Linked List: March 20, 2025

Thursday, 20 March 2025

This is beautiful and crazy, and no, I’m not going to buy one, but damn I’m tempted and I’d sure like to try one. I’m glad it exists.

Gurman: Tim Cook Has Put Mike Rockwell in Charge of Siri, Reporting to Craig Federighi ★

Mark Gurman, with a blockbuster scoop for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker’s senior leaders — a group known as the Top 100 — just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported. [...]

My quick take on this is that it’s a turf battle that Craig Federighi just won. It’s not just putting a new executive in charge of Siri, it’s moving Siri under Federighi’s group.

How Gurman got this scoop before Apple had announced the changes — even internally — is rather unbelievable. It’s not “Bloomberg” that got this scoop. It’s Mark Gurman. And trust me, Apple PR did not leak this to him deliberately. I’m sure they’re now accelerating an announcement, at least internally, framing it on their own terms. I can only guess that Gurman hinted at his sourcing in the passage above: Tim Cook must have announced these changes at the Top 100 retreat this week, and at least two of those attendees leaked the news to Gurman. Unprecedented.

Also:

Rockwell is currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products Group, or VPG, the division that developed Apple’s headset. As part of the changes, he’ll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Meade, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell.

I don’t find it surprising at all that Rockwell was given this task.

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

This I find a little surprising. But maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t buy Gurman’s argument that dismissing Giannandrea would “signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous”. Apple already signaled that publicly when they announced that all of the ambitious features for Siri and Apple Intelligence that were promised for this year’s OS cycle would be postponed until next year’s OS cycle. That’s public tumult. But I mean, you can see for yourself that Apple’s AI efforts have been “tumultuous” by asking Siri on your iPhone, right now, what month it is.

What Apple needs to signal is that they don’t expect to deliver a significantly better Siri without making significant changes to the team behind Siri.

But maybe the answer is as simple as that Giannandrea is good at leading and managing teams doing advanced research that is abstracted from product. So move the products out of his division and into Federighi’s, and put someone who knows how to ship directly in charge of Siri. Leave Giannandrea in charge of a division focused on research and technology. Attention has moved on from “machine learning” to LLMs, but Apple’s machine learning game has gotten very good.

HealthKit as a Model for an Open Semantic Index From Apple ★

Here’s an update I just appended to my post yesterday, after linking to Gus Mueller’s suggestion that Apple open up a semantic index to third-party AI apps:

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

Nobody is suggesting Apple should give up on AI. Quite the opposite. They really need to go from being a joke to being good at it, fast. But there’s no reason at all they should build out a strategy that relies on Apple doing all of it themselves, and Apple users relying solely on Apple’s own AI. Do it like Health — a model that has proven to be:

profitable (for Apple itself, selling devices like Watches);
popular (with users, who actually use it, understand it, and like it);
private;
and open to third-party developers, device makers, and medical service providers.

(Thanks to Bill Welense for the suggestion.)

The M1 MacBook Air Lives on at Walmart, Now Just $650 ★

Last March, when Apple introduced the then new M3 MacBook Airs, they moved the base model 13-inch M2 MacBook Air into the magic $999 spot in their own lineup, replacing the M1 MacBook Air. But mid-March it was announced that Walmart would begin selling the M1 MacBook Air — in one tech-spec configuration (8 GB RAM, 256 SSD), but three colors (gold, silver, space gray) for just $700.

This year Apple replaced the entire lineup of MacBook Airs that it sells itself with M4-based models, including the $999 starting-price model. Online, Walmart sells a handful of MacBook models now, at, per Walmart’s brand, slightly lower prices than Apple itself. But the one and only MacBook they seem to stock in their retail stores is the classic wedge-shaped M1 MacBook Air — now down to $650.

It’s over four years old now, and yes, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage are meager, but it’s almost certainly the best new laptop you can buy for that price. Assuming Apple thinks this partnership is a success, eventually they’ll have to replace this with a more recent MacBook Air. But I suspect the main reason it’s still the M1 Air (and hasn’t been replaced by, say, the M2 Air) is not about the specs or performance, per se, but rather simply how it looks. It looks like an older MacBook. Walmart might not get an updated MacBook with a more-recent-than-M1 chip until Apple refreshes the industrial design on its current MacBook Airs.