Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by microtherion » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #550

microtherion wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on Apple's TTS for more than a decade, I can state with confidence that this is utter bullshit and you don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Both in terms of quality, and of the underlying technology used, Apple's current TTS is in no way comparable to what existed 10 years ago (at Apple, or anywhere else in the industry). I challenge you to find a 2014 recording that is on par with…

I don't dispute your claim, just that I still find Alex voice to be the best, and it's been the same since over 10 years ago. The other voices have issues, they don't sound too good at 1.5x.

Ah, that's more specific.

Alex was developed when VoiceOver (the screen reader) was the primary use case for text to speech. Consequently, it was optimized for low latency and robustness under rate changes.

The Siri voices sound much more natural at 1x and have a higher signal quality, but rate changes were a lower priority for this use case.

Fun fact: when we worked on Alex, many VoiceOver users stubbornly hung on to Fred (which is mostly using late 1970s technology). Screen reader users are not fond of switching voices; it appears their hearing locks in to a particular voice, so switching is costly.

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

#572

Post by seec » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #386

MPSFounder wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.

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…

Jobs had failures but he made up for them with huge success. It's about the average; you can't get everything right all the time but if you manage to correct the course properly it's all good.

You are giving Cook way too much credit. The only thing he did was enrich Apple even more. Pretty much everything Apple has done is a continuation of what existed before or some side project pushed by another exec at Apple. The only thing he pushed for personally is a failure (Vision Pro, its technologically good but that's irrelevant) when it was clear that this is not a product that can be very successful or useful at any price (his arrogance is so big that he somehow thought Meta was just not good, and it's not fundamentally of problem of having nice use cases).

Cook has managed to not destroy or waste Jobs legacy but that's the best thing you can say about him. I don't think just making money is a worthwhile objective for a company, otherwise might as well just do finance, less moving parts, easier profits.

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

#573

Post by hosh » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

duderific wrote: post #509

boplicity wrote: post #462

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I used to trust Google Maps, but in the last year it has given me some very bad directions that not only were wrong, but were sometimes dangerous. I've started to very much not trust its directions, which is unfortunate, because it used to be so great.

I've been using Apple Maps exclusively for a few years now, as I like the turn by turn directions much better, and the UI is more readable to me, as others have noted. My wife seems to like Google Maps better, so we tried it on a recent trip. I ended up going around in circles in an unfamiliar area, and it kept telling me to turn where no road existed. I was flabbergasted it was so bad, as the last time I used it, I…

Engineering excellence has been a part of the Google founding culture, but I think that has been eroding in the past few years ... MBA types are taking over and engineering talent are slowly draining away. I'm just a nobody opining here -- they needed better product leadership than better business leadership. Now that their cash cow (ads on search) is eroding and they don't have a way to make solid products, they're kinda floundering.

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

#574

Post by svnt » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

kgwgk wrote: post #40

svnt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and not enough engineers with agency.

I’d be surprised to find “middle managers” at all among the top 100 senior leaders of a company with 150k+ employees,

Not currently, sure, but that path is typically how they get there.

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

#575

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

RunSet wrote: post #568

acdha wrote: post #487

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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.

Designing the mouse so it is useless while the charging cable is connected means that if the battery no longer takes a charge the mouse becomes e-waste.

Does that happen often? Especially compared to the switches?

If any other component fails the mouse becomes e-waste so that's not exactly novel.

And 50% of the original long lasting battery capacity would be fine here.

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

#576

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

dhx wrote: post #199

alexpotato wrote: post #164

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…

Obviously a made up scenario because systems engineering (as the discipline most likely to be involved in the provided scenario) is all about balancing competing requirements and dealing with design constraints such as available choice of materials, or acceptable cost to consumers, or any other number of criteria. Systems engineers would have responded by informing this hypothetical Steve Jobs that if he wanted to ma…

[deleted]

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

#577

Post by kjkjadksj » Tue, Mar 25, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #530

iamacyborg wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s probably some threshold they’ve reached at which just adding more stores doesn’t generate any incremental revenue. So you’ve got to wait a bit longer, well, where else are you going to go? Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical

And that is exactly the difference between old Apple and New Apple. Old Apple uses Apple Store as experience and services. It is part of the Apple ecosystem. It is not another "real estate property" like other Retail brands that is solely measured by incremental revenue.

Exactly. The entire thing no doubt cost money. That is why we were paying $2000 for a two year old intel chip mbp 10 years ago because the service aspect was a big part of the value proposition.

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

#578

Post by whywhywhywhy » Tue, Mar 25, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #190

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #90

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The fact Apple Music has notifications advertising it on my lock screen, or splash screens advertising it once a month when I open Music.app would have been unthinkable pre-Tim Cook.

Please for the love of everything, go in Settings and turn it off. https://www.howtoisolve.com/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-apple...

Yeah people repeat advice like this but have no idea it makes no difference and even in search it defaults to "Apple Music" but shows no results even when that slider is turned off.

It used to work in the first few versions of Music.app but broke about 2 years ago and has never fully disabled it ever since.

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

#579

Post by fennecfoxy » Wed, Mar 26, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

lsllc wrote: post #324

ksec wrote: 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…

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…

Suits. MBAs.

Inb4 someone complains that they're an MBA and not so bad. I'm talking about the guys that don't know or care about tech at all. The guys that just wanna be a big executive like they saw on TV.

The same sorta people that were in my 101s at uni who "heard programming was a good job" but didn't otherwise have any interest in tech

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

#580

Post by tehlike » Wed, Mar 26, 2025, 10:16 PM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #228

tehlike wrote: post #210

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Failing up is surprisingly common

Depends on race with an exception (sometimes) for which college you went to

Mine is less about race or college.

It's often mismatch between how people sell themselves vs what they have done.

a director at google might oversell himself and land at a vp role at a public co what's much less smaller, than swing back at another faang as a vp.

It's hard to judge someone's skills/capabilities for a job role externally vs while on the job.

So you have "proxies".

How big of an org s/he managed is often an indicator of some sort of success, but it's a terrible one, for example.