'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino' (daringfireball.net) 51
Apple's announcement that "more personalized Siri" features of Apple Intelligence would be delayed until "the coming year" reveals a troubling departure from the company's hard-earned reputation for reliability, long-time commentator John Gruber writes. Unlike other Apple Intelligence features that were demonstrated to media in June, the personalized Siri features -- promising personal context awareness, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions -- were never shown working to anyone outside Apple. Yet Apple prominently featured these capabilities in the WWDC keynote and even created TV commercials (now pulled) touting these functions to sell iPhone 16.
This represents a dangerous shift toward the pre-Jobs-return Apple that promised vaporware it couldn't deliver. Gruber writes. Apple has squandered its credibility, built meticulously over decades through consistently shipping what they promised, he writes. Gruber's post cites the following excerpt from a 2011 story: Apple doesn't often fail, and when it does, it isn't a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop. In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their BlackBerry smartphones. MobileMe was a dud. Users complained about lost e-mails, and syncing was spotty at best. Though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone, they panned the MobileMe service.
Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple's campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down." The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Gruber adds: Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then, I fear, that's all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.
This represents a dangerous shift toward the pre-Jobs-return Apple that promised vaporware it couldn't deliver. Gruber writes. Apple has squandered its credibility, built meticulously over decades through consistently shipping what they promised, he writes. Gruber's post cites the following excerpt from a 2011 story: Apple doesn't often fail, and when it does, it isn't a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop. In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their BlackBerry smartphones. MobileMe was a dud. Users complained about lost e-mails, and syncing was spotty at best. Though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone, they panned the MobileMe service.
Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple's campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down." The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Gruber adds: Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then, I fear, that's all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.
mac pro is being left behind again really need pro (Score:4, Insightful)
mac pro is being left behind again really need pro road maps and time lines for hardware coming out.
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I turned that shit off the moment I got my new iPhone and my need MacBook Air.
Didn't ask for it.
Don't need it.
Don't want it.
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Here? No, most of us won't use this. Our non-tech friends and family absolutely use Apple Intelligence in the most annoying ways. I'm constantly being sent AI generated images in group chats with the sender thinking this is the coolest thing ever.
Apparently Jobs was a sociopath (Score:1, Flamebait)
Fuck that bony corpse. There is no excuse to treat employees that way. It's his fucking failure, not theirs. What a cunt.
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Fuck that bony corpse. There is no excuse to treat employees that way. It's his fucking failure, not theirs. What a cunt.
Quite prevalent in US corporate tech culture. Bill Gates was as bad or perhaps even worse.
Jobs was very cunty to his 1st child, Lisa, refuse to admit paternity even after it had been established by DNA testing
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Tell us how you really feel.
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OK. Fuck Apple with a rusty chainsaw in a lake of gasoline.
Is that better?
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<smiling devil emoji>
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if it makes you feel better, sure.
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Or it's just not ready yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking a cue from the author, maybe they don't want to repeat the MobileMe fiasco so they are spending more time to make it work well. The fact is that AI, for all its hype, is still in its infancy. Apple waits until the dust settles on paradigm-shifting technology. They weren't the first GUI operating system in the world. They weren't the first MP3 player on the market but nobody remembers anything but the iPod. They weren't the first so-called smartphone on the market but people either have an iPhone or they have a arguable facsimile of one. AI is cool but all you really see are a few interesting use-cases that don't generalize well. Apple needs to make it useful and seamless.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You mean they don't want to follow the path Microsoft takes which is to shove things out without first testing them? That Apple wants to make a measured approach to be sure things work?
Blasphemy!
Not the point (Score:5, Informative)
The problem Gruber has is that Apple had a long run of being truthful and competent, and just threw that away with obvious deceptions.
Apple promoted pure vaporware across multiple quarters, and then quietly walked it back. They haven't done that kind of shit in a long time, and as he notes, that sort of thing comes from cultural rot and short-term thinking.
I don't have the same sense of betrayal he clearly does, but I agree that it is a bad sign.
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Taking a cue from the author, maybe they don't want to repeat the MobileMe fiasco so they are spending more time to make it work well. The fact is that AI, for all its hype, is still in its infancy. Apple waits until the dust settles on paradigm-shifting technology. They weren't the first GUI operating system in the world. They weren't the first MP3 player on the market but nobody remembers anything but the iPod. They weren't the first so-called smartphone on the market but people either have an iPhone or they have a arguable facsimile of one. AI is cool but all you really see are a few interesting use-cases that don't generalize well. Apple needs to make it useful and seamless.
