Apple Shifts Siri From Giannandrea to Rockwell
Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.”
I’d like it to be known that I hated Siri before it was cool. I’ve writtennumerousarticles on the subject. I’m an anti-Siri hipster. But when a bandwagon comes along, you better believe I’ll be sitting up front.
[…]
What is surprising is that it’s actually getting worse. And people are noticing. This needs to change, and soon.
I’m not sure whether it’s getting worse for my purposes, but after so many years it doesn’t seem to be getting better. I personally don’t care that much about the world knowledge questions. What bothers me is the service itself. It still feels slow in the normal case and sometimes takes 10 or more seconds to fail and do nothing. After a sequence of commands when controlling it with AirPods, it still sometimes stops working, saying that I need to unlock my iPhone (which is not easily reachable—that’s why I was using the AirPods). Reminders still get split, with words lost, or mangled as it tries to parse what was meant to be literal text. Music controls still seem worse than pre-Siri.
Mark Gurman (article, MacRumors):
Apple Vision Pro Chief Mike Rockwell will take over Siri, which is being removed from AI Chief John Giannandrea, I’m told. Rockwell & Siri will report to Craig Federighi. Giannandrea is staying in larger AI role.
The moves have been several months in the making and were planned before Apple confirmed the Siri AI delays earlier this month.
Told ya.
Tim didn’t “fire” JG “immediately”. Just took away his team.
(Followed by mutually parting ways in a few months.)
I would have assumed they’d keep him around running AI research, but Jones has good instincts on this stuff.
Siri — the AI division’s main consumer product — has had a number of bosses over the years. When Apple first launched the voice assistant in 2011, it was overseen by software executive Scott Forstall. It was then given to services chief Eddy Cue in 2012 and transferred to the current software head, Federighi, in 2017. Giannandrea took it over a year later. Now it will be led by Rockwell, with oversight returning again to Federighi.
My quick take on this is that it’s a turf battle that Craig Federighi just won. It’s not just putting a new executive in charge of Siri, it’s moving Siri under Federighi’s group.
Somehow, Teflon Federighi never seems to get blamed for Apple’s software failures, even though they extend way behind Siri and seem to coincide with his tenure. Siri has always been a mess, but macOS used to be really solid and better designed.
Mike Rockwell (not the one above):
It’s wild to me that there are so many people that see the Apple Intellegence thing as the indication that Apple fell off.
The volume of Apple bugs I encounter continues to increase. I think it is going exponential.
I think the question Gruber didn’t explore is, why doesn’t Mike Rockwell now report directly to Tim Cook, when John Giannandrea ran Siri and reports directly to Tim Cook?
To me it looks like a tacit admission that Tim Cook failed in directly overseeing the Siri group.
Fascinating how certain people are just 10x. Rockwell has lead AR, VR, Vision Pro, and now Siri.
Rockwell (53) is the new Mansfield (65).
The anecdotes I’ve been told about Mike Rockwell don’t bode well for third party developer support and Siri’s AI efforts
First and foremost, while I made the quick, cheap, and obvious joke yesterday that Apple was putting the person in charge of the Vision Pro in charge of Siri, this does actually seem like good news for all involved – including us, the end users. While these two projects are linked as two largely unsuccessful ones for Apple, they’re really almost the opposite of one another. Vision Pro isn’t a huge hit for Apple because the strategy around the device was a mess. But the product itself does everything it aims to do and does it increasingly well. Siri, meanwhile, has a strategy that makes sense, especially in our age of AI. But the product is a complete and utter mess. And has been for 14 years running.
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Rockwell doesn’t have the clout needed to recruit (and retain) the top AI talent that Apple will need here, but JG still does. The mistake seemed to be putting him in charge of the entire org, including the AI user-facing products, when he should have probably been more behind-the-scenes, managing the more technical aspects. He’ll apparently now be able to do that.
Unlike the Siri feature delay, I do not think the Vision Pro’s launch affects the company’s credibility at all. It can keep pushing that thing and trying to turn it into something more mass-market. This Siri stuff is going to make me look at WWDC in a whole different light this year.
There’s no doubt that Apple sacrificed the Vision Pro’s launch in favor of putting all its effort and energy into Apple Intelligence — that pull-back was clear in the months leading up to it shipping to stores as the company got cold feet.
There was an awful lot of hubris, arrogance in how Apple treated developers and potential partners (no surprise), but a complete lack of buy-in from the rest of Apple’s engineering.
Also, of note, Apple’s Vision Pro group has lost its leadership in the change, which underscores what I was saying earlier. Apple made a decade-long bet on AR/VR then threw it all away for some snake oil.
Previously:
- Leaked Apple Siri Meeting
- How Apple Could Help With AI and LLMs
- Rotten
- Whither Swift Assist?
- Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
- Siri Super Bowl Regression
- Apple Hires John Giannandrea
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The guy responsible for the dumbest product Apple has ever made - a headset with optics an Nvidia RTX5090 would struggle to feed, welded to an M2 iPad's CPU/GPU, which costs as much as a tetherable workstation VR headset...
