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.
Even the keynote video didn’t show the actual feature working. It kept cutting away from the iPhone that was purportedly performing the feature back to presenter Kelsey Peterson at every single step. Apple’s internal rules for keynote demos say that the entire feature has to be real, and capturable in a single take of video.
I’ve spoken to people who’ve been in keynotes, and many more who’ve done WWDC session videos. Apple has strict rules about everything being real. That doesn’t mean they always show the feature in a single take in the final cut of the presentation, but it has to be possible, just like it would have to be in a live stage presentation. But that Siri demo in last year’s keynote is almost like a series of screenshots. We never see Peterson speak to Siri and then watch the results come in. There’s not one single shot in the whole demo that shows one action leading to the next. It’s all cut together in an unusual way for Apple keynote demos. Go see for yourself at the 1h:22m mark.
Developer Russell Ivanovic says it’s vaporware by any reasonable definition of the term.
You announced something that never shipped. You made ads for it. You tried to sell iPhones based on it. What’s the difference if you had it running internally or not. Still vaporware. Zero difference.
M.G. Siegler, a well-known tech investor who was a partner at Google Ventures for more than a decade, notes that Apple made fun of competitor claims about products at exactly the same state of development.
Apple, as a $3T company, should grow up. The company should be acutely aware that if a product doesn’t actually ship, it’s not real. They’ve famously shied away from vaporware over the years and made fun of such things many times for the obvious reason that Apple doesn’t do that […]
Guess what, Apple? A lot of other products from other companies that were labeled as “vaporwear” also existed internally at those companies in various states at various points […] You can’t have it both ways in making fun of other companies that do this and then when you do it, think it’s an unfair framing and stonewall anyone suggesting such blasphemy.
If you didn’t ship it, it’s not really a product. It’s a concept. It’s a promise broken. You want to change that? Change it. Ship it. And if you can’t, don’t talk about it. I don’t make the rules. You do! Or did.
Props for the title of his piece: Liquid Glasslighting.
What’s your view? Is Apple right to claim it’s real if the capabilities exist internally, even if they aren’t good enough to even demo to journalists? Or is new Siri indeed still vaporware at this point? Please share your views in the comments.
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