Yes, I'm also failing to see how it can be considered a failure to not give people new features they aren't asking for, especially half-baked new features they aren't asking for. I'm not even an Apple fan anymore, but this article seems needlessly troubled by Apple missing a "promise" that most Apple fans will basically shrug off as unimportant anyway.
Re:Or it's just not ready yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Your points are excellent.
Also, the two comments already under you.
It all shows that this is a complex situation with several angles that could explain this state of affairs.
So, here is another.
When Apple came out with the iPod and iPhone, they were working with proven technology. They didn't make new advances in telephony, radio, photography, email, o.s., media codecs, etc. - minor tweaks maybe, but not revolutionary new engineering. What they did was take existing stuff and package it into a compact miniaturized all-in-one form factor, with user friendly software to use all the features - that is what was revolutionary, and kudos for them.
With this Siri AI thing, they put the cart before the horse. They promised new products on an unproven vaporware technology, presumably in the hope that by the time the product release date came, that they would have ironed out the kinks or gotten the AI experience to be meaningful. They "built" and promised a product based on hopes and wishes, not on a box of already working individual parts. And - they missed the date - maybe never can, because we still haven't seen AI deliver anything that people really want for everyday mass use.
But, I would suggest that maybe this situation does reflect ongoing concerns about reputation - pull a product before release instead of releasing crap. That's a minor stain on their reputation that they can recover from, compared to the MS way of releasing shit. It reflects a modicum of honesty or integrity.
If they want to curry favor with the public, they ought to announce something like :
"Sorry for the confusion. We honestly thought we could have this product ready for the announced release date, but we missed. Problem is, the AI thing has been hard to figure out. We will not release this product until it really works. Maybe it will never work, but we will keep researching it. But, no more premature press releases. Rest assured, we will never release a crappy product for sale."
People understand snafu's, and they like honesty and forthright communication, so they would accept that explanation. Personally, I don't care for Apple products, don't use them, don't own any anymore. But, credit where it's due, and I don't see this as a negative on Apple, more of a bellwether about AI.
Re: Or it's just not ready yet (Score:1)
"What they did was take existing stuff and package it into a compact miniaturized all-in-one form factor, with user friendly software to use all the features - that is what was revolutionary"
No, it was not. The phone they copied had the same features, broadly the same interface, absolutely the same form factor, and the processor even had the same architecture. You couldn't be more wrong.
Na, itâ(TM)s spread all over (Score:2)
Completely wrong conclusion (Score:2)
This is the problem with people who view Jobs as a paragon. He succeeded in spite of his managerial style, not because of it. Unfortunately, there is now a generation of martinet managers who model themselves after him, in the mistaken belief that being an asshole is the secret to managerial success.
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That doesn't make a lot of sense. He absolutely succeeded because of his managerial style. Those that followed didn't succeed in the same way because they didn't cover all of the same territory. Although to be fair, calling Apple's trajectory since his passing is pretty suspect... by any metric they've been wildly successful. All of the perceived gaps are soft ones, basically opinion. Every company would love to have "failed" like Apple has.
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I don't think that's true, and I am 1) a recovered Apple user and 2) think Jobs was a dumbshit for juice fasting and 3) think Jobs was an asshole for treating everyone like shit.
Here's why: Jobs' managerial style was abusive and abrasive, but it was also zero compromise. He was not interested in giving up, he was interested in success. I think he could have been just as compromising without being abusive, but I don't think that other Apple CEOs have been as unwilling to give up on their goals as Jobs was, a
Spread too thin (Score:1)
Clearly Apple has spread itself too thin: developing and releasing a bunch of features, with far too few engineers to assemble them, and even fewer (I'd say non-existent) team of people to validate/test (QA) those features, with those "features" released with tons of bugs that are essentially guaranteed to never get fixed due to Apple's broken bug tracking [appleinsider.com].
I think it's only a matter of time before Apple's software collapses under the weight of its own bugs - only question is how long this will take.
