John Giannandrea to Retire From Apple
Postedabout 1 month agoActiveabout 1 month ago
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Dec 1, 2025 at 5:20 PM EST
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436174
An organization of Apple's size doesn't fail due to the mistakes of a single person, unless that person is the CEO.
What did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years?
Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.
Then one time, in a job interview of all things, (I'm a PM and was asked for an example of a product I liked or didn't like) I went into this spiel, and what do you know, Siri texted the photo to my wife. :-)
So somewhere along the way they did add that feature, and apparently I didn't realize I had missed checking for it.
And then half the time it's "a screenshot of a social media post" - c'mon, read the damn text from the screenshot at least!
- Call "person"
- Call "business" (please don't say "I don't see so and so in your contacts" and on a second try, work)
- Find "place" (while driving) - Define "phrase or word" (please don't say I found this on the web)
- Set a timer or alarm
- Check the messages (in a sane way)
- Set reminders (this one surprisingly works well)
- Use intents correctly (I just want to be able to say "play 99% invisible in Overcast")
It doesn't need to do all the fancy things they show-cased last year. It just needs to do the basics really well and build from there.
...
...
...
Siri disappears and song continues playing
...
"Hey Siri, stop playback"
Songs stops playing.
All of that to realize Siri was kind of boring. Funny thing is it’s been over a decade and it’s maybe 20% better than it was at launch. MAYBE.
I don’t want to blame this one guy for all of that, but part of me can’t help but point at the leader and ask “you couldn’t have done better than… that?”
Also, Apple tends to recruit internally first for VP positions, which they didn't do in this case. I am sure they considered internal candidates though, but I feel they're getting a bit "desperate" in the AI game to show progress.
I thought there is a much deeper problem, this is yet another Tim Cook hiring that didn't work. In fact I am not aware of a single SVP grade report to Tim Cook that came from outside of Apple were successful.
Was the MS gig so bad?