One of my biggest fears for a floundering Apple is that they start to depart from their commitment to privacy-first design.
The reasons for Apple Intelligence's relative lackluster abilities are numerous and, from everything we hear, primarily political - but I'm certain some executives are questioning whether initiatives like Private Cloud Compute [0] were holding them back. And with app store revenue under siege, some must be questioning whether Apple could get a larger cut of the advertising market to make up for their losses... and such a push would come with all the cross-app tracking implications that are necessary to be competitive there.
IMO this would be a foundational mistake, and a massive tragedy. So many of us choose Apple products not only because of the silky-smooth interactions that flow from their long-standing intentionality in hardware and software design, but also because of the implicit promise of security, privacy, and stability that comes from the lack of hodge-podgeness that's somewhat inherent to the Android and Windows ecosystems. Take away that brand promise, and it's a downward spiral. But bigger companies have made worse choices before.
I guess I am not afraid of that so long as Apple still makes the bulk of their profits on hardware. To be sure though, they have been trying to move more strongly into "services" — as every company seems to be (MSFT, for example).
Spooky23 · 6h ago
I think it’s likely because nobody understands or believes it.
Techie people on HN adopt a “no true Scotsman” attitude, and assert that anything is not enough. People who know nothing don’t understand enough to understand the nuances, see the obvious abuses of privacy on the web, Facebook, etc and assume it’s bullshit.
msgodel · 5h ago
Apple's computing model is, in fact, fundamentally incompatible with privacy. They can say they value privacy all they want but as long as the user doesn't control the machine themselves it means almost nothing.
secstate · 3h ago
Having recently dug an old iPad out of the electronics bin at the transfer station this is acutely felt. I actually found an android tablet at the same time. I appreciate the desire to thwart theft, but lord! Wipe the android tablet, log in with Google, good to go. iPad can only be ground up and added to the asphalt to help slow down the aging of road surfaces. Again, I get the anti-theft angle, but this is so far beyond that. You are literally leasing the hardware from the manufacturer until such time as they decree you should be done with it. Never mind the thought exercise of what Apple could do if they wanted to if you were found to have CSAM and the state asked them to remove your access. No thank you.
bigyabai · 3h ago
Nobody understands or believes Apple's stance either. All they'll do is give us whitepapers on how things should work, which we know has been fabricated at least once in the case of Push Notification backdoors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
This isn't a no-true-scotsman attitude. This is a rational reaction to security theater when nobody can prove that Apple is doing what they claim to be doing.
dagmx · 2h ago
Could you point to the white paper that would apply to notifications privacy? I can’t seem to find anything claiming notifications are encrypted, often the opposite.
bigyabai · 21m ago
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said they were encrypted. I said that Apple deliberately misled developers about the surveillance functionality by pushing whitepapers that do not accurately describe how these systems work. This prevents developers from protecting their users and creates confusion around how Apple services operate.
Even if it was E2EE - trusting Apple with proprietary crypto is like trusting Microsoft to not backdoor Bitlocker. It requires a specifically-qualified moron who doesn't respond to technical arguments and only understands marketing language.
dagmx · 19m ago
Your literal words are
> All they'll do is give us whitepapers on how things should work, which we know has been fabricated at least once in the case of Push Notification backdoors
I’m asking for evidence of your own claim. Apple do not claim that everything is encrypted, they specifically call out various aspects as being unencrypted.
bigyabai · 5m ago
It should be illegal to strawman this hard. Saying that Apple has fabricated a whitepaper is not equivalent to saying that they lied about E2EE. You are conflating two issues here, this issue is not MITM collection. It doesn't matter what Apple (or Google for that matter) says about encryption, because they literally cannot protect your Push Notifications.
"Apple never pretended to care" is not a serious defense. If you don't want to talk about this, nobody is forcing you to reply to my comments.
Yeul · 4h ago
Abuses of privacy? Hardly it is all completely legal.
That is the genius of it the tech industry writes the laws.
How much money did Apple donate to Trump?
Spooky23 · 3h ago
Thank you for illustrating the point so quickly.
yupyupyups · 6h ago
>privacy-first design
I've heard this in Apple's PR campaigns a lot. How is forcing users to upload the private files to iCloud through UX dark patterns a "privacy-first design"?
Me as a tech-knowledgable person fell for it while actively trying to not enable iCloud. Apple devices, never again.
jqpabc123 · 6h ago
Apple's real innovation is a walled garden that has grown in thickness to the point where it is finally starting to exceed legality. The garden is starting to feel more like a prison.