...and whose target market is immersive video, but doesn't support the format used by immersive pornography, which is THE market for immersive video... THAT guy is going to "fix" Siri.
It's a shame the rest of the world is boycotting America right now, because the rest of us don't produce enough corn to pop to watch this trainwreck progress.
"Apple made a decade-long bet on AR/VR then threw it all away for some snake oil."
I think the VR stuff is also snake oil.
I agree with the one Mike Rockwell that the AI stuff is just the latest issue. I have so many weird problems with iOS and MacOS and TVOS. It really does seem like Apple Execs don't use their own products.
Maybe this is the thing that finally gets them to straighten up.
It's just so hard to imagine that those unmentioned changes will result in a better Siri or better to say a new Apple Intelligence assistant, as Siri has such a bad rep it should be abandoned altogether. VisionPro was the first and only product that I had to return. It's hard for me to decide what is worse: Siri or that. Yes, they are failing in dramatically different ways, but yes, they're both a disaster.
Apple should stop being distracted and spin off all the non-essential stuff, like Final Cut, Logic, and all those new instantly neglected apps like Freeform, Clips, Journal, including the new Pixelmator apps too. Make them subsidiaries similar to FileMaker. And then just focus on quality and finishing what is already announced and sold.
Making those apps separate should force them to open up APIs and OS features that will be good for all 3rd party developers. Half of the core apps and OS features are neglected now, just look at Time Machine, QuickTime, Automator etc., many of them have barely been touched and even sport outdated interfaces.
And everything to do with search is another dumpster fire. Just take your iPhone and search for DNS in settings for example.
@dmitri, kudos for having courage. But really? You purchased a VisionPro? You have more discretionary income (or courage) than me. It costs MORE than virtually all MacBook Pro configurations. But you admit the purchase anyways, which takes courage.
Hopefully you were an early adopter with development hopes and realized that (at best) you were way too early.
@Michael just want to say this is a great example of your posts collecting lots of different and relevant viewpoints. Thanks for your ongoing excellent summaries. Not sure anyone including me makes a point of saying that enough.
@dmitri excellent distillation of what a lot of people are feeling.
I think the general consensus is less that this is about Apple Intelligence itself which continues to be something people don't actually care about, and far more the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of people finally recognizing that Apple has a real leadership problem that is causing their software problems. And legal problems, for that matter.
@Kristoffer VR is great, and has a real place - it's used extensively in film and TV production, an area that Apple has been busy steadily losing traction to Unreal as the main staging software for shoots and production, and Resolve as an editing solution. Those folks use it to walk around in virtual sets, plan out lighting, block shots for actors etc. With HTC's MARS camera control systems, the cameras and the VR headsets all speak to each other, all track their locations in the studio. Real and virtual all intermingle.
Apple could have been a part of that. They used to have a SteamVR port, they used to support HTC headsets, but they didn't want to invest in competitive GPU performance, so the industry left them behind, and now they make editing software for youtube influencers, and not much else.
Then there's the use of VR in industrial design and engineering, again a serious professional field, and somewhere else that Apple won't provide solutions that work the way the industry wants them to work.
Apple would like people to believe that VR is immersive video, but immersive video is doing fine on *cheap* headsets.
@Someone, I missed the professional angle. What you described sounds really cool and useful.
From my consumer angle it's like you say, nothing but video (and most of the time not even immersive but just big screen 2D video)
Did Gruber and Seigler say why they think AVP is a good product? To me it looks like a mess.
Too heavy because of a screen that makes people look like idiots, and a piece of glass that cracks, which makes the mask uncomfortable to wear and necessitates an external battery with a cable Apple are so ashamed of that they won't allow it to show in pictures of the device.
How is that a great success hardware wise?
@Kristoffer I suspect the Grubers of the world say AVP is a good product, because it's the one Apple are selling. If the exact same product came out from a different company, it would be an "I don't see the point of this" & "VR is never going to catch on until..." and all the complaints coming from everyone who isn't financially dependent on access to Apple executives would be coming from them as well.
The problem with Siri, from its earliest days, is that Apple still had the dark magic in their marketing. People believed in 2011 that it was essentially what OpenAI (and the rest) have released today - could ask it anything and have it generate responses - because the iPhone was so impressive.
What is really was, was that they bought a larger command set and language parser than the existing Voice Control feature they had in iOS 3.
I also remember that people believe it was happening on the phone, but I knew better - the little circular progress indicator would swirl in the title bar every time you asked it a question.
That's why Siri hasn't been well received over the last decade. The marketing gave an air of what OpenAI has now, back then.
The scandal has already happened, long ago. And then again when ChatGPT took off. Siri should have been the ChatGPT like it originally promised, but they let it rot for years and years, and then tried to play catch up in... roughly a year? Whoever let that happen throughout the mid-2010's is the true party responsible for this.
"What month is it?" suddenly began returning the current date (still not the month).
"Running to the media doesn't help." Uhuh. I still can't "start the stopwatch".
