[HN Gopher] Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn aro...
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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
Author : bbzjk7
Score : 295 points
Date : 2025-03-21 04:01 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I wonder if this would help either .vision pro hasn't done better
| in any way
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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
| varunnrao wrote:
| 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.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| I can imagine Jobs being in there like "Tell me what you've
| done."
|
| "Well, um, sir, we've realigned our strategy around generative
| AI and..."
|
| "No no no, tell me what you've DONE. In the past six months. It
| shouldn't be hard."
| eru wrote:
| A good enough bullshitter will easily answer that question.
| csharpminor wrote:
| 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.
|
| But lots of execs don't know enough about their own
| products to interrogate like that. So they settle for BS
| presentations.
| eru wrote:
| > 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.)
| ivell wrote:
| So kind of a chief test officer? We need more CEOs to
| have that kind of responsibility.
| knowriju wrote:
| 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' ?
| svnt wrote:
| Parent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and
| not enough engineers with agency.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| 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.
| breckenedge wrote:
| > engineers aren't one to understand the macroeconomics
| driving industry-wide demand and long-term growth
|
| It's a two way street. Managers can only see the forest,
| but engineers are capable of seeing both the forest and
| the trees.
| kgwgk wrote:
| I'd be surprised to find "middle managers" at all among the
| top 100 senior leaders of a company with 150k+ employees,
| rchaud wrote:
| Or in HN parlance, "MBA management".
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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.
| hansmayer wrote:
| No it's more like 'visionaries' (with a flawed vision though
| :))
| thecupisblue wrote:
| 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.
| doug_durham wrote:
| The T100 has many individual contributors. Most Apple managers
| are "doers". It's an expectation.
| LoganDark wrote:
| 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.
| helveticabold48 wrote:
| My guess: Their privacy centric image/strategy is a two-edged
| sword. You can only do so much on device locally.
| LoganDark wrote:
| This has already been solved since last year with Private
| Cloud Compute.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Great point
| saagarjha wrote:
| Assuming they are actually ready, that is.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Private Cloud Compute is already used for existing Apple
| Intelligence features (all, like, one total of them).
| resource_waste wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > They must be suffering from some case of extreme
| perfectionism or something like that.
|
| Are you serious? Did you miss the headlines around their news
| and text message summary products?
| LoganDark wrote:
| > Are you serious? Did you miss the headlines around their
| news and text message summary products?
|
| Actually, riddle me this: Do you really think they would just
| ignore how that went?
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > 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.
| Jyaif wrote:
| > 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Your putting of words in his mouth is better. I think he
| would sell it as not an AI or LLM or whatever.
| mlsu wrote:
| Really?
|
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Why is Apple struggling so hard with LLMs?
|
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| xvector wrote:
| They refuse to pony up for competent talent in ML.
|
| Meta, OpenAI, and others out-compensate Apple for ML talent by
| a factor of 2-4x.
| margorczynski wrote:
| From what I'm seeing all those companies now have problems
| explaining to investors when they'll see any returns on all
| that investment.
|
| Especially after China has entered the game and DeepSeek
| disintegrating most of the moat that existed around those
| companies.
|
| And Apple can simply use what others created instead of
| burning billions into R&D which might not come up with
| anything noteworthy.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| 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.
| moandcompany wrote:
| A few quick cliffs notes plus added info:
|
| 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.
| worstdevna wrote:
| 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.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| 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.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| > Given that, Apple is stuck trying to catch up to the rest
| of the products in the AI space
|
| Oh, of course. Like...? Nothing else has access to relevant
| data. That's like 95% of the pitch of siri.
|
| Voice assistants are just fundamentally embarrassing to
| use, imo. The only exception of which I can think is while
| driving.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
|
| > Nothing else has access to relevant data.
|
| Simply not true.
