8 ms·

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of

• datadeft 2y ago
  True. I would love to have less features in MacOS actually. We are approaching Windows start menu level of crap being installed by default.
  • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    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.
    • windward 2y ago
      As a user it feels disrespectful to be so overtly treated as an untapped revenue stream for a premium-price product. It's Samsung-esque.
      • rchaud 2y ago
        None of my Samsung phones have ever advertised anything to me. Unlike iOS,there are any number of music player apps on Android that stay out of the way and don't try to be a "platform".
        • samtheprogram 2y ago
          > None of my Samsung phones have ever advertised anything to me. I had a Galaxy S8. It definitely did. > Unlike iOS,there are any number of music player apps on Android that stay out of the way and don't try to be a "platform". iOS has other music players too. It was a choice that e.g. doubleTwist stopped supporting iOS when pivoting to CloudPlayer.
          • rchaud 2y ago
            Galaxy S8 came out in 2017, almost a decade ago. I understand some budget and mid-range phones have ads, but I (in Canada) have used everything from S7, S8, S12, A51, Z Fold 3, and have never gotten one. There was a "Samsung Hub" app on the midrange A51 (similar to Google Discover), but that can be disabled.
            • samtheprogram 2y ago
              You have never been encouraged to use Bixby or any other Samsung app? Let’s define “ad”.
    • philistine 2y ago
      Please for the love of everything, go in Settings and turn it off. https://www.howtoisolve.com/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-apple-music-on-iphone-music-app/ https://www.howtoisolve.com/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-apple...
      • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
        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.
        • philistine 2y ago
          You’re wrong. It displays Apple Music, then when you search it only pulls data from what it has access to, which are the free radio stations inside Apple Music.
• jonplackett 2y ago
  They need to stop shooting for the moon and just release some incremental improvements. Like you say, Siri is borderline completely useless. Just timers for me. Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement. They even have this ChatGPT integration that Siri seems totally incapable of using in any meaningful way.
  • tokioyoyo 2y ago
    I might be completely wrong, but by making “pro-privacy bets”, they shot themselves in the foot. Average customer ended up really not caring about the benefits that we try to promote, which hinders the development and features in some sense. Also, it’s still a pain for them to integrate AI in their second biggest market — China.
    • Culonavirus 2y ago
      Maybe go all in on local on device low latency LLMs? They make their own hardware so they could probably do it and do it well with enough focus and investment.
      • rusk 2y ago
        No reason why most apps couldn’t be cloud hosted and devote all the significant local edge compute to such a digital companion.
        • iainmerrick 2y ago
          That seems like the opposite of what they were suggesting? Unless by “edge compute” you meant user’s devices, but I assume you intended the usual meaning of CDN edges.
          • rusk 2y ago
            No I meant user’s device. It’s the edge of the application space.
• diggan 2y ago
  > Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it. Well, apparently some people have at least some expectations, after Apple pushed ads touting Siri's new abilities (and Apple AI) but failed to launch them on time, and now Apple been hit with a federal lawsuit against them: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/apple-suit-false-advertising-ai-intelligence https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/apple-suit-false-advertisin...
  • samtheprogram 2y ago
    I’m one of them. I saw demos at _last year’s_ WWDC that I’ve been excited to get. And now with this announcement I don’t think that will happen before this year’s event.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Last year’s “demos” weren’t demos, but concept videos. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t happen this year nor next year, to the level implied by the ads. Incidentally, what the original Siri ads showed also never materialized.
    • basisword 2y ago
      Never mind this year's event - it's going to be multiple years before they have something of the quality they 'demoed' last year. They rushed some great concept videos and then thought they could actually build them in less than a year. And sold $1k+ devices based on it. I'd honestly say this is a bigger disaster than Apple Maps. At least in that case they were forced into doing something really big really quick (because Google was crippling the iOS Maps app). In this case Apple didn't need to do any AI. Absolutely nothing they have shipped is useful or innovative. It's one of the rare times they've followed the market instead of waiting to do it right. At the minute, it's not any better than the co-pilot rubbish MS have shoved into Windows. Edit: I wonder if this will force them back to live events? Live demos are at least more believable and might win them back some trust.
  • drewg123 2y ago
    I was hoping for more from the new Siri, but its just awful for me. Latest example: My wife and I were watching Jeopardy late at night, and Pol Pot came up. I asked Siri something like "Siri, tell me about Pol Pot" and instead, it heard "Siri, Call Scott", and rang my friend at 1am.
• JimDabell 2y ago
  Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else in charge of software who will actually change the way they do things.
  • kossTKR 2y ago
    Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f? Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..
    • ramesh31 2y ago
      >Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? It died 14 years ago.
      • JKCalhoun 2y ago
        I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its downsides too. I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse the more successful it became. Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.
        • scarface_74 2y ago
          You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt? Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.
          • 2y ago
• neximo64 2y ago
  The issue is without Scott Forstall its rubbish, process over substance & Tim Cook empowered that change to keep everyone happy.
• ed_mercer 2y ago
  Literally the only time I ever use Siri is to set a timer. That is, if I’m lucky and she actually understands me. It’s such an embarrassment in 2025.
  • stackedinserter 2y ago
    Probably there's more, but expectations are so low that I don't even want to try.
  • mplanchard 2y ago
    This is also one of my only uses of Siri, and the only one it gets right the large majority of the time. I also try to use it to se reminders in the future, but it’s a crapshoot whether it will get the date and/or reminder text correct. I may be remembering incorrectly, but I honestly think it was better when it was released years ago than it is today.
