alt Hacker NewsI think it's the same reason why MacOS and iOS degraded a lot in terms of UX the past decade. The focus of Apple shifted towards hardware independence.
The 2010s was marked by Intel's lazy product lineup, year after year pumping rehashes of older products, iterating on top of their 14nm lithography with increasingly minor improvements on its architecture until AMD overcame them. In the process, Apple's partnership with Intel became a liability it had to solve, and a push for the unified ARM architecture was no small feat.
If you ask me I don't think it's justified to degrade the user experience for the sake of focusing on this. It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know.
In any case I think it explains really well why Siri feels so abandoned.
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It's one of the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world, but your comment seems to imply they have to pick and choose what they pursue. They really don't, especially if it's hard- vs software.
They're valued at $4T, they have hundreds of billions hoarded. They could run 50 billion dollar startup projects and not feel it. Imagine a startup getting handed a billion dollars ... and the vast knowledge that Apple has access to already.
There's no way they couldn't do a better Siri. For some reason, they just ... won't.
I always found that Apple had pretty mediocre software qualify, it's always been a very strong hardware company first and foremost.
They have great kernel, drivers and low level engineering but the stack above that has a lot of questionable stuff.
I dunno, Apple has always had a pretty high level of hardware independence, and one could imagine even if Intel did produce great chips for longer the ARM architecture would replace it eventually. Certainly the timeline got shifted (and I'm glad for it) but I don't know if that really impacted Siri. If anything it seems like it got pushed to the bottom of the pile in favor of projects like the Apple Car and Vision Pro OS one on side and the demand to increase services revenue on the other.