#352  14th March 2025

Late last week Friday, Apple announced through a message to John Gruber that the updated, better, "personalized" Siri features teased at WWDC last year will not be released with iOS 18/macOS 15.

Like Joe Rosensteel (see post below), this is less surprising to me than it seems to be for John Gruber. Products and features slip, get canceled, or get released with issues with every organization and Apple certainly has had their issues in the past. From the very beginning, the Apple Intelligence releases (plural, because it is an umbrella name for many features, some of which did ship, albeit some of them are still region restricted) seemed a bit "off" for me.

I am and remain skeptical of the "AI" hype surrounding generative models. While there are some very useful applications, there is a lot of unjustified hype and the gold rush where everyone integrates some form of "AI" in their product, will be something we will be "cleaning" up for some years to come. The Apple Intelligence demos at WWDC and the iPhone 16 release event seemed "too good to be true" but Apple has a reputation for following up.

But, together with Apple's continued poor behavior and resistance regarding regulation, App Store approvals, and general relationship with developers, this just further erodes the trust and good will of the company. Each individual problem here could be ascribed to departmental issues within parts of Apple. However, the amount and persistence of these frustrations, makes one assume that high level management is involved and very much responsible for the choices made.

This outcry of disappointment should register with Apple top-level. I believe this is of the level of "incident" that, back in the day, would result in one the now-infamous "notes" from Steve Jobs. Notes like that might not be everyones style, but I am awaiting the current leaderships reaction.