That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware.
"Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out.
It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless.
TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
A few months ago, for quite a few years, Siri (in the car) would respond correctly to "Play playlist <playlist name>". Now it interprets that as of about two months ago that it should play some songs of the genre (I have a playlist named "modern").
> I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
I have almost the opposite problem this year. I tell the HomePod to turn the office lights on, it sometimes interprets this as a request to play music even though my library is actually empty, and the response is therefore to tell me that rather than turn on the lights.
Back in the pandemic, same problem with Alexa. Except it was in the kichen, so it said (the German equivalent of) "I can't find 'Kitchen' in your Spotify playlist" even though we didn't even have Spotify.
"Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.