[015a]

I think it is concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad. Being last to the party is a very normal Apple thing; quality and Doing The Right Thing takes time. Announcing something then taking months to ship it is very not-Apple, but it has happened a few times. That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.

One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays. So I generally do have hope for Apple Intelligence. At the end of the day, there are some disparate competing utilities in this class on the Samsung and Google phones, but no one is shipping something that is obviously game-changing and in first place; they all kinda suck, they're all tech demos, and it'll inevitably take many years to get this technology honed in to something that is truly useful to consumers.

[PaulHoule]

There is a lot in the Apple universe that is shoddy. iTunes, for instance.

iOS has a refinement that Android lacks but I am unimpressed with MacOS. Windows is stuffed full of terrible crapplets and Windows users largely recognize that these are terrible crapplets and don't use them. Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Even Apple fans lately claim it's been getting worse in the last few years.

(That said, I love the innovation in the M-series chips from Apple just as much as I appreciate Microsoft's commitment to the long-term viability of Windows for all of us who invest in it. Occasionally at work we still use Access '98 to handle old files and it works great, the installer works great, in fact Office still tries to take the desktop over the way it did back in the day. Clippy still works. The borderless windows look just a little funny because the compositor changed. No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98)

[mrkpdl]

> Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Many of the long term users of macOS/OS X/etc etc are highly critical of its downfalls, but still use it because of the available options they prefer it. Myself included. You can use something while also being aware of its shortcomings.

[jchw]

> No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98

The key problem for desktop Linux is that nobody knows exactly how to build binaries that will run on any reasonable Linux desktop system today, so it's hard to keep that non-existent reasonable subset of ABI stable for an extended period.

That said, you CAN do this. The kernel itself does present a mostly pretty stable ABI to userland applications, so you can grab a Debian chroot from 1998 and be on your way. Debian even still serves repositories for everything on archive.debian.org, and Dockerhub has OCI images you can `docker run` for Debian from 1999, under the debian/eol repo. You can `docker run` and `apt-get install` 25+ year old binaries on modern Linux!

What would be sweet is if we could build and ship compatibility tools that make these old binaries work mostly transparently. Today, double clicking a binary on Linux won't do anything particularly sophisticated, and there are no compatibility options. But actually, it would be totally doable to write a variety of useful compatibility shims without doing anything horribly grotesque. The DT_INTERP and DT_NEEDED fields of binaries would often give sufficient information for how you might get such a binary to run. It's not like it would be that useful, but I would personally be very pleased if you could just double click e.g. some old Kylix application and have it just run, perhaps after downloading some (shims for?) old libraries. You could extend this to transparently running CPU emulators too, not unlike the tricks people do with binfmt_misc, just possibly with more batteries included (and a bit less transparency.)

Another really great feature would be useful error messages when executing an application fails. Today if the DT_INTERP is missing, it looks like the binary itself can't be found since it returns the same errno, and you won't see linker errors if you execute a file in a GUI file explorer. What a great improvement it would be if all of that could be fixed, and there is no technical reason it can't be.

Of course, frustratingly, for more reasons than just this, the more likely thing to happen is that nobody bothers since containers are the future anyways, and Win32 instead becomes cemented as the true stable ABI of Linux. Which, in my opinion, is a bummer. We could always have two stable ABIs of Linux...

[arm]

> (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Have to strongly disagree on this point. Cog¹ is my music player of choice on macOS; not only does it have a clean GUI, but it supports almost every format² I’ve ever wanted to listen to audio in, including game music in formats like GBS (Game Boy Sound System) and 2SF (Nintendo DS Sound Format).

――――――

¹ — https://github.com/losnoco/cog

² — https://cog.losno.co/

[behnamoh]

> Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Nah, Apple users knew from the beginning that Siri sucked and still sucks. Almost no one I know uses Siri except for setting alarms and asking for weather forecast.

