Apple is lying about Apple Intelligence, John Gruber says -- and he's right

AppleInsider

Long-time Apple pundit John Gruber has launched an uncharacteristically strident attack against what he says are Apple's lies over the Apple Intelligence roll-out. And, he's spot-on with his arguments and conclusions.

John Gruber (far right) with Greg Joswiak (left) and Craig Federighi (center) after WWDC 2024 -- image credit: John Gruber

For years, John Gruber has hosted "The Talk Show," an extended post-WWDC conversation with Apple executives such as Craig Federighi. He's also written about Apple extensively, and in recent months has been increasingly critical of Siri -- as have others, including AppleInsider, but now he's gone further about what he calls the AI fiasco.

"The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI," he writes. "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."

"In the two decades I've been in this racket, I've never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple's announcement on Friday that the 'more personalized Siri' features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until 'the coming year,'" he continued. "I should have my head examined."

Gruber's argument is that he, and everyone, should not have believed Apple's promises of Apple Intelligence when they were unveiled at WWDC 2024. "I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn't see what should have been very clear to me from the start," he said.

Specifically, despite Apple having "overpromised (if not outright lied about)," Apple Intelligence, the company was only able to demonstrate what Gruber calls "the more trivial features." Those included the Writing Tools and the Image Playground, while everything more substantial was talked about, yet never demonstrated in even a rough form.

Gruber describes those more substantial features as vaporware, and Apple's presentation of a more personalized Siri as being nothing more than a concept video. AppleInsider pointed out the same thing when Apple released an ad promoting Genmoji, but using images that could not possibly be generated by that feature.

"Who said 'Sure, let's promise this" and then "Sure, let's advertise it'? And who said 'Are you crazy, this isn't ready, this doesn't work, we can't promote this now?'" continues Gruber. " And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook."

Apple's bad old days are back

In his piece, Gruber compares this situation of Tim Cook and Apple Intelligence to Steve Jobs and MobileMe, the to iCloud. Jobs was reportedly furious over how poorly MobileMe was done, and Gruber says Cook should be the same over Apple Intelligence.

Part of Jobs's tirade at that time, back in 2008, included him replacing the executives in charge of the project. And it also saw him say point out that a prominent Apple journalist had turned against the company over this failure.

"[Walt] Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us," said Jobs.

Some 17 years later, Cook may be pointing out that Gruber is now writing bad things about Apple. But as to replacing executives, Apple has already moved "fixer" Kim Vorrath to oversee Apple Intelligence and Siri.

And we are too. AppleInsider has already examined how users are losing in the current AI race.

Still, the presumption that Apple follows through on its promises has made everyone assume great Apple Intelligence features are coming. Just when they're coming is now anybody's guess.

The phrase 'Available Today' is long gone

Gruber believes that despite all of the claims that Apple is behind the industry on AI, everyone gave Apple Intelligence far too much credit -- because it was from Apple.

With leaks and complex manufacturing, Apple can no longer make surprise launches of devices and then with a flourish reveal it is "available today." But the company still has a reputation of not announcing products until they were ready.

Apple still says "Available Today" in presentations, but they only apply to beta releases

It's just that perhaps that reputation is no longer deserved. Apple now gives sneak peeks of devices ranging from the Mac Pro, to the ultimately failed AirPower charging mat, even if they are still rare.

Apple Intelligence is also not the first Apple software that was announced early and subsequently missed its deadlines. But if the long delays over the new CarPlay are embarrassing, they're also understandable because it involves Apple working with dozens of car manufacturers.

In comparison, aside from its partnership deals with OpenAI and ultimately Google, Apple Intelligence is down to Apple.

That doesn't make the work easy, even if it does make it easier. Apple has only its own timescales to work to, only its own resources to use.

Creating a personalized Siri, amongst the other remaining Apple Intelligence features, and preserving user privacy at the same time, is an immensely difficult software engineering problem.

Yet even though that means delays are practically certain, Apple as a whole should know day to day what it is doing and how the project looks.

So there is no one person to blame for Apple launching its ads promoting Apple Intelligence features that do not exist.

And there is no one person to blame for how Apple chose to make Apple Intelligence the focus of its launch of the iPhone 16 range. There is no one person to blame for how, after months of Apple Intelligence effort, Apple still made it the centerpiece of the launch of the iPhone 16e.

The buck has to stop somewhere, though. The company does have a CEO, after all.



