If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs. Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product. Also for Apple, they know their provider has ridiculously deep pockets, a good understanding and infrastructure in place for large enterprises, and a fairly diversified revenue stream.
Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
> Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product
Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door. It was nearly two years ago they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months.
Yes but they also haven’t generated spicy deep fakes and talked kids into suicide with their products.
It’s just how Apple does things: They still have no folding phone, under-screen finger print scanner, under-screen front-cam, etc.
Apple is always behind on industry trends, but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool. This is what will happen with the folding phones this year, if rumors are true.
Folding phones have been around for half a decade and sold tens of millions of units. Same with VR.
Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
> but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool
When was this part last true?
“Cool” is subjective, so you can use that to dismiss any example, but you know exactly what is being referenced.
> “Cool” is subjective, so you can use that to dismiss any example
You can't use cool to argue against me. It was in the comment I replied to.
> but you know exactly what is being referenced
No, I don't, which is why I asked. Mind explaining instead of being coy?
Apple is rarely first to the party. They wait until the tech is ready for prime time and until they have an implementation that makes sense and feels inevitable. Then the rest of the industry tends to uses that as the model and shifts to copy them.
Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player, but once they made the iPod, everyone wanted an iPod. It was cool. Most other players pivoted to be more iPod-like.
Apple didn’t make the first smart phone. Smart phones were semi-niche devices for businessmen and nerds. Once the iPhone came out, everyone wanted it and the whole market changed.
Apple didn’t make the first smart watch, but once they did, their smart watch was more capable and integrated than the others and went on to outsell Rolex.
Apple didn’t make the first tablet. Microsoft tried to push the idea repeatedly 10 years earlier. Apple waited and came out with the iPad once multitouch was a thing and they could build an OS around touch. 15 years after its launch, it’s still the only tablet anyone actually talks about.
Steve Jobs talked about putting the customer experience first and selecting technologies that will be around for the next 10+ years, rather than chasing the latest bleeding edge tech, just to say you’re using it and trying to find a way to shoehorn it in.
To know what tech is going to stick around and to find how to best implement it takes time for things to mature a little bit. This means sacrificing the bleeding edge for a more thoughtful and stable approach.
Tim Cook doesn’t have the same kind of vision as Jobs, so I think some of this has been lost, but this has been their history for a long time, and one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful.
Everything you said is so true, but it doesn't negate the fact that Apple has been all-in on LLMs since GPT-3, but they've been struggling to integrate LLMs into Siri while being fully aware of market demand... Going so far as to sell an entire line of new AI iPhones without ever actually shipping core features from the keynote.
In your examples market demand from existing customers of iMacs wasn't pointed at Apple to create the iPod. iPod customers weren't demanding that Apple create the iPhone. And iPhone customers weren't seething over the lack of a first-party watch option. Apple customers are looking across the landscape and can see every other phone manufacturer running circles around Siri, and this integration with Gemini really feels like they're throwing in the towel.
You’re right. This is where Cook lacks the clear vision and stubbornness of Jobs to either keep quiet publicly, or say that the technology simply isn’t up to Apple’s standards yet to release… and tack the lumps in the meantime. Jobs did this a lot.
The thing is, Siri doesn’t need an LLM for Apple customers to use an LLM. The App Store exists and iPhone users can download ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc, etc, etc. They can map their favorite one to the action button if they want quick access.
I don’t see a major need for Apple to rush something out the door that doesn’t live up to their quality standard. From my use of LLMs, I still don’t think it lives up to the standards needed to hand out to a billion people and say “use this, you can trust it”. Even if their internal models were as good as the best ones on the market, I still think the press would treat it as another Apple Maps situation. I’m saying that with LLMs of today, not even the ones from the GPT-3 days.
Cook is too eager to say stuff that will please the stockholders, so he teased the AI stuff and had a big AI phone release before they had a product that was viable to release. That’s a theme with him.
Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard.
Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
> Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard
Oh yeah, that's been awesome for the consumer.
Consumer wasn't mentioned.
Oh, please. That's clearly the context being discussed.
Indeed, "iPad" is almost a generic term for "tablet," especially for kids.
Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.
That would be what is referred to as a market for lemons.
Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.
That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.
>You rarely ever saw them in the wild.
Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.
UPS uses what are called DIADS made by Honeywell. I've seen Fedex and Amazon use regular android phones as far as I'm aware.
OK, but the topic is tablets before the introduction of the iPad
USB-C I guess?
Weeeeelllll that was mainstream a long long time before they adopted it. And I'm still annoyed that the only devices with Lightning in our house are my Airpods en iPhone mini 12 and wife's iPhone 14 Pro.
Always need to attach an adapter to my Anker chargers and powerbanks.
I think the person you’re replying to meant MacBooks. They were USB-C exclusively way before Windows machines.
It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything.
I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.
Same… I love MagSafe and would prefer to use it. I’m always worried about yanking the computer with the USB-C charger in and breaking the cable or the port.
But I have a bunch of USB-C stuff and so when I go to charge my laptop it’s just easier to find that cable and use it.
The battery life is sufficient that I never feel the need to leave it umbilical-ed to an outlet across the room. I'll leave it docked at my desk, or use it wirelessly, or charge it at a conference room table, or recharge it after the day is done in my hotel room as I sleep.
Thats the real difference - it now easily lasts until I would want to take an extended break anyway.
There are many magnetic USB C plugs. I am not sure if they are standard compliant but they work fine.
I might as well just use the official magsafe power cable that came with my macbook if I were to do that. The point was more convenience. I have a USB-C charger at my desk, at my bed, at the couch, etc. Anywhere I am I can just plug in without fiddling with other cables (or connectors). Ultimately I'm lazy and just want to simplify my cable management :)
There is not a single port on the Apple Silicon MBP that I wouldn't trade for another thunderbolt (USB-C) port.
Closest would be the SD card slot... if it was SD Express.
If they had released the M1 MBP in the old chassis I would have a real challenge upgrading to the current models.
Fist use of a Macbook Pro and in a sleep addled state I plugged the MagSafe cable into the Mac USB-C end first.
It’s very confusing if you do that and are an idiot.
Mag safe in the age of goof battery life
Ah ok, yeah sure, that was nice (could have added an A and HDMI port in this case, but ok, they were early with that.)
Airpods
> Apple is always behind on industry trends
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
This is very much what apple wants you to believe; they have very good PR.
In actual fact, though, apple is a very effective fifth or sixth mover, and has been for a very long time. They watch everyone else fuck it up and get it wrong a bunch of times, and then throw scads of cash at threading the needle.
> prioritizing BT over wired earphones
Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p
> I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.
Apple went USB-C on chargers starting in March 2016 (with USB-C to lightning cables on the iPad Pro). They started shipping them with phones that fall.
USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.
The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.
other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.
although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard
It's short term annoyance for a long term greater good. I'm not oblivious - but of course the impact on me is simply negative (and I'm not going to leave the walled garden anyway so what were we ever achieving really)
Oddly, Apple has gotten a lot of criticism for not including chargers be default with their phones for this specific reason.
They did still overpromise and that should not be the way Apples does things (although it was hardly the first time; the AirPower mat was announced in 2017).
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
Apple is better though. Hence the only examples being Apple Intelligence and AirPower
Whataboutism doesn’t justify what Apple did. They took billions of dollars from consumers using demos of products those consumers never received.
> At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door
To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence.
There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Lately, they've arguably been starting from their own priorities (i.e. pushing and protecting their "services" revenue at all cost) and working backwards to an acceptable user experience from there.
> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Then again, remember millimeterwave? But yes, as a general rule I think your point still stands.
> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology
Since when?
> versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats
I agree here, to a degree. It's just that Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats.
> Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats
I don't really understand this. Is it shoving when something is actually popular? The iPod was legitimately extremely popular. Did Apple decide it was hot and then somehow force people to buy 450 million of them?
I mean I'm just curious what products you're thinking of when you say "shoves it down their throats"
Is the iPod your only example? That was a quarter century ago.
