FIX APPLE SIRI

“One innovation that is underappreciated by a lot of people outside the industry is Apple Silicon. The chips in the devices are all Apple chips. And that's been true for iPhones for a long time. It wasn't true for Macs. Macs ran on Intel chips until 2020, when they started ripping them out and putting in Apple chips. Apple chips are really great.”

“The other thing that presents challenges for Apple, their commitment to privacy. Apple has a ton of personal data on its users, but company policy prohibits them from using it. And you talk to people inside Apple, that's actually frustrating for them, because there's a lot of stuff they'd like to be able to do, but they don't have access, right? Your stuff's encrypted, they have to jump through lots of hoops to get permission to do anything with data, to train a model.”

“Most recently, he ran hardware engineering for all of Apple's products. Historically, Apple has the people who design the products, who wanted to have a certain look and feel, and it has the hardware guys who figure out how to make the design team's dreams come true. He's the one who makes the products come alive on that team. He solves problems, you know, they go to the meeting, he keeps it focused, let's not waste time, he gets to a solution.”

“Tim Cook is going to step into a new role as executive chairman. He's not leaving entirely. But John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering and a longtime Apple guy, will become the next CEO.”

“I would not be surprised if under Ternus, they just lean into being a hardware company and maybe scale back on some of these other bets, these software projects, Apple TV, the sort of last year but less profitable parts of their business, I would not be surprised if they really double down on being the hardware company and continuing to make the best hardware that all, you know, all the other software can run on.”

“On Tuesday, SpaceX posted on x that it had reached an agreement with Cursor to either be able to acquire the company later this year for $60,000,000,000 or just pay it $10,000,000,000 for their work together.”

“At the same time, like, every day now, I use AI apps that just do things for me on my phone that seem clearly like things Siri should be able to do. Right? Because Siri is integrated at that operating system level. It already has the access that it needs, and I wind up having to do all these workarounds just to do these things that are now possible through the state of the art. So there is a huge missed opportunity there.”

“This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“There's a couple different things happening in terms of the services business. First off, the most lucrative that nobody really appreciates is Google Search in the Safari browser. Google pays Apple over $20 billion a year to be the default search in the Safari browser. That's somewhere around a fifth of the company's profits, which is really remarkable when you think about it.”

“Most recently, he ran hardware engineering for all of Apple's products. Historically, Apple has the people who design the products, who wanted to have a certain look and feel, and it has the hardware guys who figure out how to make the design team's dreams come true. He's the one who makes the products come alive on that team. He solves problems, you know, they go to the meeting, he keeps it focused, let's not waste time, he gets to a solution.”

“I just noticed that various players in the AI space, some of whom are, opposed to each other in various ways, seem to all be coming around to UBI at the same time. So Elon Musk did a post about this on x saying he endorsed some form of UBI. He called it universal high income.”

“The other thing that presents challenges for Apple, their commitment to privacy. Apple has a ton of personal data on its users, but company policy prohibits them from using it. And you talk to people inside Apple, that's actually frustrating for them, because there's a lot of stuff they'd like to be able to do, but they don't have access, right? Your stuff's encrypted, they have to jump through lots of hoops to get permission to do anything with data, to train a model.”

“One area Apple has also lagged in is artificial intelligence. While other tech giants like Google and Facebook have spent billions of dollars building AI models, Apple hasn't. Siri, you know, look at the modern chatbots. They are, if they are human, then Siri's a Neanderthal. She's pretty, yeah, not very smart. And they're trying to update that, but they're playing from behind.”

“There's a couple different things happening in terms of the services business. First off, the most lucrative that nobody really appreciates is Google Search in the Safari browser. Google pays Apple over $20 billion a year to be the default search in the Safari browser. That's somewhere around a fifth of the company's profits, which is really remarkable when you think about it.”

“AI's approval rating is 26%, which is lower than ICE's or just about any other unpopular institution you can think of. People hate this stuff. And the the tech CEOs have realized that they are very, very hated. And so now you're you're seeing some of them be like, yo. Wait a minute. No. No. Like, we're we'll do something good for lots of people that that aren't just us.”

“One innovation that is underappreciated by a lot of people outside the industry is Apple Silicon. The chips in the devices are all Apple chips. And that's been true for iPhones for a long time. It wasn't true for Macs. Macs ran on Intel chips until 2020, when they started ripping them out and putting in Apple chips. Apple chips are really great.”

“One area Apple has also lagged in is artificial intelligence. While other tech giants like Google and Facebook have spent billions of dollars building AI models, Apple hasn't. Siri, you know, look at the modern chatbots. They are, if they are human, then Siri's a Neanderthal. She's pretty, yeah, not very smart. And they're trying to update that, but they're playing from behind.”

