Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door. It was nearly two years ago they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months.
It’s just how Apple does things: They still have no folding phone, under-screen finger print scanner, under-screen front-cam, etc.
Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
When was this part last true?
You can't use cool to argue against me. It was in the comment I replied to.
> but you know exactly what is being referenced
No, I don't, which is why I asked. Mind explaining instead of being coy?
Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player, but once they made the iPod, everyone wanted an iPod. It was cool. Most other players pivoted to be more iPod-like.
Apple didn’t make the first smart phone. Smart phones were semi-niche devices for businessmen and nerds. Once the iPhone came out, everyone wanted it and the whole market changed.
Apple didn’t make the first smart watch, but once they did, their smart watch was more capable and integrated than the others and went on to outsell Rolex.
Apple didn’t make the first tablet. Microsoft tried to push the idea repeatedly 10 years earlier. Apple waited and came out with the iPad once multitouch was a thing and they could build an OS around touch. 15 years after its launch, it’s still the only tablet anyone actually talks about.
Steve Jobs talked about putting the customer experience first and selecting technologies that will be around for the next 10+ years, rather than chasing the latest bleeding edge tech, just to say you’re using it and trying to find a way to shoehorn it in.
To know what tech is going to stick around and to find how to best implement it takes time for things to mature a little bit. This means sacrificing the bleeding edge for a more thoughtful and stable approach.
Tim Cook doesn’t have the same kind of vision as Jobs, so I think some of this has been lost, but this has been their history for a long time, and one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful.
In your examples market demand from existing customers of iMacs wasn't pointed at Apple to create the iPod. iPod customers weren't demanding that Apple create the iPhone. And iPhone customers weren't seething over the lack of a first-party watch option. Apple customers are looking across the landscape and can see every other phone manufacturer running circles around Siri, and this integration with Gemini really feels like they're throwing in the towel.
The thing is, Siri doesn’t need an LLM for Apple customers to use an LLM. The App Store exists and iPhone users can download ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc, etc, etc. They can map their favorite one to the action button if they want quick access.
I don’t see a major need for Apple to rush something out the door that doesn’t live up to their quality standard. From my use of LLMs, I still don’t think it lives up to the standards needed to hand out to a billion people and say “use this, you can trust it”. Even if their internal models were as good as the best ones on the market, I still think the press would treat it as another Apple Maps situation. I’m saying that with LLMs of today, not even the ones from the GPT-3 days.
Cook is too eager to say stuff that will please the stockholders, so he teased the AI stuff and had a big AI phone release before they had a product that was viable to release. That’s a theme with him.
Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.
Oh yeah, that's been awesome for the consumer.
Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.
That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.
Always need to attach an adapter to my Anker chargers and powerbanks.
I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.
But I have a bunch of USB-C stuff and so when I go to charge my laptop it’s just easier to find that cable and use it.
Thats the real difference - it now easily lasts until I would want to take an extended break anyway.
It’s very confusing if you do that and are an idiot.
Closest would be the SD card slot... if it was SD Express.
If they had released the M1 MBP in the old chassis I would have a real challenge upgrading to the current models.
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
In actual fact, though, apple is a very effective fifth or sixth mover, and has been for a very long time. They watch everyone else fuck it up and get it wrong a bunch of times, and then throw scads of cash at threading the needle.
Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p
> I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.
USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.
The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.
although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence.
There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Then again, remember millimeterwave? But yes, as a general rule I think your point still stands.
Since when?
> versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats
I agree here, to a degree. It's just that Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats.
I don't really understand this. Is it shoving when something is actually popular? The iPod was legitimately extremely popular. Did Apple decide it was hot and then somehow force people to buy 450 million of them?
I mean I'm just curious what products you're thinking of when you say "shoves it down their throats"
What's hot about less ports, no headphone jack, no SD card, a tax when buying apps for your phone, planned obsolescence, antagonistic behavior towards app and software developers, an unchanged aluminum rectangle, thinner devices that look cool at the cost of performance and efficiency, heaviest laptops and phones on the market, phones made out of glass front and back, the touchbar, the notch, etc.?
Investors are the forcing function
Sorry but if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline
A pair four-trillion dollar companies striking a deal in the hottest technology space since the internet getting headline treatment is not evidence of a forcing function.
Their naff image generation tool (Playground) is further evidence.
Apple are definitely panicking. And they should be too.
That's evidence they forced themselves. Not that there was a forcing function. That's the whole point of the top comment. (Mine.) They rushed where they didn't have to. And I still don't think they need to rush.
These services are threatened by the emerging competitive landscape. Apple is panicking, and there is a forcing function, because their users are spending more and more time with LLMs having the most personal experiences they’ve ever had with any software, and Apple isn’t getting a piece of that pie. They’re in a very high risk position because this is the heart of their brand and as data is slowly siphoned away into apps and services that are providing the experiences their users are growing to expect, that moat and stickiness is eroding.
