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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

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

#401
post #351

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.

4 USB-C ports almost 10 years ago was inspired actually.

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

#402

I'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 heard a Steve story from a relation that was a high level exec during his tenure. They were running a meeting about failure rates of (Macbooks, phones, I can't remember which exactly). They knew their stats well, parts, how to source, costs, etc. They spent months on research. They presented it to him from an operations nature, e.g. the costs and such. His response was along the lines of: TV's are amazing technolog…

I think you’re spot on here. What has been lost at Apple is Steve Jobs’ product mindset.

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

#403

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…

> 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

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

#405
post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

JG is famous for research teams doing "hillclimbing" but the organizations doing this seldom thought deeply about where they were hoping to end up, what would be good-enough, or when it would be time to find a new hill.

You mean the whole local-maxima problem?

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

#406
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I personally remember "10.6.0 utterly fucking sucks" (though it got better) — hard to remember the details, which is probably in my personal best interest, but I remember fairly vividly shouting that to friends over beers somewhere. And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use. However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (…

I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective. I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working." It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that i…

I agree. About a year into the Intel transition, around 2007, it was incredibly stable.

I was doing hardcore computation 24/7 on a MacBook, including model checking real-time systems, and I vividly remember the exact day I experienced one kernel panic.

The rest of the time, everything was rock solid. It's sad both quality and aesthetics degraded during the 2010s, where the system somewhat converged to iOS UI patterns and lost skeuomorphism.

Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard. No idea why they moved to flat designs, which are easy to copy by competitors.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face. It's very well-known that Apple is perfectionistic. I'm not meaning to say that perfectionism is a negative quality or a bad thing, just that it takes a while.

Apple is not perfectionistic. Apple is performative. The entire company is performing software development instead of actually doing it. Apple's development process is a marketing pitch-driven hallucination - project management by buzzword and individual career status progression. It's almost entirely inward-looking. The connection to Rest of World is increasingly mythical and remote. Some good work gets done in spit…

> Apple is not perfectionistic. Apple is performative.

My guy, Apple is autistic as shit. Just look at how in-house everything is. Every time Apple runs into someone doing it wrong, they do it themselves. You know the saying; if you want something done right...

Sure, they're performative as well, but that doesn't change that they are still in the process of doing absolutely everything from scratch because the existing solutions are not good enough for them.

I don't know if you've used the new Apple Silicon MacBooks, but I have a 128GB/8TB one lined up for me to pick up from the Apple Store in about an hour. It's certainly not the best that Apple offers (that would be the new 512GB/16TB Mac Studio) but it practically wipes the floor with every other laptop on the planet. Because Apple made their own chips, because everyone else was doing it wrong.

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has already been solved since last year with Private Cloud Compute.

Assuming they are actually ready, that is.

Private Cloud Compute is already used for existing Apple Intelligence features (all, like, one total of them).

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

#410
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is just funny how this hyper lean design philosophy ushered in an era of littering your desk, school, and workplace with random usbc dongles from storied $5 chinese brands like iKLingKing or Daehoo and whatever else. So much for the minimalism in practice. At least they created a great deal of work for these chinese producers on amazon.

I it new cables. No dongles anywhere.
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