and worthwhile things an exec could have done that wouldn't show up in such a demo.
Eg if you increase reliability of your cloud services from 99.9% to 99.9999% that could be huge, but most likely wouldn't show up in a short demo.
On the bullshitting front: I remember a particular re-organisation we went through at Goldman Sachs that the local bigwig was explaining to us, and all the benefits it would bring. I made the perhaps unwise decision to ask what observable measurements we could take in a few months to tell us whether the whole thing was a failure (or success).
(I suspect the actual main purpose of these semi-regular re-orgs is to shake things up enough so that after a few shuffles person A can eventually land ahead of his former boss B, without anyone ever losing face. And that's a good thing! But hard to admit to.)
A CEO just needs to make sure that stuff gets done; doing it personally is just one of the ways to get there. (And not a particularly scalable one.)
For Apple it probably made sense, because the whole company's image and reputation is built on that stick.
But eg for a toilet paper manufacturer or a producer of fighter jets, the CEO shouldn't spend too much time personally testing the products.
For the former, because presumably the product doesn't change that often.
For the latter, because there's not even a single 'user' of the product. The experience of the huge ground crew (with various specialised roles) is just as important as the experience of the guy in the cockpit, etc. No CEO, and actually no single person on earth, has the expertise to judge all of these aspects of use by themselves.
That doesn't mean the experience of the users is irrelevant. Just the opposite! But the CEO will have to intelligently delegate.
Do people actually want this AI stuff in their phone? I don't want AI on my desktop/laptop computer and I don't want it on my phone either. None of my family or friends that I talk to seem to want it either.
From the number of people that do say "Hey, Siri", I'd suspect that people do want it. The concept is a nice one. Hands free. Remote control things with your voice. Super convenient by not having to have the device sitting next to you, just within earshot. Not even needing to be a mobile device. Just gizmo somewhere in the room. For non-technical people, it's utterly magic as a concept.
For technical people, it's a privacy nightmare because it doesn't really work as advertised on the tin. The only way they can get it semi working is by pushing the request to the mothership and do processing there rather than locally on device which means privacy is an option. Also, be technically minded, some people developing these systems make more money on data harvesting than any other service, so local only prevents them from that precious data. So the local processing isn't just a technical problem, but one that interferes with their core business. Of course, none of that is advertised on the tin
Maybe not?? Pretty much everyone that I've seen using Siri are most definitely not techy people. I'm far from the echo chamber SV bubble, so I spend more time around non-techy people than techy people.
Seeing how there are more non-techy than techy people, it feels like Apple has reached their target audience. If Apple depended solely on techy people, they'd need another bail out from MS or Googs to stay solvent.
I know a good number of people (mostly older) that don't seem to know that they can hold the power button for Siri. They'll hold their phone up to their face, say “hey siri”, wait for the reply, and then start talking.
I absolutely do. The Apple Intelligence pitch where you can ask it "what time is my mom landing?" and it knows who your mom is, can RAG messages and emails from her to obtain a flight number for today, and then use a tool to look it up and respond back is 100% where the future is heading.
I'm excited for it, and like Apple's high level privacy protecting narrative with the secure cluster stuff. We'll see if they're ever able to deliver.
Has the Pixel Gemini assistant gotten to that level? The Google Assistant was always better, and I know the switch to Gemini was a little rocky at first, but in theory it should be able to do that stuff, without all the privacy verbiage.
Not gonna get there with RAG based on vector spaces…. You need to integrate old-school A.I., database queries and the like for that to be reliable enough to not be a laughing stock. An LLM can use tools to set that up, but you need to build on existing technologies and face down the Gödel, Turing and scaling problems that come with it.
But how can you find out what time your mom texted you to meet? Surely, you don't mean open the text app, find the thread with your mom, and then scroll looking for it. Do you? Surely, the world couldn't function like that. We'd be staring at our screens all day doom scrolling in various apps looking for whatever info you needed. That's just not how the world works.
I think it is actually, because as everything transitions to apps and websites and smartphone, lately I feel like my phone is simply another organ located in my hands and I have to spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at it to get things done. I’d love to have something like Apple Glass powered by AI so I can get both hands freed up again.
It's only that way because you let it be. It is possible to operate in life without staring at a small screen all day. I hardly ever look at mine, and yet I'm a fully functioning person contributing to society in a positive manner. You just have to admit it is a problem, and take it from there
Disagree here. We could have very different sets of obligations in life coming from different sources, not all of which are under your control.
