Ladies, gentlemen, and those who identify otherwise, start your outrage engines because we may be on the cusp of a new Apple-gate!

This is very exciting. We haven’t had one of these in quite some time. Now, the Macalope knows that some of you are probably saying “I know what you’re going to say and this isn’t a new -gate at all, this is just a continuation of last year’s Sirigate.”

First of all, how many times does the Macalope have to tell you people, he can’t hear you? Once again, if you are talking at these columns, please seek professional help. Second, Sirigate was barely a thing. It never gained traction as a full-fledged Apple-gate.

Thirdly, this is an all-new “gate” because it’s going to have a new name. The Macalope is, of course, talking about Vaporgate. While “Vaporgate” may sound like one of those combustion engine parts your dad is always saying is probably the problem, it is actually the contention that not only did Apple fail to release an enhanced Siri as promised for iOS 18, but what it demoed at WWDC 24 was not a working product.

Once again, John Gruber has brought up the v-word. That would be vapor.

I spoke this week, off the record, to multiple trusted sources in Apple’s software engineering group, and none of them ever saw an internal build of iOS that had [the “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?”] feature before last year’s keynote. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t such a build…But none of my sources ever saw one, and they found that to be exceptionally unusual… Most rank and file engineers within Apple do not believe that feature existed in an even vaguely functional state a year ago…

Of course, companies do this kind of thing all the time. But Apple, traditionally, has not. If the company did demo vaporware, why now?

Gruber links to a piece by Michael Tsai, which takes Apple to task for fudging things in an interview with Joanna Stern.

I do want to call out that, in multiple interviews, they are kind of setting up strawmen to knock down. They keep saying that people say Apple is behind in AI because it doesn’t have its own chatbot. To me, Apple has been clear that it has a different strategy, and I think that strategy mostly makes sense. I have never heard someone wish for an Apple chatbot.

A strawman argument is one that no one is making. Personally, the Macalope likes to use them everywhere, mostly for comedic effect. They do burn so pretty. But while he agrees no users are wishing for an Apple chatbot, that doesn’t mean that no one has said Apple is behind because it doesn’t have one. In fact, lots of people are saying that.

IDG

As Tsai says, Apple’s strategy for years has been to use AI behind the scenes to make your pictures look better, to give you suggestions for travel, and otherwise make your device work better without getting in your face. But the venture capital community, Wall Street and the tech hoi polloi have collectively decided that AI means chatbots.

“We saw ‘Her’ and we’re doing that whether Scarlett Johansson agrees to it or not!”

(UPDATE: “We regret invoking Ms. Johansson’s name.”)

Forget the fact that making these things violates a million copyrights, forget that sucking up the internet to create a model burns a lot of energy, forget that the results are often just flat out wrong, this is the new crypto, the new blockchain, because those both worked out so well.

The problem is that Apple listened to these people. Maybe so much so that it did some overly aggressive handwaving 12 months ago and is now caught with its hand in an empty jar that has the words “ENHANCED SIRI” written on a piece of masking tape stuck to the outside.

While AI has its applications, this has all had very little to do with what users have wanted and everything to do with what employers looking to lay off employees, unscrupulous investors looking to get rich quick, and the billionaire CEOs of AI companies have wanted. Apple’s mistake was buying into the criticism of itself. That’s probably the biggest “gate” of them all.