3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.
I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path.
The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).
Unless you want to turn it off, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do. Every now and then my phone will randomly prompt me to "ask Gemini", which is really annoying. When I want to use the LLM, I will go to it, stop shoving it in my face over and over.
I can't turn it off on my Samsung Galaxy S23 which I originally bought, because it was not marketed with AI. The patched it in later and ever since it just randomly starts as if it was listening all the time.
Apple’s analytics probably support this which is exactly why siri still sucks. But ya, everyone will continue to think they somehow know better and apple is wrong and poorly executing
I can count on one hand, the number of times where I have gone “gosh, I so wish my voice assistant was better”.
It queues up music correctly, and picks the right destination on maps in my car. 98% use case satisfied. Would I like it to be better? Don’t really care. Is it a purchasing point? Nope. Would I miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? Also nope.
A better voice assistant is a major selling point for me. I need glasses to use my phone. Messages, email, purchases, directions, constantly. A good voice commands would be godsend. Siri doesn’t work very well
I use the phone voice assistants to set timers, and call people when I'm driving.
It is objectively worse at calling people than Assistant was. If I ask you to call someone, don't come up with a scolling list of phone numbers that I have to pick from. At least Assistant called the primary designated number for someone, Gemini just froze and wouldn't take voice commands to pick the number but forced my to pick up my phone.
I turned that bullshit off a couple of days after they forced it on me without asking.
I still feel like they are in an incredible position when it comes to AI because of their hardware integration/advantage across all of their devices. I think they see immense value in getting things on-device and not having to rely on any of these other companies.
When it comes to AI, there's ~5 trillion dollars of datacenter revenue Apple could be competing for, but isn't. That's not good.
Now, maybe it would be justifiable if there were great local AI experiences on iPhone, or an easy $5 trillion to be made elsewhere. Until then, Apple is bleeding money hand-over-fist by refusing to sign the CUDA UNIX drivers and sell the rackmount Mac as a cutting-edge TSMC inference box. The Grace superchip is absolutely eating Apple's ARM lunch right now.
Yes Siri has stagnated. But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports.
Siri could be better if Apple just threw 10000 monkeys at it and configure it more phrases (utterances) to match on.
This is what bothers me about most voice assistants, I think maybe the Amazon one finally got an upgrade to modern LLM capabilities? I don't know about the Google one.
I assume the cost is too high, but I don't expect ChatGPT / Grok / Claude level of knowledge from a voice assistant LLM, if they can run a drastically small enough model that doesn't cost an arm and a leg at scale, I would be okay with that. Definitely would have to cache some of the responses when viral events happen.
> I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon
it actually turned out to be the greatest boon in the milky way for me: joe consumer, apple device user.
been watching the copilot saga (in my head the lore is that this is clippy hes back and hes pissed everyone treated him like buttcheeks over a decade ago) over on windows & new samsung fold phones (which look really cool) having no way to fully disable that stuff and man.. i dunno im gonna be kind of pissed if this whole shakeup is just a move to make apple start doing that same shenanigans (please no)
You make it sound like Cook does everything at Apple.
His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that.
Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.
While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today.
To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time.
Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
Part of the reason Apple was doing great before he became CEO is because Tim Cook was the COO. A huge part of their success was getting good deals on the non standard parts they needed at massive scale.
Not sure there was a clear better candidate for CEO after Jobs died.
He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”.
There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake.
I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.
The more worrying aspect is that the Apple leadership continued with Dye even as he kept pushing terrible interfaces. In fact, according to all reports, they seem distraught by this move which indicates they aren’t really in alignment with the broader ecosystem that didn’t like Dye’s output at all.
Agreed. It suggests they were swayed by demos more than using their own products, which is scary. Using iOS 26 makes me wonder if Cook even uses an iPhone or has an assistant do everything - it’s not unusable but there are so many little glitches which would’ve had Steve Jobs chewing out an entire room full of managers.
i don't really care about dye (or liquid glass) but i do feel like it's an alarm of sorts that Srouji stated he'd probably take off without tim cook at the helm. I dunno what that signals, i'm less inclined to think it's a "i just really like tim, man" and more of a "this incoming leadership can get bent". Apple also just picked up the meta lady that helped draft the patriot act. i dunno. What remains to be seen is whether or not Apple maintains its core tenets or if they start slipping on things like privacy, ads, and forcing AI in everyone's face. They undoubtedly leave a buttload of money on the table never pursuing these things.
whole shakeup feels like it was driven by wall street earlier in the year, there were headlines about apple being in serious trouble for missing out on AI. I dunno feels like some game of thrones opportunism within apple leadership just played out.
apple fans are dorks in that they think such a shakeup is in response to liquid glass and the iphone air being a boring phone.
i like apple devices, this is kinda freaky i can't lie. it would actually suck if their chip division started stalling if srouji bounces, it would suck infinitely more if a new leadership was here to redefine apple values and suddenly we have a proverbial apple version of satya nadella at the helm who's here to blast you with ads and subscriptions and forced AI.
Yeah it seems pretty obvious that we’re in the mainframe era of transformer models and we’ll soon transition to the personal computer era where these all run on your device, which Apple stands to benefit from the most. Their FoundationModels are actually pretty good at certain tasks
I don't think that's obvious. The marginal return on additional units of compute seems to fall pretty quickly for the vast majority of applications, which increases the benefit of decentralization over the cost of reduced compute. It isn't clear the same is true of intelligence.
Tim Cook is a safe CEO who should have stayed a COO. I like Tim but I think what Apple needs is someone like Tim as COO and a visionary the way Steve Jobs was a visionary. For all his flaws he paved the way to where Apple is today.
IMO: Cook is going to announce his retirement by the end of Q1, they've already selected a CEO (probably Ternus), the incoming CEO wants leadership change, and some of these departures are because its better that this purge happens before the CEO change than after. I think this explains Giannandrea, Williams, and Jackson.
Dye may have also been involved in that, given how unpopular he was internally at Apple. But more likely just personal / Meta offered him a billion dollars. Maestri leaving was also probably totally uninvolved.
Srouji is the weirdest case, and I'm hesitant to believe its even true just given its a rumor at this point. Its possible he was angry about being passed over for CEO, but realistically, it was always going to be Ternus, Williams, or Federighi. If Ternus is the next CEO, its likely we'll see Apple combine the Hardware Technologies and Hardware Engineering divisions, then have Srouji lead both of them. I really do not see him leaving the company.
The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell, and this deeply pissed off many people in Apple's senior leadership. So, what we're seeing is more chaos than it first seems.
Generally, as long as Srouji doesn't leave, these changes feel positive for Apple, and especially if there's a CEO change in early 2026: This is what "the fifth generation of Apple Inc" looks like. I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.
What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.
The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years
I agree this is true, but Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover. Smartphones, iPods, earbuds, good desktop PCs were all after they watched what was good and then made it better (if you like what they did, anyway).
The next hardware category is probably AR glasses if someone can make them good and cheap, nobody has so Apple won’t do anything but wait. I’m sure they have an optics lab working on something, but probably not full throttle (and the Vision Pro is an attempt to make the OS).
> Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover.
People say Apple does its best work as a “second mover,” but that misses the actual pattern: Apple builds great products when leadership is solving their own problems.
The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just refinements of existing products. They were devices Steve Jobs personally wanted to use and couldn’t find elsewhere. The man saw the GUI at Xerox and saw how anyone could use a computer without remembering arcane commands. So he drove the development of the Mac. He was using a shitty mobile phone, saw the opportunity and had the iPhone developed. Same with the early Apple Watch (first post-Jobs new product line), which reflected Jony Ive’s fashion ambitions; once he left, it evolved into what current leadership actually uses: a high-end fitness tracker.
The stagnation we're seeing now isn’t about Apple losing its “second-mover magic.” It’s that leadership doesn’t feel an unmet need that demands a new device. None of Vision Pro, Siri, Apple Intelligence or even macOS itself anymore appear to be products the execs themselves rely on deeply, and it shows. Apple excels when it scratches its own itch and right now, it doesn’t seem to have one.
I think this is an interesting take that really reflects the saturation of the wider problem space of society. Much of the stuff that we could potentially need, we already have. It will be interesting to see what new products are released to the market in the next ten or so years which substantially change the way that we use technology.
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years
How frequently do you expect a new major product category across the industry? Is there any company who launched one that wasn't ChatGPT in the same time frame?
Apple used to put out new or interesting products. E.g. they just up and released Time Machine routers when no one was really doing that in the home router industry like at all, maybe a clunky usb ftp solution but this was first party apple white glove treatment of the issue. They had great software too in many different niches e.g. Aperture coming after Adobe's pro photo pie.
It was amazing how much diversity in really well thought out hardware as well as software was happening at apple years ago, when it was a far smaller company in terms of manpower and resources than it is today. I guess when the business model is selling ongoing subscriptions instead of compelling new products in order to get money, you stop getting the compelling new products coming out.
Personally I wouldn't count Chromebooks as something newer than Apple's last category-creating product since the iPad is in roughly the same time frame and netbooks a few years before that.
The Apple Watch is newer and is where I'd say the cutoff is for Apple.
--
At a higher level, I'd say there were two personal-computer-hardware revolution periods that Apple featured heavily in:
1) home personal computers and then the GUI-fication of them and the portable-ification - the wave the Apple II was part of, and then the one the Mac mainstreamed, then laptops where Apple was pretty instrumental in setting design and execution standards
2) mainstream general-purpose/software-defined mobile devices (vs single- or few-function gadgets). Initial failures or niche products (Newton from Apple, Palm/PocketPC more successfully as a niche later) and then Apple REALLY mainstreaming with the iPhone and the extensions that were the iPad and Watch. I'm leaving out the iPod here since "single-purpose MP3 players" were a transitional stop on the gadget->general purpose device trend. (But that general purpose nature also makes it hard to invent a new mobile device category.)
