I used to enjoy when Steve Jobs would give presentations “live without a net”.
Steve had backup plans, not to mention very thorough practice sessions. Once, a Mac had froze and he had to switch to a backup one, joking about it with grace.
(Aside: When will AppleInsider fix this broken forum software? Daily headaches)
That was what was so great about it. Even with all the preparations things could still and did go wrong and he had the ability to recover. Just because a theater group rehearses thoroughly doesn’t take away from their performance when the show opens. Just because Eddie Van Halen had decades of music experience didn’t take away from his live performances. He didn’t just play a studio tape for the audience.
OMG, the "infomercial" format has to go. Either do a real conference or just release the content on Monday morning, the pretending that it's a week-long event when it's just videos is a bit much, especially when other companies are doing live keynotes. We're so far from WWDC of old - old being just a few years ago.
Personally, I give Cook the benefit of the doubt, though not without some serious questions that I'll mention in a minute. But he has been Apple CEO longer than Jobs 2.0, coming up on 14 years this October, without a hint of deceptive or dishonest behavior during that time. So to quickly throw Cook in with the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era of failure and broken promises seems like a VERY cheap shot, and one not deserved by Cook. Sure, be angry... call this out as the major f-ck-up that it is and that it shouldn't have happened. That's all fair game. But don't jump to dishonest and disreputable when Cook has never been either in his 14 years of leadership. And aside from his past record, Tim just seems too damned cautious and conservative a leader to take a flyer on intentionally misleading the public.
Gruber has met the execs in person and can contact them directly. He could have reached out to them to ask how things were going and could even have done this in an interview this year.
Rather than find out what's going on, he decided to very publicly write a put down of their leadership and their integrity just because of a delay.
This is where the impersonal nature of online commentary gives people a different sense of what's appropriate. If Gruber had a coworker and he had some concerns about them, this would be like writing an offensive note and pinning on a noticeboard for everyone to see instead of talking to them directly.
Now the Apple execs will give their time to iJustine, MKBHD and Brian Tong.
But yeah, I have questions. My first reaction to last year's WWDC timeline for "AI Siri" was: if Siri still sucks so badly after 14 YEARS, how is Apple going to achieve all this in less than a year? I know I have old posts from that time which said as much. And my second, more damning question Is: why did Apple wait until less than a month before it was supposed to deliver AI Siri to announce that it needed (A LOT) more time? The best it could do for an estimate was "within the coming year" which, technically speaking, means as late as the end of 2026, since that is "the coming year." Sorry, but even if Apple had, at the outset, wildly underestimated the challenges it faced, it would have known it was going to miss its delivery date months before it made the announcement. That's not something that creeps up by surprise. Did the Siri team keep insisting that it was going to get it done? We'll probably never know the real answer.
There's been a lot of advances in AI in recent years and there are enough open source models and clients so it's much faster to build a high quality product. The DeepSeek model was made in a short timeframe:
The big AI models used a few million hours of GPU time. With 10,000 GPUs, this is under 6 months. Grok 3 used 200 million GPU hours and 100,000 GPUs, took about 3-4 months to train.
Apple can use their own chips. The others use GPUs like the Nvidia H100. Apple would need about 3-4x the amount of M3 Ultra vs H100 or a custom chip. They'd be able to train a large model in under 6 months but it would only work in the cloud.
They don't have to do it all themselves either. Siri could use other engines. I think the main challenge Apple is trying to tackle is having good, local models. Nobody else is doing that, they have everything going to the cloud. The issue is RAM so local models have to be smaller and less accurate. It would be best if they could stream the model from the SSD like in tiles/layers like a series of nested models than a single large model. Llama3-7b works pretty well but it needs about 20 different models with different specialties.
What Apple likely estimated was the timeframe to train a competitive product but because it's inherently unpredictable, they couldn't know the result of the training would be production-ready. The issue of hallucinations has only been studied recently, nobody knows exactly how the models work but they will figure it out eventually. Apple probably shouldn't worry too much about the output of the AI, they can always have a filter on sensitive topics and just return a standard reply like 'my responses are limited, would you like to use a cloud-based model'. People would be ok with that for now.
