The incredible engineering in the hardware is prized above software quality.
For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?
Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.
> Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both
This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).
At least in the case of UI bugs, no secret sauce seems to be required to resolve them. No particularly special feats of engineering. It seems simply dollars can fix them: QA & engineering. When I discover these obvious defects, update iOS multiple times over the course of months, and continue to experience them, I can only assume Apple prioritized having cash on hand over investing in my (our) experience.
The number of incredibly obvious bugs in Screen Time that make it frequently useless just boggles my mind. It has never worked for us at anything like 100%, it is hit or miss and frequently just does randomly stupid things. Settings reverting on their own, new app categories appearing out of thin air, etc.
Just one more thing that sours me on their stuff when I'm otherwise inclined to like it.
Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.
In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.
Ask any giant company that's been disrupted by a startup: money does not buy taste, or quality, or core competence. It can help, if leaders understand those things.
Apple is ultimately a hardware company that's so good they can monetize software and services. But they are not really a software company, or a services company. I think Ternus' promotion recognizes that: software and services are worth a lot of money, but they're value adds to hardware.
Minimizing shipped defects is qualitatively simpler in physical engineering because the set of possible defects you have to account for is astronomically smaller.
I am a physical engineer by background but have also spent much of my career in high-reliability software systems. The problems of reliability in software systems make physical systems look like child’s play. The levels of effort are on different scales.
An important difference is that software correctness is mostly binary. In physical engineering you can usually spend a bit more money to over-engineer a component if you have any doubts or are lazy, and that works. Effort does not scale nearly as well when it comes to reliable software.
IMO the barriers to entry are just much different, and it’s reflecting in the workforce. There’s cultural differences too, but I think the education differences is the biggest cause.
Nah. That’s not it. Software is just legitimately harder than most physical engineering (notice I didn’t say all).
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse, or your CPUs fail unexpectedly, or submarines implode. Rarely. In fact, I bet most people reading this thought of the same few examples.
Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software? Even at the elite, smartest, most educated levels of software, there are still bugs everywhere. Humans are essentially incapable of writing bug free software. And it isn’t because a bunch of uneducated dummies that didn’t get degrees are the ones writing it (as you arrogantly implied). It’s because it’s way fucking harder to do perfectly or near perfectly.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t incredibly hard physical engineering. Obviously there is insanely difficult engineering in nearly any variety. But if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening.
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse
When skyscrapers fall or bridges collapse, the negligent engineers who knowingly signed off on them go to jail. When was the last time a software developer or manager went to jail over a known bug?
For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?
Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.