Apple may have belatedly responded to accusations of showing off Siri vaporware at last year’s WWDC, but the controversy is showing no sign of dying down anytime soon.
John Gruber – author of the original piece taking issue with Apple showing off features it hadn’t demonstrated to anyone outside the company – is now joined by M.G. Siegler and others …
How it started
Apple showed off some extremely impressive-looking new-Siri features at last year’s WWDC, doubling down on these in an ad for the iPhone 16, promising that these capabilities were “coming soon.”
The company subsequently walked back the “soon” promise, and deleted the ad.
John Gruber had frequently supported Apple’s claims that it doesn’t do vaporware, but he changed his mind following this. He noted that the claimed capabilities hadn’t been demo’d to a single journalist, and even Apple insiders he spoke to said they’d never seen them working.
How it’s going
We had to wait a year for Apple to respond, but two senior execs did so in an interview last week when asked about the vaporware claim.
Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak told the WSJ’s Joanna Stern that this is absolutely untrue, and that the demos were real. Stern: But there was a working version of this? This wasn’t just vaporware? Federighi: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, of course, no. We were filming real working software with a real large language model, with real semantic search. That’s what you saw.
However, Gruber isn’t satisfied, and suggests that this fits Apple’s own prior use of the term when criticising claims by other companies, and also breaks Apple’s own keynote rules.
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