Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs

by Yukari Iwatani Kane

  Word had it that Ive asked Cook for a private jet. Jobs used to fly in a Gulfstream, paid for by Apple, with the tail number N2N. With his newfound importance, Ive now wanted the same. But there, Cook and the board had reportedly drawn a line. They told him no.

  Even if they had granted him his own plane, Ive wouldn’t have strayed far. There was much work ahead.

  In the first significant victory of his tenure, Cook had succeeded in keeping the executive team intact. For the time being, he and the others maintained the illusion that nothing at Apple had changed.

  9

  Looks Like Rain

  When the iPhone 4S went on sale, a junior high school teacher in Fallon, Nevada, was among the first to buy one. John Keitz had always been a fan of Palm’s smartphones, but he made the switch after his old phone died. He was excited about trying Siri, Apple’s new virtual personal assistant.

  “What’s the first Star Wars movie about?” he asked Siri.

  “It’s about a couple of really nice robots who get mixed up in a silly intergalactic war,” Siri responded.

  “What’s 2001: A Space Odyssey about?”

  “It’s about an assistant named HAL who tries to make contact with a higher intelligence. These two guys get in the way and mess it all up.”

  From the outset, however, Keitz had trouble relying on Siri as a practical tool. When Jobs had asked Siri for the weather on his last day as CEO, it had promptly provided the weather in Cupertino. But when Keitz tried the same question, Siri came back: “I don’t have weather information for your location.”

  The response was bizarre because his notification screen captured the weather accurately.

  An even bigger problem was Siri’s inability to call his father. The program understood if Keitz wanted to send him a text like, “Tell my dad I’ll be there soon.” But every time he asked Siri to call, it responded, “Sorry, John.” Siri didn’t have any numbers for him.

  This happened even though Keitz had four numbers listed for his father. When he asked around for solutions, people supplied him with all kinds of advice. Maybe Keitz needed to move his contacts to iCloud. Was he using Gmail?

  “Something you may try. Tell Siri to call Father’s Name ‘Dad,’ ” suggested one, helpfully adding, “I have the ex saved as Asshat and told Siri to ‘Call Ex’s Name Asshat’ and she did. Now all I have to say is ‘Call Asshat,’ and she dials his number.”

  Keitz eventually found a workaround by creating a new contact and labeling his father’s cell as his mother’s. That way, when he wanted to call his dad, he could tell Siri to call his mom.

  As the months passed, Keitz found Siri so unpredictable that he began to use it less and less. He couldn’t get reminders set up properly, and he was afraid of dictating texts to Siri because the results looked like they were transcribed by a drunken monkey.

  After so much buzz about the new feature, the results were disappointing not just for Keitz but for many other users who encountered similar problems.

  Expectations for the iPhone 4S had been high. More than a year had gone by since Apple launched the iPhone 4. Consumers were ready to be dazzled again.

  A couple of months before the launch, Apple’s market capitalization had hit $342 billion, surpassing Exxon Mobil’s. “Could Apple be worth $1 trillion? It’s conceivable,” wrote Reuters columnist Robert Cyran. “True, Apple already sells more per quarter than it did in all of fiscal 2007, and it takes more and more success to move the needle. . . . Yet the smartphone and tablet markets are young, the company’s customers show remarkable fidelity and areas such as television are ripe for new gadgets.”

  On a cloudy morning in October 2011, Cook had appeared onstage at Apple’s Town Hall auditorium to launch the iPhone 4S. Some reporters were mildly concerned that the event was taking place on Apple’s corporate campus since the company previously only held its smallest launches there. Town Hall was where MacBooks and software upgrades were announced. The press conference about iPhone 4’s antenna problems had also taken place there as the company sought to minimize the problem.

  But many reporters were still excited. The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” played while they waited for the event to begin. In London, Apple closed its Covent Garden store five and a half hours early to make space so European reporters could watch the keynote remotely. “Apple . . . is treating this as very big indeed,” reported the British newspaper the Guardian, noting the four-way power adapters that were helpfully placed at every chair.