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >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.
| ejoso wrote:
| 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.
| epohs wrote:
| 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.
| cageface wrote:
| Only in the US. Apple Maps is still far behind Google
| Maps in most of the rest of the world.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| agos wrote:
| would you really say the color iMacs didn't have a wow
| factor?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Well that hockey puck mouse got really famous.
| anon7000 wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Making functional AI ('It does all things') work well
| across a platform is an integration problem.
|
| Which are historically the hardest problems for engineering
| orgs to ship: precisely because they cut across team/org
| boundaries.
|
| Suddenly the Maps team need to give a shit about the
| Calendar team, etc.
|
| And both teams tend to exaggerate and say 'Sure, our side
| of the integration is finished... it must be a problem on
| their side.'
|
| Ironically, Amazon-as-a-company probably has the most
| experience retooling this way -- from the Bezos API memo.
| Because that's what it will take.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| 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.
| ricknroll wrote:
| ,,[...]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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| So they needed someone with... vision?
| _justinfunk wrote:
| More than that, they needed a professional with vision.
| caycep wrote:
| Weren't there rumors that Giannandrea doesn't have full control
| of the AI/ML house? There were entrenched old Siri folks
| fighting for their turf
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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...
| potatolicious wrote:
| > _" 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.
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Guess the title was changed from earlier.... "shakes up"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425082
| varunnrao wrote:
| 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.
| kelseydh wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| Apple's TTS voices still run on 10 year old technology.
| Pretty disappointing, at one time the had the best system
| voices.
| microtherion wrote:
| 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.
| pzo wrote:
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| The ML blog seems to disagree with that take:
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/on-device-
| neural-... (2021)
|
| > 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
| krackers wrote:
| 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.
| varunnrao wrote:
| 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.
| chippiewill wrote:
| > 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.
| varunnrao wrote:
| 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.
| pzo wrote:
| 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.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >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.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| 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.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| They've started moving away from Siri with the latest iOS and
| branded most of it "Apple Intelligence".
| realusername wrote:
| 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.
| kelseydh wrote:
| 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.
| hu3 wrote:
| 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"
|
| Any other basics that work?
| fernandotakai wrote:
| >In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down
| Gemini.
|
| i have a pixel 9 with gemini. i absolutely hate it. google
| assistant is miles ahead.
|
| and btw, i'm not the only one complaining https://www.reddi
| t.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jdpvnq/gemini...
| hu3 wrote:
| oh nooo! for now they still allow me to stay with the
| good old Google Assistant.
|
| But it's only a matter of time until some exec removes it
| to "improve Gemini adoption".
| fernandotakai wrote:
| yeah, android authority has said that 2025 is the last
| year of old google assistant. i dread having to use
| gemini every single day.
|
| https://www.androidauthority.com/google-killing-
| assistant-35...
| kelseydh wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| I don't care because it doesn get deployed in EU anyway. EU-Siri
| is just as dumb as it has always been.
| troupo wrote:
| It's getting deployed in the EU according to original schedule
| (despite all of Apple's posturing).
|
| And Siri will continue to be dumb regardless of whatever "AI"
| monicker they slap on it.
| haunter wrote:
| Siri can't even answer what month it is so the only way is up
| from here I guess
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jehkpm/apple_intel...
| 2dvisio wrote:
| I had to try to believe and I'm baffled.
| spinningarrow wrote:
| Mine told me the entire date instead of just the month.
| troupo wrote:
| Mine told me "It was Saturday, March 1st 2025" today.
| calmoo wrote:
| close enough
| thebytefairy wrote:
| Impressive. Mine goes 'sorry, I don't understand', after
| multiple attempts at 'what month is it'. Google assistant
| understands.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Having used it over the years I'm not. It feels like Siri
| uses AI/ML for speech recognition and then some pattern
| matching for the actual actions.
