[gchamonlive]

I think it's the same reason why MacOS and iOS degraded a lot in terms of UX the past decade. The focus of Apple shifted towards hardware independence.

The 2010s was marked by Intel's lazy product lineup, year after year pumping rehashes of older products, iterating on top of their 14nm lithography with increasingly minor improvements on its architecture until AMD overcame them. In the process, Apple's partnership with Intel became a liability it had to solve, and a push for the unified ARM architecture was no small feat.

If you ask me I don't think it's justified to degrade the user experience for the sake of focusing on this. It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know.

In any case I think it explains really well why Siri feels so abandoned.

[threetonesun]

I dunno, Apple has always had a pretty high level of hardware independence, and one could imagine even if Intel did produce great chips for longer the ARM architecture would replace it eventually. Certainly the timeline got shifted (and I'm glad for it) but I don't know if that really impacted Siri. If anything it seems like it got pushed to the bottom of the pile in favor of projects like the Apple Car and Vision Pro OS one on side and the demand to increase services revenue on the other.

[Wowfunhappy]

Also: Before, Apple was dependent on Intel (whose "product" is an integrated chip design and the fab to make it). Now they're dependent on TSMC (whose "product" is a fab). I'm... not really sure they've reduced their dependence? If TSMC starts falling behind Intel--which doesn't seem likely, but what happened to Intel didn't seem likely two decades ago--Apple will be stuck.

[GeekyBear]

TSMC does have competitors.

Intel is already being evaluated to fab Apple's entry level chips, if they can meet performance, energy efficiency, and production targets.

[Wowfunhappy]

Sure, but Intel has/had competitors too.

[GeekyBear]

Sure, and Apple very successfully competed with Intel when it came to chip design.

With fabs, other companies can still compete, but you absolutely require a partner with deep pockets to place big orders, since the costs have grown exponentially.

[newsclues]

A series is their own chip design, not Power PC or Intel designs.

It's the CPUs they have built for their purposes, which is next level hardware independence.

[Cthulhu_]

It's one of the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world, but your comment seems to imply they have to pick and choose what they pursue. They really don't, especially if it's hard- vs software.

[footydude]

> seems to imply they have to pick and choose what they pursue. They really don't, especially if it's hard- vs software.

Money can often just be one part of the equation.

To do things well you also need - available & capable technical resource, suitable facilities, available & capable leadership and management (with engaging at the right level in the business) and a clear vision of what you're trying to achieve/working towards.

Given how Apple appears to operate, I wonder if a strong desire for senior management control/oversight over major developments means they (artificially) limit how many concurrent large-scale things they can work on at any given time?

Maybe not, but that'd be my guess.

[gchamonlive]

> It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know.

I didn't imply, it's explicit in my comment. it's what their actions show. Their updates make their systems worse and worse, Tim Cook is out and Siri is in shambles. It might have been something else, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because the alternative is just sheer stupidity.

[realusername]

I always found that Apple had pretty mediocre software qualify, it's always been a very strong hardware company first and foremost.

They have great kernel, drivers and low level engineering but the stack above that has a lot of questionable stuff.

[rkapsoro]

I only partly agree with this. The answer is maddeningly more complicated.

Some parts of their software stack -- higher up than the kernel -- are actually pretty great. There's a lot of realy brilliant stuff in their system frameworks, and in SwiftUI, Cocoa, and UIKit. I've been using Linux at home recently, and I find myself missing some of it.

But, on the flip side, suddenly you hid maddening bugs, crashes, or terrible developer-experience papercuts. And, of course, there's the App Store, which is just evil. For my next app I'm just going to go Notarization only, and see how that goes...

[pfisherman]

The comment above is on to something. I find CarPlay to much more valuable and much more of a lock in to the iPhone than Siri. I do not think I could ever go back to using the infotainment systems that ship with cars. So makes sense why they might prioritize over Siri. And in the context of CarPlay, the simplicity of Siri is nice. I really only need it to execute a few simple commands like looking up directions, making calls, reading / sending texts, playing a podcast, etc.

[BoingBoomTschak]

>They have great kernel, drivers and low level engineering but the stack above that has a lot of questionable stuff.

Do they? Is Linus' rant about porting git to OSX now obsolete? At least, unlike MS with ReFS, they managed their HFS+ -> APFS migration.

[gchamonlive]

I don't dispute that, but Apple made its business on the premise of being the best in the business in terms of UX. Note though that you can have great UX powered by mediocre software, so those aren't mutually exclusive.

[robotresearcher]

Apple’s Mac software in the 90s had great UX and very underwhelming and old fashioned kernel software which they struggled to replace. Jobs knew this and did the work externally with NeXT.

[gchamonlive]

I knew that only by hearsay. After watching Halt and Catch Fire I truly understood how revolutionary Apple's UX was

[HumblyTossed]

They're valued at $4T, they have hundreds of billions hoarded. They could run 50 billion dollar startup projects and not feel it. Imagine a startup getting handed a billion dollars ... and the vast knowledge that Apple has access to already.

There's no way they couldn't do a better Siri. For some reason, they just ... won't.

[gnerd00]

here is a clue delivered -- money does not make software better, and lots of money often results in worse.. it makes no sense? actual experience begs to differ.

Classical homework assignment -- the Mythical Man Month and related essays

[ux266478]

Money is a means to an end, so that's true. Just because you have a screwdriver does not mean you will drive screws. You have to have someone who can use the screwdriver, knows righty-tighty, wants to drive the screws, etc. Stupidly throwing money at a problem can get you places, but the efficiency can also drop to near zero. The problem is we're talking about a quantity of money where you don't need to be highly efficient. Savants can do pioneering work in a cave with a box of scraps, but you don't have to strive for that kind of austere efficiency. Nobody is expecting that.

If Apple can't harness the potential of the currently overfilled labor pool, that indicates a systemic issue within Apple. The entire raison d'etre of management structures within a business is to increase efficiency of capital to drive productive forces. If they cannot do that, then that would indicate an extremely problematic competency crisis within Apple's management organ.

This kind of failure when you are a company with the valuation of a first world country's GDP should be raising alarm bells in any rational person's mind.

[HumblyTossed]

I’ve read all that. I know all that. None of that changes my point.

[foobiekr]

Heavily funded startups have terrible track records in reality. The only cases where it seems to have worked is when the money was used to undermine the market dynamics by nuking competition via severe underpricing.