[UltraSane]

iPadOS is truly terrible and wastes the amazing hardware of apple silicon iPads

[jiveturkey]

> iTunes, for instance.

assuming you mean on macOS, given your comment after this. (there is no iOS app called iTunes anyway)

yes, on both iOS and macOS, Apple intentionally hobbled iTunes/Music, incrementally making it worse each update, after Apple Music gained an initial foothold.

not that it was ever "great" after 1.0 maybe 2.0, but it certainly used to be good. Now, if you're not an Apple Music subscriber, you're left with a pretty basic player. I get that they want to segment the market, but to remove features and actively make it worse? horrible.

[cageface]

I was unhappy with the state of music players on macOS too so I wrote my own:

https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

[matthewdgreen]

There is a point where supporting legacy software stops being impressive and just starts to be counterproductive. I'm glad my Mac doesn't support Mac OS 8 software anymore, especially since it means I can use a much faster processor architecture.

[azeirah]

> No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98

Can you give me a few examples of linux binaries from 98? I would like to give this a go, I think I have a pretty reasonable way to go about achieving this.

[thaumasiotes]

> (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

What are the good music players off MacOS?

I figured the entire field had withered and died from lack of public interest.

[isjamesalive]

> No good music players for MacOS for instance

Slightly OT but Doppler is quite good in my opinion.

[dangus]

Mentioning "iTunes is bad" is like a trigger word for me because it's so misinformed at this point.

For one thing, the iTunes name doesn't technically exist anymore except on Windows. And anyone complaining about it being bad on Windows...I mean, that's like complaining that Microsoft Remote Desktop (Now called the Windows app for some reason) sucks on Mac, right? Like, can we just put the Windows version aside please? Even then, I'm not really sure what specific thing iTunes for Windows sucks at besides not looking like a Windows app. People just say that because they were saying it in 2005.

On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the streaming service) is fantastic and has supported Apple's "classic" digital music workflow longer than anyone else has been willing to support their users. The Apple TV app (again, not to be confused with TV+ subsciption service) is now the home for the music/TV show store/rental place and the home of your TV/movie library, which is a big improvement from shoving that functionality in iTunes. in that sense, Apple has cleanly separated use cases and functionality in a way that iTunes didn't previously, which is one reason why a lot of people said "iTunes sucks."

I have a family member who recently switched to Android because of frustration with Apple as a whole. They are a big digital music collector, they don't believe in streaming or "renting" their content.

I tried to help them with their music collection on Android. Theoretically it should be easier right? No weird restrictions on sync direction, basically dump your stuff on an SD card/transfer over USB-C and you're off to the races.

But still, they switched back to Apple secondarily because it's the only place left that actually makes that "purchased digital music" experience user-friendly, or possible at all. (Primarily they switched back to iPhone because the modem in their Google Pixel sucks and/or is poorly tested with their major US carrier and would drop international calls every 15 minutes exactly for no reason)

Google Play's music store doesn't exist anymore. Every jukebox app on Android depends on 100% manual file management. None of them have the polish of the Music app (the app not the service). Almost none of them have decent jukebox companion apps available on desktop computers. A whole bunch of other digital music stores have closed entirely.

Apple's system for synchronizing content is actually pretty amazing for continuing to support an offline cloudless workflow. You still just hit one button/plug in your device to sync your music, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and photos content. It also supports WiFi syncing, and it furthermore supports every iPod that ever existed so long as you have the right cable/adapter.

You can back up your iPhone's full image to your computer if you don't want to use iCloud backups just like it was an iPod. You can synchronize your Photos library and avoid iCloud storage fees, deleting synchronized photos from your phone to free up space to take new photos and videos. It works just like you were using a digital camera in 2005. Yep, you can still rip and burn CDs!

Furthermore, the way Apple moved device synchronization functions to Finder and split out Music from Podcasts and Audiobooks is helpful for organizing the whole process. It used to be that iTunes was the home for all this synchronizing of non-music-related content, but now it more sensibly exists in Finder.