And the phone does consolidate many, many technologies that used to be disparate objects. Now, you can also live life without a camera, CD player or walkman, cookbooks, planner/calendar (i actually still use a paper one in addition to calendar/reminder apps), and letters coming in the mail, sure. But I don’t think you’ll get fat proposing that to everyone, and these are just a few examples. Not everyone is going to want to live a life of pure asceticism.
I think back on my parents’ stacks of mail and realize that searchable email is way better than that.
I also just bought concert tickets for a few shows in the summer. Yes, there is a paper ticket option, that you pay to have mailed to you. Have you ever lost a paper ticket before, or tried reselling them? Much easier to deal with with the AXS app.
A buddy visited a while back and getting him a transit card without using the smartphone option took about 30 minutes.
I think it’s just that after having centralized so many things into one device, there’s a new step function horizon to cross to make it more effective to use or come up with a new form factor.
Most “normies” have no idea what it can or cannot do, but they’ve heard at least the one buzzword and probably seen an ad for “Apple Intelligence.” Maybe had a laugh at the idea of an “AI boy/girlfriend” and would be curious to check it out.
I could be wrong of course, but my intuition is that only that tiny fraction of the population already following LLMs would potentially not want AI Stuff on their phones.
Regardless, I can imagine how rage inducing it is for the Apple CEO to use Siri, then immediately after use ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode. Its like what Siri should be, regardless if this much or that much people will use it.
If Apple made a voice mode as advance as ChatGPT, and no one used it, then you can throw away Siri all together (and i'd assume Apple has the data that shows people actually use the Siri)
A lot of the Apple Intelligence stuff seems like a waste of space. But having some personal LLM with context over my phone and life? That sounds pretty cool.
This is one reason I've started using Google's AI app more. It's integrated with my calendar and my email, so I can ask it "Have I booked a hotel for that conference in March" and it'll check my calendar for the conference dates then search my email for a hotel reservation around those dates.
Small tasks like that are things I spend a few minutes on several times per week and it's nice to have a contextual AI assistant that can handle those types of things.
Copilot as a sort of unobtrusive popup window on my PC, as long as it remains an isolated app without roots into the OS, used as a more precise search engine available with a keyboard shortcut while coding on Windows has been surprisingly useful for learning etc.
Anything more ingrained or trying to be too clever or invasive, not at all. Microsoft has a funny example here, as what I describe is the consumer Copilot app. The Microsoft 365 Copilot experience seems the worst extreme, muddling the product, injecting itself across domains for dubious benefit. The rating in the app store of both of these 2 apps reflects this divergence.
On mobile, I could see the potential as a substitute for search engines, with pros and cons for it's style of information retrieval. Beyond that it's stretching the use case of LLMS
This whole process sucks, but I'm not betting against Apple. I believe that the best AI integration happens at the OS level, and Apple has all the components to do it, they need to find a path to execute. No chance I'm going to let an external LLM have access to certain parts of my data/OS.
Apple needs to just put Siri down and launch a brand new, ground-up service/feature that completely changes the subject. That is a win for them, and we finally get rid of the most unhelpful "assistant" the world has known since Clippy.
I'd be glad if Apple could concentrate on a number of less prestigious not-quite-AI issues such as their text input, selection, and mixed-language spellcheck handling in iOS (easier to retype things most of the time, undesired pasting of styled text in recent Safari making pasted text invisible in dark mode) and window focus management (bring to top random windows after closing a window) on macOS.
It's not uncommon for technology companies to over promise and under deliver. We just aren't used to it from Apple because of their secretive nature. They released a new MacBook recently and we don't know whether that was on time or months late simply because Apple never mentioned it before the product was released.
Whether the fault lies with individuals or the structure of the organisation is a more interesting question. I wonder if American corporations would take a more individualistic approach to this compared to their European and Asian peers.
I just wish they'd give up the interface already and open it instead of trying to reserve it only to be used by Siri for whenever they have a Siri personality-ified LLM or if ever the LLM works as a universal router for doing anything.
At a basic level i just want the interface to have good voice to text recognition. if it's a question ask an LLM, if it's a special recognized command run it instead.
At a dev/pro-user level let me define statement patterns (regex or semantics) where i can trigger a shortcut and parse some input from a single statement.
By all means, regen the custom responses devs and users setup with the Siri personality LLM so it sounds like Siri all the time. Just set the interface free already.