That said, this precisely why it’s taken so long. While Apple is desperate, they are completely unwilling to disrespect their users trust and mishandle their personal data or compromise their privacy.
A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business.
The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing vision models to smart personal assistants via Gemini.
Just as Apple heavily promoted Siri back when it was pioneering.
But Siri has stagnated for years. It’s basically the Internet Explorer 5 of the assistant domain. And the competition is so far ahead in capabilities that people are going to start questioning the innovation happening at Apple. In fact people already are.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
The fact is, Siri sucks. I almost never use it now. Apple knows this. We know it. Consumers know it. Apple know that they have to urgently fix it.
Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.
This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:
1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.
2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier
3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities
4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code
I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.
But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.
That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.
The choice of theme is the misstep. Not the strategy.
Or maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises and it was all intentional and part of a well orchestrated plan from the outset? Seems like an odd strategy
Which is not how headlines work.
You may have an argument that Apple is under pressure. But your headline argument is bananas.
> maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises
Where did you get that?
The attitude I called "fucked up" is precisely rushing to make promises and then meet them. Apple's sales don't suggest customers are putting material pressure on Cupertino. Apple's share price doesn't suggest investors are panicking. The promises have already been broken. If Apple is pushing something out, again, because they feel they have to on the basis of those promises, it's–again-a fuckup.
That’s the joke. I assure you they are panicking.
They don't though, Android is clearly ahead in AI integration (even Samsung are running TV ads mocking iPhones AI capability) yet still iPhones sales are breaking records - the majority of their phone buyers still prefer an iPhone over an AI capable other phone.
They can take their time to develop AI integration that others can't deploy - 'secure/private', deep integration with iCloud, location services, processing on device etc. that will provide the product moat to increase sales.
They're not good enough for that usecase, currently - so almost all interactions make the UX worse, currently.
Might change in the future, I'm just taking about today in January 2026
I don’t think that’s true. People just use the LLM apps. What people don’t feel like they need right now is deep LLM integration across the whole OS. IMO, that’s more of just not showing people the killer product yet.
I don't often use voice assistants myself, but they're fully conversational these days and several billion times more useful than the old-school Alexa-style stuff with a limited set of integrations.
1. Have a user interface. Sometimes I'll ask a question and Siri actually provides a good enough answer, and while I'm reading it, the Siri response window just disappears. Siri is this modal popup with no history, no App, and no UI at all really. Siri doesn't have a user interface, and it should have one so that I can go back to sessions and resume them or reference them later and interact with Siri in more meaningful ways.
2. Answer questions like a modern LLM does. Siri often responds with very terse web links. I find this useful when I'm sitting with friends and we don't remember if Lliam Neeson is alive or not - for basic fact-checking. This is the only use case where it's useful I've found, when I want to peel my attention away for the shortest period of time. If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case. Otherwise Siri isn't good for long questions because it doesn't have the intelligence, and as mentioned before, has no user interface.
3. Be able to do things conversationally, based on my context. Today, when I "Add to my calendar Games at Dave's house" it creates a calendar entry called "Games" and sets the location to a restaurant called "Dave's House" in a different country. My baseline expectation is that I should be able to work with Siri, build its memory and my context, and over time it becomes smarter about the things I like to do. The day Siri responds with "Do you mean Dave's House the restaurant in another country, or Dave, from your contacts?" I'll be happy.
btw: I hope you will visit Dave's House someday in the future.
Siri's current architecture now provides context into the prompt, such as the app/window that has focus and the content loaded into it. In that sense, Siri is more like the MacOS menu bar than an app. A consolidated view of Siri history may look disjointed, in that there is a lot of context hidden if all it shows is a query like "when was this building built?".
Even more so, it might not provide the functionality desired if you go look at historic chats and ask "who was the architect?", unless all that context was actually captured. However, that context was never formatted in a way that was intended to be clearly displayed to the user. That in itself creates a lot of challenges around things like user consent since Siri can farm off queries to other (online) tools and world-knowledge AI services.
There is at least a UX paradigm for this - clipboard history. Coincidentally, Tahoe built clipboard history into Spotlight. But clipboard history lends itself to perhaps being more a complete and self contained snapshot. I'm not sure Siri is being built to work this way because of implicit context.
For 2, at a certain point this gets farmed off to other tools or other AI services. The Gemini agreement is for the foundational model, not large "world knowledge" models or backing databases. Today, Siri answers this question by providing bibliographical information inline from Wikipedia, using internal tools. The model itself just isn't able to answer the actual question (e.g. it will just say his birthday).
For 3, the model already has substantial personal context (as much as apps are willing to give it) and does have state in between requests. This is actually one of the issues with Siri today - that context changes the behavior of the command and control engine in interesting ways, phone to phone and sometimes moment to moment.
Unfortunately, I think stopping and asking for clarification is not something generative AI currently excels at.
This should be possible, go to Settings->Action Button->Controls and search for ChatGPT
If you ask for a website it should open a browser.
