Gruber just had some choice words related to Apple’s fumbling of Apple Intelligence and Siri improvements. He’s not so much angered (his choice of word) by the delay as by what he claims was effectively fraud.
The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos…
The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
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You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit. And the “more personalized Siri” features, it turns out, were bullshit.
Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
Sure looks to me like Gruber is saying Apple played us.
Or the well-briefed and deep insider Gruber is sympathetic to certain voices within the company, it has the feel of internal strife, perhaps a push on Giannandrea. If there was some unity I think the messages he would be getting would focus on the challenges a deep, personalized Siri faces with issues of confidentiality, privacy etc, pace of development change, ie issues emerging as testing unfolded. Which I am sure there are anyway.
In terms of the ‘state of the company’ which Gruber uses this to open things up, whether it’s a disconnected Cook or a complacency emerging with all the success, he has a point. The company has not been design/product led for a long time and marketing and corporate appear to be the ones in the driver’s seat, revealed here with this crisis.
If they weren’t ready and they still put it out there it was coming, that was panic at the top.
Pitchbook said that 60% of VC capital in the US last year went into AI ventures. Unreal. And Apple clearly behind the field on various fronts, they must be feeling the heat. I can’t believe the level of quality in Perplexity Pro Deep Research, and that’s a consumer level app. I wonder what the top researchers in Apple are showing the management team as to what’s possible.
The stakes are high and a flub, a Siri that’s a joke in comparison to the competition, is exactly what will kill the credibility stock Gruber talks about.
It turns out my hunch about incompetence and lack of focus inside Apple being implicated in our miserable “Apple Intelligence” experience was even understated:
Sadly, ossification and risk aversion taking over previously innovative teams and companies is not a new problem. But Apple is a special case because it is the perfect breeding ground for incrementalism and not-invented-here syndrome due to its massive size, current senior mangement, dependence on a single product for most of its revenue, and extremely secretive and insular culture.
The history of the composition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a great illustration of how “nothing is forever” in business:
Full disclosure: for years I’ve thought about converting my frustration into a blog designed to humiliate Siri over its ridiculous performance. Haven’t gotten around to doing so yet.
Having seen the fruits of AI over the past 2 years, most of which resemble what would result if you asked AI to draw a cross among three fruits, I was underwhelmed by Apple’s introduction of AI in iPhone and did not see it as a reason to upgrade from an iPhone 11.
The current trade climate, on the other hand, did persuade me to replace our iPhones over last weekend. It was a nice bonus that Apple offered US$130 each for the old ones, which was a much more generous offer than our wireless carrier. (AT&T wouldn’t even consider any model below iPhone 14 Pro.)
I do understand why someone might feel misled by the ads, but I believe it was a really weak selling point to begin with, and I haven’t seen anything to change my mind. The new iPhones feel almost identical to the old ones (which is good!!), and they seem to respond a little faster.
That’s all we want from them. I don’t need my phone to make my day artificially better.
To be honest, I think that the vast majority of iPhone buyers didn’t care at all, if even know at all, about these features when they bought these phones. I think the pissed people are the smaller number of techno-nerds and they didn’t buy iPhone 16 models because of Apple Intelligence - they would have bought one anyway, because they always buy the new ones - and love the schadenfreude of criticizing Apple (or any other company) over any shortcoming.
I do think people are a lot more aware of the well-publicized shortcomings of Siri these days, but don’t think of it as AI, and experience it equally on older iPhones that don’t have Apple intelligence.
Since we’re being honest, let’s try this. Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true. They showed people “future functionality” indicating it was a demo when actually it was all staged bullshit.
They took all that trust they had built up over the years and threw it out the window all just because overzealous marketers wanted to scream “us too” and not a single exec had the stones to say stop. For that they deserve all the legal fallout that’s coming their way. Every bit of it.
It will take years for them to rebuild the trust they so casually sacrificed for that ‘event’. Delivering on each and every one of those lofty promises promptly and with excellent quality will be just a start.
