“Siri was released just after Jobs died. Development in its first years concentrated mainly on basic tasks such as providing weather info, setting timers, playing music and handling texts. It didn’t benefit heavily from Apple’s nascent machine learning research, which focused on applications including facial and fingerprint recognition, smart suggestions, . . . improved maps and the company’s moon shots at the time: the headset and the car.”
I had no idea they had worked on the Apple car and the Vision Pro for more than a decade. I guess they were thinking the next big thing would be hardware, not software.
I think that’s the reason.
And it reminds me that at present, and maybe always, Apple is much more of a hardware product company than it is a software product one. The software they create, that I prefer to use to get my work done, is not conceived as a stand alone, it’s always at the service of the hardware it’s running on.
I don’t think you can say that for Apple’s hardware.
And maybe that’s why hardware and engineering issues get sorted and software bugs languish for years.
This was a great read.
As to the failure to crack AI I think the key aspect here is how Gianandrea, a bona fide AI rockstar exec, hasn’t been able to deliver within Apple. But JG is the same guy who was at the top when working for Google, so the difference has to be in how Apple operates differently than Google (or Alphabet, whatever)