Tag: Apple

When I updated my iPhone to iOS 18.1 public beta in September last year, I changed both system language and Siri language to English (United States) in order to use Apple Intelligence. In the past few months, I have also started logging my blood pressure by double-tapping the bottom edge of the screen to type to Siri.

iOS 18.4 added Apple Intelligence support for English (Singapore). After updating to the new iOS version this morning, I changed my system language and Siri language back to English (Singapore). When I tried to log my blood pressure by typing to Siri tonight, it didn’t work.

Siri directed me to this Apple Support article, which explains:

To access and log Health app data using Siri, you need:

• iPhone with iOS 17.2 or later, supported iPad models* with iPadOS 17.2 or later, or Apple Watch Series 9 or Apple Watch Ultra 2 with watchOS 10.2 or later

• Siri language set to English (United States) or Mandarin Chinese (China mainland). To check your Siri language: Go to Settings > Siri & Search > Language. ¹

I changed my Siri language back to English (United States) while keeping the system language as English (Singapore). Now I can type to Siri to log blood pressure by pressing the side button, but I can’t double-tap the bottom edge of the screen to activate it because, apparently, this is an Apple Intelligence feature which doesn’t work when system language and Siri language are different!

What the hell, Apple.

This experience highlighted to me, once again, the shitty mess that is Siri today. One of its features only works in two localised languages. Two. And it can’t tell you what month it is.

Also, why does Siri need a separate language setting from the system language? Who’s using Siri in a language different that is from their system language? Maybe this is related to how Siri is implemented at a technical level, but as a user, I don’t care, and I shouldn’t need to care. Apple has always been good at eliminating unhelpful complexity from what they present to users. In this instance, they failed.

John Gruber asking how Apple got itself into announcing but not being able to ship its headline Apple Intelligence feature:

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.

[…]

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.)

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.