Apple Newsroom, “John Giannandrea to Retire From Apple”:

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

After the fiasco around Apple Intelligence and the “more personalized Siri” features — which were announced at WWDC in June 2024, but postponed until 2026 in a tail-between-their-legs announcement in March 2025 — and the executive reshuffling immediately after that delay was announced that put Mike Rockwell in charge of Siri and moved all or most of Apple Intelligence and Siri under Craig Federighi, it would have been much more surprising if Giannandrea had stayed at Apple. In fact, I’m surprised he wasn’t out before WWDC this past June.

I don’t think we need to wait for additional details to know that he was squeezed out. If, as Mark Gurman reported back in March, “Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development”, why was he still there?

As for Subramanya, according to his LinkedIn profile, he was at Google for 16 years, and left to join Microsoft only five months ago. Either he didn’t like working at Microsoft, or Apple made him an offer he couldn’t refuse (or, perhaps, both).

A user-hostile “lose your phone, lose your account history” architecture may well be “secure” in a technical sense, but it’s the sort of brittleness that’s kept Signal from achieving more mainstream use.

ohoj Software: We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Ducklet. While we had high hopes for this product, it has unfortunately not proven to be commercially viable, and as a result, we can no longer dedicate the time and resources necessary to support it moving forward. I thought this app had potential. I’m sorry […]

Jon Henshaw (via Jeff Johnson): Jon Henshaw: I got pretty excited when Zuckerberg and Meta were being serious about integrating ActivityPub into Threads. And a lot of people I knew were just like, “It’s not going to happen,” and “They’re going to screw it up,” but I thought it was going to be for real […]

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

Sponsored by:

• Clic for Sonos: No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.