As with most big corporations, Tim and company have an insatiable appetite for your money --- and they have shown an obsessive willingness to restrict free enterprise itself in defiance of court orders if that is what it takes to get it.
yupyupyups · 6h ago
Always has been a prison. People who wanted to break free had to download dodgy software to "jailbreak" their iPhones and now it's so locked down that even that option is no longer possible.
latchup · 3m ago
Unlike IOS itself, most IOS jailbreak tools and package managers are open-source and auditable, as are many of the unsanctioned applications commonly used on jailbroken devices.
The fact you nevertheless refer to this software as "dodgy" really shows how well Apple's messaging works to deter people from using it, even when their main argument against it is security (from what?).
Funny, considering that without Apple's draconian restrictions on user freedoms, IOS security is basically nonexistent even when compared to the low standard set by Android. It is true that the inside of Apple's jail feels safe, but in truth, there is much less keeping attackers out than users in.
aetherspawn · 6h ago
Their big mistake so far is not going up against Office 365 for corporate email hosting (effectively destroying Outlook and Google Workspace) and launching their own MDM.
The minute you can put an iCloud email on your corporate domain, REALLY manage your Apple fleet centrally from a web portal without Jamf, and properly use iCloud for business, Apple wins on every front.
Spending years collaborating with Microsoft over platform SSO was a train wreck and a waste of time (we waited years and nothing works, all the Microsoft stuff is full of bugs).
And why does this make sense? Most of Microsoft’s profit is Office 365, and a decent chunk of Google’s revenue is Workspace; Apple has a chance to go after it all.
AnonHP · 3h ago
I don’t think Apple’s organization structure and its current leadership team are going to be able to handle a corporate market. It takes a different mindset, attitude and focus to work on that. But, never say never! I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
jaybrendansmith · 3h ago
This 'no corporate sales' approach has always been an unwritten Apple rule. It seems likely there are active agreements made with Microsoft in exchange for MSOffice support on Apple hardware.
mingus88 · 3h ago
IMO that would be a huge mistake. Why would they go head to head with MS in the corporate space?
Rather, Apple played to their strengths and made corporate IT come to them. I was there in the early 2010s when they tried to force everyone to leave their iPhones at home and carry a blackberry for work email. Where is blackberry today?
Microsoft tried to have it all once, too. What happened to the windows phone?
> Danny Bolella:
> In all sincerity, I would of course love for many of the AI goodies we see with IDE’s like VS Code and Cursor make it’s way (natively) into Xcode.
I think instead it's time for Apple to acknowledge developers moving out of the Xcode ecosystem and Apple should instead embrace development in VSCode, etc.
JimDabell · 6h ago
They already have a Swift LSP, but I think expecting iOS developers to switch over to VS Code is probably going a bit far. By the time you build things like code signing, SwiftUI previews, build settings, etc. into it, you’re basically building a new IDE on top of VS Code rather than just supporting VS Code itself.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible. It’s just what you’d get at the end wouldn’t really resemble VS Code. Even though I spend a lot of time writing web app code in VS Code, my hope – wearing my iOS developer hat – is that they have a skunkworks project to replace Xcode with a new native IDE, not that they embrace VS Code.
JKCalhoun · 5h ago
I was more suggesting Apple follow where developers are going and not try to lead where few want to follow. And if developers want VSCode, so be it.
I remember when the Cocos framework (a 2D and later 3D gaming engine) was found to be a popular binary that iOS apps were linking against, Apple suddenly saw fit to push their own game engine. I am not sure how many developers came aboard though. Cocos was, shhh!, cross platform and that was likely a problem from Apple's point of view; a boon from the developer's point of view.
JimDabell · 4h ago
I don’t hear many iOS developers clamouring for VS Code. They mostly just want Xcode fixed. The only mention of it in those two articles is somebody wanting “AI goodies we see with IDE’s like VS Code and Cursor make its way (natively) into Xcode.” But there are many wanting a better Xcode.
I’m not sure you can point to Cocos as a motivating factor for Apple, and it certainly wasn’t sudden. It got popular very early on and plateaued. I remember building apps with it for iPhoneOS. SpriteKit didn’t come along until years later.
JKCalhoun · 4h ago
I'm not in the loop then if you say iOS devs just want Xcode fixed. You could be right. You would have to weigh that against devs that are not even testing the iOS waters because they see Xcode as a barrier, are more familiar with their VSCode Cmake ecosystem.
A new framework like SpriteKit requires at least a year (an iOS release cycle) before it sees WWDC ... and then a shipping iOS. My recollection is that this is pretty close to the timeline I described where Cocos starts to show up in abundance in the iOS apps submitted and as a result a team is spun up at Apple to create what ends up being SpriteKit.
