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Comment by AlexMuir | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri.

Most people have never used voice recognition beyond shouting "Call Dave Jobs[1] Mobile" in the car. This is going to be perceived as magic, in the same way as the accelerometer in the Wii or the original finger touch interface. Anyone with a 4S is going to be showing this off to their friends, and I can't wait to try it.

There are parallels with people saying 'Touch has been around for years, but people prefer buttons' when the iPhone came out. True - until someone did it right. And now everyone wants touch.

And yes, I know it's been around on Android. But Apple make you WANT to use it. No-one's ever been bursting with excitement to show me their Android voice recognition stuff, and nor have I been wetting myself to try it out.

On the downside for Apple - improvements to the iPhone for the foreseeable future look to be on the software/web server side. They are vulnerable here. Limiting features to new models is going to piss people off, and fighting patent battles on software is much, much harder.

[1] Funny typo - I meant to type Dave Jones. Only noticed this on rereading the post.

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You could replace a few words and that comment would apply to last year's "one more thing": video chat. And many people did make exactly those comments. (Actually most of them said "Apple did it first! Wait, Europe had what a decade ago? Okay, I meant Apple did it best! That's why it'll catch on this time.")

As far as I can tell it's still the same niche users using it for the same niche tasks (talking to kids on business trips, sexting etc.). Nice to have for those that need it, but they mostly had it already via netbooks with Skype.

Likewise, I'm hearing about how this is going to transform computing for people with certain disabilities, when they've apparently just bought the same Dragon software you've been able to buy for years (for transcription, the Siri stuff is apparently semi-distinct).

Don't get me wrong, I like that I can already call up songs in my car by voice with my $100, no-contract, chinese-branded, 600Mhz ARM11 Android phone with a 3rd party, free, ad-supported app. (I amuse myself by practicing my french pronunciation with it too) The gushing just gets a bit old, as does the speculation about what magical powers the A5 must have to enable such wizardry.

I don't think Facetime's first year was a good measure of it's longer term outlook. The inability to use it with any past iOS products severely limited the launch impact - you were limited to whoever was buying the iPhone 4. With the 4S, just about everyone on an iOS device will have Facetime, and iMessage is obviously an effort to further this sense of a BBM-style device "club" among one's peers.

A lot of people have Macs. Plus Steve said that FaceTime was going to be an open standard, but that never happened. If they thought the network effect was a problem, they sure haven't tried solving it.

The two features aren’t really comparable. It makes no sense to compare the two.

What exactly makes them incomparable? I think it is fairly apt. They were both the "one more thing", both were Apple versions of existing technologies that some people are claiming will succeed mostly cause they are Apple versions, they are really power user features that lack mass adoption currently, both face social mores that make their use somewhat awkward and so on. I think all signs point to Facetime the sequel. A damn good product that is used once or twice to test, a lot by a couple of people, and is mostly inconsequential.

What?! No, certainly not. When FaceTime gets adaption you will not know whether Siri will also be able to get adaption. The reverse is also true. They are completely different features.

For one thing, FaceTime is a multi-party tool which falls victim to the network effect. The first people to get an iPhone 4 had few people they could FaceTime with, so it wasn't very useful to them.

Siri, on the other hand, doesn't depend on anyone else having anything in particular. Siri would be just as useful if you were the only person on the planet able to use it. I think that will make a huge difference in adoption.

It wasn't really the features I was commenting on, it's the marketing hype and the reactions to it that are predictable and repetitive.

What "marketing hype"? Being announced last on a keynote?

People attribute special powers to Apple's "marketing hype" but 99% is web generated --articles, posts, comments, user anticipation etc, not from some Apple's marketing campaign.

Except if showing the Facetime and Siri features in its tv ads qualifies as "marketing hype".

In any case, Facetime is an iOS/Mac feature. Noone expected it to catch as much as Skype, if only because there are like 80% more Skype-capable devices out there (like, say, all Windows boxes).

And Apple even made some bad decisions IMHO in promoting it: no OSX client from the beginning, not integrated with other apps (say, iChat), not promoted for PCs bundled with iTunes, etc.

