This is almost exactly what I said. He asks softball level to "fair" level questions. Meaning things that wont have much push back.
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Apple Executives Won't Be Appearing at This Year's WWDC Episode of The Talk Show Live
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What if Apple couldn't get any leadership that would want to go on The Talk Show Live and own up to the mistake? What if Federighi was like "hell no I'm not going on there and saying that's my fault" since he didn't lead the Siri / AI teams. Giannandrea / Cook are the ones ultimately responsible for it but theres no way they would go on the show so maybe no one goes. Rockwell should have gone and said look I'm steering this thing in the right direction.
Apple messed up. Gruden called them out, granted he was a bit over the top. This would have been a great opportunity to address the mistakes and how they plan to move forward. Instead they look bad for avoiding an event they have attended for the last few years.
Gaslighting is what this is. Apple created the high expectations people hold them to. I think I speak for many here that want Apple to be better. You can't get there pretending the emperor isn't naked.
But they did admit to dropping the ball. That was the primary point of directly reporting through Gruber that the Apple Intelligence features would be substantively delayed.
From the original article that starts this thread.
"... Gruber's comments were notable given his status as one of the most well-known Apple pundits, not to mention the fact that Apple had chosen him to be the one to share the news days earlier that the Apple Intelligence-powered Siri revamp had been delayed. ..."
If bother to go look at the linked article, Apple is quoted as saying "... It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. "
Gruber's wrap-around text of that quote goes on to say that probably means next year's iOS ( iOS 19 not this year's sequence of 18.xx )
That some of the features are sliding to next year is not an admission that the 'ball got dropped' ?
What are they doing? Moving it to later.
The crux of the matter here is what came AFTER Apple's admission. Several days later Gruber decided to 'reward' Apple handing him an exclusive ( that likely drove web traffic to his site), by composing a click bait title that throws them under the bus. A substantively large portion of that article about "rotten core" was actually about how Gruber had "screwed up" "missed the boat", misperceived what was going on. The term 'Apple Intelligence' had fooled him. He hadn't used critical thinking skills and now realized how wrong he had been. That's Apple's fault?
The title of his article could easily just have been "Sorry Readers, I blew it". However, that certainly wouldn't have generated as many clicks.
Apparently somewhat humorously continues down the dubious critical thinking when lays the core of the micromanaging of the marketing/sales commercials at the feet of Tim Cook. Really? There are lots of reports of folks 'crossing' Cook when they haven't done their homework on facts and numbers. The Cook - Ive dyamic was too loose of delegation; not micro-managing. Deducing this is "Tim Cook" is more likely even more clickbait tactics ( as there is whole subculture of "get rid of Cook" . Closely followed by. writing a "what should apple do with the Mac Pro" type of article. ).
Pretty likely that the Chief of Marketing/Sales made the call. Gruber called the person who made the decision full of "bullsh*t". But also throws 'gas on the fire' by publicly dragging that guy's boss in to the mess. Given that the Chief of Marketing/Sales likely primarily approves the allocation of folks to the WWDC 'talk show' ... surprise , surprise , surprise... he got cut off.
Cherry on top also grumbling about how Federighi was pitching Apple AI features and Giannandrea was not. There is usually a joke from Federighi in many of these dog and pony shows about how the "our crack marketing team 'told' him to say xxxx ". Again Gruber it is more of "cover my own ass" going on here since Gruber had Giannandrea on the WWDC 2024 "talk show" on stage
(
As Gruber stated in his announcement he has had inside track there since 2015. Almost 10 years with just 'give me' access. Gruber was not renting out places the size of the California theater in San Jose before that streak.
Antennagate? Roadmap?????????? St. Steve revisionist history,.
Basically the bulk of the presentation was about how Apple's phone was no worse than everyone else's phone.
Coverage of Apple's iPhone 4 Press Conference
Backstage at Apple Town Hall (via mrvideobba) Apple today is holding its iPhone 4 press conference where it is expected to address issues with the...
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Also , Need something better if trying to posture about he pinnacle of truth and transparency. Question one from the Q&A session
"...
Q: How's your health, Steve?
A: Fine! I was on vacation in Hawaii, but this was worth coming back for.
..."
Jobs was literally dead just a little over a year later. The press conference wasn't about his health , so it was a deflection. But it isn't very truthful.
Second question
"...
Q: Any changes to future antenna design?
A: Steve: We're still working on this. We're happy with the design. Maybe our wizards will come up with something better, but we don't think there's a problem here.
..."
