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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

The personal context issue could have been solved long before LLMs appeared.

My foil for this has always been the simple request from Siri: "Take me home".

Apple and my device know where I live. I have even registered "home" in Apple maps. This is not a huge leap, and this is not even something that requires an LLM. But it does force the featureset and capability to be better. This was a problem in 2015. 10 years later I still can't make this simple request.

I don't know why Apple just froze Siri and put it on life support. They could have been doing far better in this space.

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On a related note, I don’t know how Apple has managed to mess up so badly the idea of storing your own information like address, phone number, etc.

Every time I’ve moved, for months afterwards I keep having to fix my address when using Apple Pay or setting directions to home, etc. because it seems like they keep multiple copies of that information all over the place, instead of referring to a single piece of information.

Places I can think of where I’ve had to update my address one by one: each credit card I have associated with Apple Pay; Maps; my own contact that I can share with others; subscription information; shipping address for Apple Pay.

I get it that some people use separate billing and shipping addresses, but for the vast majority of people the use case is “I have a single home address where I want to direct Maps to, be billed at, and ship stuff to, please update it all at once when I update my address.”

Yes it's extremely dumb and annoying. It's everywhere in Apple products, for example your Health ID cannot get your weight for your latest recorded weight in the app. I mean, it's even the same app, it's like the devs can't be bothered to make a smart product.

I think this is because of the way they silo everything, the way they are paranoid about privacy/security (mostly for their marketing, they don't care that much) and the culture that isn't very competitive anymore.

It finally hurts them because the experience isn't coherent and very frustrating for the user. It's funny because the marketing is all about the "ecosystem" but in reality, the coherence is mostly about how things look.

The rumor of a big redesign isn't surprising; instead of working on how things actually work (they wouldn't need to back off some marketing choice and that seems impossible) they will put a coat of paint and make people focus on good looks.

The last redesign was terrible and it took an awful lot of time to get things back to half-decent. It's just one more motivation to not renew for an iPhone I guess...

I encounter this every time there is an Apple hardware release and I try to buy on the phone, and pay with Apple Pay.

They’ll have lost shipping and billing address and I have to laboriously type it in again before I can pay for it.

Sometimes I will have purchased from them, the very prior week, sending to the same address they now lost.

How a trillion dollar company cannot figure out the most basic functionality of an online shop I don’t know.

FYI, I find that "navigate home" works, if you want to get home. (I agree with your complaint however that Siri is brain dead much of the time)

I just tried this, thinking that I was "holding it wrong" and no - it still doesn't work. It says it doesn't know where I live.

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