No one at Apple uses Siri, that would be my guess and it provides no value to the company. Heck I'm surprised when anyone uses voice assistance in general.
Voice assistance was the hyped thing sometime before block chain and LLMs. Everyone needed one or was working on one. So Siri got stuck into the iPhone, like Apple Intelligence is now, because "the market" needed Apple to do so to keep stock prices going up. Then the hype died out Apple sort of needed to keep Siri around, because it is one of the interface to the HomePod and CarPlay. There's no reason do develop Siri beyond that, because very few people use it, not having a better version isn't going to sell less iPhone and they can't mine the data, because they sold everyone on Apple being privacy friendly.
There's absolutely no business case in having Siri do anything beyond "Call my wife", "Next song", "Play U2".
People don't use it because when it was first introduced, it responded "I found some web results for that" for the complex types of things people wanted to ask it.
The technology exists for much better responses to those types of requests today, but who knows if they can re-train their customers that it'll work for them now.
There are definitely a lot of complicated personal-assistant type tasks that they could do now that people would like.
Windows Vista happened and Microsoft still exists. And many other products from huge companies failed hard. I think these things are quite common for large companies. The fact that it's Apple just makes it more interesting.
Honestly, Windows Vista was a victim of the computing landscape of the time. Virtually none of what made Vista hated was changed at all to Windows 7, except by then everyone's PC had caught up to what the OS expected or they were going to stick with XP until the bitter end.
The elephant in the room is that the underlying technology SUCKS. No amount of engineering can fix that.
It’s not that apple botched their AI implementation while everyone else has figured it out. The marketing departments using demos have convinced customers that they should have high expectations
The baffling part of Apple’s AI strategy - they continue to insist on using the “Siri” brand. That brand is damaged beyond repair and has been for many years, maybe since it was first launched 10+ years ago. The recent mistakes of over promising and under delivering have further eroded the brand to near zero. For a company that comes up with ridiculous branding of small features (Retina Display, Force Touch, Dynamic Island) the choice to keep “Siri” and its negative connotations is un-Apple like.
Agree, Siri is a damaged brand. Microsoft had the insight to drop Cortana when it flopped too.
In the age of LLMs I also increasingly view my experience with "Hey Google" and "Alexa... " with similar contempt. Their output feels so bad compared to what ChatGPT's voice gets me. All of the big tech companies seem to be struggling immensely to deploy the latest in AI advancements.
I never tried advanced things with "Hey Google" but it always gets the basics right for me:
"go home" opens maps app with a route to my home.
"alarm in", "alarm at", "what time is it?" works well too.
In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down Gemini.
Alexa is the same with basics, works well for me with "reminder in X hours", "reminder at 10am on every workday", "alarm at", "play The Strokes", "add coffee to the list" (groceries)
Alexa is really bad with any advanced stuff I've tried. Didn't try with "hey Google"
I agree Alexa/Hey Google are generally great at following commands.. but lately I find myself most wanting to use voice primarily for getting quick answers to factual or opinion based questions. There the results are abysmal vs ChatGPT voice.
It also doesn't help that ChatGPT's voice cadence is much closer to sounding like a real human.
Siri meanwhile is still far behind both Alexa and Google Assistant in its basic voice-to-text conversion capabilities -- a pain point I experience everytime I talk into my Apple TV remote to search for content.
And here we're on an English speaking forum, I can tell you that no matter how bad you think Siri is, it's actually 2x worse in the other languages they support.
I have been running Apple Intelligence betas for a long time. I wish they would provide a voice interface for at least: querying calendar, recent emails, checking available file storage, query any system setting for the current value, etc. About six months ago I was testing Gemini Advanced and asked how many times I had Covid and it reviewed my emails and eventually came up with the correct numerical answer. I was impressed, but I don't know if their current system would pass that test.
Kevin Weil has been a very good product manager at OpenAI - Apple should try to hire him.
They've been behind for almost a decade now. I bought an Android phone around 2017, and the difference in usability between Google Assistant and Siri was enormous even then. I don't think Siri has improved meaningfully since then, either.
Maybe they should consider starting over from scratch.
I think the main issue is that you can't fully control what an llm will output. If Apple products output wrong/silly/dangerous content it is in the news and big reputation hit for them, whereas for a small ai startup people don't really care. Apple likes to have full control over the user experience.