“So the Titan project was Apple's $10,000,000,000 effort to build a self driving car, which I think was instinctively something that, honestly, a lot of people really wanted. Right? Like, when I heard that Apple was building a car, like, I definitely wanted to see it. I definitely wanted to test drive it. I definitely wanted to see if songs of innocence would autoplay when I turned the key in the ignition, but they canceled the project in 2024.”

“Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training data. This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“We should try and find ways to get off of taxing human labor. We're going to be trying to encourage job type arrangements in every quarter. And right now, income tax is a discouraging factor on both the employer and the worker. So tax AI, tax the bots, don't tax humans. And the way I would do a universal basic income, if any of them come to me and, you know, is, I would do some amount like $1,200 a month, for every American and just start paying it out as as quickly as you can.”

“Tim Cook, presented Trump with a golden glass statue in August 2025 while he was seeking tariff relief in what just appeared to be an obvious bribe right out in the open. By the way, he did get that tariff relief, so it worked. Tim Cook also attended the VIP screening of Melania, which, again, when I said this man would do anything for his company, I think that is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.”

“John Ternes will take over as CEO of Apple on September 1st. He's been at the company for 25 years. John Ternes is a 50-year-old hardware engineer, mechanical engineer by training. He's been with Apple since 2001. He's an Apple lifer. Four years after he graduated, he came to Apple and steadily rose up the ranks. He's central casting for corporate CEO, just to look at the guy, tall, thin, good looking.”

“Chinese robot beats human best time in half marathon after a stumble. A five foot five humanoid called Lightning Short King, developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, has beat the human world record time for a half marathon. But just before completing the race, there was some drama. Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The robot managed to get back on its feet and ran across the finish line in fifty minutes and twenty six seconds.”

“I think the thing that has made me the most sad, Kevin, has been the darkening of the culture in Silicon Valley where a lot of folks who, I think could have been talked into UBI type proposals, or, hey, let's try and keep the machinery going. They have given up. They're just like, fuck it. I've got my bunker. You know, like, I'm just projecting forward. Like, I have seen that degree of fatalism from many, many more folks in the valley than I would have imagined.”

“When he took over, this was a company that was worth $300 billion. As of today, it's worth $4 trillion, which is a monumental increase in market capitalization. Well, I mean, gosh, the hardest thing for him is how do you increase value for a company that's already trading at $4 trillion? Stepping into the shoes of these two predecessors is got to be tough.”

“John Ternes will take over as CEO of Apple on September 1st. He's been at the company for 25 years. John Ternes is a 50-year-old hardware engineer, mechanical engineer by training. He's been with Apple since 2001. He's an Apple lifer. Four years after he graduated, he came to Apple and steadily rose up the ranks. He's central casting for corporate CEO, just to look at the guy, tall, thin, good looking.”

“I remember when the Apple Watch came out, there was this moment of, like, oh, Apple's cooked. Like, they can no longer innovate. This thing is obviously not going to work. This is just a gadget for luxury users, and this is not going to sort of be useful enough for many people to shell out for. And then I think Tim Cook, to his credit, saw that health was taking off. The people wanted to track their steps. They wanted to know if their blood oxygen levels were changing or if their heartbeat was irregular.”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told them, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise, which you and I would never do if we were running a convenience store.”

“That was yeah. That happened three years into his tenure, and, that rascal Bono convinced him to put songs of innocence into the hands of something like 500,000,000 people. What's your favorite song off songs of innocence, by the way? I have like, that album has started auto playing in my car so many times over the years.”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told it, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise.”

“Jobs was the iconic technology CEO. He had defined the way humans interact with computing devices for 30 years almost, maybe more. So that was quite a legacy for Tim to match. And he didn't try. He didn't try to be the innovative product visionary that Jobs was. He handed that off to others, and he really focused on operations.”

“We should also talk about the fact that under Tim Cook's tenure, Apple has become what I would consider an AI laggard. Right? They are not a frontier AI model company. Their own AI efforts under the banner of Apple Intelligence have been sort of delayed over and over again. They have not managed to give Siri the sort of brain transplant that they have been teasing now for years. And I think it is fair to say that they are behind when it comes to AI and all AI related things.”

“Jobs was the iconic technology CEO. He had defined the way humans interact with computing devices for 30 years almost, maybe more. So that was quite a legacy for Tim to match. And he didn't try. He didn't try to be the innovative product visionary that Jobs was. He handed that off to others, and he really focused on operations.”

“We need to tax AI and then start distributing the gains as quickly and broadly to the American people as we can. Poverty should be an artifact of the past. GDP is going to roar past a $100,000 ahead. And at that point, you should be able to put more into people's hands.”

“When he took over, this was a company that was worth $300 billion. As of today, it's worth $4 trillion, which is a monumental increase in market capitalization. Well, I mean, gosh, the hardest thing for him is how do you increase value for a company that's already trading at $4 trillion? Stepping into the shoes of these two predecessors is got to be tough.”