9 ms·

> I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of draw

by ethbr1 2y ago

> I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem. It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft. I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't. Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text. I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.

TreetopPlace 2y ago
"AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`' Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.
- parl_match 2y ago
  For what it's worth, those platform investments are the difference between Apple being applauded for this, and Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - practicemaths 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - abhpro 2y ago
    That might be "trust" in a relative sense
- cchance 2y ago
  Have to agree, apple seems to put a really strong emphasis above all else on your shit is your shit and we don't want to see it.
  - m463 2y ago
    But this is not true. that's the thing. Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time. ios gives you zero control (all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it) Apple uses your data. you should be able to say no. And as for your data, they do other things too, a different way. Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to icloud. I've seem privacy minded parents say no, but then they get their kid an iphone and all of their stuff goes to icloud. I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data icloud.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      A key difference is that Apple isn’t then selling the info it has on you to advertisers. I don’t think any large tech company is morally good, but I trust Apple the most out of the big ones to not do anything nefarious with my info.
      - tsunamifury 2y ago
        They absolutely are. And they give it to governments upon request. Their privacy stories are marketing first.
        rootusrootus 2y ago
        They are selling data to advertisers? I would like to know more about that.
        mgiampapa 2y ago
        Google isn't. They are the advertising engine and sell to advertisers for reach, just like Facebook does. I trust Apple about as far as I can throw them too. They are inherently anti-consumer rights everywhere in their ecosystem. The "Privacy" angle is just PR.
- harry8 2y ago
  > "I trust Apple..." I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing. The even more terrible part is I'm sure it's common. And so via network externalities the rest of us who do NOT trust any of these companies on the basis that all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways, will get locked into this lunacy. I now can't deal with the government without a smartphone controlled by either google or apple. No other choice. Because this utter insanity isn't being loudly called out, spat upon, and generally treated with the withering contempt that these companies have so richly and roundly earned this decision is being made for all society by the most naive among us.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    What government needs you to have a smartphone from Apple or Google?
    - jay_kyburz 2y ago
      The Australian Government required you to have an app called MyGovID to do you business taxes and other administrative tasks. This app is only Apple or Android, there is no web interface.
      - kolinko 2y ago
        That’s crazy. Why no web interface? In Poland for taxes we have a web interface that is mobile and stationary, and for many other things it’s a choice between an app and web and paper.
        jay_kyburz 2y ago
        The tax part is all web, it just mandatory 2 factor authentication to login that requires the app.
- anileated 2y ago
  Since Apple is building ChatGPT integration into its devices, it’s clear that Apple’s users’ data is going to be slurped by Microsoft via ClosedAI servers now. It’s unlikely latency would permit them to proxy every request to fully mask end-user IPs (it’s unclear what “obscured” means), and they would probably include device identifiers and let Microsoft maintain your shadow profile if that could improve ChatGPT output (it may not require literally storing your every request, so denying that is weasel phrasing).
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I’ve been browsing with Private Relay since the day it became available. What’s this intolerable latency you’re talking about?
    - anileated 2y ago
      Browsing is not the same as using a personal assistant. First, it takes much less compute to serve a page than to run an LLM query. LLMs are slow even if you eliminate all network. Second, your expectations when browsing are not the same as when using a personal assistant. Right now even when I simply ask Siri to set a timer it takes more than a couple of seconds. Add an actual GPT in the mix and it’s laughable. In any case, even with a private relay, Apple’s phrasing does not deny sending device identifiers and allowing ClosedAI/Microsoft to build your shadow profile (without storing requests verbatim).
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        Nope, you’re moving the goalposts. You were talking about the latency of making a network call. I pointed out that Apple’s current proxying architecture has low latency for web browsing, with orders of magnitude larger requests moving through it. We’re not going to bring GPT slowness into the mix because that’s not what we were discussing.
