Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.

Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”

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[–] 221 points 1 day ago (5 children)

he not only he is pushing for a bad idea, he clearly missed the memo that Apple was mostly unaffected precisely because they had been slow to adopt AI

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  • [+] -10 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

    They where jot slow they pushed really hard but failed to execute. I love how everyone seems to forget that.

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  • [–] 67 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

    they skipped burning infinity billions on training useless models and building data centres.

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  • [–] 11 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Apple very much did want to invest into AI development, but the financial department - which used to be Cook's department before he became CEO - repeatedly denied allocating money for buying GPUs, and told the engineers to 'just use the old ones'.

    At that point, the 'old ones' were several years old, and in quantity about 1% of what Microsoft or Google had at the time.

    Apple never 'chose' to wait with AI. It chose to be run by businessmen, who are always clueless, and who will always make terrible decisions. Though in this case it happened to have temporarily positive or neutral consequences for the users.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago

    repeatedly denied allocating money for buying GPUs, and told the engineers to ‘just use the old ones’.

    What's the source for this story? Seems wild finance was able to make a top level strategic decision like that

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  • [+] -6 points 16 hours ago

    They didn't "fail", they just realized the technology was not ready. This was made very clear through many public blunders. And they didn't want to just ram it down people's throats like their competitors.

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  • [–] 126 points 1 day ago (9 children)

    Sometimes I swear the job of CEO seems to be the easiest ever. Just follow whatever's trending now. Seems so easy: start your day, see all headlines say "AI", order a few people to put "AI" everywhere, sit back, relax and rack profits from investors who are just as brain dead.

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  • [–] 74 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

    That's because your mental image of a CEO is these big dogs. You will never read a story about a CEO doing a great job, only dumb fucks like Musk make the news.

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  • [–] 42 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

    To be fair, they can't just sit back, they also have to have a lot of meetings that could have been emails.

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  • [–] 10 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    Funny story. I once worked at a company where I got along very well with my boss so I'd regularly get some gossip about the higher ups. One time my boss had a meeting (or rather multiple meeting) with the higher ups to go over the quarterly goals for the department. They had created the goals, had a presentation and all they needed was for the higher ups to give the okay to continue. Fairly simple thing, except every meeting was completely derailed by the CEO and his incessant need to discuss fishing. And because the higher ups were all buddies they all started discussing fishing and boating etc. After 4 failed meeting to get a simple Yes my boss sent everything in email and got a near instant confirmation to go ahead.

    Sometimes the meeting has to be an email.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago*

    I worked for one company that had a CEO like this except he was also a heavy cocaine user. One time we had a client visit our offices for a meeting; we had written software for this client for more than ten years at that point. In the middle of the meeting the CEO wanders in randomly and starts just talking incessantly for 45 fucking minutes straight. Finally he slaps his thighs and says "so, do you think you want to do business with us?" We damn near lost the client over this.

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  • [–] 54 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

    Geezus how much more AI do we need? For the cost of it, we're not getting the great benefits we thought we were going to get. It's too environmentally harmful when it's run in concentrated places. There's also no reason to have these data centers. If PCs were invented today, we'd be renting PCs forever because this era isn't about innovation anymore. It's about trapping people in a rental world.

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    I can's see the appeal for me but I think I can understand where Apple is coming from, at least in theory. More AI in phones means an excuse to sell you more powerful phones.

    Unless you are very into having the latest piece of tech or your old phone dies, I haven't seen much that a new phone can do and my 4 years old one can't, so many people (including me) are sticking with their old phones for longer. AI seems like it has the potential to put something new on those marketing assets. Granted, it worked like shit with AI laptops/Copilot PCs but Apple has a knack for turning others' failures into long lines of people fighting to give them their money so we'll see...

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago

    A large part of this is also app development. App developers want as many peo0le as possible to use their apps, so they're designed to work on phones that cost a hundred bucks new when they were sold on 2018.

    PCs run into this with lots of things too, but one huge difference is the multitasking experience. I have a big-ass folding phone, but the multitasking experience still sucks, most because the phone is just a bad format for the kind of workflows that necessitate multitasking.

    If I'm working in multiple windows, I need a keyboard and mouse. Yeah, I can have firefox open on one half of the screen and Outlook in the other on my phone, but it's still the mobile version of both apps, and any time I want to type something half the screen becomes a keyboard.

    So I don't really have a need for a powerful phone. It's a content consumption and communication device, both of which don't need much horsepower.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 day ago* (8 children)

    The stuff they just released is so bad. My 17 Pro used to open an app immediately when I asked Siri and now she churns for over 5 seconds sometime before opening things. Went from a time saving shortcut to an annoyance.

    She can’t understand anything going on with my phone, she misunderstands me a lot more than before. Keeps requesting the same permissions over and over with no way to permanently grant them. Navigation is ridiculous she’ll navigate to a town in the next country before a name in my contacts. Having really loved iPhones since 2010 this will be my last one. I’m bound for grapheneos or something similar have already begun moving my data out of their cloud in anticipation.

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  • [–] 10 points 19 hours ago

    I got this too. I think it’s a bug in our user profiles - local inference for shit like opening apps should be fast, but instead it hands off to ChatGPT or something and fucks around for like 8 seconds.