|
| Meanwhile LLM's came along and shifted peoples expectations.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Lol
|
| Just tried this on Android, and it works (though it gives the
| full date)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Works fine for me on iOS 17.7
| deanc wrote:
| Sometimes I ask it the time and it takes time to think and
| gives up. It's absolutely and utterly useless.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Would whoever in Apple who originally setup that AI division take
| the appropriate "blame" for being wrong and resign themselves?
| Hardly.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| It's the usual cop out so, a shrug of the shoulders and fire
| some VPs and start the merry-go-round again.
|
| It seems like most tech corporate structures are to figure
| out the appropriate place in the org chart to wield the axe,
| so long as it's lower down.
| richardatlarge wrote:
| The AI issue is a perennial one: people don't need to fix a
| problem they don't have
|
| you'd think that would be a lesson well learned by now
| blitzar wrote:
| rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| 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.
| skc wrote:
| I knew that them branding their AI strategy as Apple Intelligence
| was risky.
|
| Because now the perception is that "Apple Intelligence" is
| something distinct from the state of the art.
| AnonC wrote:
| 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.
| datadeft wrote:
| True. I would love to have less features in MacOS actually. We
| are approaching Windows start menu level of crap being
| installed by default.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| windward wrote:
| As a user it feels disrespectful to be so overtly treated
| as an untapped revenue stream for a premium-price product.
| It's Samsung-esque.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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".
| samtheprogram wrote:
| > None of my Samsung phones have ever advertised anything
| to me.
|
| I had a Galaxy S8. It definitely did.
|
| > 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".
|
| iOS has other music players too. It was a choice that
| e.g. doubleTwist stopped supporting iOS when pivoting to
| CloudPlayer.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| You have never been encouraged to use Bixby or any other
| Samsung app?
|
| Let's define "ad".
| philistine wrote:
| Please for the love of everything, go in Settings and turn
| it off.
|
| https://www.howtoisolve.com/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-
| apple...
| jonplackett wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| 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.
| rusk wrote:
| No reason why most apps couldn't be cloud hosted and
| devote all the significant local edge compute to such a
| digital companion.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| 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.
| rusk wrote:
| No I meant user's device. It's the edge of the
| application space.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The M chips are pretty much perfect for this.
| Uehreka wrote:
| 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.
| xvector wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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".
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > 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.
| joshvm wrote:
| There is already a ChatGPT extension for Siri
| https://support.apple.com/en-
| gb/guide/iphone/iph00fd3c8c2/io...
| apwell23 wrote:
| how does current siri manage to be safe for all audiences.
| michelb wrote:
| It's not an LLM, just a bunch of templates.
| kube-system wrote:
| Apple Intelligence already uses LLMs today in iOS 18 and
| macOS Sequoia.
| nailer wrote:
| You're correct. I imagine the parent poster may be using
| an pre-Iphone 15 Pro so not be aware.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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...
| samtheprogram wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| drewg123 wrote:
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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.
| kossTKR wrote:
| 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..
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Where is the passion, catering to pro's, any idealism?
|
| It died 14 years ago.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its
| downsides too.
|
| I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse
| the more successful it became.
|
| Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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.
| veidr wrote:
| Apple basically _did_ die, after Performa/Copland (and
| let's not forget Open Transport!!)
|
| The resuscitation was truly miraculous.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And QuickDraw GX and another quickly abandoned technology
| that came with System 7 Pro.
| officeplant wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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
| mulletbum wrote:
| 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.
| achierius wrote:
| What makes you think that's not a software problem too?
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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
| codr7 wrote:
| We use to have a saying for this behavior, embrace and
| extend something...
