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Comment by computomatic | Hacker News Reader

According to an interview I watched recently, Steve Jobs wasn’t even sure they’d launch the iPhone a year before they did.

There’s a relatively well-known exchange where he flat-out tells an interviewer there’s no phone, and post-launch admits he was lying. The truth was in the middle - if they couldn’t control the product enough (due to then-standard carrier influence over design and experience), then they wouldn’t make a phone. Eventually they found a launch carrier that would let them do it.

If apple can’t make “the best search in the world” (by someone’s subjective definition), then they’ll never launch it. Simple as that.

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Sort of the anti-Google.

Whereas Google will release something, get user traction and then try to make it 'best in the world'. If it doesn't get to world class status, then it cancels it and moves on, pissing off the early adopters in the process.

The problem is that this becomes counter-productive just like serial dramas in the TV world. If people think you're going to cancel something, they're not going to get emotionally invested in your product. Then it almost certainly gets canceled because it doesn't get enough user traction. Rinse. Repeat.

Apple will pull the plug on things that aren't panning out too though. The MacBook Pro's Touch Bar came and went in a pretty short period of time, for example.

Though I suppose in that specific example at least, the people whose trust was damaged are mainly developers who invested in building for it, and probably less so users who invested in learning it or relying on it. Maybe there are better, more Google-like examples where user/community trust bears the brunt of it.

Mostly went. My 2022 13" MacBook Pro still includes it. Whether or not it should is a different question, of course.

From the perspective of employees it's also terrible to see the product being worked on for years get cancelled.

Sometimes there are no easy choices. My takeaway is that Apple wants its customers to be happy even at the expense of its employees, but Google wants its employees to be happy (product launch => promotions) more than it wants its customers to.

It doesn't have to be "best in the world", just good enough and justifiable to themselves - many of the Apple in-house products kinda sucked when first released (I'm thinking of Apple Maps).

They were greatly embarrassed by the Apple Maps launch, leading to Scott Fortall's firing. It's definitely not a strategy they want to repeat.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/executive-reportedly-fired-ap...

It's Apple -- the best technology company in the world, known for making the best computer and smartphone in the world. Their standards are different.

IMO, looking at the state of Siri, I'm not quite sure about that. Siri has always been not as good as alexa or google and has been getting worse over the years with weird ass bit flip bugs interpreting a 'turn off' as a 'turn on' or similar and the rest of the 'smart assistant' stuff throughout the OS usually not being very useful.

Probably true. I find all of them annoying almost to the point of uselessness though. I generally use them for some specific incantations like setting an alarm but mostly don’t even try to think of them as any sort of true voice assistants.

Siri launched in 2011 with a live demo of untrained speech recognition which was unheard of at the time.

Alexa launched in 2014 and Google Assistant in 2016.

Siri has not always been ‘not as good as Alexa or Google’, it existed way before either of them were released.

And none of that matters? As a product to do basic things like 'turn off lights' and 'whats the temperature' and such it fails horribly, while alexa and co at least are very reliable on the basics.

You can argue all you want that Google and Alexa have surpassed Siri but the thread is about Apple not launching poor products. Siri wasn’t a poor product, surpassed by Alexa and Google, at launch because they didn’t exist when Siri launched.

Siri was a lot better when it was being run by a tiny startup as opposed to once Apple started taking control of development isn’t much of a defense of Apple.

In fact, the Siri Apple released was significantly gimped compared to the Siri that was available on the App Store before Apple bought it.

I specifically remember telling Siri “Read my last SMS” and it doesn’t work anymore. “Start the chronometer” (in French) doesn’t work either.

I’m at the point where I wonder whether they flagged me as a bad person, on which they make Siri do the opposite of what I ask.

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