I can't believe I wrote this nearly a decade ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234
Remember, Siri wasn't a Steve Jobs project. But there's more...
Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
191–200 of 581 posts
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#192I think this is another symptom of exponential growth break down. Wall St wants exponential growth. That's not possible over the long term. When the curve starts to deviate they look for reasons. AI which at present delivers pretty much nothing useful to the end user anywhere in the industry, is selected as "the reason for failure".
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f? Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..
>Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? It died 14 years ago.
I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its downsides too.
I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse the more successful it became.
Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#194I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…
I can't believe I wrote this nearly a decade ago... and it still holds true: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234
"If Steve Jobs still ran Apple"
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#195I have to say that while I’d somewhat like to have a better Siri, it’d make more of a difference in my daily life if they would put those engineers on fixing text input so I didn’t have to change “snd” to “and” dozens of times a day or deal with bizarre and ungrammatical suggestions.
I’d be happy with just being able to accurately position the cursor.
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else…
They aren't even doing hardware well in some cases, their bread and butter. Bluetooth has been broken on both editions of their Pro Max Phone (15 & 16). It cuts out and has all kinds of weird issues, but no fix has come for years now. This was why I always paid a premium for their phones, they did hardware and software well. Not anymore, their so focus has been on their processors.
Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such.
This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will have a degraded experience in some way
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#197I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…
Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer? The en…
Not sure if he did it, but from what I heard from friends who worked with him, wouldn't be surprised if he did. Really love the guy as someone who combined creativity and tech, but these kind of things is one of least things I liked about him. It is one these Trumpisuqe quality playing hard ball, etc. Very US business like tend to be very off putting.
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else…
Imagine that the last Major OS release was going to be a bug fix release ... but then AI happened. And imagine this happens every year with some new feature demanding it be shipped. Having said that, here's the reality of bugs that are assigned to a team. Feature work comes first. The (older) engineers don't want this — they want to fix bugs, refactor code, get rid of tech debt. But ever since Jobs returned to Apple,…
> But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features
Were you using Macs before Jobs came back? The entire operating system for PowerPC based Macs was technical debt with parts of the OS running under emulation.
It was a buggy unreliable crash prone mess.
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#199I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…
Obviously a made up scenario because systems engineering (as the discipline most likely to be involved in the provided scenario) is all about balancing competing requirements and dealing with design constraints such as available choice of materials, or acceptable cost to consumers, or any other number of criteria.
Systems engineers would have responded by informing this hypothetical Steve Jobs that if he wanted to make the phone smaller by 20%, the phone would lose 10% processing power and lose 30% battery capacity, 9 months and $50m would need to be expended to retool the factories, and 12 months and $40m would need to be expended to redesign software UI for a smaller screen. And for an accurate answer, those systems engineers would have needed to have been able to consult with materials scientists, software engineers, engineers designing factory tools, and dozens of other different types of disciplines.
Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
#200David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails/37 Signals) has been writing about the state of Apple AI on LinkedIn recently (as well as an additional post that was deleted for using the word "asshole"):
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...