Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber today shared some strongly-worded comments about Apple’s delayed personalized Siri features. Gruber is a well-known Apple pundit who has been writing about the company for more than two decades.
In a blog post titled “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino,” Gruber said Apple’s credibility has been “damaged” by the delay:
Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Apple went from a company that you couldn’t believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible company in tech. Apple remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable company in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.
This obviously isn’t the first time that Apple has failed to deliver. However, Gruber said other examples like the canceled AirPower charging mat “tended to be around the edges,” whereas he believes that generative AI is going to be “big” and “important.”
It’s not the delay by itself that bothers Gruber. He said the true “fiasco” here is that Apple “pitched a story” last year “that wasn’t true”:
The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
Gruber said the personalized Siri features announced during the WWDC keynote last year were merely conceptual, and therefore “bullshit”:
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
He was even more explicit here:
You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit. And the “more personalized Siri” features, it turns out, were bullshit.
Gruber said Apple’s repeated unwillingness or inability to demo the personalized Siri features in action since WWDC last year “should have set off blinding red flashing lights and deafening klaxon alarms” in his head that something was wrong.
Gruber went as far as saying that Apple’s culture of excellence could be at risk if this situation is not handled correctly within the company:
Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn’t yet occurred or doesn’t happen soon, then, I fear, that’s all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.
The full post is worth a read.