Card-carrying Tame Apple Press member John Gruber has penned a snotagram in his Daring Fireball magazine stating that he has had enough of the company’s empty promises and outright failures.
Gruber said that the decision to promote features that were not ready was a sign that the company was promoting “bullshit” and that it was “a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis”. Apple should have known that the features would not be ready in time and should not have promised them if they were not likely to be available, he said.
He said the fruity cargo cult is in "disarray if not crisis" after its much-hyped AI features for the iPhone have failed to materialise.
This is a bloke who usually finds a way to defend the fruity cargo-cult even when it serves up steaming piles of mediocrity, so when he starts using words like "bullshit," you know something is properly wrong.
The mess started last June when Apple unveiled its so-called "Apple Intelligence," which was supposed to revolutionise Siri and bring AI-powered magic to the iPhone.
Predictably, the company delivered a lot of hot air and a couple of gimmicks, like an app that generates AI images. The real meat of the update—giving Siri the ability actually to be useful—was promised for this year. But Apple quietly admitted it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Instead, the long-overdue updates have been pushed into the vague abyss of "the coming year," which could mean 2026 if we’re lucky.
Apple, of course, tried to spin this as progress, boasting about how Siri is now more "conversational" and how it has integrated ChatGPT—because nothing screams innovation like bolting on an external AI system that everyone else already has. In reality, it’s yet another example of Apple selling a dream it knows it can’t deliver, and Gruber is calling it out.
He pointed out that Steve Jobs wouldn’t have tolerated this level of incompetence, and he’s right. The late Apple founder made Elon [Roman Salute] Musk look benign and notorious for terrorising his staff into getting things done.
Current CEO Tim Cook, on the other hand, seems more content to let things slide while counting the billions rolling in from increasingly lacklustre hardware updates.
Gruber fears that if Cook hasn’t already had an emergency meeting to "rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle," then Apple’s days of being taken seriously might be over. According to him, the rot of "mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit" has already set in, and once that happens, there’s no turning back.
For years, Apple has coasted on reputation and brand loyalty while doing the bare minimum. Now, even its most loyal defenders are starting to realise that the emperor has no clothes and they are paying for it.
If the Fruity Cargo Cult doesn’t get its act together soon, the only thing left will be the marketing department frantically trying to convince the world that delay-ridden, half-baked features are a revolutionary breakthrough. Although we would argue that has been the status quo for the last decade.