Where is the admission of a problem here?????? Apple is willing to hand out bumper 'pacifiers' to those who complain, but they don't see a major root cause problem.
And roadmap??? "maybe will come up with something" is a roadmap? apple doesn't discuss future products in detail then and now. Policy really hasn't changed and it originates from Steve era.
further in Q&A
" ...
Q: Well, you supposedly fixed this problem two years ago, and now you say it's been a problem all along.
A: Steve: They're probably unrelated. I honestly don't remember the issue you're talking about.
....
Yes there is lots of "we are devoted to the customer" stuff there. Apple was going to attempt to make folks 'happier'. That is different from admission or roadmaps. The 'admission' was primarily that some customers were not happy. Not their design was basically flawed.
And got sued anyway. Settled in 2012.
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This. No idea why everyone is so up in arms about this when all he ever did was throw marketing spin questions and refrain from actually digging deeper into any topic.
It‘s like a lowkey WWDC rehearsal, he just asks what he is supposed to and lets the execs spit their script 24/7. Stopped watching years ago, don‘t need a recap of what I saw in a scripted show beforehand.
Kudos to Gruber for publishing the original article. Especially as many blame him to be some fanboy only.
Reaction of Apple proves it was the right thing to do.
Reaction of Apple proves it was the right thing to do.
Even worse? Telling the truth about what Apple is doing.
This shows why he pitched softball questions. Because the second you stop, you’re not on the podium interviewing Apple Execs anymore. 😂
Really this is an excellent idea. They don’t need to put those who failed on the stage, just bring out Rockwell and say something like we haven’t gotten to where we are going with Siri yet, but this is what we’re going to be doing. Don’t talk about the past, talk about the future. Consult with the engineers first and be able to give a reasonable expectation of approximately when those features will be out. They can get with Gruber and plan their questions like they mostly do already. This way they don’t have to lose face, talk about the future and don’t look like cowards. They wanted us to have courage to get rid of our 3.5 mm headphone jack so that we would buy their blasted air pods, they should show a little courage and show up.
A lot of people are going through a similar partial but significant process of disillusionment with Apple as I did starting some time in the mid to late 1990s, which didn’t entirely let up, as I and many others encountered a rising tide of hardware problems with Apple products, mostly Macs (repeated repair issues, design flaws, etc.) which Apple would only rarely acknowledge, and which many people were told by tech support, when they called Apple to report an issue, “That’s the first time Apple has heard of this problem!”, even when the issues had been reported in tech news for some time. It became a running joke. At the time, despite all of that, Apple had a better reputation for dealing with hardware problems than most other companies (and an even better reputation now), but that wasn’t much of a salve to Mac owners who had to deal with a variety of problems, including repeats of the same problems when Apple would simply replace bad parts with ones from the same production run, which had the same flawed designs and/or improperly spec’d parts, often leading to the same failure within a year or so.
Not to mention the repeated issues with Mac OS over those years, which many people thought would be resolved by switching to Jobs’ UNIX-based OS X, but that started a period of at least two or three years when the teething pains of OS X were often excruciating.
But even after my disillusionment set in, Apple continued to innovate with new products and they improved hardware reliability, and they did a pretty good job of getting Mac OS/OS X/macOS to run decently for most people. All of this maintained a decent amount of positive feeling towards Apple, both for me and many others.
In “recent” years, post-Jobs, Apple’s pace of innovation has diminished, though they’ve still introduced some decent products like Apple Silicon, AirTags, AirPods, Apple Watch, the HomePods, newer versions of the Mac mini, the Vision Pro, etc. That said, for some bizarre reason they didn’t do much with Siri, even though they had the initial goals for Siri’s capabilities clearly in mind from its initial developers, and then it got buggy for many people, and then it got progressively buggier.
The current semi-debacle with Apple Intelligence, and how it’ll integrate with or replace Siri, is something Apple might eventually fix fairly well, maybe within the next year or two. My point is that missteps and delayed fixes are nothing new for Apple, as they aren’t for plenty of other companies, and so today’s disillusionment with Apple is nothing new too, for whatever that’s worth.
And THAT said, it’s clear that Apple has a lot more innovative competitors these days than they’ve had previously, so they have a lot of catching up and outpacing to do, and mea culpas to admit to, and Apple knows this, and so Apple leadership needs to really act on that knowledge.
Not to mention the repeated issues with Mac OS over those years, which many people thought would be resolved by switching to Jobs’ UNIX-based OS X, but that started a period of at least two or three years when the teething pains of OS X were often excruciating.