I have now fully come around to agreeing that It’s time for Tim Cook to go.
A lot of great things happened under his leadership, especially apple silicon in Macs, but the Apple car debacle and now the AI debacle are convincing me that Apple needs a “product guy” leading the firm again.
Please explain what you see as a "debacle" for the R&D that Apple put into a possible car. There was never any assurance that a car would result from this effort--the whole point of doing research and development is to determine if manufacturing a competitive and superior product is possible and financially viable. And for Apple, never having been in the car manufacturing business, the challenge was even more difficult, especially considering that Apple's business model is based on very high profit margins, while autos are a fraction of that. At the end of the day, Apple decided there was no financially viable path forward and shut down the project. Look around at the EV business and you'll understand why this was the smartest decision: Fiskar is already out of business, Rivian and Polestar continue hemorrhaging money like it's water, and every company not named Tesla that produces EVs is losing a massive amount of money on every EV they sell. Ford has been manufacturing cars for 123 years, yet Car & Driver reported that in the Q1 2024, it was losing $130,000 on every EV that it sold. And now, with the EV business already a black hole money pit for car makers, Trump is ending the incentives that helped to bolster EV sales, so things are about to get even worse. The inescapable truth from all available evidence is that Apple avoided a money-losing debacle by shutting down Project Titan. The only argument one might make--and there's no way to know the truth of it--is that they should have shut it down sooner than they did. We also don't know what R&D for Project Titan might be useful for breakthroughs on other projects, so it's not as if the whole thing was pointless.
The explanation lies in these Steve Jobs quotes. If you can't see it from that, you'll never figure it out:
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.”
“Real artists ship.”
"And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
Ah, yes... quotes from the infallible god worshipped by the Cult of Dead Stave--the god who said nobody would want to watch video on a phone screen and lots of other stuff he got wrong. Had he not been fired in '85, Steve would have bankrupted Apple early on with the Mac and Lisa. and then he went on to launch the failure called Next, where he replicated his problems at Apple: high prices and low sales. But hey, I realize the messy bits always interfere with the story of an infallible god, no matter which religion. No doubt Steve hit his genius years upon his return to Apple--and ironically, he now saved Apple from the fate it would have suffered years earlier had he not been fired: bankruptcy, His last 13 years at Apple were very successful. But the truth is that he spent more years unsuccessful at business--great products don't matter if you can't generate the sales to sustain your company--so you'll forgive me if I don't regard his words as holy scripture.
Judging by the quotes you've chosen, it seems your main beef is that R&D in the car space would have been a no for Steve and was a mistake for Cook to say yes. And you know Steve would have said no because why? Steve and Tony Fadell were talking about an Apple car as early as 2008, and according to Apple board member Mickey Drexler, "Steve's dream before he died was to design an iCar." But Project Titan wasn't just about designing a car--it was a proof of concept as to whether a car could be built, delivered and sold in sufficient quantities at the price point Apple would need. Pulling the plug when Tim did was better than delivering the automotive equivalent of Lisa.
But Project Titan wasn't just about designing a car--it was a proof of concept as to whether a car could be built, delivered and sold in sufficient quantities at the price point Apple would need. Pulling the plug when Tim did was better than delivering the automotive equivalent of Lisa.
A 10 year POC for designing a car? How many decades would Apple then spend on building it?
As for not delivering a Lisa.... AVP is an unsellable miracle of tech like Lisa. It has to be more affordable and open a new market (like DtP) to become a Mac - but for now Cook shipped a Lisa. Which is obviously better than shipping two. I do however believe Car would have been able to disrupt a market.
Apple has historically been a device company first and a software company second. AI is all about software an area is not as competent in as hardware. For decades Apple product announcements have emphasized the physical aspects of their devices - color, thinness, weight, colors, screen sizes, etc. on an OS level they’ve done OK. But Apple has always emphasized selling the hardware because the hardware is what gets people locked into their ecosystem. They have never produced stellar applications. They frequently copy features from independent software developers. AI is all about software leadership. Apple doesn’t know how to do that. Even their hardware frequently lags other competitors, especially in the phone segment. I’ve complained for years that there needs to be better ways to manage devices and configurations. What better tool to do that you ham AI? But Apple has never thought that way about device management. They need some real thinking outside the Apple Box when it comes to AI. I’m not sure that’s something they are currently capable of.