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think the difference is intentional vs unintentional.
|
| Apple has the MFI program for these things. You can get
| certified and tested in relatively short order.
|
| They also aren't removing the original protocol support
| or anything like that.
|
| What I will say is that I think they don't devote as much
| QA resources to getting it right as they do their own
| protocols, hence the difference.
|
| With Microsoft it was very different. They wanted to
| subsume or shutdown whatever they targeted with EEE
| xxpor wrote:
| Headsets have been fine IME, but the killer is car
| bluetooth. Can't swap that out easily.
| roydivision wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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...
| codr7 wrote:
| Sounds more like process problems than strategy problems
| to me.
| lapcat wrote:
| > They addressed this once with a huge "0 new features"
| iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it
|
| This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and
| Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard
| actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...
|
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah it seems like there's a serious fundamental problem,
| or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence.
|
| Because they still managed to fix all the egregious bugs by
| August every year, as late as Mojave in 2019.
|
| From my recollection at least.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > 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.
| veidr wrote:
| 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...
|
| [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/106449
| ben7799 wrote:
| 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.
| nextos wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > It's constant change for the sake of change.
|
| 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.
| keyringlight wrote:
| 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)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| artimaeis wrote:
| 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).
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > 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.
| LegNeato wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| > As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1
|
| 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.
|
| Remember this one? It's hard to find a worse bug than
| total user data loss:
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-bug-
| respon...
| deergomoo wrote:
| > 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.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Effectively supporting the workflows people have on an OS
| necessarily involves significant OS updates given enough
| users and enough workflows.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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."
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _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.
|
| It was a buggy unreliable crash prone mess.
| mapmap wrote:
| >Were you using Macs before Jobs came back?
|
| I think he was :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(video_game)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Well I feel dumb for asking him :)
|
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.)
| ben7799 wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.)
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| 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.
| neximo64 wrote:
| The issue is without Scott Forstall its rubbish, process over
| substance & Tim Cook empowered that change to keep everyone
| happy.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Literally the only time I ever use Siri is to set a timer. That
| is, if I'm lucky and she actually understands me. It's such an
| embarrassment in 2025.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Probably there's more, but expectations are so low that I
| don't even want to try.
| mplanchard wrote:
| 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.
| pesus wrote:
| > 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.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > 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.
| mtrovo wrote:
| 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.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| My life would rapidly fall apart.
|
| 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.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| They're very good at marketing, I'm beginning to believe
| that's all they're doing well these days.
| hylaride wrote:
| 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.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > 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.
| saghm wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easier to just stop saying that rather than
| trying to let the marketing language drive the engineering
| goals?
| tehlike wrote:
| I am curious how data driven apple teams are. Any ideas there?
| georgeburdell wrote:
| >Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations
|
| 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...
| deergomoo wrote:
| 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).
|
| + Hyperbole, in case it wasn't obvious
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| 42772827 wrote:
| When my phone downloaded Image Playground I legitimately
| thought my phone had been hacked.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| I thought my iPad had been hacked when it was constantly
| started to play that crappy U2 song at random times for no
| reason.
|
| I wonder how much U2 had to bribe someone at Apple for that
| __loam wrote:
| Can't be deleted on MacOS btw
| RankingMember wrote:
| > turning it back on after every update despite me turning it
| off 3 times already
|
| That's a page right out of the Windows Update playbook
| siva7 wrote:
| 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.
| xvector wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Probably because people would get cheesed off if their current
| Siri requests started hallucinating.
|
| Me: Hey Sir, set a timer for my management meeting in 10
| minutes.
|
| Siri: I've deleted your minutes from the last 10 management
| meetings.
| siva7 wrote:
| That's something i would absolutely trust the current Siri to
| do, but less so the LLM.
| layer8 wrote:
| Existing app integrations (SiriKit) might not be easy to
| migrate.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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 ]
|
| "It's March".
| saagarjha wrote:
| Are you familiar with how app intents work?
| sgt wrote:
| App intents have a purpose but not anywhere nearly as
| impressive as AppleScript hooks.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yes but they don't work on iOS
| sgt wrote:
| Of course, iOS has the AppleScript ecosystem which is
| superior in most ways. I would not want Android intents
| there.
| vessenes wrote:
| That's what I was thinking of on iOS. At minimum Siri hooking
| into App Intents would provide world's better experience.
