Rotten
John Gruber (Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users, AppleInsider):
But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. […] There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. […] What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
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Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.
Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to Apple. Decision makers within the company did it.
Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?
Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
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It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.
Wow. As an ex employee, this will create a tsunami. Good for you. We all felt this way. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They don’t have a serious plan. Siri should have been everyone’s wake up call. Your framing around “credibility” was excellent and just might move mountains. Hope so.
Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.
It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!”
Gruber has never been an Apple shill – he has voiced criticisms of the company on many occasions – but he has been someone who clearly has a close relationship with the iPhone maker. He’s one of a number of friendly ears Apple uses from time-to-time to help get a message out. So when Gruber goes thermonuclear in this way, that’s no small thing.
I’ve read Daring Fireball for 23 years and he has never come close to this level of criticism about the company. It reads like an obituary, and I agree with every word.
Nailed it
Alarm bells have rung in Cupertino. Their reaction sets the tenor.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of Gruber’s piece.
The problem here isn’t that Apple Intelligence is bad/behind. That’s a symptom.
The problem is that the culture at Apple is broken and Apple has devolved into a company that will lie and promote mediocrity.
The road I’d have preferred?
“AI is early, but we’re all over it. Right now a lot of these early products don’t deliver at the quality and standards our customers expect. We’re focused on what matters to our customers, today.”
Rewatching the keynote after reading Gruber’s post jogged my memory and while I still have no interest in many of those features, it really does seem like Apple sold everyone a bill of goods.
With this failure, longstanding bugs, products like the Vision Pro that can’t justify their existence, and even the general arrogance towards regulators worldwide, Apple needs to step back and reflect why some of its biggest supporters have been so vocal lately. The company may still be successful on paper, but it does feel similar to the ineptitude that eventually led to the “bad” days in the ’90s.
My own mistake was that I assumed I would see it and that it would still suck. I did not expect not to see it. That’s the surprise here to me. Apple touted vaporware on stage.
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Some believe this change may be related to security. Because this is Apple’s AI — Siri — handling your very personal data stored on your devices, there’s a far greater risk than with more “general” AI services, the thinking goes. It’s possible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple uses that as an excuse/rationale regardless, as it fits their overall narrative well. But I think it’s just as likely — if not more so — that such features simply don’t work. That Siri simply doesn’t work. Again.
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Yes, I was holding out hope that the innovations behind AI would start to slow enough that Apple could be the one to best productize such advances. But we’re not there yet. And so, in a weird way, it still feels as if Apple is too early in AI, at least for them.
They clearly — clearly — felt pressured by Wall Street into rushing Apple Intelligence out the door. Cook can say he doesn’t “consider the bloody ROI” all he wants, he obviously does at least somewhat!
According to Kuo, Apple is already aware of Apple Intelligence’s “underwhelming performance,” and has provided suppliers with conservative iPhone shipment forecasts as a result.
No, the smart Siri will need buy-in from developers. Devs will tell the system about nouns and verbs that their apps know about — the semantics of the app’s data model objects, and the actions users can take upon them. Additionally, using this structured data, apps will tell the system what the user is doing right now, thus providing the context that Siri can become aware of. It’s all built on top of the existing Intents and UserActivities that apps have already been using to integrate with Shortcuts, Spotlight, and a bunch of other bits of the system. But using those is optional, and even for an app that’s got a head start, the new supercharged versions will require extra work to adopt.
I suspect Apple was hoping that, by pre-announcing what’s coming, devs would rush to adopt these intents, so when smart Siri does ship, there’d be a bunch of apps ready for it. After all, if Apple shipped a user-facing feature that didn’t do anything yet because apps hadn’t adopted it, that wouldn’t be a good look either.
I don’t think that this was the entire reason for the pre-announcement, and nor do I think the pre-announcement was made with conscious knowledge that this delay would come. I see it more as something that might have tipped the balance slightly on an already contentious internal decision, and that it went hand in hand with a bit of naïve optimism about what could be accomplished in time.
However, even the APIs didn’t ship to developers until iOS 18.4 (which is still in beta).
