Daring Fireball: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

I've read Gruber for a long time and he is an Apple fan, but that also means when he tears into them it cuts deep. This writeup on the Apple Intelligence blunders in what they promised is tough, and totally valid.

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It's also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They're inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with -- how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve -- problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true, and they set a course based on that.

At the end he calls back to Steve Jobs, the savior figure of Apple, interrogating (that is the right term) the engineers that built MobileMe (which was bad!):

Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple's campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:

"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down." The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. "Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us," Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group.

Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then, I fear, that's all she wrote. The ride is over.

It is time for the often joked about Siri issues to get addressed.