| apetresc wrote:
| Wait, what? There's AppleScript on iOS? Since when?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Siri is also on MacOS which is what I think the OP was
| referring to.
| vessenes wrote:
| Sorry, I meant App Intents.
| xvector wrote:
| 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.
| bonesss wrote:
| 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.
| netcan wrote:
| 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.
| smcleod wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
|
| Now it's a crapshoot.
| netcan wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| That crapshoot always seems to land on "Playing Apple
| Music".
| bombcar wrote:
| Sorry, "Cancel Timer" was not found in your music.
| Subscribe to Apple Music for more!
| kotaKat wrote:
| 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.
| easton wrote:
| I was mad that easter egg was gone, but I just tried "I
| need to hide a body" and Siri disabled location sharing on
| Find My.
|
| which is equally funny I think
| Lanolderen wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Moravec's Paradox strikes again.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
| netcan wrote:
| Woah!
|
| You have no idea how much "hole" you just filled in my
| lexicon. Have been articulating this all wrong for years.
| ianbicking wrote:
| That's also a nice explanation of why brain size among
| mammals scales with body size without necessarily leading to
| higher-order intelligence.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| 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.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1781030511336456612
|
| [2] https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114172857097176113 and
| https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114180042031267746
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43432945
| esskay wrote:
| We need another snow leopard. Stop all this ai nonsense and just
| fix your damn os.
| rifty wrote:
| 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.
| rmholt wrote:
| But opening the interface would be horribly insecure though.
| People could make competing products to Apples own offering!
| kamil55555 wrote:
| I just don't understand how a huge company like Apple managed to
| mess up Siri so badly. Siri used to be useful, now it is a piece
| of crap.
| michelb wrote:
| 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.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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".
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| hi_hi wrote:
| 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?
| juujian wrote:
| 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.
| marmarama wrote:
| 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.
|
| I don't miss the old Assistant at all now.
| mtrovo wrote:
| 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.
| flakiness wrote:
| - 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.
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| 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.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| This should be the top comment in here, and it seems like the
| elephant in the room.
| korale wrote:
| 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.
| ninkendo wrote:
| 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.
| korale wrote:
| 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.
| margorczynski wrote:
| 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.
| whynotminot wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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...
| whynotminot wrote:
| Did you see the part where I said macOS on my M1-based
| laptop is great?
| viraptor wrote:
| Yes, that's why I'm saying - no, they're not better and I
| do see issues on Apple silicon. You got lucky so far.
| whynotminot wrote:
| For years now. I guess I've had a good run.
| racl101 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| 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.
| SirMaster wrote:
| 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.
| michelb wrote:
| 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.
| infecto wrote:
| 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.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| They over-promised and under-delivered.
|
| Many of the most interesting features (like LLM Siri) were
| ultimately cut from ios 18. Maybe next year.
| lsllc wrote:
| 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!
| tmpz22 wrote:
| 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.
| pzo wrote:
| 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.
| kittikitti wrote:
| 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.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| What's most improbable about this anecdote is there happening
| to be an open fish tank in the meeting room. ;)
| creaturemachine wrote:
| As a pescatarian maybe he liked his snacks fresh XD
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Chekhov's fish tank
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Also that the bubbles were visible to the rest of the room,
| or that the tiny amount of air was able to overcome surface
| tension in the first place.
| vekatimest wrote:
| I think this originates from Isaacson's biography and was about
| the iPod?
| programmertote wrote:
| 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".