        anileated 2y ago
        No, I meant the cumulative latency that increases with every hop. You can’t fool physics. Not proxying is just faster and in case of an already super-slow server these seconds matter to any UX designer worth their salt.
- 4m1rk 2y ago
  Google is not trusted because it was an AI company and needed your data. Apple just joined the club.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  When enrolling physical security keys to my accounts, only Google's process requested extra, identifiable fields in my key, generating a warning in Firefox, which can anonymize these fields. Google wants to track even my physical security key across sites to track me. How can I trust their AI systems with my data?
  - dwaite 2y ago
    The attestation on (FIDO certified) security keys is a batch attestation, and meant to correspond to a a batch size of at least 100,000. So they were effectively asking for the make and model. There are non-certified authenticators which may have unfortunate behaviors here, such as having attestations containing a hardware serial number. Some browsers maintain a list and will simply block attestations from these authenticators. Some will prompt no matter what. There is also a bit of an 'Open Web' philosophy at play here - websites often do not have a reason to make security decisions around the make and models of keys. Having an additional prompt in a user conversion path discourages asking for information they don't need, particularly information which could be used to give some users a worse experience and some vendors a strong 'first-mover' market advantage. In fact, the motivator for asking for this attestation is often for self-service account management. If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone. Many parties (including Google) seem to have moved to using an AAGUID lookup table to populate this screen in order to avoid the attestation prompt. It also winds up being more reliable, as software authenticators typically do not provide attestations today.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Both devices are Yubikey 5 series, and none of the other services asked for anything similar, or triggered any warnings. Moreover, none of the service providers auto-named my keys with make/model, etc. > If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone. First, Google doesn't differentiate the security keys' name even if you allow for that data to be read, plus you can always rename your keys to anything you want, at any of the service providers I enrolled my keys, so it doesn't make sense. Moreover, Firefox didn't warn me for any other services which I enrolled my keys, and none of them are small providers by any means. So, it doesn't add up much.
- jeswin 2y ago
  > I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI... Depends on where you are. Apple will bend over backwards when profits are affected, as you can see in China. Ironically, the only time a large company took a stand at the cost of profits was in 2010 when Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor. Google has changed since then, but that was the high watermark for corporates putting principles over profits. Apple, no.
  - dwaite 2y ago
    > Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor My impression is that they had little chance to survive in a Chinese market, competing with a severely limited product against state-sponsored search products while also being a victim of state-sponsored cyberattacks. It was the morally correct decision, but I don't know if they were leaving any money on the table doing so. I suspect the Google of today would also decide not to shovel cash into an incinerator.
ManuelKiessling 2y ago
It’s ironic how the one company that is WAY over the top wrt secrecy — not only to the public, but also and especially internally (they’ve even walled the hardware team from the software team while developing the iPhone!) — is at the same time the one company that really nails integration.
- xethos 2y ago
  People will scoff and say "Yeah, but all kinds of companies have internal firewalls, big deal". But no, these were literal walls that would appear over a weekend and suddenly part of the campus was off-limits to those not on the iPhone project.
  - kolinko 2y ago
    Wow. Any place to read about that?
    - gumby 2y ago
      Any book about the development of the iphone or articles in the business press from a few months after product introduction (if any are still online…try Fortune).
    - xethos 2y ago
      I found it in Fred Vogelstein's "Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution" [0]. Decent read, not amazing IMO, but with fun tidbits about the iPhone / Android launches [0] https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=60B714243482AE3D7B9A83B52F7BED02 https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=60B714243482AE3D7B9A83B...
  - kudokatz 2y ago
    I heard they did this for the Amazon Fire Phone, too
