Justin Bieber has a design note for Apple.
Bieber vented his frustrations about the dictation button available on Apple iPhones in social media posts on X and Instagram on Friday. The dictation button is a text-to-speech feature that users often accidentally hit.
“If I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I’m gonna find everyone at apple and put them in a rear naked choke hold,” Bieber wrote. “Even if I turn off dictation I somehow hit the voice note thing The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot.”
Bieber shared a screenshot of his iMessage screen, highlighting the dictation feature, alongside his remarks. His posts garnered thousands of positive responses, including one from the head of product design at OpenAI.
“you’re officially invited to our weekly design crits,” Ian Silber wrote on Friday.
Bieber’s critique comes at the end of a rough week for Apple, which is navigating some major departures among its leadership.
Apple announced on Monday that John Giannandrea, senior vice president for machine learning and AI strategy, is stepping down from his position. He will serve as an advisor until his retirement in 2026.
On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Alan Dye will run the company’s new creative studio in Reality Labs. Dye, who serves as the vice president of human interface design at Apple, has worked at the company for nearly 20 years.
Then, Apple announced on Thursday that Lisa Jackson, its vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, will retire in late January. Kate Adams, the company’s general counsel since 2017, will also retire next year.
Long a Big Tech stalwart and consistent innovator, Apple has been slow to pivot and compete with companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google in the red-hot AI market.
In October, OpenAI launched its own version of an app store, making a major move against Apple (and Google). That same month, former Apple CEO John Sculley said OpenAI is Apple’s “first real competitor” in decades.
Five months earlier, OpenAI announced a partnership with Jony Ive, who spent three decades as Apple’s chief design officer. He oversaw the design of the iPhone and other products before he left in 2019.
OpenAI worked with Ive’s design firm, LoveFrom, before acquiring his AI hardware startup, IO, in May. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are now rumored to be working on a device that could compete with Apple’s iPhone, though exactly what form it will take has been kept tightly under wraps.