Read on AppleInsider

kalmadda

I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this.  For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements.  And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet.  Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…

daalseth

He’s not wrong. This has been a fiasco.

And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook."

Tim Cook was the steady hand that kept Apple going when Steve Jobs left. He did good work, but that is in the past. What have we had in recent years? The CarPlay fumble. The AppleCar fiasco. The Siri fiasco which is a part of Apple Intelligence being mostly a half baked “us too’ project and not something well thought out. AppleVision becoming this decades Lisa. Software shipped with obvious bugs. On and on and on. 

It is time for Tim Cook to step aside. He made Apple into the most profitable company in the world, but it’s become clear that he isn’t able to lead it anymore. There are little fiefdoms, and pet projects, and a loss of focus on what is most important. That takes a firm hand from the top, and Cook isn’t providing that anymore. I’m of the same cohort as Cook and I know how hard it is to step back and let younger people take the reins. But it is time. For the good of Apple it is time for Cook to leave the stage

gatorguy

KalMadda said:

I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this.  For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements.  And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet.  Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…

"If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality....
 Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when.

Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work."

jagrahax

I have to say that one statement in this article is incorrect. “Apple released an ad promoting Genmoji, but using images that could not possibly be generated by that feature.”  I looked back at that article and tried to create those Genmoji images myself.  I created three of them with very little difficulty, and then stopped. 

Admittedly, I am using the latest beta version of iOS, but this contradiction leaves me wondering if Gruber, et. al. are being a little shrill. 

gatorguy

jagrahax said:

I have to say that one statement in this article is incorrect. “Apple released an ad promoting Genmoji, but using images that could not possibly be generated by that feature.”  I looked back at that article and tried to create those Genmoji images myself.  I created three of them with very little difficulty, and then stopped. 

Admittedly, I am using the latest beta version of iOS, but this contradiction leaves me wondering if Gruber, et. al. are being a little shrill. 

That statement about Genmoji didn't come from Gruber AFAIK. It was from the AppleInsider editor. I'm fine with Gruber calling Apple out for a high-profile and widely marketed tent pole feature they've never been able to demo, and still can't present any evidence of it existing in any usable form. Everyone believed it was true just because Apple said it. 

edited March 13

kalmadda

gatorguy said:

KalMadda said:

I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this.  For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements.  And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet.  Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…

"If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality....
 Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when.

Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work."

Mark Gurman reported info about them from his sources, first saying they would be ready by 18.4, then saying they had been delayed to 18.5 due to issues that arose with the features.  So there is no reason to believe they don’t exist at all.  Creating AI features like this with privacy and security is a difficult task, and likely they discovered an issue with it recently after the features were most of the way completed that will require some reworking to fix.  That’s the way complex software like this ends up working out sometimes.  There is absolutely zero reason to believe the features don’t exist.

Furthermore, Apple basically never demonstrates unreleased software features before they’re in beta to journalists or any outside sources, so expecting that is incredibly unreasonable.  Just because Apple hasn’t shown these features to journalists doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  That’s a preposterous leap that doesn’t even make any semblance of logical sense…

mknelson

KalMadda said:

I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this.  For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements.  And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet.  Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…

I'm not sure about the "too hard" part - I believe they've earned the complaint.
At the same time I can see where they may have had an early prototype but getting it to completion has bee more difficult than expected. Thats pretty common with other AIs - it's easy to get the basics, but it takes an exponential amount of work to improve.

wesley hilliard

jdw said:

Wow.  Just wow.

When otherwise staunchly left-leaning Tim Cook isn't quite left enough for the left, they pounce. 

Great job, folks.  Great job.

This has nothing to do with politics and it's an insane leap to try and make it so. Stop.

humbug1873

Apple has lost it's edge. Remembering the days where it was at the verge of death, essentially 'betting the company' (Steve Jobs) on new product categories that are the true reasons for Apple's turnaround. Nowadays they are essentially drowning in money and spend tons on overcomplicated underimpressive stuff that are more often than not failures (like the car).
Obviously all the truly creative people are gone and the whole thing is coordinated by the CEO bean counter that doesn't care about the products. Instead we're getting more and more money grabs to milk the customers and pushing money to shareholders with stock buybacks (that essentially cover the slowing growth due to lack of products.)

Gruber is correct. The Apple is rotten.

anonymouse

gatorguy said:

KalMadda said:

I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this.  For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements.  And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet.  Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…

"If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality....
 Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when.

Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work."

Oh my god, hell has surely frozen over when I find myself agreeing with gatorguy.

applepoor

The misleading advertising to entice sales and the hype of the move to 16GB of ram is now the minimum necessary for AI smells like a sewage plant poorly run.

Apple needed the 16GB of ram minimum for years but put profit over customer approvals. Ever since I started in the computers back in the 70s, more memory was the least expensive upgrade to boost performance, but that all changed at Apple when they soldered in the Memory and SSDs. Now a relatively modest expenditure to improve a computer a customer had ALREADY purchased with more memory has morphed into "buy a new computer".

There are not enough fans to get the oder of this out of the atmosphere. Apple blew away all consumer trust this year with all of the massive advertising across their entire product lines that their non-working AI was all set to go., That was the complete hype for the iPhone 16 series and why folks needed to buy it now. 

Some tentative features even were retracted as they really were hardly "alpha" let alone "beta" features.  

AI is operational in some arenas of the computer industry but definitely NOT in the Apple World.

The billions wasted on the car project and the goofy Googles that ceased production in less than a year due to lack of sales shows that Apple's management team is way over paid and really out of touch. Tim's only justifiable claim to fame is the Apple Watch which is an insignificant percentage of sales.

It is definitely  time to kick back sides and take names for the exit from Apple program.

muthuk_vanalingam

Wesley Hilliard said:

jdw said:

Wow.  Just wow.

When otherwise staunchly left-leaning Tim Cook isn't quite left enough for the left, they pounce. 

Great job, folks.  Great job.

This has nothing to do with politics and it's an insane leap to try and make it so. Stop.

Agreed. And I usually enjoy reading @jdw's posts. Definitely, not this one. Not after, it was deleted for violating the forum rules.

My personal take on the topic at hand - Ok, Apple lied about an important feature - so what? Everything is fair in love, war and marketing. Apple's marketing is usually not as deceptive as competition and they are still far better than competition even after this situation. Of course. competition is not the gold standard for Apple to follow, rather Apple has to set the high bar for others to follow. But occasional missteps happen and that is inevitable. Is this misstep large enough for CEO to step down - I don't think so, considering the track record of the CEO in question for the last 10+ years.

matkinson

Better late than never. Credit where credit is due: MacDailyNews has been saying this for quite awhile now.

John Gruber finally figures out that Tim Cook has turned Apple into a wheezing vaporware factory - MacDailyNews.com

daalseth

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

jdw said:

Wow.  Just wow.

When otherwise staunchly left-leaning Tim Cook isn't quite left enough for the left, they pounce. 

Great job, folks.  Great job.

This has nothing to do with politics and it's an insane leap to try and make it so. Stop.

Agreed. And I usually enjoy reading @jdw's posts. Definitely, not this one. Not after, it was deleted for violating the forum rules.

My personal take on the topic at hand - Ok, Apple lied about an important feature - so what? Everything is fair in love, war and marketing. Apple's marketing is usually not as deceptive as competition and they are still far better than competition even after this situation. Of course. competition is not the gold standard for Apple to follow, rather Apple has to set the high bar for others to follow. But occasional missteps happen and that is inevitable. Is this misstep large enough for CEO to step down - I don't think so, considering the track record of the CEO in question for the last 10+ years.

So what? It’s called fraud and people have been prosecuted for it. At the very least I expect a massive lawsuit over this which I expect Apple will lose costing them millions. The damage to their reputation will be even worse. 

bloggerblog

I am glad I didn't upgrade to iPhone 16 from my 14.
Anyway, my only beef with Apple Intelligence is the buggy implementation of Smart Script. I spent over two hours at Apple stores to find out how I could get it to work correctly and discover any ux patterns I needed to follow, but I always ended up getting frustrated with all sorts of bugs. It's a fantastic idea if it worked, but in its current state it shouldn't even be in Beta it's definitely in Alpha.

I do remember when SJ introduced Siri he said it's a conversational voice assistant, over a decade later it is still not conversational.

bigstick

This is the same debacle we had with Siri.
For years Siri has been the 'developmentally challenged' virtual assistant, being outclassed by Google and Alexa.

Over the years improvements have been marginal and slow.

Apple Intelligence is anything but.

canukstorm

KalMadda said:

gatorguy said:

KalMadda said:

I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this.  For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements.  And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet.  Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…

"If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality....
 Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when.

Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work."