    • pesus 2y ago
      > I may be remembering incorrectly, but I honestly think it was better when it was released years ago than it is today. I think you're remembering correctly. Siri used to work much better for basic tasks, and didn't seem to randomly fail for no discernible reason. I can't remember what iOS updates changed things, but there were at least a few that absolutely degraded Siri's functionality. One that stuck out to me was when Siri was one day suddenly unable to correctly respond to "play all songs shuffled" - it worked fine for years, but after an update, just decided it couldn't do that anymore.
  • el_benhameen 2y ago
    My favorite is asking it to set a timer for n minutes, seeing the timer start and assuming it’s good, and only later realizing that it actually started a timer for n hours or n days. Learned that lesson with some burnt cookies.
  • ein0p 2y ago
    Especially embarrassing when OpenAI's Advanced Voice can easily understand mixed-language contemporary slang on arbitrary topics, and even convincingly simulate it in the output. It can also do this at any volume, with "uhs" and "ahs", interruptions, corrections, and ignoring the accent.
• heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half. The concrete value-measure for me is whether I would feel any loss as a user if Siri simply disappeared. The answer is no, I would feel no loss. But this is also true for me if the subject is Gemini, CoPilot, Alexa, &c. For all the money and energy burned, for all the advertising babble and grotesque valuation, I would not as a user be one jot less productive if the invisible Thanos hand of the market made them all disappear at the end of this sentence.
  • mtrovo 2y ago
    As an Android user I have to disagree, at least if we're comparing apples to apples (could not resist the pun). Google Assistant with Gemini (or whatever its name is this month) is really remarkable at helping with mundane tasks, and I would really miss it if it were gone. Circle to search, asking questions about my agenda, and setting up new events on my calendar based simply on taking photos of documents or posters is so convenient that I really buy the concept of having an AI personal assistant. And because this is a very sticky feature when delivered properly, if Apple is not involved it gives a very strong competitive advantage to Android flagships.
    • heresie-dabord 2y ago
      It's not so much a question of disagreement. The fact that you have found value as a user is fine by me, of course! Maybe your use-cases should be captured by the Siri development team. If Siri has been useless for more than a decade, that also means that many users are barely using it, if at all. I'm not the only user of a system containing such applications that has found zero concrete value in them.
      • dboreham 2y ago
        Which voice assistants are useful?
  • samatman 2y ago
    My life would rapidly fall apart. I use Siri for about three things: timers, reminders, and asking about the weather. But the reminders are mission critical. I use the watch, and any time my flighty brain hits on something, I set a reminder for it on the spot. I literally couldn't get along without it. The only killer feature of Siri is accurate voice transcription, and that's all I need (and it could be more accurate, I just get used to comical translations when I use a rare word). I guess I wouldn't mind if it were better, but I don't need it to be. Reminders are enough.
• mrtksn 2y ago
  Don't you think that maybe the issues are rooted in the Apple's attempt to do everything by itself? All things considered Apple actually delivers some great software, Apple is one of the few companies that built their own operating systems, their software UX is considered to be the gold standard. They pulled architecture transition processes that required great software engineering alongside with the hardware engineering and they did it amazingly well. Apple's success in some areas suggests that the failure in other areas doesn't have to be about software development culture but simply wrong bets or policies. Apple tomorrow can become the best platform for anything AI, they just have to open up their platform and let people on the cutting edge of AI to take over some functions. IMHO Apple's greed is failing them. That revenue growth in the "Services" category on their quarterly reports is their Achilles heel. Locking down users on their platforms allows them access to a "market without competition" but there's actually a competition happening outside of this walled garden and that competition is fierce. People in the garden start thinking that maybe the grass is greener beyond the fence. Ironically, there's a possibility EU saving them from themselves if they stop being just compliant enough to hold up in court and embrace the spirit of what DMA is trying to do. Throw a tantrum on EU and say that the lost revenue was because of the evil EU thingy and save this great brands and great company.
  • codr7 2y ago
    They're very good at marketing, I'm beginning to believe that's all they're doing well these days.
    • hylaride 2y ago
      They've been very good at marketing, but it was often backed by good products. I still remember the feeling of getting my first MacOS X machine and what a breadth of fresh air it was. No drama or window focus stealing and a stable OS with relatively modern software that even had access to a POSIX shell! Wireless networking was simple, but you could still do advanced stuff! But in those days apple was the underdog and HAD to do good by their users or there was no reason people would switch. Now it feels like their first thought is how they can monetize every step of the way - they're turning into Disney in that sense. There's often little money in fixing bugs anymore.
• behnamoh 2y ago
  > It’s not a big deal if it remains so for another half a decade. Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it. But when Apple advertises literally all their new devices as "Built for Apple Intelligence" without actually delivering on that promise, that's just false advertising.
  • saghm 2y ago
    Wouldn't it be easier to just stop saying that rather than trying to let the marketing language drive the engineering goals?
• tehlike 2y ago
  I am curious how data driven apple teams are. Any ideas there?
• georgeburdell 2y ago
  >Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations His delivery is too perfect and makes him sound like a really good text to speech program. It’s off-putting. The only other person I’ve heard that has this presentation style is David Miscavige. Perhaps some analogies could be made…
• deergomoo 2y ago
  Apple doesn't fix bugs†, they just eventually replace the feature or ship a different way of doing the same thing, whose bugs hopefully don't overlap those of the first feature. We're on Sequoia 15.3.2 now and the keyboard shortcuts of the big new window tiling feature still don't work on non-Apple keyboards (or Apple keyboards, if you happen to have remapped the globe key to something else, like Caps Lock). † Hyperbole, in case it wasn't obvious