Of things that have been percolating for a while, maybe VR/AR takes off one day, I'm not sure there's mass appeal there. Are people going to get enough utility over a phone to justify pop-up ads in their field-of-view all day long?
It's possible the LLM/transformer boom could lead to some new categories, but we don't know what that would look like yet, so it's hard to penalize Apple for not being a super-early first-mover in the last 3 years since nobody else has figured out a great hardware story there either, and even in their prime they were less of a "first mover" than a "show everyone else how it could be done better" player.
I guess we’re being a bit vague on timeframe but chrome books launched in 2011 so they’re one of those products that took ~10 years to be an overnight success, with 2020 being an accelerant. So my vote is no.
This seems true at many companies. While I'm not all that impressed by many current leaders, I'm sort of terrified of my generation (younger gen x) taking over because some of them seem to not be prepared or not have been prepared for the roles.
Look outside the HackerNews/Silicon Valley bubble: Apple is doing very well. Consumers broadly don't care whether their phone has AI, as long as it has the ChatGPT/etc apps. iMessage and FaceTime have a stranglehold on, uh, everyone in America. They sell more iPhones every quarter. Their services revenue keeps going up. Mac sales are up big. Apple Silicon is so far ahead of anything else on the market, they could stay on the M5 platform for three years and still be #1. Apple Watch is the most popular watch brand in the world (and its not close; sensing a pattern?). Airpods, alone, make more money than Texas Instruments or SuperMicro. Yes; Vision Pro and iPhone Air sold poorly. Who cares? They're both obvious stepping stones to products that will sell well (Vision Pro -> Glasses-style AR device, iPhone Air -> thin engineering will help with the iPhone Fold). Apple can afford to take risks and adjust.
Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.
I wish Apple would split software and bring back Scott Forstall (soon after Tim Cook leaves) and give him a big chunk, like iOS and iPadOS. Craig Federighi needs to reduce the scope of his work and get competent people in to handle the software area.
Great points, this is indicative of something going on. And this point is especially spot on:
> I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
It's time for change. Maybe it won't get better, but I do hope it will.
True. Cook was a great money maker but he's so boring on the product side.
But they'll never get anyone even close to Jobs obviously. Just won't happen. Even if they find someone with the same attention to detail and "risk it all on a grand vision" mentality, he or she won't get the trust of the board who are generally risk-averse. The only reason Jobs got away with doing all that was that he was Mr. Apple. He was the company.
Hopefully they'll get someone closer to that but the magic will never come back IMO.
> the incoming CEO wants leadership change, and some of these departures are because its better that this purge happens before the CEO change than after
Or the more common all the ones who didn’t get the crown are leaving.
> The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell
"Less probable" is the understatement of the century. This rumor came out of nowhere, and it should instantly set off the BS-meter of anyone familiar with how Apple is run.
The most likely explanation for it is that Tony felt like a little boost to his profile couldn't hurt whatever his next step might be, and so he made a few phone calls to get this rumor ball rolling so that his name is in the news for a bit (hey, it worked!).
Your last point is the interesting one: for years people have complained that Apple has gotten slow, conservative, and repetitive. Maybe, this is what the reset looks like
> I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
Short of Tim Cook being replaced, it just seems like disarray and things are falling apart at the seams, resulting in things only likely getting worse, not better.
If Tim Cook is indeed about to get replaced, then I think you might hear fewer complaints. But right now, the complaints are likely assuming a Tim Cook replacement isn’t part of the plan, or at the very least, not a guarantee.
If you’re wrong about a Tim Cook replacement, then I think the complaints may be justified.
Could be Fadell, why else would Apple put Thread in phones? Maybe iTunes Store (via Fuse) and iPhone (via General Magic) weren't the only things Fadell had pitched Jobs on when the time was right.
Poor analysis. Apple is doing quite well as a Big Tech company that simply doesn't need to "pivot to AI" like everyone else. Their missteps in "Apple Intelligence" have in fact demonstrated that they don't actually need to have much of a "strategy" here at all. In fact, if they simply link out to other people's chatbots and make it totally opt-in, that would be ideal.
The much bigger problem is that they've lost the wow factor in their software design, and in some regards the hardware as well even though the internals and build quality has never been better. Apple needs a design shakeup far more than it needs anything to do with AI, a poison pill which will bring the entire industry down in 2026.
I have intentionally withheld updating my daily drivers to iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass. But if I had to pick between two evils - diminishing UX quality and shoving AI into every corner where no one asked for it - I’d still pick Liquid Glass.
And I love it! The ocr/vision models are a literal life saver here. Translating websites in Safari? Even text in images gets translated, super convenient! The only gripe i have is that it tries to be smart and tries to detect addresses, phone numbers. If the address or phone number is part of a text it is nearly impossible to copy the whole text since the phone number gets prioritised over the text (so you can only copy or call the number… )
A small nitpick: the translation and data detectors pre-date Apple Intelligence.
I do indeed love these features. They have definitely had some regressions in the data detectors over the past few years. I assume that they only test these automatically in “ideal” contexts that don’t account for real life. Not sure. They used to be more reliable.
They absolutely are. And you can turn them off. My comment is more about the technology industry’s general insistence on shoving AI down your throat whether or not it’s useful, usable, or desired.
I’m hopeful that whatever combination of factors at Apple prevent that from happening remain. Otherwise I’ll have to start considering GrapheneOS and defaulting to my Debian-based MacBook.
But I don't think the choice is quite as binary as "pivot to AI" vs "ignore AI entirely." What's changed in the last two years is that user expectations are shifting at the OS level, not just the app level
Yep. User expectations are leading people away from the slop-filled Windows 11 trainwreck and into the arms of Linux and macOS. Last thing we need is macOS to copy Redmond. (Used to be the other way around!)
> they've lost the wow factor in their software design
Software craftsmanship at large scale is dead, so we shouldn’t expect to see that make a return any time soon.
The last few decades of free market experimentation and evolution have revealed the playbook to maximize engagement+money: sell software as subscriptions, use every means possible (push notifications, full screen ads, etc) to monopolize the user’s attention, prevent users from importing/exporting data to keep them trapped in your walled off app…
In this kind of environment, the little touches and consideration that gave software its “wow” factor are a liability, since everything gets redesigned every 18 months anyway to keep up with the new trends and what A/B testing reveals.
The Apple of the 2000s could offer genuinely delightful experiences because software was in such a different, immature state back then and thoughtful design could be a meaningful differentiator. Similar to how the most successful+profitable games nowadays are filled with loot boxes and dark patterns, and have nothing to do with the masterpieces from a few decades ago.
Indie developers can still make delightful things that treat the customers’ wallet+time+attention with respect (thank God), but those will never make billions and billions the way Fortnite or TikTok or ads in the Settings app can.
> Similar to how the most successful+profitable games nowadays are filled with loot boxes and dark patterns, and have nothing to do with the masterpieces from a few decades ago.
That one actually hurts. I lost touch with games a while ago but it was a good run through the golden era. The cinema is on its way out. At least we have the memories.
Every generation has their stuff, there's new things to be excited about, but the turnover is getting crazy fast.
I agree that Apple is in a position where they don't have to and shouldn't go all in on AI yet. They can wait and watch and figure out the right move (though they will need someone with Jobsian vision).
But what's this about AI bringing the entire industry down?
It's also anyone's guess what direction it will matter. Will apple miss the boat on AI because it's the real deal? Or is it a bubble that will pop and apple will be left standing because they didn't bet the farm on AI
While we can agree that adding AI just to tick a box will win no awards, it will be a laughable proposition to suggest that Apple doesn't need to do anything on AI.
If anything its laughable and points to the unoriginality of product creators that we haven't fundamentally transformed how we interact with technology given how much AI offers as functionality. Anyone (I'll bet 20% on Ive) who figures this out will eat Apple's dinner.
If you're giving 5:1 against Ive I'll take that in a heartbeat. He has zero historical record to show he can somehow capitalize on AI; even his design contributions are overall meh. Apple will have to do "something" but the beauty of mountains of cash and a business that doesn't need AI everywhere is that they can wait and see what something is, and then execute. They've actually been really good at figuring out implementation after the conceptual heavy lifting is done; it's deep in their DNA
Why does Apple need a different AI strategy? They make good laptops and people like them (I say this as someone that runs Linux on a framework laptop). Anyone using AI is using their MacBook laptops to use AI already. They're perfectly capable of running LLMs locally if anyone actually wants to do that. I'm not sure shoving a bunch of weird AI crap into the UI is actually what end users want.
I’d guess a matter of control - Apple wants full control of the products and services that it owns and maintains - buying WB/HBO comes with a bunch of baggage around IP stewardship, international contracts around IP that restrict Apple in ways they’d never do with their own content, a ton of employees outside of the Apple corporate structure, etc.
> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer.
I wonder if he is responsible for all those niceties MacOS got for the last 10 or so years. Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.
He created liquid glass, the much ballyhood but controversial new ios 26 update. Marketed like "magic" but mainly just visual updates that are buggy, drain battery and make things hard to read. Wonder if they'll keep supporting/pushing it.
They'll virtualize the ink jet printer ink model: Totally Transparent Liquid Glass UI is free, DRM'ed dye is an in-app purchase that fades over time, or subscription that you don't actually own.
User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.
>The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...]
>It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...]
>That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...]
>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
It didn't say 26-year-old, it said 26 year, according to your own quote. You inserted the word "old", which changes the meaning entirely. If he's been working on design for 26 years then he is a veteran, not hired as a child.
I'd far prefer a kid with actual HCI usability design skills and compassion for users, than a middle aged superficial cosmetician who scoffs at "programmer talk" and prides himself on not knowing what a "key window" or "Fitts' Law" is.