The trouble here is that generative AI is at a lower level of development as opposed to semiconductor design. Apple can build an internal talent pool to make the M1, M2, M3, etc. and produce an industry leading product but in A.I. the field is so rapidly changing that no company can dominate. Every moment is a “DeepSeek moment” in that smaller organizations are making tiny, small, medium and occasionally large advances and if you draw a line at time t where you pick the SOTA and build a proprietary system based on that you will be obsolete in a few months.
It’s kryptonite for Apple but I can’t believe anybody thought Apple Intelligence was more than hype.
Does Google have an LLM based AI experience for Android? What are they doing differently to avoid the problems plaguing Apple. The core technology in both can't be that different. Or is it an expectation thing?
I feel like they may be experiencing that issue where the product is quite good within some core set of features, but the edge cases are where all the paper cuts happen. And when its a singular product on a singular device made by a singular company, those paper cuts really add up. There must be a more succinct term for that.
Can it even be solved with the current state of LLMs?
- They don't insist on being on-device although they seem to have on-device route.
- Their promise isn't as ambitious as Apples. It's basically Gemini + pre-existing Assistant features as plugins. Not trying to be the privacy-touching agent at least at the first cut. (Or they promised big, but they have trained the audience not take it as a fade value haha.)
- They ship the Gemini version as an opt-in for the Assistant replacement so that they can learn "iterate" on the adventurous enthusiast while leaving larger user base as is.
The Android assistant with Gemini is quite good nowadays, very close to parity of features with the previous one. It's not there yet but Google decided to develop it in the open, similar to the old "beta" products. Hard to see Apple doing the same.
The main issue to Apple is the different mindset that takes to deliver hardware vs. services. Delivering hardware you have one shot to "wow" your customers, and Apple keep nailing this process in a way that the whole industry can't keep up with anymore. On software, that doesn't work that well. You can totally be disrupted by a startup that delivers an MVP faster with 30% of your perfect product that would take 3 years to deliver. In this way, Google's assistant strategy in the short term was spot-on compared to Apple's. You take the hits of bad feedback in the short term in the hope that being in the game can create enough momentum to get you to a solid position of features and know-how in a couple of years.
Android has it, but it has much fewer features then the previous assistant. So what's the point? Yes, they were first, tothey beat apple. Except it doesn't work.
The Gemini Assistant is pretty close to feature parity now with the old Assistant, it got a lot better very quickly. And obviously it's a lot better at conversations.
> As part of the changes, he’ll be leaving that team, though the Vision Pro software groups will follow him to Federighi’s software engineering group. The hardware team will remain under John Ternus and report to Paul Meade, a hardware engineering executive who worked on the Vision Pro.
So the VisionOS programming team is joining the Siri team umbrella? That's kinda weird.
Almost every comment is negative.
From Apple’s point of view, this is not worrying. Look at people you know who are not in IT and software. They use AI for information and solutions, not expecting an agent. And since Apple Intelligence successfully proxies that function to ChatGPT, this is covered for Apple.
You don’t have your relative asking when it’s going to be agent-level help from it.
Regular people don’t expect new this and new that from a device; they accept it as it is, and convincing them to move away from Apple would take years of them seeing how someone else uses another platform. The same time it took you to convince them that Apple is a better platform and worth buying their next phone or computer.
Not to forget that the majority of the public think of Apple and its simplicity of UX as a top-level product with a justified top-level price, that you buy when you get promoted/retire/become rich.
Apple could have five years just refreshing and adding nothing new before they feel the market share fall badly. And ten years or more to do nothing and be in a situation with no return. Neither of those will happen. It would be more worrying if there was no reshuffling of executives.
> since Apple Intelligence successfully proxies that function to ChatGPT
I don't know how it's implemented, but Apple Intelligence's proxying to ChatGPT ends up being far worse than using ChatGPT directly. You could ask the same question to ChatGPT and Siri powered by Apple Intelligence proxied by ChatGPT, and the former gives the right answer while the latter gives the wrong answer.
> Regular people don’t expect new this and new that from a device
But Apple advertised iPhone 16 specifically along with Apple Intelligence. They didn't market the new generation of iPhone as iterative improvements; they marketed it as specifically for Apple Intelligence.
- Yes chatGPT experience is worse. Likely due to censorship.
- When Apple advertised that in keynote, it wasn’t something anticipated and needed by general public and still not, otherwise like with serious delays in the past Apple would have said something.
And after new iOS was released it was said a lot that this is a solution looking for a problem.
We're at an inflection point in the last few months that means Apple might finally be able to do something good with Siri.
