Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”
Good thing I never have, not ever will have any iPhone or Apple product. Personally I hate this walled garden concept.
Never anything good comes out of a ‘walled garden’ historically.
For current example: https://vger.to/aussie.zone/post/38263078
yep. fuck apple.
your link is dead for me fyi. just says:
Oops! An unexpected error occurred.
Same same
The latest iOS update was just slop. If you’re in Europe there are no tangible improvements since the slop isn’t allowed here.
I’ve been so frustrated with iOS 27. I spent an hour disabling as much AI shit as I could only for it to be reversed on the next update.
If it doesn’t settle down I’ll be looking into alternatives for my next device.
I haven’t bothered to update. Don’t really see the point as nothing new is added.
That’s fair. I think it’s habitual for me to be an early adopter and I’m finding that lately to be less desirable than it used to be.
So long as older versions continue to get security patches I’d say stay put.
So, over the last couple or years, Samsung has been updating the OS of my Galaxy Smartphone repeatedly. With each iteration more and more AI features have appeared as new buttons with ambiguous icons.
Using AI features on my phone requires opening a Samsung account so it cat track my token use. This requires providing personal information, and making up a password I will remember since the Samsung account app isn’t compatible with password managers (except Samsung’s proprietary manager, which I do not use). I also anticipate Samsung will want a credit card number to quietly charge me as I use compute.
I haven’t made a Samsung account.
And so all these buttons with weird icons are now productivity potholes, since tapping any of them accidentally switches me to the create a Samsung account page, interrupting my workflow.
Like tyranny, enshitification is more about incompetence than malevolence.
This is why I left OnePlus for iPhone
Really hoping for a competent Linux to show up in the US market but I’m not holding my breath. At this point, just trying to pick the least shitty device
Can’t you use a different launcher? Samsung launcher has always been shit. I had a misfortune of using Samsung phone 10 years ago or so and even then it was excellent hardware mated to absolute trash software that slowed everything down.
Not OP, but I still haven’t found anything worthy of replacing (the now radioactive) Nova Launcher
I switched to octopi launcher
The software has gotten a LOT better since 10 years ago. They also offer much longer updates. I still use a third party launcher with mine, but the default has become less offensive than back then.
Samsung has also been taking away bootloader unlocking so you can’t escape without buying something else.
“John Ternus will be great for Apple because he’s an engineer”
A society that refuses to mix ethics with STEM: hold my beer…
Seriously, being an engineer or working on or in something doesn’t automatically make you the best leadership choice automatically. Ethics are kind of an important thing America continues to gloss over at an alarming rate.
Funny. In my 1986 college freshman year I was required to take an ethics for engineers course. They told us working for the military industrial complex was bad.
Curiously, the MIC was hiring and was where the well-paying jobs were at the time. Also, the field was impacted thanks to decades of cold war STEM push.
And there you get the contrived desperation, that drove studying engineers students into Lockheed, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas like Russian girls into Epstein’s sex spa for billionaires.
It turns out you can’t eat ethics. Although I still find myself judging ICE recruits.
Unfortunately ethics is kinda one of those major pillars that separates us from the other animals in the kingdom.
There is no real freedom for ethics under capitalism. Like technically there is, you can go live selflessly like a monk and quite a few people do, but you’ll bump in the bars of your cage all the time.
I agree, which is why those with power like to structure society so that we have to act against principle and according to loyalty to survive.
We like to imagine a differently shaped society run on rules guided by ethics, but so far power consolidates and those systems get perverted.
Yeah. Animals are way more ethical.
If there is anything worse than getting into a pyramid scheme is getting late into a pyramid scheme
Google got in late to .com
And look at them now. The anti-privacy slophole company!
he not only he is pushing for a bad idea, he clearly missed the memo that Apple was mostly unaffected precisely because they had been slow to adopt AI
They where jot slow they pushed really hard but failed to execute. I love how everyone seems to forget that.
they skipped burning infinity billions on training useless models and building data centres.
Apple very much did want to invest into AI development, but the financial department - which used to be Cook’s department before he became CEO - repeatedly denied allocating money for buying GPUs, and told the engineers to ‘just use the old ones’.