>After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”
Mental is actually easier than serious because monster are exactly like in Hard but just invisible from time to time. But they movement are easy to predict because they mostly run in straight lines ;)
I don't know if it's only because he left, but there are stories about how bad he was in his position for such a long time. If that's true, Apple must be blamed for keeping him there--until he voluntarily left. WTF?
TBH I don’t know much about the Mac eco except that I have been using a couple of MacBook Pro for work for the recent 5 years. My humble experience says hardware is easy but software is hard. Might be counterintuitive but that’s honestly what I felt.
With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine.
But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers.
At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)
I don’t care that they’re behind on AI, I care that they’ve decided to throw UX out the window so all my devices are just a little bit worse to use than they were 12 months ago.
Anecdotal but I was talking to a recruiter about a role in Apple last week, and then was told they are doing a total hiring freeze until at least the new year.
There was also a bit of a shakeup in one of their teams for video content production a few months back which surprised me. Not anyone that would get a tech journal article written about them, but someone who was very experienced, knowledgeable, and loved his role.
Nothing newsworthy just sounds more rocky than usual for Apple
>as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence.
Most critics I see deal with the fact that they’re fad chasing and delivering without their flagship polish (for both new products and updates). This narrative is likely to push apple deeper into the well if it becomes the mainstream spin.
As someone who has Apple-everything (just about) and has since 2013 or so, every time I see a headline about Apple being in serious trouble over their “AI failure” I can’t even understand what they’re talking about. Nothing I’ve seen yet is compelling enough I need it in my OS. People can reach Chatgpt on the iPhones just fine. Who cares? Who are these people like “idk might switch to Windows because of Apple’s failed AI strategy” making this an actual problem? I’ve never even understood what their supposed strategy was trying to do (at which it evidently failed? How did it fail? I also don’t follow that.)
>Who are these people like “idk might switch to Windows because of Apple’s failed AI strategy” making this an actual problem?
It’s not about users but about investors who rely on the greater fool theory. If Apple is not adopting the current thing, people won’t FOMO in, so it’s better to buy other stock.
>Nothing I’ve seen yet is compelling enough I need it in my OS
I'd put it more strongly, as someone who hasn't bought an Apple device in over a decade, I have contemplated buying one now because it seems to be the only way to escape the enslopification. Them being behind on this crap is an active selling point for me
Literally every single person in my life is using AI on an almost daily basis. Not just like my co-workers, or some nerdy discord chat, like every single person I regularly interact with from my niece to my mother, my boss to my barista.
People complain about it, it's short falls and idiosyncrasies, but it's only been getting better, both the models and the integration.
There is no future now where LLMs aren't playing a big role. We'll have our CLI luddites who believe computing peaked in 1992 forever, but the rest of society is running full speed towards computers that they can talk to in natural language.
That's why Apple is uneasy. The god-tier technology usability company is on the verge of totally missing out on the greatest revolution in human-computer usability ever. My mother isn't going to want an Apple UI anymore when you just talk to the new computers.
I've seen product manager type people use LLMs to auto-generate product requirements docs. I know people who use AI to separate instruments from music tracks in order to learn them.
I guess I should have been more precise with the actual question - what do people do with AI that would cause Apple to be behind as long as they can access chat from their phone? Apple doesn’t need an “AI strategy” just to be able to run a third party chat interface.
As a mac user since 2006 I see the problem as twofold.
1. Siri has always been terrible. The rise of chatbots has made that fact even more obvious. It's such low hanging fruit to integrate some sort of llm chatbot. Why didn't they do it years ago?
2. Their advertisements all mention Apple Intelligence. Costco today was advertising "Macs with Apple Intelligence" as a headline feature. I use MacOS and iOS everyday and I'm not even sure what they are referring to. It's probably fine if their AI strategy isn't clear yet, but stop letting marketing act like they've already shipped it. That they have been promoting this non-existent feature since 2024 is embarrassing.
Whose chatbots are actually better, though? I have yet to hear from an Android, Alexa, or Windows user who uses the voice controls for more than what Siri does. The people raving about LLMs are using things like ChatGPT which work just fine as apps on Apple devices, so it’s not clear when this turns into an important OS feature other than exposing the hardware acceleration features on modern devices.
Issue with LLM with Siri is bad press. There are articles every day about LLM pushing suicide, drugs, violence and the like. Stability and security are issues too if it was given any sort of system write access.
However much value it may add it is guaranteed to do greater long term reputational damage in the current state.
Mark Gurman @markgurman
BREAKING: Apple’s chip chief Johny Srouji informed CEO Tim Cook he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains at least for now.
It's all crashing down around Cook. He could've chosen to actually be good to Apple customers. Instead, he milked them with ridiculous app store policies and terrible software. Yes the hardware was good, but those two things destroyed so much good will.
Anyone recall IBM of the mainframe pre-PC days, and how different it was compared to post-redhat acquisition?
If you'd told me in 1987 DEC was going to disappear up it's own fundament and be absorbed by Compaq, and then HP I would have laughed you off the floor.
Or Sun be Oracle. And then Oracle try to morph into hyperscaler, and sort-of.. well existing Oracle customers aside, .. fail?
Companies change. Nintendo was a 19th century playing card manufacturer.
Kodak was a very innovative Photography related enterprise.
Xerox invented the workstation. So tell me where Xerox is now? "Xerox Holdings"
Yeah I don't think Apple will ever be an AI company. It's just not in their DNA. They do consumer computers. It's all they've ever really been good at. When they stray very far from that it doesn't go well.
They treat the departure of Alan Dye as a negative for Apple rather than the unalloyed win it is. That tells you everything you need to know about the credibility of the article.
Apple usually manages succession quietly and years in advance... seeing multiple senior people leave in the middle of an industry platform shift is unusual for a company that's spent two decades projecting stability
This is 100% needed, I'm sorry to say. Apple's hardware game has never been stronger - but software-wise they seem to be wandering around aimlessly. MacOS26 feels like a huge step back, so I'm hoping some fresh people will be a good thing.
In some ways it feels like the old 1990's Apple, except now they have enough money for all the misteps, and can survive being the iDevices company, which is where all that money is coming from.
When I lived in a different country, I could read as much cnn as I wanted. Now that I live in the USA, I need a subscription. So I am less informed on us politics now that I live in the USA. Ironic.
Insofar as this article is about the 4 execs leaving Apple, this is a total non-story and the "What the heck is going on at Apple" is just click bait:
- Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, and general counsel Kate Adams, are set to retire. While these may be high level execs, they don't really have much to do with the overall direction and success of the company. And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.
- Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, is leaving to join Meta as its chief design officer. Sounds like he won't really be missed: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-.... Assuming he was responsible for Liquid Glass, I say good riddance.
- John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, is also retiring. He had basically already been demoted, taken off leading Siri due to Siri's competitive failures.
So yeah, it's pretty obvious that Apple is behind the AI wave, but honestly, they may end up having the last laugh given how much backlash there is from consumers about trying to shoehorn AI into all these places where it's just an annoyance.
There's more than just 4 execs and imo an unprecedented level of turnover for a historically very stable company. It’s multiple senior leaders across legal, policy, AI, design, hardware, and operations leaving within a short period, making it one of Apple’s most significant leadership shakeups in years, which is why several outlets are finding it newsworthy.
1) John Giannandrea, Senior VP of Machine Learning & AI Strategy, Apple’s AI chief is leaving in 2026 after setbacks with Siri, his entire team is being reorganized and cut.
2) Alan Dye, VP of Design and responsible for liquid glass left for Meta
Bloomberg
3) Kate Adams, the top lawyer and general counsel is leaving
4) Lisa Jackson, VP of Policy & Social Initiatives also leaving
5) Johny Srouji, hardware/chip head, said he is "seriously considering leaving" which is really interesting seeing as he actually said that out loud for press to report on.
6) Jeff Williams, COO retired
7) Luca Maestri the CFO left ealier this year
8) Ruoming Pang the AI foundation leader left for Meta
9) Ke Yang, head of Siri search also left for Meta.
I was reading and 2 (Srouji) is 61 years old. While that is not too old, but that does explain why he may not be choice for next CEO (besides any other things). You want someone to helm the ship for a decade.
Apple is (for a very long time) essentially a hardware company so all the contrived drama about not embracing AI is perhaps Apple style accumulation of data as it refines the sequence of "neural cores" to efficiently serve wherever the industry is careening.
While Apple wants its hardware to best run popular apps (AI included), it's premature to presume these people leaving for Meta (Dye in particular) have any impact other than tribal knowledge in their departures.
(disclaimer: was an engineer in an inner sanctum of apple for several years)
“many people” are mostly stupid (go to your local dmv to see “many people”) so that it irrelevant. sales are through the roof, profits same, cash on hand to buy many countries, life is good…
1) LLM advances stop
2) The Chinese companies release open source/weight models which are as good or better than the West
3) Apple somehow turns it around with AI
Apple is done for.
AI is going to be central to the next generation of phones and the next form factor.
Their complete failure on AI has been ... shocking. Not sure if they don't have the data to train a leading edge model or if they have some kind of personele issue, it has just been shocking to see their lack of progress.
No doubt Apple has rested on their laurels for a long time. I just would not have expected this.
Or maybe not and Cook and Williams are in their 60s and want to be retired, Giannandrea (sp?) was overpaid enormously but didn't create any magic, Dye is a longtime Apple person who had incredible luck but is frankly fungible (bring back Evans Hankey, for instance). Srouji is a special personality and talent, though.
Windows 11 25H2 introduces several exciting new AI features. Its also being reported as a massive memory hog and its causing a lot of consternation online.