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  The key difference is that Apple (as an organization) appears to have an overarching roadmap (that spans multiple product lines). The secrecy is irrelevant as long as the leadership of each division is aligned (it hurts, but does not prevent success). Google, MS, and others are less organized at the top, so subdivisions of the overall org are left to plan for themselves and between each other, which leads to conflicts. Resolution may be achieved when things get pushed high enough, but only if it surfaces at the top for a leader (if such people exist in their org structure) to declare a resolution and focus for the groups involved.
highwaylights 2y ago
Ironically, I feel like Apple might have lost me as a customer today. It won't matter to Apple, obviously, but so much of what they showed today I just felt was actively pushing me out of the ecosystem. I first bought some devices for myself, then those devices got handed off to family when I upgraded, and now we're at a point where we still use all of the devices we bought to date - but the arbitrary obsolescence hammer came down fairly hard today with the intel cut-off and the iPhone 15+ requirement for the AI features. This isn't new for Apple, they've been aging perfectly usable devices out of support for years. We'll be fine for now, but patch support is only partial for devices on less-than-latest major releases so I likely need to replace a lot of stuff in the next couple of years and it would be way too expensive to do this whole thing again. I'll also really begrudge doing it, as the devices we have suit us just fine. Some of it I can live without (most of the AI features they showed today), but for the parts that are sending off to the cloud anyway it just feels really hard to pretend it's anything other than trying to force upgrades people would be happy without. OCLP has done a good job for a couple of homework Macs, I might see about Windows licenses for those when they finally stop getting patches. I'd feel worse for anyone that bought the Intel Mac Pro last year before it got taken off sale (although I'm not sure how many did). That's got to really feel like a kick in the teeth given the price of those things.
- methodical 2y ago
  While I mostly agree with your point of Apple being rather aggressive with forced upgrading, I don't think the device requirements for these features were based solely on the desire to push out people with older devices, but rather due to the hardware requirements for a lot of the ML/AI features being based on the Apple Silicon, at least for the Mac side of things. As to why they drew the line at the iPhone 15, perhaps it's a similar reason regarding performance requirements. While obviously, I'm not intimately knowledgeable of their basis for the device requirements, I'd wait a few more years to see how the device requirements for these new features cascade. If they continue requiring newer and newer devices, only supporting the trailing generation or so, then I'd agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.
  - guhcampos 2y ago
ants_everywhere 2y ago
That's actually exactly what you want. No one company should know what you do on all apps.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  At this point, I trust {insert megacorp} more than {insert App Dev LLC} + {insert megacorp}. Neither is great, but at least the megacorp has a financial incentive to maintain some of my privacy.
  - Sai_ 2y ago
    I don't quite understand this comment. Are you encouraging us to use your comment as some sort of template and insert our own preferred corporate names? Sounds like some crazy level of meta where your brilliance is applicable to any pair of mega corps...which I don't buy.
bbor 2y ago
Well tbf I’m not sure Google does project ownership… I was shocked how many seemingly important conversations ended with “well, I guess these days that functionality is owned by the community of relevant stakeholders…” (aka: owned by nobody at all). I think they’re only able to do what they’ve done through the sheer concentration of brilliant overpaid engineers, in spite of such “innovation”. Totally agree on the AI points. Google may have incredible research, but Apple clearly is playing to their strengths here.
jerieljan 2y ago
For Google in particular, this was honestly something they could've done far earlier. They had the Pixel phones, they had the Tensor stuff, and then Gemini came along. But for some reason, they decided to just stick to feature tidbits here and there and chose not to roll out quality-of-life UI features to make Gemini use easier on normal apps and not just select Google apps. And then it's also limited by various factors. They were obviously testing the waters and were just as cautious, but imho it was a damn shame. Even summarization and key points would've been nice if I could invoke it on any text field. But yeah, this is truly the ecosystem benefit in full force here for Apple, and they're making good use of it.
- smileysteve 2y ago
  Google couldn't figure out which messaging platform of theirs would succeed; imagine if the team working on hangouts or meet v1 had worked on RCS or context first. RCS isn't fair, Google wanted the carriers to work on that, but in a disparate ecosystem they also couldn't come to a decision
- kaba0 2y ago