Bound to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
The founders are no longer there. the original talent that cares about the consumer experience and the product have left. By the time Jony Ive left many had already bailed out. People like Bas Ording and Greg Christie (from whom many of the iPhone ideas originated). That's OK, and technically a good thing to have churn and employees moving on to other things, the issue is that the people who joined after them .. instead of bringing in new improvements and ideas, were vultures instead. Many of the people there today in my opinion joined because they want the prestige and wealth of Apple. They may have been good at resume design and interviewing which enabled them to get hired, but that's because they were told to go into their respective fields by their guidance counsellors. Do they have love for making a world inspiring product that people love? I don't think so. Not everyone there seems to have that. I do have some friends who still work there that are good, but they're not like everyone else there. You need to have people who care about the product who are constantly researching and trying to think of improvements or innovations if not in features but also in manufacturing cost so that the product is more accessible. If you love what you're building, you'll want everyone to have one and you won't think in terms of "how can I easily get myself the most money from this job without getting fired?".
projection (Score:1)
"When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over."
Steve Jobs is example one. Talk about bullshit taking root.
"A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity..."
What does that have to do with Apple. Apple's a huge corporation, it has the same problems as are inherent in huge corporations.
But it's MacGruber, build into what he says is a SuperKendalleque butt-licking of Apple.
The problem is not Apple (Score:2)
The problem is AI is not ready for widespread consumption yet. I am glad Apple is admitting that, instead of trying to force it down our throats like all the other companies.
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The problem is AI is not ready for widespread consumption yet. I am glad Apple is admitting that,
That's kind of the point of the article: Apple announced something that clearly wasn't even close to ready, instead of doing the classic thing of actually having a working prototype (if not already production-ready) to announce. (Remember that charging pad from a few years ago?)
These days too much of the software they talk about or release are either early prototypes, or of beta quality only.
Re:The problem is not Apple (Score:4, Informative)
I am glad Apple is admitting that, instead of trying to force it down our throats like all the other companies.
Whatever you say... [macrumors.com]
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Zero Software Quality Assurance at Apple (Score:3)
Marketing (Score:2)
The golden goose for the all advertisers is (Score:3)
Based on all their personal data that has been stolen and crunched, that the automated advertising machine masquerading as AI uses to deliver the ad payloads.
Always remember there is no Intelligence in today's AI, just fancy automation pretending to know things.
This also is not limited to Apple, at this point most everyone involved in AI are in it for it's advertising/propaganda potential.
The nice thing (Score:1)
The nice thing is that nobody needs or wants all that stupid bullshit anyway. So nothing useful was lost.
This is not a clickbait criticism! (Score:1)
John Gruber writes intelligently about Apple, and his Dithering podcast with Ben Thompson is a must listen.
If he's taking Apple to task, then I think this is a truly warranted warning sign for the company's approach to AI.
Just stop the AI craze. (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't want "smart" things that are useless. They want dumb, simple things that are useful.
Just now he's realizing that "the ride is over"??? (Score:2)
The ride's been over for at least the past decade. Tim Cook was never Steve Jobs and the iPhone was really never all it could be.
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What could it be today that it isn’t?
I blame Tim Apple (Score:1)
Re: I blame Tim Apple (Score:1)
Damn bifocals (Score:2)
When slightly out of focus "more personalized Siri" looks like "more personalized sin". I thought they had a hot marketing idea for a moment. No such luck.
I agree with the article's point.
The Absence of AI is a Feature I May Pay Money For (Score:2)
They just stupidly trusted the AI bros (Score:3)
And now they are finding those people cannot deliver. At least instead of pushing out hallucinating morons, Apple has the decency to delay the product and try to fix it.
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I agree. And Apple will likely find that too. If Apple states that they cannot make a personal assistant work well enough, maybe that woll start the end of the mindless current AI hype.
10.13.6 (Score:1)
ffs guys wake tf up (Score:1)
It's not just Shittle. Everything everywhere has been made utter garbage by capitalism. There is no surviving under this system
Stock Price (Score:2)
At the height of AI mania people were selling $AAPL because they had "no clear AI strategy".
At the same time they probably don't want to release something that will be mocked for its errors.
So they preannounced to save their market reputation but now suffer user reputation.
But Tim Apple's job is only to make the users happy to the extent that it makes the shareholders happy.
In his position (which I have assiduously avoided) I would probably do the same thing.
He is being pressed to release technology that do
Something rotten (Score:2)
Oh yeah... this is BIG (Score:2)
When asked to comment, Siri replied: (Score:1)
"I don't know how to respond to that."