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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#421

Post by nrp »

pm90 wrote: post #383
lsllc wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously. You can imagine how it usually works…

“Big Company Experience” is a fucking plague. Smaller companies hire from them thinking they will bring magic sauce but all they bring is toxicity and political baggage. Meanwhile the people who went against all odds to get the company to where it is are pushed out, because “they’re not the right fit for this scale”. Nobody who says this ever talks about growing people into those roles.

See also: the last ten years of AR/VR at Meta.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#422

Post by sitkack »

pm90 wrote: post #383
lsllc wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously. You can imagine how it usually works…

“Big Company Experience” is a fucking plague. Smaller companies hire from them thinking they will bring magic sauce but all they bring is toxicity and political baggage. Meanwhile the people who went against all odds to get the company to where it is are pushed out, because “they’re not the right fit for this scale”. Nobody who says this ever talks about growing people into those roles.

Big Company Experience means you can thrive Roman style bureaucratic power plays, not actually build things. It does take a different kind of person to bootstrap something out of a garage into a company, and then continue that fledgling company to the next phase, but instead of going BCE, they should be tapping back into the Founder Energy, not the BCE people.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#423

Post by samatman »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #143
AnonC wrote: post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

> Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half. The concrete value-measure for me is whether I would feel any loss as a user if Siri simply disappeared. The answer is no, I would feel no loss. But this is also true for me if the subject is Gemini, CoPilot, Alexa, &c. For all the money and energy burned, for all the advertising babble and grotesque valuation, I would not as a user be one jot less productive…

My life would rapidly fall apart.

I use Siri for about three things: timers, reminders, and asking about the weather. But the reminders are mission critical. I use the watch, and any time my flighty brain hits on something, I set a reminder for it on the spot.

I literally couldn't get along without it. The only killer feature of Siri is accurate voice transcription, and that's all I need (and it could be more accurate, I just get used to comical translations when I use a rare word).

I guess I wouldn't mind if it were better, but I don't need it to be. Reminders are enough.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#424

Post by nemothekid »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #386
MPSFounder wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.

Yeah, agree with your take. I think it's especially odd to describe Apple as suffering from this "big company problem" given that it seems like the execs there have tenures much longer than the norm. Cook has been at Apple since 1998, shortly after Jobs' return. Federighi originally worked at NeXT when it was acquired by Apple. Eddy Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and his Wikipedia page says he was instrumental in c…

Seems more like a political problem. Once a founder leaves, the leadership team no longer has a mandate. Things that were once "my way or get fucking lost" become "I need to justify this decision with the Board, McKinsey, Blackrock, etc".

Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 years and knows every employee by name, but instead went to San Jose State.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#425

Post by FredPret »

airstrike wrote: post #403
Dylan16807 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.

Sorry, what's the advantage here? People are going to unplug the mouse anyway when it doesn't need charging because it feels much more natural. _Forcing_ people to stop using the mouse to charge is a braindead decision

It might be wrong but it's not braindead.

The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision.

I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is what makes it a viable career to the people here)

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#427

Post by busymom0 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #285
wtallis wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't a lot of phones that have air vents, except for the ones that also have fans. Convection doesn't work at those sizes and power levels. Thermal design for phones is all about conduction, getting the heat out to the surface of the device and spread evenly enough that there's no hotspot that would be uncomfortable for the user holding the device.

Some phones have fans??

I have seen reviews of redmagic and asus gaming phones with fans.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#428

Post by skydhash »

caycep wrote: post #351
kstrauser wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the tra…

that being said, Ive was important in asking why physical form factors should make sense in human terms. Big computers w/ a lot of ports make sense to comp sci/ee ppl in the lab but people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive. Without Ive challenging the design, Apple wouldn't have even tried.

I remember using consumer grade netbook and normal laptop and those have way fewer ports than a workstation. But all were useful ones. Mainly hdmi, ethernet, sd card reader, and usb.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#429

Post by dubrocks »

airstrike wrote: post #403
Dylan16807 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.

Sorry, what's the advantage here? People are going to unplug the mouse anyway when it doesn't need charging because it feels much more natural. _Forcing_ people to stop using the mouse to charge is a braindead decision

The problem is the software. macOS could remind you to charge the night before, but it always ends up needing charging in the morning as you're ready to start working. One engineer could fix the problem in under an hour if anyone at Apple cared about user xperience.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#430

Post by hylaride »

tedd4u wrote: post #344
heed wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eddy Cue owns Maps too

Maps is my default now, it’s improved so much relative to Google Maps. (At least in my area)

Yeah, Apple maps is my default, too. No ads and is accurate. Google maps is still better for finding businesses and streetview is still much, much more comprehensive.
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