  Android CPUs are not playing in the same ballpark as Apple’s, there is always at least one generation difference between - and the core of these AI features is on-device intelligence, possibly by having managed to fit a good chunk of an LLM to an iphone. It being able to determine when to go online is the crucial part. Also, apple bought up more ML startups than google or microsoft.
tstrimple 2y ago
Microsoft is trying and I feel they are in a much stronger position than Google. The same advantage that Apple has for personal docs and images Microsoft has across business content. Seamless AI integration across teams and outlook and sharepoint and other office products offer huge platform benefits.
- kaba0 2y ago
  What personal data do you have on Microsoft? It doesn’t even know where my photos are as the folder structure is at the end completely arbitrary - how could it execute “call the person on this photo”, and similar level of integration? This Apple AI presupposes their strong ecosystem, which no one has anything similar to. Google was in a good position years ago, but they are criminally unfocused nowadays.
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    I know reading comprehension is difficult based on the overall quality of internet content these days. But I explicitly called out the business data Microsoft has in this domain. So why does Microsoft’s control of personal data factor into this at all? Do you have anything of value to add? Did you even bother to read what you are responding to? But sure. Go off on your anti Microsoft rant completely disconnected from the topic at hand.
tempestn 2y ago
Neither is Apple unless one buys wholly into the Apple ecosystem. I want open ai tools that I can truly use with all my text. But I'm not holding my breath.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  "Open tools" and "Integration" is really hard to do. I'd _love_ to be able to pull down my email from Fastmail, Calendars from iCal, notes from Google Notes etc to a single LLM for me to ask questions from, but it would require all of the different sources to have a proper API to fetch the data from. Apple already has all it on device and targeted by ML models since multiple iPhone versions ago. Now they just slapped a natural language model on top of it.
dwighttk 2y ago
How long until the EU decides that making this a platform capability is a fineable offense?
epolanski 2y ago
Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to? Anyway, while I see all of your points, none of the things I've read in the news make me excited. Recapping meetings or long emails or suggesting how to write are just...not major concerns to me at least.
- themadturk 2y ago
  >suggesting how to write As a(n amateur) fiction writer who pays too much for ProWritingAid each year, I'd love to see if this feature is any good for fiction. I take very, very few of PWA's AI-suggested rewrites, but they often help me see my own new version of a bit of prose.
- kelsey98765431 2y ago
  "Anyone serious about software should be making their own hardware - Alan Kay" - Steve Jobs
- sunaookami 2y ago
  >Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to? https://crmtipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ms-org-chart.png https://crmtipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ms-org...
- ethbr1 2y ago
  I've heard Microsoft has gotten better, but I think this still rings true. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/internal_structure_of_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
- dagw 2y ago
  Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to? Microsoft seems to have lost all internal cohesion and the ability to focus the entire company in one direction. It's just a collection of dozens of small fiefdoms only caring about hitting their own narrow KPIs with no overall strategic vision. Just look at the mess of competing interest that Windows 11 and Edge have turned into.
  - 2y ago
vjulian 2y ago
Could you please explain ‘lay bare organisational deficiencies’? I ask without skepticism.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  I assume they mean: expose internal corporate silos/VP-fiefdoms that don't work seamlessly together despite being marketed under the same brand
  - dmix 2y ago
    Google is quite notorious for having this issue from various blog posts and HN comments I've read. Lots of middle management power groups that would prevent a cohesive top down vision from easily being adopted.
    - ljm 2y ago
      The same as any enterprise company. It’s all office politics and bureaucracy. Make no mistake, Google is Enterprise.
    - yen223 2y ago
      This is the norm, not the exception for big companies. The more I spend time in mid-large companies, the more I'm amazed that that Apple somehow managed to avoid releasing three different messaging apps that do the same thing.
    - drevil-v2 2y ago
      Now it makes sense why Elon Musk trims the fat on his companies ruthlessly and regularly
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Most companies don't have an unified platform they can build this on. And even if they seem to have superficially, the internal organisation is so splintered that it'll never happen. Like what's going on inside Google, it's getting stupidly political and infighty. If someone tries to build a comprehensive LLM that touches on gmail, youtube, docs, sheets etc, it's going to be an uphill battle.

