Apple signaled its arrival to the AI arms race with “Apple Intelligence” in June 2024. The centerpiece of the AI system was a reimagined Siri that would be, like, actually useful.

In one memorable ad, a guy at a house party nervously waves at “The Last of Us” star Bella Ramsey. In a panic, she asks her iPhone 16, “Siri, what’s the name of that guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?”

“Zac Wingate,” Siri responds.

Crisis averted.

One year later, Apple Intelligence has become a punchline — a hodgepodge of features that, to put it delicately, are not cutting edge. And Siri still can’t tell you about Zac Wingate — in fact, it can hardly make a grocery list. Last month, Apple had to announce the indefinite delay of the advanced Siri features, like those in the Bella Ramsey commercials, triggering a false advertising lawsuit and a wave of embarrassing commentary.

For a company that built its brand on seemingly impossible feats of technology, Apple now finds itself stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle — falling behind in the AI race and struggling to attract the talent needed to catch up, one former exec told me. Some observers believe the only way out is a blockbuster acquisition (i.e. acquiring Perplexity).

But David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”), the Danish Ruby on Rails creator, 37signals co-owner, investor, and author, has a simpler (and cheaper) solution: Apple needs a new asshole in charge.

In an essay by the same name, and in the following interview with me, DHH explained — nay, proselytized — the type of leader Apple should be promoting: someone willing to hold its managers accountable to the outcomes of their initiatives. To say a product wasn’t good enough, even if the people working on it “tried their best.”

In other words, an asshole.

All of Apple’s problems are downstream from this gaping void of assholery, he said.

“There’s no craziness left. It has been sucked out by a logistics bean counter at the very top, who I am sure does not have one bone of crazy in his body,” DHH said. “And that’s why he’s exceptionally good at what he does, which is to negotiate with Chinese subcontractors and ensure that there’s X amount of parts available at this moment in time. I’m sure he is very good at that, but that is just not what fires up anyone to push forward. Right?”

STEP 1: ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE A PROBLEM

Let’s first establish that Apple does not, in fact, already have an asshole in charge.

First, it failed to ship the iPhone 16’s so-called “star feature” (Apple Intelligence).

“That’s the Rubicon for me that Apple chose to cross. [Going out and selling] hardware you can find in the store today on the promise of technology that does not exist,” DHH said. “That is like a stake in the heart of the ghost of Steve Jobs.”

Second, after the embarrassing delays, a senior director defended the Siri division’s work in an all-hands meeting, calling it “incredibly impressive,” as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported. That was a glaring lack of assholery in DHH’s view.

Third, in a “reshuffling” at the company (which definitely wasn’t intentionally leaked...), Apple’s AI head John Giannandrea got demoted.

“By media report, no one has lost their job. There’s been a reshuffle. What the fuck does that mean? That means that whoever was in charge still has a job at Apple making millions at a VP level — and that sends a signal to the entire rest of the organization: even if you fuck up something so monstrous as the iPhone 16 launch, don’t worry, you’ll get another chance,” DHH said.

“Why the fuck should you even bother to try? Who cares? No one cares about anything anymore,” he added.

Fourth, while the Vision Pro headset is commendable, the only AI features Apple has actually managed to release — during the biggest paradigm shift in technology since the “goddamn internet” — include an emoji-generator called “Genmoji,” news summaries, and email categorization, DHH said.

“Apple would literally have been better off if they hadn’t shipped anything relative to AI. Their summaries were awful and had to get retracted. Their Genmoji is pathetically out of date. It looks like Midjourney 0.5 from four years ago. It’s actually worse that they shipped any of it,” DHH said. “All of it made Apple look retarded.”

“It doesn’t look like anyone gave two fucks about Genmoji,” he continued. “I cannot envision the character in my head who’s like, holy shit, I’m going to get up in the morning and I’m going to deliver Genmoji. Then it’s going to be what? It’s going to be stupid.”

Fifth, and more insidious, under Cook, the company’s become much less “top-down” from a product standpoint. One reshuffle can’t fix that.

Tyler, an Apple employee until March 2024, told me about the “quality assurance” (QA) team in the ads division. It’s responsible for making sure that ads-related updates (say, changing how they appear in the App Store) won’t cause issues. But Tyler started to notice a curious incentive emerging within the QA team. Every time there was an issue (something they were supposed to prevent), the team grew — eventually ballooning to about a quarter of the ads division. It slowed everything down (they took weeks to rubber stamp changes) and “diffused responsibility for any single feature among more and more people,” he said.

“Apple needs more than just an asshole, they need a mega-asshole,” Tyler said. “Because it’s not just one person who needs firing, it’s entire divisions of the company.”

We don’t have to guess how that asshole Steve Jobs would have reacted to Apple’s recent failures.

During his reign in 2008, the launch of the cloud service MobileMe was a complete disaster. Jobs fired the leader, reorganized the team, and humiliated them, reportedly saying: “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation. You should hate each other for having let each other down.”

His righteous anger made MobileMe a case study in how not to launch a product at Apple — and a much-adored chapter of company lore.

“He humiliated that part of the company to teach the company a lesson that this was utterly unacceptable and that he would see no such mediocre bullshit ever again,” DHH said.

