gatorguy

GSMA has finally accepted open-source MLS as the RCS encryption standard as expected. It's had strong support for a few years now, and already integrated with other mobile operating systems since at least 2023, just waiting on GSMA to make it official so that Apple will join the band.

Apple should have no issue with rolling out the update since E2EE using MLS has been in the works for months now. How they'll handle China may be the remaining obstacle, but perhaps that too will be a non-issue.

Good news. The standards group has finalized E2EE as of this week, and Apple has stated they'll be integrating it with RCS in a future version. 

Somewhat shocking opinion piece by John Gruber. In general he's always been pretty upbeat about Apple, but not today.

"What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later...
Last week’s announcement — “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” — was, if you think about it, another opportunity to demonstrate the current state of these features. Rather than simply issue a statement to the media, they could have invited select members of the press to Apple Park, or Apple’s offices in New York, or even just remotely over a WebEx conference call, and demonstrate the current state of these features live, on an actual device. That didn’t happen. 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."


https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_cupertino

loopless said:

You guys don’t reflect what most people use Siri for.  Apple intelligence is not Siri. All the other tools like summaries and email categories are actually super useful. Apple has to build out massive AI compute farms and integrate Siri into iOS and apps, that takes time. And Apple likes to get things right.

...which may require scrapping Siri altogether. 

EDIT: There are reports coming out this morning that Apple has wasted more than a year trying to integrate Apple Intelligence with Siri before determining it just wasn't going to work. If accurate, that would help explain the "new" Siri moving to 2026. 

AppleZulu said:

saarek said:

AppleZulu said:

Honestly, it’s remarkable how long Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field remains in effect after his own death. 

The perception that he introduced new, fully-formed, instantly successful category killer products on an annual basis continues unabated. This is, of course, the driving force behind the perpetual lamentations about incrementalism at Apple. 

Turn off the RDF, and you’d realize everything at Apple has started at a slow burn and moved along at an incremental pace thereafter. Even the iPhone took years to become an instant success. 

The gloomy predictions in this article seem largely based on some features not showing up yet in the current iOS beta. I personally wouldn’t recommend selling your stock based on that. Either way, this stuff takes time to get right, and then when it does, everyone forgets about the half-baked competition that was supposed to be ahead of the curve. 

Siri is currently better than the peanut gallery claims, and in my experience, the occasional regressions where Siri stumbles on something that used to work usually turn out to be the result of back-end updates that come before a boost in Siri power or features. 

Lost in the grousing about iPhone 16e and MagSafe is the fact that the included hardware didn’t skimp on its ability to handle ‘Apple Intelligence.’ That’s because that’s what’s coming in the immediate pipeline, and they’re not going to sell a new iPhone that can’t handle it. Apple’s decisions about the 16e likely would’ve been different if the delays predicted in this article are accurate. 

I think that it's fair to say that people have a right to be frustrated here. You've got to remember that Siri first shipped in 2011, Apple had first mover advantage and it failed to deliver on the original promisses. In 2014 it was eclipsed on day one by Amazon's Alexa and was further pushed into also-ran status when Google Assistant launched in 2016. 

Yes, for super basic queries, Siri does just fine. But, after nearly 14 years of being on the market, you'd think that they'd have caught up by now. 

Think of Apple Maps. When it launched, it was rightly called out for being a mess and for being an inferior replacement for Google Maps. It took a few generations, but I've not heard the average person bitch about Apple Maps for years now.

Consider where iOS is today and what it can do now against iOS version 5. Yes, Siri has moved on a bit from iOS 5 too, of course it has. But it's still absurdly basic and poorly received by the masses in comparison to the competition.

...note that Apple has indicated that its AI will in the future be able to engage with apps on the users' devices. This potentially expands its capability to legitimately tap into user-paid content so that Siri can read or otherwise conveniently provide that content to the user on demand, all while respecting IP and user privacy and security. 

Because google doesn't have nearly as much control over the hardware that runs Android, they couldn't begin to do what Apple is preparing to do, even if they wanted to. Instead, Android assistant will have to be farmed out to AI running on google's servers.

Google will be doing that thing you say they can't do, beginning with the Pixel 10.
Personal "Assistant" (it will be rebadged, possibly Pixie) data is processed privately, securely, and on-device. No "AI running on Google servers" required.