by ethbr1 2y ago

TreetopPlace 2y ago

"AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`' Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.

parl_match 2y ago
For what it's worth, those platform investments are the difference between Apple being applauded for this, and Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.
olddustytrail 2y ago
[flagged]
- practicemaths 2y ago
  [flagged]
- abhpro 2y ago
  That might be "trust" in a relative sense
cchance 2y ago
Have to agree, apple seems to put a really strong emphasis above all else on your shit is your shit and we don't want to see it.
- m463 2y ago
  But this is not true. that's the thing. Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time. ios gives you zero control (all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it) Apple uses your data. you should be able to say no. And as for your data, they do other things too, a different way. Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to icloud. I've seem privacy minded parents say no, but then they get their kid an iphone and all of their stuff goes to icloud. I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data icloud.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    A key difference is that Apple isn’t then selling the info it has on you to advertisers. I don’t think any large tech company is morally good, but I trust Apple the most out of the big ones to not do anything nefarious with my info.
    - tsunamifury 2y ago
      They absolutely are. And they give it to governments upon request. Their privacy stories are marketing first.
      - rootusrootus 2y ago
        They are selling data to advertisers? I would like to know more about that.
        mgiampapa 2y ago
        Google isn't. They are the advertising engine and sell to advertisers for reach, just like Facebook does. I trust Apple about as far as I can throw them too. They are inherently anti-consumer rights everywhere in their ecosystem. The "Privacy" angle is just PR.
harry8 2y ago
> "I trust Apple..." I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing. The even more terrible part is I'm sure it's common. And so via network externalities the rest of us who do NOT trust any of these companies on the basis that all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways, will get locked into this lunacy. I now can't deal with the government without a smartphone controlled by either google or apple. No other choice. Because this utter insanity isn't being loudly called out, spat upon, and generally treated with the withering contempt that these companies have so richly and roundly earned this decision is being made for all society by the most naive among us.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  What government needs you to have a smartphone from Apple or Google?
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    The Australian Government required you to have an app called MyGovID to do you business taxes and other administrative tasks. This app is only Apple or Android, there is no web interface.
    - kolinko 2y ago
      That’s crazy. Why no web interface? In Poland for taxes we have a web interface that is mobile and stationary, and for many other things it’s a choice between an app and web and paper.
      - jay_kyburz 2y ago
        The tax part is all web, it just mandatory 2 factor authentication to login that requires the app.
anileated 2y ago
Since Apple is building ChatGPT integration into its devices, it’s clear that Apple’s users’ data is going to be slurped by Microsoft via ClosedAI servers now. It’s unlikely latency would permit them to proxy every request to fully mask end-user IPs (it’s unclear what “obscured” means), and they would probably include device identifiers and let Microsoft maintain your shadow profile if that could improve ChatGPT output (it may not require literally storing your every request, so denying that is weasel phrasing).
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I’ve been browsing with Private Relay since the day it became available. What’s this intolerable latency you’re talking about?
  - anileated 2y ago
    Browsing is not the same as using a personal assistant. First, it takes much less compute to serve a page than to run an LLM query. LLMs are slow even if you eliminate all network. Second, your expectations when browsing are not the same as when using a personal assistant. Right now even when I simply ask Siri to set a timer it takes more than a couple of seconds. Add an actual GPT in the mix and it’s laughable. In any case, even with a private relay, Apple’s phrasing does not deny sending device identifiers and allowing ClosedAI/Microsoft to build your shadow profile (without storing requests verbatim).
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Nope, you’re moving the goalposts. You were talking about the latency of making a network call. I pointed out that Apple’s current proxying architecture has low latency for web browsing, with orders of magnitude larger requests moving through it. We’re not going to bring GPT slowness into the mix because that’s not what we were discussing.
      - anileated 2y ago
        No, I meant the cumulative latency that increases with every hop. You can’t fool physics. Not proxying is just faster and in case of an already super-slow server these seconds matter to any UX designer worth their salt.
4m1rk 2y ago
Google is not trusted because it was an AI company and needed your data. Apple just joined the club.
bayindirh 2y ago
When enrolling physical security keys to my accounts, only Google's process requested extra, identifiable fields in my key, generating a warning in Firefox, which can anonymize these fields. Google wants to track even my physical security key across sites to track me. How can I trust their AI systems with my data?
- dwaite 2y ago
  The attestation on (FIDO certified) security keys is a batch attestation, and meant to correspond to a a batch size of at least 100,000. So they were effectively asking for the make and model. There are non-certified authenticators which may have unfortunate behaviors here, such as having attestations containing a hardware serial number. Some browsers maintain a list and will simply block attestations from these authenticators. Some will prompt no matter what. There is also a bit of an 'Open Web' philosophy at play here - websites often do not have a reason to make security decisions around the make and models of keys. Having an additional prompt in a user conversion path discourages asking for information they don't need, particularly information which could be used to give some users a worse experience and some vendors a strong 'first-mover' market advantage. In fact, the motivator for asking for this attestation is often for self-service account management. If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone. Many parties (including Google) seem to have moved to using an AAGUID lookup table to populate this screen in order to avoid the attestation prompt. It also winds up being more reliable, as software authenticators typically do not provide attestations today.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Both devices are Yubikey 5 series, and none of the other services asked for anything similar, or triggered any warnings. Moreover, none of the service providers auto-named my keys with make/model, etc. > If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone. First, Google doesn't differentiate the security keys' name even if you allow for that data to be read, plus you can always rename your keys to anything you want, at any of the service providers I enrolled my keys, so it doesn't make sense. Moreover, Firefox didn't warn me for any other services which I enrolled my keys, and none of them are small providers by any means. So, it doesn't add up much.
jeswin 2y ago
> I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI... Depends on where you are. Apple will bend over backwards when profits are affected, as you can see in China. Ironically, the only time a large company took a stand at the cost of profits was in 2010 when Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor. Google has changed since then, but that was the high watermark for corporates putting principles over profits. Apple, no.
- dwaite 2y ago
  > Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor My impression is that they had little chance to survive in a Chinese market, competing with a severely limited product against state-sponsored search products while also being a victim of state-sponsored cyberattacks. It was the morally correct decision, but I don't know if they were leaving any money on the table doing so. I suspect the Google of today would also decide not to shovel cash into an incinerator.

