elijahg

My almost 2 year old iPhone 13 Pro is on 85%. However it dropped to 85% after about a year, and has stayed there ever since.

appleinsideruser said:

phytonix said:

ramanpfaff said:

14 Pro already down to 89%. Bought right at launch a year ago. Never saw this drastic decline with any of my previous phones (I get a new one every year). 

I am also at 89%. I have to say Apple must have changed their battery supplier. My MBP 14 M1 is also 89% battery health with 261 cycles.

I am very disappointed by obvious decline in battery quality for the last couple of years.

Er, hang on. 89% for 261 of 500 cycles sounds spot on schedule. Just done the maths: 89.65% is on target to hit 80% after 500 cycles.

It's supposed to be 1000 cycles for Macbooks.

coolfactor said:

GerfnitAuthor said:

My primary problem with Siri is it doesn't remember context. So if I ask about where someone lives or the address of a company and it gives me the answer, I can't request, "Take me there" because it doesn't know what "there" means. I'm afraid I've gotten spoiled by GPTchat engines with which I can make backward references.

I believe the next version of Siri — coming with iOS 17 — can chain queries together. Combined with saying just "Siri", instead of "Hey Siri", the experience of interacting with the assistant should be much more natural and enjoyable.

Has this improved Siri been available in the iOS 17 betas, or do the betas still use the same Siri as the rest of us?

It does but it's still really basic. Siri stays active after a query in iOS17, and that is the only time you can expect it to remember context. If Siri stops listening, and you re-initiate it with "Siri" or whatever, it has no clue about the last thing you asked.

chasm said:

noelos said:

I'm sorry - but the excuses about Siri being crap because of privacy concerns just doesn't hold water.

"Hey Siri - play Scarborough Fair". Now I have "Scarborough Fair" by Simon & Garfunkel in my library, and I'd guess this is the version that 99.9% of people would want 99.9% of the time and it's a track I've also asked Siri to play literally hundreds of times because it helps my toddler get to sleep.

And yet, every time it is a gamble if she will play this, or some other rando version, or some other rando song completely. Siri learns NOTHING and doesn't even use the contextual knowledge available to make a reasonable guess of what you want.

Or what about a simple query while I'm driving and I idly ask what year some actor died. "I can't answer that while you're driving". Is that to preserve my privacy or is it just because they haven't put in the work to make Siri be able to answer simple queries in natural language?

Okay, let’s go over this:

As I mentioned, if you issue requests poorly, you can get bad results. Your S&G request is a good example of this. If you want a specific artist’s version of a song, you need to include the artists’ name in the request. A thousand acts (at least) have covered this song, so saying “Hey Siri, play Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel” will probably get you the right version, though I admit there’s a possibility you might get a live version by them — but if you add the phrase “from my library” I think you’d hit 100 percent accuracy.

As for your driving and asking questions query, I’ll remind you that Siri is not a chat bot. It is MUCH more restricted by Apple while you’re driving so that you don’t get distracted, and this is by design. Apple does not want you asking Siri random questions while you are driving, because that indicates that you are distracted or want to be distracted.

You may find that too restrictive, and I think you have something of a case, but when it comes to driver distraction I’d rather Apple err on the side of being over cautious and thus more limited. When I’m NOT in motion, suddenly Siri can answer a question like that handily. I just asked it “what year did actor John Wayne die,” when I was at home, and it gave me a very full answer, including his age and location when he died as well as the date.

I am certainly NOT saying there isn’t any room for improvement in Siri; quite the opposite! I’m just explaining why it behaves in some of the ways it behaves.

More excuses. That request was perfectly reasonable. Siri should lean toward using the songs in your library, and especially songs that you have played recently, or multiple times. All of that can be on-device, none of it needs to be privacy violating. We all like Apple, but it's quite sad that you feel the need to defend something that essentially everyone finds to be junk. Push Apple to be the best, don't try and fail to persuade 4 people on an Apple forum that they're apparently wrong, because for those 4 there's another 250 million each that experience Siri being crap. You've a very long way to go.

chasm said:

twolf2919 said:

I'm a big Apple fan - have all their devices - and was very enthusiastic when Siri first came out.  But over the years, Siri has moved inches, while competitors have moved miles - I can't believe a company that spends $22b on R&D can't make its voice assistant more useful in people's day-to-day lives.  So disappointing.

Siri will NEVER EVER be as “smart” as other voice assistants, so you’d better get over this right now. The reason? Because Siri doesn’t heavily rely on the collected data about you that encompasses more than even your parents know about you.

Siri continues to work very well for me, because I know what it can do and I don’t have much need outside of it helping me organise my day/life. I am fully aware that if you ask it some random question, probably phrased poorly, it will punt to web results. This is because it doesn’t have access to everything you have ever searched for or asked about ever in your life to help piece together what you actually want.

Maybe my needs are unusually simple, but I appreciate that Siri isn’t spying on me to get “smarter,” because it currently does 95+ percent of what I want it to do. I think the main area where Siri actually needs work is on accent recognition, and I could certainly see where Siri may in the future ask you to train it to your voice with more phrases than it does now.

It is much harder to develop a system that uses “AI” (in quotes on purpose) without scraping and selling all your personal data, which is why progress on Siri has been very slow (though it has in fact improved a great deal in recent years, at least in my use of it) compared to the companies that raid your brain for your every thought. But this is like praising the child who answers the algebra question by looking over another student’s shoulder, and failing the child who did all the work themselves because it took too long IMO.

Did you forget the AI in Photos? Assuming Apple collects no personal data for this, there is no reason Siri could not use a similar training methodology. ChatGPT blows it out of the water, and it is also not based on personalised data, only data publicly available. 

But either way Siri and AI is irrelevant because the reason Siri is so crap is its interpretation engine is not AI. It is programmed with a set of predefined phrases (amongst which are variants of that phrasing and wording) that it "understands", anything outside of that and it's clueless. That is why it's crap, and Apple very rarely adds to the list of understood phrases, it's only ever added to facilitate using Siri with a new product or service.

I don't believe you get a 95% success rate, I get at least 10% of queries answered with Homepods or AW complaining that it's not connected to the internet or "hmm, that's taking a little too long, can you try again?". Add to that the number of times it completely mishears or misunderstands and it's success rate is probably more like 50%. It's terrible and has never improved. There is zero excuse, stop trying to invent one.

Randomly emboldening sentences doesn't make them right by the way, Apple in fact does use your own personal data, but it's anonymised with "differential privacy".