Apple will need devs to buy in to their new tech. Too bad they spent the last decade + crapping all over devs
Goodwill isn’t just a nice thing. It’s self serving too. Apple forgot that in their rush to squeeze every dime from every person they could.
Don’t really care about Apple Intelligence, don’t really care about ChatGPT, don’t really care about the whole AI bullshit fest, other than that it has the potential to destroy education, literacy, numeracy, and the planetary ecosystem. Those concerns aside, however, I do care that Apple management have caved to the hype to the extent that they feel they have to lie about this shit or they’ll be ‘left behind’.
Something I haven't really seen anyone touch on relates to an example you point to in this article where Siri takes action for you across apps ala ”Send the email I drafted to April and Lilly”
Do you really trust Siri to do that? I don’t. I still have a hard time talking to Siri and trusting that it interpreted me correctly. At this point, I don't understand why they don't leave it behind and rebrand.
Trust is earned. Siri lacks trust.
Reminded me of a Guy Kawasaki concept call “bozosity.” I think Apple is afflicted with that.
I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.
They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?
The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough – because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter.
Another thing that came to mind for me recently is how many misses Apple has had with marketing in the past 12 months. Things started with the iPad Pro ad where they destroyed tons of creative tools, which people did not react well to, and Apple soon apologized for. Then there were the Apple Intelligence ads that were celebrating people being shitty employees and spouses with AI to trick people into thinking they were competent and loving. And now we have Apple pulling one of their premiere ads from the internet because it advertises an iPhone 16 feature that they have confirmed will not ship until at least the iPhone 17 is released later this year. It’s simply the sort of messiness I’m not used to seeing from Apple.
If the iPhone was a properly open computer - then other folks would have figured out how to provide an amazing assistant.
Apple wouldn’t be in control - but their platform would be stronger - and their devices more valuable to own.
Previously:
- Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
- Whither Swift Assist?
- Our Changing Relationship With Apple
- 2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card
Update (2025-03-14): Joe Rosensteel:
Apple very rarely has the time to refine anything they ship. Version one of a thing tends to stick around for a long time with only extras bolted on, or omitted, because the people involved are simply too busy for a second pass. Because the bar to ship quality software is so low, and the need to revise quickly is nearly nonexistent, there was never any chance that they’d meet expectations for the robust features Apple was promising.
Let’s review what Apple actually shipped as Apple Intelligence.
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This takes us to another thing about Visual Intelligence: you can’t run Visual Intelligence on a photo that you already took. Unlike a Google image search, or similar, it will only accept your fake shutter button non-photos as input. Again, this is worse than existing products.
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So, just in that little run-through, you can hopefully see what I see. The problem isn’t just “More Personalized Siri” not shipping, the problem is what did ship, and what that portends for all future releases. Software quality is out the window, so for “More Personalized Siri” to not meet the low bar of something like Visual Intelligence…
[…]
The only thing they did with Siri in the past year that was significant was add the new visual language for Siri. I believe every Apple pundit under the sun has been in agreement that that was a huge mistake because it signaled change where there was no meaningful change.
Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press.
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If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown.
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I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.
My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products.
There's an NBC Brian Williams interview with Steve Jobs from 2006 which elucidates this; rather than quoting exact lines, Brian tries to corner Steve into seeing his silhouette as a captain of industry in the annals of history, and Steve is very uncomfortable because he just wants to go on to do the next thing. (And notes that a lot of products are just "technology in search of a problem".)
The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn't be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.
I think he’s overthinking it. What happened was, Board-level people and Wall Street both yelled the same thing at Tim Cook: “Make grandiose AI announcements or your share price goes down.” In 2025 capitalism, those voices can’t be ignored or resisted. So they made the announcement.
That’s what makes this whole thing so inexplicable to me. What’s the point of building up so much capital -- both literal cash and figurative faith -- if not to use it to hold one’s fire when catching up
AAPL was the most valuable company in the world a year ago. They had no need to overpromise and risk underdelivering.
The thing about John Gruber’s “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” is that it fails to link the Apple Intelligence fiasco to the general level of decrepitude of Apple’s software offerings. There are so many bugs in Apple’s software these days that it is simply impossible to trust that they might be able to build a tool that, say, can RELIABLY respond to requests such as “Add this address to their contact card”.