ManuelKiessling 2y ago

It’s ironic how the one company that is WAY over the top wrt secrecy — not only to the public, but also and especially internally (they’ve even walled the hardware team from the software team while developing the iPhone!) — is at the same time the one company that really nails integration.

xethos 2y ago
People will scoff and say "Yeah, but all kinds of companies have internal firewalls, big deal". But no, these were literal walls that would appear over a weekend and suddenly part of the campus was off-limits to those not on the iPhone project.
- kolinko 2y ago
  Wow. Any place to read about that?
  - gumby 2y ago
    Any book about the development of the iphone or articles in the business press from a few months after product introduction (if any are still online…try Fortune).
  - xethos 2y ago
    I found it in Fred Vogelstein's "Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution" [0]. Decent read, not amazing IMO, but with fun tidbits about the iPhone / Android launches [0] https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=60B714243482AE3D7B9A83B52F7BED02 https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=60B714243482AE3D7B9A83B...
- kudokatz 2y ago
  I heard they did this for the Amazon Fire Phone, too
Jtsummers 2y ago
The key difference is that Apple (as an organization) appears to have an overarching roadmap (that spans multiple product lines). The secrecy is irrelevant as long as the leadership of each division is aligned (it hurts, but does not prevent success). Google, MS, and others are less organized at the top, so subdivisions of the overall org are left to plan for themselves and between each other, which leads to conflicts. Resolution may be achieved when things get pushed high enough, but only if it surfaces at the top for a leader (if such people exist in their org structure) to declare a resolution and focus for the groups involved.