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| wtallis wrote:
| 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.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Some phones have fans??
| wtallis wrote:
| There are phones made specifically for gaming, and some
| of them have fans.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| In an alternate world where your phone has a Core i7
| daghamm wrote:
| No idea, but technically some phones are now water-
| cooled.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I have seen reviews of redmagic and asus gaming phones
| with fans.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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)
| postalrat wrote:
| I think you are imagining little tiny bubbles coming out.
| wtallis wrote:
| > 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| wtallis wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| freeamz wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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].
|
| [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-
| allege...
| kthomson wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| basisword wrote:
| >> "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.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| I can't believe I wrote this nearly a decade ago... and it
| still holds true: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234
|
| "If Steve Jobs still ran Apple"
| dhx wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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.
| cloverich wrote:
| 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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| > 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).
|
| Very well put!
| herbturbo wrote:
| I think you're spot on here. What has been lost at Apple is
| Steve Jobs' product mindset.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| tiahura wrote:
| I'd be happy with just being able to accurately position the
| cursor.
| quesera wrote:
| Many people are unaware of the ability to precisely position
| the cursor with the iOS keyboard by long-pressing the
| spacebar.
| losvedir wrote:
| Wow! What a game changer, thanks so much for this.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| 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.
| pesus wrote:
| It used to be much easier and more precise with 3D Touch,
| though. But probably even fewer people knew about that.
| ddp26 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Seems like there's a deeper story here.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| His persistent presence over what can only be called a disaster
| of the first magnitude is indeed puzzling.
| tehlike wrote:
| Failing up is surprisingly common
| runjake wrote:
| The key ingredients here appear to be audacity and
| persistence, with competence taking somewhat of a backseat.
|
| This isn't intended to be overly critical. It aligns with the
| old adage, "If you want it, ask for it."
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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.
| tunesmith wrote:
| You mean the whole local-maxima problem?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The key weakness of the iterative development strategy.
| codr7 wrote:
| Alternatively, the rumors were true, and Alexa/Siri were
| actually real people working very cheap for a while.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Wait, are you saying there was a deeper meaning to S5E14 of
| Big Bang Theory "The Beta Test Initiation"? That would be
| quite hilarious.
| ksec wrote:
| 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.
|
| Probably a few more names missing.
| numbsafari wrote:
| > Putting too much trust on Eddy Cue
|
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| 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.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue
|
| 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.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > 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?
| klabb3 wrote:
| > The users aren't the issue, the developers are.
|
| 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?
| musictubes wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| 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?
|
| Maybe I'm just a bit too cynical
| dieulot wrote:
| > Craig Federighi [...] merging iOS and macOS team together.
|
| What year was that?
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It was 2016. Right after I quit.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| xxpor wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Having sat beside both of them together in Caffe Macs
| some years ago, your assertion seemed exactly correct.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| 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.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Don't forget the Touch Bars.
| sroussey wrote:
| I love the Touch Bar. Should have been above the function
| keys
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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...)
| caycep wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Who's responsible for designing the trash can Mac Pro?
|
| > _"I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal
| corner, if you will," one of Apple's top executives
| reportedly said._
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-
| fai...
| kemayo wrote:
| 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...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| sroussey wrote:
| I it new cables. No dongles anywhere.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| 4 USB-C ports almost 10 years ago was inspired actually.
| skydhash wrote:
| 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.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| > 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
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Iphone 6, 2015 MBP, thrashcan where all under Cook. To me
| this precisely shows Cook did not have Ive under control.
| kstrauser wrote:
| But there's a dev pipeline. I'm certain those didn't all
| start their lives 6 months before release.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| sure, but I don't think that's really relevant here since
| the products are years after cooks rise to power.
| xeonmc wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE
| herbturbo wrote:
| 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?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| 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
| FredPret wrote:
| It might be wrong but it's not braindead.
|
| 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)
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| > 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.
| dubrocks wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use
| it
|
| Maybe without this flaw they would use it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's possible.
|
| 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.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| 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.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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!)
