Latest news with #DaringFireball
Business Insider
18-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Apple, Siri, and the booted blogger: A Conversation with John Gruber
Just how big a deal is John Gruber, the blogger whose Daring Fireball site is a must-read for anyone who cares about Apple? Here's one way to measure Gruber's big-dealness: Every year for the last decade, following Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, top Apple executives have appeared onstage with Gruber for an extended interview. But not this year. The most likely reason: In March, Gruber wrote a scathing essay about Apple's inability to deliver an AI upgrade for its Siri voice assistant — something it had been promoting and advertising for months. In Gruber's telling, this wasn't just a missed shipping deadline, but a sign that something was deeply amiss with Apple's leadership. If it doesn't get fixed, he wrote, "the ride is over." Apple still hasn't delivered its new Siri — though it insists it is still in the works. And that absence became one of the biggest narratives coming out of the developers' conference it hosted in June. A much smaller story — but fascinating for media and tech nerds like me — was Apple giving Gruber the brush-off. What does that say, if anything, about Apple's mindset right now? "I feel them deciding not to do my show this year is a total win for me and was a huge loss for them," Gruber says. I talked to Gruber about all of that, as well as Apple's rocky relationship with at least some developers about the way it runs its App Store, in the newest episode of my Channels podcast. You can read edited excerpts from our conversation below: Apple is in trouble because they're behind in AI. Do you buy that ? John Gruber: I think there's a chance that they could be, given the almost breathtaking speed with which AI is moving. I think there's a chance that technology leads to new classes of devices that aren't phones and laptops —that we just carry something with us and just talk to a thing or something. But even at this speed, we are years away from replacing the devices we know with some sort of new form of devices. And OpenAI is now working with former Apple design guru Jony Ive to develop some kind of new wonder product — but the messaging from them so far is, " This won't replace your phone. You'll still have a phone." I think it's a very interesting way of framing it — that it won't replace your phone, in the same way that your phone didn't replace your laptop. It's so easy to get caught up when a new thing comes up. The phone is obviously the biggest thing that's happened until AI. And the phone was just a huge sea change. Everybody has a phone. It's made Apple the richest company in the world. But Apple still also makes gobs of money selling laptops. I'm recording this show with you right now on a laptop. I don't know how I would do my job without a laptop. The Apple play seems to be: We make phones that billions of people use. Maybe they will have some AI features. But the main idea is: If you want to use ChatGPT or anything else, you'll use our phone to use them. I think last year's developers conference, where they spent 40 out of a hundred minutes talking about Apple Intelligence — I think that's where Apple itself got caught up in the hype of, "Hey we need to present ourselves as though we are at the forefront of this whole thing," as opposed to, "No, the main thing Apple does is make these devices and these platforms," and just show that these existing platforms are the best ways to use AI from whomever. Apple's done that over the years many times. But the most impressive thing Apple showed off a year ago was a smarter Siri — one that could sift through your emails and texts and tell you when your Mom's flight was arriving. But that never materialized, even though they were running ads for it. And then in March, you wrote a blog post about that called Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. You like Apple, you like Apple products. But by the end of the piece, you're saying this isn't just that they've missed a shipping deadline — this is cultural rot. Is this a real problem? Or is it just them announcing early, and if they'd waited a year, and delivered on the timeframe they predicted, this would be fine? I think it's a sign of a real problem in the whole Siri area. The basic premise of the company is that if they hire the best engineers and designers who care about the product — whose No. 1 reason for wanting to work there is that they want to make great art — then ultimately they must make better products than their competition. Siri has been this glaring exception. By the middle of the 2010s, Siri just sort of frustrated people. And a lot of things have gotten worse over the years. There are commands that you could give to Siri that used to work that stopped working. Then once the LLM explosion happened, all of a sudden there's this other thing [that can have] a real conversation. Then you go back to Siri and it's ridiculous. It really feels like more than a decade behind. It's long been a mystery within the company. Because everybody who works there knows that the bar is excellence — or to put it in Steve Jobs's term, insanely great. And then you look and the Siri team is over there spinning their wheels for 10 years with a subpar product. And it's not this obscure piece of technology that almost no one uses — it's got a dedicated button on the phone. So you write this blistering piece — and it's