Long-time Apple pundit John Gruber has launched an uncharacteristically strident attack against what he says are Apple’s lies over the Apple Intelligence roll-out. And, he’s spot-on with his arguments and conclusions.
For years, John Gruber has hosted “The Talk Show,” an extended post-WWDC conversation with Apple executives such as Craig Federighi. He’s also written about Apple extensively, and in recent months has been increasingly critical of Siri — as have others, including AppleInsider, but now he’s gone further about what he calls the AI fiasco.
“The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI,” he writes. “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.”
“In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the ‘more personalized Siri’ features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until ‘the coming year,'” he continued. “I should have my head examined.”
Gruber’s argument is that he, and everyone, should not have believed Apple’s promises of Apple Intelligence when they were unveiled at WWDC 2024. “I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start,” he said.
Specifically, despite Apple having “overpromised (if not outright lied about),” Apple Intelligence, the company was only able to demonstrate what Gruber calls “the more trivial features.” Those included the Writing Tools and the Image Playground, while everything more substantial was talked about, yet never demonstrated in even a rough form.
Gruber describes those more substantial features as vaporware, and Apple’s presentation of a more personalized Siri as being nothing more than a concept video. AppleInsider pointed out the same thing when Apple released an ad promoting Genmoji, but using images that could not possibly be generated by that feature.
“Who said ‘Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it’? And who said ‘Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?'” continues Gruber. ” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.”
Apple’s bad old days are back
In his piece, Gruber compares this situation of Tim Cook and Apple Intelligence to Steve Jobs and MobileMe, the to iCloud. Jobs was reportedly furious over how poorly MobileMe was done, and Gruber says Cook should be the same over Apple Intelligence.
Part of Jobs’s tirade at that time, back in 2008, included him replacing the executives in charge of the project. And it also saw him say point out that a prominent Apple journalist had turned against the company over this failure.
“[Walt] Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” said Jobs.
Some 17 years later, Cook may be pointing out that Gruber is now writing bad things about Apple. But as to replacing executives, Apple has already moved “fixer” Kim Vorrath to oversee Apple Intelligence and Siri.
And we are too. AppleInsider has already examined how users are losing in the current AI race.
Still, the presumption that Apple follows through on its promises has made everyone assume great Apple Intelligence features are coming. Just when they’re coming is now anybody’s guess.
The phrase ‘Available Today’ is long gone
Gruber believes that despite all of the claims that Apple is behind the industry on AI, everyone gave Apple Intelligence far too much credit — because it was from Apple.
With leaks and complex manufacturing, Apple can no longer make surprise launches of devices and then with a flourish reveal it is “available today.” But the company still has a reputation of not announcing products until they were ready.
Apple still says “Available Today” in presentations, but they only apply to beta releases
It’s just that perhaps that reputation is no longer deserved. Apple now gives sneak peeks of devices ranging from the Mac Pro, to the ultimately failed AirPower charging mat, even if they are still rare.
Apple Intelligence is also not the first Apple software that was announced early and subsequently missed its deadlines. But if the long delays over the new CarPlay are embarrassing, they’re also understandable because it involves Apple working with dozens of car manufacturers.
In comparison, aside from its partnership deals with OpenAI and ultimately Google, Apple Intelligence is down to Apple.
That doesn’t make the work easy, even if it does make it easier. Apple has only its own timescales to work to, only its own resources to use.
Creating a personalized Siri, amongst the other remaining Apple Intelligence features, and preserving user privacy at the same time, is an immensely difficult software engineering problem.
Yet even though that means delays are practically certain, Apple as a whole should know day to day what it is doing and how the project looks.
So there is no one person to blame for Apple launching its ads promoting Apple Intelligence features that do not exist.
And there is no one person to blame for how Apple chose to make Apple Intelligence the focus of its launch of the iPhone 16 range. There is no one person to blame for how, after months of Apple Intelligence effort, Apple still made it the centerpiece of the launch of the iPhone 16e.
The buck has to stop somewhere, though. The company does have a CEO, after all.