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| As soon as Craig Federighi was taking over from Bertrand
| Serlet, quality started to decline. The only one to not
| notice is Tim Cook.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Because Cook is a supply chain mastermind not a software UX
| and QA guy. You can tell Steve Jobs is missing.
| lsllc wrote:
| 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.
|
| /rant
| MPSFounder wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| 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
| rvnx wrote:
| 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
| nemothekid wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| pm90 wrote:
| "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.
| nrp wrote:
| See also: the last ten years of AR/VR at Meta.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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.
| zelon88 wrote:
| 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?
| michaelt wrote:
| Are they looking for magic sauce?
|
| 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.
| grey-area wrote:
| Buying a canoe with the company credit card is peanuts vs
| the waste of something like a multi-year 'AI' project
| which delivers zero useful results.
|
| Maybe they should have kept the canoe guy instead of
| hiring grown up bean-counters who know the cost of
| everything and the value of nothing.
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_firm_size
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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"
| finnh wrote:
| 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.
| babelfish wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| > " _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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> 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.
| heed wrote:
| Eddy Cue owns Maps too
| tedd4u wrote:
| Maps is my default now, it's improved so much relative to
| Google Maps. (At least in my area)
| hylaride wrote:
| 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.
| caycep wrote:
| aren't a lot of App Store/dev relations critics frustrated
| with/ Schiller though?
| caycep wrote:
| 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...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >if you didn't have at least some misfires then it probably
| means you're being too conservative.
|
| Think you've dunked too far into the McKinsey kool-aid
| here.
| neal_jones wrote:
| On the one hand Tim Cook has done better than I expected, but
| on the other hand I've been increasingly frustrated with the
| company
| deergomoo wrote:
| > 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.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| 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.
| khazhoux wrote:
| It's obviously the hair. His epic lion's mane.
|
| 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?"
| mac-mc wrote:
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| 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.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| 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.
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| I can't believe I wrote this nearly a decade ago:
| https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234
|
| Remember, Siri wasn't a Steve Jobs project. But there's more...
| dboreham wrote:
| 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".
| gadders wrote:
| 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"):
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...
| veidr wrote:
| 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...?
|
| Can anybody square that circle?
| gadders wrote:
| He seems to be quite active on there. I think he also has a
| blog on hey.com but that's blocked at my employer as it's an
| email domain.
| veidr wrote:
| Oh, that blocking is most likely the reason, then, which
| does make sense. He posted a more complete version to
| hey.com:
|
| https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-does-ai-as-microsoft-did-
| mob...
| mapper32 wrote:
| It looks like he's posting on his blog and maybe it cross-
| posts to linkedin:
|
| https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-needs-a-new-asshole-in-
| charg...
|
| https://world.hey.com/dhh/age-is-a-problem-at-apple-f7ae6eca
|
| https://world.hey.com/dhh
| SirMaster wrote:
| 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.
| phito wrote:
| Just a local LLM app would be fine. I don't want it to be
| integrated with the OS.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Sure yeah a local LLM app would be nice. But yeah I don't
| need or want it all integrated into the OS either.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| mckn1ght wrote:
| 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.
| biztos wrote:
| 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.
| cg5280 wrote:
| 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.
| njovin wrote:
| 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.
| dionian wrote:
| I do, i use LLMs heavily, and i hope they can make Siri smarter
| tlonny wrote:
| If AI is what stops me having this exchange with Siri 50% of
| the time:
|
| > Hey Siri, please play Emerald Rush, by Jon Hopkins on Youtube
| Music.
|
| > Sorry, you'll need to continue in Youtube Music.
|
| Then yes - I want AI on my phone
| PKop wrote:
| 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
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| babyent wrote:
| Is it odd that I've never seen anyone say hey siri irl? And
| I'm in tech in Bay Area.
|
| And whenever they do use Siri, holding the button to talk to
| her, it is to set a timer.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 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.
| shmatt wrote:
| 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)
| losvedir wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 Godel,
| Turing and scaling problems that come with it.
| dostick wrote:
| 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > 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.
| dostick wrote:
| - 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.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| "Hey Siri, play next song"
|
| ...
|
| ...
|
| *Siri caption displays "play next song"
|
| ...
|
| ...
|
| Continues playing current song.
| yogurt-male wrote:
| 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.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Not only that but Siri seems to even have become worse than it
| used to be.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Are more people using it more often driving up costs and
| there are pressure on some managers to reduce said costs?