You'll have to educate me on the plateauing of Cocos. If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?
JimDabell · 3h ago
> A new framework like SpriteKit requires at least a year (an iOS release cycle) before it sees WWDC ... and then a shipping iOS. My recollection is that this is pretty close to the timeline I described
It’s not. Cocos got popular in the iPhoneOS 2.x days. SpriteKit came along in iOS 7. We’re talking about a period of five years, not one or two.
> If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?
Plateau means it stayed flat, not that it went away. Nothing replaced it. It just didn’t keep getting more and more popular.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Pushback from the HN crowd? I'll say it anyway, Apple should double down on AI.
As loopy as the news of the purchase of Jony Ives company (?) that made the rounds lately, I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's. Whether it can be feathered in to Apple's existing xOS and put into the iPhone, or it requires writing a new platform is yet to be seen. But it's clear to me at least that this is the future.
In fact, if a new AI initiative required a new chip from Apple (A19? A20?) it would make a wild selling point to get some of us to buy new hardware just so we could get the new AI features (Yep, still on my iPhone 12 Mini I bought just before I retired).
(And here I didn't even use the word "agent" — whoops, I just did.)
msgodel · 5h ago
Today on my Linux machine I can prompt an agent and have it run shell commands directly. Until Apple is able to reproduce this on their devices they're behind the curve and I'm nearly certain their leadership is afraid of giving users that much control.
This is the beginning of their decline.
spacemadness · 2h ago
Sorry what point are you making exactly? There are plenty of apps that make API calls to LLMs. I don’t think that’s the problem statement.
JimDabell · 4h ago
> Today on my Linux machine I can prompt an agent and have it run shell commands directly. Until Apple is able to reproduce this on their devices they're behind the curve
I don't think running shell commands is the achilles heel of Apple's ecosystem. I am quite sure most Apple customers are happy not to be running shell commands; they've done pretty good job so far without any shell access ability (unless you're strictly speaking about MacOS — and here too most of their customers have no doubt never launched Terminal).
The agent part may be important — but that's also the thing most likely to land in a future xOS.
msgodel · 5h ago
The agent needs a shell. Canned integrations are doomed to be underwhelming.
Apple themselves published a recent paper pointing out that LLMs are very bad at sticking to algorithms (similar to how they're bad at arithmetic.) So if you want an agent to do anything complex it needs to generate a program to do it.
bigyabai · 3h ago
> I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's.
Well, good thing you bought a phone from the genius minds that brought us Siri!
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
> But Gruber says that this year, for the first time since 2015, Apple has declined the invitation to join. Notably, Gruber published a blog earlier this year taking critical aim at Apple’s mishandling of AI features. Coincidence, I’m sure!
I suspect instead that Apple, knowing they fucked up w/ regard to devs, want to completely control their own mea culpa and not risk a slip-up/soundbite coming from a talk show.
I do expect an apology during the Keynote. How sincere an apology, well that's up to the developers to decide.
> They’ll keep pretending that the Vision Pro is a beloved innovation and not just collecting dust on the shelves of early adopters.
Will they? Or will they instead just artfully not talk about the VisionPro at all. Perhaps quietly pull it sometime later this year. I don't think Apple will want to die on the VisionPro hill.
> Apple executives would do well to remember that it was apps that made the iPhone what it is today.
Are apps still what make the iPhone what it is today? And here I am speaking as a user. The "joy of discovery" when installing new apps died a long, long time ago. Installing a new app is cause for anxiety. If it even works and does not spy on me (or charge me for basic functionality "in app" — or worse yet, require an account or subscription), is it going to become an important addition to my "lifestyle" or another icon buried on some screen or folder in SpringBoard?
To be sure though, this is WWDC and Apple is catering to developers. I'm just saying out loud what I feel about the state of iOS apps these days.
AnonHP · 3h ago
> I suspect instead that Apple, knowing they fucked up w/ regard to devs, want to completely control their own mea culpa and not risk a slip-up/soundbite coming from a talk show.
I have watched many of “The Talk Show” post WWDC episodes, but I don’t think John Gruber actually asks (or has asked) tough questions at that event. This time though, it would’ve been extremely awkward not to ask any questions at all about the state of Apple Intelligence and where it’s heading. For Apple, it would be difficult to focus on other topics that it wants to advertise to the audience.
> I do expect an apology during the Keynote. How sincere an apology, well that's up to the developers to decide.
