- Apple’s progress with Siri and artificial intelligence has been slow, and features promised in June remain delayed.
- At a Siri team meeting, senior director Robby Walker acknowledged the frustration within the team, describing the delays as “ugly.”
- Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
- Challenges include quality issues that caused these features to malfunction up to a third of the time and conflicts with Apple’s marketing division over showcasing incomplete features.
- Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.
- Senior executives, including Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, are reportedly taking personal accountability for the delays.
- Walker emphasized that the team’s work is impressive and that the delayed features will be released once they meet Apple’s standards.
This whole thing is a textbook example of how bad shady marketing today and can really cause you a lot of pain tomorrow. If Apple had not been so quick to let PR write checks their ass was not ready to cash the conversation around Siri would still just be the casual jokes about it sucking, and not more serious public blackeyes.
This is what happens when you get pressure to please shareholders instead of customers. Historically, Apple has been good about revealing and delivering at the same time. But caught with their pants down during the AI hype, they fell into the trap so many other tech companies do. (Tesla is the undisputed heavyweight champ here)
Now that they’ve been burned by all this, here’s hoping they learn from it and return to form.
I don’t think tech companies got caught with their pants down, they just hit the far end of the S curve regarding growth.
A lot of other “tech” companies in the past saw massive leaps in tech capabilities, then hit a wall once tech got to a certain level. Computing has hit its wall.
Apple has had so many misses recently. The current AI stuff, Vision Pro and maybe the 16e (too early to tell) form stuff that has released. But also this Siri AI, Air Power wireless charging pad, Apple Car project.
The Apple Watch is probably the last hit they had (the M series chips are good but not really new products, but maybe that’s me being overly harsh)
maybe that’s me being overly harsh
That’s actually probably fair: the M-chips are impressive, but they’re just an evolution that’s come out of the A-series stuff for their phones.
Which, of course, Apple bought and did not actually create. (I’ll let someone else argue the merits of buy vs do it yourself, especially when you give your aquisition endless R&D funds to make good shit.)
Well, first they’ll need to dig up and reanimate the corpse of Jobs. It’s amazing to see how they repeat the same failure track when he’s not pushing them to innovate. Even when he was (back) in the top dog seat, they still fell behind the competition and took forever to come up with features that other companies had been doing for years.
That’s always been their MO though. Take a recent innovation, and implement it better. That always means it’s later than tech from other places, but they get it “right”. Yes, I know that’s subjective.
In the case of AI, they scrambled to announce the feature with barely any work done on it. Had they kept mum about Apple Intelligence features for a year or so and then revealed, that would be the Apple way.
Also by all indications the current direction in Machine Learning (stuff like LLM) is a dead end which will never yield a “reasoning artificial intelligence” (even whilst quite a lot of other areas in ML have already reached sufficient capabilities in their domain to actually be useful) so there really isn’t any space to “implement (the main subdomain of ML that has been promoted as) AI better” IMHO.
It has its uses and who though we where anywhere near general intelligence. They are still making strides in LLM and it can still improve and is useful.
LLMs have already massively slowded down in terms of improvement from generation to generation and they’re not at all improving when it comes to logical errors (because they’re not structured for that at all - they’re massive statistical engines for language, not reasoning devices), so it seems unlikely that this stage of LLM evolution is the beginning of something massive, rather it looks like it is has gone as far as it can.
Not saying they’re useless, just not at the early days of a game changer technology.
When Apple got into personal computers, that tech was just about to go from a niche thing to mass adoption (from big machines in universities and very large companies to mass adoption by consumers and businesses) and 3 decades of advancing by leaps and bounds, and similarly Apple’s entrance into portable networked computing (with iPhones and iPads) pretty much turned the niche of ultra portable computing devices (such as the Palm Pilot) into an omnipresent mass market product.
A lot of that was getting in early and then ridding the wave of incremental tech improvements in those areas and related areas.
What exactly wave of tech improvements is there going to be from now onwards on LLMs given that they’ve barelly improved in terms of output and the only significant improvement in the last couple of years was Deepseek’s significant reduction in required computing power from “insane” to “massive”? Even some kind of amazing fall in required resources crossed to mass adoption of NPUs and TPUs would still not solve the reliabilty problems of the Technology and so far nobody has managed to crack that specific nut.
I was there when personal computing took off, when mobile networked personal computing took of, when the interned took of and so on, and what I’m seeing with LLMs now (not 2 years ago, but now) doesn’t at all feel like being at the brink of a revolution like with at least the personal computer and the internet (the smartphone looked more like a cool gimmick back then, to be honest).
Frankly the AI “Revolution” at this stage feels a lot more like the Bitcoin “Revolution” after a few years and it having been taken over by greed and speculation, than the Personal Computer Revolution or the Internet Revolution.
It probably doesn’t help that the tech in question, LLMs, are kinda shit, to put it plainly. You meant the shiniest, most polished turd and it’s still just a turd. They are interesting and can be neat to play with but, they lack practical applications where cost to run them actually makes sense and benefits humanity. The iPod shuffle was more impactful, when measuring positive impact on people’s lives.
Take a recent innovation, and implement it better.
Ah, the mad rush to be Second Place.
Historically, Apple has been good about revealing and delivering at the same time.
I’m not so sure about that. MobileMe, iTunes Ping, Vision Pro, and AirPower (their wireless charging pad) come to mind.
“You’re holding it wrong”
All of these things except the AirPad were released at about the same time they were announced. That’s what I was getting at.