When you're hiring Oscar winning directors to make the (series of) adverts based entirely around one feature you're well into "marketing hype" territory.

A few people made the sensible point that Facetime was going to have a hard time displacing Skype due to network effects (and Wifi limitations), or indeed being useful at all for many people without large numbers of iPhone 4 using family and friends who they didn't see face-to-face enough. Many others seemed to have forgot that Skype and other such video chat tech such as iChat even existed in their excitement for this revolutionary technology.

A position I feel they were forced into since this was the big finale "one more thing" in an iPhone announcement, and therefore couldn't be considered a bit of a damp squib if they wanted to maintain face.

I think the issue with FaceTime is actually more to do with people finding they don't like looking at themselves, and their appearance on camera. I am of course obligated to here mention David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

In the book, people begin to go so far as to buy masks and hologram replications of themselves to look as ideal as possible. This quote sums up the key problem:

"The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech."

This post on Kottke.org has some nice non-spoiler citations: http://kottke.org/10/06/david-foster-wallace-on-iphone-4s-fa...

As to accessibility you should also keep in mind that Apple has a great track record with that community through their work on the Mac and the iPhone, this is likely to greatly improve it.

I know someone at work who bought 3 iPhones so he could faceTime with his kids. It's definitely a growing option.

"I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri."

Perhaps. But I as a tech person find it magical. But I showed the video of Siri in action to my wife and she had an immediate, visceral hatred of the idea of talking to the phone like that "If I want to set a bloody alarm, I'll tap the set alarm button thank you".

For context, she's not a luddite, she's tech savvy, though not into tech or its own sake. But I don't think she'll be alone, I think this is a feature that many non-tech people will loathe initially, perhaps for reasons they cannot articulate.

I'd suggest this is due to the necessity to "converse" with Siri. I don't want to pretend I'm talking to a human when talking to a phone because if I'm on a train/plane I'd look like an idiot.

Instead, if it could understand something along the lines of: "alarm, 5.30, tomorrow" that'd be much better, quicker and simpler than: "Siri, set my alarm for 5.30am tomorrow morning". I don't want to have a conversation with my phone. Get in, get it done, get out. Speed always wins. But then I hate the new dumbed down Google too so what do I know eh.

Siri will flop, the speed is a non-issue for the majority of iPhone owners and the camera just about brings the phone up to spec with it's competitor cameras. If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas.

"If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas."

Yeah, instead they only pre-sold one million of them in 24h.

Well, they may have allegedly pre-sold one million within 24 hours, but they certainly won't get my $1,000+, which still sits by my desk waiting for the iPad3 and iPhone 5. I know two others who won't be upgrading on either product too, so thats another $2,000. Small sample, yes, yet representative of the population I'd say if you exclude end of contract "forced" sales.

What's an "end of contract forced sale"? People coming off 2 year contracts today are holding a phone Apple still sells.

Some will transfer to the Android camp. Some will wait it out. I suggest if the iPhone 5 had been shown many more would have taken an upgrade rather than waiting or jumping ship to Android. Hence, it's not that releasing the iPhone 4S was "bad" as such, just that iPhone 5 would have been much much better.

Which features would an iPhone 5 have? What would make it distinct from the iPhone 4S?

I'm thinking he wanted a new form factor to show that IT'S NOT AN IPHONE4. We're getting into the realm of tail fin marketing.

I actually don't mind the (I assume) 2 year cycle they've got going now, with a new phone 1 year with a follow up "S" model the next.

That way, when people are on their 2 year contract cycles, you either sit on the "new shiny" or the "advanced shiny" cycle, so consumers rarely lose out depending which cycle their contract ends in, since there are pros and cons for both.

I'd say its smart business.

What's worrisome is that we're probably at the end of a long stretch where the industrial design drove the sales. From here on in, at least for a while, the innovations are turning inwards. Siri. Better camera. Better power consumption.

It's not like we're launching new networks every year or two, or individual ARM cores are going to make huge leaps in performance.

Have we trained everyone to worship the new/shiny when we're probably hitting a short-term asymptote?

