John Giannandrea to retire from Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#311

Post by skylurk » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:48 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #171

highwaylights wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating. I’m looking at you, Photos sync. EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right ( h…

Photos is horrific for this. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality. Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.

There's a lot of arcane lore about how to get it to sync. Closing all applications, restarting, then starting photos, then hiding the photos main window, then waiting, was how I got it to work last time. It worked twice, YMMV. If there's a cli alternative, please tell me.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#312

Post by OJFord » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:56 AM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #309

QuercusMax wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have…

> And manpages exist. For older tools, sure. Newer tools eschew man pages and just offer some help flag, even though there are excellent libraries that generate manpages like https://crates.io/crates/clap_mangen or https://crates.io/crates/mandown (for Rust, but I am sure most languages have one) without requiring you to learn troff.

Newer in maturity though, I'd say, no not like 'modern' tools vs. only vintage tools have them. It's just not something people tend to consider early on I think, but popular stuff gets there. (For one thing, at some point someone points it out in the issue tracker!)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#313

Post by fsflover » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 9:12 AM UTC

khazhoux wrote: post #238

isodev wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple focused so much on privacy Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data. > Subramanya, who Apple describes as a "renowned AI researcher," spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Gemini. He left Google earlier this year for Microsoft. In a press release, Apple said that Subramanya wi…

> Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data. big company bad, or do you have examples?

Can you install any app on your phone without giving all your personal data to Apple?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#314

Post by eitland » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 9:41 AM UTC

setr wrote: post #262

xnx wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of an advertised set of capabilities is intentional so that data can be gathered on what users want the system to do (even if it can't). Unfortunately, this is a terrible experience for the user as they are frustrated over and over again.

Given that they made no apparent use of such information in practice, the unfortunate thing is that they had the idea to begin with.

This is a problem all over our industry:

- almost every search field (when an end user modifies the search instead of clicking one of the results for the second time that should be a clear signal that something is off.)

- almost every chat bot (Don't even get me started about the Fisher Price toy level of interactions provided by most of them. And worse: I know they can be great, one company I interact with now has a great one and a previous company I worked for had another great one. It just seems people throw chatbots at the page like it is a checkbox that needs to be checked.)

- almost all server logs (what pages are people linking to that now return 404?)

- referer headers (you product is being discussed in an open forum and no one cares to even read it?)

We collect so much data and then we don't use it for anything that could actually delight our users. Either it is thrown away or worse it is fed back into "targeted" advertising that besides being an ugly idea also seems to be a stupid idea in many cases: years go by betweeen each time I see a "targeted" ad that actually makes me want to buy something, much less actually buy something.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#315

Post by gwd » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 9:46 AM 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…

Siri does have a "Ask me some things I can do" feature, but the problem is it's way too big; most of the things are things I don't care about ("Ask me for a joke", "Ask me who won the Superbowl last night"); and a lot of times even forx things I can do, its comprehension is just poor. "Hey Siri, play me Ein Klein Nachtmusik by Mozart". "OK, here's Gonna Pump Big by Diddy Q[1]". "Hey Siri, tell Paul I'm on my way". "OK, calling Mike smith".

[1] Made up title

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#316

Post by eitland » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

apparent wrote: post #296

drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

There was a time when Siri would confirm before making a phone call. But now it will call anyone, including people I've literally never called (and rarely text), without confirmation. This seems like a bad outcome that is very easy to fix.

Especially when it happens at night.

But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#317

Post by eitland » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #38

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…

Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.

My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way".

Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it.

Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you still need to open the share menu from there to find the search button.

Meanwhile other buttons that weren't as obviously misplaced in "share" like "Add to Bookmarks" are now on the top level together with the share button.

Same goes for the arguments against things like cut and paste in finder: they didn't create it back in the day and now there is a complete mythology about why cut and paste in Finder would actually be stupid and almost evil.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#318

Post by cmiles8 » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

perryizgr8 wrote: post #214

the_snooze wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alexa has this annoying habit of being non-deterministic. > Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights. > OK lights turn on In the evening: > Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights. > I'm sorry, I don't know a device called "bedroom lights". How is it even possible to build a computer system that behaves like this?

OMG yes this! It’s infuriating.

Even basic tasks like “play this song” get screwed up and wonder off into the abyss. Absolute pile of garbage from Amazon on this AI stuff.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#319

Post by mike_hearn » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 10:15 AM UTC

perryizgr8 wrote: post #214

the_snooze wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alexa has this annoying habit of being non-deterministic. > Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights. > OK lights turn on In the evening: > Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights. > I'm sorry, I don't know a device called "bedroom lights". How is it even possible to build a computer system that behaves like this?

Internal timeouts on backend calls, eventual consistency...

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#320

Post by fingerlocks » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 10:33 AM UTC

anon7000 wrote: post #304

highwaylights wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating. I’m looking at you, Photos sync. EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right ( h…

Bingo. My wife’s phone failed to backup to iCloud. To be fair, there’s an error message. However, the list of what takes up space does not show what’s actually taking up space. Such as videos texted to or from you (can easily be multiple gigs as they add up over a year or two) The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it…

It’s messed up, but it can be fixed by turning off iMessage and MMS in settings.app and then turning it back on. It’s an old bug. Since it hasn’t been fixed, I’m guessing the solution introduces more problems than it a solves for whatever reason.