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.”
“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.
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.
“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.
Given I have Apple “intelligence” turned off - I just couldn’t care less.
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.
Being slow on LLMs is the one good decision apple is making.
Apple has been compromised for a long while now, they’re building an excuse to dump it on. This is the future of all tech.
Tim Cook was a good transitional douchebag CEO to soften people up before the full Gavin Belson experience.
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.
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.
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.
Put it everywhere, just like Microsoft
I had no idea this was even happening. Am i out of the loop?
Being back Tim Apple. John Apple sucks if his pushes are going to be on iPhones folding out into iPad mini’s for $2000 and Siri AI
That’s a rather obvious and expected move in my eyes. After all, they had setup themselves for deep AI integration with their processor changes about a decade ago already. I was wondering for a while why they never really played their hand so far. Siri was not the epitome of that development.
Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”
I’d say we should expect to see an interview with Federighi, with pained expression, claiming, “this was not the apple that I knew and loved, I just had to leave”, in the near future.
But then, this is a Mark “twice a day? that clock is going to take my job!” Gurman interview.