There's no reason to be a first mover on AI. There's still no moat, and it is unlikely one will be found. A computer firm we have never heard of could spin up tomorrow and be the true leader of the much prophesied AI Revolution. Apple can let other people burn their brands to the ground chasing the dream.
Colloquially, 2025 is the year of the linux desktop, thanks in part to Microsofts AI approach (And valve opening up games). In 10 years the ramifications of that might even be felt in enterprise. We could have enterprise users looking for Linux/MacOS clients to run Microsoft Office 365. Really one should be asking why Microsoft thinks it can ruin the client experience. "What the heck is going on at Microsoft". We know whats going on, no one in the upper echelons of Microsoft can be seen to ignore the next big thing. They are compelled to grasp at anything labelled AI and ship it.
I dont like Apple, at all really. But not going all in on AI is to be lauded. In fact they could have done even less. Consumers want them to release the next iBrick with another 200 dollars attached to the pricetag. Thats it. They can meet consumer expectations by doing nothing other than Business as Usual.
I don't think this entire piece taught me anything new other than a speculation that "speculation is mounting that Tim Cook may be preparing to step aside as CEO" --
"speculation". "may be". "preparing".
The lagging behind the AI wave is known, and matter of fact, the "Liquid Glass" saga is not even mentioned while they focus on the Apple Vision glasses.
This is a great model for the poor low quality of journalism that became industry standard nowadays.
Yes, apple direction is questionable, and while it is mainly questionable because the of AI wave, well, the entire AI wave is questionable nowadays.
one more thing, the URL path has "/apple-tim-cook-leadership-changes" in it, suggests the title "what the heck" is most likely a newer version than the original one which they decided not to publish as is since it is not based enough.
I recently purchased an iPad Air and am blown away at how bad the UX is. Notes is incredibly buggy, the iOS is not optimized for the pencil pro (seems like it delivers very little value outside of visual arts programs), the Siri +gpt experience is laughable, and I can go on…
I’m a long time Apple user and I’m concerned with the state of things.
>The changes come as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence.
It might pay off to be a contrarian on AI or, at least, to appear that way.
MS is currently facing significant user backlash against the AI components of Windows 11. Some of their own engineers have ripped management for forcing AI that's in a very poor state into every pore of the company's products while fixing that AI is verboten to all MS employees but the AI dept.[1]. Google is featuring frequently wrong AI summaries at the top of every search result. Elon Musk is using Grok to create his own version of reality in the form of Grokipedia, making billionaires everywhere look that much more like moustache-twirling villains.
Even if you think LLM's have some solid applications and potential for growth, the way it's being pushed on average users is truly cringe-worthy. To make matters worse, there is broad public perception that AI is putting people out of work, ripping off artists, etc.. It might actually benefit a company like Apple to not feature AI prominently in their products, even if they do spend the resources to catch up.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not an Apple fanboy trying to recast Apple being behind in AI into genius. I parted ways with Apple products over a decade ago due to bad experiences that I don't care to repeat. I'm just saying there could be an emerging niche for them to exploit. Being the one and only mainstream PC company that doesn't shove AI down people's throats could be a real competitive edge in 2026 and beyond.
> Apple acquires OpenAI, Sam becomes CEO of combined company; iPhone revenue used to build out data centers; Jony rehired as design chief for AI device.
There were a lot of non-optimal decisions, and statements were out of reality.
The macPro is not the best.
The M3 slower.
A.I. acronym opportunity could have been leveraged differently.
A mac is supposed to be comfortable, macOS 26 "Da hoe" initially lacked various elements that were expected.
The current state of logs/logging in macOS is a paradise for an adversary but time-hogging for legitimate user.
Shareholders use macs, and they trust teams that studied Nokia.
New emojis have a relatively inelastic relationship with sales.
It lost the formatting, I meant it as a list of what out-of-reality decisions led to. I mean the macPro sux, when the macbookproM3 came out it was slower than the previous mode. I meant that 'Apple-Inteligence' sux, that macOS26 doesn't help working better. That opening console on a fresh macOS can show thousands of entries per second and that entries like "User <private> result: <private>" are not helpful. That what happened to Nokia can happen to Iphones, and finally that listing emojis among top features is yet out-of-reality. And I didnt mention the vision pro because I wanted to make a joke about it, in case someone said I forgot that on my list.
What did you understand?
Shareholders use macs -> proportionaly feel the same frustration as other mac users.
Trusting teams that studied Nokia -> Nokia was once the leader in mobiles, and quickly fell.
Emojis -> how many new emojis were added are usually indicated along the other, top, features.
3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.
Perhaps the sky already fell a while back?
I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path.
The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).
Personally I prefer a useless Siri that I can turn off, rather than a copilot into everything I cannot turn off.
I am perfectly fine with Apple lagging behind in "AI".
Wouldnt you prefer a competent Siri that you can turn off?
Gemini on android just works. I can ask it nearly anything in spoken natural language and it'll talk back with an answer.
> Gemini on android just works.
Unless you want to turn it off, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do. Every now and then my phone will randomly prompt me to "ask Gemini", which is really annoying. When I want to use the LLM, I will go to it, stop shoving it in my face over and over.
Just turn off Google Assistant stuff. It's always been annoying and useless to me and I've always turned it off.
I can't turn it off on my Samsung Galaxy S23 which I originally bought, because it was not marketed with AI. The patched it in later and ever since it just randomly starts as if it was listening all the time.
I use Siri for about four or five things:
- setting a timer; - sending a text; - starting a call; - adding an item to a shopping list; - playing/controlling music (very occasionally);
Siri does all of these with 95% accuracy. Occasionally it mishears "15 minutes" as "50 minutes" if I'm rushed or something.
You use the device however it works for you, but I truly cannot comprehend the use case of a voice assistant beyond these type of tasks.
More complex tasks would likely require more concentration on the response/result, at which point I shouldn't need to do it hands free.
Apple’s analytics probably support this which is exactly why siri still sucks. But ya, everyone will continue to think they somehow know better and apple is wrong and poorly executing
> which is exactly why siri still sucks
It probably does what most people need it to do, so it sucks?
That's some interesting logic to say the least.
Siri can answer questions just fine. It's the "doing stuff" that introduces complications
I can count on one hand, the number of times where I have gone “gosh, I so wish my voice assistant was better”.
It queues up music correctly, and picks the right destination on maps in my car. 98% use case satisfied. Would I like it to be better? Don’t really care. Is it a purchasing point? Nope. Would I miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? Also nope.
A better voice assistant is a major selling point for me. I need glasses to use my phone. Messages, email, purchases, directions, constantly. A good voice commands would be godsend. Siri doesn’t work very well
How is Gemini on iPhone is diffetent though? Do you really use AI as assistant on the phone for anything other than fancy way to set an alarm clock?
I mean not for looking up the information, but for something that alter how you use phone.
I use the phone voice assistants to set timers, and call people when I'm driving.
It is objectively worse at calling people than Assistant was. If I ask you to call someone, don't come up with a scolling list of phone numbers that I have to pick from. At least Assistant called the primary designated number for someone, Gemini just froze and wouldn't take voice commands to pick the number but forced my to pick up my phone.
I turned that bullshit off a couple of days after they forced it on me without asking.
Is the answer correct?
I still feel like they are in an incredible position when it comes to AI because of their hardware integration/advantage across all of their devices. I think they see immense value in getting things on-device and not having to rely on any of these other companies.
When it comes to AI, there's ~5 trillion dollars of datacenter revenue Apple could be competing for, but isn't. That's not good.
Now, maybe it would be justifiable if there were great local AI experiences on iPhone, or an easy $5 trillion to be made elsewhere. Until then, Apple is bleeding money hand-over-fist by refusing to sign the CUDA UNIX drivers and sell the rackmount Mac as a cutting-edge TSMC inference box. The Grace superchip is absolutely eating Apple's ARM lunch right now.
Yes Siri has stagnated. But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports.
Siri could be better if Apple just threw 10000 monkeys at it and configure it more phrases (utterances) to match on.
> But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports.
Link to reports? As far as I understand, google assistant is being deprecated in favor of gemini.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/gemini-is-an-increas...
This is a little older. I know things improve a lot quickly.
https://www.slashgear.com/1521993/google-gemini-ai-replace-s...
> Siri seems to have stagnated
This is what bothers me about most voice assistants, I think maybe the Amazon one finally got an upgrade to modern LLM capabilities? I don't know about the Google one.
I assume the cost is too high, but I don't expect ChatGPT / Grok / Claude level of knowledge from a voice assistant LLM, if they can run a drastically small enough model that doesn't cost an arm and a leg at scale, I would be okay with that. Definitely would have to cache some of the responses when viral events happen.
> I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon
it actually turned out to be the greatest boon in the milky way for me: joe consumer, apple device user.
been watching the copilot saga (in my head the lore is that this is clippy hes back and hes pissed everyone treated him like buttcheeks over a decade ago) over on windows & new samsung fold phones (which look really cool) having no way to fully disable that stuff and man.. i dunno im gonna be kind of pissed if this whole shakeup is just a move to make apple start doing that same shenanigans (please no)
Calling Tim Cook an extremely competent accountant is an extreme understatement.
He’s maybe the most competent accountant of all time, given how far he’s brought Apple.
You make it sound like Cook does everything at Apple.
His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that.
Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.
While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today.
To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time.
Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
Part of the reason Apple was doing great before he became CEO is because Tim Cook was the COO. A huge part of their success was getting good deals on the non standard parts they needed at massive scale.
Not sure there was a clear better candidate for CEO after Jobs died.
> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer.
If this person had any role to play in the user interface decisions of macos Tahoe, then good riddance.
He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”.
There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someo...
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.
The more worrying aspect is that the Apple leadership continued with Dye even as he kept pushing terrible interfaces. In fact, according to all reports, they seem distraught by this move which indicates they aren’t really in alignment with the broader ecosystem that didn’t like Dye’s output at all.