What's hot about less ports, no headphone jack, no SD card, a tax when buying apps for your phone, planned obsolescence, antagonistic behavior towards app and software developers, an unchanged aluminum rectangle, thinner devices that look cool at the cost of performance and efficiency, heaviest laptops and phones on the market, phones made out of glass front and back, the touchbar, the notch, etc.?
> There isn't currently a forcing function.
Investors are the forcing function
> There isn't currently a forcing function
Sorry but if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline
> if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline
A pair four-trillion dollar companies striking a deal in the hottest technology space since the internet getting headline treatment is not evidence of a forcing function.
Them having bolted on ChatGPT in the ugly way they did is evidence though.
Their naff image generation tool (Playground) is further evidence.
Apple are definitely panicking. And they should be too.
> Them having bolted on ChatGPT in the ugly way they did is evidence though
That's evidence they forced themselves. Not that there was a forcing function. That's the whole point of the top comment. (Mine.) They rushed where they didn't have to. And I still don't think they need to rush.
That’s some politician-grade logic you’ve got there:
A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business.
The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing vision models to smart personal assistants via Gemini.
Just as Apple heavily promoted Siri back when it was pioneering.
But Siri has stagnated for years. It’s basically the Internet Explorer 5 of the assistant domain. And the competition is so far ahead in capabilities that people are going to start questioning the innovation happening at Apple. In fact people already are.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
The fact is, Siri sucks. I almost never use it now. Apple knows this. We know it. Consumers know it. Apple know that they have to urgently fix it.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.
This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:
1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.
2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier
3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities
4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code
I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.
But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.
That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.
The redesign was part of that strategy. But they didn't have to go with Liquid Glass, as a theme, to achieve that.
The choice of theme is the misstep. Not the strategy.
Apple provides high-value services like iMessage, iCloud, iPhotos, Apple Maps, Apple Health etc. They hold mountains of people’s personal data and interactions. These services provide the personalized experiences that allows Apple’s hardware to be so sticky.
These services are threatened by the emerging competitive landscape. Apple is panicking, and there is a forcing function, because their users are spending more and more time with LLMs having the most personal experiences they’ve ever had with any software, and Apple isn’t getting a piece of that pie. They’re in a very high risk position because this is the heart of their brand and as data is slowly siphoned away into apps and services that are providing the experiences their users are growing to expect, that moat and stickiness is eroding.
That said, this precisely why it’s taken so long. While Apple is desperate, they are completely unwilling to disrespect their users trust and mishandle their personal data or compromise their privacy.
Not enough things are referred to as naff these days, which is funny because there's so much naff shit knocking around.
I mean, maybe if the headline was “For no particular reason whatsoever, under absolutely no pressure from their millions of customers to deliver on the promises they paid for nearly two years ago, Apple picks Gemini to Power Siri”
Or maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises and it was all intentional and part of a well orchestrated plan from the outset? Seems like an odd strategy
> if the headline was “For no particular reason whatsoever, under absolutely no pressure from their millions of customers to deliver on the promises they paid for nearly two years ago, Apple picks Gemini to Power Siri”
Which is not how headlines work.
You may have an argument that Apple is under pressure. But your headline argument is bananas.
> maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises
Where did you get that?
The attitude I called "fucked up" is precisely rushing to make promises and then meet them. Apple's sales don't suggest customers are putting material pressure on Cupertino. Apple's share price doesn't suggest investors are panicking. The promises have already been broken. If Apple is pushing something out, again, because they feel they have to on the basis of those promises, it's–again-a fuckup.
> Which is not how headlines work
That’s the joke. I assure you they are panicking.
> Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door
They don't though, Android is clearly ahead in AI integration (even Samsung are running TV ads mocking iPhones AI capability) yet still iPhones sales are breaking records - the majority of their phone buyers still prefer an iPhone over an AI capable other phone.
They can take their time to develop AI integration that others can't deploy - 'secure/private', deep integration with iCloud, location services, processing on device etc. that will provide the product moat to increase sales.
The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
They're not good enough for that usecase, currently - so almost all interactions make the UX worse, currently.