Apple never apologizes in public and doesn’t admits mistakes as mistakes in public (it may sometimes acknowledge certain things and word it very differently). At least not as a full fledged apology of any sort for various reasons. IIRC, there’s already a class action lawsuit filed against it for misleading and false promises about Apple Intelligence. The last thing Apple would do is provide more ammo for that suit to succeed and for more lawsuits to be filed for every misstep and egregious delivery in/from its announcements.
Spooky23 · 6h ago
I think there more inside baseball to the Gruber story. I really like his work overall and subscribe to his podcast with Ben Thompson.
They’ve been doing victory laps about his story about AI for a couple of months now. It’s weird and out of character… I’d guess Apple lied to him.
spacemadness · 2h ago
“Doesn’t he owe this particular audience some kind of apology after a judge put him on blast for choosing the worst option for developers at every turn?”
I mean perhaps, but this comes off as entirely naive. Does the author really think this would happen?
The reasons for Apple Intelligence's relative lackluster abilities are numerous and, from everything we hear, primarily political - but I'm certain some executives are questioning whether initiatives like Private Cloud Compute [0] were holding them back. And with app store revenue under siege, some must be questioning whether Apple could get a larger cut of the advertising market to make up for their losses... and such a push would come with all the cross-app tracking implications that are necessary to be competitive there.
IMO this would be a foundational mistake, and a massive tragedy. So many of us choose Apple products not only because of the silky-smooth interactions that flow from their long-standing intentionality in hardware and software design, but also because of the implicit promise of security, privacy, and stability that comes from the lack of hodge-podgeness that's somewhat inherent to the Android and Windows ecosystems. Take away that brand promise, and it's a downward spiral. But bigger companies have made worse choices before.
[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Techie people on HN adopt a “no true Scotsman” attitude, and assert that anything is not enough. People who know nothing don’t understand enough to understand the nuances, see the obvious abuses of privacy on the web, Facebook, etc and assume it’s bullshit.
This isn't a no-true-scotsman attitude. This is a rational reaction to security theater when nobody can prove that Apple is doing what they claim to be doing.
Even if it was E2EE - trusting Apple with proprietary crypto is like trusting Microsoft to not backdoor Bitlocker. It requires a specifically-qualified moron who doesn't respond to technical arguments and only understands marketing language.
> All they'll do is give us whitepapers on how things should work, which we know has been fabricated at least once in the case of Push Notification backdoors
I’m asking for evidence of your own claim. Apple do not claim that everything is encrypted, they specifically call out various aspects as being unencrypted.
"Apple never pretended to care" is not a serious defense. If you don't want to talk about this, nobody is forcing you to reply to my comments.
That is the genius of it the tech industry writes the laws. How much money did Apple donate to Trump?
I've heard this in Apple's PR campaigns a lot. How is forcing users to upload the private files to iCloud through UX dark patterns a "privacy-first design"?
Me as a tech-knowledgable person fell for it while actively trying to not enable iCloud. Apple devices, never again.
As with most big corporations, Tim and company have an insatiable appetite for your money --- and they have shown an obsessive willingness to restrict free enterprise itself in defiance of court orders if that is what it takes to get it.
The fact you nevertheless refer to this software as "dodgy" really shows how well Apple's messaging works to deter people from using it, even when their main argument against it is security (from what?).
Funny, considering that without Apple's draconian restrictions on user freedoms, IOS security is basically nonexistent even when compared to the low standard set by Android. It is true that the inside of Apple's jail feels safe, but in truth, there is much less keeping attackers out than users in.
The minute you can put an iCloud email on your corporate domain, REALLY manage your Apple fleet centrally from a web portal without Jamf, and properly use iCloud for business, Apple wins on every front.
Spending years collaborating with Microsoft over platform SSO was a train wreck and a waste of time (we waited years and nothing works, all the Microsoft stuff is full of bugs).
And why does this make sense? Most of Microsoft’s profit is Office 365, and a decent chunk of Google’s revenue is Workspace; Apple has a chance to go after it all.
Rather, Apple played to their strengths and made corporate IT come to them. I was there in the early 2010s when they tried to force everyone to leave their iPhones at home and carry a blackberry for work email. Where is blackberry today?
Microsoft tried to have it all once, too. What happened to the windows phone?
WWDC 2025 Wish Lists: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/06/wwdc-2025-wish-lists/
WWDC 2025 Preview: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/07/wwdc-2025-preview/
> Danny Bolella: > In all sincerity, I would of course love for many of the AI goodies we see with IDE’s like VS Code and Cursor make it’s way (natively) into Xcode.