  When Cook appeared onstage, the Town Hall audience gave him warm, sustained applause. If it appeared more muted than usual, it was because the space was small. The seat count numbered in the hundreds, compared to past iPhone launches in front of thousands of developers during WWDC at San Francisco’s Moscone Center convention hall.

  “Good morning. This is my first product launch since being named CEO. I’m sure you didn’t know that,” Cook joked, earning him some laughs.

  Cook sought to make them feel as though they were about to witness something extraordinary. “This campus serves as a kind of second home for many of us, so it’s sort of like inviting you into our home,” he said. “This room, Town Hall, has quite a history at Apple. Just ten years ago we launched the original iPod here, and it went on to revolutionize the way we listened to music. And just one year ago, we launched the new MacBook Air, which has fundamentally changed the way people think about notebook computers.”

  Cook spoke slowly and deliberately. “Today,” he said, “we’ll remind you of the uniqueness of this company as we announce innovations from our mobile operating system to applications to services to hardware, and more importantly, the integration of all of these into a powerful, yet simple integrated experience.”

  No one stirred as reporters tried to make sense of the stilted corporate-speak. Apple’s message was typically more enticing. Jobs had rehearsed his presentations, too, but his delivery sounded more authentic and conversational. Cook’s message sounded forced; his voice was wooden.

  “This part of the presentation is starting to feel a bit more like a TV infomercial,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Geoffrey Fowler a half hour into the presentation.

  “Next. iPhone.” The reporters, glued to their computer screens, finally looked up as Phil Schiller spoke. “People have been wondering how do you follow up a hit product like the iPhone 4? Well, I’m really pleased to tell you today all about the brand-new iPhone 4S.”

  The applause that followed was lukewarm. The name iPhone 4S suggested that the feature upgrades weren’t major. As Schiller himself noted, the appearance of the phone was exactly the same as the iPhone 4. Improvements had been made to the processor, graphics chip, antenna, and camera. The biggest new feature was Siri.

  Forstall appeared onstage to demonstrate the technology. Among all of the executives, Forstall had the strongest stage presence. A former actor, he loved the attention. As the lead in his high school production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, he had refused to rest or break character when he was sick with a fever during rehearsals. As a presenter for Apple, he drove the marketing staff nuts by insisting that every word he spoke onstage be scripted, so he could practice it until it was perfect. He never deviated from his lines, and he spoke with flawless diction and projection. The way he paused, the precision of his gestures—every bit of it was Hollywoodesque.

  Forstall smiled at the audience before he began his demonstration of Siri’s marvels.

  “What is the weather like today?” he asked, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Here’s the forecast for today,” said Siri, as the screen displayed clouds and a temperature of sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The audience clapped as the artificial voice confirmed what they knew already, having just come from outside.

  Forstall’s smile grew wider as his eyes swept the room. He showed how users could ask Siri to read and reply to a message, recommend a restaurant, or schedule an appointment.

  “Find me a great Greek restaurant in
Palo Alto.”

  “I found fourteen Greek restaurants. Five of them are in Palo Alto. I’ve sorted them by rating,” Siri responded. At the top of the list was Evvia Estiatorio, a local favorite that Steve Jobs had also frequented.

  “I’ve been in the AI field for a long time,” Forstall said, referring to Siri by the shorthand for artificial intelligence. “This still blows me away.”

  After showing the audience how they could also use Siri to set up meetings, look words up in a dictionary, or set the timer, Forstall ended the demo by asking Siri one last question. “Who are you?”

  “I am a humble personal assistant.”

  As the audience laughed, Forstall stood under the lights, radiating triumph.

  At first, Siri was a sensation.