Agreed. It suggests they were swayed by demos more than using their own products, which is scary. Using iOS 26 makes me wonder if Cook even uses an iPhone or has an assistant do everything - it’s not unusable but there are so many little glitches which would’ve had Steve Jobs chewing out an entire room full of managers.
Alan Bye!
There also seems to be a general vibe of cheerfulness among Apple fans about Dye's departure.
i don't really care about dye (or liquid glass) but i do feel like it's an alarm of sorts that Srouji stated he'd probably take off without tim cook at the helm. I dunno what that signals, i'm less inclined to think it's a "i just really like tim, man" and more of a "this incoming leadership can get bent". Apple also just picked up the meta lady that helped draft the patriot act. i dunno. What remains to be seen is whether or not Apple maintains its core tenets or if they start slipping on things like privacy, ads, and forcing AI in everyone's face. They undoubtedly leave a buttload of money on the table never pursuing these things. whole shakeup feels like it was driven by wall street earlier in the year, there were headlines about apple being in serious trouble for missing out on AI. I dunno feels like some game of thrones opportunism within apple leadership just played out. apple fans are dorks in that they think such a shakeup is in response to liquid glass and the iphone air being a boring phone. i like apple devices, this is kinda freaky i can't lie. it would actually suck if their chip division started stalling if srouji bounces, it would suck infinitely more if a new leadership was here to redefine apple values and suddenly we have a proverbial apple version of satya nadella at the helm who's here to blast you with ads and subscriptions and forced AI.
Yeah it seems pretty obvious that we’re in the mainframe era of transformer models and we’ll soon transition to the personal computer era where these all run on your device, which Apple stands to benefit from the most. Their FoundationModels are actually pretty good at certain tasks
I don't think that's obvious. The marginal return on additional units of compute seems to fall pretty quickly for the vast majority of applications, which increases the benefit of decentralization over the cost of reduced compute. It isn't clear the same is true of intelligence.
Tim Cook is a safe CEO who should have stayed a COO. I like Tim but I think what Apple needs is someone like Tim as COO and a visionary the way Steve Jobs was a visionary. For all his flaws he paved the way to where Apple is today.
He's also a very competant politician vis-a-vis governments, according to Warren Buffet many years ago
I think people are reacting less to who left and more to when
IMO: Cook is going to announce his retirement by the end of Q1, they've already selected a CEO (probably Ternus), the incoming CEO wants leadership change, and some of these departures are because its better that this purge happens before the CEO change than after. I think this explains Giannandrea, Williams, and Jackson.
Dye may have also been involved in that, given how unpopular he was internally at Apple. But more likely just personal / Meta offered him a billion dollars. Maestri leaving was also probably totally uninvolved.
Srouji is the weirdest case, and I'm hesitant to believe its even true just given its a rumor at this point. Its possible he was angry about being passed over for CEO, but realistically, it was always going to be Ternus, Williams, or Federighi. If Ternus is the next CEO, its likely we'll see Apple combine the Hardware Technologies and Hardware Engineering divisions, then have Srouji lead both of them. I really do not see him leaving the company.
The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell, and this deeply pissed off many people in Apple's senior leadership. So, what we're seeing is more chaos than it first seems.
Generally, as long as Srouji doesn't leave, these changes feel positive for Apple, and especially if there's a CEO change in early 2026: This is what "the fifth generation of Apple Inc" looks like. I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.
What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.
The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years
I agree this is true, but Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover. Smartphones, iPods, earbuds, good desktop PCs were all after they watched what was good and then made it better (if you like what they did, anyway).
The next hardware category is probably AR glasses if someone can make them good and cheap, nobody has so Apple won’t do anything but wait. I’m sure they have an optics lab working on something, but probably not full throttle (and the Vision Pro is an attempt to make the OS).
> Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover.
People say Apple does its best work as a “second mover,” but that misses the actual pattern: Apple builds great products when leadership is solving their own problems.
The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just refinements of existing products. They were devices Steve Jobs personally wanted to use and couldn’t find elsewhere. The man saw the GUI at Xerox and saw how anyone could use a computer without remembering arcane commands. So he drove the development of the Mac. He was using a shitty mobile phone, saw the opportunity and had the iPhone developed. Same with the early Apple Watch (first post-Jobs new product line), which reflected Jony Ive’s fashion ambitions; once he left, it evolved into what current leadership actually uses: a high-end fitness tracker.
The stagnation we're seeing now isn’t about Apple losing its “second-mover magic.” It’s that leadership doesn’t feel an unmet need that demands a new device. None of Vision Pro, Siri, Apple Intelligence or even macOS itself anymore appear to be products the execs themselves rely on deeply, and it shows. Apple excels when it scratches its own itch and right now, it doesn’t seem to have one.
I think this is an interesting take that really reflects the saturation of the wider problem space of society. Much of the stuff that we could potentially need, we already have. It will be interesting to see what new products are released to the market in the next ten or so years which substantially change the way that we use technology.
> Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down
This is one of those political things where people deny something right up until the minute when it happens.
Obviously. It's a bit funny people take this at face value.
CEO’s always say they are not planning to leave up until the moment they leave.
Just like CEOs always say they are not planning any layoffs until the moment they do them
Yep. Corpo PR speak provides zero information. They will say they have no plans whether or not they do.
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years
How frequently do you expect a new major product category across the industry? Is there any company who launched one that wasn't ChatGPT in the same time frame?
Apple used to put out new or interesting products. E.g. they just up and released Time Machine routers when no one was really doing that in the home router industry like at all, maybe a clunky usb ftp solution but this was first party apple white glove treatment of the issue. They had great software too in many different niches e.g. Aperture coming after Adobe's pro photo pie.
It was amazing how much diversity in really well thought out hardware as well as software was happening at apple years ago, when it was a far smaller company in terms of manpower and resources than it is today. I guess when the business model is selling ongoing subscriptions instead of compelling new products in order to get money, you stop getting the compelling new products coming out.
Foldable phones are one example. Apple completely missed the boat here, while even freaking Google managed to make a decent device.
Smart rings are booming. Apple has nothing, probably afraid that it can cannibalize their watch sales.
If we look at the wider industry, EVs and self-driving cars are coming. Huawei has its own car now, along with a battery research program.
What's the appeal of a foldable phone? Always assumed they were just a luxury item or party trick that would add more friction to the user experience
This is a good point, technically chromebooks fit this definition?
Personally I wouldn't count Chromebooks as something newer than Apple's last category-creating product since the iPad is in roughly the same time frame and netbooks a few years before that.
The Apple Watch is newer and is where I'd say the cutoff is for Apple.
--
At a higher level, I'd say there were two personal-computer-hardware revolution periods that Apple featured heavily in:
1) home personal computers and then the GUI-fication of them and the portable-ification - the wave the Apple II was part of, and then the one the Mac mainstreamed, then laptops where Apple was pretty instrumental in setting design and execution standards
2) mainstream general-purpose/software-defined mobile devices (vs single- or few-function gadgets). Initial failures or niche products (Newton from Apple, Palm/PocketPC more successfully as a niche later) and then Apple REALLY mainstreaming with the iPhone and the extensions that were the iPad and Watch. I'm leaving out the iPod here since "single-purpose MP3 players" were a transitional stop on the gadget->general purpose device trend. (But that general purpose nature also makes it hard to invent a new mobile device category.)
Of things that have been percolating for a while, maybe VR/AR takes off one day, I'm not sure there's mass appeal there. Are people going to get enough utility over a phone to justify pop-up ads in their field-of-view all day long?
It's possible the LLM/transformer boom could lead to some new categories, but we don't know what that would look like yet, so it's hard to penalize Apple for not being a super-early first-mover in the last 3 years since nobody else has figured out a great hardware story there either, and even in their prime they were less of a "first mover" than a "show everyone else how it could be done better" player.
I guess we’re being a bit vague on timeframe but chrome books launched in 2011 so they’re one of those products that took ~10 years to be an overnight success, with 2020 being an accelerant. So my vote is no.
Chromebooks were almost 15 years ago.
This seems true at many companies. While I'm not all that impressed by many current leaders, I'm sort of terrified of my generation (younger gen x) taking over because some of them seem to not be prepared or not have been prepared for the roles.
> Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.
No he isn't and no there wasn't.
I'm serious. Cook did not deny that, and the Bloomberg article did not claim that.
Also it's hard to maintain exponential growth forever.
Look outside the HackerNews/Silicon Valley bubble: Apple is doing very well. Consumers broadly don't care whether their phone has AI, as long as it has the ChatGPT/etc apps. iMessage and FaceTime have a stranglehold on, uh, everyone in America. They sell more iPhones every quarter. Their services revenue keeps going up. Mac sales are up big. Apple Silicon is so far ahead of anything else on the market, they could stay on the M5 platform for three years and still be #1. Apple Watch is the most popular watch brand in the world (and its not close; sensing a pattern?). Airpods, alone, make more money than Texas Instruments or SuperMicro. Yes; Vision Pro and iPhone Air sold poorly. Who cares? They're both obvious stepping stones to products that will sell well (Vision Pro -> Glasses-style AR device, iPhone Air -> thin engineering will help with the iPhone Fold). Apple can afford to take risks and adjust.
Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.
Apple shipped only 20% of the smartwatches in 2024. They are the most lucrative brand with 60% of the market, but not the largest one by volume.
I grew up in the South. Almost everyone has an Android phone, though my family is slowly converting to Apple as their subsidies renew
My only worry regarding these moves (assuming Srouji doesn’t go) is that the software position is unchallenged.
I’m not sure about Federighi’s popularity inside, but it seems like Software is in need of changes as well.
I wish Apple would split software and bring back Scott Forstall (soon after Tim Cook leaves) and give him a big chunk, like iOS and iPadOS. Craig Federighi needs to reduce the scope of his work and get competent people in to handle the software area.
