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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

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481–490 of 581 posts

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

#481

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It might be wrong but it's not braindead. The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision. I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is…

This is ugly. User behavior modification as a product goal. The reverse of how you should build products. You need to start with "The user wants to do X." rather than "I want the user to do X." Who is Apple to dictate the "correct" way for me to use a mouse?

Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.

If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged cause of their battery anxiety from every other device. Then you try it unplugged and you realized you have to plug it in for like an hour every couple months and it's way better than tethering yourself with a cable.

I've used a Magic Mouse daily for work for years and it's literally never been an issue once.

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

#482
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.

> But people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive.

Funny how the latest Macbook brought back the Magsafe connector, HDMI port, and SD card port. Apparently the people in the real world have rediscovered priorities that Ive's design had made them forget

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

#483
post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

Apple doesn't fix bugs†, they just eventually replace the feature or ship a different way of doing the same thing, whose bugs hopefully don't overlap those of the first feature.

We're on Sequoia 15.3.2 now and the keyboard shortcuts of the big new window tiling feature still don't work on non-Apple keyboards (or Apple keyboards, if you happen to have remapped the globe key to something else, like Caps Lock).

† Hyperbole, in case it wasn't obvious

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

#484
post #237

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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…

> Promote Craig Federighi, after all these years I am still not convinced he is the right person for the job Yeah I wonder about Federighi. He doesn't seem to catch much criticism from the Apple pundits—I assume because he's one of the few SVPs that seems like a real human in interviews and videos and not a stilted robot like the rest of them. But Apple's software, and macOS in particular, seems to be rotting from th…

I have met Craig a couple times. The man radiates charisma like a god damn movie star. The whole vibe in the room changes when he enters. Something about it, man.

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

#485
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ugly. User behavior modification as a product goal. The reverse of how you should build products. You need to start with "The user wants to do X." rather than "I want the user to do X." Who is Apple to dictate the "correct" way for me to use a mouse?

Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better. If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged cause of their battery anxiety from every other device. Then you try it unplugged and you realized you have to plug it in for like an hour every couple months and it's way…

> If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged

So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer. My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too? Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?

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

#486
post #174

Earlier 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 addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS…

> Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule

I cannot think of anything that less needs yearly major updates than macOS. It's a mature, 25 year old OS that, unlike iOS, is used for an enormous range of professional work. I need to it be fast, stable, and predictable. The last thing I want is change for the sake of change, which largely describes the last 5-10 years of the OS.

Wanna make Notes.app compatible with the new features in this year's iOS? Just update Notes. I don't need a whole new OS to get new features for a notepad.

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem is the software. macOS could remind you to charge the night before, but it always ends up needing charging in the morning as you're ready to start working. One engineer could fix the problem in under an hour if anyone at Apple cared about user xperience.

I’ve used one of those for years and there’s never been any impact on the user experience. Every few months, the low battery warning pops up. At that point, it will still work for hours and it only takes a few minutes to charge so even if it popped up first thing in the morning I’d plug it in the next time I got coffee, went to a meeting, walked the dog, etc.

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

#488
post #57

Hopefully the new guys take the existing GenAI bullshit and fuck off from turning it back on after every update despite me turning it off 3 times already.

When my phone downloaded Image Playground I legitimately thought my phone had been hacked.

Can't be deleted on MacOS btw

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

#489

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> Craig Federighi […] merging iOS and macOS team together. What year was that?

In the absence of someone giving you a better answer, my hazy memory says 2015 or early 2016? Given what we know about Apple's hardware platform direction, on hindsight, it seemed like a good strategy. Note: I am talking about the team merging, not merging macOS and iOS themselves.

It was 2016. Right after I quit.

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The key weakness of the iterative development strategy.
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