This week was Apple's biggest conference of the year, WWDC
2025. And recently Apple's not been in
the news for many positive things.
And spoiler alert, it only got worse.
The conference can only really be described as disappointing at
best. And what made it even worse was
just before the conference, Apple's team launched a research
paper. This research paper basically
took a swipe at all the big AI labs, saying that large language
models never reason, they've only ever memorized.
In today's episode, we're going to discuss the conference, the
research paper, and the fact that Johnny I've, Apple's most
historically important designer ever, has just joined Open AI
and explain why I think this spells a lot of trouble for
Apple. This is in the leap with Jack
Horton. I hope you enjoy the show.
So let's start at this year's big keynote at the Apple WWE C
conference, where usually they would announce the most exciting
new updates and features and strategies of the year.
And you're probably expecting some from VI News or Siri
updates or something really interesting.
So with that in mind, what do we think the big headline was?
In actual fact, their big headline of the year was that
they've revolutionized user interface with something they're
calling Liquid Glass. Now before you get too excited,
let me translate this from marketing speak to human speak.
It basically took a trend called Glassmorphism from 2022 and
probably arguably 2016 Windows and slapped a new brand name on
it just like they did with Apple Intelligence.
If you've never heard of Glassmorphism, it's a design fod
where everything looked like frosted bathroom windows.
Renaming this to Liquid Glass just like their Apple
Intelligence rebrand. It's certainly we should all
start to learn from which is branding is more important
apparently than substance. And if we keep going in this
direction of liquid glass or frosted glass windows and
bathrooms that I guess eventually user interfaces being
visible, which to say the least is not very accessible for those
that are hard of sight, good luck trying to navigate the
Frosted Windows App Store. What I find particularly funny
is that Windows actually did this with Windows Vista about 15
years ago. And anyone that remembers Vista
would know how that turned out. Which is probably the worst
operating system update in history.
And I found some quite funny tweets about this Tom Warren on
Twitter or X sorry, said that I can't wait to not be able to
read anything on the new iPhone. And I think that's someday all
this might make me seem like an Apple hater, which is just not
the case. All I've got an Apple Mac, I've
got an iPhone, I've got an iPad. So I'm actually the opposite.
But I'm incredibly disappointed in them.
And I think to be honest, they're in big trouble.
And I've come on to exactly the reasons I think that is going to
be true. This is why they're in trouble,
because they're so far behind on Siri.
And the fact that they can't have a unified vision of what
Syria is supposed to be is kind of crazy to me because open AI
are literally telling them what they should do, which is a
universal assistant on every single device.
That's what Sam Altman came on a stage, and that's their vision
for what AI is supposed to be. And this isn't just a small
little problem that Apple are facing.
This disaster's been brewing for over a decade.
I think it's a master class on how to completely fumble one of
the biggest tech revolutions probably since the smartphone.
So if we start with Siri, because that's where this whole
mess started. Siri was launched in 2011, so 14
years ago, and somehow it's gotten arguably worse.
And meanwhile, Google have launched their Gemini where they
can actually have real life conversations.
It understands context of the app and the screen.
You can have your camera holding up to things in the real world,
and it can tell you what it sees.
And it integrates in all applications.
And one of the reasons for this complete fumble is that Apple
had been at war with itself for years until very recently.
John G Andrea was head of AI at Apple, and Apple poached this
person from Google in 2018 to run all of Apple's AI efforts.
When this happened, the head of software at Apple, So Craig
Federighi apparently had 0 faith in this person and what he did
is he started a competing AI team.
So that's right, Apple had two separate AI teams in the same
company fighting for the same resources trying to build
competing products. The team under Federighi
actually nicknamed that other team as the Aimless.
So you know that company culture is probably quite problematic
when employees are creating nicknames that are very toxic
and negative about each other. And it gets even better.
When Chachi BT launched, Gee Andrea basically said that LLMS
have very limited utility in the world.
This culture sounds very much like the early days of Apple,
when Steve Jobs was to build this rampaging around Apple,
doing incredible things but being quite divisive.
Now this dysfunction got so bad this year that Tim and Kirk
apparently lost all confidence in Gee Andrea and strict control
of Siri from them. And I actually handed it to Mike
Rockwell, who was the person behind the Vision Pro.