highwaylights 2y ago

Ironically, I feel like Apple might have lost me as a customer today. It won't matter to Apple, obviously, but so much of what they showed today I just felt was actively pushing me out of the ecosystem. I first bought some devices for myself, then those devices got handed off to family when I upgraded, and now we're at a point where we still use all of the devices we bought to date - but the arbitrary obsolescence hammer came down fairly hard today with the intel cut-off and the iPhone 15+ requirement for the AI features. This isn't new for Apple, they've been aging perfectly usable devices out of support for years. We'll be fine for now, but patch support is only partial for devices on less-than-latest major releases so I likely need to replace a lot of stuff in the next couple of years and it would be way too expensive to do this whole thing again. I'll also really begrudge doing it, as the devices we have suit us just fine. Some of it I can live without (most of the AI features they showed today), but for the parts that are sending off to the cloud anyway it just feels really hard to pretend it's anything other than trying to force upgrades people would be happy without. OCLP has done a good job for a couple of homework Macs, I might see about Windows licenses for those when they finally stop getting patches. I'd feel worse for anyone that bought the Intel Mac Pro last year before it got taken off sale (although I'm not sure how many did). That's got to really feel like a kick in the teeth given the price of those things.

methodical 2y ago
While I mostly agree with your point of Apple being rather aggressive with forced upgrading, I don't think the device requirements for these features were based solely on the desire to push out people with older devices, but rather due to the hardware requirements for a lot of the ML/AI features being based on the Apple Silicon, at least for the Mac side of things. As to why they drew the line at the iPhone 15, perhaps it's a similar reason regarding performance requirements. While obviously, I'm not intimately knowledgeable of their basis for the device requirements, I'd wait a few more years to see how the device requirements for these new features cascade. If they continue requiring newer and newer devices, only supporting the trailing generation or so, then I'd agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.
- guhcampos 2y ago

ants_everywhere 2y ago

That's actually exactly what you want. No one company should know what you do on all apps.

ethbr1 2y ago
At this point, I trust {insert megacorp} more than {insert App Dev LLC} + {insert megacorp}. Neither is great, but at least the megacorp has a financial incentive to maintain some of my privacy.
- Sai_ 2y ago
  I don't quite understand this comment. Are you encouraging us to use your comment as some sort of template and insert our own preferred corporate names? Sounds like some crazy level of meta where your brilliance is applicable to any pair of mega corps...which I don't buy.

bbor 2y ago

Well tbf I’m not sure Google does project ownership… I was shocked how many seemingly important conversations ended with “well, I guess these days that functionality is owned by the community of relevant stakeholders…” (aka: owned by nobody at all). I think they’re only able to do what they’ve done through the sheer concentration of brilliant overpaid engineers, in spite of such “innovation”. Totally agree on the AI points. Google may have incredible research, but Apple clearly is playing to their strengths here.

jerieljan 2y ago

For Google in particular, this was honestly something they could've done far earlier. They had the Pixel phones, they had the Tensor stuff, and then Gemini came along. But for some reason, they decided to just stick to feature tidbits here and there and chose not to roll out quality-of-life UI features to make Gemini use easier on normal apps and not just select Google apps. And then it's also limited by various factors. They were obviously testing the waters and were just as cautious, but imho it was a damn shame. Even summarization and key points would've been nice if I could invoke it on any text field. But yeah, this is truly the ecosystem benefit in full force here for Apple, and they're making good use of it.

smileysteve 2y ago
Google couldn't figure out which messaging platform of theirs would succeed; imagine if the team working on hangouts or meet v1 had worked on RCS or context first. RCS isn't fair, Google wanted the carriers to work on that, but in a disparate ecosystem they also couldn't come to a decision
kaba0 2y ago
Android CPUs are not playing in the same ballpark as Apple’s, there is always at least one generation difference between - and the core of these AI features is on-device intelligence, possibly by having managed to fit a good chunk of an LLM to an iphone. It being able to determine when to go online is the crucial part. Also, apple bought up more ML startups than google or microsoft.