Something IS indeed rotten in the State of Cupertino, but that rot is not new. To me, it feels like the Apple Intelligence fiasco is the accumulation of Apple’s software failures over the past 10-15 years finally coming to a head. They are just not very good at making software anymore.
See also: Jim Dalrymple and Dithering.
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Back when I worked on the mac client for Messages, ignored by leadership and severely underesourced, we used to joke that the only way we were going to get enough engineers and HI attention to straighten up the product was if John Gruber went a wrote an article titled "MacOS Messages Sucks".
Sadly the guy didn't and the product died a slow, ignominious death, replaced by the iOS product being subjected to engineer crunch until it behaved mostly like the old one.
The most rotten things on the Mac as of today are in my opinion: Contacts (you can buy the most expensive Mac but it will give you a beach ball in no time and absolutely no obvious development for like 15 years); Spotlight works worse every year; Mail is not lacking (so) much in functionality, but it feels like it has been left with no maintenance for 10 years – it still cannot remember column widths for example – it is this sloppiness in how it comes across that says something about the company (on the positive side it can handle more mail than it used to do and import/export can work now); kernel panics when opening the lid of MacBooks are common still; logs being close to pointless for normal users; etc Many other shortcomings can be solved via third party apps.
I never expected anything from Apple Intelligence, so I am not so mystified that they cannot get people to be excited about it. But I did get good help from the proofreading function, but had to use it together with BBedit to make it useful.
> While I still have no interest in many of those features, it really does seem like Apple sold everyone a bill of goods.
Exactly. It's a self-inflicted wound, but ultimately, do any of the customers care? Hardly, from what I can tell in my own circles.
It's likely that one department/team/product manager/group of managers screwed up on the approach to integrating AI.
I'll further clarify my position - nothing could have been more "rotten" at Apple than the years 2014-2019. Those versions of macOS were awful ugly (from the font used in the UI all the way down to the default desktop photo). The Intel hardware sat there for eons without being updated (Mac Pro, Mac mini), or had major issues (bad graphics cards in the Intel iMacs). MacBook Pro butterfly keyboards. Boring (aluminum iMac) or ugly (iPhone 6, 6s, 7, 8) industrial design. Pushing iPads as non-computer computer replacements. It felt like the company was abusing their Mac user base, who had so much of their personal and professional lives depending on a healthy platform.
I really thought they were killing off the Mac platform, and _now_ I'm supposed to think Apple is "rotten" over ... this?
@Oscar / Mac Messages
I had a fun time opening that up and exploring the bundle contents of that. Was surprised that WebKit/CSS was being used to render the chat thread, was also surprised/impressed with the crazy masking CSS that was being used to create that blue gradient between all of the messages as they spanned up the window.
@Jerry
I never have a problem with Contacts, but Notes is super slow to open.
As for Mail, yes it works, but I agree that it could use some overall modernization. I wish they'd switch the message format to HTML by default, like most other clients do these days.
I've had major problems with Spotlight recently on my MacBook Pro. The process goes crazy, eats CPU cycles, and writes hundreds of gigabytes of data onto the SSD for days on end. I finally figured out why it'd feel so warm after supposedly being in sleep mode overnight with its lid closed - and yup, corespotlightd. I had to disable SIP to fully disable that process. I mean it must have written terabytes of data, which is horrible for the lifespan of that non-replaceable SSD.
I'm still extremely happy to be on macOS, and I'm smitten with this (orange) M4 iMac sitting on my desk. And with my MacBook Pro (when corespotlightd isn't shredding my primary storage drive).
Apple barkers like John Gruber are full of crap imho. Paid cronies.
Siri was born dead. It never worked. Couldn't add a date to its own calendar, still can't, confidently. How long has that gone on? And iTunes was decimated in its transition to Music. Unforgivable. That was many years prior. Meanwhile real actual Apple users have know this for certain for far longer than is expressed by such paid talismen.
The ineptly and woefully named Apple Intelligence is merely worse after bad.
