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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

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

#531

Post by ksec »

xxpor wrote: post #303
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…

I'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.

I think Ive has burn out issue at the time and has clearly thought about departing Apple. ( A book chronicling 20 years of Apple's design in 2015 ) He wanted to design the perfect and final thing and so MBP was rushed. Steve Jobs would have worked him and likely said hey this is good but we must do it incrementally so our user can adopt to changed. How about the Keyboard keys goes to 1.2mm instead of straight to 0.7mm key travel.

It took us 20 years for humans to adopt from the good old 2.5mm keyboard to 1.5mm. And you want to cut in half again in one go?

I think it is best summarised as Steve Job's quote in the movie;

"Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."

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

#532

Post by wtallis »

resource_waste wrote: post #224
varunnrao wrote: post #15

imo, Apple are actually ahead when it comes to the hardware side of the whole thing. Their vertical integration gives them an edge not many can match, when it comes to running ML models. It's a no-brainer for Apple to reduce the barriers for devs to build really cool native Mac/i{Pad}OS applications and incentivize them to leverage the built-in AI/ML abilities to a greater extent. The iPhone in part took off _because…

>imo, Apple are actually ahead when it comes to the hardware side of the whole thing. It surely is just your opinion. Nvidia is king and Apple has found a way to market an integrated GPU and CPU RAM as something magnificent, rather than something that has existed since the dawn of computing. There is a reason Nvidia is king. There is a reason corporations buy Nvidia and not Apple for their LLM uses.

You seem to think that the AI market consists entirely of the segment that NVIDIA dominates (datacenter training and inference) and that the segment where NVIDIA is absent (inference on battery-powered devices) doesn't exist.

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

#533

Post by ksec »

samatman wrote: post #414
Dylan16807 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've never heard from anyone who likes the Apple Mouse enough to use it, but doesn't like the charging from the bottom. It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use it, this has become a bit of conventional wisdom. In reality it's a non-issue. I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shap…

I actually like the charging port design. It stops normal user from using the mouse plugging in. Which is not what it was designed for. They could have designed the USB-C port in the mouse does not come with Data Pin. But given it is a wireless mouse it would still work plugged in as wireless mouse powered by cable.

In the end I really think it is a non-issue. The shape still sucks though.

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

#534

Post by ksec »

deergomoo wrote: post #472
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…

> 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…

It is not about design features and bugs etc. The whole iOS feels a lot slower than before despite having much more processing power.

Android caught on, and now feels smoother than iOS. And that is with iOS animation tuned off.

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

#535

Post by wtallis »

pzo wrote: post #160
varunnrao wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. The hardware right now can't run useful models. But that's why I think they have a couple of years to sort out their software issues. When useful models can be run on their devices they have to be ready. The hardware advantage can only be an advantage when they have the software to run useful applications. Hopefully they don't get stuck in the typical big company bureaucracy and ego matches and instead…

They made it less useful because they were greedy. Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB. In PC world before M1 and even before apple started soldering everything you could have easily laptop extended up to 64GB RAM for a cheap price. Those ram sticks are not expensive in retail price and should be even less expensive if wholesale and not full sticks as bill…

> Before M1 we used to have laptops that had 16GB RAM as a base. With M1 the made base back to 8GB.

You're getting product segments mixed up. From what I can tell, the 13" MacBook Pro in the Intel era never started at 16GB; the last model still started at 8GB. That's what was replaced by the M1. The 15/16" Intel-based MacBook Pro models didn't get a proper replacement until the M1 Pro and M1 Max, which started at 16GB and 32GB respectively. The only regression I can find there is that the last 13" Intel MacBook Pro could be configured with up to 32GB, which wasn't available from the base M series chips until the M4 last year.

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

#536

Post by mark_l_watson »

I have been running Apple Intelligence betas for a long time. I wish they would provide a voice interface for at least: querying calendar, recent emails, checking available file storage, query any system setting for the current value, etc. About six months ago I was testing Gemini Advanced and asked how many times I had Covid and it reviewed my emails and eventually came up with the correct numerical answer. I was impressed, but I don't know if their current system would pass that test.

Kevin Weil has been a very good product manager at OpenAI - Apple should try to hire him.

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

#537

Post by ksec »

klabb3 wrote: post #318
dmonitor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that being a strong case against Eddy Cue. Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue, and as a whole those services probably make bank. Apple TV+ especially funds good television. Even if it loses money, funding the arts carries intrinsic value.

> Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue Compared to? All taxes mean fewer transactions – and purchases that never happen don’t generate revenue. This is not easily measurable. Most SaaS or similar services probably go through other devices or email to handle transactions. Apples payments and subscriptions are excellent products but how much goes through there of say revenue for streaming services like Spotify an…

I am sure plenty of people, if not majority of people will happy pay the 10% premium just because the subscription goes through Apple and have a peace of mind. That allows them to easily unsubscribe.

That is the thing about the whole 30%. It is not flexible, stringent and does not adopt to market. Even Tax by state have more flexility than they do.

And I have been saying this since 2013 but every time I get downvoted to oblivion for it. If Apple had move their Game into a Separate Store. They would have kept 75% to 80% of their App Store revenue at 30% cut. They could then charge 10% on top of all subscription and 15% for downloads. Once you include all the payment processing fees, fraud and additional services and value Apple offers the 10% extra meant for example Netflix actually earns more from an Apple's sign up. That create incentives for other companies to work with this Model. While Apple would still keep ~90% of their current App Store revenue. And I assume without much of the backlash and regulation that they had to fight and costing them hundreds of millions in operation, PR and brand damages.

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

#538

Post by vrc »

ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #447
lsllc wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> " 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'. " Microsoft's revitalization occurred only after Steve Ballmer was ousted and Satya Nadella pushed out much of the old guard who were set in their ways.

Satya had been at the company for quite a while himself. Perhaps not as long as others, but he was a well known veteran within the company

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

#539

Post by PlunderBunny »

kemayo wrote: post #473
eric-hu wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget the Touch Bars.

The real problem with the Touch Bar was that they never made an external keyboard with it. So I could never actually build it into my habits, since it was only actually available to me half the time. (I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external…

There were so many problems with the Touch Bar to pick any one as the ‘real’ problem. As a software developer, I’m used to resting my finger on the F5 key when I’m thinking or in the few seconds before a build finishes. Can’t do that with the Touch Bar.

Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t.

There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.

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

#540

Post by skydhash »

thecupisblue wrote: post #131
travisgriggs wrote: post #4

I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”. I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles Law of Bureaucracy remains on full display, these shuffling of the titanic deck chairs will continue. I wish it could be otherwise. I wish a company could introspect on itself and say “hey, our doer/decider balance is out of whack, let’s correct” but that just ne…

Well, that is the problem with them making Siri useful for everyone - it is made for discussers and deciders. Summarise a meeting here. Summarise the report there. Summarise the email from marketing. Schedule a meeting with Jim. Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper. While yes, there is some usefulness in having something summarise things for you, most people in their day to day lives don't handle a "…

> Summarise a meeting here. Summarise the report there. Summarise the email from marketing. Schedule a meeting with Jim. Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper.

Isn’t that what administrative assistants and hired help do? To handle the minutia of triage and actually doing the stuff you’ve decided upon? And they actually have to do their job well because (reputation loss, employment, and legal)?

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