    Try Settings > Siri > Turn off Siri, then turn it on again.

    When I did that it asked if I still wanted to be in the beta (what beta did I sign up for?!). I said no, and it finally reverted back to being fast-but-shitty, which is better than slow-and-shitty.

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  • [–] 4 points 17 hours ago*

    This latest update is 18gb which is over a quarter of the total storage on my phone. I am stuck because I haven't been able to clear enough space yet... I don't want all these BS AI features but I also need to download the security updates...

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago (2 children)

    You could also just open the app yourself and that's always faster than asking siri...

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 child)

    You don’t know how many apps I have on how many screens, or how many aren’t even on home screens, or what kind of tasks I’m doing with my hands where I might want this functionality. You don’t even know if I have hands. You have zero idea if it would be faster for me to manually open an app vs use a voice assistant.

    No thank you for your useless opinion.

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  • [–] 39 points 21 hours ago

    There are things that the user wants, and there are things that are good for the user. The two are rarely the same.

    This is neither.

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  • [–] 30 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    Tim Cook was a good transitional douchebag CEO to soften people up before the full Gavin Belson experience.

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  • [–] 28 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

    If there is anything worse than getting into a pyramid scheme is getting late into a pyramid scheme

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  • [–] 26 points 19 hours ago

    More proof that the biggest morons rise to the top of the capitalism rancid stew.

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  • [–] 25 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    Keep in mind Apple has a poorly documented and mostly unknown daemon called knowledgeconstructiond that cannot be turned off and solely exists to profile you based on accessing every Apple apps data - ical, messages, mail, photos etc, which is astoundingly personal info especially considering a lot of Apple users dump everything into stock apps, as the “strength” of Apple has typically been consistency of the platform

    https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-personal-knowledge-graph

    The person who wrote that article vibecoded an app that allows you to visualize the data captured: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow

    It is basically all the gross shit that ad networks do. What does Apple do with this data, that has been aggregated since macos 13? Officially it’s probably to “enhance the user experience” but at a minimum it probably changes how Apple delivers ads to you. do they sell it? Who knows

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    I tested after reading that article, and I was able to Force Quit any of those daemons' processes just in the Activity Monitor on os 15 Sequoia. They'll probably respawn at reboot, but they are just user processes that can be killed so I bet you could run a login script to kill them each time you reboot and log in. I had already turned off all the Siri AI options and every single one of dozens of "learn from this app" toggles hidden in Settings.

    This is without disabling SIP also

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  • [–] 21 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

    Are people hired to be CEOs because they are dooshbags or do people become dooshbags because they are CEOs?

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  • [–] 48 points 23 hours ago (7 children)

    Apple has been speedrunning problems and bad decisions since Ternus took over: the iPhone duo, macos 27 being buggy as fuck and making it difficult to disable the siri ai bs, the new macbook having an OLED that flickers so slowly it gives you eyestrain, the apple tv going from $150 to $300

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  • [–] 16 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    "The customer is always right" has become "The customer will like it" with screen controls in cars, IOT jammed into everything, subscriptions, AI forced down our throats...

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  • [–] 11 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    In many cases they have blown past "the customer will like it" all the way to "our data suggests that 90% of customers will not leave and profits will slightly increase as a result."

    I mean, at this point enshittification is a widespread business plan.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

    "John Ternus will be great for Apple because he's an engineer"

    A society that refuses to mix ethics with STEM: hold my beer..

    Seriously, being an engineer or working on or in something doesn't automatically make you the best leadership choice automatically. Ethics are kind of an important thing America continues to gloss over at an alarming rate.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

    Funny. In my 1986 college freshman year I was required to take an ethics for engineers course. They told us working for the military industrial complex was bad.

    Curiously, the MIC was hiring and was where the well-paying jobs were at the time. Also, the field was impacted thanks to decades of cold war STEM push.

    And there you get the contrived desperation, that drove studying engineers students into Lockheed, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas like Russian girls into Epstein's sex spa for billionaires.

    It turns out you can't eat ethics. Although I still find myself judging ICE recruits.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately ethics is kinda one of those major pillars that separates us from the other animals in the kingdom.

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  • [–] 1 point 31 minutes ago

    I agree, which is why those with power like to structure society so that ee have to act against principle and according to loyalty to survive.

    We like to imagine a differently shaped society run on rules guided by ethics, but so far power consolidates and those systems get perverted.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 hours ago

    Being slow on LLMs is the one good decision apple is making.

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  • [–] 13 points 23 hours ago

    Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”

    I'd say we should expect to see an interview with Federighi, with pained expression, claiming, "this was not the apple that I knew and loved, I just had to leave", in the near future.

    But then, this is a Mark "twice a day? that clock is going to take my job!" Gurman interview.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    So, over the last couple or years, Samsung has been updating the OS of my Galaxy Smartphone repeatedly. With each iteration more and more AI features have appeared as new buttons with ambiguous icons.