Software rot, customer exploitation, is Apples plan. Dumbing down. The essential point is, John Gruber et al have nothing critical to say, nothing to add, nothing fortuitous to profess, except that they admit to knowing where the exits are after the ship is below water.
So Apple isn't delivering a promised feature. Um, BFD? You don't think it's more worrying that Apple Mail can still be made to *reliably* lose email when it's moved? That's an issue of company culture. Because yes, Timmy-boy really *does* care about the ROI. Just look at the latest AppleVis report card: same old disappointments and frustrations, but especially with macOS VoiceOver. It's all about chasing the last dollar and bling over what truly made Apple products great, and it has been for a good long while now. This is just the latest, and clearest, manifestation. There has to be some reason that Gruber has only just noticed.
Personally, I'm getting rather tired of being told that macOS is still the best platform. Partly because it very effectively absolves Apple from any responsibility for making it better. But mostly, I'm sorry to say, because it's true. But again, you owe yourself the challenge of trying the alternatives, if only to reassure yourself that your requirements are only met by macOS. If there's a market, that includes in software quality, and there's scope there for the other platforms. I love my Mac Mini and my MacBook Pro for their hardware ... but my desktop is more open to a transition now than it has been in the past. And I have to be honest that both Windows and Linux have something to offer me now that, when my 2020 iMac finally gives up the ghost and I can no longer dual-boot macOS and Windows for the best of both, means I have to seriously consider Windows and Linux as my primary OS (but, I'll be frank, probably mostly Windows for the accessibility ecosystem) and I will buy hardware to support that choice. Apple won't have a monopoly on quality processors forever, and if they aren't careful they will simply give up their core competence of UX entirely to alternatives that, while they've never been great, are at least functional. That will be a grim day, but I'm ready for it.
Has Apple shown any signs of learning anything in the last years? Like from the EU thing? Nope. So the pain hasn't been bad enough.
Messages is truly weird. The data model uses ids everywhere except for the groups. And the data itself sucks lemons. The messages use a format that isn't properly documented. The old style tapbacks use effing text like "liked" for thumbs up and then the original message. The attachments are worse. And yes, the interface is html.
I find it sad that this is what sends Gruber into full whine mode.
Not that Apple are fighting right to repair bills tooth and nail whilst pretending to have board meetings with mother earth.
Not the way they are fleecing developers
Not the way they view their customers (lazy cheaters)
Not the way they flaunt international attempts at reigning in their monopoly
"Spotlight works worse every year"
Spotlight hasn't reliably worked for me at all in at least a few years. 50% of the time, it only shows the "Search the Web" option, even for search terms that it returned an actual result just a few seconds earlier.
I also believe that pretty much all the AI-based features Apple announced were useless garbage to begin with. Ironically, the only thing that I actually like is the much maligned Image Playground app, because at least it's fun to use. Everything else is shit. For example, a context menu where you select "Proofread" or "Rewrite" that just returns a replacement string without any details on what was changed, with a single "Apply" button, just isn't how people write.
(Also, I tried the "Rewrite" feature on the paragraph above, and it helpfully told me that "Writing Tools aren't designed to work with this type of content." Thanks, Tim Apple.)
Apple could have won this whole thing by just looking at what Microsoft is doing and telling people, "we've seen what our competition is doing in this area, and we know that you all hate it. We'll have something to show you when the technology is ready." Then wait for everybody else to make all the mistakes, and ship something that's actually genuinely useful when you're able to build it.
You know, the approach that's consistently worked for them in the past, and that they should have applied to Apple Vision Pro, too.
"I find it sad that this is what sends Gruber into full whine mode."
Because I have no emotional investment in Gruber's opinions, I would say, "I find it interesting..."
In the midst of all this teeth gnashing...
Has everyone forgotten
that there's a shiny new UI coming in June?
At the same time, since part of the Titan software team was probably integrated into the Apple Intelligence team, what did you expect when it comes to delivery schedules?
How long until the ex Googler gets the boot? Perfect scale goat for a perfect distraction.
Then some more buy backs and Apple is back, stronger than ever
@Slava: oh my god, that is actually when it all started to go to hell.
I can’t vouch for this company anymore.