I think a lot of people don't realize that Apple basically still allows you to send over personally owned non-DRMed or even pirated content to Apple's own modern apps very easily this way, you just have to be willing to synchronize using "the old way" like your iPhone is an iPod. They've even kept ancient hosted services like iTunes Match going just in case you still need that sort of thing (it essentially allows you to sync music to your iPhone that is either pirated or not part of a known label music catalog via a cloud service rather than having to do a local sync via cable or WiFi).

And this workflow is very simple for non-technical users who don't really know how to traverse complicated file management structures. Yes, I would really like if apps like Photos was more flexible on file management, but on the other hand if you follow the prescribed workflow the results are quite user friendly for someone who really doesn't want the cloud but also can't handle setting up a home NAS. In this use case you have a reasonable photo storage system by syncing your device and then backing up your computer in a relatively hands-off manner using Time Machine.

One final point here is that Apple Music the subscription service can be hidden entirely from the app. Apple will just give you a 100% owned music jukebox app. Google doesn't do that, and with Microsoft you're probably using a legacy app like Windows Media Player that looks like it belongs on Windows Vista.

[bolognafairy]

Please don’t spoil this enjoyable nuanced conversation about Apple’s flaws with the usual laundry list of, frankly, unintelligent copy-pasted 2000s Mac vs PC online forum flame war talking points.

You’ve referred to iTunes in the present tense when it hasn’t existed for years, refer to ‘Apple fans’ as some sort of completely separate group of clearly defined people, and spend an unjustifiable amount of your comment talking about your quite niche professional Windows backwards compatibility use case.

We don’t need to rehash this whole thing. Please. Don’t take all the oxygen out of the room.

[wtmt]

> One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays.

This depends on where (which country) you live. For all the ways Apple has been vocal about the Indian market and local production, Apple Maps literally sucks even in major cities in India. Google Maps is decades ahead and gets updated very quickly. Apple Maps cannot even find regular addresses or places.

Apple has its share of incompetencies and willful blind spots, and that shows up in specific areas often related to its services (Apple Intelligence is also a service). The organization and its people are not built for handling these effectively or quickly.

That said, I have more hope in Apple Intelligence improving quicker (at least in English, while competitors are already ahead in other languages, including several Indian languages) than I have in Apple Maps improving in India.

[AlotOfReading]

Google maps also sucked in India until a couple of engineers flew there to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of mapping/routing and spent a bunch of time implementing regionalized fixes for them. Apple expresses some very clear preferences in what regions they support well in Apple maps, which exclude most "difficult" areas.

[jiehong]

While I do like Apple Maps, and I agree it has improved, it constantly get the speed limits very wrong in France (just 2 weeks ago).

The public transport part of Maps got much better in Germany, though.

[tonyedgecombe]

It's the same in the UK. Also I have been trying to get them to list my address for two years now. Google were able to update it but any requests to Apple seem to go into a black hole.

[iTokio]

What I want is simple :

A smart assistant, that can understand and speak to me like Advanced Voice Mode, use a vast knowledge database, is tailored to my needs and can act on my behalf.

And it would be great if it’s able to run locally.

[tmzt]

I would say Gemini Live is getting there. It's lacking integration with NotebookLM and Keep. It would be amazing if I started a project conceptually and wanted to move to code it could fire up VS Code and let me get to work.

Gemini's home automation works nicely and it can understand comments like it's too dark in here or it's cold inside and act appropriately. This is using the Android app as an assistant, not live mode.

OpenAI's implementation is apparently similar but I haven't tried the voice mode as a free user.

I haven't tried Apple Intelligence yet on my M1 and don't have an iPhone, so I can't compare.

I've been looking at offline capabilities with open weight models but they aren't there either. A full speech-to-speech model [1] working on an M1 Mac would be incredible.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00037

[hoseja]

How is a corporation going to profit off that?