    Using AI features on my phone requires opening a Samsung account so it cat track my token use. This requires providing personal information, and making up a password I will remember since the Samsung account app isn't compatible with password managers (except Samsung's proprietary manager, which I do not use). I also anticipate Samsung will want a credit card number to quietly charge me as I use compute.

    I haven't made a Samsung account.

    And so all these buttons with weird icons are now productivity potholes, since tapping any of them accidentally switches me to the create a Samsung account page, interrupting my workflow.

    Like tyranny, enshitification is more about incompetence than malevolence.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Can't you use a different launcher? Samsung launcher has always been shit. I had a misfortune of using Samsung phone 10 years ago or so and even then it was excellent hardware mated to absolute trash software that slowed everything down.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    The software has gotten a LOT better since 10 years ago. They also offer much longer updates. I still use a third party launcher with mine, but the default has become less offensive than back then.

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  • [–] 12 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Put it everywhere, just like Microsoft

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  • [–] 11 points 22 hours ago

    Craig Federighi

    I know this isn’t on topic, but my brain interpreted this guy’s last name as Ferengi, and given the topic I figured I’d run with it.

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  • [–] 11 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    Huh, when did Tim Cook go?

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    If you've been using the Apple eco system since 2022, it's likely they know everything about you. That's when their operating systems had written into them the ability to create detailed profiles of their users.

    https://elsolitario.org/en/2026/11/07/macos-profiles-your-contacts-and-routines-since-2022/

    Gee, I wonder what the AI tech will be used for, and why it's being put into everything?

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  • [–] 21 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

    In other news soon... Apple lays off 40% of employees.

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  • [–] 2 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

    Maybe but they’re already using AI (Claude) in a lot of their day-to-day engineering. What they use to develop and what features they provide users are very different.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago (1 child)

    They are different, and yet one always seems to lead to the other, no?

    Companies shoving AI dung into every corner of their products prove to be devoid of ethics & values, putting profit over people. I could be wrong, but I wont be.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    That’s correct, but companies like Apple have put profits above employees for a long time. Granted, high pay and good benefits have been a path to attract talent that would increase profits, but profit has always been the motive.

    So I don’t think you’re wrong that they might have a big layoff, but it’s not related to adding more AI into the product.

    That said, having good, well integrated, local AI features that are optional to use are purely a plus for the customer. Local AI Siri, local AI multitasking (e.g. “insert a summary of that messages thread into a new draft email”), local AI reminders of things you might have forgotten, etc.

    That’s probably not exactly what’s going on here though.

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  • [–] 9 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

    So I’m actually not an AI hater, and I love my iPhone, but there’s no amount of lipstick to make that piece of shit Siri work any better

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  • [–] 6 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

    I mean it's just a front end for Gemini now isn't it?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

    AIphone branding in 5 4 3..

    Edit: lol they can't, the name belongs to an intercom company 🤣

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  • [–] 8 points 6 hours ago

    Oh yeah, time for some iSlop

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  • [–] 7 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

    he's speed running customer alienation

    also what happened to tim apple?

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  • [–] 5 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

    Tim was promoted to chairman of the board. Who knows what strings he’s still pulling. Either way, I am so far very unimpressed with the new CEO. And not listening to Craig Frederighi (who probably should have been made CEO) puts him on my shitlist.

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  • [–] -1 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

    I am so far very unimpressed with the new CEO

    i mean he launched a $400 budget laptop. i would say that was very impressive. and before that, he did the Apple Silicon transition (to the M1 chip).

    Craig Frederighi (who probably should have been made CEO)

    i would be cautious of putting that much trust in people who are mainly just known for being very charismatic at presentations. it doesn’t necessarily mean they usually have good ideas, it just means they have flair. Frederighi was also the main driving force behind macOS becoming so locked down.

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  • [–] 12 points 22 hours ago* (3 children)

    yea he’s dropping the ball with everything he’s announced and released since taking over. steve is rolling in his grave with the touch screen, folding phone, ai, price increases, shitty operating system redesigns, etc

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  • [–] 3 points 15 hours ago

    as much as i hate Jobs, i think he would have been fine with a folding iphone. an iphone that would fold out into a mini ipad? from an idea point what's not to love? he did ultimately see the light with smaller tablets and signed off on producing the ipad mini a year before he died. (only after being told and shown how convenient and useful the smaller form factor tablets were, a samsung 7 inch tablet for reference)

    but the iphone duo? i think he would have absolutely hated the thing. the interface sucks big balls. the price tag sucks even more. and they all have an inherent defect in the hinge that will and has been breaking the inner display. it's not a matter of 'if' it will break, but 'when'.

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  • [–] 6 points 16 hours ago

    Being back Tim Apple. John Apple sucks if his pushes are going to be on iPhones folding out into iPad mini’s for $2000 and Siri AI

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  • [–] 6 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah, with 26 I feel there’s a real dive into enshitification. Whatever apple products I have now will be my last. And if Motorola ever makes a sub $600 usd graphene phone I’ll get that.

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  • [–] 3 points 22 hours ago

    Same for me i just fear that google will soon block grapheneOS and other alternative and be just as closed as Apple.

    This Iphone ( which i have not updated the firmware for some time ) might just be my last smart phone

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  • [–] 6 points 19 hours ago
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