tstrimple 2y ago

Microsoft is trying and I feel they are in a much stronger position than Google. The same advantage that Apple has for personal docs and images Microsoft has across business content. Seamless AI integration across teams and outlook and sharepoint and other office products offer huge platform benefits.

kaba0 2y ago
What personal data do you have on Microsoft? It doesn’t even know where my photos are as the folder structure is at the end completely arbitrary - how could it execute “call the person on this photo”, and similar level of integration? This Apple AI presupposes their strong ecosystem, which no one has anything similar to. Google was in a good position years ago, but they are criminally unfocused nowadays.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  I know reading comprehension is difficult based on the overall quality of internet content these days. But I explicitly called out the business data Microsoft has in this domain. So why does Microsoft’s control of personal data factor into this at all? Do you have anything of value to add? Did you even bother to read what you are responding to? But sure. Go off on your anti Microsoft rant completely disconnected from the topic at hand.

tempestn 2y ago

Neither is Apple unless one buys wholly into the Apple ecosystem. I want open ai tools that I can truly use with all my text. But I'm not holding my breath.

theshrike79 2y ago
"Open tools" and "Integration" is really hard to do. I'd _love_ to be able to pull down my email from Fastmail, Calendars from iCal, notes from Google Notes etc to a single LLM for me to ask questions from, but it would require all of the different sources to have a proper API to fetch the data from. Apple already has all it on device and targeted by ML models since multiple iPhone versions ago. Now they just slapped a natural language model on top of it.

dwighttk 2y ago

How long until the EU decides that making this a platform capability is a fineable offense?

epolanski 2y ago

Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to? Anyway, while I see all of your points, none of the things I've read in the news make me excited. Recapping meetings or long emails or suggesting how to write are just...not major concerns to me at least.

themadturk 2y ago
>suggesting how to write As a(n amateur) fiction writer who pays too much for ProWritingAid each year, I'd love to see if this feature is any good for fiction. I take very, very few of PWA's AI-suggested rewrites, but they often help me see my own new version of a bit of prose.
kelsey98765431 2y ago
"Anyone serious about software should be making their own hardware - Alan Kay" - Steve Jobs
sunaookami 2y ago
>Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to? https://crmtipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ms-org-chart.png https://crmtipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ms-org...
ethbr1 2y ago
I've heard Microsoft has gotten better, but I think this still rings true. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/internal_structure_of_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
dagw 2y ago
Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to? Microsoft seems to have lost all internal cohesion and the ability to focus the entire company in one direction. It's just a collection of dozens of small fiefdoms only caring about hitting their own narrow KPIs with no overall strategic vision. Just look at the mess of competing interest that Windows 11 and Edge have turned into.
- 2y ago

vjulian 2y ago

Could you please explain ‘lay bare organisational deficiencies’? I ask without skepticism.

ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
I assume they mean: expose internal corporate silos/VP-fiefdoms that don't work seamlessly together despite being marketed under the same brand
- dmix 2y ago
  Google is quite notorious for having this issue from various blog posts and HN comments I've read. Lots of middle management power groups that would prevent a cohesive top down vision from easily being adopted.
  - ljm 2y ago
    The same as any enterprise company. It’s all office politics and bureaucracy. Make no mistake, Google is Enterprise.
  - yen223 2y ago
    This is the norm, not the exception for big companies. The more I spend time in mid-large companies, the more I'm amazed that that Apple somehow managed to avoid releasing three different messaging apps that do the same thing.
  - drevil-v2 2y ago
    Now it makes sense why Elon Musk trims the fat on his companies ruthlessly and regularly
theshrike79 2y ago
Most companies don't have an unified platform they can build this on. And even if they seem to have superficially, the internal organisation is so splintered that it'll never happen. Like what's going on inside Google, it's getting stupidly political and infighty. If someone tries to build a comprehensive LLM that touches on gmail, youtube, docs, sheets etc, it's going to be an uphill battle.