Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”
So, over the last couple or years, Samsung has been updating the OS of my Galaxy Smartphone repeatedly. With each iteration more and more AI features have appeared as new buttons with ambiguous icons.
Using AI features on my phone requires opening a Samsung account so it cat track my token use. This requires providing personal information, and making up a password I will remember since the Samsung account app isn’t compatible with password managers (except Samsung’s proprietary manager, which I do not use). I also anticipate Samsung will want a credit card number to quietly charge me as I use compute.
I haven’t made a Samsung account.
And so all these buttons with weird icons are now productivity potholes, since tapping any of them accidentally switches me to the create a Samsung account page, interrupting my workflow.
Like tyranny, enshitification is more about incompetence than malevolence.
Can’t you use a different launcher? Samsung launcher has always been shit. I had a misfortune of using Samsung phone 10 years ago or so and even then it was excellent hardware mated to absolute trash software that slowed everything down.
I had no idea this was even happening. Am i out of the loop?
“John Ternus will be great for Apple because he’s an engineer”
A society that refuses to mix ethics with STEM: hold my beer…
Seriously, being an engineer or working on or in something doesn’t automatically make you the best leadership choice automatically. Ethics are kind of an important thing America continues to gloss over at an alarming rate.
Funny. In my 1986 college freshman year I was required to take an ethics for engineers course. They told us working for the military industrial complex was bad.
Curiously, the MIC was hiring and was where the well-paying jobs were at the time. Also, the field was impacted thanks to decades of cold war STEM push.
And there you get the contrived desperation, that drove studying engineers students into Lockheed, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas like Russian girls into Epstein’s sex spa for billionaires.
It turns out you can’t eat ethics. Although I still find myself judging ICE recruits.
“The customer is always right” has become “The customer will like it” with screen controls in cars, IOT jammed into everything, subscriptions, AI forced down our throats…
In many cases they have blown past “the customer will like it” all the way to “our data suggests that 90% of customers will not leave and profits will slightly increase as a result.”
I mean, at this point enshittification is a widespread business plan.
‘I want more AI in my life’ said noone
Oh yeah, time for some iSlop
Keep in mind Apple has a poorly documented and mostly unknown daemon called knowledgeconstructiond that cannot be turned off and solely exists to profile you based on accessing every Apple apps data - ical, messages, mail, photos etc, which is astoundingly personal info especially considering a lot of Apple users dump everything into stock apps, as the “strength” of Apple has typically been consistency of the platform
https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-personal-knowledge-graph
The person who wrote that article vibecoded an app that allows you to visualize the data captured: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow
It is basically all the gross shit that ad networks do. What does Apple do with this data, that has been aggregated since macos 13? Officially it’s probably to “enhance the user experience” but at a minimum it probably changes how Apple delivers ads to you. do they sell it? Who knows
I tested after reading that article, and I was able to Force Quit any of those daemons’ processes just in the Activity Monitor on os 15 Sequoia. They’ll probably respawn at reboot, but they are just user processes that can be killed so I bet you could run a login script to kill them each time you reboot and log in. I had already turned off all the Siri AI options and every single one of dozens of “learn from this app” toggles hidden in Settings.
This is without disabling SIP also
whoever would be in that position would do the same insane crap
If there is anything worse than getting into a pyramid scheme is getting late into a pyramid scheme
Google got in late to .com
Being slow on LLMs is the one good decision apple is making.
I chose the iPhone 15 specifically because it did not support Apple Intelligence.
What I want is options, not being screwed into paying to burn fossil fuels (for AI data centers), for O&G to say we “demand” fossil combustion.
How about Apple makes FaceTime calls be halogram call like in Star Wars? Oh wait, nobody is asking for that. Just like nobody is asking for AI but here we are.
No shit. You say “AI” and investors scramble to throw money at you.
You say “AI will destroy the world” and they throw even more at you.
Everybody wants to own a piece of the apocalypse.
After updating my phone to the Apple Intelligence stuff I now have a 3+ second stall/freeze when asking Siri anything, including the fucking timer.
It also lags out hard typing into the address bar on Safari.
I’m so poised that they stopped updating security in the previous OS.
As long as it can be shut off, I’m okay with Apple shoving this into the devices.
I like the option called “off”.
The problem is there is an “off” button but, at least on desktop, you need a 3d party app to delete the 30 gigs of AI models…
I just wish you could turn all non essential features off. I perform music using my mac laptop and the m4 processor works great, but the recent update to apple intelligence forced me to turn siri off entirely as id lost processing headroom that had allowed me to perform without risking audio drops. I often wonder what other background processing is costing me that headroom, but the only thing i can easily turn off with a script is spotlight indexing. Wish I could switch off every background process with a click, apple could call it “performance mode” or some shit and introduce it with a slick new presentation but i guess they don’t because all tech companies value nowadays is not users but data…
