John Gruber Says 'Something is Rotten' at Apple

Daring Fireball's John Gruber today shared some strongly-worded comments about Apple's delayed personalized Siri features. Gruber is a well-known Apple pundit who has been writing about the company for more than two decades.

Apple More Personal Siri Ad
In a blog post titled "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino," Gruber said Apple's credibility has been "damaged" by the delay:

Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Apple went from a company that you couldn't believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible company in tech. Apple remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable company in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. 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.

This obviously isn't the first time that Apple has failed to deliver. However, Gruber said other examples like the canceled AirPower charging mat "tended to be around the edges," whereas he believes that generative AI is going to be "big" and "important."

It's not the delay by itself that bothers Gruber. He said the true "fiasco" here is that Apple "pitched a story" last year "that wasn't true":

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It's also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They're inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true, and they set a course based on that.

Gruber said the personalized Siri features announced during the WWDC keynote last year were merely conceptual, and therefore "bullshit":

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.

He was even more explicit here:

You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can't maintain credibility with bullshit. And the "more personalized Siri" features, it turns out, were bullshit.

Gruber said Apple's repeated unwillingness or inability to demo the personalized Siri features in action since WWDC last year "should have set off blinding red flashing lights and deafening klaxon alarms" in his head that something was wrong.

Gruber went as far as saying that Apple's culture of excellence could be at risk if this situation is not handled correctly within the company:

Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn’t happen soon, then, I fear, that's all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.

The full post is worth a read.

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Top Rated Comments

eric89074 Avatar
2 weeks ago
The only good thing about Apple intelligence is Apple is putting better hardware in devices than they probably want to to support AI.
Score: 138 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dguisinger Avatar
2 weeks ago
....this is the thing that did it for him?

Not over 10 years of dropping the ball on Siri?
Not the ever-more buggy iOS platforms?
Not a business model that is increasingly built on rent-seeking?
Not selling commodity storage and memory for 5x or more than the industry standard because they know their customers have no other choice?
Not several years of selling defective macbooks who's keyboards couldn't be typed on?
Not billions wasted on a car that never made sense and never came to market?
Score: 130 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dukebound85 Avatar
2 weeks ago
Agree. They had to have known this before launching the 16
Score: 114 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DHagan4755 Avatar
2 weeks ago
I don't even really care about A.I. The empty promise is what's truly disappointing.
Score: 96 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dustin_ Avatar
2 weeks ago
He’s right. Apple’s been killing it at hardware, but there are some major changes that need to be made on the software side of the company.
Score: 91 Votes (Like | Disagree)
twolf2919 Avatar
2 weeks ago
Totally agree with Gruber. They mislead the public into believing they’d get some great AI features a few months down the road - but only if they upgraded their iPhones. Analysts went as far as calling for an iPhone upgrade supercycle due to these great AI features. Most prominent/exciting being a Siri that knows about you. And that is the exact feature that turns out to be vaporware - for the entire iPhone 16 cycle! So the trust is broken. You can no longer believe what Apple tells you.
Score: 90 Votes (Like | Disagree)