Fundamentally, Siri's great promise (well in the last few years) has been that it could hook into all of the scripting facility made available by iOS apps. There are tons and tons of AppleScript hooks on many, many apps -- if only Siri could, you know, access them.
This is traditionally not Apple's strong suit - API access oriented thinking - but I will also say that it turns out to have been a pretty hard problem to actually parse out what 'hooks' to access.
We now refer to this as "tool calling", and know that it's a specific thing an LLM (or even MLM/SLM in many cases) can be trained to do a pretty good job at.
If Apple wants to do all this on device, I think we're not far off in terms of hardware and architectural knowhow to get this done now. I would bet that the Siri team spent a number of years on alternates, essentially relearning the bitter lesson.
I'd guess the best way to make this work on device would be to train and finetune a small model on a massive number of apple app store apps so that it gets good at figuring out which apps it will want to query for tooling functions calls - that's too much to inject in context directly especially on device - then it would call out for a list of available calls -> that's just code -> then it could use a local LLM to choose the proper call and call it -> then if needed it could offload for more heavyweight thinking. To start you could offload the tool call decisions as well, or really the whole thing, except for the local function call.
This would be vastly vastly better than what we have now, and I think does not require huge reintegration efforts from app developers.
"Siri what month is it?"
[... calendar_getcurrentdate requested ]
-> [ Mar 21 2025 ]
I'm really buffled what makes it for Apple so difficult to cut off Siri and replace it with state-of-art technology (LLMs). Siri is still akin to a "dumbphone" 4 years into the age of "smartphones" which is a good indicator for a lost case and when it's better to start a product from scratch without the tech debt.
Org level dysfunction. It is likely an exec's pet project.
Kind of like how Meta keeps the disaster that is Horizon Worlds going, but much worse because Apple has a monopoly on AI integrations in iOS, and nobody else is allowed to compete with their terrible implementation.
Apple knows how to call an OpenAI API as well as anyone. I don't think they're struggling with the LLM side of things. The problem is to ensure security (vs prompt injection), and to create an ecosystem of apps and developers who will provide hooks into their apps to let AI perform actions on behalf of the user.
Why is Apple struggling so hard with LLMs? I get that they're a hardware company, but surely that can't be the full story. They must be suffering from some case of extreme perfectionism or something like that. I would assume it'd be very difficult to get an LLM to perform consistently and reliably without making it useless.
No commercialized LLM product released so far would meet Steve Jobs' standard for a high-profile Apple product, and while that standard is clearly much more lax now, there still is one and still higher than what people accept from OpenAI et al. I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face.
I think many inside and outside Apple hoped that the ways that they scoped their features in the Apple Intelligence announcement would help them pull off something duly reliable and practical, but it's not that surprising that even those ambitions might have bought too deeply into the hype.
> No commercialized LLM product released so far would meet Steve Jobs' standard for a high-profile Apple product
I can put words into Steve Jobs' mouth as well!
Steve Jobs would reframe LLMs (and other ML-based solution) as creative assistants, insisting that their job is not to get the right answer, but to help you get your creative juice running.
To get this to happen, he would have personally convinced engineers that have made cool AI demos to work for Apple to turns these demos into features that form a new Apple creative suite.
> I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face.
It's very well-known that Apple is perfectionistic. I'm not meaning to say that perfectionism is a negative quality or a bad thing, just that it takes a while.
Apple is not perfectionistic. Apple is performative. The entire company is performing software development instead of actually doing it.
Apple's development process is a marketing pitch-driven hallucination - project management by buzzword and individual career status progression.
It's almost entirely inward-looking. The connection to Rest of World is increasingly mythical and remote.
Some good work gets done in spite of this. But senior management doesn't understand quality - either in the internal sense of having bug-free robust product, or the design sense, where products meet real user needs in a satisfying, creative, and delightful way.
Nice graphic design though. Apple is still the leader there. Processor dev has also been exceptional.
IMO it's time for most of the C-suite to step down and let much younger talent take over and shake things up.
Has things gone cracy since I last used OSX for real in 2008 or whatever? Windows have become such a shitshow since Windows 7. I kinda assumed Apple didn't follow suite.
> Apple is not perfectionistic. Apple is performative.
My guy, Apple is autistic as shit. Just look at how in-house everything is. Every time Apple runs into someone doing it wrong, they do it themselves. You know the saying; if you want something done right...