That would definitely not work out. Forstall is a micromanager/new project kind of guy.
Also, as I'm required to point out every time I mention him, he invented MS WordArt.
Great points, this is indicative of something going on. And this point is especially spot on:
> I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
It's time for change. Maybe it won't get better, but I do hope it will.
True. Cook was a great money maker but he's so boring on the product side.
But they'll never get anyone even close to Jobs obviously. Just won't happen. Even if they find someone with the same attention to detail and "risk it all on a grand vision" mentality, he or she won't get the trust of the board who are generally risk-averse. The only reason Jobs got away with doing all that was that he was Mr. Apple. He was the company.
Hopefully they'll get someone closer to that but the magic will never come back IMO.
And he came back when they were near bankruptcy
Yeah he's like the saviour of apple. A board doesn't say no to someone like that, that's what I mean :)
> the incoming CEO wants leadership change, and some of these departures are because its better that this purge happens before the CEO change than after
Or the more common all the ones who didn’t get the crown are leaving.
> The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell
"Less probable" is the understatement of the century. This rumor came out of nowhere, and it should instantly set off the BS-meter of anyone familiar with how Apple is run.
The most likely explanation for it is that Tony felt like a little boost to his profile couldn't hurt whatever his next step might be, and so he made a few phone calls to get this rumor ball rolling so that his name is in the news for a bit (hey, it worked!).
“Fadell says he’d be open to replacing Tim Cook” might be accurate, but I’d be open to that too if Apple rang me up.
Agreed. It would be extremely strange if he were even in the running, let alone picked.
Your last point is the interesting one: for years people have complained that Apple has gotten slow, conservative, and repetitive. Maybe, this is what the reset looks like
> I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
Short of Tim Cook being replaced, it just seems like disarray and things are falling apart at the seams, resulting in things only likely getting worse, not better.
If Tim Cook is indeed about to get replaced, then I think you might hear fewer complaints. But right now, the complaints are likely assuming a Tim Cook replacement isn’t part of the plan, or at the very least, not a guarantee.
If you’re wrong about a Tim Cook replacement, then I think the complaints may be justified.
Could be Fadell, why else would Apple put Thread in phones? Maybe iTunes Store (via Fuse) and iPhone (via General Magic) weren't the only things Fadell had pitched Jobs on when the time was right.
Poor analysis. Apple is doing quite well as a Big Tech company that simply doesn't need to "pivot to AI" like everyone else. Their missteps in "Apple Intelligence" have in fact demonstrated that they don't actually need to have much of a "strategy" here at all. In fact, if they simply link out to other people's chatbots and make it totally opt-in, that would be ideal.
The much bigger problem is that they've lost the wow factor in their software design, and in some regards the hardware as well even though the internals and build quality has never been better. Apple needs a design shakeup far more than it needs anything to do with AI, a poison pill which will bring the entire industry down in 2026.
I have intentionally withheld updating my daily drivers to iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass. But if I had to pick between two evils - diminishing UX quality and shoving AI into every corner where no one asked for it - I’d still pick Liquid Glass.
26.2 is looking a lot less glassy. If you want to avoid the glass, I’d wait for its full release.
The Apple Intelligence features are some of the more subtle ones overall compared to other companies like Google and Microsoft IMO
And I love it! The ocr/vision models are a literal life saver here. Translating websites in Safari? Even text in images gets translated, super convenient! The only gripe i have is that it tries to be smart and tries to detect addresses, phone numbers. If the address or phone number is part of a text it is nearly impossible to copy the whole text since the phone number gets prioritised over the text (so you can only copy or call the number… )
A small nitpick: the translation and data detectors pre-date Apple Intelligence.
I do indeed love these features. They have definitely had some regressions in the data detectors over the past few years. I assume that they only test these automatically in “ideal” contexts that don’t account for real life. Not sure. They used to be more reliable.
They absolutely are. And you can turn them off. My comment is more about the technology industry’s general insistence on shoving AI down your throat whether or not it’s useful, usable, or desired.
I’m hopeful that whatever combination of factors at Apple prevent that from happening remain. Otherwise I’ll have to start considering GrapheneOS and defaulting to my Debian-based MacBook.
I've used macOS these days, give them a few years and they'll "catch up" I'm certain.
Work is talking about upgrading our Macs to macOS 26. I'm holding off for now.
But I don't think the choice is quite as binary as "pivot to AI" vs "ignore AI entirely." What's changed in the last two years is that user expectations are shifting at the OS level, not just the app level
Yep. User expectations are leading people away from the slop-filled Windows 11 trainwreck and into the arms of Linux and macOS. Last thing we need is macOS to copy Redmond. (Used to be the other way around!)
> they've lost the wow factor in their software design
Software craftsmanship at large scale is dead, so we shouldn’t expect to see that make a return any time soon.
The last few decades of free market experimentation and evolution have revealed the playbook to maximize engagement+money: sell software as subscriptions, use every means possible (push notifications, full screen ads, etc) to monopolize the user’s attention, prevent users from importing/exporting data to keep them trapped in your walled off app…
In this kind of environment, the little touches and consideration that gave software its “wow” factor are a liability, since everything gets redesigned every 18 months anyway to keep up with the new trends and what A/B testing reveals.
The Apple of the 2000s could offer genuinely delightful experiences because software was in such a different, immature state back then and thoughtful design could be a meaningful differentiator. Similar to how the most successful+profitable games nowadays are filled with loot boxes and dark patterns, and have nothing to do with the masterpieces from a few decades ago.
Indie developers can still make delightful things that treat the customers’ wallet+time+attention with respect (thank God), but those will never make billions and billions the way Fortnite or TikTok or ads in the Settings app can.
> Similar to how the most successful+profitable games nowadays are filled with loot boxes and dark patterns, and have nothing to do with the masterpieces from a few decades ago.
That one actually hurts. I lost touch with games a while ago but it was a good run through the golden era. The cinema is on its way out. At least we have the memories.
Every generation has their stuff, there's new things to be excited about, but the turnover is getting crazy fast.
I agree that Apple is in a position where they don't have to and shouldn't go all in on AI yet. They can wait and watch and figure out the right move (though they will need someone with Jobsian vision).
But what's this about AI bringing the entire industry down?
Apple not having an AI strategy doesn't matter until it suddenly does.
Whether that is in 2 years or ten is anyone's guess.
Apple seems to have an AI strategy - throw $1 billion at Google for its models.
And if you believe the numbers from the press on Google’s AI spending, that’s an amazing deal.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-ai-bo...
And with the pipeline
Voice -> free text -> LLM -> standardized JSON -> call API to do stuff.
The only “hard” part in 2025 is the LLM. Everything after that is what I call a “10000 monkeys problem”. Just throw some developers at it.
It's also anyone's guess what direction it will matter. Will apple miss the boat on AI because it's the real deal? Or is it a bubble that will pop and apple will be left standing because they didn't bet the farm on AI
While we can agree that adding AI just to tick a box will win no awards, it will be a laughable proposition to suggest that Apple doesn't need to do anything on AI.
If anything its laughable and points to the unoriginality of product creators that we haven't fundamentally transformed how we interact with technology given how much AI offers as functionality. Anyone (I'll bet 20% on Ive) who figures this out will eat Apple's dinner.
If you're giving 5:1 against Ive I'll take that in a heartbeat. He has zero historical record to show he can somehow capitalize on AI; even his design contributions are overall meh. Apple will have to do "something" but the beauty of mountains of cash and a business that doesn't need AI everywhere is that they can wait and see what something is, and then execute. They've actually been really good at figuring out implementation after the conceptual heavy lifting is done; it's deep in their DNA
Why does Apple need a different AI strategy? They make good laptops and people like them (I say this as someone that runs Linux on a framework laptop). Anyone using AI is using their MacBook laptops to use AI already. They're perfectly capable of running LLMs locally if anyone actually wants to do that. I'm not sure shoving a bunch of weird AI crap into the UI is actually what end users want.
Because shareholders want "number go up".
Would be nice to know why Apple didn't throw its war chest at the WarnerBros/HBO acquisition Netflix just did.
I’d guess a matter of control - Apple wants full control of the products and services that it owns and maintains - buying WB/HBO comes with a bunch of baggage around IP stewardship, international contracts around IP that restrict Apple in ways they’d never do with their own content, a ton of employees outside of the Apple corporate structure, etc.
> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer.
I wonder if he is responsible for all those niceties MacOS got for the last 10 or so years. Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.
He created liquid glass, the much ballyhood but controversial new ios 26 update. Marketed like "magic" but mainly just visual updates that are buggy, drain battery and make things hard to read. Wonder if they'll keep supporting/pushing it.
Feature request: a Dye Injector in the Control Panel that allows to add a tint to Liquid Glass, all the way to 100% opaque if desired.
(Unscientific fiction, I know.)
They'll virtualize the ink jet printer ink model: Totally Transparent Liquid Glass UI is free, DRM'ed dye is an in-app purchase that fades over time, or subscription that you don't actually own.
User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.
Ironically this was a feature in Windows 7.
It’s so weird that such a role could even have been allowed to be held by such a halfwit. How dies that even happen?
He arrived from the world of fashion with Watch, and somehow that gave him enough cachet at the top to entrench an extended nonsense career.
Looking forward to his tenure at Meta. With any luck he'll kill the company.
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
Bad Dye Job
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
>The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...]
>It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...]
>That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...]
>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997
"Dye [...] get[ting] squeezed out" of Apple is such vividly technicolor imagery!
I too hope he makes Meta curl up and dye.
“ adding that 26-year Apple design veteran Steve Lemay will take over Dye’s role.”
