blastdoor

foregoneconclusion said:

blastdoor said: Today, the AI features Apple desperately wants and needs to bring to their products exist in products from other companies but Apple's project management/leadership appears to be failing big time. Apple can turn it around, and I bet they eventually will. But for the time being, this really looks like a mess. 

AI is all about the size and quality of the database used for training. The LLM programs themselves aren't nearly as important. 

charlesn said:

blastdoor said:

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. 

Stabitha_Christie said:

Marvin said:

blastdoor said:

When I first read that Apple executives wouldn’t be talking to John Gruber this year (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/29/the-talk-show-live-tickets-2025) I interpreted it as a snub. But now I wonder if the Apple executives are just going into hiding. 

John Gruber was rude with his recent unforgiving article about Apple. He definitely deserved a snub.

Just because Apple goes the extra mile to do their normal quality assurance doesn't justify attacking them for it the way he did.

AI is a constantly evolving technology and every month there's a new bar being set for what it can do like Google's Veo 3 video generator and others:







Apple hasn't been involved nearly as much with large scale cloud computing as other companies like Google and Microsoft so they have to scale up cloud infrastructure to handle this or figure out how to do more locally. Apple would probably prefer to do it locally but there are too many constraints on low-end hardware.

They should start with small, meaningful features that are done reliably and give people the assurance of privacy like being able to generate photoreal backgrounds for Facetime and wallpapers. They just need to manage expectations better so that people know this will be a multi-year technology and it won't come all at once.

Super curious, I assume the recent article is Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. What exactly was rude in that?  I can see why Apple wasn’t a fan of it but all Gruber did was give a fairly sober take on how Apple botched the rollout of Apple Intelligence.