STEP 2: CHANNEL YOUR INNER WORK DADDY

Admittedly, being from blob media land (I recently fled Business Insider to join PW), when I first saw DHH’s essay, I thought Apple might have the opposite problem — that it needed fewer assholes; not more. Last time I spoke with employees at the company, they were living in fear of fucking up. Couldn’t a toxic work culture be contributing to bad products? When I asked DHH about this, he cut me off mid-sentence to say that he “absolutely” disagreed. Whatever group I’d spoken to, he asserted, didn’t have enough of a visionary asshole at the helm, which meant they were working on “regular” and “pleasant” things that didn’t really matter. This made them, thanks to the human condition, “whiny little bitches,” he said.

This is the great irony of working for great assholes. They’re way more tolerable, in the long run, than the alternative.

“Because you are allowed too much time to think about all the little nonsense that you would have no time to think about if you had fucking Steve Jobs looking over your shoulder asking you why the fuck the thing isn’t done yet,” he said. “You don’t have time to think about toxicity. You’re not going to have time to think about any of those things. You’re just going to go, holy shit, that’s Steve Jobs and he’s telling me my work SUCKS and I better damn well pull an all-nighter so that he’s happy in the morning when I have to show him again. Right?”

My thinking, maybe, was a relic from the so-called accountability crusade of the past few years (even DHH’s company was deemed to be not “inclusive” enough). But today, the Jobsian tech asshole is back in style. Welcome to how the world functioned for eons.

“If you look at human history from fucking the stone age up to 2017, that was how everything happened. Everything,” DHH said. “And then there was just this weird, weird moment in time where we decided that being good at things and wanting things to come true was actually bad, and it was way more important to sit around in a fucking circle and talk about your feelings.”

I am not a “bro.” And I’ve watched us reenter a Joe Rogan, Muskified Trump Era — complete with Zuck calling for more corporate masculinity while cosplaying as a bow hunter — with skepticism. But does it also secretly, shamefully resonate? Is there some unmentionable corner of my psyche that craves a work daddy to be disappointed in me?

Hell yes. Don’t take my word for it. Next time you need a kick in the ass, go listen to the leaked audio of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon ranting about remote work culture and tell me it doesn’t move you.

JPM was in the middle of hauling people back to the office. More than 1,200 employees had signed a petition opposing the mandate. In a town hall meeting, Dimon let them have it.

He didn’t care how many people signed the “fucking” petition. He was fed up with everyone sitting around on “fucking Zoom,” not prepared enough, sending texts to each other about “what an asshole the other person was,” slowing down efficiency — “and don’t give me this shit that work-from-home Friday works,” he said. “I call a lot of people on Friday, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get ahold of.”

Then, he tackled bureaucratic bloat. People were complaining that they needed more people to get stuff done: “No, because you’re filling out requests that don’t need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don’t need to go to. Someone told me to approve something in Wealth Management, that they had to go to 14 committees. I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees, and I feel like firing 14 chairmen of committees. I can’t stand it anymore.”

No hard feelings if you didn’t want to work for him anymore, Dimon said.

“We didn’t build this great company by doing that — by doing the same, semi-diseased shit that everybody else does,” Dimon added.

What an asshole.

STEP 3: ASSHOLERY PLUS VISION EQUALS GIVING A FUCK

DHH isn’t advocating for assholery for the sake of assholery.

People don’t like to get berated; that’s not the trigger for greatness, DHH said. Your asshole levels have to be directly proportional to (a) how much you care and (b) the badassery of a grand vision.

You don’t get to be an asshole, in other words, if you’re working on Genmoji. But if you’re literally trying to advance mankind?

“The person who worked on the first Macintosh; the team who worked on the iPhone; the team at Elon’s SpaceX that’s catching rockets with chopsticks? Yeah, okay. They’re pursuing something that’s so grand that I’d actually feel not well at ease on behalf of humanity if there’s not an asshole in the loop,” DHH said. “There’s got to be an asshole somewhere in that loop. When you reach that level of criticality, that level of just importance for humanity, someone’s got to go like, ‘This is not good enough. Do it again.’ And then when the person goes ‘This is the best I’ve got.’ They go, ‘TRY HARDER. STAY UNTIL 4 IN THE MORNING. SLEEP ON THE FLOOR.’ I feel like that’s actually warranted. That’s how humanity does move forward.”

Is it assholery plus vision equals giving a fuck? Or giving a fuck plus vision equals asshole?

Doesn’t matter. When a leader has a vision she believes in much more than the average person, these traits always blur together: “That’s the magic,” DHH said. Go ahead and brace for exposés in “fucking The Verge” about the handful of assholes leading cracked teams at Google, OpenAI, and xAI who “really truly care” about what they’re working on, he said.

If you’re asking yourself: who hurt DHH? What wound is causing all this pain? Well, I asked. It’s because Apple lost its magic, he told me. There’s a trillion tech companies that, every day, push out complete garbage that no one should buy, and they should all be embarrassed about it, he said. But Apple was supposed to be better than that — the shining city on the hill that entrepreneurs like him broke their backs to emulate.

It’s the fall from grace that actually “hurts,” he said.

“Apple has been this shining example of what this industry could be when someone cared obsessively about making really great stuff,” he said. “They set the bar for everyone that I’ve known in terms of technology, in terms of design, in terms of almost everything — every parameter you could define a technology product on, Apple was leading. And now they’ve fallen so goddamn hard. It’s like seeing, I don’t know, Michael Jordan go back and try to play basketball in his fucking sixties. You’re just like, dude, please don’t do it. I have this image of you in my head where you’re amazing and you won five championships in a row. Why would you embarrass yourself like this? And that’s what it feels like with Apple.”

“The industry needs Apple,” DHH said. “Right now, the industry doesn’t have Apple. And that’s sad.”

— Blake Dodge