Ladies, gentlemen and those who identify otherwise, start your indignation engines because we may be on the cusp of a new Apple gate!
This is very exciting. We haven’t had one of these in a long time. Now Macalope knows that some of you are probably saying “I know what you want to say and this is not a new one at all, this is just a continuation of last year’s Sirigate.”
First of all, how many times do Macalope have to tell you people, He can’t hear you? Once again, if you speak in these columns, seek professional help. Secondly, Sirigate was hardly a thing. It never got traction as a full-fledged Apple gate.
Third, this is a brand new “gate” because it will have a new name. Of course, Macalope is talking about Vaporgate. While “Vaporgate” may sound like one of these internal combustion engine parts that your father always says is probably the problem, it is actually the claim that not only Apple failed to release an improved Siri as promised for iOS 18, but what it Demoed in WWDC 24 was not a work product.
Once again, John Gruber has raised the V-word. It would be steam.
I spoke this week, outside the record, to more trusted sources in Apple’s software technology group, and none of them have ever seen an internal building of iOS that had [the “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?”] Function before last year’s keynote speaker. It doesn’t mean there was no such building … but none of my sources have ever seen one, and they found it was unusually unusual … Most of the rank and filing engineers in Apple do not believe that the feature existed in an yet vaguely functional state a year ago …
Businesses, of course, do this kind of thing all the time. But Apple has traditionally not. If the company demonstrated evaporates, why now?
Gruber connects to a piece of Michael Tsai taking Apple to the task of feeding things in an interview with Joanna Stern.
I would like to call that in several interviews they are kind of to create straw men to crack down. They still say people say Apple is behind in AI because it doesn’t have its own chatbot. For me, Apple has been aware that it has a different strategy and I think the strategy for the most part makes sense. I’ve never heard any desire for an Apple Chatbot.
A strawman -argument is one that no one is doing. Personally, Macalope likes to use them everywhere, mostly for comic effect. They burn so beautiful. But while he agrees with no Users Wishing an Apple Chatbot, that doesn’t mean no one has said Apple is behind because it doesn’t have one. In fact, many people say it.
IDG
As Tsai says, Apple’s strategy for years has been to use AI behind the scenes to make your photos look better, to give you suggestions for travel and otherwise make your device work better without getting on your face. But the venture capital community, Wall Street and Tech Hoi Polloi have collectively decided that AI means chatbots.
“We saw ‘her’ and we do it, whether Scarlett Johansson accepts it or not!”
(Update: “We regret to invoke Mrs. Johansson’s name.”)
Forget the fact that doing these things violating a million copyright, forget to suck up on the internet to create a model burns a lot of energy, forget that the results are often just flat, this is the new crypto, the new blockchain because they both worked so well.
The problem is that Apple listened to these people. Maybe so much so that it made something too aggressive hand waves 12 months ago and is now trapped with his hand in an empty jar that has the words “improved Siri” written on a piece of masking tape that is stuck to the outside.
While AI has its applications, all this has had very little to do with what users have wanted and everything to do with what employers who want to dismiss employees, unscrupulous investors who want to get rich fast, and billionaire CEOs of AI companies have wanted. Apple’s mistake was to buy into the criticism of itself. It is probably the biggest “port” of them all.