[Someone]

If that is simple, start a company to build it and become a billionaire.

I don’t think any company has a smart assistant that’s reliable enough to act on your behalf except for some very constrained tasks (examples: dish washers, auto-parking cars)

[SebFender]

Can't talk for all regions of Apple Maps, but here in Canada I still get many errors when using it - especially when using bikes, buses and so on. It remains impossible to confidently use compared to Google Maps. When it comes to Apple AI stuff - too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple. I wouldn't be surprised it will be presented in the future as one of the greatest miss from Tim and his gang.

[JKCalhoun]

> too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple.

I think it is more complicated than that. I think the Apple Vision is a kind of albatross. No one wanted this thing. I happen to think the executives didn't want it either. For all the years and effort put into it (and, well, there was project "Titan" before that) killing it might have hurt worse than their lackluster shipping of it.

Flush with cash (and I can't think of a phrase that really carries the weight of just how flush with cash they are — embarrassingly wealthy?) it was a rounding error for Apple to hire everyone they could in The Valley and keep them busy (and filing patent applications as they worked). It kept them from the competitors.

And I don't believe you could have instead put the engineering hires to "fixing Maps" or whatever pet peeve you and I have about the current Apple ecosystem. You're 1) likely not hiring the type of engineers for those tasks and 2) just throwing more people on the thing is not necessarily going to be the right answer (The Mythical Man-Month, too many cooks (ha ha) and all that).

On the whole I think Tim has steered the Apple ship to align with the times we have been living in.

[nfca]

In Metro Vancouver, Los Angeles and the state of Washington, my experience with Apple Maps has been far better than Google Maps; the latter seems to have stagnated completely.

Apple Maps provides me with more accessible info. e.g. "turn right at the next traffic light", "stay in the second lane from the left" vs. "In 200 metres, turn right onto 1st Avenue" (where it's always off by 50m) and nothing about lanes

[hobs]

MobileMe/iCloud sucked for half a decade at least, it was well known internally and was something Jobs supposedly bitched about a lot.

[jimmydoe]

Jobs seemed very tolerant in this case, he was quite mad at Eddy Cue at times, but did not fire him.

[wileydragonfly]

Who can forget the time that Apple Maps took me down a road that had never been finished.. that became gravel in a field.. and I realized I had driven into a homeless camp. Ever seen a zombie movie where they swarm a car? It’s happened to me.

[soylentcola]

Maybe it was all the people who'd followed the same navigation.

[hb-robo]

It still really isn't that close to Google Maps, with public transit in particular Apple Maps is pretty much useless. GM is typically more complete with paths and building data outside of North America too.

[mensetmanusman]

Apple sent me to a rural cornfield once instead of a church where baptism was taking place. It was funny because we weren’t the only ones, everyone using Apple Maps was sent to the same cornfield.

These type of rare but common enough edge cases make me super hesitant to use it in the Midwest.

[dcrazy]

I was able to navigate the transit systems in Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama near-flawlessly with Apple Maps in 2018. I only recall encountering one correctness issue.

[jairuhme]

I have had a really good experience using Apple Maps for public transit. Earlier this year I went to NYC for the first time as an adult and it was super easy to use for finding which train to get on. Had a similar experience in Europe this fall as well.

[gazchop]

Huh. Just used it fine for public transport in 8 European cities recently.

Google maps won’t even work properly when there’s no data.

[robertoandred]

Huh? Public transit has been better on Apple Maps. Does Google even have station entrances/exits yet?

[robocat]

> concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad

The very initial success of Microsoft was that everything was reliably mediocre. Most things Microsoft delivered that were truely bad were fixed within a few major versions. It was a superpower.

The same model works for most purchases on a bad|average|best spectrum: we never want to buy bad, best is difficult to buy, so we settle for average quality.

Aside: I think MS has gone downhill and is now bad on multiple dimensions for me

[kace91]

Apple has a potentially interesting use case for generative AI in their professional creative apps: heavy integration in logic pro or in final cut. Perhaps even create simpler tools with similar functionality but aimed at non professional users.