I think instead it's time for Apple to acknowledge developers moving out of the Xcode ecosystem and Apple should instead embrace development in VSCode, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible. It’s just what you’d get at the end wouldn’t really resemble VS Code. Even though I spend a lot of time writing web app code in VS Code, my hope – wearing my iOS developer hat – is that they have a skunkworks project to replace Xcode with a new native IDE, not that they embrace VS Code.
I remember when the Cocos framework (a 2D and later 3D gaming engine) was found to be a popular binary that iOS apps were linking against, Apple suddenly saw fit to push their own game engine. I am not sure how many developers came aboard though. Cocos was, shhh!, cross platform and that was likely a problem from Apple's point of view; a boon from the developer's point of view.
I’m not sure you can point to Cocos as a motivating factor for Apple, and it certainly wasn’t sudden. It got popular very early on and plateaued. I remember building apps with it for iPhoneOS. SpriteKit didn’t come along until years later.
A new framework like SpriteKit requires at least a year (an iOS release cycle) before it sees WWDC ... and then a shipping iOS. My recollection is that this is pretty close to the timeline I described where Cocos starts to show up in abundance in the iOS apps submitted and as a result a team is spun up at Apple to create what ends up being SpriteKit.
You'll have to educate me on the plateauing of Cocos. If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?
It’s not. Cocos got popular in the iPhoneOS 2.x days. SpriteKit came along in iOS 7. We’re talking about a period of five years, not one or two.
> If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?
Plateau means it stayed flat, not that it went away. Nothing replaced it. It just didn’t keep getting more and more popular.
As loopy as the news of the purchase of Jony Ives company (?) that made the rounds lately, I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's. Whether it can be feathered in to Apple's existing xOS and put into the iPhone, or it requires writing a new platform is yet to be seen. But it's clear to me at least that this is the future.
In fact, if a new AI initiative required a new chip from Apple (A19? A20?) it would make a wild selling point to get some of us to buy new hardware just so we could get the new AI features (Yep, still on my iPhone 12 Mini I bought just before I retired).
(And here I didn't even use the word "agent" — whoops, I just did.)
This is the beginning of their decline.
You can do that on a Mac today as well:
https://steipete.me/posts/2025/claude-code-is-my-computer
The agent part may be important — but that's also the thing most likely to land in a future xOS.
Apple themselves published a recent paper pointing out that LLMs are very bad at sticking to algorithms (similar to how they're bad at arithmetic.) So if you want an agent to do anything complex it needs to generate a program to do it.
Well, good thing you bought a phone from the genius minds that brought us Siri!
I suspect instead that Apple, knowing they fucked up w/ regard to devs, want to completely control their own mea culpa and not risk a slip-up/soundbite coming from a talk show.
I do expect an apology during the Keynote. How sincere an apology, well that's up to the developers to decide.
> They’ll keep pretending that the Vision Pro is a beloved innovation and not just collecting dust on the shelves of early adopters.
Will they? Or will they instead just artfully not talk about the VisionPro at all. Perhaps quietly pull it sometime later this year. I don't think Apple will want to die on the VisionPro hill.
> Apple executives would do well to remember that it was apps that made the iPhone what it is today.
Are apps still what make the iPhone what it is today? And here I am speaking as a user. The "joy of discovery" when installing new apps died a long, long time ago. Installing a new app is cause for anxiety. If it even works and does not spy on me (or charge me for basic functionality "in app" — or worse yet, require an account or subscription), is it going to become an important addition to my "lifestyle" or another icon buried on some screen or folder in SpringBoard?
To be sure though, this is WWDC and Apple is catering to developers. I'm just saying out loud what I feel about the state of iOS apps these days.
I have watched many of “The Talk Show” post WWDC episodes, but I don’t think John Gruber actually asks (or has asked) tough questions at that event. This time though, it would’ve been extremely awkward not to ask any questions at all about the state of Apple Intelligence and where it’s heading. For Apple, it would be difficult to focus on other topics that it wants to advertise to the audience.
> I do expect an apology during the Keynote. How sincere an apology, well that's up to the developers to decide.
Apple never apologizes in public and doesn’t admits mistakes as mistakes in public (it may sometimes acknowledge certain things and word it very differently). At least not as a full fledged apology of any sort for various reasons. IIRC, there’s already a class action lawsuit filed against it for misleading and false promises about Apple Intelligence. The last thing Apple would do is provide more ammo for that suit to succeed and for more lawsuits to be filed for every misstep and egregious delivery in/from its announcements.
They’ve been doing victory laps about his story about AI for a couple of months now. It’s weird and out of character… I’d guess Apple lied to him.
I mean perhaps, but this comes off as entirely naive. Does the author really think this would happen?