John Gruber (like Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, Rene Ritchie, among others before him) was a trusted spokesman (some say shill) for Apple's message, but this appears to have hit a brick wall:
Speaking to the debacle that Siri has become, Gruber wrote:
"Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn’t yet occurred or doesn’t happen soon, then, I fear, that’s all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three."
There is definitely trouble in Camelot...
The other part I don’t understand to this is there are a TON of third party AI apps that are available for Apple products right now. So what is the big deal with the media and everyone? Who cares if Apple has a built in AI?
Has anyone managed an AI-powered user experience which is:
capable
pleasant to use/interact with
not subject to hallucinations
If Apple can't deliver on all three of those, I don't see a need to include it --- and I can certainly see the potential of a long-term investment in research and additional development w/o a need to go "scorched earth" and abandon current (internal) efforts/code.
That said, I would hope that any AI inclusion would have user preferences for enabling/disabling and controlling which information it has access to and being able to run self-hosted at a reasonable performance (as an option, maybe something one has to buy into at the highest performance hardware price) and include a switch for whether or no "generative" options are included with results (maybe 3 position: off/on/allow when an override phrase is included in the prompt).
I've definitely been seeing more and more commentators talking about no matter how good the hardware is for Apple, at some point, they have to take accountability for their software, which lags behind everyone else at this point. This mainly has been focused on iOS/iPadOS compared to Android, but I've also seen the complaints about MacOS and certain Apple programs.
On the one hand, I do agree that as a hardware first company who also put up a walled garden to make third party software difficult to impossible to implement properly, they've somewhat shot themselves in the foot. They don't have th expertise in the software department that Google and M$ does.
On the other hand. I hate pretty much all applications of AI right now, and am enjoying my mostly AI free experience on my Mac and iPad Pro, so I don't care all that much about the current way Apple is lagging behind in software, even though it could eventually mean their downfall.
If they hadn't already leaned into advertising Siri's new planned AI, Apple could have done something impressive by bucking the AI trend completely and advertised themselves as the company for privacy that will never use your data to train. That would have been stellar IMO.