Might change in the future, I'm just taking about today in January 2026
I think this is the wrong framing. Nobody cares whether there's an LLM in their phone. What people do want is features like improved Siri (still, debatable beyond setting timers) or other improvements, that could potentially come from LLMs.... if they actually work. So far other providers (such as Amazon Alexa) have struggled to deliver a reliable voice assistant powered by LLMs.
I’m almost certain even something as ad-hoc as Opus 4.5 with access to iOS native APIs at the level of Siri exposed via MCP would run circles around Siri in January 2026.
It would, but it would also result in a bunch of users getting hacked through prompt injection attacks.
I strongly agree with this. Frankly even ChatGPT 3.5 could do better. I am baffled that Apple has stuck so stubbornly to whatever insane architecture they have that results in my daily cornucopia of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand" as well as own goals like it forgetting that Apple Music is the only music service I have, or calling a girl I haven't seen in 20 years instead of my wife who has the same first name.
I am also baffled that how common I do something never updates the model. I often use Siri to start a playlist while running but had to rename them because Siri would play some unknown to me public playlist instead of what would seem to me be the highest likelihood target - my own
> The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
I don’t think that’s true. People just use the LLM apps. What people don’t feel like they need right now is deep LLM integration across the whole OS. IMO, that’s more of just not showing people the killer product yet.
Live translation? Circle to search? All the magic reframing and relighting stuff in the camera app? I don't know how good the Apple equivalents are, but those are all deeply integrated into Android and are used pretty heavily as far as I can see.
I don't often use voice assistants myself, but they're fully conversational these days and several billion times more useful than the old-school Alexa-style stuff with a limited set of integrations.
I don’t need a Siri LLM. The current Siri is more than adequate for responding to texts and calling while driving. A lot of the “ai integrations” is marketing material for features nobody will actually use
i dont NEED it, but if Siri could actually do anything you could do on your phone it would be very nice.
> It was nearly two years ago
Just under 16 months since the release of iOS 18. The phones they would have sold this with shipped alongside 18.
Also, the personalized Siri was indicated it would not be available until later and was expected in the spring release (March 2025).
What are the top 3 features you’re missing right now?
I'll bite
1. Have a user interface. Sometimes I'll ask a question and Siri actually provides a good enough answer, and while I'm reading it, the Siri response window just disappears. Siri is this modal popup with no history, no App, and no UI at all really. Siri doesn't have a user interface, and it should have one so that I can go back to sessions and resume them or reference them later and interact with Siri in more meaningful ways.
2. Answer questions like a modern LLM does. Siri often responds with very terse web links. I find this useful when I'm sitting with friends and we don't remember if Lliam Neeson is alive or not - for basic fact-checking. This is the only use case where it's useful I've found, when I want to peel my attention away for the shortest period of time. If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case. Otherwise Siri isn't good for long questions because it doesn't have the intelligence, and as mentioned before, has no user interface.
3. Be able to do things conversationally, based on my context. Today, when I "Add to my calendar Games at Dave's house" it creates a calendar entry called "Games" and sets the location to a restaurant called "Dave's House" in a different country. My baseline expectation is that I should be able to work with Siri, build its memory and my context, and over time it becomes smarter about the things I like to do. The day Siri responds with "Do you mean Dave's House the restaurant in another country, or Dave, from your contacts?" I'll be happy.
For 1, I think we are getting farther away from this.
Siri's current architecture now provides context into the prompt, such as the app/window that has focus and the content loaded into it. In that sense, Siri is more like the MacOS menu bar than an app. A consolidated view of Siri history may look disjointed, in that there is a lot of context hidden if all it shows is a query like "when was this building built?".
Even more so, it might not provide the functionality desired if you go look at historic chats and ask "who was the architect?", unless all that context was actually captured. However, that context was never formatted in a way that was intended to be clearly displayed to the user. That in itself creates a lot of challenges around things like user consent since Siri can farm off queries to other (online) tools and world-knowledge AI services.
There is at least a UX paradigm for this - clipboard history. Coincidentally, Tahoe built clipboard history into Spotlight. But clipboard history lends itself to perhaps being more a complete and self contained snapshot. I'm not sure Siri is being built to work this way because of implicit context.
