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A notification for you, Apple: There is no husband

golly_ned

I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization.

It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.

They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.

DidYaWipe

Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.

When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience.

Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.

And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone.

There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?

Kwpolska

The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.

kruuuder

> The calendar thing is working correctly.

Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.

In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.

There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.

pmontra

Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.

I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.

DidYaWipe

Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time.

So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.

coldtea

>And also: Jony Ive.

The person who created the distinctive Apple design language, several iconic products, got tons of awards, and his designs are still guiding today's Apple products (they're all Ive-derivative still), is one of your examples of failure?

griomnib

The butterfly keyboard is undoubtedly the biggest fail in hardware design of the past 10 years. They took something that we figured out in the 1970s and somehow managed to screw it up and held onto it for three consecutive generations.

You’re only as good as your last product, and Johnny Ive under the hand of Steve Jobs is a lot different than Johnny Ive under the hand of Tim Apple.

whycome

The context for this thread is about keeping persons on even when they are either no longer adding value, or even potentially detracting. In Ive's case, he absolutely created many successful aspects of Apples design language. But, he also put an over emphasis on minimalist design over function. The butterfly keyboards are one example. Was the removal of the ESC key something that happened on his design watch? The reduction of ports on their highest end pro models? Those are design decisions that have been undone as Apple realigns with the actual needs of its users rather than trying to dictate how they should use their hardware.

BearOso

His designs were fine when reined in by Jobs. Now they take simplicity too far to the extreme.

ben_w

> See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.

> When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?

For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.

It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall win rate.

robertlagrant

> For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.

Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.

DidYaWipe

Yeah I knew throwing Ive in there invites a skeptical response, but I really detest that guy's product-degrading mania and attitude.

And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

gffrd

That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the first time around.

That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...

DidYaWipe

Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.

golly_ned

Agreed on the "pets" idea. I've even seen this from former Apple tech leaders. I've been one of the "pets" and it benefitted my career tremendously and, frankly, above my capabilities at the time; yet it gave me the opportunity to step in and fill out bigger shoes.

When I was there the stance on "intelligence" was that Apple doesn't advertise itself as "AI" or "ML". It just builds good products by any means and if it happens to use particular technologies, then fine. Not so anymore.

DidYaWipe

Thanks for the anecdote. I think a lot of us have been there, promoted into roles we're not quite ready for. The responsible ones kick into high gear to meet the challenge. I remember cramming a new programming language and framework when faced with a potential high-profile (public) failure for a new employer.

But when people repeatedly demonstrate that they don't have the mindset or aptitude for the role, or important aspects of it, they need to be relieved of responsibility for those aspects. I'm griping about the individuals for whom that isn't done.

cultureulterior

Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.

zero-sharp

7 months to go through interviewing is outrageous, no?

seec

I had a similar story. But it makes sense. Because of the image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance all that inefficiency. But it's really not fair for the people applying, that's for sure.

In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need.

If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.

timewizard

> a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean

This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with.

> a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.

They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways.

If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.

matthewdgreen

Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. Everyone is building out capabilities so they can quickly implement one when it arrives, while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime. Currently text summarization (as realized) isn’t the killer app, but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.

timewizard

> Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI.

There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things.

> Everyone is building out capabilities

They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack.

> while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime

If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could.

> but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.

An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI.

Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.

8note

chatgpt is undeniably the killer app for LLMs

MagicMoonlight

This is why I don’t believe in private sector efficiency. You go in any company and most of the employees are morons and they’ll be paying contractors £1000/day to write a hello world service in new azure WorldGreeter(tm)

walthamstow

The private sector efficiency is they’re willing to lay off some of the morons each time the economic cycle dips. Public sector keeps their morons for 40 years, then they get pensions

Or a new cost-cutting government comes in, lays off all the best people and keeps the morons.

LeoPanthera

I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to confirm or deny this story.

mattnewton

One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his manager “What does anyone actually have to do around here to get fired?!” (About a coworker who effectively only made work for other people)

There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch.

I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.

nyarlathotep_

Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every software company has now been laying people off en masse for the better part of three years.

That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.

msephton

Can confirm. I was a Technology Evangelist (adjacent t,o but not the same as, Developer Relations) for certain web and app technologies.

The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in late-2015/early-2016.

I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never heard from them again.

rustystump

Can confirm.

whynotminot

Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large?

I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.

Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.

Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.

griomnib

The most recent versions of macOS and iPhone OS have me seriously considering a Linux desktop for the first time. That is almost completely due to the fact that Apple Intelligence is so bad and I’m forced to disable it across every single app. This is not the type of stuff Steve Jobs would’ve shipped.

barbazoo

> The most recent versions of macOS and iPhone OS have me seriously considering a Linux desktop for the first time.

