Apple Shakes Up AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri (bloomberg.com) 41
Apple is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he's moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven't been announced.
Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea's command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker's senior leaders -- a group known as the Top 100 -- just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported.
The moves underscore the plight facing Apple: Its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The Apple Intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop, despite being the main selling point for the iPhone 16. Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino'
Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea's command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker's senior leaders -- a group known as the Top 100 -- just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported.
The moves underscore the plight facing Apple: Its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The Apple Intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop, despite being the main selling point for the iPhone 16. Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino'
AI (Score:2)
Apple have lost something intangible (Score:4, Interesting)
Macs - mini is cool. we get it. Where the 27" imac ? or 32" imac no-fuckingwhere that's where.
Mac books, we have so many slices of air vs pro 13 vs 14 vs 16, m2 m3 m4 pro max ultra, half speed ssd, some pro-motion, some this some that. I'm still on a 2019 16" but i'm genuninely not sure what machine to buy next . I think a 15" mac book air will smoke my current system but it doesn't have high refresh, what fucking century is this christ 99$ android phones have high refresh and a laptop that costs thousands from supposedly a tier 1 manufacturer doesn't wtf apple! ALL your laptops should have this feature. I have access to a 14mbp i know it's a great feature.
And iphone - jesus-h-fucknugs. What on EARTH is going on with iphone ? There's is so many models but all with minute tiny differences. I mean really what is the difference between 14/15/16 ? an action button and a 'camera button' ?? How very un-apple! Adding buttons, and complexity ! I thought the selling point of the iphone was no buttons, it's all in the software, dummies! And there used to be 'iphone' not iphone X Y or Z but just 'iphone' .Apple need to greatly simplly their product line. I really don't know what is AIR PRO, MAX, ULTRA, PLUS, ULTRA PLUS PRO MAX or is it Macs ? or M3 Mac Book Pro or is it M3 Pro Mac Book Pro.
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Apple is now the poster child for coasting on previous successes. They've made some good moves leveraging their existing talent to improve existing products (i.e. transitioning their computers to Apple Silicon), but most of their new product lines have struggled to gain much traction despite their huge devel
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Of course this is so much easier in Windows-land. Intel's chip names just say what they are - everyone intuitively understands the differences between Core Ultra and Evo chips just by looking, right?
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In 2009, during the height of the Jobs era, how many models do you count?
I still maintain if you find this confusing, you should take refuge in that easy-to-understand, marketing-speak-free model of consumer clarity that is Dell [dell.com].
And I'm done, you're welcome t
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I have nothing to add to the discussion (I'm not an Apple person) but I am nicking your last line, it's great. Thanks!
Success (Score:2)
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I bought a new iPhone to replace my 7+ but only because they quit releasing updates. If they had kept releasing updates the 7+ would have been plenty for what I use a phone for.
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I don't remember where I read it, but I remember that this was one of the first things Steve Jobs tackled when he returned. There were multiple Mac computers that were the same system under the hood, but marketed with different names and aimed at different customers. He cleaned all of that out and got back to a very simple product line that showed differentiation.
Steve ain't coming back to save Apple again. Of course, in '97, Apple was hanging on the edge. These days, they burn bundles of hundred dollar
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Mac books, we have so many slices of air vs pro 13 vs 14 vs 16,
Er? That's different screen sizes because people have different preferences for screen sizes.
m2 m3 m4 pro max ultra
The number refers to different generations of CPUs as they are updated almost on a yearly basis by Apple. The suffix refers to the power of the chip within each generation. Ultra > Max > Pro > Base.
I'm still on a 2019 16" but i'm genuninely not sure what machine to buy next . I think a 15" mac book air will smoke my current system but it doesn't have high refresh,
Go to apple.com. Click on "Tech Specs" for more information. Any new MacBook with an M1 and newer chip will smoke your machine. However if the display refresh rate is a priority, buy a Pro instead of an Air.
. I mean really what is the difference between 14/15/16
Tho
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Apple's core market positioning strategy is to lay out a breadcrumb trail up the upgrade path. Once you understand the sole reason for offering their products that way is to get you in the door then upsell you, then it's not confusing at all. Take the M4 mini -- by all accounts the basic model is really quite capable for the price, but given that you might want a smidge more memory. But you can't get it without upgrading the hard disk too, and that bumps you up from $530 to $900. That's almost $400 for
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Jobs died.
There are still talented engineers with ideas and executives to do cost-analysis. They will continue to iterate and produce new products, but there is no guiding vison or plan.
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Macs - mini is cool. we get it. Where the 27" imac ? or 32" imac no-fuckingwhere that's where.
Why? I never understood the point of the iMac. It's a huge pile of e-waste in my book. Three to five years later, you're throwing away this giant monitor that's still in perfect condition, all because the CPU is junk by modern standards. An external display and a Mini has basically the same footprint and features, but in three to five years, you throw away this tiny little thing and keep the screen.
The iMac kind of made sense for the education market in the CRT days, but I literally never understood it
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the macs with huge displays can be reused, you don't have to throw them away, look up mac OS target display mode.
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AI is largely a flop anyway... (Score:3)
Look ... I'm as fascinated as the next guy at seeing what kind of responses a ChatGPT type program gives to queries. But these voice assistants don't need to become ChatGPT mouthpieces.
The little bit I've seen of Apple doing AI in other places has been a non-starter for me, too. (EG. They let it summarize text messages you receive so in the car, via Apple CarPlay, it reads you this AI generated cliff-notes version of the group of texts that came in. Every time I let it do that though? I get this nonsensical mash-up of parts of what someone was trying to tell me so it's useless.)