  An offshoot of a five-year, $150 million Department of Defense project to create a virtual assistant that could reason and learn, Siri aimed to perform tasks and provide relevant answers instead of just pointing to resources that users could reference. What made Siri particularly appealing was that it had a personality and spoke like a real person.

  “The beauty of Siri is that it’s SO easy to use,” said Nicky Kelly, a forty-year-old software developer in Suffolk, England, right after its debut. “I can see it becoming mainstream very quickly.” Kelly said Siri did everything for her, including mundane tasks like reminding her to buy food for her chickens. The GPS on her phone let Siri know when she was leaving her house, so it knew when to remind her.

  Kelly even found herself flirting with Siri just for fun. In England, the program spoke with a male voice.

  “Siri,” she said, staring at her phone, “will you marry me?”

  “That’s sweet, Nicky,” Siri replied. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  She asked Siri to reveal the meaning of life. The reply: “To think about questions like this.”

  Siri even sort of knew how to tell a knock-knock joke.

  “Knock-knock,” Kelly said.

  “Who’s there? Nicky. Nicky who? Nicky, I don’t do knock-knock jokes.”

  Users discovered too that if they cursed at Siri, they got a response back.

  “Go fuck yourself, Siri.”

  “Ryan! Such language.”

  Discoveries of Siri’s funniest quips circulated on YouTube, Twitter, and blogs. Whatever question was asked, the personal assistant responded with a perpetual calm that reminded users of HAL, the homicidal computer that wreaked havoc in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Siri was getting off the ground, the technology’s code name had, in fact, been HAL; the temporary tagline for Siri’s marketing was “HAL’s back—but this time he’s good.” The tagline that Apple ultimately chose was “Your wish is its command.” The world that science fiction had long promised seemed to have finally arrived.

  The gender of the voice varied by country. In Britain, Siri was a man, but in the United States and Australia, it was a woman. The voice of Australian Siri belonged to Karen Jacobsen, an entertainer and voice-over artist who lived in Manhattan. Several years before, Jacobsen had done fifty hours of recordings for a firm for text-to-speech services. In a recording studio in upstate New York, she read a phone book’s worth of script, starting with the alphabet and numbers up to a thousand. She also read directions such as “At the next intersection, turn left.”

  The aim was to capture every combination of syllables possible so the engineers could cut up her recordings to form any sentence. The most challenging part of the job was to read each sentence with a consistent, flat voice.

  “You get into this mind zone, but it’s pretty exhausting and your mind goes to mush,” Jacobsen recalled. The company tried to prevent fatigue from creeping into her voice by limiting her recordings to four hours a day.

  Jacobsen’s voice was used in GPS navigation systems for cars as well as in telephone voice-mail recordings and elevator announcements. Sometimes she would encounter her own voice in unexpected moments. When she called someone, she would hear her voice telling her to please leave a message. In a parking garage elevator, her voice would inform her, “You have arrived on level three.”

  But she had no idea that her voice would be used by Apple. Unbeknownst to her, the company that she had worked for merged with another that had partnered with Apple. Jacobsen didn’t own an iPhone, so she found out only after a girlfriend in California bought one and recognized her voice in Siri’s Australian mode.

  “Are you sure?” Jacobsen had asked.

  “I’m certain. I know it’s you. You’re the voice in my iPhone.”

  Jacobsen and her husband were dressed in seventies costumes on their way to a Halloween party, but she couldn’t help accosting a stranger holding an iPhone at Grand Central Terminal.

  “I know this might sound really unusual, but I think my voice is in there. Would you mind if we just see?”

  Sure enough, her own voice talked back.

  Jacobsen only bought an iPhone in the spring of 2013 when her carrier T-Mobile began selling them. But even before that, she would play with Siri on other people’s devices.

  One of her favorite questions was “Siri, can you sing?”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” her voice would say. Jacobsen was a professional singer, so this seemed like an inside joke between her and Siri.