I'm getting the most profound headache trying to create a small instance of the magical thinking necessary to generate the comments you've made here.

I don't even know where to start.

Like, how do you think this works? They have a magical golden goose shitting out new, feature complete design verification test models and they just decided not to "show" you the next one behind the curtain?

Apple is successful because they take their time creating their hits. The 3GS didn't imperil the company and neither will this.

Isn't that a risk Apple has taken ever since the first iPhones went off-contract in 2009? People have always had the choice to be disappointed in the latest model and jump to whatever they wanted, Android or not.

It looks like Apple has done pretty well in spite of itself. You're always going to disappoint a certain % of people (like yourself).

So...you're "punishing" Apple by giving them your money next year instead of this year? I bet that will really teach them a lesson.

Well, you'll find business is not that simple. Consider this, In that time I may see an Android phone I like and jump ship. That's then a 2 year lock out during which I won't return to iPhone. Further, having finished my contract by the end of this month, that means they're not taking a cut of contract revenues from me until I get back on, if I ever do. They've effectively lost a customer, along with the cost endured to acquire said customer.

It's the carrier that's been paying back the subsidy from your subscription fees under contract. Apple got their money up-front from you two years ago. Any extra revenue they earned from you was from iTunes/App Store sales, which I'm guessing will probably continue after the contract is over.

You also said you're waiting with your cash in-hand for iPhone5, so looking at competing Android phones isn't even on your radar. Tim Cook loves customers like you.

certainly won't get my $1,000+, which still sits by my desk waiting for the iPad3 and iPhone 5

Not sure how smart it is keeping cash lying around to either depreciate or get stolen, but if you're going to wait for the iPad 3 and iPhone 5, you're only going to regret it, because the iPad 4 and iPhone 6 are going to be even better.

The problem with designing an interface like "alarm, 5.30, tomorrow" is that soon you will start asking for for loops.

I don't think anyone has suggested that you can't be as terse as you like with it. Somehow I doubt Siri is going to get offended and respond with "Whats the magic word?"

>Siri will flop,

Claim chowder.

> the speed is a non-issue for the majority of iPhone owners

Emm, the speed enables better apps, especially better games. It's always good to have. Smartphones have a long way to go yet.

> and the camera just about brings the phone up to spec with it's competitor cameras. If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas.

All the specs people wanted from an iPhone 5 are present, except a new chassis some pundits idiotically predicted. So what exactly do you miss, an increased NUMBER???

Oh, and they already started making an absolute killing.

Most people use their phone as...surprise surprise, a phone. Speed is irrelevant to the majority of users I know (non-tech), it's something Steve would not have done, it's an engineers mindset and I suggest it's the future of Apple under Tim. Apple isn't succesful because it has the fastest chips, but that's all it has to offer now?

Further, I'd challenge you to name one non-game app that would be massively improved by a faster chipset over what is currently available on iPhone 4 devices. Just ONE. That should tell you how unneeded a chip upgrade really is.

Except when Steve did it with, drumroll, the iPhone 3GS.

Which was phenomenally successful.

What all the hysterics are missing here is that this is entirely with precedent.

When 3GS was introduced, it was pointed out that the S stands for speed.

> Most people use their phone as...surprise surprise, a phone.

Yeah. Back in the day. Or in rural Nebraska.

Nowadays, smartphones are used for tons of things besides calling. I'd even go as far as to say that actual call time is far less than other-use time. Else we wouldn't have TONS of web traffic originating from mobile phones and 300,000 apps in the App Store.

> Speed is irrelevant to the majority of users I know

Are those the same "most users" that use their smartphone "as a phone"?

For those people even a smartphone is irrelevant. They can get by with some dumb device.

Now, speed is irrelevant as a goal in itself. But a faster CPU enables more powerful apps. Without that irrelevant "speed", we wouldn't have the ability to handle 8 megapixel images properly, or edit movies in iMovie mobile to name a few examples. And for 3D games, more speed is better.

> Further, I'd challenge you to name one non-game app that would be massively improved by a faster chipset over what is currently available on iPhone 4 devices. Just ONE.

