Comment by schmidtleonard

10 months ago

If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.

To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.

13 comments

schmidtleonard

Reply
woleium  10 months ago

That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”

  • jcgrillo  10 months ago

    That sounds prudent. There's no reason for them to continue this embarrassment of cramming the product full of worse-than-useless "AI" features. Wait until you can separate the good from the bad from the ugly and choose to just do it good.

  • schmidtleonard  10 months ago

    That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.

    • woleium  10 months ago

      Their modus operandi is usually to wade in late with a better solution. remember how awful bluetooth was until they applied it well?

frizlab  10 months ago

Snow leopard is fondly remembered but was buggy has hell when initially released. It got good, with time…

  • fumar  10 months ago

    I wish for snow leopard strategy to be applied to modern scaled operating systems. Let's all agree to spend a year fixing and optimizing rather than making existing functionality worse or launching half baked ideas.

  • walterbell  10 months ago

    iOS becomes good a year after release, then Apple stops you from installing stable version, forcing install of unstable version with unwanted features.

  • jmb99  10 months ago

    Perhaps I was just lucky, but 10.6.0 was equally stable as 10.5.8 for me. It did improve with time, and there’s little opposition to 10.6.8 being the best OS X release there was (except maybe 10.9.5), but for me at least it was a great OS even at launch.