What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.
Until WWDC last year, that is.
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Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? (If they do exist today in demonstratable form, they should, you know, demonstrate them.)
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The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
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Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Apple went from a company that you couldn’t believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible company in tech. Apple remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable company in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.
Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to Apple. Decision makers within the company did it.
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Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
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It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.
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Apple Intelligence fiasco
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Red Bull’s driver merry-go-round
Oleg Karpov and Jose Carlos de Celis reporting for Motorsport.com:
Liam Lawson could be replaced at Red Bull by Yuki Tsunoda as early as the Japanese Grand Prix, Motorsport.com understands.
Red Bull’s toxic, cut-throat culture is well-known, and Lawson didn’t do himself any favours in the first two races of the 2025 season. But firing him now is not just cruel, it’s also counterproductive.
When Lawson tested Red Bull’s 2024 car (RB20) in July last year, he got within 2 tenths of Verstappen’s lap time. This was also around the time when Perez started his run of poor form and Red Bull started to lose its dominance. Up to this midpoint of the season, we could assume Red Bull had a reasonably fast and balanced car.
From what I could learn, as the season evolved, RB20 became more oversteer-y (“pointy”) and harder to drive. Like Apple with its ill-fated “trash can Mac Pro”, Red Bull designed themselves into a bit of aerodynamic corner. Verstappen happens to like a pointy car, so it didn’t stop him from winning the world championship. But for any other driver, that RB20 must be a proper handful to drive.
Lawson was given the second Red Bull seat because of his 3-lap performance in a much less extreme mid-2024 RB20, and a quarter of a season in a VCARB (where he did about as well as his then teammate Tsunoda). Now, is it any surprise that he struggled with an even more pointy car just 2 races in? At this point, Red Bull seems to be expecting its second driver to match Verstappen’s performance in a car that Verstappen is uniquely suited to handle. Such a driver may not exist.
Oleg Karpov and Jose Carlos de Celis continued:
After finishing sixth in the sprint, Tsunoda was asked in his media session whether he would agree to swap places with Lawson in Suzuka. He replied: “Japan? Yeah, 100%. I mean, the [Red Bull] car is faster.”
Yes, the RB21 is faster than VCARB02 when Verstappen drives it. As much as this may seem like a big break for Tsunoda, I fear it’s going to turn into a trap, just like how it turned out for Lawson.
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Renewables for energy security
A key benefit of the UK’s “climate leadership”, [Rachel] Kyte argued, is that the energy transition will “make British people more secure”.
[Ben] Parsons said the argument – recently deployed by Conservative leader Badenoch – that the energy transition replaced reliance on Russian fossil fuels with reliance on Chinese technology was incorrect.
“Fossil fuels are fuel – they require constant replenishment. Renewables are infrastructure,” he said, adding that arguably the UK should be accelerating its deployment of clean-energy technology.
When you hear people arguing for fossil fuel in the name of “energy security”, please interrupt and correct them.
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Transition carbon credits are an unwise distraction
Patrick McCully in an opinion piece for Eco-Business:
The two largest offset standard-setting bodies are currently developing protocols to enable the creation of a market in carbon offsets from the emissions avoided by shutting down coal plants and replacing them with renewables.
Like other voluntary carbon market methodologies, these protocols will suffer from the tendency to overestimate emission reductions. They also fail to recognise that offsets are a zero-sum game: the emissions benefit from closing coal and building renewables will be lost if polluters elsewhere are able to buy offsets from these retirements in order to avoid cutting their own emissions. Large scale coal retirements will require governments and financial institutions to accept that they will not be able to recoup all of their investments in coal plants, and will require large-scale support for the rapid deployment of sustainable power.
Spot on. Like all avoidance-type carbon credits, the so-called “transition credits” let polluters “offset” their very real emissions (and harms) with imaginary reductions (and benefits). The seemingly robust and rigorous modeling to calculate the amount of potential emission reduction is based on two assumption-riddled speculations about the future. That’s some serious sleight of hand.
In Southeast Asia, the key barriers to shutting down coal power plants are often political. Project developers (coal interests with significant political influence) and investors (mostly commercial banks and multilateral development banks) who built new coal plants in the late 2010s are now holding energy transition hostage to protect their financial interests. Instead of undermining their coercive power, transition credits represent capitulation.
McCully also pointed out that carbon credits are particularly attractive to fossil fuel companies like Shell (world’s largest purchaser of carbon credits in 2024 by far). They use all forms of carbon credits to avoid reputational and regulatory pressure, but transition credits can be particularly beneficial to oil and gas interests. By paying a small price for these credits, oil and gas companies (with the help of governments, banks, and philanthropies) can get rid of the incumbent coal power in these fast-growing economies and make room for their “cleanest form of fossil fuel” gas solutions.
My simple rule-of-thumb: if something is welcomed by fossil fuel interests, it’s bad for the climate.
An Inconvenient Thought 