Just one?

1) Any music app (like Fruity Loops, Beatmaker, Massive, etc) would be able to either play more samples / synthesize more voices = improved polyphony, or synthesize better voices = better sound quality.

2) Any video encoding/editing app, such as iMovie mobile will be massively improved in what it can do.

3) Any drawing app, like Brushes. Most use complicated code to render realistic brush responses and lag when live-painting.

4) Any app written with an "interpreted" layer, from Adobe's flash transcompiled apps to Mono Touch will feel more native. Also, MacRuby will be eligible for iOS apps soon, as the GC problem is solved, and it will greatly benefit from a faster CPU.

Oh, and a faster CPU also does stuff in less time, so if the power requirements per instruction are the same as the previous CPU (which often happens with next generation CPUs), a faster CPU means better battery life.

Basically what you're saying is: "640K should be enough for everybody".

uhm.... I'm in rural ND and most people under 30 don't use their phone to talk. Text and Facebook seem to be the main phone uses. It is my understanding that due to the cost of voice, most people in Africa use SMS and not voice.

> MacRuby will be eligible for iOS apps soon, as the GC problem is solved

If I didn't miss any recent developments, that was a misunderstanding from when ARC was leaked as iOS5 having "GC", then it turned out that it was actually compiler-supported reference counting. Which means that MacRuby is still stuck on iOS and doomed on OS X, with some people expecting the GC to be deprecated sooner or later.

With the current App Store rules, I don't see why Matz' C Ruby with 'dl' disabled wouldn't be eligible.

Re: MacRuby/iOS, you're right, GC problem not solved with ARC after all.

I had visions of people screaming demands into their phones in public, too. But it turns out you can use Siri by bringing it up to your head, ala a regular phone call, too.

That was the exact opposite reaction of my girlfriend's. She's basically upgrading her iPhone 4 just for Siri. Context, she's tech savvy but she works as a tax accountant.

I can see using it myself as lot as well, especially for reminders and texting while I'm driving.

@brador I think that may work with Siri actually. People try the more conversional stuff in demo because, let's face it, it's more "magical."

Siri has been out since 2010 on the app store. Is there any reason (other than Apple's push with building it into the operating system) that users will take more notice of it now than they have in the last (nearly) two years?

Building it into the operating system is good enough reason.

Simply getting it in front of more users might make the difference. It's also a lot more tightly integrated I would assume.

A lot, yes. Apparently you can just hold the phone to your ear in order to activate it.

From the videos I've seen it looks like it launches via holding down the home key and at least for some command separation you need to hit the "talk" button with the Siri application.

There are two options to activate Siri: use the Home button, or just put it to your ear, as if you were talking on your phone rather than to. The second option can be disabled, but it's there and enabled by default.

That'll make me use it in public more. Genius move.

I'm just too shy to walk down the street and talk to my phone without it looking like I'm talking to someone.

The no button option will rock for my Mom, no button - less problems.

Hitting the talk button for command separation is optional. It will just wait for a pause.

I'll answer with a parallel:

"The secret to ending all poverty and hunger has been hidden deep in the earth's crust for two decades. Is there any reason why digging it out and placing it in Times Square for all to examine (except for the fact that now everyone can see it) will cause people to take more notice now than they did before?"

I don't get it.

The poster has treated as trivial the most crucial shift in the described circumstance. (And thereby answered his/her own question)

It was a diamond in the rough, it just got de-roughed and as such is more diamond-y. Or it was a really cool product that people over looked, by featuring it prominently Apple hopes to get a lot of reward for very little effort.

This is vastly more capable and polished than the app in the App Store for the last two years. Deep integration with calendar, reminders, location (it looks like they've smoothed over a lot of the awkward permission requests in iOS 4), phone book and hardware (via the home button) makes it a radically different app.

Integrating it with the OS is the reason users will take more notice now. I'm not sure why you dismiss that, but it's actually a huge deal.

