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).
I am perfectly fine with Apple lagging behind in "AI".
Gemini on android just works. I can ask it nearly anything in spoken natural language and it'll talk back with an answer.
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.
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.
I mean not for looking up the information, but for something that alter how you use phone.
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.
- 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.
Siri could be better if Apple just threw 10000 monkeys at it and configure it more phrases (utterances) to match on.
Link to reports? As far as I understand, google assistant is being deprecated in favor of gemini.
This is a little older. I know things improve a lot quickly.
https://www.slashgear.com/1521993/google-gemini-ai-replace-s...
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)
He’s maybe the most competent accountant of all time, given how far he’s brought Apple.
If this person had any role to play in the user interface decisions of macos Tahoe, then good riddance.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
This is one of those political things where people deny something right up until the minute when it happens.
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?
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.
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.
No he isn't and no there wasn't.
I’m not sure about Federighi’s popularity inside, but it seems like Software is in need of changes as well.
Or the more common all the ones who didn’t get knighted are leaving.
"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!).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But what's this about AI bringing the entire industry down?
Whether that is in 2 years or ten is anyone's guess.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-ai-bo...
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.
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.
Would be nice to know why Apple didn't throw its war chest at the WarnerBros/HBO acquisition Netflix just did.
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"
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.
(Unscientific fiction, I know.)
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.
Looking forward to his tenure at Meta. With any luck he'll kill the company.
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.
You mean they invisible? Also I had fun playing mental. Finished FE on it ;)
Then I watched someone doing a long play on Serious and I think that’s a superman.
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!)
What does any of this mean?
That doesn't bode well. The last thing I want from macOS is Windows-like overbearing insistence on AI everything.
Hardware's top-notch, and hopefully this opens the door for better UI and AI without messing with what already works.
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
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.
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.
If anything, I know people that are getting pissed off about all the AI stuff in windows and are considering switching.
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.
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'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
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. 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.
Article source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-06/apple-roc...
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.
"speculation". "may be". "preparing".
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:
* [company]
+ [AI]
+ [speculation]
+ [analyst quote about urgency].
OpenAI: Code Red
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...
- 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.
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.
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.
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-...
Bad AI is a venial sin at Apple, but bad design is mortal. Or at least, it used to be.
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)
- 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.
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."
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
Wonder what to call this brand of fanfic?
The people responsible for terrible UI and AI have gone.