Mark Gurman reported info about them from his sources, first saying they would be ready by 18.4, then saying they had been delayed to 18.5 due to issues that arose with the features.  So there is no reason to believe they don’t exist at all.  Creating AI features like this with privacy and security is a difficult task, and likely they discovered an issue with it recently after the features were most of the way completed that will require some reworking to fix.  That’s the way complex software like this ends up working out sometimes.  There is absolutely zero reason to believe the features don’t exist.

Furthermore, Apple basically never demonstrates unreleased software features before they’re in beta to journalists or any outside sources, so expecting that is incredibly unreasonable.  Just because Apple hasn’t shown these features to journalists doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  That’s a preposterous leap that doesn’t even make any semblance of logical sense…

"Furthermore, Apple basically never demonstrates unreleased software features before they’re in beta to journalists or any outside sources"

Well, they have this time and they've been caught with their pants down.  Gruber's right.  All we've been shown are a bunch of canned video demos and zero amount of working code.  Apple's guilty and it's on them prove themselves innocent and gain back trust.  People need to stop shilling for Apple here.

"Mark Gurman reported info about them from his sources, first saying they would be ready by 18.4, then saying they had been delayed to 18.5" =>  In his latest report, Gurman mentions that one of his sources said Apple may likely have to start everything from scratch because features are not working.

edited March 13

canukstorm

DAalseth said:

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

jdw said:

Wow.  Just wow.

When otherwise staunchly left-leaning Tim Cook isn't quite left enough for the left, they pounce. 

Great job, folks.  Great job.

This has nothing to do with politics and it's an insane leap to try and make it so. Stop.

Agreed. And I usually enjoy reading @jdw's posts. Definitely, not this one. Not after, it was deleted for violating the forum rules.

My personal take on the topic at hand - Ok, Apple lied about an important feature - so what? Everything is fair in love, war and marketing. Apple's marketing is usually not as deceptive as competition and they are still far better than competition even after this situation. Of course. competition is not the gold standard for Apple to follow, rather Apple has to set the high bar for others to follow. But occasional missteps happen and that is inevitable. Is this misstep large enough for CEO to step down - I don't think so, considering the track record of the CEO in question for the last 10+ years.

So what? It’s called fraud and people have been prosecuted for it. At the very least I expect a massive lawsuit over this which I expect Apple will lose costing them millions. The damage to their reputation will be even worse. 

Exactly. They mislead the public into believing they’d get some great AI features a few months down the road - but only if they upgraded their iPhones. Analysts went as far as calling for an iPhone upgrade supercycle due to these great AI features. Most prominent/exciting being a Siri that knows about you. And that is the exact feature that turns out to be vaporware - for the entire iPhone 16 cycle! So the trust is broken. You can no longer believe what Apple tells you.

macplusplus

More personalized Siri... Easy to utter, extremely hard to conceive and implement. The biggest drawback of current LLMs is their lack of "context retention". Ask any of the most powerful LLMs they will list that among their limitations. Even in a single session they have difficulty on maintaining an established response pattern in repetitive tasks. A Siri that responds with a different personality everytime is intolerable. Maintaining the context is crucial even for an avatar-level "personality". Apple's refusal of a premature jump lnto the "AI smartphone" bandwagon has certainly serious technical reasons. Remember that Apple has already laid out a very solid foundation with the A18 chip designed specifically to run on-device LLMs, and before that, the Neural Engine. In that sense, the "lack of context" shared by Gruber and the author is even more amazing than that of LLMs.

canukstorm

macplusplus said:

More personalized Siri... Easy to utter, extremely hard to conceive and implement. The biggest drawback of current LLMs is their lack of "context retention". Ask any of the most powerful LLMs they will list that among their limitations. Even in a single session they have difficulty on maintaining an established response pattern in repetitive tasks. A Siri that responds with a different personality everytime is intolerable. Maintaining the context is crucial even for an avatar-level "personality". Apple's refusal of a premature jump lnto the "AI smartphone" bandwagon has certainly serious technical reasons. Remember that Apple has already laid out a very solid foundation with the A18 chip designed specifically to run on-device LLMs, and before that, the Neural Engine. In that sense, the "lack of context" shared by Gruber and the author is even more amazing than that of LLMs.

"Remember that Apple has already laid out a very solid foundation with the A18 chip designed specifically to run on-device LLMs, and before that, the Neural Engine"

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Apple's lost trust.  It's their job now, to earn it back.