Author calls out some truly irritating defects, and Messages is rife with them. But there are bigger ones in that application on both Mac OS and iOS.
Topping the shitlist has to be the inexplicable splitting of group threads for random people in the group, even when everyone is using an iPhone. Suddenly someone in the group gets the messages by him or herself and can't reply to the group. And this occasionally also happens in one-on-one threads: I've had years-old (maybe decades-old) threads suddenly split off into a new one with a friend of mine for no apparent reason.
There's some fundamental incompetence in Message's design, and I'm sure that the addition of RCS has made it worse because it was slapped onto a rotten core.
Oh yeah, then there's the way Messages (or, to be fair, iOS) loses all of your contacts' names if you travel outside the country. This is another brain-dead defect: Just because you're in a new country code, your iPhone suddenly can't associate U.S. numbers with your contacts. How the hell does this go unfixed for one major iOS revision, let alone 15+ years?
Oh yeah, then there's the way Calendar "helpfully" changes the times on your appointments when you travel... meaning that you'll miss all of them if you travel east, because your phone will move them hours later. I mean... who lives like that? I you're going to London on business and the next day you have a meeting at 10 a.m., your iPhone will "helpfully" change that meeting to, say, 5 p.m.
So when the author muses about whether Apple developers ever actually use this stuff in the real world, the only logical answer is no. Or they just take so little interest in the functional quality of their product that they just check in some grossly defective trash and call it a day... and refuse to fix it year after year.
Or... they're not given time and resources to fix it. I'm pretty gentle when filing bugs about Xcode, because I'm sure they are understaffed. But at this point, the neglect has (or should have) exhausted every developer's patience.
Which brings us to a bit of hypocrisy in the post: "Apple is clearly behind on the AI arms race"
NO. Apple's sad capitulation to armchair "industry observers" and "analysts" has contributed greatly to the very defects the guy complains about. Apple should not have jumped on the "AI" hype in the first place. It does not serve Apple's product line or market. They are not a search company or gatekeeper to huge swaths of the Internet. If they wanted to quietly improve Siri and get it RIGHT, fine. But now they're embarrassed, and resources that should have been spent on QA have been squandered on bullshit "AI" that failed.