Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.

Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”

  • Leon@pawb.social
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    1 day ago

    The latest iOS update was just slop. If you’re in Europe there are no tangible improvements since the slop isn’t allowed here.

    • recked_wralph@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I’ve been so frustrated with iOS 27. I spent an hour disabling as much AI shit as I could only for it to be reversed on the next update.

      If it doesn’t settle down I’ll be looking into alternatives for my next device.

      • Leon@pawb.social
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        1 day ago

        I haven’t bothered to update. Don’t really see the point as nothing new is added.

        • recked_wralph@lemmy.world
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          That’s fair. I think it’s habitual for me to be an early adopter and I’m finding that lately to be less desirable than it used to be.

          So long as older versions continue to get security patches I’d say stay put.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    So, over the last couple or years, Samsung has been updating the OS of my Galaxy Smartphone repeatedly. With each iteration more and more AI features have appeared as new buttons with ambiguous icons.

    Using AI features on my phone requires opening a Samsung account so it cat track my token use. This requires providing personal information, and making up a password I will remember since the Samsung account app isn’t compatible with password managers (except Samsung’s proprietary manager, which I do not use). I also anticipate Samsung will want a credit card number to quietly charge me as I use compute.

    I haven’t made a Samsung account.

    And so all these buttons with weird icons are now productivity potholes, since tapping any of them accidentally switches me to the create a Samsung account page, interrupting my workflow.

    Like tyranny, enshitification is more about incompetence than malevolence.

    • Jim9222@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      This is why I left OnePlus for iPhone

      Really hoping for a competent Linux to show up in the US market but I’m not holding my breath. At this point, just trying to pick the least shitty device

    • daq@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      Can’t you use a different launcher? Samsung launcher has always been shit. I had a misfortune of using Samsung phone 10 years ago or so and even then it was excellent hardware mated to absolute trash software that slowed everything down.

  • Toga77@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “John Ternus will be great for Apple because he’s an engineer”

    A society that refuses to mix ethics with STEM: hold my beer…

    Seriously, being an engineer or working on or in something doesn’t automatically make you the best leadership choice automatically. Ethics are kind of an important thing America continues to gloss over at an alarming rate.

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      Funny. In my 1986 college freshman year I was required to take an ethics for engineers course. They told us working for the military industrial complex was bad.

      Curiously, the MIC was hiring and was where the well-paying jobs were at the time. Also, the field was impacted thanks to decades of cold war STEM push.

      And there you get the contrived desperation, that drove studying engineers students into Lockheed, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas like Russian girls into Epstein’s sex spa for billionaires.

      It turns out you can’t eat ethics. Although I still find myself judging ICE recruits.

      • Toga77@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Unfortunately ethics is kinda one of those major pillars that separates us from the other animals in the kingdom.

        • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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          There is no real freedom for ethics under capitalism. Like technically there is, you can go live selflessly like a monk and quite a few people do, but you’ll bump in the bars of your cage all the time. This is called liberalism.

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          14 hours ago

          I agree, which is why those with power like to structure society so that we have to act against principle and according to loyalty to survive.

          We like to imagine a differently shaped society run on rules guided by ethics, but so far power consolidates and those systems get perverted.

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Keep in mind Apple has a poorly documented and mostly unknown daemon called knowledgeconstructiond that cannot be turned off and solely exists to profile you based on accessing every Apple apps data - ical, messages, mail, photos etc, which is astoundingly personal info especially considering a lot of Apple users dump everything into stock apps, as the “strength” of Apple has typically been consistency of the platform

    https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-personal-knowledge-graph

    The person who wrote that article vibecoded an app that allows you to visualize the data captured: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow

    It is basically all the gross shit that ad networks do. What does Apple do with this data, that has been aggregated since macos 13? Officially it’s probably to “enhance the user experience” but at a minimum it probably changes how Apple delivers ads to you. do they sell it? Who knows

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      I tested after reading that article, and I was able to Force Quit any of those daemons’ processes just in the Activity Monitor on os 15 Sequoia. They’ll probably respawn at reboot, but they are just user processes that can be killed so I bet you could run a login script to kill them each time you reboot and log in. I had already turned off all the Siri AI options and every single one of dozens of “learn from this app” toggles hidden in Settings.

      This is without disabling SIP also

    • Allero@lemmy.today
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      2 hours ago

      “To accelerate integration of AI into Apple products and continuously improve user experience, we decided to remove the optionto disable Apple Intelligence”

      -Them soon enough, probably.

      Also, I’m pretty certain there’s more to it than that. More vibecoding coming to Apple devices.

  • Jhex@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    he not only he is pushing for a bad idea, he clearly missed the memo that Apple was mostly unaffected precisely because they had been slow to adopt AI

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      They where jot slow they pushed really hard but failed to execute. I love how everyone seems to forget that.

        • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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          Apple very much did want to invest into AI development, but the financial department - which used to be Cook’s department before he became CEO - repeatedly denied allocating money for buying GPUs, and told the engineers to ‘just use the old ones’.

          At that point, the ‘old ones’ were several years old, and in quantity about 1% of what Microsoft or Google had at the time.

          Apple never ‘chose’ to wait with AI. It chose to be run by businessmen, who are always clueless, and who will always make terrible decisions. Though in this case it happened to have temporarily positive or neutral consequences for the users.

          • Taldan@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            repeatedly denied allocating money for buying GPUs, and told the engineers to ‘just use the old ones’.

            What’s the source for this story? Seems wild finance was able to make a top level strategic decision like that

            • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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              17 hours ago

              Apple Explained published a fairly thorough video on the failure of Apple Intelligence, and it’s covered there.

              Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRLvC0kd2jk

              Unfortunately he doesn’t provide sources, but usually shows articles, so you can easily find them. The original sources there were leaks iirc.

      • artyom@piefed.social
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        They didn’t “fail”, they just realized the technology was not ready. This was made very clear through many public blunders. And they didn’t want to just ram it down people’s throats like their competitors.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “The customer is always right” has become “The customer will like it” with screen controls in cars, IOT jammed into everything, subscriptions, AI forced down our throats…

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      In many cases they have blown past “the customer will like it” all the way to “our data suggests that 90% of customers will not leave and profits will slightly increase as a result.”

      I mean, at this point enshittification is a widespread business plan.

      • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        And one main premise of capitalism is that you have market choice. Well when every car has a screen now, no options on AI, etc it sort of defeats that premise.

  • SplitTheUSInFour@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Geezus how much more AI do we need? For the cost of it, we’re not getting the great benefits we thought we were going to get. It’s too environmentally harmful when it’s run in concentrated places. There’s also no reason to have these data centers. If PCs were invented today, we’d be renting PCs forever because this era isn’t about innovation anymore. It’s about trapping people in a rental world.

    • andallthat@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I can’s see the appeal for me but I think I can understand where Apple is coming from, at least in theory. More AI in phones means an excuse to sell you more powerful phones.

      Unless you are very into having the latest piece of tech or your old phone dies, I haven’t seen much that a new phone can do and my 4 years old one can’t, so many people (including me) are sticking with their old phones for longer. AI seems like it has the potential to put something new on those marketing assets. Granted, it worked like shit with AI laptops/Copilot PCs but Apple has a knack for turning others’ failures into long lines of people fighting to give them their money so we’ll see…

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        A large part of this is also app development. App developers want as many peo0le as possible to use their apps, so they’re designed to work on phones that cost a hundred bucks new when they were sold on 2018.

        PCs run into this with lots of things too, but one huge difference is the multitasking experience. I have a big-ass folding phone, but the multitasking experience still sucks, most because the phone is just a bad format for the kind of workflows that necessitate multitasking.

        If I’m working in multiple windows, I need a keyboard and mouse. Yeah, I can have firefox open on one half of the screen and Outlook in the other on my phone, but it’s still the mobile version of both apps, and any time I want to type something half the screen becomes a keyboard.

        So I don’t really have a need for a powerful phone. It’s a content consumption and communication device, both of which don’t need much horsepower.

    • Garfunkel@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      If you want to live in the AI utopia of the 21st century, china sadly is the destination. Here in the us all we’ve got is israel’s surveillance feudal colony.

  • northernlights@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    Sometimes I swear the job of CEO seems to be the easiest ever. Just follow whatever’s trending now. Seems so easy: start your day, see all headlines say “AI”, order a few people to put “AI” everywhere, sit back, relax and rack profits from investors who are just as brain dead.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      That’s because your mental image of a CEO is these big dogs. You will never read a story about a CEO doing a great job, only dumb fucks like Musk make the news.

    • frongt@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      To be fair, they can’t just sit back, they also have to have a lot of meetings that could have been emails.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        Funny story. I once worked at a company where I got along very well with my boss so I’d regularly get some gossip about the higher ups. One time my boss had a meeting (or rather multiple meeting) with the higher ups to go over the quarterly goals for the department. They had created the goals, had a presentation and all they needed was for the higher ups to give the okay to continue. Fairly simple thing, except every meeting was completely derailed by the CEO and his incessant need to discuss fishing. And because the higher ups were all buddies they all started discussing fishing and boating etc. After 4 failed meeting to get a simple Yes my boss sent everything in email and got a near instant confirmation to go ahead.

        Sometimes the meeting has to be an email.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          I worked for one company that had a CEO like this except he was also a heavy cocaine user. One time we had a client visit our offices for a meeting; we had written software for this client for more than ten years at that point. In the middle of the meeting the CEO wanders in randomly and starts just talking incessantly for 45 fucking minutes straight. Finally he slaps his thighs and says “so, do you think you want to do business with us?” We damn near lost the client over this.

    • Kekzkrieger@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      Being CEO is hard.

      You get so much money and you need to figure out a way to spend it.

      You get a brand new super expensive car on company cost so you can’t worry about repairs or when you have to replace it.

      You get invited for lunch and dinner so you can’t think about what to cook in the evenings and also you can’t waste time in the supermarket.

      You have so much responsibilities that even when you do a shit job and the company fires you or goes bankrupt you get hired by the next one anyways so you don’t have to worry about your job or providing for your family.

      You don’t need to track your time by the minute and you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder all the time so you need to figure out a way on what to do with all that time.

      I mean i certainly wouldn’t want all these terrible terrible burdons being loaded onto me.

      Poor CEOs

      • northernlights@lemmy.today
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        You forget how they’re gifted the latest stuff by companies all the time just because they’re “important.” Rich people actually don’t pay for much.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I feel like the main attribute of a CEO or any type of leadership position is having no need or desire for naps. This is why heavy cocaine use is so common among that species. I could never be a CEO, naps are just too important a part of my life.

    • jtrek@startrek.website
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      2 days ago

      They’re not smart or visionary. They’re just rich. They sell us a myth that they’re titans but it’s a lie.

    • LibertyLizard@quokk.au
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      I do think it requires some skill and sociopathy around being able to sell the biggest lies you can imagine so investors give you money.

  • treesquid@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Tim Cook was a good transitional douchebag CEO to soften people up before the full Gavin Belson experience.