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>Swift appeared in IOS first

Which makes perfect sense. We talk to our phones all the time anyway, and hands-free is crucial. For desktop, not so much.

>APFS (not AFS) is the default in IOS, and still in feature preview and pretty unusable in 10.12. It's "expected" it will be released for desktop in 2017

Which makes perfect sense. A constrained environment without an exposed filesystem like iOS is easier to convert to a new FS. A full blown desktop OS not so much. That's why it needs much more testing and development to deliver the latter.

But they ARE doing this testing and development.

(Btw, APFS is not "the default in iOS" yet. It will be when 10.3 is released -- it is still in beta atm).



I agree it makes sense.

But it also indicates that Apple isn't really designing for the Mac as the author points out.

I mean, Siri is the biggest feature Apple is touting for Sierra (http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra/). And as you point out, it's something that doesn't even make all that much sense on the Mac.


I may be in the minority here, but I find Siri just about as annoying as the old Clippit thingie in Microsoft Office. It's the first thing I turn off.


>But it also indicates that Apple isn't really designing for the Mac as the author points out.

Maybe they don't but I don't see them doing anything major on the iOS side either. Both platforms are quite mature by now anyway.

(And Apple was never about revolutionary new designs and jumps. Back in the day of the iPod and early MBPs etc, we cheered and waited anxiously for at best incremental changes -- now it has USB, now it has a different touch wheel, now it has a color screen, now it has wifi, now it does video, etc, year over year).

>And as you point out, it's something that doesn't even make all that much sense on the Mac.

Yes, but people (and pundits) have been asking for it all the same to appear on the Mac anyway.

And "talking to your computer" has been a thing from the times of 50's sci-fi stories even.


I'm sure they'll figure it out at some point, but the mystique of Apple only releasing something when it was "ready" has been over for a while now. So not only did it come later, it was less evolved than the Windows implementation a year prior. Cortana felt useful from day one for various tasks. Siri? Only in a subset cases.


Siri is a humiliating embarrassment. There is no other way to describe it. The only time I ever use it is for comedic relief, or to demonstrate the obvious superiority of either Google's, Microsoft's, or Amazon's implementations. To Apple, it's just another in a long series of marketing-driven features rolled out into some perceived white space in the competitive landscape and then abandoned. It's ridiculous that something so potentially game-changing to enable non-technical users, which is theoretically the market Apple thinks it owns, has gotten such short shrift at Apple, even in the face of growing (and superior) competition.


> The only time I ever use it is for comedic relief, or to demonstrate the obvious superiority of either Google's, Microsoft's, or Amazon's implementations.

Curious here - can you give some examples? Siri seems to work better (on friends' devices) than "OK Google" on my Moto X.


I don't know how well Cortana works, but Siri works very well for English. It is passable in Swedish for every-day language (like "påminn mig att köpa mjölk ägg och smör" will be fine) whereas anything remotely technical or heaven forbid English will be a jumbled mess. Google is understandably leaps and bounds ahead of Apple, and it's not surprising that there is essentially nothing in the field of machine learning coming out of Apple, whereas Google is basically _the_ ML company on Earth right now.


Apple was never about revolutionary new designs and jumps.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple


Yeah our desktops are just the thing we use to make those, no big deal really




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