For 2, at a certain point this gets farmed off to other tools or other AI services. The Gemini agreement is for the foundational model, not large "world knowledge" models or backing databases. Today, Siri answers this question by providing bibliographical information inline from Wikipedia, using internal tools. The model itself just isn't able to answer the actual question (e.g. it will just say his birthday).
For 3, the model already has substantial personal context (as much as apps are willing to give it) and does have state in between requests. This is actually one of the issues with Siri today - that context changes the behavior of the command and control engine in interesting ways, phone to phone and sometimes moment to moment.
Unfortunately, I think stopping and asking for clarification is not something generative AI currently excels at.
Thanks for sharing. 1. Could be fixed today. 2./3. need a good enough LLM.
btw: I hope you will visit Dave's House someday in the future.
My wife and I got a kick out of your “Games at Dave's house” example. Thanks for sharing
Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth made a massage appointment with the head of Xbox programming (luckily Siri was not that competent that it said "Mr. Appointment" in the invite)
>If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case
This should be possible, go to Settings->Action Button->Controls and search for ChatGPT
Isn’t its voice the ui? It should respond using the same context of the request. Voice and natural language.
If you ask for a website it should open a browser.
Edit: everything else spot on
> Isn’t its voice the ui? It should respond using the same context of the request. Voice and natural language.
Yeah it’s an interesting idea, but visuals are required sometimes. Even the simple task of “List the highest rated Mexican restaurants near me” works perfectly well enough with old crappy Siri. You’ll get a list of the highest rated Mexican restaurants near you. But as soon as you open the first restaurant, Siri closes and the list is gone. You can’t view the second restaurant. To get the list back you need to ask Siri again.
There’s no world in which that user experience makes a viable product. It’s a completely broken user experience no matter how smart the Gemini model is.
Yes, the lack of context or history has annoyed me in the past too.
Also, Liam Neeson just catching strays over here
I'm sorry, I can't answer that right now.
Would you like to click this button which takes what you said and executes it as a Google search in Safari?
Now playing You're Missing, by Bruce Springsteen on Apple Music
You don't have a subscription for Apple Music. Here is 1 month free trial.
Here is Missing by Everything But The Girl on Apple Music
Siri to function above the level of Dragon NaturallySpeaking '95
Fantastic reference. I remember pirating this from microcrap.com in about 1996.
> 1996
I'm chuckling at the idea of pirating software in 1996.
iirc even in 1999, I couldn't figure out why Windows update required me to use internet exploder. It would take forever to download updates over dialup.
Don't remember if it was the 90's, but we got trial versions of Photoshop on some magazine CD and it was then all about searching for cracks / patches to it. These were quite small and bearable to download on dialups. And of course, even otherwise, dialups really taught all of us patience ... our generation thus knows the value of delayed gratification :).
My older brother and I were pirating software from BBSes before the World Wide Web existed.
Talk about being there when the deep magic was written.
Or buying CDs packed with software from markets. In Glasgow you could get copies of loads of high-end software from traders in the Barras market.
Exchanging "emails" over FidoNet was so cool
I definitely pirated Photoshop around 1996 from the macfilez (possibly zelifcam by then) AOL chat room.
BBS existed long before that, and even before that we had "sneakernets" or "copy parties". I assume the term "pirating" is much newer than the concept of copying software, or copyright of said software.
efnet
- [deleted]
ANY ability to answer simple questions without telling me to open Safari and read a webpage for myself...?
I should be able to completely control my phone with voice and ask it to do anything it is capable of and it should just work:
"Hi Siri, can you message Katrina on WhatsApp that Judy is staying 11-15th Feb and add it to the shared Calendar, confirm with me the message to Kat and the Calendar start and end times and message."
They will never do this, and the lack of it can be marketed as a security feature.
Well that’s what they sold people in June 2024
Could it just fucking work? "Hey Siri turn on the [room name] room lights" and it gives me a positive chime and ... doesn't turn any lights on? In any of my rooms?
Judging by another comment, it probably turned the lights on in a restaurant in a different country.
Somewhere deep inside your iPhone, an LED is toggling.
Apple’s insistence on not ever displaying error messages is infuriating.