Sure, they're performative as well, but that doesn't change that they are still in the process of doing absolutely everything from scratch because the existing solutions are not good enough for them.
I don't know if you've used the new Apple Silicon MacBooks, but I have a 128GB/8TB one lined up for me to pick up from the Apple Store in about an hour. It's certainly not the best that Apple offers (that would be the new 512GB/16TB Mac Studio) but it practically wipes the floor with every other laptop on the planet. Because Apple made their own chips, because everyone else was doing it wrong.
If Apple released OpenAI's voice mode, without calling it "AI," referring to a "GPT" or a "model" -- if it was just integrated into the iPhone with a wake word, that absolutely would satisfy Jobs.
The problem with these companies is that they can't visualize how a product works for non-technical customers any more. Because everyone they know lives and breathes Silicon Valley. They see billboards for vector databases on their commute, so they think it's perfectly normal to name a product "GPT."
A product containing a language model should never, ever be called "AI" or "GPT" or even "Intelligence." 10 years ago, the only people who knew what the term "AI" even was were the nerdy readers of pulp scifi novels. I'm half joking but the whole town of silicon valley needs their glasses smashed and to be shoved into a locker.
Depends what you mean. Building an LLM seems to be easy enough that several companies have built one, and even Twitter was able to magic one out of the ether from pretty much a standing start given the resources.
Getting an LLM to do the right thing for you 99.999% of the time? Has anyone managed that yet? Frontier models still hallucinate the most basic shit, and consistency is very, very difficult.
Its wild to me that people actually believe the privacy marketing.
I guess not... there is a reason Apple is still in business, they are great at deception.
It just seems so silly to believe a blackbox company that was outed by Snowden in PRISM would actually be privacy focused. Or that a company that touts security has been hacked so easily by Pegaus that anyone even buys into the marketing.
But hey, people are religious, so I should be less surprised that people trust others.
People expect the llm version of siri to be an agent, not a chat bot. There's a very wide gulf between a chatbot like chatgpt and an agent like... well I haven't found any good agents I'd give write access to my calendar yet so I don't know what to cite.
Theory: a lot of this work was started a few years back, when it was a common belief that LLMs would continue to improve at a breakneck pace. That has now happened, so now they’re stuck with a lot of clearly Not Good Enough stuff.
It's interesting that Whisper from OpenAI that has been released so long time ago is much better than Siri and also support like ~50 languages and an be run actually realtime on iPhones. They could even take it probably for free since its MIT license but most likely they have not invented syndrome at Apple.
Actually ex-Apple devs are running company that optimised whisper for apple devices and even provide it on HF open source: https://www.argmaxinc.com/team
Just very good multilingual STT would improve Siri experience a lot. I'm wondering if apple privacy policy backfired and they don't have much data they can use for training.
Vision Pro is an amazing product looking for a purpose and a market. I've opined that it's the 128K Mac of the 2020s -- an expensive toy of very little practical use on its own, that portends a revolution in computing, later versions of which really do change everything. I don't know if that's true anymore. It isn't the 1980s, and initiatives that don't make money over their first year or so tend to get axed. There's no Jobs to push the "vision thing" (no pun intended) anymore.
The Vision/Vision Pro product was also years behind schedule, based on original expectations, and some people feel that they had to launch something so that's why we got what we got.
We have to have thin glasses or contacts. No one wants to wear a bulky helmet thing. Until that happens it will forever be a hardcore enterprise or niche consumer product
I would say it's more like the internal Xerox machines that were built in the mid-1970s at PARC. Most people have no idea how to work with those machines. By the time the 128K Mac came out, people understood what a GUI interface was and knew how to use them - it's just that the Mac in particular was limited by it's hardware.
I feel like service revenue is going to be Apple's "oil curse". I get why they need it in the short to medium term, but in the long term it removes the fear of death that used to originate from having to release groundbreaking (and successful!) hardware products every few years. And as they grow the service revenue, the fear of death will wane even further.
From a GTM perspective, Apple is fine to be behind OpenAI and others. Other than Search and studying, most consumers just aren't finding compelling use cases for a lot of this tech. The news woman herself said it herself that
> I've had iPhone 16 and haven't used any of these features.
Not only did she not use it, she wasn't even sure how she would start to use it. Emoji customization is kinda fun, but hardly a killer offer.