Re:AI is largely a flop anyway... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's dozens of way they could integrate 'AI' into iphone without this gimped summarisation nonsense. How about trying to make every feature on the phone controlable via voice, with context and natural language. THAT would be a feature. a phone you could talk to. At that point you even can do away with a screen.
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It's not what AI can do now. It's the promise of what it might do: usher in a world that doesn't need people. When that day comes, what matters is how much of the pie you're hanging onto.
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Consumer LLMs may be a flop, but AI as a general term is far from it. In fact we've been using it for the best part of a decade for all sorts of amazing things with excellent results, and we will continue to find new and amazing uses for it going forward.
Stop equating stupid chat bots with AI. The field is bigger than that.
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Well, if AI is "largely a flop" then it makes perfect sense for Apple to put the guy in charge of Vision Pro in the lead - Vision Pro is also a flop!
Uh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Shouldn't Apple be promoting/hiring an extremely talented AI developer to lead the group? I don't see what moving over a leader from a product in a completely different market, not to mention its very tepid reception, is going to accomplish for the AI team.
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Apple knows AI is mostly bullshit but there are real opportunities to improve siri here. I think they just want a guy who can tease that kinda shit out of product managers and get the devs to produce something appley.
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Good developers (of any kind) rarely make good executives. Developers deal with reality, executives deal with smoke and mirrors. Those two worlds don't intersect very well.
But the Vision Pro is a failure (Score:2)
Why is the Vision Pro project lead being put in charge? The Vision Pro flopped. Because it’s just a bad knockoff of the Meta Quest that most people can’t afford. John Giannandrea should have been fired months ago. Does Tim Cook even know what Apple is selling anymore?
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Pretty sure AVP is a a dev kit in disguise. Though I don't think it quite got the party started the way they hoped it"s where apps for later headsets will get made and where they can maybe get enough data to tease out what the next headset should look like. I don't expect apple to release anything exciting until normal people care about VR more than they do now. Maybe just possibly another bafflingly expensive headset as a hardware refresh to keep some level of community interest going if it takes long
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Why is the Vision Pro project lead being put in charge? The Vision Pro flopped. Because it’s just a bad knockoff of the Meta Quest that most people can’t afford. John Giannandrea should have been fired months ago. Does Tim Cook even know what Apple is selling anymore?
Apple management finally read "The Peter Principal" and thought it was a guidebook rather than a cautionary tale.
Apple jumped on the AI bandwagon way too soon in the cycle. They typically wait until others have come out with half-assed products, then shine them up for the masses. That's how Jobs came off looking so amazing to most. He took half-assed ideas, then put them in extremely market-friendly packages, giving people something they didn't even know they wanted and somehow convincing them they couldn't
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They need to generate a certain amount of shareholder buzz. But hopefully they'll use LLMs to make small improvements to siri and then quietly learn from everyone else's mistakes before releasing something impressive.
I think they're doing that with AVP right now but with less shareholder story time because nobody gives a fuck. I think when it comes to personal consumer devices VR will prove to be a much bigger deal while AI is mostly LLM autocomplete and little neural network and expert system QoL stuff
Robotics is next (Score:3)
Consumer robotics is stupid -- we are decades from the tech and price points needed to make that viable. Robotics first use case should be companies, factories, farming, meal prep, and security guard (note the wheeled knightscope "security" robot is stupid) ..
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Consumer robotics is stupid -- we are decades from the tech and price points needed to make that viable
What do you define as "consumer robotics"? That's a very broad term which would easily cover things like robot vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, and even the Sony AIBO which (if you don't feel old yet) is over 1/4 of a century old.
Farming is already there (Score:1)
Robotics first use case should be companies, factories, farming
Farming is already highly automated, giant machines doing all kinds of work.
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"Farming is already highly automated, giant machines doing all kinds of work."
But the smaller scale is not. There is a whole crew of workers pruning the apple trees in the orchard across the road. There will be another crew to harvest them. I still have to pick strawberries and raspberries by hand, not to mention cucumbers and tomatoes. A properly armored robot could even get into the center of the blackberry patch.
Nor do I see a weed pulling robot for sale. Weed wacker robots? Lawn mower robots that can av
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There are indeed weed "pulling" robots [carbonrobotics.com]
Used the scare quotes because it's not technically pulling but if the weed is dead and gone who cares.
That kind of stuff trickles down over time so it will reach smaller operations. Until recently though it really is cheaper to hire illegal aliens at far under minimum wage to to some jobs, which also stunts the expansion of robots in farming... but over the next few years I think you'll see a rapid uptake of existing technology.
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Lol imagine using any assistant to do anything but ask basic questions and set timers. "10 years" ...the most compelling uses were almost feasible in the 90s, we're just dumb.
Why does this crap have to get in the way? (Score:4, Interesting)
I got an update on my iPhone last night. Went to use the keyboard this morning, and every time I hit a double space the siri thing comes up. Why can't Apple make a compelling use case for it first before making it get in the way all the time? Disabled as a useless feature after the second time it happened, since there was no other way to disable the keyboard interference.
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You're holding it wrong. -JobsGPT
Good lack with that (Score:2)
For once, the problem is not the "leadership", but the massively overhyped technology.
Stupid Tim bought into the AI fantasies of John (Score:2)
This would never have happened to Steve.
But Steve is dead.
Tim should fire Tim.
Vision Pro guy to the rescue? (Score:2)
Do Not Want (Score:2)