Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

ZING!

Promising and not delivering on Apple Intelligence.

But I seriously do not want any agent knowing too much.

For example: “Onscreen awareness” — Giving Siri awareness of whatever is displayed on your screen.

Siri had better not be shy.

Or perhaps Siri ought to take a long walk on a short pier.

Same for Copilot,I suppose.

Life is a creative work. It's art, not algorithm. I take my camera with me to be surprised. I play piano to be part of the process that a composer felt.

If I hand off my email writing, photography, music and so on, I'm not learning. Great results but not mine. Just LIKE mine.

AI, please paint my house. It bores and taxes me. Life doesn't.

When John Gruber, Apple's unofficial defence attorney, is shattered like this, you know it's bad. The stock market also agrees: ever since this Apple Intelligence debacle, Apple has lost several hundred billions of dollars in market value.

> I would actually argue that axing Image Playground would improve Apple Intelligence; its mere existence greatly lowers the expectations for how good the whole thing is.

I can never understand this tired line. Do you and all the people who bleat the same thing also post the same thing about Nintendo and PlayStation bloggers? He’s an Apple commentator. Doesn’t it stand to reason that he does that full time because he’s fundamentally a fan of the company, rather than because he’s suborned his integrity in service of… getting to play with new Apple hardware a week before it goes on sale?

Apple can release a half-baked version of this before it’s ready, but then pundits will say “oh. Steve Jobs would have never allowed such unpolished garbage to ship.”

Sometimes it’s better to wait 6 months for something to be mature and stable. Apple has a long history of being conservative in this regard, and they often aren’t the first entrant into a market, but they still dominate because of very good integration with their ecosystem and a high quality bar. Apple Intelligence will probably be the same (bookmark this post for 3 years from now, when Gemini is being split into three businesses and rebranded / killed).

...Has Apple's stock dropped notably more than the overall market has, due to uncertainty about tariffs and other economic issues?

Agreed. And my impression is that Gruber is a thoughtful, careful writer. I don't know any details, but he must have a fair number of sources within Apple too. So when he writes this (uncharacteristic for him) piece just excoriating Apple's management, I'm pretty sure it's not just him being in a grumpy mood or being dramatic for click-bait. He must be aware that things related to Siri/Apple Intelligence are as bad or worse than they appear and that management doesn't have a good handle on it.

Does anyone remember the Longhorn presentation video of 2003?

It's quite incredible that the company that never talks about future products has not only started doing that, but sold an entire generation of $1000+ smartphones based on a feature that didn't yet exist and probably won't exist until they release their next generation smartphone.

When they botched Apple Maps one of the top guys lost his job really quickly. This is a much bigger scandal in my opinion. Selling hardware based on software that won't exist. And the small parts of Apple Intelligence they have managed to ship are awful.

They should go back to not announcing this stuff in advance. The big features should remain secret until the OS is ready to launch. Sure it means developers won't be able to integrate with them for another 6-12 months but it's much better than where they find themselves now.

I still have a copy of it somewhere. Obviously MS is still dominant in desktop OS marketshare but I wonder if Apple would have had less success if MS succeeded with Longhorn instead of it becoming the watered down bug-ridden mess that was Vista.

S&P is down 5% YTD, AAPL is down 12% YTD..

When Gruber talks like this, sh-- is really bad.

There is a different between a Fan of something, such as Nintendo and Playstation. And making reasons up simply to protect the company it loves. Which is what Gruber and DED on AppleInsider does.

USB-C Invented by Apple? AirPod selling at cost or loss? And countless other things.

Assume you are referring to "Apple's official defense attorney" and yeah, that's not fair to Gruber, as others point out he's a very good and thoughtful writer.

I'd say less "fundamentally fan of ..." and more "deeply understands ..."

It's interesting.

We talk about what happens when people put unrealistic standards on themselves they can't live up to, and the self-destructive cycles that can follow; but what happens when it happens to companies?

When a company defines themselves internally as "we're #1, we'll always be #1, because we're the best, we can always get away with these margins"? If the company starts losing, or falling behind, or is criticized for not innovating, they don't know how to cope. They start overcorrecting, overreacting, promising things early, overestimating their abilities, following trends... pride kills companies, just like people.

We live in a time in tech, where it seems to just be beginning at Apple, but ironically, their old partner Intel got so high on that feeling during the 2010s, then was burned to the point of struggling to maintain its existence as a unified entity. Apple in the 90s, and Intel right now, should be a massive warning to Apple that nothing is infallible.

I expect some form of Leadership earthquake soon, within the next year.

Sure, but you don't sell millions of phones by using that non-existent feature as a marketing pillar.

They don't even necessarily need to clam up in a way that hamstrings developers. If they have enough of a product there that they can call their APIs even halfway stable, they're probably going to be able to ship it, even if it's not perfectly on time. That sort of thing they can absolutely talk about at WWDC, give a tentative release date to, and largely retain our trust that it will show up.

This isn't that. This aspect of Apple Intelligence has nothing visible. They didn't announce it ahead of time so that developers could start hooking into it; there's still nothing for developers to do here.

This was a bad decision, apparently done purely for its short-term marketing potential, and it does, indeed, make me concerned for what's going on inside Apple.

People call Gruber an Apple apologist, but he's really not. He's just a person whose taste aligns very well with Apple's. If your taste runs a different way then he can look like an Apple cheerleader, but he criticizes them regularly.

This is a particularly sharp example though.

Just to argue the other side, I'm an Apple user of iPhones and Macbooks and my reaction to Apple Intelligence being rubbish is eh ... who really cares? I mean Siri has been rubbish for many years and people basically ignore it. They'll probably get Apple Intelligence to do something half useful one day.

Yes, as an end-user I didn't really care about Apple Intelligence, and had to disable it because it kept suggesting dumb responses in Messages, which I use many times a day. As an observer of and investor in Apple, it's very concerning. Announcing and hyping products that don't exist is a serious breach of their brand promise, and as Gruber rightly observes, signs of serious rot in their culture.

I was going for this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y

> People call Gruber an Apple apologist, but he's really not

Agree and but it took me a while to realize this. He definitely gives them the benefit of the doubt, and but I think that's okay.

In recent memory, Gruber criticized Apple’s butterfly keyboard and the handling of it for years, how it treats developers, how it was handling the DMA, its App Store policies and a few other things.

But most famously called Jobs saying you didn’t need apps on the phone a “shit sandwich”

Google is down 13% YTD due to Apple Intelligence!

How much of this is something being rotten inside Apple, and how much is it about LLM models being antithetical to many things that Apple advocates? (Privacy, Creativity, Individuality, ...)

I can easily see a large, powerful group inside Apple proclaiming AI is a dead end (either for Apple, or just in general).

I can also see a large, powerful group inside Apple proclaiming AI is the only future and they need to figure out how to integrate it into a company with their culture and brand perception with minimal damage to both.

I can see a large, powerful group inside Apple saying that nobody cares about either of those things, we have to do something big with AI because it's what the market expects.

It's interesting that this seems to be the first time Apple has been faced with a threat of unproven credibility, that also carries enough momentum that they "must" respond without full information.

I agree with most of the points in TFA, I can't necessarily point to something in it that I think is wrong. But as with so many conversations about AI at the moment, it seems to leave a lot of people asking "what the hell happened?", often about things that have usually been considered table stakes - or at least reasonable expectations - in the past.