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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

#431

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

nemothekid wrote: post #424
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agree with your take. I think it's especially odd to describe Apple as suffering from this "big company problem" given that it seems like the execs there have tenures much longer than the norm. Cook has been at Apple since 1998, shortly after Jobs' return. Federighi originally worked at NeXT when it was acquired by Apple. Eddy Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and his Wikipedia page says he was instrumental in c…

Seems more like a political problem. Once a founder leaves, the leadership team no longer has a mandate. Things that were once "my way or get fucking lost" become "I need to justify this decision with the Board, McKinsey, Blackrock, etc". Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 y…

Very much agree. The Wikipedia page on Forstall says as much:

> Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public. Forstall had such a poor relationship with Ive and Mansfield that he could not be in a meeting with them unless Cook mediated; reportedly, Forstall and Ive did not cooperate at any level.

> After Jobs' death in 2011, it had been reported that Forstall was trying to gather power to challenge Cook.

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

#432

Post by PaulHoule »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #415
artimaeis wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in this thread (correctly!) pointing out Apple's struggles with releasing high quality user software on MacOS. But at least when they changed the System Settings UI in MacOS Ventura (10.13) they managed to stick the landing. Not that I necessarily _like_ the new Settings UI, but there's no jumping into old UIs to configure things. Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, and here we are 13 years later usi…

It really is the worst of both worlds. I don't like change for change's sake which we seem to agree on (though I do like the newer MacOS but we can agree to disagree there, that's strictly a matter of subjective taste) but it is INFURIATING and frankly should be embarrassing what a mess Windows is now. Change for change's sake is bad enough, they're currently doing... change for change's sake but not changing the who…

Yeah, but the fear I have is that if they put somebody like you in charge they'd prioritize visual consistency over functionality and things would just get dropped.

On some level it's an embarrassment, on the other level I never run into a "can't get there from here" experience though I had an awkward experience the other day when I brought home a bargain monster TV from the reuse center and found I had to look across a several different screens to find all the settings to get the video output properly matched to the TV.

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

#433

Post by kstrauser »

eric-hu wrote: post #339
kstrauser wrote: post #291

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…

Don’t forget the Touch Bars.

Ouch, yeah. I loved the idea of it. I mean, I have a Stream Deck sitting on my desk as I type this, and that's basically a large, freestanding Touch Bar.

But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.

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

#434

Post by scarface_74 »

officeplant wrote: post #261
scarface_74 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt? Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.

It's wild but my own issue free MacOS era was OS9 on my iBook G3 clamshell. Had to replace a harddrive (bounced down a stairwell, but held together) and upgraded the ram, but other than that fine experience. My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit…

I skipped most of the x86 era. I had the first Intel Mac mini connected to my TV running Front Row in 2006. But after that I didn’t buy another Mac until the M2 MacBook Air in 2023.

At the end of the day, I was just not that impressed with the x86 based Macs. They had all of the drawbacks of x86 with all of the added disadvantages of Ive inspired design which led to poor heat dissipation, not enough ports and butterfly keyboards

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

#435

Post by kstrauser »

rowanG077 wrote: post #360
kstrauser wrote: post #291

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…

Iphone 6, 2015 MBP, thrashcan where all under Cook. To me this precisely shows Cook did not have Ive under control.

But there's a dev pipeline. I'm certain those didn't all start their lives 6 months before release.

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

#437

Post by kmeisthax »

lsllc wrote: post #324
ksec wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years. John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time. Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly ev…

This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously. You can imagine how it usually works…

One thing to note about "big companies" is that everyone involved at the upper levels are rich enough to engage in recreational lawsuits. So if you say anything true about their performance, you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, possibly in a speech-hostile venue like England. The end result is a conspiracy where it's in everyone's best interest to lie about their peer's performance.

These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".

[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"

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

#438

Post by 6SixTy »

michelb wrote: post #140
kamil55555 wrote: post #98

I just don't understand how a huge company like Apple managed to mess up Siri so badly. Siri used to be useful, now it is a piece of crap.

Windows Vista happened and Microsoft still exists. And many other products from huge companies failed hard. I think these things are quite common for large companies. The fact that it's Apple just makes it more interesting.

Honestly, Windows Vista was a victim of the computing landscape of the time. Virtually none of what made Vista hated was changed at all to Windows 7, except by then everyone's PC had caught up to what the OS expected or they were going to stick with XP until the bitter end.

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

#439

Post by JKCalhoun »

scarface_74 wrote: post #359
JKCalhoun wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're objectively right. I have been running emulators recently with System 6.0 and was surprised at how much crashing I must have just tolerated. I shouldn't have made it appear that I was defending the quality of pre-OSX Mac OS. (Although we were talking about how quality has come down of late.) As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineer…

> As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineers could call the shots with their own frameworks/apps That’s a bug not a feature. Engineering led companies rarely ship good consumer products. What happened to Apple before there was a product guy at the top is a prime example. Another recent example is Google. Google has the best technology in t…

When your customers are nerds like you, I think engineers do fine.

I should qualify it somewhat though — I mean I was, for a spell, working on the ColorSync framework. So the "customer" was also an engineer using our API.

At the same time, when I worked on Preview initially I added features that I wanted and I think it dovetailed what users wanted. I am also a user I rationalized.

Further, many of the old timers like myself, were hung up on Tog and his Human Interface Guidelines. We would argue over lunch the Right way to handle UI for a specific feature, etc.

Jobs comes along and with Design at his side, and they decide that the address field in Safari should also be a progress bar (that appears to select the text as it loads?). Some poor engineer was told then to implement that. (I hated what I came to call one-off UI.)

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #391
PaulHoule wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of Microsoft’s bad habit of introducing meaningless superficial changes to the interface but they also keep legacy software working for a long long time. (Office ‘97 works fine on Win 11) The strangest thing about this is in the system configuration dialogs where they have a set of really gee whizzy modern configuration screens but you still have to go into 15 year old screens to do many common tasks —- they…

Oh my god, as a UI designer by trade, the sheer STATE of the Windows OS will send me into a rant far too long (and that I'm far too sober for right now) for a hacker news comment. It's a TRAVESTY. If you try and modify certain system settings you will see, in no particular order, the slightly cleaned up Metro ala Windows 11 (I honestly don't know if this got a name), remnants of the original Metro from 8/10, the modi…

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