Folks in business are finding a lot of use: Research summation, data structuring, rapid prototyping, copy editing, and all sorts of business-grade use cases are phenomenal. None of them are central to Apple's core business or user experience. Use cases might be found closer to the Macbook/Pro line-up... but most of these are already accessible via a web layer through Chrome/Safari. They're making good use of Apple's performant M-chips. Of course, we all know Siri really should be able to do a helluva lot more than it currently does.
Apple being behind tech-wise is a *huge* risk bc it puts them on the back foot, but short-term not enshittifying their tech with worthless AI use cases may be the right move.
Is part of the problem not that people don’t actually want to use voice commands on their phone for most things? Using my phone is a private activity. I don’t want to yell at my phone in public about doctors appointments, work emails, setting up dinner reservations, calendar events etc. And god forbid I have to repeat myself. There are certain situations, like driving, where it’s necessary. I just don’t think voice commands are a significant step up from typing.
David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails/37 Signals) has been writing about the state of Apple AI on LinkedIn recently (as well as an additional post that was deleted for using the word "asshole"):
LOL I did not click the links because I don't want to visit that site (and also have limited interest in what DHH says about Apple Intelligence — not none, but not enough to click it), but I am actually very curious as to why DHH (or anyone, but especially someone like him, with many other places to opine) would post his opinions on LinkedIn of all places...?
Yes, I can't find the episode now, but on the 37signals podcast, Jason and DHH said that driving signups with public writing are part of their job that they owe to their employees, and that includes presence on places they don't really like such as Linkedin.
imo, Apple are actually ahead when it comes to the hardware side of the whole thing. Their vertical integration gives them an edge not many can match, when it comes to running ML models. It's a no-brainer for Apple to reduce the barriers for devs to build really cool native Mac/i{Pad}OS applications and incentivize them to leverage the built-in AI/ML abilities to a greater extent. The iPhone in part took off _because_ of the whole app ecosystem that got built around it. Sure they might take a loss in their services revenue in the short term but they get to be _the_ AI platform for at least the next decade and half - both on-device and server side with their new Apple silicon servers.
It's just that most Apple software seems to suck in some fundamental way right now. I don't know if it's a technical issue (SwiftUI being meh when compared to UIKit for example) or a culture issue or the money coming in insulating management from accountability. Software execution has been lagging behind the excellent hardware execution for almost all of the Tim Cook era. They desperately need someone like Scott Forstall to come in, kick butts and get stuff going again.
They ideally have a couple of years while waiting for Moore's Law to catch up to turn around their software side. Otherwise, it's a real shame that all that great hardware is just being used to run Electron B2B SaaS apps.
They also had (but squandered) the potential to be ahead on the software side. macOS is the only platform I'm aware of that has every app wired for scripting (AppleScript/Apple Events). And not only that, they already solved the issue of adoption since almost every well-behaved (read: non-electron) application has decent support for AppleScript.
It would take very little effort to put an LLM frontend on top of this, and yet they've not only abandoned applescript (or the underlying apple events) at a time when they could expose it to the masses, but have gone in the exact opposite direction with "Shortcuts".
Oh and the icing on the cake is that apple events can be sent over the network as well, and this infrastructure has existed since the early days of OSX.
I agree. The AppleScript/Apple Event Manager thing is an example of treating macOS like a second class citizen in the ongoing iOS-fication of the Apple Ecosystem. The point of macOS for me is that it's simple to use for most beginners but allows more advanced users to add complexity through tools like Apple Script and Automator and the underlying Unix base.
Like you say, an MCP server integrated with AppleScript/Apple Event Manager would instantly hook up any LLM with virtually all Mac apps. More Mac devs will then be incentivized to support these features. For people who find AppleScript un-intuitive, JavaScript is also supported. And in my view, this is a revolutionary way to use my computer - a very Star Trek way of using the computer.
> Their vertical integration gives them an edge not many can match, when it comes to running ML models.
They have an advantage when it comes to running them locally, but it feels like they're trying to push it onto consumer hardware before consumer hardware is at the point of actually being able to run useful LLMs.
You're right. The hardware right now can't run useful models.
But that's why I think they have a couple of years to sort out their software issues. When useful models can be run on their devices they have to be ready. The hardware advantage can only be an advantage when they have the software to run useful applications. Hopefully they don't get stuck in the typical big company bureaucracy and ego matches and instead can make a change for the better.
They made it less useful because they were greedy. Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB. In PC world before M1 and even before apple started soldering everything you could have easily laptop extended up to 64GB RAM for a cheap price. Those ram sticks are not expensive in retail price and should be even less expensive if wholesale and not full sticks as bill of material but just memory modules.
