Liquid Glass makes sense if this is what they are working towards: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/20th-anniversary-iphone/

They have done this before, release something large early in anticipation of a major shift and iron out issues before the shift happens. Liquid Glass started off a little janky but they appear to have been ironing out initial issues with each update.

Yea, if anything, it's Apple's normal mode to heavily disturb and move things around.

When a company doesn’t have anything to innovate on, or hires a new marketing exec, the first thing they do is change the company logo.

Liquid Glass was Apple’s logo change moment

Alexa+ is terrible compared to Alexa. It's so bad that I've dusted off my v1 echos cuz they're too old to run Alexa+. Complete shit show that is.

I do like Gemini better than Assistant, even though it's not quite there yet. But that's just a matter of time because they actually designed it from the ground up to be a drop in replacement for Assistant.

Alexa+ has been a massive downgrade for me. It's extremely laggy and constantly misunderstands me, whereas the old one never did. "Set a timer for 20 minutes" used to be instant and just work, I did this the other day and it took 10 seconds to respond and set a timer for 10 minutes.

I agree, ChatGPT voice mode is pretty impressive. Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably.

Siri doesn't need to have conversations with you. ChatGPT can do that. But, it should be able to do actions you'd do on your phone.

"objectively better" is a subjective statement :)

My preference, however, is for a voice-control UX just like I get with my Amazon Echo and "classic" Alexa like I have been for the past 10 years I've been using it: I think I can best describe it as a "voice-driven command-line" just like your OS' CLI shell, which makes its interactions predictable, even if it means I need to "know" what commands are valid in a given context. We all need predictability and reliability when it comes to my home-automation integrations.

...but computer interaction with a LLM / transformer-driven / "AI agent" is anything but predictable. When Amazon opted everyone into Alexa+ I agreed to give it a go and see if it really made things better or not - and it did not. I opted-out of Alexa+ and went back to something actually reliable.

This! I talk to ChatGPT every morning, and will listen and navigate my feeds while I drive, summarises posts, answer my questions. It just works.

I concur that the ChatGPT voice mode is excellent. I can't even think of anything to knock it for other than for whatever reason it never 'hears' my kids, but that's probably because it's not intended to be used in multi-participant chats?

But for one-on-one, it is a really outstanding experience. Especially since they tamped down the way over-the-top humanisms.

Strong disagree. The upgrade was a little bit rough at first (mostly because of slow response) but now it's a million times better than the old assistant. The old assistant basically just repeated "I don't know how to do that" over and over.

I have never had trouble setting timers with either.

Oh man. I made the mistake of converting my Google Home devices to Gemini.

The first problem is that it's just slow. If I want it to turn off some light, it takes a long time before responding.

But yeah, the failure to do basic tasks. I have a routine that I used to have it run (controls several devices at once). Now:

10-20% of the time it runs it.

60% of the time it says it's running it but it doesn't do anything.

20-30% of the time it says it can't do it unless I opt in to invasive permissions. And when I opted into them, it still failed about a third of the time. So I opted out again.

I like that I can ask more nuanced questions without getting dumped to a web search, and I can have a back-and-forth conversation.

But timers and smart home actions are definitely less reliable and sometimes take absurdly long to respond (like 20-30 seconds p99).

I hate it too.. the old assistant is pretty smart, obviously it has some language processing, but not "AI", but it's very fast for things like "Set alarm for ... ", "Remind me at X about Y", "Add calendar event on x at y about z", or "Navigate home".

And now if I want to use Gemini on my phone I have to replace Assistant. Nah, I'll keep Assistant thanks, and just have a shortcut to load the Gemini in the browser.

Except the browser experience is so fucking buggy, constant reloads needed..

The only thing I haven't been able to get it to do is read from my phone's local calendar. The claude app can but the voice assistant cannot (Why? No idea). Perplexity has no issue doing it so I actually use them for my rare needs to do voice commands with my phone.

How did you do that?

Actually, could you recommend one? The ones I've found all seem to want subscriptions. I'm okay paying a few dollars for a well done frontend, but an ongoing sub to run an open weights model locally is nuts...

Also: Before, Apple was dependent on Intel (whose "product" is an integrated chip design and the fab to make it). Now they're dependent on TSMC (whose "product" is a fab). I'm... not really sure they've reduced their dependence? If TSMC starts falling behind Intel--which doesn't seem likely, but what happened to Intel didn't seem likely two decades ago--Apple will be stuck.

A series is their own chip design, not Power PC or Intel designs.

It's the CPUs they have built for their purposes, which is next level hardware independence.

> seems to imply they have to pick and choose what they pursue. They really don't, especially if it's hard- vs software.

Money can often just be one part of the equation.

To do things well you also need - available & capable technical resource, suitable facilities, available & capable leadership and management (with engaging at the right level in the business) and a clear vision of what you're trying to achieve/working towards.

Given how Apple appears to operate, I wonder if a strong desire for senior management control/oversight over major developments means they (artificially) limit how many concurrent large-scale things they can work on at any given time?

Maybe not, but that'd be my guess.

> It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know.

I didn't imply, it's explicit in my comment. it's what their actions show. Their updates make their systems worse and worse, Tim Cook is out and Siri is in shambles. It might have been something else, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because the alternative is just sheer stupidity.

Heavily funded startups have terrible track records in reality. The only cases where it seems to have worked is when the money was used to undermine the market dynamics by nuking competition via severe underpricing.

here is a clue delivered -- money does not make software better, and lots of money often results in worse.. it makes no sense? actual experience begs to differ.

Classical homework assignment -- the Mythical Man Month and related essays

I only partly agree with this. The answer is maddeningly more complicated.

Some parts of their software stack -- higher up than the kernel -- are actually pretty great. There's a lot of realy brilliant stuff in their system frameworks, and in SwiftUI, Cocoa, and UIKit. I've been using Linux at home recently, and I find myself missing some of it.

But, on the flip side, suddenly you hid maddening bugs, crashes, or terrible developer-experience papercuts. And, of course, there's the App Store, which is just evil. For my next app I'm just going to go Notarization only, and see how that goes...

The comment above is on to something. I find CarPlay to much more valuable and much more of a lock in to the iPhone than Siri. I do not think I could ever go back to using the infotainment systems that ship with cars. So makes sense why they might prioritize over Siri. And in the context of CarPlay, the simplicity of Siri is nice. I really only need it to execute a few simple commands like looking up directions, making calls, reading / sending texts, playing a podcast, etc.

I don't dispute that, but Apple made its business on the premise of being the best in the business in terms of UX. Note though that you can have great UX powered by mediocre software, so those aren't mutually exclusive.