But Project Titan wasn't just about designing a car--it was a proof of concept as to whether a car could be built, delivered and sold in sufficient quantities at the price point Apple would need. Pulling the plug when Tim did was better than delivering the automotive equivalent of Lisa.
A 10 year POC for designing a car? How many decades would Apple then spend on building it?
As for not delivering a Lisa.... AVP is an unsellable miracle of tech like Lisa. It has to be more affordable and open a new market (like DtP) to become a Mac - but for now Cook shipped a Lisa. Which is obviously better than shipping two. I do however believe Car would have been able to disrupt a market.
Again, not just designing a car, nubus--there are incredibly challenging problems for a non-car company to manufacture a $50K (and up, no doubt) vehicle, and to Apple standards no less.. but let's assume Apple had figured out design and manufacturing--you're still left with the problem of setting a price point that's competitive, and whether the profit margin is worth the effort, assuming there IS a profit at all. For every car company not named Tesla, EVs have only been a sea of red ink. So even if Apple designed and manufactured a disruptive car, you're back to the problem of the original Mac: a great, disruptive product mired in low sales because prices were too high.
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Rather than find out what's going on, he decided to very publicly write a put down of their leadership and their integrity just because of a delay.
This is where the impersonal nature of online commentary gives people a different sense of what's appropriate. If Gruber had a coworker and he had some concerns about them, this would be like writing an offensive note and pinning on a noticeboard for everyone to see instead of talking to them directly.
Now the Apple execs will give their time to iJustine, MKBHD and Brian Tong.
There's been a lot of advances in AI in recent years and there are enough open source models and clients so it's much faster to build a high quality product. The DeepSeek model was made in a short timeframe:
https://www.unite.ai/how-deepseek-cracked-the-cost-barrier-with-5-6m/
The big AI models used a few million hours of GPU time. With 10,000 GPUs, this is under 6 months. Grok 3 used 200 million GPU hours and 100,000 GPUs, took about 3-4 months to train.
Apple can use their own chips. The others use GPUs like the Nvidia H100. Apple would need about 3-4x the amount of M3 Ultra vs H100 or a custom chip. They'd be able to train a large model in under 6 months but it would only work in the cloud.
They don't have to do it all themselves either. Siri could use other engines. I think the main challenge Apple is trying to tackle is having good, local models. Nobody else is doing that, they have everything going to the cloud. The issue is RAM so local models have to be smaller and less accurate. It would be best if they could stream the model from the SSD like in tiles/layers like a series of nested models than a single large model. Llama3-7b works pretty well but it needs about 20 different models with different specialties.
What Apple likely estimated was the timeframe to train a competitive product but because it's inherently unpredictable, they couldn't know the result of the training would be production-ready. The issue of hallucinations has only been studied recently, nobody knows exactly how the models work but they will figure it out eventually. Apple probably shouldn't worry too much about the output of the AI, they can always have a filter on sensitive topics and just return a standard reply like 'my responses are limited, would you like to use a cloud-based model'. People would be ok with that for now.
Judging by the quotes you've chosen, it seems your main beef is that R&D in the car space would have been a no for Steve and was a mistake for Cook to say yes. And you know Steve would have said no because why? Steve and Tony Fadell were talking about an Apple car as early as 2008, and according to Apple board member Mickey Drexler, "Steve's dream before he died was to design an iCar." But Project Titan wasn't just about designing a car--it was a proof of concept as to whether a car could be built, delivered and sold in sufficient quantities at the price point Apple would need. Pulling the plug when Tim did was better than delivering the automotive equivalent of Lisa.
As for not delivering a Lisa.... AVP is an unsellable miracle of tech like Lisa. It has to be more affordable and open a new market (like DtP) to become a Mac - but for now Cook shipped a Lisa. Which is obviously better than shipping two. I do however believe Car would have been able to disrupt a market.