John Gruber: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

This is a pretty scathing piece from Gruber on what Apple’s done in the past year talking about Apple Intelligence to both the press and customers.

Another thing that came to mind for me recently is how many misses Apple has had with marketing in the past 12 months. Things started with the iPad Pro ad where they destroyed tons of creative tools, which people did not react well to, and Apple soon apologized for. Then there were the Apple Intelligence ads that were celebrating people being shitty employees and spouses with AI to trick people into thinking they were competent and loving. And now we have Apple pulling one of their premiere ads from the internet because it advertises an iPhone 16 feature that they have confirmed will not ship until at least the iPhone 17 is released later this year. It’s simply the sort of messiness I’m not used to seeing from Apple.