But even after my disillusionment set in, Apple continued to innovate with new products and they improved hardware reliability, and they did a pretty good job of getting Mac OS/OS X/macOS to run decently for most people. All of this maintained a decent amount of positive feeling towards Apple, both for me and many others.
In “recent” years, post-Jobs, Apple’s pace of innovation has diminished, though they’ve still introduced some decent products like Apple Silicon, AirTags, AirPods, Apple Watch, the HomePods, newer versions of the Mac mini, the Vision Pro, etc. That said, for some bizarre reason they didn’t do much with Siri, even though they had the initial goals for Siri’s capabilities clearly in mind from its initial developers, and then it got buggy for many people, and then it got progressively buggier.
The current semi-debacle with Apple Intelligence, and how it’ll integrate with or replace Siri, is something Apple might eventually fix fairly well, maybe within the next year or two. My point is that missteps and delayed fixes are nothing new for Apple, as they aren’t for plenty of other companies, and so today’s disillusionment with Apple is nothing new too, for whatever that’s worth.
And THAT said, it’s clear that Apple has a lot more innovative competitors these days than they’ve had previously, so they have a lot of catching up and outpacing to do, and mea culpas to admit to, and Apple knows this, and so Apple leadership needs to really act on that knowledge.
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They clearly did, so i have no idea why you think this works for you as an argument.
This has nothing to do with why they didn't do it, and your parenthetical claiming Gruber (of all people) is advocating for physical violence is ridiculous and insulting and extremely wrong.
To be clear: they absolutely COULD. They do not have the bravery and will to do it. They are choosing this.
Has to be said—it would have been a DISASTER for Gruber if they HAD showed up. He'd be forced to actually interview them, and he's not good at that. He would have utterly choked. He's lucky they blinked first.
No they don’t, why increase the click count of your critics? If you believe cook will be booed off a stage you’re totally off base.
Whoever is in charge of PR, publicity and optics at Apple, it's well past the time to fire them. This is Apple blinking and swerving. It shows a lack of confidence in their products and methodology to be afraid of some shill tossing pre-approved softball questions. If nothing else was, this is definitely a sign Apple is scared and rudderless. Good thing they have a strong product pipeline because their C-suite lacks the spine to get in front of all this and control the narrative. And because people hate it, no, Jobs wouldn't have been spineless. For all his faults, he had the integrity necessary to tackle a tough PR nightmare like this. I'm convinced Cook is made of noodles and rainbows. I don't think he touches his own toilet paper. He's a lizard person like Zuck.
It’s not just Apple. It’s the whole valley, and a broader change in our culture in general actually.
Apple was a beacon of sorts, and they did really care about what they were doing. Slowly over time they shifted to be more about pure profit, which was perhaps inevitable.
So were they held to higher standards? Yes. But that was not just marketing, there was also truth to it.
Could someone have been disillusioned with Apple during Steve’s tenure? Sure. But the fall would not have been as great.
Tim Sweeney has a very funny idea:
Tim would wipe the floor with John, so it would be enjoyable to watch...
Tim would wipe the floor with John, so it would be enjoyable to watch...
You’re absolutely right Apple has taken public stances on issues like privacy, climate, and inclusion. But those are broad, mostly values driven positions, not partisan endorsements. What I was getting at is that Apple carefully avoids close association with individuals who have become polarizing, especially those who openly inject politics into their commentary.
In Gruber’s case, it’s not just that he leans liberal (which is fine), it’s that he recently crossed into personal insult territory like mocking Tim Cook for congratulating Trump and implying he had “Cheetos-dusted testicles” in his mouth. That kind of language, no matter how tongue in cheek, isn’t just political it’s inflammatory and crass, and puts Apple in a tough spot if they’re seen as endorsing or platforming that voice.
So yeah, maybe this year’s WWDC snub has less to do with criticism of Siri and more to do with Apple saying: We’re not tying our brand to anyone who might turn into a headline liability. And honestly, that’s probably smart.
I fully support Gruber entering his bad boy arc
Current day Apple doesn’t deserve “insightful and not negative” John
Also those live shows were a massive waste of time, Craig Federighi is a funny guy but I don’t care about irrelevant trivia like he was actually playing guitar that one time - plenty of people in the Apple sphere I do want to hear from
Current day Apple doesn’t deserve “insightful and not negative” John
Also those live shows were a massive waste of time, Craig Federighi is a funny guy but I don’t care about irrelevant trivia like he was actually playing guitar that one time - plenty of people in the Apple sphere I do want to hear from
John Gruber should get into a debate with Neil Cybart (AboveAvalon), and watch the former get the floor wiped.