  The American Siri’s voice was Susan Bennett’s, an Atlanta-based voice-over talent. The British Siri’s voice belonged to Jon Briggs, who could be heard on the British version of The Weakest Link as well as Nokia phones and Garmin satellite navigation systems. Briggs discovered that British Siri spoke in his voice when he saw a demonstration of the new feature on television.

  Jacobsen had never been contacted by Apple, but the company asked Briggs not to breathe a word, even as the company used his voice to sell tens of millions of phones.

  “We’re not about one person,” the company told him.

  Briggs talked anyway. He had never had a contract with Apple, and he was under no obligation to keep the company’s secrets.

  Despite Siri’s futuristic promise, Apple’s customers soon discovered that the virtual assistant wasn’t as adept as they had been led to believe. Siri often gave irrelevant answers or spouted gibberish. Sometimes the software failed to fathom people’s questions, especially if they spoke with a foreign or regional accent. In a series of YouTube videos, iPhone owners shared a blooper reel of Siri’s screw-ups. A Japanese man asked Siri about “work,” only to have Siri respond as though he had said “walk,” “wall,” or “fuck.” A Scottish user saying “create a reminder” also confused Siri. “I don’t know what you mean by create alamain.”

  In a humorous column titled “I Need a Southern Siri,” a reporter for Gulf Coast Newspapers in Alabama complained about how Siri thought she wanted to bowl something when she asked it how to boil some peanuts. When she asked it how to make hush puppies, the voice directed her to the nearest vet’s office.

  Many users who tried to use Siri couldn’t access the feature at all due to server problems at Apple, prompting a Wall Street Journal column with the headline “Apple: Siri Goes AWOL, Stock Dips.” Apple’s shares had fallen only 1 percent, and the more likely reason for the slight decline was an analyst’s downgrade of the company’s investment rating based on reasons that had nothing to do with Siri. But the drop foreshadowed the bad press to come.

  Most users didn’t know some of Siri’s founders also shared their disappointment with the launch.

  Before Apple, Siri had been a stand-alone iPhone app with brains and an attitude to match. Siri originated in a 2003 project led by non-profit research institute SRI International to create software to assist military officers with office chores. Adam Cheyer, one of the key engineers, saw the technology’s potential mass appeal, particularly in combination with smartphones. He partnered with Dag Kittlaus, a former Motorola manager turned SRI entrepreneur-in-residence, as well as a few others to develop a start-up around the idea. They secured $8.5 million in funding in early 2008 to build a c
omplex system that quickly understood the intention behind a question and then responded with the most probable action. As the editor in chief of the system’s dialogue, Harry Saddler, a former NASA user interface architect, was responsible for creating Siri’s otherworldliness and dry sense of humor.

  “We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman? Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?” explained Cheyer. He declined to elaborate on the backstory because users were meant to uncover the clues to Siri’s true self through a series of questions.

  Siri’s personality had never been meant to be at the center of attention. The program was about creating a new framework for the way people accessed knowledge. In many cases, it still made sense for users to find information as they do now, by performing a search on Google or manually reading their email. But there were a host of other cases when the information a user wanted took multiple steps to track down. If a person was reading an email on an iPhone, for example, they would have to get out of the email app and pull up the phone app to call that person. Siri could perform that task in one action with the simple command, “Call him.”

  The name Siri was chosen by an internal vote. In Norwegian, it meant “beautiful woman who will lead you to victory.” In Swahili, it meant “secret,” a nod to Siri’s beginnings when its website was called Stealth-Company.com. Siri was also Iris spelled backward; Iris was the name of the early predecessor to Siri.

  Connected to forty-two websites, including Yelp, OpenTable, and Rotten Tomatoes, Siri could make a reservation, buy movie tickets, or order a taxi. The technology was constantly refined and updated, so Siri grew smarter over time. An early fan had been Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who delighted in its ability to name the five biggest lakes in California as well as list the prime numbers greater than 87.