I've used Siri on and off since it came out. It's pretty good. The reasons I don't use it more are precisely the problems that will be solved by integrating it into the OS. First, the app was a pain in the ass to activate, requiring half a dozen taps to get started. This problem disappears on the 4S. Second, the app couldn't do anything with the data on the phone (like send e-mails or check my calendar) because it didn't have access, or at least they didn't build it to. Again, this problem disappears with integration.

The main advantage of something like Siri is convenience and speed. The app couldn't achieve that precisely because it was an app that wasn't built in to the OS.

I'm not disputing that bulding it into the OS is a big deal, but pointing out that in its 2 years of public release on the app store, Siri didn't see the organic growth of apps like Instagram or Hipstamatic.

Apple has added new features to integrate it more deeply with things like the Calendar and Reminders apps, but at the same time, half of Scott Forstall's demo commands at the 4S keynote were exactly the same as the Siri demo at 2009's All Things D conference.

A big part of building it into the OS is that it only takes a single action to activate, instead of the half dozen or so plus a considerable amount of waiting that it takes to activate the standalone app. I believe this will result in a qualitative difference. The app was mostly a novelty that was usually slower and less convenient than doing things directly. The OS service is likely to be considerably faster and more convenient than the other paths that exist for achieving what it can do.

Huh? I, for one, didn't even know Siri existed until the keynote.

So I'd say, yes, there is a reason.

My android phone has been begging me to talk to her for more than a year, but i refuse. It's still deep in the uncanny valley for me. You mentioned yourself that it might be useful in the car, where you are alone and nobody can hear you. Speech is disemmination, not simple message passing. It's literally shouting, when you really should only be whispering. If it was handwriting-recognition or some magical mind-reading or gesture-reading device i 'd use it.

To recap, you haven't tried Siri.

> You mentioned yourself that it might be useful in the car, where you are alone and nobody can hear you.

And what if people can hear you, in the street say? It's not like we don't already TALK to our phones all the time while walking in the street. You think it matters to passers-by if you talk to your boss or Siri?

> It's literally shouting, when you really should only be whispering.

Huh? What do you mean with this bizzaro comparison?

It's all a matter of least effort. I can imagine a few situations where it's handy, but most times the gain in effort to setup a reminder for example is offset by the inappropriateness of the situation. It becomes net positive at times when your hands are not available (the promo video shows people running, cooking, driving)

> "Call Dave Jobs Mobile"

This can be done on iPhones through the regular Voice Control feature in iOS 4. I use it frequently to change music while walking (holding the middle button on my headphones activates Voice Control).

Voice Control sucks for me, especially with ethnic names.

"I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri."

I think that that is exactly why we (tech people) hate it so much. We like to be in control of what happens, and Siri is all about giving most of that control over to your iPhone.

I'd speak for yourself — as a die hard "tech person" nothing in tech gives me a beefier erection than successfully accomplishing science fiction.

Thanks for that mental image.

No, it is simply another means of control, like touch input.

We do? I'm an geek, using Linux with a custom kernel and a tilling WM, and I never had any real interest in Apple products, but Siri seems fantastic; it's the first time I really want an iPhone feature.

Siri seems to be the dream of every guy who read or viewed sci-fi, where voice interfaces are ubiquitous.

Sure, I'd wish it didn't transmit everything to "the cloud", and I'm definitively not buying an iPhone just for it, but it reached to me like no other Apple product did.

Not all of us tech people aspire to be system administrator on every single box with an operating system that we own or come into contact with. Eventually you start to realise there are too many boxes and not enough time. I have absolutely zero interest in being able to ssh into my mobile phone - I'm happy to accept that the people who were working on building the mobile phone full-time are going to be doing better work than I can manage to squeeze in outside of my day job.

No kidding! I have enough of a time on my own projects. I don't particularly care about adjusting gamma on my TV or constantly f'ing with the microwave to get it to warm up pizza. Although I enjoy hacking, sometimes I just want stuff to work. I'd rather tinker with something that's going to make my products better rather than spending hours trying to get a phone to do something. I spend enough hours getting molested by Heroku and performing anal exams on obscure Gems and a/b testing and blah, blah, blah. If I wanted to waste my time on a phone, I would have bought Android.

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