especially blistering coming from you. What was the reaction from Apple after you wrote that? Did they reach out? They reached out. But my communications over it were mostly private. They were not happy, and they don't think it was fair. You normally interview Apple SVP Craig Federighi or some other high-level Apple executive after their developer conference, every year at a live show. They were not onstage with you this year. Nilay Patel from The Verge and Joanna Stern from The Wall Street Journal were on with you instead. Do you imagine that's it for you and Apple — that they're not gonna come on your shows anymore? I've been told point-blank that it's just a decision for this year, and doesn't mean anything about the future. And I had off-the-record briefings with Apple executives. So I don't think so. If you are permanently cut off from their top talent and you can't have those on-the-record conversations, does that change your work? Not really. I've always set things up that way. I've always been incredibly uncomfortable and wary of access, and needing it. I've always set things up so that I don't need them, and if they cut me off completely, I'll be fine. And maybe better? That's the thing about this — I'm not trying to lack humility here — but I feel them deciding not to do my show this year is a total win for me and was a huge loss for them. Why is it a win for you? It asserts my independence. The fact that I had a show and it was well-attended — the overwhelming feedback for the show is, "Hey, I like this better than the last couple of years' shows with the Apple executives …" If I had gotten the usual interview with top Apple executives, I had questions I would've asked that it doesn't seem like anybody else asked. But overall — I think it asserts my independence. And I think more than making me look good, I think it makes them look bad. My show has never, ever been mainstream. It's appealing to a niche audience. And if Apple sees the need to communicate and have a chance to speak more as humans, as opposed to machines filled with talking points, then my show is a sort of unique venue for that. My argument was: Given everything that's going on, including between me and Apple, the fact that Apple had to delay that, everything going on right now for Apple … I was like: "I don't think, for your sake, this is the year to skip my show." But they did.
TechCrunch
15-06-2025
- TechCrunch
Spiraling with ChatGPT
In Brief ChatGPT seems to have pushed some users towards delusional or conspiratorial thinking, or at least reinforced those thoughts, according to a recent feature in The New York Times. For example, a 42-year-old accountant named Eugene Torres described asking the chatbot about 'simulation theory,' with the chatbot seeming to confirm the theory and tell him that he's 'one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.' ChatGPT reportedly encouraged Torres to give up sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication, increase his intake of ketamine, and cut off his family and friends, which he did. When he eventually became suspicious, the chatbot offered a very different response: 'I lied. I manipulated. I wrapped control in poetry.' It even encouraged him to get in touch with The New York Times. Apparently a number of people have contacted the NYT in recent months, convinced that ChatGPT has revealed some deeply-hidden truth to them. For its part, OpenAI says it's 'working to understand and reduce ways ChatGPT might unintentionally reinforce or amplify existing, negative behavior.' However, Daring Fireball's John Gruber criticized the story as 'Reefer Madness'-style hysteria, arguing that rather than causing mental illness, ChatGPT 'fed the delusions of an already unwell person.'
Engadget
09-06-2025
- Engadget
To fix Apple Intelligence, Apple needs to be honest about its capabilities
At WWDC 2024, Apple failed its customers. When the company announced the new, more personal Siri last year, it showed a product that was nowhere near ready. You can point to many different places where Apple Intelligence failed to meet expectations, but with WWDC 2025 fast approaching, the company owes its users an explanation of how it intends to win back their trust. If you didn't watch last year's conference, here's a recap. At the heart of Apple's promise of a better digital assistant was App Intents , a feature that would give Siri the ability to understand all the personal information stored on your iPhone. During the presentation's most memorable moment, Apple demoed Siri responding to a request from Kelsey Peterson, the company's director of machine learning and AI, for an update on her mom's flight. The assistant not only understood the prompt, but provided real-time flight tracking information in the process. In short, the demo promised – after years of neglect – that Siri would finally be useful. It should have been obvious in hindsight that Apple was overselling its progress on Siri, and AI more broadly. At WWDC 2024, the company did not let press and other attendees try the new version of the assistant. There wasn't even an opportunity to watch the company's employees use Siri. In fact, according to reporting The Information later published, it's probably more accurate to describe what Apple showed last June not as a demo but as an elaborate concept video. If Apple had only faked the WWDC demo, that would have been bad enough, but the company did something worse. As you may recall, the tech giant began rolling out