So the Apple Vision Pro, if you remember though, it's the three
and a half $1000 headset that probably about 1000 people
bought. And he goes well beyond just the
culture with their AI efforts, because Apple's internal data
centres are running on about 50,000 GPUs, many of them were
five years old. And the AI teams have been
begging the likes of Google and Amazon just to get enough
computing power to train the models.
So that's the same Google and Amazon they're actually trying
to compete with. And then if we go back in time
when we remember that Apple was promising all these amazing AI
features that are going to be ready for the iPhone 16 launch,
well, it turns out only half of the promised chip budget got
approved because the Apple CFO told the AI team just to do more
with less. So when all the other big
companies see that AI is actually the next big computing
platform and is spending really Big, Apple cut their AI team's
budget in half. Now, I'm not saying spending
more equals better results, but if you're a technology company
and you're not spending more making big bets and willing to
RIP up the entire playbook or business model, I think you're
in deep trouble. The idea of product market fits,
or when a product aligns with a market and a need and a want is
something that every company has lost right now because every
single person's needs and wants are changing so fast because of
this new technology. And what frustrates me most
about Apple right now is that Steve Jobs would have cut 75% of
the fat when it comes to Apple. So he'd have cancelled every
product that wasn't going to deliver triple digit growth.
He would have ruthlessly cut teams and made everyone
incredibly focused and aligned on what was most important.
And he'd guarantee he would have been in the office of the
software and the design teams every single day making sure
this thing happened and this sort of energy with a founder or
a leader or a visionary. He was in the office with the
team day in, day out driving those outcomes.
It's something that Steve Jobs was famous for and I guarantee
something that has been lost over the last few years.
And this comes to the second reason I think they're in
trouble, which is their way of thinking about the world.
And this comes to the point of that research paper.
So Apple know they're behind and their answer wasn't to try and
make big bets. For example, I suggested about,
I think about 10 episodes or so ago, that if I was Apple, I
would spend a huge amount of money to buy an AI lab and just
leapfrog everybody and own our own model.
So we own every inch of the stock and we can triple down on
that user experience across all interfaces in every device
because Apple can own the stock. That's always been their
strategy. And instead they've not done any
of that. They've released a research
paper arguing basically that all these large language models are
rubbish and they're not actually reasoning.
Tim Cook must have genuinely been furious because this became
the backdrop of the conference right around the time of their
annual conference, the WWDC 2025, when everyone was
expecting Apple to have some kind of cool breakthrough.
And instead they dropped a paper called The Illusion of Thinking,
Understanding the strengths and limitations of reasoning models.
Now let me break down what this paper actually claimed, because
it's important to understand. So our researchers tested AI
models on a puzzle called the Tower of Hanoi, which is
basically a game which stacks rings and you have to move disks
from one pole to another without putting a bigger disk on a small
one. It's a logic puzzle with a known
algorithmic solution, and the big finding was that AI started
failing when the puzzle got too complex.
So Claude could handle about 6 discs.
It struggled with 7 and gave up at 8.
And the conclusion was the AI models therefore don't reason,
they just pass a match really, really well.
Now, of course, this was a great day for many AI skeptics, namely
Gary Marcus, who has been quite famous in AI Twitter and social
media circles for trying to make a career out of basically being
incredibly pessimistic about AI, and he tried to call it a
knockout blow for LMS. And obviously lots of people
were sharing this online too. That being said, my personal
opinion plus many researchers I'll go into, is they're just
all revision. It really doesn't matter.
For example, many pointed out that AI models weren't failing
because they couldn't reason, they were failing because they
were hitting token limits, which is the equivalent of running out
of space to write their answers on a piece of paper.
One researcher called Lisa and Avgab actually replicated the
exact experiment and found that models were literally telling
the researchers they couldn't complete the tasks due to the
output constraints. So instead of just giving up,
the models would explain the algorithm for solving the puzzle
and create the code to implement it.
In other words, the AI was smart enough to recognize its
limitations and provide alternative solutions.
But Apple's researchers said they interpreted this as proof
that AI doesn't actually reason. And what was also reported is
that upper researchers actually prevented the AI models from
writing code to solve the problems.
And they acted surprise when the models can solve coding problems
without being allowed to code. And one of the researchers let
the AI models use their full set of capabilities.
