Apple Intelligence debacle to headline Apple’s Top 100 offsite meeting this week

Apple CEO Tim Cook
“From the day the company announced the Apple Intelligence platform last year, it was a disappointment — with a roster of features that didn’t measure up to competitors’ offerings,” Mark Gurman writes for Bloomberg News. “Since then, Apple has delayed feature after feature, all while telling consumers that their new iPhones are ‘built from the ground up’ for AI.”
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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Apple’s marketing has been especially misleading. With slick videos, TV advertisements and media pitches, the company touted the system like it was the world’s next iPhone. That’s far from the case: From Siri to Writing Tools to Image Playground, the Apple Intelligence platform is nowhere near a revolution.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last Friday:
The Apple Intelligence vaporware [is] false advertising, fraud, and lies. Those will be the basis for class action lawsuits from iPhone, iPad, and Mac customers soon enough. And Apple will deserve them all.
Gurman continues:
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A few weeks ago, I first reported that Apple’s AI-infused Siri upgrade, which includes features like leveraging personal context, on-screen awareness and the ability to more precisely control apps via voice, would be delayed. Apple confirmed this earlier this month, saying the features wouldn’t arrive until sometime in the “coming year.” The reality is that the upgrades are now delayed indefinitely… Apple ran ads for these postponed Siri features for the past six months or so (the company only recently removed them). These commercials were touting a technology that — at best — won’t exist until sometime in 2026.
Apple’s product marketing organization, marketing communications, software engineering team and AI organization are all culpable here…
John Giannandrea’s AI group failed to create usable underlying technology… And, of course, Cook ultimately made the final choice to launch a half-baked Apple Intelligence platform.

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MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote 3 months prior to Apple’s voluminous vaporware emissions at WWDC 2024:
Apple pays and has been paying John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, millions upon millions of dollars for years. WTF of any import does he really do? WTF of any import has he really delivered? Have you used Siri lately? Yup, it’s still a steaming pile of dogshit.
Where’s Apple’s generative AI, John? “Too hard; too late; look for partners; gimme my paycheck and stock options.”
AAPL shareholders need to start asking real questions of these executives, especially those who are supposedly in charge of Apple’s “AI Strategy,” when the company clearly has none. How about some accountability for once? – MacDailyNews, March 18, 2024
Gurman continues:

Given the nature of this collective failure, it’s unlikely to result in management changes on Cook’s executive team. That would mean admitting fault, which Apple hates doing. A shake-up would also suggest that the company took one of the world’s preeminent names in AI — Giannandrea — and failed to put him in a position to succeed, making yet another failed outside hire to Cook’s cabinet… In other words: Apple will need to push forward with who it currently has in charge.
Still, the whole mess is likely to come to a head this week at Apple’s annual Top 100 offsite. A March tradition since the days of Steve Jobs, this is a meeting of the company’s 100 most important executives, who trek well outside the Cupertino, California, campus to discuss the future of Apple. Executives attending this year’s gathering expect Apple Intelligence to be a focal point.

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MacDailyNews Take: It is what it is and, unfortunately, it will remain as it is, regardless of blathering at meetings, until the myopic Tim Cook is finally, blessedly gone for good.
What we have here is a company that was once led by a visionary who set the agenda for entire industries, now led by a reactive caretaker who heard somewhere that VR headsets and electric cars were the next big things (probably read it in “Wired”), so that’s what he had Apple do, while completely missing artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, and now is scrambling to catch up to something Steve Jobs would have focused on long before anyone ever even heard of OpenAI.
Steve Jobs bought Siri in April 2010. Steve Jobs would never have ignored Siri, basically let it rot, for well over a decade and counting. Steve Jobs would have made Siri the first conversational generative AI assistant years before anyone else. And the company would today be worth at least a trillion dollars more than it is currently. (Yes, we’re lowballing that estimate.) – MacDailyNews, February 21, 2024
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024
When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017

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