I would have bought one either way, but I’m not a typical consumer. But Apple spent millions on the AI ads, and millions more developing the technology, so you might want to drop an email to their CFO that that was a vast waste of money :-)
Including me. I couldn’t care less about AI. Or the latest camera. Or all of the cool iCloud services or other gee-whiz things Apple is always advertising.
I want my phone to:
Make and receive calls and texts
Support Apple Pay with my various payment cards
Maps/navigation
Play a dozen or so games (mostly puzzle-type games)
And do it without crawling to a halt or draining my battery.
Which means I don’t go looking for a new phone until my favorite apps get “upgraded” to something that is no longer compatible (or no longer works well) on the phone I’ve got. Historically, this means it gets replaced in 5-7 years (and with 1-2 battery changes over that time). I’ll get the new model because it will be able to run my apps, and nothing else really enters into the equation at all.
Maybe Apple did lie in their ad. But I don’t care, because I don’t care about the feature they were hyping. Just like I didn’t care about any of the other features they were hyping in the past.
When you wrote it that way, the connection of AI security and how it is prompted clicked immediately. As I understand it, you need to personalize speech recognition to the primary user for best results. When I use Otter, the App seems to translate my voice differently than that of whomever I interview, especially if they have much of an accent. I recall running into a security system somewhere that is supposed to be able to identify my voice. Whether or not that’s a good idea is another question, and time may tell on that. Personally, I don’t use Siri’s features at all; after decades of earning my living by the written word, I prefer to ask questions through the keyboard.
Heh, heh! You just don’t like to talk on the record . . .
As the voice recognition gets better and better I find I’m using Siri more but not for what seems to be what most people on this forum want. Text messaging when out and about. (Yes, I have to edit everything it says but I don’t have to sit down and laboriously type out my cunning paragraph in the middle of the sidewalk.) What temperature is it outside? (Yes, I have a watch and a phone and a workstation but I don’t want to touch any of those as I stumble out the front door.) What’s the word for disgusted in French? (Dégoûté, if you must know, and, no, I won’t tell you why I needed it.) What’s 7% of 2447? (171.29) Ask ChatGPT what the most life-saving drugs of the last hundred years have been? (Antibiotics and vaccines by a landslide.)
Simple questions instantly answered with no fiddling to find the appropriate app. That’s useful.
And what’s with this “I’m turning this new Apple AI off right now!” How do you know if it’s useful if you won’t try it? “Well, it takes 6G of space!” and how many of you have 2TB drives with 200G used? Try it! And if you don’t like it or parts of it, turn it off (email categories—what a disaster).
I do not want a personal assistant or avatar or agent. I most certainly don’t want machines to correct how I express myself (spelling excepted but even there the machines are kinda stupid). Everything I’ve seen about the attempts to do these high-level things are a horror show. If I must have an assistant because my time is so valuable, well then maybe I should hire one of those odd humans that, properly vetted, are genuinely useful and a pleasure to be around but are not for free.
I turned Apple AI on when it first arrived on my MacBook Pro. I then turned off Mail categories because they weren’t helpful, but I had an open mind about what other benefits Siri-AI might offer. The only place I saw its effect was also in Mail, providing short summaries of my emails in place of just quoting the first two lines (I don’t use Siri for much, I guess). The problem was that the summaries were less useful than the first two lines. In some cases they were actually misleading, giving me the impression that the email said the exact opposite of what it actually said. After a few weeks, I turned AI off. Siri still offers me canned responses to texts on my watch, but I never use my watch (or Siri) for texting. I would turn that off as well if I knew how.
Well, I’m a fan of using AI to research and look things up with guardrails. I typically ask Siri to launch Perplexity for those research queries. Not a fan of using it to generate anything beyond that. Image playground, no. Text clean up, no.
I do continue to use Siri in the usual way that has proven useful, eg set a timer, read latest messages, what’s the weather like. All I wish is that it could be conversational and hold a line of thought from query to query.
