frumious

Once again, Apple created a product category (or at least simplified it) that the vast public wasn't aware they needed yet. Then they failed to actively promote it to improve the Mac experience in the average home. Then they made the decision to phase it out. Then the streaming world and portables turned things upside down making the Apple original even more of an obviously needed product. And by then Apple had dropped its attention and moved elsewhere.

Somebody got paid money for this creative? Holy cow, how the ad business has fallen. No break through, no branding, and fuzzy messaging? Really Apple?

The first one doesn't even make sense unless you already know about the iPhone's photo capabilities, so just preaching to the converted. 

There's an account that needs to be up for review.

lkrupp said:

frumious said:

Astonished that they made NO changes to the remote. No way to know it's charging or is charged. No way to instantly tell the top from the bottom. And no way to "page" it, maybe with your phone, or via Siri to say "Here I am," because it's so tiny it can so easily vanish in bed covers. Just the most basic stuff. Frustrating.

I'm thinking that since there are no apparent changes to the remote Apple knows that it is popular with the majority of users and could care less what the critics say. If the remote is a deal killer for you then so be it.

Not a "deal killer." I've had two of them. My extended family combined has five of them. That makes seven actual, daily users of it. ALL of us have had the same gripe over it. The identical gripe is reaffirmed by Apple Store employees who say countless users have also grumbled over it. We love the product. But even constant use doesn't blunt the design flaw of the remote. The AppleTV is "popular with the majority of users." Obviously, that's in spite of the remote's design deficiencies, and that is the actual interface people interact with. And Cook whizzed right past the presentation without even so much as a look or mention of the remote at all (aside from the Emmy for the Siri aspect).

Astonished that they made NO changes to the remote. No way to know it's charging or is charged. No way to instantly tell the top from the bottom. And no way to "page" it, maybe with your phone, or via Siri to say "Here I am," because it's so tiny it can so easily vanish in bed covers. Just the most basic stuff. Frustrating.

Gotta pile on here. When I first encountered Siri, I loved the IDEA of it, and fully understood it was a nascent application that would have learning issues. Even a year ago, I was perfectly willing to just let it dial phone numbers and set up reminders, and ask nothing more complicated. But when it got ported to the MacOS and it failed to even properly accomplish what little it was doing on my phone, I finally turned against it. On my iMac, it has failed every single test and task I gave it. Every one. The Christmas season ceding the voice recognition brand to Amazon instead of Apple (ie: the "Kleenex" example) finally just has me damn mad - especially as a stockholder, but far more crucially, just as a consumer and lover of Apple. There are just no excuses anymore for the comparative quality failure of Siri. Ben's article tries to use the "We got the numbers on our side! We win!" argument. But Siri comes in the box, like an accessory cord. It's not a profit-generating product that drives consumers to seek it out, like the Echo is apparently accomplishing. It's just something the box they were buying anyway does as an afterthought. No one is buying AppleTV or iPhone because of Siri, but in spite of it. That is NOT the position Apple should be in, especially after Siri's longer development and supposed refinement period.

I get that Amazon and Google leverage their horrific level of invasive privacy theft to teach their voice assistants faster than Apple. But there has got to be a solution to that, and it's frankly disgraceful that Apple has had the product in use so long and so widely, and yet is getting its ass kicked in the functionality and understanding. Apple has its Maps, Safari, iTunes, TV, etc. to feed data into Siri's brain, so how can it still be this unreliable? No, it shouldn't "push" ads to your phone, but it sure as hell should be able to at least successfully type a semi-intelligible text or memo longer than 8 words while I'm driving by now.

A previous poster's recommendation that Apple needs to regularly survey users at least as to the success or failure of Siri's functions should have been happening from Day 1. But Apple's corporate attitude has always been "We don't ask opinions, we make them." Maybe that has worked 85% of the time, but most especially with Siri, that's just frankly a lousy way to improve a product that has so many variables involved in making it work for everybody's voices and contextual phrasing, at all times.