The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in arts/humanities, and most other use cases are really unneeded - who needs text summarizing for something as simple as personal texts from friends? casual use is not really complex enough to warrant an assistance.

[xena]

Author of the article here. I do video work occasionally and I use Davinci Resolve to do it. Davinci resolve uses generative AI as tools to help you. It makes all my subtitles and if I'm not going into domain specific terminology that often, it'll be 95% of the way there in about 15 minutes. This is massive, especially when combined with "edit by word" editing.

[ChadNauseam]

> The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in arts/humanities

I don’t anticipate this being a problem. Have you used generative fill in photoshop or lightroom? It’s a complete game changer. In Egyptian mythology they weigh your soul against a feather when you entered the afterlife, and with professional tools I think moral hangups about AI are going to get about the same weight. It’s just too good not to use.

[duped]

I have this deep feeling that engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of the arts, which is reinforced when there is a suggestion that "heavy integration" of generative AI into multimedia production apps is somehow desirable. It's not just contrary to the design and use of these applications, but contrary to art as an endeavor - and users find it revolting.

Apple already has simpler tools aimed at non professionals, they don't need generative AI either.

[pjmlp]

> That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.

It was actually quite common Apple during the days Steve Jobs was no longer at the helm, they weren't even able to create a new OS, had to buy another company to rescue them.

And had they gone with Be instead of NEXT, most probably we would be talking about Apple in the past tense nowadays.

Nowadays they might have more money than ever, but it won't last forever if they cannot do anything else than reboots of existing products.

[AliAbdoli]

Gemini is pretty good on Android nowadays. No real complaints

[jmull]

I agree that Apple Intelligence generally stinks, but I'm not seeing anything actually generally more useful from anyone else.

If no one is good enough, does it really matter who's the worst?

[behnamoh]

Google Assistant and Gemini have been great.

[ifyouwantto]

Shrug. If I had to go back to desktop Linux, and I could pay to have Preview, Safari, Terminal(! yep, I like it better than my Linux options), Digital Color Meter, Apple's office-alike suite, Notes, and various other first-party Mac apps, on Linux, I'd absolutely click the "buy" button. And I spent 20 years on Windows and Linux before seriously giving Mac a shot, and still regularly use both for various reasons, so it's not that I don't know what else is out there—Apple's first-party apps are my favorites in their categories more often than not (big, glaring exception for Xcode, hahaha). They're mostly really good, stable, and don't eat my battery like it's free.

[BeFlatXIII]

IMO, this happened because Tim needed to please in ~~morons~~ investors. It wasn't ready, but the stock market may push for regime change if Apple didn't have "a compelling AI story" or some similar garbage.

[enlyth]

Is it actually that bad?

I've been really enjoying the AI notification summaries, they're a nice combination of time saving and comedy

[paul7986]

I can have a whole human like conversation with chatGPT via their app on the same iPhone where Siri still is total horse-poo. I have iPhone 15 Pro and running 18.3 .... Siri is so pathetic.

I chat with GPT (especially in the car) to get things done; assistant and a knowledgebase. Siri makes me have nerd rage (lol) trying to use her the same.

If GPT came out with an AI Phone Apple would be out of my life. I want an AI Phone where on the lock screen I see a facetime like call with my AI Assistant (can skin how they look to be whoever). They do everything for me via voice, text, hand gestures, facial expressions and etc. It would be less icon focus and way more AI focused of a UX.

[widdershins]

I think it's much easier for Apple to sort out their AI and add this to iPhone than it is for OpenAI to figure out an entire mobile ecosystem where Apple has a ~15 year headstart and use their AI in it.

I agree Siri isn't good, but adding good AI into the existing ecosystem is clearly where the market is headed, and I don't think it will be long before Apple gets there.

[BirAdam]

MobileMe.