- [deleted]
Elementary anti-spam.
I consider Apple to be practical, Also Apple will be running Gemini on its own hardware. This is better than Buying perplexity and running chinese model on which Perplexity runs. Training Models is a money on game, Its better to rent models than training your own. If everyone is training models they are going to be come commodity, also this is not the final architecture.
I still think Apple should, at least to Apple One customers, offer small, private models, trained on your personal imessage, image and video archives in icloud. With easy-to-use, granular controls for content inclusion/exclusion.
Will make it much easier to find those missing pictures from a few years ago...
The iPhone 16 was released 16 months ago, not “nearly” 24 months.
Well it ain't coming now either if it's just Gemini, is it?
Nothing about OpenAI is clean. Their complete org is controlled by Altmann, who was able to rehire himself after he was fired.
Anthropic doesn't have a single data centre, they rent from AWS/Microsoft/Google.
Also: they've dealt with Google for default search engine deals before even through the early Android/iPhone competition days (and for early iPhone Weather, Stocks, etc.) It's a familiar enough dynamic.
I was more thinking about this being driven by the fact that Google pays Apple $20B a year for being the pre-selected search engine and this way, Apple still gets $19B and a free AI engine on top.
It was 20 billion dollars years ago, 2022. There's little doubt it's closer to $25B now, perhaps more.
Counterpoint: iOS’s biggest competitor is Android. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.
Counterpoint: Google is paying Apple $20b/year to keep themselves as the default search engine in iOS. Android's biggest competitor is iOS. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.
Does Apple develop a competing search engine?
It's strategically devastating because no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google and now they have no choice but to have Google AI on-board their machines.
I respect Google's engineering, and I'm aware that fundamental technologies such as Protocol Buffers and FlatBuffers are unavoidably integrated into the software fabric, but this is is avoidable.
I'm surprised Google aren't paying Apple for this.
> no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google
Unfortunately, it probably actually is a small number comparatively. Or at least I would need to see some sort of real data to say anything different.
I feel like people who distrust Google probably wouldn't trust Apple enough to give them their data either? Why would you distrust one but not the other?
Google lost multiple antitrust lawsuits in 2025.
Apple still is in the business of selling devices, not customer data - with Google being an external company , I bet there'll be an extensive permissions systems you can limit what the AI can do (or turn it off altogether).
Siri > off is my default. Presumably I could still do this?
Yes but I may want to use Apple intelligence and now I have to use Google intelligence instead. This is not the product I paid thousands of dollars for.
Second I'm developing privacy focused apps that were going to use foundation models. Now I need to seriously reconsider this.
Just don't update your phone, they'll probably switch it on without asking like they do for Apple Intelligence. Or use Carplay, for which Siri is required.
- [deleted]
- [deleted]
Is android really iOSs competition ? I feel like the competition is less android more vendors who use android. Every android phone feels different. Android doesn’t even compete on performance anymore the chips are quite behind. The target audience of the two feels different lately.
>Is android really iOSs competition ?
It ISN'T in this day and age. People don't switch back and forth between iOS and Android like it's still 2010. They use whatever they got locken in initially since their first smartphone or where Apple's green/blue-bubble issue pushed them to or what their family handed them down or what their close friend groups used to have.
People who've been using iOS for 6+ years will 98% stick to iOS for their next purchase and won't even bother look at Android no matter what features Android were to add.
The Android vs iOS war is as dead as the console war. There's no competition anymore, it's just picking one from a duopoly of vendor lock-ins.
Even if EU were to break some of the lockins, people have familiarity bias and will stick with inertia of what they're used to, so it will not move the market share needle one bit.
Of course android is iOSs competition. android is also 75% of the market that apple surely wants bigger piece of.
Performance? We are many years past the point somebody cared about performance. I am writing this on iphone 11 pro and the experience is almost exactly the same as current iOS.
You know what's not the same? Android became pretty great OS. I recently got older Pixel to see how GrapheneOS works and was surprised about Android (which i havent seen for a decade). iOS on the other hand has recently gone trough with very bad ui redesign for no reason.