What about it? I often hear this sentiment but I hardly ever notice the OS having updated in the first place.

griomnib

My primary complaint is the aggression to turn it on. You don’t get an option of “No” any more just “Not Now” which is openly user hostile as it implies I can’t make my own choices, I can only delay the inevitable. They’ve been doing that for a while now and each time it pushes me a little closer to leaving the ecosystem.

Then there’s the fact that I hate photos, mail, and the rest of it - which they turn on by default and then you have to disable. The fact that Apple Music works fine in my car but for some reason all other music apps are buggy.

Apple News won’t let me block news sources, anything I try to block stays in my feed just greyed out. Like, I’m not allowed to keep BuzzFeed out of my feed? Wtf.

Then there’s the sick charade of their “privacy” claims, which I won’t even get into, but it’s laughable.

They went from being the most user-focused company to nakedly extracting rent from a captive audience. I no longer feel I own my Apple devices, they own me, and I’m sick of it.

clort

That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been frustrated with something in the new software and tried to pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices, shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and didn't have the cruft in the end.

Someone

Possibly “Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker” (https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...)

jiggawatts

Something that amuses me is that this method demonstrably works, but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved. Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice. However, it must be done, because otherwise large organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and indolence.

Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked.

Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.

moogly

> Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.

Everything is permitted if someone gets fabulously rich in the end. Got it.

seec

Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to shit. Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power to get away with it. In my opinion all of this comes from submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking nicely" way of working everywhere.

Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.

supriyo-biswas

Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn’t say the organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the company?

ksec

FHE as in fully-homomorphic encryption ?

ggm

I am probably suffering confirmation bias. But that said, this LLM smartness continues to be impressively shit. There's a level of "yea that's cool" but it's outweighed by "that'd be wrong, and suggests you understand nothing about me or my data"

It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.

ben_w

Likewise, I do wonder how much of my enthusiasm is confirmation bias. Could it just be a Clever Hans? I think it has to be at least a little smarter than that, even just to get code that usually compiles, but still, I am aware that it may be more smoke and mirrors than it feels like, that I may be in the cargo cult, metaphorically putting a paper slip into the head of a clay golem shaped like Brent Spiner.

Targeted ads are a useful reference point. A decade back, everyone was horrified (or amazed) by that story of supermarkets knowing some teenager was pregnant before their father did. But today… the category in which your fridge example is, is the best it gets for me — even Facebook, for the most part, is on-par with my actual spam folder, with ads for both boob surgery and dick pills, ads for lawyers based in a country I don't live in who specialise in giving up a citizenship I never had, recommendations for sports groups focusing on a sport I don't follow in a state I've never visited of a country I haven't set foot in since 2018. Plus, very occasionally, ads for things I already have.

112233

Yeah, framing is the key. Put LLM in autocomplete, and it is "oh wow this thing reads my mind". Present it as an expert counselor and "this stupid bot does not know we have no bridge in our city" or something.

fouronnes3

I wonder how long it will take for "guaranteed AI-free!" to become a serious marketing argument for some products or services.

ragazzina

As someone who has shopped for a dumb TV, this may very well never happen.

mrweasel

Products no, I don't think that will happen. The market will be so small and manufacturers won't service that market due to cost. For services, maybe. I can see a bank or an ISP advertise with "No AI customer service, only real people" and especially elderly paying extra for that service.

One thing that I do wonder about is the value in adding AI and "Smartness", what if people don't use it? I know practically no one who uses their smart TV as anything but a monitor (and speakers). Everyone adds an AppleTV or a ChromeCast. My in-laws used Netflix on their Sony TV for a bit, but it was slow and two years ago Netflix stopped being supported on their TV and I gave them an old ChromeCast. Backed in AI could easily end up in the same situation. It's omni-present, but rarely used. That's a problem with the current logic behind innovation where little market research is done and companies are afraid to remove functionality as it may make them look less competitive (in the eyes of shareholders).

Someone point out that apparently Romanian online electronics retailers have a pretty nice selection of dumb TVs, at least they did a few years ago.

xethos

The OEMs don't care Netflix is no longer supported - they're OCR'ing, hashing, and selling what you're watching either way. They only need you to care enough to hook it up to the internet in the first place so they can sell what their users are watching

joseda-hg

I'm pretty sure I've already seen telcos use "Our support is 100% human" or something to that effect as a marketing point

add-sub-mul-div

Yeah, exactly. Undiscerning shoppers hear "Smart" TV and either assume it's better or buy whatever's put in front of them most loudly without even wondering if it's better or not. Those same people will ensure that AI products are successful and alternatives will similarly disappear.

chgs

People buy the cheapest option.

Two identical TVs the same size and make, one “smart”, one not. The smart is $10 cheaper, people go for that.

cmiller1

I wouldn't mind these "smart" TVs so much if they didn't suck so much for regular use. Why does it take 30+ seconds for me to get my television turned on when I just want to use a gaming console plugged into one of the inputs??

112233

I am surprised the artist/handcraft community has not yet agreed on a way to signal that, given the strong sentiment.