If last year they would make each macbook air as a standard have 32GB RAM and iPhone 16GB RAM + 250GB SSD as a base they would have the most capable hardware with big user base.
Sure they loose some money of people having upgrade models but they would sell much more Macs. As a reference they sell each year only ~20M Macs comparing to 60M ipads and 240M iphones. Macs are having only like what ~10% market share worldwide? They could easily double it but they protect their profit margin like virginity.
> Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB.
You're getting product segments mixed up. From what I can tell, the 13" MacBook Pro in the Intel era never started at 16GB; the last model still started at 8GB. That's what was replaced by the M1. The 15/16" Intel-based MacBook Pro models didn't get a proper replacement until the M1 Pro and M1 Max, which started at 16GB and 32GB respectively. The only regression I can find there is that the last 13" Intel MacBook Pro could be configured with up to 32GB, which wasn't available from the base M series chips until the M4 last year.
A lot of people forget that it was only recently that the Photos app on your iPhone could run OCR text search on pictures in your phone. Google had that feature on their phones many years before Apple.
> Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, such as Tacotron and WaveRNN, have made it possible to construct a fully neural network based TTS system, by coupling the two components together. [...] However, the high computational cost of the system and issues with robustness have limited their usage in real-world speech synthesis applications and products. In this paper, we present key modeling improvements and optimization strategies that enable deploying these models, not only on GPU servers, but also on mobile devices
Having worked on Apple's TTS for more than a decade, I can state with confidence that this is utter bullshit and you don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Both in terms of quality, and of the underlying technology used, Apple's current TTS is in no way comparable to what existed 10 years ago (at Apple, or anywhere else in the industry).
I challenge you to find a 2014 recording that is on par with a contemporary Siri voice.
I have been playing recently with those enhanced TTS model and they are of similar quality like piper TTS models to me - not that good. StyleTTS 2 like kokoro sounds so much better for me and also run realtime on their devices. And when you compare their online models to not even what OpenAI have but some small recent startups like Sesame or open source models like Orpheus, Apple TTS sounds (pun intended) really behind.
I don't dispute your claim, just that I still find Alex voice to be the best, and it's been the same since over 10 years ago. The other voices have issues, they don't sound too good at 1.5x.
>imo, Apple are actually ahead when it comes to the hardware side of the whole thing.
It surely is just your opinion. Nvidia is king and Apple has found a way to market an integrated GPU and CPU RAM as something magnificent, rather than something that has existed since the dawn of computing.
There is a reason Nvidia is king. There is a reason corporations buy Nvidia and not Apple for their LLM uses.
You seem to think that the AI market consists entirely of the segment that NVIDIA dominates (datacenter training and inference) and that the segment where NVIDIA is absent (inference on battery-powered devices) doesn't exist.
Hopefully the new guys take the existing GenAI bullshit and fuck off from turning it back on after every update despite me turning it off 3 times already.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max and had to turn off all Apple Intelligence. It bricked my phone multiple times and made things significantly worse all around.
I think this is another symptom of exponential growth break down. Wall St wants exponential growth. That's not possible over the long term. When the curve starts to deviate they look for reasons. AI which at present delivers pretty much nothing useful to the end user anywhere in the industry, is selected as "the reason for failure".
I just don't think any corporation is capable of making a voice assistant that anyone actually wants to use.
The problem is that it cannot be profitable, which is not something that modern capitalism can tolerate. The only revenue generating actions a voice assistant can take involve advertising or selling something, which is not something that anyone wants.
Users of voice assistants want to use their device hands free to do trivial things like controlling widgets, setting timers, doing simple web searches. These actions cannot be monetized, so the corporation has a decade-long crisis trying to game users into revenue generating actions.
This leads us to today. All voice assistants are useless spy engines that exist only to tell you about the more profitable things you can do with them and sell any data you accidentally give them.
With an LLM backend, the cost of running the service skyrockets and the profitability crisis will only get much worse.
What happens when siri costs 1000x to operate and still has the same usability and user count as on-device siri? Is Apple management even aware of that question?
This is probably the death-knell for siri, Alexa, et al. One hopes, anyway.
I think Tim Cook should be changed. Wasn't he the one who had software that made older iPhones run slower so that people would buy new ones, then publicly lost that lawsuit which confirms they did it in bad faith, and then stayed CEO. How is this possible?
I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category.
Seems like there's a deeper story here.
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