I’ve talked to Apple engineers.
Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Everyone made fun of them for protecting them.
This is exactly the opposite of that, where Mark is throwing you and your children under the bus again because he’s unoriginal and doesn’t know how to make money any other way than by getting all up in your business, statistically.
Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.
Having seen multiple leading messaging/VoIP stacks from inside, the amount of engineering spent to work around various limitations of E2EE in real prod scenarios is insane, and even for simple every-day-use features metrics don't compare to the metrics of the same feature running without E2EE.
It may just be that ROI doesn't make sense: very few user out there truly care about (or even understand) E2EE, for quite some users it creates an inconvenience & support incidents (harder to move from device to device, forgot your passphrase - lost your history, new joiners to a group chat don't see previous history, etc), it requires a significant additional engineering effort to just maintain it, many new features get shipped much slower because of it...
That makes zero sense.
The problem with Siri is... Siri. The interface itself.
Zero of my complaints around Siri have to do with it not being able to access my private data.
They're entirely about it not understanding my request in the first place or lacking a basic capability.
It’s about the sum of all expression being able to be reflected back to you in such a way that Dawkins believes he’s met intelligent life.
Facebook and Google just slurped up their data centers, while Apple was encrypted.
Uhh. What the heck are you talking about? I’m calling straight bs on this unless presented rational.
Siri has access to knowledge.db or whatever it is, which is the centralized hub for pretty much all things. Siri phones home every request made via Siri.
I think you got sold snake oil
Garbage. That's some good spin, though. Siri is a turd in a punch bowl for many reasons that have nothing to do with privacy.
"Siri, do X thing" "Done"
"Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean"
Siri is connected to my Apple HomeKit. "Siri, turn off my Kitchen Lights" "I don't know what lights you mean."
Siri feels like it never evolved past a proof of concept.
It’s funny. Even a team of interns could’ve mapped more synonyms, right?
& Apple Intelligence, when it uses ChatGPT, it wouldn’t be quite as horrible if Apple had paid for better tokens instead of quantizing into oblivion… I think.
Two savings for Apple resulting in subpar experiences.
"Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years"
Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials
Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years.
In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.
(Looking for anything here!)
Neither did Meta, but that's a different discussion
I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck. Metaverse?
Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
I’m sure this will not be a popular take on HN however.
I literally helped create Android to prevent Microsoft from controlling the phone the way they did the PC - stifling innovation. So it's always funny for me to hear Gates whine about losing mobile to Android.
— Rich Miner (https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765)
Whereas Microsoft and Google care about their users like a farmer cares about a herd of pigs.
Precisely because it's your feelings, not objective observation.
No public company would care of their users, even remotely.
Indeed, during Jobs time it actually worked that way, but that time is long gone.
The OS is not nearly the best, just like laptops.
They stay rather secure because of all these measures. But they’ll get dismantled, too. Because idiots push idiots in power to weaken Apple’s stance. Useful idiots is the right term.
