2025-03-09 10:41:00
Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal timeline for the Internet.
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2025-03-09 09:16:42
This whole 1989 profile of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli by John Culhane for the LA Times is full of enjoyable nuggets, but this fact blew my mind:
Giovanni Broccoli and his brother emigrated to Long Island from Calabria at the turn of the century. According to research done in Florence by Broccoli’s wife of 30 years, Dana, the brothers were descended from the Broccolis of Carrera, who first crossed two Italian vegetables, cauliflower and rabe, to produce the dark green, thick-stalked vegetable that took their name and eventually supported them in the United States.
Giovanni’s brother started a broccoli farm on Long Island, and soon all of Giovanni’s family worked for him. “Myself, my brother, my mother, my father — all working on our hands and knees,” said Broccoli, who picked up the nickname Cubby (after a round-faced comic strip character) at about that time. “Later on, we had our own farm.”
Two weeks ago on The Talk Show, I even joked with Paul Kafasis about the fact that in over 30,000 posts in Daring Fireball’s history, the only ones that contain the string “broccoli” are ones about the Bond movies, not the vegetable. Until now I guess.
2025-03-09 08:56:57
Pierce, David Pierce:
On this episode of The Vergecast , we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see — but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.
I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the Bond franchise, but I do love talking and thinking about it. Really enjoyed this chat.
2025-03-09 04:11:03
Simon Willison:
These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user’s behalf.
This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based system has access to private data, tools it can call and exposure to potentially malicious instructions (like emails and text messages from untrusted strangers) there’s a significant risk that an attacker might subvert those tools and use them to damage or exfiltrate a user’s data.
I published this piece about the risk of prompt injection to personal digital assistants back in November 2023, and nothing has changed since then to make me think this is any less of an open problem.
Prompt injection seems to be a problem that LLM providers can mitigate, but cannot completely solve. They can tighten the lid, but they can’t completely seal it. But with your private information, the lid needs to be provably sealed — an airtight seal, not a “well, don’t turn it upside down or shake it” seal. So a pessimistic way to look at this personalized Siri imbroglio is that Apple cannot afford to get this wrong, but the nature of LLMs’ susceptibility to prompt injection might mean it’s impossible to ever get right. And if it is possible, it will require groundbreaking achievements. It’s not enough for Apple to “catch up”. They have to solve a vexing problem — as yet unsolved by OpenAI, Google, or any other leading AI lab — to deliver what they’ve already promised.
So Apple had promised for this year — and oft promoted — an entire set of features that they not only have now acknowledged will not ship this year, but which they might, in fact, never be able to ship. Makes me wonder how many people inside Apple were voicing these concerns a year ago, and why they lost the debate to start promising these features last June and advertising them in September.
2025-03-09 04:01:53
Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.
The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.
In the ad spot, Ramsey sees someone familiar approaching and asks Siri the name of the person they had a meeting with the previous month at a specific restaurant.
Siri immediately responded with the name presumably based on a calendar event, email, or message on Ramsey’s iPhone.
I think that was the only TV commercial Apple ran showing the “personalized Siri through App Intents” feature that Apple has now admitted won’t ship in iOS 18, but I saw that commercial a lot during the baseball playoffs and NFL season. (I tend only to see TV commercials while watching sports.) The other Bella-Ramsey–starring Apple Intelligence ads all showcase Apple Intelligence features that are now shipping. But did Apple run other ads (TV, print, billboard) promoting this non-existent feature? I’m wondering what else they might send down the memory hole now that they’re facing reality on these personalized Siri features.
Apple’s product pages for Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, and MacOS 15 Sequoia are lousy with references to these “new era for Siri” features that we now know aren’t going to ship this year. This is a marketing fiasco.
2025-03-08 06:00:00
Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:
Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday.
In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
I really don’t mean to be overly pedantic (so I’ve edited this post since original publication), but Apple’s statement reads “in the coming year”, so I think it’s possible we could see those features in iOS 19.0, 19.1, or 19.2 before the end of 2025. Would I want to bet on that? No. This feels like something of a reset, not just a “we need a few months” type thing.
Apple did not give a reason for the delays. The iPhone maker had previously indicated the features would come in 2025.
Again, hairsplitting, but I actually think “It’s going to take us longer than we thought” is a pretty good explanation.