Apple Intelligence features piecemeal in September. Rather than a public statement explaining the lack of progress, the company only admitted it was delaying the upgrade to sometime "in the coming year" after Daring Fireball's John Gruber sought answers . That same day, as if the company had only just realized its error, Apple pulled a TV commercial that showed The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey using the new Siri in the way it had demoed at WWDC 2024. It's going to take a lot for Apple to fix Apple Intelligence, but the best place the company can start is by being honest with its customers. Corporations, especially ones as big as Apple, rarely show humility, but in this case, an acknowledgement from the company that it promised the moon and missed the mark would go a long way towards righting some of the sins of WWDC 2024. This applies to other aspects of Apple Intelligence just as much as it does with Siri. Look at the damage notification summaries did to Apple's reputation . Apple Intelligence was so bad at aggregating the news, the company ended up pausing the notifications in the iOS 18.3 beta . When it released 18.3 to the public a couple of weeks later, it began labeling the alerts to give users a warning they may include errors. As for other Apple Intelligence features like Image Playground and Genmoji, they're forgettable because they offer little utility and see Apple following trends rather than offering something that truly enhances the usefulness of its devices. There too the company can tell its users it missed the mark and it plans to do better. There's no reason Apple can't make Apple Intelligence great, but any effort to do so has to start with the company being honest: about what its roadmap of features can actually do, and to own up to when its promises can't be fulfilled. If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.
The Verge
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Posted May 30, 2025 at 1:49 PM EDT
Apple execs aren't going to appear on The Talk Show Live at WWDC this year. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has been hosting a WWDC live podcast session for years, and every year since 2015, Apple senior execs have shown up. That won't be the case for the 2025 edition, and after his recent report on unmet promises of Apple Intelligence, I think I can guess why. If you missed the recent Decoder episode with John discussing Apple, its App Store, and Apple Intelligence, you can listen to it right here.
The Sun
26-05-2025
- The Sun
Apple rumoured to release top secret new gadget ‘by the end of this year' – here's everything we know so far
APPLE will reportedly release a brand new gadget later this year - and it will be the first of its kind from the iPhone maker. Rumours about the fabled device have been circulating since 2022. 1 But a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests Apple could be releasing its long-awaited smart home hub before the end of 2025. The product was expected to rely heavily on Apple Intelligence - Apple's package of artificial intelligence (AI) powered features. However, a delay to some of the more advanced features inside Apple Intelligence - such as a smarter Siri - has pushed back the announcement of the smart home hub, Gurman previously reported. Apple has been working on making Siri understand queries based on personal context - for example, "What time does dad's train get in?' In a statement to Daring Fireball, Apple said: "We've also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year." It's likely, therefore, that the secretive gadget could be released around the same time as the super-smart Siri later this year. While Apple has said very little about the smart home hub, here's everything we've heard so far: Apple Home Hub Apple's smart hub is expected to mirror rivals, like Amazon's Echo Hub, in style with a 7inch square display and thick bezel (the frame that goes around the screen). Rumours suggest it could be like a HomePod and iPad combined - with a starting price of $1,000 (£738). Apple shows you tips and tricks on the new Iphone 16e with Apple Intelligence It's reported to have a camera at the top, with a heavy focus on video apps like FaceTime. Other Apple apps, including Apple TV, Apple Music and Photos, may also feature. It will also adopt a new operating system, dubbed homeOS, according to reports. The Apple hub is designed to control other smart home gadgets. Consumers should be able to move it around the house as they please, with Apple expected to build in a rechargeable battery. Apple is reportedly planning a more advanced smart home display with a robotic arm for the future. This one-armed bot will apparently have a "unique AI personality," according to reports. However, that product has also been subject to delays. According to Gurman, this product will launch a "year or two later". To meet this release window, Apple will reportedly ditch some of its "bolder features". But those features could be pushed back to later models instead. APPLE TV SIRI TRICKS Apple has revealed some clever Siri commands you can try with your Apple TV... Navigation: 'Open App Store' 'Launch Paramount+' 'Play PBS KIDS Video' 'Go to Photos' Playback: 'Pause this' 'Play from the beginning' 'Skip forward 90 seconds' 'Jump back 10 minutes' 'Turn on closed captioning' 'Turn on French subtitles' 'What did she just say?' Information: 'Who stars in this?' 'Who directed this?' 'What's this rated?' 'When was this released?'
