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John Gruber Says 'Something is Rotten' at Apple

Chungry said:
We're on a similar trajectory, I've had Macs since the old Mac OS days pre OS X, and every iPhone up to the 16 PM. All this pushed me over to an S25 Ultra and it's a breath of fresh air. I'm ashamed to say I have a vision pro and kept it past the return window. It's a glorified immersive studio display. It works for PWAs I guess. Which is great because the app store is dead.
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lol. Yea Vision Pro is awesome but difficult to use if you don’t live alone. Gotta look at family and say “you do your own thing I’m going to put my face helmet on.”
No amount of camera on the inside/screen on the outside will make that better. They should have spent that time making AR first instead of VR with an outside camera. I got fooled by all the YouTubers and pundits saying it’s real life including Gruber his style of interviewing Apple and being subservient is part of the reason for their problems. Surrounded by yes men and women that celebrate everything they make and just complain about colors or something innocuous.
 
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reasonablewolf said:
When I began testing iOS 18 last June, I had anticipated the release of all those exciting features in September. However, when September arrived, and I discovered that they wouldn’t be available until March, I was disappointed. When March finally came, and it was revealed that the features wouldn’t be released until iOS 19 or even iOS 20, I decided to switch back to Android after 11 years of loyalty to Apple. I’ve owned every iPhone since the iPhone 4S.
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Chungry said:
We're on a similar trajectory, I've had Macs since the old Mac OS days pre OS X, and every iPhone up to the 16 PM. All this pushed me over to an S25 Ultra and it's a breath of fresh air. I'm ashamed to say I have a vision pro and kept it past the return window. It's a glorified immersive studio display. It works for PWAs I guess. Which is great because the app store is dead.
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What are your thoughts on Android? What has impressed you most that you felt was missing in iPhones?
 
reasonablewolf said:
When I began testing iOS 18 last June, I had anticipated the release of all those exciting features in September. However, when September arrived, and I discovered that they wouldn’t be available until March, I was disappointed. When March finally came, and it was revealed that the features wouldn’t be released until iOS 19 or even iOS 20, I decided to switch back to Android after 11 years of loyalty to Apple. I’ve owned every iPhone since the iPhone 4S.
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To me I like iOS 18 for what it is. AI is not a feature I would use as a justification to get a competitor phone, but that’s me. There is a lot of value of being in the Apple ecosystem. I’m locked in because my entire family use Apple devices.

Apple will roll the features out on their timeframe and they will be the right features for the right audience. In the meantime iPhone 17 ultra here I come.
 
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I find it interesting that one guy writes an article and people are thinking the sky is falling.
He’s most likely a great guy, but unless he’s working inside apple he’s another blogger with his own creative thinking, that may or may not have any relevance. Most reputable company's want the product they provide to be at its best, who rolls out something thats no going to work as advertised. Do it once and do it right. How can you miss a feature you’ve never had?
 
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Just seems like Apple is really missing it when I can have the most natural and in-depth voice conversations with the ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Grok apps....but Siri, the one that lives by default on our phones, is still basically dumb as a rock. How hard could it possibly be to give Siri LLM AI intelligence? It doesn't have to be "Apple Perfect", just something that competes with the rest of the conversational AI's. I don't need Siri to cure cancer, but if I could communicate with her in a natural conversational experience, that would be so much more useful than she is now.
 
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ScanTheNavian said:
Can you connect your iPhone to a display and it becomes a desktop OS? Can you fold your iPad Mini and put it in your jeans pocket?

I am increasingly starting to feel one word for Apple's non-Mac lineup and that is 'stale'.
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Perhaps "stale" and "dependable" are two sides of the same coin, and as I hit middle age, I find myself less enamoured with flashy new gimmicks and more concerned over "what reliably works".

Dex may be cool, and I honestly do not know anyone around me who uses it. I got to play around with it once when I loaned out my school's phone as part of an excursion, and because I happen to have an external monitor + dock setup at my desk. Showed it to a couple of my colleagues who happen to carry Samsung phones, and they couldn't look less interested if they tried. Like how often do you end up in a scenario where you need a desktop setup, don't have your laptop with you, there is a spare monitor + keyboard + mouse + usb-c dock available, and it's more expedient to plug in your phone over retrieving your computer (which you probably need for access to VPN and network drive documents)?

You are also right that I can't fold my iPad, and I have seen a couple of folding phones fail around me already. One was when I went on overseas exchange programme, and this other teacher had her galaxy fold's display fail right after returning from overseas. Another was using the Galaxy Flip, and something happened that freaked her out and made her switch to a more conventional S24 barely a year later.

I am also seeing numerous incidents of green lines on Samsung phones around me. A notable issue in my country.


Meanwhile, I continue to use my iPad both inside and outside the classroom since 2012. My last iPad, the 2018 iPad Pro, lasted 5.5 years before I upgraded to the M4. I used my 8+ for 4 years before switching to the 13 PM, which will soon be hitting 4 years as well. The Apple TVs I purchased in 2012 still continue to work great for airplay mirroring despite not having been updated in ages. Notability is still an iOS-only app, while Lumafusion only recently came to Android (I think?). Heck, I still find myself on the fence whether I want to upgrade to the M4 MBA because my current M1 model is still going strong.

Does that make Apple stale? Perhaps insofar that their products are affordable and reliable and get supported for a reasonable period of time, and this is really what the bulk of us really need.
 
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"The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It's also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They're inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true, and they set a course based on that."

Sounds like the whole gist of AI to me!
 
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jonnysods said:
I'm 100% with you. The way I interact and use AI involves very specific instructions to get specific results. It has been helpful in many regards, but only when I interact with it directly.