26 year old ‘veteran’? This guy was 6 when Windows Aero was introduced…
It didn't say 26-year-old, it said 26 year, according to your own quote. You inserted the word "old", which changes the meaning entirely. If he's been working on design for 26 years then he is a veteran, not hired as a child.
Oh lol, totally misread that!
I'd far prefer a kid with actual HCI usability design skills and compassion for users, than a middle aged superficial cosmetician who scoffs at "programmer talk" and prides himself on not knowing what a "key window" or "Fitts' Law" is.
>After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”
Absolutely
Ah, another blessing I get to enjoy due to forced update policy from our IT department.
He absolutely was responsible for all the bad UI introduced over the last 10 years. Nobody said no to them.
> Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.
You mean they invisible? Also I had fun playing mental. Finished FE on it ;)
Damn I can’t even beat normal. I kept dying :/
Then I watched someone doing a long play on Serious and I think that’s a superman.
Mental is actually easier than serious because monster are exactly like in Hard but just invisible from time to time. But they movement are easy to predict because they mostly run in straight lines ;)
I don't know if it's only because he left, but there are stories about how bad he was in his position for such a long time. If that's true, Apple must be blamed for keeping him there--until he voluntarily left. WTF?
TBH I don’t know much about the Mac eco except that I have been using a couple of MacBook Pro for work for the recent 5 years. My humble experience says hardware is easy but software is hard. Might be counterintuitive but that’s honestly what I felt.
With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine.
But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers.
At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)
I wonder if the already-bad Horizon OS will get worse now.
I don’t care that they’re behind on AI, I care that they’ve decided to throw UX out the window so all my devices are just a little bit worse to use than they were 12 months ago.
> Amar Subramanya, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI, will be Apple’s new vice president of AI.
That doesn't bode well. The last thing I want from macOS is Windows-like overbearing insistence on AI everything.
He’s really a Google guy, spent about half a minute at Microsoft.
Apple's ecosystem and business model are still rock solid. A few senior execs leaving is just a normal shake-up, not a crisis.
Hardware's top-notch, and hopefully this opens the door for better UI and AI without messing with what already works.
Related:
Apple Rocked by Executive Departures, with Chip Chief at Risk of Leaving Next
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175205
John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114122
Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142843
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139145
Anecdotal but I was talking to a recruiter about a role in Apple last week, and then was told they are doing a total hiring freeze until at least the new year.
There was also a bit of a shakeup in one of their teams for video content production a few months back which surprised me. Not anyone that would get a tech journal article written about them, but someone who was very experienced, knowledgeable, and loved his role.
Nothing newsworthy just sounds more rocky than usual for Apple
>as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence.
Most critics I see deal with the fact that they’re fad chasing and delivering without their flagship polish (for both new products and updates). This narrative is likely to push apple deeper into the well if it becomes the mainstream spin.
As someone who has Apple-everything (just about) and has since 2013 or so, every time I see a headline about Apple being in serious trouble over their “AI failure” I can’t even understand what they’re talking about. Nothing I’ve seen yet is compelling enough I need it in my OS. People can reach Chatgpt on the iPhones just fine. Who cares? Who are these people like “idk might switch to Windows because of Apple’s failed AI strategy” making this an actual problem? I’ve never even understood what their supposed strategy was trying to do (at which it evidently failed? How did it fail? I also don’t follow that.)
>Who are these people like “idk might switch to Windows because of Apple’s failed AI strategy” making this an actual problem?
It’s not about users but about investors who rely on the greater fool theory. If Apple is not adopting the current thing, people won’t FOMO in, so it’s better to buy other stock.
>Nothing I’ve seen yet is compelling enough I need it in my OS
I'd put it more strongly, as someone who hasn't bought an Apple device in over a decade, I have contemplated buying one now because it seems to be the only way to escape the enslopification. Them being behind on this crap is an active selling point for me
> Who are these people like “idk might switch to Windows because of Apple’s failed AI strategy” making this an actual problem?
If anything, I know people that are getting pissed off about all the AI stuff in windows and are considering switching.
Literally every single person in my life is using AI on an almost daily basis. Not just like my co-workers, or some nerdy discord chat, like every single person I regularly interact with from my niece to my mother, my boss to my barista.
People complain about it, it's short falls and idiosyncrasies, but it's only been getting better, both the models and the integration.
There is no future now where LLMs aren't playing a big role. We'll have our CLI luddites who believe computing peaked in 1992 forever, but the rest of society is running full speed towards computers that they can talk to in natural language.
That's why Apple is uneasy. The god-tier technology usability company is on the verge of totally missing out on the greatest revolution in human-computer usability ever. My mother isn't going to want an Apple UI anymore when you just talk to the new computers.
What are they doing with AI besides an improved search if they aren’t developers?
According to OpenAI, ~4% of tokens generated are for software.[1]
LLMs are not a tech tool. SWE is practically a fringe use of LLMs.
See page 16: [1]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34255/w342...
I've seen product manager type people use LLMs to auto-generate product requirements docs. I know people who use AI to separate instruments from music tracks in order to learn them.
I guess I should have been more precise with the actual question - what do people do with AI that would cause Apple to be behind as long as they can access chat from their phone? Apple doesn’t need an “AI strategy” just to be able to run a third party chat interface.
What device would she use though, and how are they doing AI more meaningfully than can be an app on the device?
I'm with you. The fact that Apple isn't yet pushing AI in everything is a feature for me.
As a mac user since 2006 I see the problem as twofold.
Whose chatbots are actually better, though? I have yet to hear from an Android, Alexa, or Windows user who uses the voice controls for more than what Siri does. The people raving about LLMs are using things like ChatGPT which work just fine as apps on Apple devices, so it’s not clear when this turns into an important OS feature other than exposing the hardware acceleration features on modern devices.
Issue with LLM with Siri is bad press. There are articles every day about LLM pushing suicide, drugs, violence and the like. Stability and security are issues too if it was given any sort of system write access.
However much value it may add it is guaranteed to do greater long term reputational damage in the current state.
A tweet I saw earlier:
Tweet source: https://x.com/markgurman/status/1997352821453447399Article source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-06/apple-roc...
It's all crashing down around Cook. He could've chosen to actually be good to Apple customers. Instead, he milked them with ridiculous app store policies and terrible software. Yes the hardware was good, but those two things destroyed so much good will.
Anyone recall IBM of the mainframe pre-PC days, and how different it was compared to post-redhat acquisition?
If you'd told me in 1987 DEC was going to disappear up it's own fundament and be absorbed by Compaq, and then HP I would have laughed you off the floor.
Or Sun be Oracle. And then Oracle try to morph into hyperscaler, and sort-of.. well existing Oracle customers aside, .. fail?
Companies change. Nintendo was a 19th century playing card manufacturer.
Kodak was a very innovative Photography related enterprise.
Xerox invented the workstation. So tell me where Xerox is now? "Xerox Holdings"
Yeah I don't think Apple will ever be an AI company. It's just not in their DNA. They do consumer computers. It's all they've ever really been good at. When they stray very far from that it doesn't go well.
> Nintendo was a 19th century playing card manufacturer.
Still is one, just does other things too.
They treat the departure of Alan Dye as a negative for Apple rather than the unalloyed win it is. That tells you everything you need to know about the credibility of the article.
Only Srouji would be a real loss. Not that they wouldn't feel the loss of the others, but more of a 'never mind' than an 'oh no'.
Apple usually manages succession quietly and years in advance... seeing multiple senior people leave in the middle of an industry platform shift is unusual for a company that's spent two decades projecting stability
This is 100% needed, I'm sorry to say. Apple's hardware game has never been stronger - but software-wise they seem to be wandering around aimlessly. MacOS26 feels like a huge step back, so I'm hoping some fresh people will be a good thing.
In some ways it feels like the old 1990's Apple, except now they have enough money for all the misteps, and can survive being the iDevices company, which is where all that money is coming from.
The Computer Company, not sure.
When I lived in a different country, I could read as much cnn as I wanted. Now that I live in the USA, I need a subscription. So I am less informed on us politics now that I live in the USA. Ironic.
Insofar as this article is about the 4 execs leaving Apple, this is a total non-story and the "What the heck is going on at Apple" is just click bait:
- Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, and general counsel Kate Adams, are set to retire. While these may be high level execs, they don't really have much to do with the overall direction and success of the company. And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.
- Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, is leaving to join Meta as its chief design officer. Sounds like he won't really be missed: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-.... Assuming he was responsible for Liquid Glass, I say good riddance.
- John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, is also retiring. He had basically already been demoted, taken off leading Siri due to Siri's competitive failures.
So yeah, it's pretty obvious that Apple is behind the AI wave, but honestly, they may end up having the last laugh given how much backlash there is from consumers about trying to shoehorn AI into all these places where it's just an annoyance.
There's more than just 4 execs and imo an unprecedented level of turnover for a historically very stable company. It’s multiple senior leaders across legal, policy, AI, design, hardware, and operations leaving within a short period, making it one of Apple’s most significant leadership shakeups in years, which is why several outlets are finding it newsworthy.
1) John Giannandrea, Senior VP of Machine Learning & AI Strategy, Apple’s AI chief is leaving in 2026 after setbacks with Siri, his entire team is being reorganized and cut.
2) Alan Dye, VP of Design and responsible for liquid glass left for Meta Bloomberg
3) Kate Adams, the top lawyer and general counsel is leaving
4) Lisa Jackson, VP of Policy & Social Initiatives also leaving
5) Johny Srouji, hardware/chip head, said he is "seriously considering leaving" which is really interesting seeing as he actually said that out loud for press to report on.
6) Jeff Williams, COO retired
7) Luca Maestri the CFO left ealier this year
8) Ruoming Pang the AI foundation leader left for Meta
9) Ke Yang, head of Siri search also left for Meta.
A lot of other AI engineers have also left.
