Honestly this comment reads like an emotional outburst, by someone who has zero clue about the domain.
Its very well known fact in AI/ML community, that Apple has almost little or no talent nor do they have any major efforts at organizational level (E.g. FAIR at FB, MSR, Brain & Deep Mind at Google).
>> But in Machine Translation, Apple is ahead.
LOL where did you get this from? I am pretty sure that Google NTM which was put in production yesterday is the state of the art.
Also there are metrics e.g. in the report released yesterday you can find BLEU scores on WMT 2014 tasks, and the clear conclusion is that Google is way ahead. Also when it comes to Imagenet or Coco challenges, I don't think Apple has competed in any let alone placing anywhere at top, while FB, MSR and Google all have had top models.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144v1.pdf
>> but the popular press is not discerning enough to make heads or tales out of what they report on, and they end up mis-educating the public.
Sorry you are wrong, the sad reality (for Apple), is that they are truly 3-4 years behind FB, MSFT & Google.