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Comment by rldjbpin | Hacker News Reader

> to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control.

i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general. the ux/ui used to be a top priority, but the quality control has certainly gone down over the years [1]. the company is now driven by supply chain and business-minded optimizations than what to give to the end user.

at the same time, what one can do using AI has large correlation with what one does with their devices in the first place. a windows recall like feature for ipad os might have been interesting (if not equally controversial), but not that useful because even till this day it remains quite restrictive for most atypical tasks.

[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/macos-tahoe-upside-down-ui-...

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>> to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control.

>i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general.

One 100% agree with this, if I compare AI's ability to speed up the baseline for me in terms of programming Golang (hard/tricky tasks clearly still require human input - watch out for I/O ops) with Apple's lack of ability to integrate it in even the simplest of ways.. things are just peculiar on the Apple front. Bit similar to how MS seems to be gradually loosing the ability to produce a version of Windows that people want to run due to organisational infighting.

Personally, I’ve never seen an AI flow of any kind that meets what would meet the quality of a typical ‘corporate’ acceptable flow. As in, reliably works, doesn’t go crazy randomly, etc.

I’ve seen a lot of things that look like they’re working for a demo, but shortly after starting to use it? Trash. Not every time (and it’s getting a little better), but often enough that personally I’ve found them a net drain on productivity.

And I literally work in this space.

Personally, I find apples hesitation here a breath of fresh air, because I’ve come to absolutely hate Windows - and everybody doing vibe code messes that end up being my problem.

The regular ChatGPT 5 seems pretty reliable to me? I ~never get crazy output unless I'm pasting a jailbreak prompt I saw on twitter. It might not always meet my standards, but that's true of a lot of things.

Maybe not the same thing, but chatgpt 5 was driving me insane in visual studio co pilot last week. I seemingly could stop it from randomly changing bits of code, to the point where it was apologising then doing the same in next change even when told not to.

I've now changed to asking where things are in the code base and how they work then making changes myself.

Deleting comments even when instructed not to do so is another failure mode. They definitely require more fine-tuning in these cases.

> Personally, I find apples hesitation here a breath of fresh air

i does not appear to me as hesitation but rather an example of how they were unable to recently deliver on their marketing promises.

calling a suite of incomplete features as "Apple Intelligence" means that they had much higher expectations internally, similar to how they refined as second-movers in other instances. they have a similar situation with XR now.

Everyone else just ships anyway?

> I’ve never seen an AI flow of any kind that meets what would meet the quality of a typical ‘corporate’ acceptable flow. As in, reliably works, doesn’t go crazy randomly, etc.

Jump [1] built a multi-million dollar business exactly on this, a service used by corporations in financial consultancy.

[1] https://jump.ai/

>i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general.

They're definitely not as good as they WERE, but they're still better than anybody else.

With Apple it's incredibly obvious that most software product development is nowadays handled by outsourced/offshored contractors who simply do not use the products. At least I hope that's the case, it would be disastrous if the state of iOS/watchOS is the result of their in-house on-shore talent.

It's such a testament to how good they used to be, that years and years of dropping the ball still leaves them better than everyone else. Maybe they were actually just much better than anyone was willing to pay for, and the market just didn't reward the attention to detail

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