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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
| walterbell wrote:
| 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.
| square_usual wrote:
| They sold 500 million really cheap speakers. The voice
| assistant is mostly doing the same thing Siri does, i.e.
| set timers.
| walterbell wrote:
| 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.
| thebytefairy wrote:
| 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.
| yandie wrote:
| 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
| dmix wrote:
| > 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| iOS and macOS are being converged with VisionOS, starting this
| fall.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Tim Cook loves that sweet services revenue.
|
| Maybe non-terrible Siri needs to be a subscription service,
| instead of a phone-selling feature.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| mitchitized wrote:
| 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.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| 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.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| Yep, I like to put it like this: imagine you could afford to
| hire a human assistant that could remote into your phone and
| click on stuff for you based on voice commands. How much would
| people really use that? How much would people be willing to pay
| for that? I'd argue people value it very little because it's
| fundamentally automating very little.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Do the executives sit in deck chairs?
| wayeq wrote:
| I find it hard to believe anyone was even working on Siri over
| the past decade.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| There has been. It's mostly someone ripping out parts of Siri
| to make it even worse. They share desks with the one developer
| working on desktop macOS.
| ginkgotree wrote:
| Good luck. They just need to fire the entire team, and admit
| defeat, and integrate with an existing offering: Claude, OAI, etc
| sroussey wrote:
| New manager will push out the date of new Siri, throw previous
| manager under the bus and thus we will have new (later) dates for
| Siri upgrades.
| eluded7 wrote:
| Do consumers really care about AI on their phones? Apple
| intelligence/Siri would not be on my radar at all when thinking
| about buying a phone.
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Counterpoint - Google maps has been fine for me, my only
| annoyance being that iPhone often defaults to Apple Maps and I
| have to manually switch over.
|
| Nonetheless, your comment convinces me that I should try Apple
| Maps more seriously. Maybe I'm missing out.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| mway wrote:
| 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.
|
| I assume you mean Google Maps :)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Haha good spot. I'll correct it in my original comment
| (while I still can)
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| My team works on the CarPlay implementation of Google
| Maps.
|
| Apple severely dictates and limits what we or any other
| app can do there as far as UX, while not holding
| themselves to the same rules.
|
| I ran Android Auto for the first time yesterday and was
| impressed by how much more "Google" it was.
| hosh wrote:
| 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).
| boplicity wrote:
| 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.
| duderific wrote:
| 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.
| deergomoo wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| 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.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| 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.
| atombender wrote:
| I prefer Apple Maps from a UX perspective, but where it still
| can't compete well is search. And I can't believe it still
| struggles to with it.
|
| An example I ran into was looking for a specific IKEA near
| Oslo. There are two. The one that's closest to me is a place
| called Furuset.
|
| Google: https://i.imgur.com/rHu9XOO.png
|
| Apple: https://i.imgur.com/5HaiGny.png
|
| 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:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/FrXeyow.png
|
| ...But there aren't 10 IKEAs there. Just one.
|
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| Every few months I get curious and say something like "Hey Siri,
| are you actually smart yet or are you just a script matching
| keywords?"
|
| So far the response has always been "I'm soOrrY I doOnT kNoW
| HoooW ToDooo ThaAT". At which point I decide to wait a few more
| months.
| smoovb wrote:
| On iPhone 15 you can set the "Action Button" to ChatGTP voice,
| which is a nice proxy for what Siri could be.
|
| Settings > Action Button > Shortcut
| spandrew wrote:
| 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.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| 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?
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| I've never used Siri... To be honest, there is nothing about it
| that can make my day-to-day life any better in any way.
| falaki wrote:
| 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.
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