In an article headlined, “What’s Wrong With Apple?,” The New York Times reports Friday that Apple plans to release its delayed Apple Intelligence Siri features this fall.
Tripp Mickle for The New York Times:
[C]ompany insiders worry that Apple, despite its years of gravity-defying profits, is hamstrung by the political infighting, penny pinching and talent drain that often bedevil large companies, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and advisers.
While Vision Pro sales have been disappointing, Apple’s issues with Apple Intelligence exposed dysfunction inside the organization.
In a nearly two-hour video presentation last summer, Apple… revealed an improved Siri virtual assistant that could combine information on a phone, like a message about someone’s travel itinerary, with information on the web, like a flight arrival time.
The A.I. features were unavailable when new iPhones shipped… Then, last month, the company postponed the spring release of an improved Siri because internal testing found that it was inaccurate on nearly a third of requests, said three people familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
After the delay, Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, told employees that the company would reshuffle its executives, removing responsibility for developing the new Siri from John Giannandrea, the company’s head of A.I., and giving it to Mike Rockwell, the head of its Vision Pro headset.
Mr. Cook, 64, who has a background in operations, has been hesitant over the years to provide clear and direct guidance on product development, said three people familiar with the way the company operates.
“It’s clearly a breakdown of leadership and communication and internal processes,” said Benedict Evans, an independent analyst who previously worked as a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.
Apple hasn’t canceled its revamped Siri. The company plans to release a virtual assistant in the fall capable of doing things like editing and sending a photo to a friend on request, three people with knowledge of its plans said.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s wrong with Apple is its feckless leadership.
What’s wrong with Apple is that Tim Cook should have bowed out 3-5 years after providing continuity for the company as a caretaker CEO after Steve Jobs’ untimely death, not hung on, endlessly pumping out annual iterations of Steve Jobs’ innovations, nauseatingly virtue-signaling and pontificating at the drop of a hat until it became unfashionable — even deigning to blow millions of shareholders’ dollars on fake news* — and burning tens of billions on failed projects and releasing a half-baked DevKit as a consumer product in order to cover for his glaring lack of vision.
And, by the way, Tim Cook’s wheezing vaporware factory promised and falsely advertised a clearly non-existent Siri that could do much more than merely edit and send a photo to a friend on request in an iOS release a year later than promised.
As usual, you read it all here first:
Apple pays and has been paying John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, millions upon millions of dollars for years. WTF of any import does he really do? WTF of any import has he really delivered? Have you used Siri lately? Yup, it’s still a steaming pile of dogshit.
Where’s Apple’s generative AI, John? “Too hard; too late; look for partners; gimme my paycheck and stock options.”
AAPL shareholders need to start asking real questions of these executives, especially those who are supposedly in charge of Apple’s “AI Strategy,” when the company clearly has none. How about some accountability for once? – MacDailyNews, March 18, 2024
We shall see, but it’s likely that Apple will do the same thing [with Cook] they did with Jony Ive – give him a transition title with nothing much to actually do in order to assuage Wall Street (and as they also just did with [CFO Luca] Maestri) when Cook finally decides to bow out — which he should have done long ago after serving 3-5 years following Steve Jobs’ untimely demise; a caretaker CEO hanging on well over a decade leads to missing paradigm shifts like GenAI and having to execute vaporware schemes in order to try to catch up. Until Apple again gets a visionary CEO, these issues will compound. It would also be nice to get a charismatic CEO who can handle live keynotes again. – MacDailyNews, July 27, 2024
When you’re caught flat-footed like Tim Cook’s Apple, you pop into scramble mode to try to catch up. Early on, you hit it with a big marketing flourish (WWDC24) in order to buy some more time. Then you dribble out features as they get finished and actually exist. Classic vaporware. – MadDailyNews, July 31, 2024
The Apple Intelligence vaporware [is] false advertising, fraud, and lies. Those will be the basis for class action lawsuits from iPhone, iPad, and Mac customers soon enough. And Apple will deserve them all. – MacDailyNews, March 14, 2025
*Cook infamously, in a 2017 hissy fit over fake news**, gave $1 million of Apple’s — not his personal — money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been called a “con” for “bilking gullible liberals”. The company also matched two-for-one employees’ donations to the SPLC through September 30th of that year and even had Apple’s iTunes Store offer visitors a way to donate to the SPLC.
**In a typically sanctimonious letter to Apple employees at the time, Cook wrongly claimed that President Trump made “a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis,’ a claim that anyone who watched the actual video of the event (as Tim Cook should have done before wasting Apple shareholders’ money) and even the left-leaning Snopes has since rated as “FALSE.”
Cook should personally reimburse Apple Inc. the $1 million that he stupidly and embarrassingly gave to the SPLC in a 2017 knee-jerk hissy fit over fake news, with interest, and issue public apologies to Apple shareholders and President Trump.
Read more, including our Take (behind which we stand 100%): Apple-backed Southern Poverty Law Center wracked in turmoil, called a ‘con’ for ‘bilking gullible liberals’ – March 24, 2019
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