Something odd has been happening for the last few months. We’ve been hearing more and more about internal conflicts at Apple, a company typically so locked down that it makes Lockheed Martin look like a leaky sieve. First Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reported on a nasty internal fight over Siri and Apple Intelligence, complete with a recap of a team meeting. Yesterday The Information followed with a more extensive scoop on the same subject. Today we got a piece from The New York Times which strongly implies Tim Cook is failing as a leader and the company’s enormous potential is being mismanaged.
Yikes.
The stories and the details aren’t especially surprising if you’ve watched the abysmal response to Siri and Apple’s AI moves. Siri has been a mess for years, being one of the most secure voice assistants but also one of the stupidest and most prone to failures. Apple Intelligence is so mediocre Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal got Apple Software Chief Craig Federighi to admit it on camera. AI is juicing the valuations of every major publicly traded tech company and the idea that Apple, the major publicly traded tech company, can’t get a strong grasp on the technology is raising alarm bells all over the place.
But Apple’s AI boondoggle shouldn’t be a surprise. Google, Microsoft, and nearly every other tech company have rushed to implement AI with middling to poor results. I’ve seen the word AI used in more pitches in the last two years than I ever saw VR or 3D deployed at the height of their respective crazes. We’ve got AI pins, and buttons, and glasses. It’s pre-loaded on laptops and phones and used as an adjective every time a company wants to make its technology sound fancier than it is.
Apple is a company that usually waits for the dust to settle and proper use cases to emerge before it steps in and announces its reinvented a technology. Getting into the mix this early was always odd for Apple. Apple is the gal who is normally fashionably late to the bar, but its AI move was Apple showing up at the exact time doors open. It’s not a surprise that Apple Intelligence is, by all accounts, an initiative summoned from the bowels of marketing and forced onto designers and engineers who were not ready or enthusiastic about the possibilities—particularly in the time frames dictated by Apple leadership.
It’s also not a surprise that the Siri team, which is where most of the AI work happens, has seen some major leadership changes or that Craig Federighi and his glorious hair stepped in to make the change. Apple screwed up and is now using its incredible resources to fix its problems.
What is surprising was that Apple let the tail wag the dog by allowing its marketing department to effectively create the roadmaps for AI. We’ve now seen three different significant leaks from the company about those issues. This is not how Apple operates. The very public infighting feels like the kind you often see where they gleefully use news outlets to make their point and win internal battles, but given it is Apple, a company that has maintained a very capable leak-free culture for decades, there’s also the sense that some people are just mad at the direction of the company.
But whatever the motivations behind the leaks they’re showing a major shift in how Apple’s culture operates. Apple’s AI stumbles aren’t the problem, nor are the stories about them. They’re all symptoms of something very weird happening at One Apple Park Way.
