Apple’s iCloud, Health, and Artificial Intelligence teams are seeing departures, Mark Gurman reports via his “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg News.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Some Apple employees tell me that a notable number of engineers are departing Apple’s cloud services, health and AI groups. Here are two big names: Emily Fox, in charge of Health AI research, is departing for a university position starting later this year, and Ruslan Meshenberg, who was a leader on Apple’s cloud infrastructure team after serving as a Netflix VP, just left for Google…
–the employees may be less optimistic about their work. What gigantic advancements have we seen in recent years from those groups?
Apple launched iCloud+ this year, but it just added a handful of features to existing paid iCloud accounts: Private Relay (a VPN on steroids), custom domains and new features for hiding your email address. I think Apple has larger ambitions to revamp its aging cloud infrastructure, but those changes are likely far off.
Apple’s AI team has cooked up some cool features, like better on-device processing for Siri, but we’ve yet to see a long-awaited full Siri revamp. Apple’s Health team has struggled with its own internal issues, and users are clamoring for additional Apple Watch sensors like those for blood-sugar monitoring.
MacDailyNews Take: They were probably just tired of being served shit sandwiches from wildly overpaid hypocrites.
I’ve had more than enough of the nauseatingly sanctimonious Tim Cook – and I bet most Apple employees have, too.
The only reason I put up with Tim Cook for all of these years was his unwavering stance on privacy.
But, he proved himself to be a spineless hypocrite, as expected (given his repeated embarrassing capitulations to Communist China).
MacDailyNews Take: BOOM!
Thanks for telling it like it is all in a single compact sentence, MDN!
There’s no way for Apple to reel this disaster back in. They’ve already announced to the world that they were willing to destroy privacy, and they keep doubling and tripling down on it by adding empty FAQs and tweaks that solve nothing, so there’s no way for them to continue to claim to be the company that champions and protects privacy.
Other CEOs – those who aren’t empty undeserving heroes to woke ignoramus millennials – would get shown the exit over such a blunder.
He has proved that he will abuse his power. Remember the last election!?
Regardless of what they claim (THE BS)… this is a mass surveillance initiative….180 from their stance and Mantra all these years… and a betrayal of User and Investors alike.
I hope some Sharp Lawyers are already working on a massive class action lawsuit!!!
When will the Apple board realize that Apple doesn’t make money because of Tim Cook; Apple makes money because of Steve Jobs.
Fire Tim Cook and get a real man in there. One with vision, and zero propensity for nausea-inducing virtue signaling.
always fun to see who is more ignorant, the MDN editors or the trolls in the comments 🤣🤣🤣🤣
You win the ignorance race by a mile, sandstorm!
Electronic Frontier Foundation: If You Build It, They Will Come: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship Around the World
Apple has created an infrastructure that is all too easy to redirect to greater surveillance and censorship. The program will undermine Apple’s defense that it can’t comply with the broader demands.
All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, the adoption of the iPhoto hash matching to iMessage, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. Apple has a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the necessary changes. China and doubtless other countries already have hashes and content classifiers to identify messages impermissible under their laws, even if they are protected by international human rights law. The abuse cases are easy to imagine: governments that outlaw homosexuality might require a classifier to be trained to restrict apparent LGBTQ+ content, or an authoritarian regime might demand a classifier able to spot popular satirical images or protest flyers.
Now that Apple has built it, they will come. With good intentions, Apple has paved the road to mandated security weakness around the world, enabling and reinforcing the arguments that, should the intentions be good enough, scanning through your personal life and private communications is acceptable.
Well when you tell your iCloud team to add a back door, smart people are going to leave.
I am dating myself here, but a part of a movie titled “Days and Wine and Roses” (Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick).
“The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play
Through the meadow land toward a closing door
A door marked “nevermore” that wasn’t there before.
The lonely night discloses just a passing breeze filled with memories
Of the golden smile that introduced me to
The days of wine and roses and you”
The Apple land never more…
We are closed in by a door marked “nevermore” that wasn’t there before.
Filled with memories….