Edit: everything else spot on
Yeah it’s an interesting idea, but visuals are required sometimes. Even the simple task of “List the highest rated Mexican restaurants near me” works perfectly well enough with old crappy Siri. You’ll get a list of the highest rated Mexican restaurants near you. But as soon as you open the first restaurant, Siri closes and the list is gone. You can’t view the second restaurant. To get the list back you need to ask Siri again.
There’s no world in which that user experience makes a viable product. It’s a completely broken user experience no matter how smart the Gemini model is.
Also, Liam Neeson just catching strays over here
Would you like to click this button which takes what you said and executes it as a Google search in Safari?
I'm chuckling at the idea of pirating software in 1996.
iirc even in 1999, I couldn't figure out why Windows update required me to use internet exploder. It would take forever to download updates over dialup.
Talk about being there when the deep magic was written.
"Hi Siri, can you message Katrina on WhatsApp that Judy is staying 11-15th Feb and add it to the shared Calendar, confirm with me the message to Kat and the Calendar start and end times and message."
Will make it much easier to find those missing pictures from a few years ago...
Just under 16 months since the release of iOS 18. The phones they would have sold this with shipped alongside 18.
Also, the personalized Siri was indicated it would not be available until later and was expected in the spring release (March 2025).
Anthropic doesn't have a single data centre, they rent from AWS/Microsoft/Google.
I respect Google's engineering, and I'm aware that fundamental technologies such as Protocol Buffers and FlatBuffers are unavoidably integrated into the software fabric, but this is is avoidable.
I'm surprised Google aren't paying Apple for this.
Unfortunately, it probably actually is a small number comparatively. Or at least I would need to see some sort of real data to say anything different.
I feel like people who distrust Google probably wouldn't trust Apple enough to give them their data either? Why would you distrust one but not the other?
Second I'm developing privacy focused apps that were going to use foundation models. Now I need to seriously reconsider this.
It ISN'T in this day and age. People don't switch back and forth between iOS and Android like it's still 2010. They use whatever they got locken in initially since their first smartphone or where Apple's green/blue-bubble issue pushed them to or what their family handed them down or what their close friend groups used to have.
People who've been using iOS for 6+ years will 98% stick to iOS for their next purchase and won't even bother look at Android no matter what features Android were to add.
The Android vs iOS war is as dead as the console war. There's no competition anymore, it's just picking one from a duopoly of vendor lock-ins.
Even if EU were to break some of the lockins, people have familiarity bias and will stick with inertia of what they're used to, so it will not move the market share needle one bit.
Performance? We are many years past the point somebody cared about performance. I am writing this on iphone 11 pro and the experience is almost exactly the same as current iOS.
You know what's not the same? Android became pretty great OS. I recently got older Pixel to see how GrapheneOS works and was surprised about Android (which i havent seen for a decade). iOS on the other hand has recently gone trough with very bad ui redesign for no reason.
Imho the main thing Apple has going for it is that Google is spyware company and Apple is still mainly hardware company. But if Apple decides to pull their users data to gemini… well good luck.
Personally I wouldn't use it, it still belongs to an advertiser specialised on extracting user information. Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher. But clean smell also means bland smell.
I don't however like the idea of having Google deeply embedded in my machine and Siri will definitely be turned off when this happens. I only use Siri as an egg timer anyway.
This seems like a odd move for a company that sells privacy.
Given my stance about AI, I'll definitely not use it, but I understand Apple's choice. Also this choice will give them enough time to develop their infrastructure and replace parts of it with their own, if they are planning to do it.
> Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher.
Breaching privacy and using it for its own benefit is AIs business model. There are no ethical players here. Neither from training nor from respecting their users' privacy perspective. Just next iteration of what social media companies do.
I dont think the model is that much different if they thought Siri was half decent enough for so long.
Judging from the past 10 years, I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services. When everything else being roughly equal.
Instead of raising price again Paying Apple even more per user, How about we pay the less but throw in Gemini with it?
Apple has been very good, if not the best at picking one side and allowing the others to fight for its contract. They dont want Microsoft to win the AI race, at the same time Apple is increasing the use of Azure just in case. Basically playing the game of leverage at its best. In hindsight probably too well into it they forgot what the real purpose of all these leverage are for, not cost savings but ultimately better quality product.
Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?
Google shouldn't be able to charge a fee on accessing every registered trademark in the world. They use Apple get get the last 30% of "URL Bars", I mean Google Search middlemen.
Searching Anthropic gets me a bidding war, which I'm sure is bleeding Google's competition dry.
We need a "no bare trademark (plus edit distance) ads or auto suggest" law. It's made Google an unkillable OP monster. Any search monopoly or marketplace monopoly should be subject to not allowing ads to be sold against a registered trademark database.
I guess this venture into politics more than anything else. And I am opinionated on the subject.
But other than that, the point worth centred on is Apple no longer care as much as being the best. They care much more about extracting best business deals and money out of their current position. Which is very different to Steve Jobs era, No money can put crap on his plate.
Also accounting optics means Apple can shows lower revenue but cleaner margins