While they did get released when they said, they didn’t get released in the state that was stated/indicated though.
baffles me why anyone supports a company that’s a decade behind their competitors
I don’t care how far behind they are with AI because I don’t want AI on my phone anyway.
If they know Siri’s shit then why can’t I have my power button back?
Could you explain? I have never turned Siri on, but my power button works as normal.
If Siri is enabled, then the default behavior of long-pressing the power button brings up Siri instead of turning off the device. IIRC you can disable that behavior without having to disable Siri, but there’s no way to set the “action button” to open Siri; if you want a Siri button, it needs to be the power button.
Would be nice if any voice assistant actually did what I asked.
The whole industry is a shit show right now with the “AI race”
I don’t want to be a software developer anymore because it’s become a permanent deathmarch toward the next buzzword.
Maybe your boss can develop software all by his or her self now lop.
Better yet, ask the AI to do it.
We just had a town hall with our CEO and they came right out and said we need to simultaneously add AI and not add AI to our products, because customers are both excited and nervous about it. Our competitors are putting “AI” everywhere in their marketing, while we’re just trucking along making a quality product.
Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives. So the end user just sees “AI” as a liability. But the decision makers as to what product to use are removed from conditions on the ground and respond well to marketing BS.
We actually do use AI with some parts of the product (e.g. curve fitting on past data for better predictions), but we need to be very careful about how we advertise that.
It’s dumb. Just pick the product based on what fits your operations best, don’t pick based on buzzwords…
Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives.
I mean attorneys don’t seem to have a problem submitting case law that AI hallucinated.
I don’t want that on my phone. I just want a dumb program that sets alerts and schedules, I don’t want it interpreting information and I doubt most people really need that function on a phone.
Yeah, but smartphones have stopped offering anything new. I recently upgraded my 8-year-old device, and I hardly notice any difference. I bet other customers see that too. They are desperately trying to find the next big thing. It’s astonishing, however, that all these companies completely ignore the fact that their customers don’t even want AI features.
But but but . … they’ve spent Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on this!!! You HAVE to buy it!!! Noooooooooo
these features to malfunction up to a third of the time
That’s “ai” for you lol
Dropping rapidly, and using reasoning models can solve most of it today.
Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
Tech companies not understanding exponential complexity is one of the funnier things to come out of recent years.
Anyone who isn’t completely high from huffing AI brainfarts saw this coming.
AI is overrated in almost every implementation that isn’t scientific research. The buzzword stock hype machine fake growth cycles are going to kill the tech industry.
Apple fucked up no doubt. Given how hard they pushed AI as a key feature of IPhone 16 I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a class action lawsuit for this.
But it’s also interesting to read a few things from the article that makes me hopeful for when Apple finally releases the features:
- Let’s be honest, AI by Google, MS is shit right now. They are claiming the same promises which most of the time don’t work, but Apple chose to delay release until they could get better consistency.
- The executives are taking personal responsibility? I hope that’s the case and no developers are thrown under the bus for this. I’ve rarely seen an article mention personal executive responsibility from a tech firm for delays and qa issues.
- I hope marketing gets reigned in so they won’t push other unready features the next few years.
- I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.
I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.
That’s literally never going to happen. Closed-source proprietary stuff is their MO.
A while ago I set up a Siri shortcut that opens ChatGPT in voice mode. Now I can just say “hey siri, ask the demon” and in a moment start talking to ChatGPT with no further commands and zero buttons pressed throughout. It answers in voice mode.
This is pretty useful for things like doing units conversions while my hands are sticky during cooking, or just doing simple information lookups while my hands are busy. I use ChatGPT responsibly, never trusting it for things that aren’t one-dimensional information retrievals and summarization. It works great for me for like 50-60% of the things I used to Google. Internet search is, once again, just for finding websites, like it should be.
What’s my point? We don’t need Siri Apple Intelligence to ship. There’s already something better. And it runs on my iPhone 14, which isn’t even compatible with Apple Flatulence.
I’ve never used Apple intelligence and Siri alone has done a fine job for unit conversions, info lookups, and most any other things. No need to fire up chat GPT for those basic uses
Mm. Siri doesn’t do information lookups in the sense that I mean. It resorts to “here’s something I found on the web” very very quickly, and that’s not very helpful.
Fair enough. It’s not going to summarize results or anything. I’ll give chatGPT that one. But this is also where chatGPT can easily pull wrong information into the summary. If the “here’s something I found on the web” isn’t accurate, the topic is likely to have the AI summary screw it up too. In which case you’re better off manually searching and filtering results yourself.
I don’t fucking want AI in my phone, so take it out and be done with it.
You’ve had AI on your phone for ages. All your pictures are “AI” touched. And no you don’t want the raw output cameras in phones are not that good.
I was just fine without voice assistants and such. I especially don’t want LLMs being shoved down my throat at every turn.
Right? Hink of everything else I can do with that space and computing power. Not to mention the fuckin environmental devastation we’d curb.
Siri has run locally since iOS 15
they should embrace it and be the anti AI tech giant
There stock would fall. I don’t care but investors would fear Apple is missing out on the future.
Hell, if they genuinely do that, I might even consider switching sides.
AI isn’t the answer. Plain and simple.
AI can make me a video of the brave little toaster suplexing Putin, to sit on that kind of power is silly.
LLMs aren’t the answer. *
LLMs are the question, “no” is the answer.
