John Giannandrea to retire from Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#121

Post by kridsdale1 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:44 PM UTC

sethops1 wrote: post #22

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

I'd throw in the failure to do anything meaningful with home automation, which I guess could fall under the Siri umbrella of failure. Maybe I'm still peeved big tech bought up the industry just to kill any innovation.

Hey, my 10 HomePods are able to turn off 80% of my lights at night, 80% of the time!

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#122

Post by kridsdale1 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

npunt wrote: post #90

smelendez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor? A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.

Apple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.

Hey, I made that!

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#123

Post by rdiddly » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #49

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…

Ironically this manages to break all four of Apple's famous UI principles from Bruce Tognazzini: discoverability, transparency, feedback and recovery

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#124

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

I think the only department involved in privacy at apple is the marketing department. Nobody else has worked in anything related.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#125

Post by andy_ppp » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#126

Post by Izikiel43 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

aetherspawn wrote: post #56

This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like. I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple. I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices). At this point, their investment…

He is a researcher, so I would keep a bit of hope he is not the same as the regular business side of msft.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#127

Post by baggy_trough » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

kulahan wrote: post #117

This is a serious question that's partially mine, but I'm asking because of all the comments here: Specifically, what HAS Apple done with Siri over 15 years? Are there new functions I don't know about? I... can't think of anything else they'd add, but I literally do not understand what their engineers and managers working on Siri were doing on a daily basis. They must have been writing some code at some point. Did it…

They changed it from responding to "Hey Siri" to just "Siri".

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#128

Post by npunt » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

kridsdale1 wrote: post #122

npunt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.

Hey, I made that!

It's a great feature! I was demoing it to my parents over Thanksgiving and forgot about the lack of Siri support, and of course it failed. Parents were excited when I mentioned it but now won't be using it. Ah well.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#129

Post by dyauspitr » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:50 PM UTC

98codes wrote: post #110

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Uses for Siri: 1. Checking the current temp or weather 2. Setting an alarm, timer, or reminder 3. Skipping a music track or stopping the music altogether roughly 3 seconds after hearing the command, or 1 second after you assume it didn't work

Telling it to find directions in CarPlay but you have to say “using Google Maps” at the end. It’s pretty good for finding directions with voice only.

It is ridiculously useless for most things though. Like I’ll ask it a question on my Apple Watch and it will do a web search and give me a bunch of useless links.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#130

Post by kshacker » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

the_snooze wrote: post #120

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze. I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfac…

> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case

You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while.

If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.