Linked List: September 7, 2018

Friday, 7 September 2018

Aaron Tilley, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas; here’s MacRumors’s summary)

During meetings, Mr. Cue is sometimes known to fall silent, shut his eyes and tilt his head back, leaving other participants to wonder whether he is staring at the ceiling or sleeping, said several former Apple employees and one outside partner present on multiple occasions when it happened over the past few years. In at least two of these situations, Mr. Cue began snoring, one source said. […]

From the moment he gained responsibility for Siri, Mr. Cue seemed to lack much interest in it, according to people who worked on the project. When Siri team members presented Mr. Cue with technical data around the performance of the assistant — an area of frequent criticism of the technology — Mr. Cue appeared bored and seemed to fall asleep in at least two meetings, said a former Apple employee who was present.

I’ve heard some really good Eddy Cue stories over the years, but this falling asleep thing is a new one.

Also, I thought this was interesting:

Apple has improved Apple Maps since its troubled launch, boasting that the service is more popular on iPhones and iPads, on which it comes pre-installed, than Google Maps. But Google Maps still reaches more users because of the larger global audience of Android devices, and the quality of Google Maps often comes out ahead in independent evaluations.

One such evaluation was a blog post last year by the cartographer Justin O’Beirne, which chronicled in exhaustive detail the richer detail available on Google Maps. The post appeared to rattle Mr. Cue, who ordered changes to Apple Maps to satisfy internal concerns related to the blog post, said a former Apple employee. In June, Mr. Cue publicly promised further improvements to the service. Some observers believe Apple Maps faces a disadvantage as long as the company restricts it to Apple devices.

Bizarre to me that The Information didn’t even link to O’Beirne’s work. It’s good to know it caught Cue’s attention.

Shocker: AnandTech Catches Huawei and Honor Cheating on Benchmarks ★

Ian Cutress and Andrei Frumusanu, writing for AnandTech:

We did approach Huawei about this during the IFA show last week, and obtained a few comments worth putting here. Another element to the story is that Huawei’s new benchmark behavior very much exceeds anything we’ve seen in the past. We use custom editions of our benchmarks (from their respective developers) so we can test with this “detection” on and off, and the massive differences in performance between the publicly available benchmarks and the internal versions that we’re using for testing is absolutely astonishing.

As usual with investigations like this, we offered Huawei an opportunity to respond. We met with Dr. Wang Chenglu, President of Software at Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, at IFA to discuss this issue, which is purely a software play from Huawei. […]

He states that it is much better than it used to be, and that Huawei “wants to come together with others in China to find the best verification benchmark for user experience”. He also states that “in the Android ecosystem, other manufacturers also mislead with their numbers”, citing one specific popular smartphone manufacturer in China as the biggest culprit, and that it is becoming “common practice in China”. Huawei wants to open up to consumers, but have trouble when competitors continually post unrealistic scores.

In other words, he’s defending Huawei’s cheating because China is full of cheats. You have to love that “in the Android ecosystem” hedge too.