1, 8 and 9 leaving is expected. They failed at their jobs.
3 and 4 literally don't matter.
5, 6 and 7 probably left / are going to leave because they got news they wouldn't get the CEO role once Cook retires.
2 is the big surprise that raises the most eyebrows.
Seems it's mostly succession drama with a side of failure @ AI.
Also the rumor I heard from a friend at Apple (hearsay, obviously, and an anecdote to boot) was that Alan Dye was pretty unpopular among designers.
Yeah, I'd definitely classify Dye in the "failed at their jobs" category alongside 1, 8, and 9.
Bad AI is a venial sin at Apple, but bad design is mortal. Or at least, it used to be.
i wonder if Dye is the self-important personality who parked his audi r8 in handicapped parking routinely in front of IL1.
if not Dye, then apologies to Dye for looking like that person.
also, there's this.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
And users too!
It's worth reading Gruber's writeup on Dye's departure - it really sounds like it will be a net positive for Apple that he's leaving: https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
I was reading and 2 (Srouji) is 61 years old. While that is not too old, but that does explain why he may not be choice for next CEO (besides any other things). You want someone to helm the ship for a decade.
And 7 left January 1st, so I don’t know if I would include them in talks of an exodus.
> 1, 8 and 9 leaving is expected. They failed at their jobs.
Siri search is pretty good. (You mostly see it as the autocomplete in the Safari address bar.)
Apple is (for a very long time) essentially a hardware company so all the contrived drama about not embracing AI is perhaps Apple style accumulation of data as it refines the sequence of "neural cores" to efficiently serve wherever the industry is careening.
While Apple wants its hardware to best run popular apps (AI included), it's premature to presume these people leaving for Meta (Dye in particular) have any impact other than tribal knowledge in their departures.
(disclaimer: was an engineer in an inner sanctum of apple for several years)
> And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of > changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.
Foolishly, some of us still hoped Apple was better than that. And definitely better than this:
"Apple is bringing in Meta chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead to lead government affairs after Adams retires and serve as its new general counsel."
- vice president of human interface design
- senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy
If so many people hates/complains on liquid glass and Apple Intelligence, I guess the resign will be a good thing.
“many people” are mostly stupid (go to your local dmv to see “many people”) so that it irrelevant. sales are through the roof, profits same, cash on hand to buy many countries, life is good…
To be fair there are reasons to expect a sample of people from the DMV to be significantly less stupid than the population average.
You are responding to someone who thinks password protected PDFs through emails are secure
:) for mom&pop docs it is top-notch opsec
Isn't it obvious- we're hitting the limit of metrics of modern success/ end of this style of innovation- and are too uninventive to find new ones
Unless:
1) LLM advances stop 2) The Chinese companies release open source/weight models which are as good or better than the West 3) Apple somehow turns it around with AI
Apple is done for.
AI is going to be central to the next generation of phones and the next form factor.
Their complete failure on AI has been ... shocking. Not sure if they don't have the data to train a leading edge model or if they have some kind of personele issue, it has just been shocking to see their lack of progress.
No doubt Apple has rested on their laurels for a long time. I just would not have expected this.
Apple: (From Investors' twisted view) Not lagging behind, but prudently?? Spent less on AI which is wise
OpenAI: Code Red
Maybe Tim Apple has cancer and his search for a successor is causing a bit of a leadership shuffle.
Or maybe not and Cook and Williams are in their 60s and want to be retired, Giannandrea (sp?) was overpaid enormously but didn't create any magic, Dye is a longtime Apple person who had incredible luck but is frankly fungible (bring back Evans Hankey, for instance). Srouji is a special personality and talent, though.
Windows 11 25H2 introduces several exciting new AI features. Its also being reported as a massive memory hog and its causing a lot of consternation online.
There's no reason to be a first mover on AI. There's still no moat, and it is unlikely one will be found. A computer firm we have never heard of could spin up tomorrow and be the true leader of the much prophesied AI Revolution. Apple can let other people burn their brands to the ground chasing the dream.
Colloquially, 2025 is the year of the linux desktop, thanks in part to Microsofts AI approach (And valve opening up games). In 10 years the ramifications of that might even be felt in enterprise. We could have enterprise users looking for Linux/MacOS clients to run Microsoft Office 365. Really one should be asking why Microsoft thinks it can ruin the client experience. "What the heck is going on at Microsoft". We know whats going on, no one in the upper echelons of Microsoft can be seen to ignore the next big thing. They are compelled to grasp at anything labelled AI and ship it.
I dont like Apple, at all really. But not going all in on AI is to be lauded. In fact they could have done even less. Consumers want them to release the next iBrick with another 200 dollars attached to the pricetag. Thats it. They can meet consumer expectations by doing nothing other than Business as Usual.
I don't think this entire piece taught me anything new other than a speculation that "speculation is mounting that Tim Cook may be preparing to step aside as CEO" --
The lagging behind the AI wave is known, and matter of fact, the "Liquid Glass" saga is not even mentioned while they focus on the Apple Vision glasses.This is a great model for the poor low quality of journalism that became industry standard nowadays.
Yes, apple direction is questionable, and while it is mainly questionable because the of AI wave, well, the entire AI wave is questionable nowadays.
one more thing, the URL path has "/apple-tim-cook-leadership-changes" in it, suggests the title "what the heck" is most likely a newer version than the original one which they decided not to publish as is since it is not based enough.
Bottom line:
The template is:
It produces volume, not insight.I recently purchased an iPad Air and am blown away at how bad the UX is. Notes is incredibly buggy, the iOS is not optimized for the pencil pro (seems like it delivers very little value outside of visual arts programs), the Siri +gpt experience is laughable, and I can go on…
I’m a long time Apple user and I’m concerned with the state of things.
Im considering returning this piece of junk.
The iPad line in particular feels like the part of Apple's ecosystem that hasn't figured out what it wants to be
Maybe Apple should have focused more time onto the software and hardware and stopped trying so hard to be a media studio.
Nobody asked for Ted Lasso, but a lot of us asked for Siri to do a little more than set a damn timer.
Do they make Silicon Valley employee collector cards yet?
Suck.com Net Moguls, from back in the day (art by Jay Bevenour, edited by Carl Steadman):
https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...
Steve Jobs (front):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115101im_/http://www.suc...
Steve Jobs (back):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143431im_/http://www.suc...
Gil Amelio (front):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115107im_/http://www.suc...
Gil Amelio (back):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143436im_/http://www.suc...
About Suck.com:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com
>The changes come as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence.
It might pay off to be a contrarian on AI or, at least, to appear that way.
MS is currently facing significant user backlash against the AI components of Windows 11. Some of their own engineers have ripped management for forcing AI that's in a very poor state into every pore of the company's products while fixing that AI is verboten to all MS employees but the AI dept.[1]. Google is featuring frequently wrong AI summaries at the top of every search result. Elon Musk is using Grok to create his own version of reality in the form of Grokipedia, making billionaires everywhere look that much more like moustache-twirling villains.
Even if you think LLM's have some solid applications and potential for growth, the way it's being pushed on average users is truly cringe-worthy. To make matters worse, there is broad public perception that AI is putting people out of work, ripping off artists, etc.. It might actually benefit a company like Apple to not feature AI prominently in their products, even if they do spend the resources to catch up.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not an Apple fanboy trying to recast Apple being behind in AI into genius. I parted ways with Apple products over a decade ago due to bad experiences that I don't care to repeat. I'm just saying there could be an emerging niche for them to exploit. Being the one and only mainstream PC company that doesn't shove AI down people's throats could be a real competitive edge in 2026 and beyond.
[1]https://jonready.com/blog/posts/everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai...
This is nothing, or at minimum a good thing.
The people responsible for terrible UI and AI have gone.
Apple acquires OpenAI, Sam becomes CEO of combined company; iPhone revenue used to build out data centers; Jony rehired as design chief for AI device.
the worst possible future for Apple, & perhaps for us all.
> Apple acquires OpenAI, Sam becomes CEO of combined company; iPhone revenue used to build out data centers; Jony rehired as design chief for AI device.
Wonder what to call this brand of fanfic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction
Stratechery 2.0
This is so insanely terrible that I’m going to put my phone down now and go do something else.
I hate that this sounds plausible
I'm more in the "Not in a million years" camp on this one. :)
There were a lot of non-optimal decisions, and statements were out of reality. The macPro is not the best. The M3 slower. A.I. acronym opportunity could have been leveraged differently. A mac is supposed to be comfortable, macOS 26 "Da hoe" initially lacked various elements that were expected. The current state of logs/logging in macOS is a paradise for an adversary but time-hogging for legitimate user. Shareholders use macs, and they trust teams that studied Nokia. New emojis have a relatively inelastic relationship with sales.
Shareholders use macs, and they trust teams that studied Nokia. New emojis have a relatively inelastic relationship with sales.
What does any of this mean?
I’ve tried reading this a few times and it seems like a stream of consciousness word salad?
It lost the formatting, I meant it as a list of what out-of-reality decisions led to. I mean the macPro sux, when the macbookproM3 came out it was slower than the previous mode. I meant that 'Apple-Inteligence' sux, that macOS26 doesn't help working better. That opening console on a fresh macOS can show thousands of entries per second and that entries like "User <private> result: <private>" are not helpful. That what happened to Nokia can happen to Iphones, and finally that listing emojis among top features is yet out-of-reality. And I didnt mention the vision pro because I wanted to make a joke about it, in case someone said I forgot that on my list.
What did you understand? Shareholders use macs -> proportionaly feel the same frustration as other mac users. Trusting teams that studied Nokia -> Nokia was once the leader in mobiles, and quickly fell. Emojis -> how many new emojis were added are usually indicated along the other, top, features.
New emojis motivate people to install security updates.