Comment by anon373839
23 days ago
Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.
This is so obvious I'm kind of surprised the author used to be a software engineer at Google (based on his Linkedin).
OpenClaw is very much a greenfield idea and there's plenty of startups like Raycast working in this area.
Being good at leetcode grinding isn’t the same as being a good product person.
iOS 26 is proof that many product managers at Apple need to find another calling. The usability enshittification in that release is severe and embarrassing.
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shots fired!
Ouch. You could have taken a statistical approach "google is not known for high quality product development and likely therefore does not select candidates for qualities in product-development domain" - I'm talking too much to Gemini, aren't I?
I'm not that surprised because of how pervasive the 'move fast and break things' culture is in Silicon Valley, and what is essentially AI accelerationism. You see this reflected all over HN as well, e.g. when Cloudflare goes down and it's a good thing because it gives you a break from the screen. Who cares that it broke? That's just how it is.
This is just not how software engineering goes in many other places, particularly where the stakes are much higher and can be life altering, if not threatening.
It is obvious if viewed through an Apple lens. It wouldn't be so obvious if viewed through a Google lens. Google doesn't hesitate to throw whatever its got out there to see what sticks; quickly cancelling anything that doesn't work out, even if some users come to love the offering.
Regardless of how Apple will solve this, please just solve it. Siri is borderline useless these days.
> Will it rain today? Please unlock your iphone for that
> Any new messages from Chris? You will need to unlock your iphone for that
> Please play youtube music Playing youtube music... please open youtube music app to do that
All settings and permission granted. Utterly painful.
You'll need to unlock your iPhone first. Even though you're staring at the screen and just asked me to do something, and you saw the unlocked icon at the top of your screen before/while triggering me, please continue staring at this message for at least 5 seconds before I actually attempt FaceID to unlock your phone to do what you asked.
I think half your examples are made up, or not Apple's fault, but it sounds like what you really want is to disable your passcode.
I LOVE the "complaining about apple ux? no way, YOU'RE the problem / you're doing it wrong / you must not be a mac person".
Thanks for keeping this evergreen trope going strong!
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"Will it rain today? Sorry, I can't do that while you're driving."
Do you want people being able to command your phone without unblocking? Maybe what you want is to disable phone blocking all together
I want a voice control experience that is functional. I don't want every bad thing that could happen-- especially those that will only happen if I'm careless to begin with-- circumscribing an ever shrinking range, often justified by contrived examples and/or for things much more easily accomplished through other methods.
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Oh no, what if they put on Christmas music playlist in February? the horror!
There should exist something between "don't allow anything without unlocking phone first" and "leave the phone unlocked for anyone to access", like "allow certain voice commands to be available to anyone even with phone locked"
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Probably need VoiceID so only authorized people can talk to it.
Not really. Giving the weather forecast or playing music seems pretty low risk to me.
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Right, but you understand why allowing access to unauthenticated voice is bad for security right?
But you understand why if I don't care about that, I should be able to run it, right?
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re: youtube music, I just tried it on my phone and it worked fine... maaaybe b/c you're not a youtube premium subscriber and google wants to shove ads into your sweet sweet eyeballs?
The one that kindof caught me off guard was asking "hey siri, how long will it take me to get home?" => "You'll need to unlock your iPhone for that, but I don't recommend doing that while driving..." => if you left your phone unattended at a bar and someone could figure out your home address w/o unlock.
...I'm kindof with you, maybe similar to AirTags and "Trusted Locations" there could be a middle ground of "don't worry about exposing rough geolocation or summary PII". At home, in your car (connected to a known CarPlay), kindof an in-between "Geo-Unlock"?
I pay for YouTube Music and I see really inconsistent behavior when asking Siri to play music. My five-year-old kid is really into an AI slop song that claims to be from the KPop Daemon Hunters 2 soundtrack, called Bloodline (can we talk about how YT Music in full of trashy rip-off songs?). He's been asking to listen to it every day this week in the car and prior to this morning, saying "listen to kpop daemon hunters bloodline" would work fine, playing it via YT Music. This morning, I tried every iteration of that request I could think of and I was never able to get it to play. Sometimes I'd get the response that I had to open YT Music to continue, and other times it would say it was playing, but it would never actually queue it up. This is a pretty regular issue I see. I'm not sure if the problem is with Siri or YT Music.