It's not like it makes my life all that much faster, for say going through all our servers we manage and flagging warranties that are up for expriry 6 months out and then get a quote for a warranty extension from a vendor on my behalf - I still have to make the lists, I still have to look at the dates and set reminders. I don't see a lot of time saving features.

I 100% don't want it managing my email or even scanning it for that matter.

The biggest issue for me is how much worse off society will be for it, especially when AI starts learning from AI generated content, and we have this cheap dataset that drowns out real creativity and real content. Have you seen the AI generated 'photos' they sell at places like Adobe Stock? It's brutal.
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AI doesn’t learn. At least, not in the way most people think of learning. They are trained on large sets of data and will only ever know these inputs. LLMs do not currently have the capability to learn based on experience, nor can it “think” of questions that haven’t been asked yet. It’s a black box with some algorithms and most of human knowledge. AGI, where it can learn and think, is likely a long way off at best, but I’m doubtful will ever be real, or if we should even be trying to get there.
 
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thejadedmonkey said:
He'd be over-reacting if Apple's competitors didn't have perfectly workable AIs already deployed.

I am a programmer, and write code all day long. I can ask Microsoft's Co-pilot or their Github agent for help, and Google has an AI baked right into Android Studio that will take my project context into account, and even offer to make the changes for me. It isn't always correct, it requires a bit of hand holding, but it's like having a junior developer sitting next to me 24/7.

The tech is here.

And Apple promised it would be on my devices.

Except, Apple hasn't delivered, at all.

I upgraded to an M4 MBP in a major part due to the promised AI. We're half way through the M4 cycle, and it's nowhere to be found. If Apple releases an M5 chip before AI, I'll have basically bought a MBP a year early based on false advertising, and have every right to be pissed. :mad:

EDIT: If Tim Apple had got on stage and said "We've been experimenting with this new 'AI' thing, and it seems pretty cool. Over the course of the next two years, we are going to start rolling out AI features for the iPhone 15 Pro, and all 16 series iPhones. By Fall 2026 when we've completed our internal AI roadmap we estimate 80% of active iPhone users will have access to some form of the AI features, and we think you're gonna love it", that would have gone over really well, without over promising. It's called setting expectations, and Apple really dropped the ball this time.
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M4 MBP is still one of the best Laptops you can get, with or without Apple intelligence. And, it’s a Mac, you can use any “AI” you want. If you needed a laptop, I don’t think you made a mistake buying the M4
 
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russell_314 said:
This is a gimmick or party trick that you can impress your friends with, not something useful.
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Do you feel that way about iPad's external display support and Stage Manager? Because pretty much everything you said about a potential desktop mode for iPhone applies to iPad, too.
 
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01cowherd said:
Do you feel that way about iPad's external display support and Stage Manager? Because pretty much everything you said about a potential desktop mode for iPhone applies to iPad, too.
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If you’re comparing external display support to being able to run a desktop operating system with an external display, that’s two different things. I used to hook up an external display AKA television to my iPod. I could watch movies on the thing. I’ve done it maybe twice, but it seemed cool at the time. Maybe that was a gimmicky thing Apple did.

I’m absolutely for innovating new things, but just throwing things out there randomly to see if people like them is not how Apple does it. In some future scenario where we could set our iPhone on a table, and it projects a screen above it and keyboard out in front of it, that might be actually usable. In that scenario you wouldn’t need to carry additional stuff with you and the phone would actually provide desktop computing. I think people would use that device.
 
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"Examples of AI Learning:

Image Recognition: AI can learn to recognize objects, faces, or scenes by analyzing images."

I have a Nest Hello doorbell and it was doing that 6+ years ago before this fad came out. Was it using AI back then, or an algorithm?
 
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jonnysods said:
You nailed it - 3 years ago we called these things algorithms.
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jonnysods said:
"Examples of AI Learning:

Image Recognition: AI can learn to recognize objects, faces, or scenes by analyzing images."

I have a Nest Hello doorbell and it was doing that 6+ years ago before this fad came out. Was it using AI back then, or an algorithm?
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Sure, if you say so bud.😏 Let us all know when your Nest doorbell can do research for you, or write code, create and edit photos, write news articles, do your taxes, diagnose a disease, or when you're capable of having a natural conversation with it. And that’s just a few of the tens of thousands things AI can do today. Let me know when your doorbell catches up.🤭

And BTW...

"In our minds, inputs are external stimuli, for example the landscapes we see, the cars we hear in the street, and those come from events in our daily lives. These inputs will then trigger our “mental algorithms,” or thought patterns, which lead to outputs in the form of our feelings and actions."
 
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jonblatho said:
Ok, cool. I was talking about Gruber. This article — this thread — is about Gruber. Accordingly, I don’t care about other “Apple pundits” going on CNBC or whatever.
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Obviously, that’s why I figured you must’ve misread my post. I was talking about tech pundits in general who do the exact same thing and how it relates to product release cycles.
 
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spazzcat said:
If you think the current offerings are amazing you have blinders on, they get the job done most of the time, but they are far from amazing.
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Well i got posters done from AI, got various python codes written out of it, got browser extension made out of it. So yes, it is amazing if you can tame it. it has its pitfalls, still its amazing.
 
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Sptzz said:
You didn't even specify your claim. You just blankly stated: Apple is ahead of the game by a mile in AI, not even close.

If you mean so that users can run local LLMs? Then yes, for the 1% of the computer using population, then yes. Absolutely.

If you mean with actual AI research, not even worth a discussion.
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I meant hardware. And who says they’re not in research? Apple just never tells.
 
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