Failure Has Many Fathers at Apple Right Now
We all know the saying "success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan," but reading a couple new reports about the current inner-workings of Apple, it almost feels inverted at the most valuable company in the world.
The first report, which Wayne Ma published for The Information yesterday, details the in-fighting leading up to the launch of the new 'Apple Intelligence' features at last year's WWDC and the complete and utter bellyflop that the company performed afterwards, culminating in the delays to the most highly-touted features showcased at the event nearly a year ago.
Ma's report paints a picture of a battle between two warring factions ostensibly working towards the same goal, but using completely different, and often conflicting methods. Call it: Team Giannandrea vs. Team Federighi. Now, that's obviously going to be oversimplified. And it certainly doesn't seem like the two leaders dislike each other – they were, undoubtedly not coincidentally, both on stage with John Gruber for his live Talk Show event after WWDC last year. But they're also clearly two very different people with two very different styles of leadership. As Ma details, John Giannandrea is a more reserved, quiet manager. Craig Federighi is basically the opposite. And if management styles bleed into their teams, it's little wonder the two sides were at odds.
And this seemingly culminated in the shake-up of the Siri (and broader AI) team a few weeks ago, with Federighi replacing Giannandrea as the new leader of the group. But it's also not just about those two. One level below each, Ma details a battle of sorts between key lieutenants Robby Walker and Sebastien Marineau-Mes (and, tangentially, Mike Rockwell). Some of this was detailed in an earlier report by Mark Gurman for Bloomberg, but this new reporting, seemingly backed up by yet another story by Tripp Mickle today for The New York Times suggests that this was an even more contentious battle than the one being waged by their bosses. And again, Team Federighi clearly won, and by extension, so did Team Marineau-Mes and Rockwell.
Honestly, reading these reports, even if just some of the details are as bad as they sound, it's hard to see how Giannandrea and Walker can stay at Apple. Again, it's undoubtedly not as cut and dry as it may seem on paper, with Mickle getting intel that Giannandrea had long ago asked for the ability to buy up more GPUs to get their AI work done, only to have it blocked by CFO Luca Maestri – someone who is, incidentally, no longer in that role. Apple has a long history of slow exiting folks – not necessarily for bad reasons – but don't be shocked if all of these people are on their way out at some point in the not-too-distant future, perhaps just delayed for the disastrous optics of it all. We'll see...
But really, this all speaks to what is clearly a larger issue: a lot of this falls – or should fall – on Tim Cook.
There's just no sugarcoating it. He's the CEO. The buck literally stops with him – if the CFO overrides him on the GPU request, he should veto that, as he apparently had already signed off. If the CFO changed his mind, okay, but why? Just cost? That would indicate a colossal misreading of the situation. It's nice that Apple's CapEx spend has been so much lower than their peers. Sorry, that's nice – for Wall Street. It's potentially not nice at all for Apple and, by extension, in the long run, shareholders. Again, we'll see – but then again, we're already seeing!
You read all of these little details in both reports and it's very clear that the CEO needed to step in to clean this all up a lot earlier than he ultimately did.
Of course, Cook has other problems now – far more immediate ones with the tariff situation as it relates to their supply chains, mainly in China. Cook is seemingly the best person in the world to deal with this particular crisis – as he already did so once, in Trump's first term – but it's also, in a way, a crisis of his own making. Arguably Cook's crowning achievement at Apple is the supply chain he built in China which allowed the company to scale the business in ways that the world had never seen before. And that, in turn, gave Apple that title of most valuable company in the world. It may have been Steve Jobs product decisions that led up to that point, but it was Cook's supply chain decisions that got them over that line.
But, as it turns out, live by the Chinese supply chain, die by the Chinese supply chain. Apple has been hustling to diversify, of course. But many of the other countries in which they're now operating also face tariff challenges. What Cook really needs are exemptions, again, just like the last time around. He paid the cost to the boss, but that boss may have a different agenda this time. Yet again, we'll see...
But back to the AI fiasco, this feels like a situation where Cook just completely failed to read the company. His company. From Ma's report:
Some of Apple’s struggles in AI have stemmed from deeply ingrained company values—for example, its militant stance on user privacy, which has made it difficult for the company to gain access to large quantities of data for training models and to verify whether AI features are working on devices.
But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities within Apple, according to multiple people who worked in the AI and software engineering groups. More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine-learning group led by Giannandrea—known as AI/ML for short—told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution. They singled out Walker as lacking both ambition and an appetite for taking risks on designing future versions of the voice assistant.
Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group’s relaxed culture and struggles with execution have even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials: AIMLess.
Long before the explicit tariff threat, Cook clearly knew that AI would be an issue – optically for Wall Street, if nothing else – and so they set the stage, quite literally, to showcase their work at WWDC. But it was obviously ahead of when they were ready to do so, and that's just a complete and utter failure in strategy.
And as these reports detail, it was a failure on the part of Walker (seemingly focused on more trivial AI things and moving too slowly on even those), of Giannandrea (downplaying the role "chatbots" would play in all of this and being lackadaisical about Apple's response), and ultimately Cook (in presiding over all of this clear and obvious infighting). These reports paint a picture of Apple that wasn't just aimless, they were rudderless.
Former Apple employees have referred to Siri as a “hot potato,” continuously passed between different teams, including those led by Apple’s services chief, Eddy Cue, and by Federighi. However, none of these reorganizations led to significant improvements in Siri’s performance.
Now, after seven years, it’s back under Federighi’s oversight, with some former Apple employees saying the change was long overdue, especially given the AI group’s poor track record.
For example, Federighi’s group also has its own machine-learning team, which has absorbed more AI responsibilities over time, prompting clashes with some of Giannandrea’s teams. The AI team under Federighi is responsible for many of the AI features, grouped under the name Apple Intelligence, successfully released so far.
Yep, that's all on Cook. As is this type of nonsense:
Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year one of Giannandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team.
It didn’t help the relations between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine-learning engineers that goes by the name Intelligent Systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastien Marineau-Mes.
Over the years, Intelligent Systems has trained its own models and built demos that enabled users to control apps with voice commands, often without help from the Siri team. That created tensions with the Siri group. In one internal Apple presentation, a member of Intelligent Systems showed a slide depicting an animation of two mountains smashed together and flattened, which some saw as a subtle dig at Giannandrea’s hill-climbing philosophy, according to two people with direct knowledge.
I mean, this isn't quite Microsoft org-chart bad, but it's getting there... Cook should have snuffed this out months and months ago. Instead, we're getting features that are delayed by months and months – Ma pegs some of them coming in 2026, while Mickle's report cites sources saying they're still aiming to have at least some ready for this coming fall. Regardless, the whole thing is beyond embarrassing.
We're once again just a few weeks away from WWDC. What a fascinating one it will be! Less so because of what Apple has to show off this year, and more in how they show it off, and who shows it off! Will they reference any of these internal battles? Undoubtedly not. But the silence will be deafening.
Failure, it seems, has many fathers right now at Apple.
M.G. Siegler