At that point, the ‘old ones’ were several years old, and in quantity about 1% of what Microsoft or Google had at the time.
Apple never ‘chose’ to wait with AI. It chose to be run by businessmen, who are always clueless, and who will always make terrible decisions. Though in this case it happened to have temporarily positive or neutral consequences for the users.
repeatedly denied allocating money for buying GPUs, and told the engineers to ‘just use the old ones’.
What’s the source for this story? Seems wild finance was able to make a top level strategic decision like that
Apple Explained published a fairly thorough video on the failure of Apple Intelligence, and it’s covered there.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRLvC0kd2jk
Unfortunately he doesn’t provide sources, but usually shows articles, so you can easily find them. The original sources there were leaks iirc.
Well I want the source, but finance has usually ran the show. They are the ones with the checkbook after all.
They didn’t “fail”, they just realized the technology was not ready. This was made very clear through many public blunders. And they didn’t want to just ram it down people’s throats like their competitors.
Keep in mind Apple has a poorly documented and mostly unknown daemon called knowledgeconstructiond that cannot be turned off and solely exists to profile you based on accessing every Apple apps data - ical, messages, mail, photos etc, which is astoundingly personal info especially considering a lot of Apple users dump everything into stock apps, as the “strength” of Apple has typically been consistency of the platform
https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-personal-knowledge-graph
The person who wrote that article vibecoded an app that allows you to visualize the data captured: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow
It is basically all the gross shit that ad networks do. What does Apple do with this data, that has been aggregated since macos 13? Officially it’s probably to “enhance the user experience” but at a minimum it probably changes how Apple delivers ads to you. do they sell it? Who knows
I tested after reading that article, and I was able to Force Quit any of those daemons’ processes just in the Activity Monitor on os 15 Sequoia. They’ll probably respawn at reboot, but they are just user processes that can be killed so I bet you could run a login script to kill them each time you reboot and log in. I had already turned off all the Siri AI options and every single one of dozens of “learn from this app” toggles hidden in Settings.
This is without disabling SIP also
Sometimes I swear the job of CEO seems to be the easiest ever. Just follow whatever’s trending now. Seems so easy: start your day, see all headlines say “AI”, order a few people to put “AI” everywhere, sit back, relax and rack profits from investors who are just as brain dead.
That’s because your mental image of a CEO is these big dogs. You will never read a story about a CEO doing a great job, only dumb fucks like Musk make the news.
That’s a fair point.
With the possible exception of this guy, assuming that one can be a good CEO and a bad boss.
To be fair, they can’t just sit back, they also have to have a lot of meetings that could have been emails.
Funny story. I once worked at a company where I got along very well with my boss so I’d regularly get some gossip about the higher ups. One time my boss had a meeting (or rather multiple meeting) with the higher ups to go over the quarterly goals for the department. They had created the goals, had a presentation and all they needed was for the higher ups to give the okay to continue. Fairly simple thing, except every meeting was completely derailed by the CEO and his incessant need to discuss fishing. And because the higher ups were all buddies they all started discussing fishing and boating etc. After 4 failed meeting to get a simple Yes my boss sent everything in email and got a near instant confirmation to go ahead.
Sometimes the meeting has to be an email.
I worked for one company that had a CEO like this except he was also a heavy cocaine user. One time we had a client visit our offices for a meeting; we had written software for this client for more than ten years at that point. In the middle of the meeting the CEO wanders in randomly and starts just talking incessantly for 45 fucking minutes straight. Finally he slaps his thighs and says “so, do you think you want to do business with us?” We damn near lost the client over this.
Just follow whatever’s trending
nowyesterday.They’re not smart or visionary. They’re just rich. They sell us a myth that they’re titans but it’s a lie.
Being CEO is hard.
You get so much money and you need to figure out a way to spend it.
You get a brand new super expensive car on company cost so you can’t worry about repairs or when you have to replace it.
You get invited for lunch and dinner so you can’t think about what to cook in the evenings and also you can’t waste time in the supermarket.
You have so much responsibilities that even when you do a shit job and the company fires you or goes bankrupt you get hired by the next one anyways so you don’t have to worry about your job or providing for your family.