So reasoning, researching, writing, coding, they solved the
puzzle really easily even with hundreds of disks.
So my take here is that Apple is really in trouble if it doesn't
start to change its thinking fast again.
This Twitter post sums it up perfectly.
Be Apple, richest company in the world, every advantage
imaginable. Go all in on AI, make countless
promises, get immediately lapped by everyone.
Then two years into the race with nothing to show for it,
you'd give it write a paper up how how it's all fake anyway and
it really doesn't matter. Now I don't think it even
matters if models reason or not because most of us care whether
this model does a thing better than the last model and faster.
Not the academic definition of reasoning.
Now that's not to say these debates shouldn't happen, they
really should. But Apple making this their
issue to focus on is just madness.
They're a consumer company. They care about what everyday
people and customers want to do faster and easier.
And this gets us to the third and final reason I think they're
in trouble. And this one I find particularly
interesting. And the third reason is that the
core business might not be there forever.
And if it is there, it's going to change.
As we've seen. I have very little faith in them
executing and importantly, managing that change.
A good example of this change is Johnny Oliver and Sam Altman.
And now if you don't know Johnny, I've other than probably
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, there would literally be no Apple
today without him. He was this legendary designer
that came up with his team for most of the concepts between the
iPod, the iPhone, iPod, and basically every iconic Apple
product that ever made the company what it is today.
And he just joined Open AI. So let that sink in from Evan,
Apple's most famous and most important designer ever.
The guy who literally shaped the modern tech aesthetic.
He turned Apple from a computer company into a lifestyle brand,
has now sold his business to Open AI and partnered with Sam
Altman on creating what they call the next generation device
of the AI era. Sam Altman aims to ship 100
million AI devices and thinks that this collaboration could
add a trillion dollars in value to Open AI.
And with a number of leaked meeting recordings, Sam Altman
described their secret device as some of them that will be fully
aware of the user's surroundings, unobtrusive enough
to rest in someone's pocket or a desk, and positioned as a third
core device that a person would put on their desk after a
MacBook and an iPhone. So while Apple is making the
apps on their phones look a little bit more transparent and
publishing papers on how AI doesn't even really work
properly, their former design genius is literally building the
future AI hardware with one of their biggest potential
competitors. Because Open AI is the leader in
consumer AI. That's where a massive chunk of
Open AI's revenue comes from. And this is just one example of
people trying to invent the next consumer device.
Take Meta. They've actually partnered with
Ray Ban on glasses that take great photos and videos.
The audio quality is apparently really good and obviously
they're stylish enough to probably make people wear them
because it's Ray Ban and now Google is doing the exact same.
They're partnering with Warby Parker.
And if Google started shipping very nice looking glasses
powered by Gemini with real time, say, translation, vision,
AI, search and integrate into all of their services, what is
Apple going to compete with Siri?
Now, I can't say if any of these potential devices could really
take over the iPhone, but again, I don't believe that Apple could
react and change and execute properly on this if it did.
So I'll give you one final important tape before I say
goodbye today. I don't think this is about AI
or design language or corporate dysfunction.
I think it's about a company that's built its entire modern
identity on being ahead of the curve and taking existing
technology and making it so much better and redefining entire
product categories. The iPhone wasn't the first
smartphone, but it was one of the few that didn't suck.
Apple's whole thing was let others fumble around and then
we'll turn up and do it. Brian, this time they're turning
up very late, empty handed, relying on other people's
technologies and are spending time publishing research papers
that seem to me quite petty. And the tragic part is this was
avoidable. Siri was around in 2011.
They had a seven-year head start.
But instead of building on that advantage, they let internal
politics and egos and nonsense destroying any potential
progress they could have made. Almost all of this was
happening. Open Eye was just busy changing
the world. I don't want to be completely
unfair here. Apple still makes good products,
but as someone that has loved the way Apple have produced
industrial design at scale and appreciate how difficult it is
to create such incredible products that so many people
love and build their entire brand on, think different.
Well, it just leaves me very disappointed and it's a big
lesson of what not to do if you're a leader of an
organization right now. Embrace focus and start making
bets, otherwise you'll probably regret in a few years.
Anyway, thanks for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode
and as always, share this into a slot channel a WhatsApp chart to
a friend that lives Apple and may want to hear an interesting
perspective. See you next week.