It totally would make sense in, e.g. art or photography (or, strangely, crocheting) circles to show that this image of a mouse was not vomited by an ML that had eaten too much LAION

wongarsu

Photography has C2PA to have a cryptographically verifiable chain of provenance for images. That way you can see what camera took the image and which edits were done.

It's fairly new, but with the mess around stock photo sites having undeclared AI images I wouldn't be surprised if it sites eventually showcase this information

https://c2pa.org/

112233

This is an excellent thing to have with a very narrow usage (e.g. journalism)

I do not see this getting into consumer phone images, screenshots or such things.

Also, c2pa as done by Adobe simply records signed list of what AI tools were used, and, since they are pushing AI into everything, good luck deriving anything useful from that list of modifications.

Also, I've seen a few photographers on internet on one hand hating AI with all their might, and on other proudly sharing their "technique" of upscaling blurry mess photos to huge sizes using Topaz Labs. I mean...

ernst_mulder

As a maintainer of a calculator collection website which is guaranteed AI-free I asked ChatGPT to draw me a logo for a guaranteed AI-free website, then realising I could not use that logo on an AI-free website :-)

thechao

I don't want to dox you, since it's easy to get from your museum to your personal webpage. Would you be kind enough to submit your site to HN, or post here for other people? It's a really amazing bit of old web!

RobbieGM

As one example, sr.ht advertises the lack of AI features.

gklitz

> Apple’s AI tools were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases.

This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.

This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”

> woman we not worth as much as men

And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.

And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.

sirlone

I do not want to use "sanitized models". Let me install my own models. I don't want some SV people deciding what is "right think" and what is forbidden.

remram

I want to sympathize, but also isn't that what you sign up for when you use AI products? Or is OP saying that iPhones have AI features you don't opt into? (I don't have an iPhone)

AI is not perfect (and I personally think it's all BS) but why would you use AI features and then complain that you get hallucinations? The state of the art isn't error-proof, petitioning Apple to do better than state-of-the-art seems kind of meaningless?

rchaud

Turned on by default as part of a firmware update.

dcrazy

Apple Intelligence is not turned on by default. You are asked after the software update completes if you would like to turn it on.

Prosammer

I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your clothes, dipshit".

sen

It’s probably my favorite of the AI features on Apple devices now.

My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages needs a reply now or whether it’s just “chat”.

I’ve found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the handiest uses of it personally.

dalmo3

No offense to you personally, but what kind of life does one live where one needs to glance at their partners' texts to shave off those ten precious seconds.

MisterSandman

I feel the same way - summarizing unnecessarily long email chains or slack threads at work? Works for me. Summarizing messages from my friends and loved ones? Feels dehumanizing.

unsnap_biceps

My wife loves to carpet bomb messages and the summary is often useful to glance at to see how important they are. But the inaccuracy prevents it from being useful and I'll often open the entire stream of thought even though I don't have time between meetings.

pornel

That sounds like AI is a band-aid for Apple's self-inflicted problem caused by designing notifications as a dumb list of boxes limited to a couple of lines.

They could have merged the last few recent short messages into one bigger notification, instead of making the notification for the very last message cover the rest.

ripped_britches

> I don’t have time between meetings

[guillotine raises]

carbocation

I turned these summaries off, but then turned them back on because I find them humorous.

A bit notable: the AI summarization of spam texts makes them seem much more credible.

timewizard

There is no 'ironic user only' option in the analytics.

There probably should be.

mattclarkdotnet

The entertainment value for me is in seeing these features turned in by Apple/Meta/Google and then working backwards to the real use cases they must be seeing. They simply wouldn’t do it if people didn’t want it, hence lots of people want it. You’re all weirdos.

rchaud

It's red meat for the shareholder class and nothing more. It's opt-out by default so on the next earnings call they can brag about the "stunning levels of user adoption".

astrange

It's useful for multiple texts. Single ones not so much.

the_snooze

I find the whole summarization use case completely misses the mark. If a message is from someone I want to hear from, just give it to me verbatim. Otherwise, give me tools to delay/down-prioritize/ignore their messages.

I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI summaries.

HnUser12

I also find it useful for group texts when a long conversation happens. Easier to get an idea when I don’t care to join in. Another use case for me is image descriptions, particularly in carplay.

Apocryphon

This would be an Apple Maps-level disaster, if people actually relied upon smartphone A.I. features for day to day use.

darknavi

> If you still have problems with it, turn it off... Have I done that? No, of course not. He may be messy and lack common sense, but that’s no reason for me to kill my husband!

I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.

mensetmanusman

I’m sorry Gal, you have a husband now.

null

[deleted]

rpigab

Worst way to find out that your spouse is cheating on you, and is married to two people at the same time unbeknownst to them. The AI knows.

miah_

Whatever this link was, all it does now is download a randomly named 0 byte file in Firefox.