You don’t need to track your time by the minute and you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder all the time so you need to figure out a way on what to do with all that time.
I mean i certainly wouldn’t want all these terrible terrible burdons being loaded onto me.
Poor CEOs
You forget how they’re gifted the latest stuff by companies all the time just because they’re “important.” Rich people actually don’t pay for much.
I feel like the main attribute of a CEO or any type of leadership position is having no need or desire for naps. This is why heavy cocaine use is so common among that species. I could never be a CEO, naps are just too important a part of my life.
Don’t forget the falling for honey traps.
I do think it requires some skill and sociopathy around being able to sell the biggest lies you can imagine so investors give you money.
“The customer is always right” has become “The customer will like it” with screen controls in cars, IOT jammed into everything, subscriptions, AI forced down our throats…
In many cases they have blown past “the customer will like it” all the way to “our data suggests that 90% of customers will not leave and profits will slightly increase as a result.”
I mean, at this point enshittification is a widespread business plan.
And one main premise of capitalism is that you have market choice. Well when every car has a screen now, no options on AI, etc it sort of defeats that premise.
Geezus how much more AI do we need? For the cost of it, we’re not getting the great benefits we thought we were going to get. It’s too environmentally harmful when it’s run in concentrated places. There’s also no reason to have these data centers. If PCs were invented today, we’d be renting PCs forever because this era isn’t about innovation anymore. It’s about trapping people in a rental world.
I can’s see the appeal for me but I think I can understand where Apple is coming from, at least in theory. More AI in phones means an excuse to sell you more powerful phones.
Unless you are very into having the latest piece of tech or your old phone dies, I haven’t seen much that a new phone can do and my 4 years old one can’t, so many people (including me) are sticking with their old phones for longer. AI seems like it has the potential to put something new on those marketing assets. Granted, it worked like shit with AI laptops/Copilot PCs but Apple has a knack for turning others’ failures into long lines of people fighting to give them their money so we’ll see…
A large part of this is also app development. App developers want as many peo0le as possible to use their apps, so they’re designed to work on phones that cost a hundred bucks new when they were sold on 2018.
PCs run into this with lots of things too, but one huge difference is the multitasking experience. I have a big-ass folding phone, but the multitasking experience still sucks, most because the phone is just a bad format for the kind of workflows that necessitate multitasking.
If I’m working in multiple windows, I need a keyboard and mouse. Yeah, I can have firefox open on one half of the screen and Outlook in the other on my phone, but it’s still the mobile version of both apps, and any time I want to type something half the screen becomes a keyboard.
So I don’t really have a need for a powerful phone. It’s a content consumption and communication device, both of which don’t need much horsepower.
If you want to live in the AI utopia of the 21st century, china sadly is the destination. Here in the us all we’ve got is israel’s surveillance feudal colony.
Given I have Apple “intelligence” turned off - I just couldn’t care less.
“To accelerate integration of AI into Apple products and continuously improve user experience, we decided to remove the optionto disable Apple Intelligence”
-Them soon enough, probably.
Also, I’m pretty certain there’s more to it than that. More vibecoding coming to Apple devices.
Being slow on LLMs is the one good decision apple is making.
Tim Cook was a good transitional douchebag CEO to soften people up before the full Gavin Belson experience.
Going full Belson.
There are things that the user wants, and there are things that are good for the user. The two are rarely the same.
This is neither.
Apple has been speedrunning problems and bad decisions since Ternus took over: the iPhone duo, macos 27 being buggy as fuck and making it difficult to disable the siri ai bs, the new macbook having an OLED that flickers so slowly it gives you eyestrain, the apple tv going from $150 to $300
Most, if not all of these, have been decided since before Ternus took over though.
Tim Cook sucked ass too
Hey! No kink-shaming.
Exactly
It’s all Tim’s fault.
iPad mini software locked to 60hz refresh rate
Is it the driver? I thought it was the controller
Product pipelines are years long.
the apple tv going from $150 to $300
In their defense, going from 4GB of LPDDR4X to 8GB of LPDDR5X isn’t cheap right now.