Imho the main thing Apple has going for it is that Google is spyware company and Apple is still mainly hardware company. But if Apple decides to pull their users data to gemini… well good luck.
Nothing about OpenAI smells clean.
Yup, Anthropic has constant performance problems (not enough GPU), OpenAI is too messy with their politics and Altman.
True. Also Gemini is the boring model, heavily sanitised for corporate applications. At least it admits this if you press it. It fits Apple here very well.
Personally I wouldn't use it, it still belongs to an advertiser specialised on extracting user information. Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher. But clean smell also means bland smell.
I suspect you're exactly right about it being the most sanitized model.
I don't however like the idea of having Google deeply embedded in my machine and Siri will definitely be turned off when this happens. I only use Siri as an egg timer anyway.
This seems like a odd move for a company that sells privacy.
There is no US company using cloud, that could sell privacy.
Google, as the designer of the original transformer, is designer of the original "mechanism" for inserting ads into a prompt answer in realtime to the highest bidder, so it makes sense from that part too.
Given my stance about AI, I'll definitely not use it, but I understand Apple's choice. Also this choice will give them enough time to develop their infrastructure and replace parts of it with their own, if they are planning to do it.
> Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher.
Breaching privacy and using it for its own benefit is AIs business model. There are no ethical players here. Neither from training nor from respecting their users' privacy perspective. Just next iteration of what social media companies do.
>If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs.
I dont think the model is that much different if they thought Siri was half decent enough for so long.
Judging from the past 10 years, I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services. When everything else being roughly equal.
Instead of raising price again Paying Apple even more per user, How about we pay the less but throw in Gemini with it?
Apple has been very good, if not the best at picking one side and allowing the others to fight for its contract. They dont want Microsoft to win the AI race, at the same time Apple is increasing the use of Azure just in case. Basically playing the game of leverage at its best. In hindsight probably too well into it they forgot what the real purpose of all these leverage are for, not cost savings but ultimately better quality product.
> I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services.
Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?
Google shouldn't be able to charge a fee on accessing every registered trademark in the world. They use Apple get get the last 30% of "URL Bars", I mean Google Search middlemen.
Searching Anthropic gets me a bidding war, which I'm sure is bleeding Google's competition dry.
We need a "no bare trademark (plus edit distance) ads or auto suggest" law. It's made Google an unkillable OP monster. Any search monopoly or marketplace monopoly should be subject to not allowing ads to be sold against a registered trademark database.
>Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?
I guess this venture into politics more than anything else. And I am opinionated on the subject.
But other than that, the point worth centred on is Apple no longer care as much as being the best. They care much more about extracting best business deals and money out of their current position. Which is very different to Steve Jobs era, No money can put crap on his plate.
Aren't both of those companies also both at the whims of Microsoft for the actual compute hardware? I'm not good at keeping track of who has actual hardware vs. who runs in one of the big clouds
don’t forget oracle!
Please forget Oracle. I don't even know the name of their cloud service. I haven't heard anyone using their service for AI.
OpenAI aren’t using their cloud directly, but have signed data center partnerships with them that are effectively huge amounts of debt not backed up with revenue. That’s all liability that Google doesn’t really have because they have revenue from other areas.
I agree with your point about Google being more stable company then the rest so the decision probably makes sense. But there was a study done by multiple news companies in Czechia by asking about news topics and Gemini was consistently the worst in citations and straight up being incorrect (76% of its answers had "issues", I don't have exact issues specification).
I've noticed Gemini tends to struggle with current news.
Apple is afraid of Siri succeeding
It has nothing to do with how good Gemini is relative to others. Apple is picking Gemini because they don’t want AI to be the selling point for Android phones. Apple execs do not care about innovations. They only care about keeping their monopoly intact.
With Anthropic or OpenAI they would have had to pay for it, but Google already pay them $20bn+ per year to be the default search engine - so they just knock $1bn off Google's bill for Gemini
What's the difference if Apple gets $20B from Google and spends $1B to another company or just gets $19B from Google and doesn't spend nothing?
I suppose Apple is forcing Google to compete against itself. "Pay us less, or pay us more and we buy someone else’s model."
Also accounting optics means Apple can shows lower revenue but cleaner margins