The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► One of the things that made me think Brad Bird is, number one, I'm a big fan of

00:00:03 ◼   ► all of his movies. I can't think of a single one that I didn't enjoy. But the other thing is that

00:00:08 ◼   ► he has a track record of jumping into somebody else's thing and sticking with it. He did a

00:00:16 ◼   ► Mission Impossible movie that is just a pure Mission Impossible movie. I think the best one

00:00:20 ◼   ► since the first one that the Palmyts did. Yeah, I agree.

00:00:26 ◼   ► famously he took over Ratatouille after somebody else, it wasn't his movie at Pixar, somebody

00:00:32 ◼   ► else had it and everybody decided this isn't working out and he took over it at a, you

00:00:37 ◼   ► know, late in the game and did well. And that's obviously what somebody's going to have to

00:00:41 ◼   ► do to make a new Star Wars movie, not necessarily that takeover and a half aborted movie, but

00:00:47 ◼   ► you're coming into a series.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Right. Yeah. But I mean, that person, whoever it is, will have a much easier time than it would appear on the surface

00:00:59 ◼   ► just because, I mean, I don't know about the people you chat with on Twitter and stuff, but everyone,

00:01:06 ◼   ► there was universal acclaim for the fact that George Lucas will only be a creative consultant on these things.

00:01:10 ◼   ► I mean, I think everyone can agree that the one through three range from suck to bad.

00:01:21 ◼   ► And so, you know, it's big shoes to fill, but it's also, I think, you know, they're

00:01:25 ◼   ► kind of starting with a clean slate where they can do what they want.

00:01:31 ◼   ► So do you think, what do you think they're going to do for these Star Wars things?

00:01:35 ◼   ► So they went from, George Lucas was obviously on record as saying that this was it, they're

00:01:39 ◼   ► never going to do another one. Like he absolutely said, "No, we're not going to do it." And then,

00:01:44 ◼   ► you know, things change. People acquire other entities and those entities have other ideas

00:01:50 ◼   ► for what to do. But there's all this, you know, there's the surrounding universe of

00:01:53 ◼   ► Star Wars. There's all those books, comics, etc. Do they use any of that or do they just

00:01:59 ◼   ► come up with completely new things now?

00:02:01 ◼   ► I say they go with completely new stuff, I think. I've always, and I know there's probably

00:02:07 ◼   ► a ton of listeners out there who are going to disagree. But my opinion has always been

00:02:13 ◼   ► that the movies are the only canon in Star Wars. And the other stuff is just--it may

00:02:19 ◼   ► have the official logo on it, but it's fan fiction.

00:02:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Right. Because I never got into it. I read the first one, because I was so excited when

00:02:27 ◼   ► the first novel came out. Because it was--I'm like 99% sure. Yeah. I think I've got the

00:02:36 ◼   ► timing right on this, where Return of the Jedi comes out in 1983, and then Lucas says,

00:02:42 ◼   ► "Okay, I'm done with these Star Wars movies for now." And that was the only time it really—the

00:02:47 ◼   ► late '80s was the only time where Star Wars really kind of faded away, where there was

00:02:50 ◼   ► no new stuff at all. And in the '90s, they said, "Okay, we're going to start some

00:02:54 ◼   ► new stuff." And the first thing they did was commission a novel. And it was terrible.

00:03:01 ◼   ► It was so bad.

00:03:04 ◼   ► You know, what was it? Was it an extension of?

00:03:07 ◼   ► Yeah, it took place immediately after return of the Jedi and it's about this guy named Grand Admiral something

00:03:14 ◼   ► it was like some kind of alien Admiral in the in the

00:03:19 ◼   ► Empire and he was holding what was left of the Empire together and and

00:03:25 ◼   ► And I guess what I really hated about it was it was it were number one just wasn't that compelling and number two it was

00:03:32 ◼   ► just

00:03:33 ◼   ► Well, what do you know once again the entire fate of the galaxy comes down to Han Solo princess Leia and Luke Skywalker

00:03:40 ◼   ► All right, right it and and I got the impression then after you know

00:03:45 ◼   ► I never read any other stuff

00:03:46 ◼   ► But I can't write I'd often pick up the back of them those novels and see what it is

00:03:50 ◼   ► And it's just a series of you know 40 different incidents where the entire galaxy comes down to the fate of Han

00:03:57 ◼   ► Luke Skywalker is late

00:04:01 ◼   ► Yeah, that's uh, I you know, it's sort of the James Bond movies, right?

00:04:06 ◼   ► So they're what was it up until I forget you'll know this which one was was derived from an actual Ian Fleming novel

00:04:13 ◼   ► But they obviously had to break away from that because they just ran out of novels doing it

00:04:17 ◼   ► I forget the last one that was based on any it was one of the ones in the 70s

00:04:21 ◼   ► it was one of the Roger Moore ones and

00:04:23 ◼   ► So they eventually had to move on and just come up with new stories and they also have I think they have the same thing

00:04:28 ◼   ► where they have people doing fan fiction and doing their own like James Bond things, so

00:04:32 ◼   ► it's not as big, I don't think, as the Star Wars element of it. But yeah, so now the movies

00:04:36 ◼   ► are just, they hire great screenwriters, well, sometimes mediocre, sometimes it's the cast

00:04:42 ◼   ► when the screenwriters are on strike, but they try and hire great screenwriters to write

00:04:46 ◼   ► these things just from scratch, and I think that works pretty well.

00:04:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too. And you know, obviously, and then again, they went back to Ian Fleming's

00:04:54 ◼   ► source material for Casino Royale, and did, I think, a fantastic job of modernizing it,

00:05:01 ◼   ► because the geopolitics of a novel written in 1959 don't exactly hold up anymore.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Right. I've heard the new one is excellent. I've avoided reading any major review of it,

00:05:15 ◼   ► but the buzz seems to be excellent.

00:05:16 ◼   ► The buzz? Yeah, I've actually heard, and dead serious—I'm exactly with you, where I almost

00:05:22 ◼   ► didn't even want to watch the trailer, but I did. And I'm glad I did, because it wasn't

00:05:25 ◼   ► a spoiler trailer, that new modern format of trailer where we condensed the entire plot

00:05:30 ◼   ► into the two minutes. It wasn't like that at all. It was a true teaser trailer. But

00:05:37 ◼   ► the thing I've heard is that there are people saying that this seriously could be like a

00:05:40 ◼   ► Best Picture movie. I don't know about that. I mean, that's almost too good to wish for.

00:05:46 ◼   ► But that somebody would even seriously or even half-seriously suggest it says to me

00:05:51 ◼   ► all I need to know. Well, Javier Bardem is always an actor in

00:05:56 ◼   ► some category. He seems to be in it every year, being nominated for something. And this

00:06:00 ◼   ► is his movie this year, so maybe. Yeah, there's an old adage, I'm sure it's

00:06:07 ◼   ► attributed to 30 different directors, but that 90% of directing is casting. And I do

00:06:13 ◼   ► think that a lot of the bad James Bond movies have been really poorly cast, where it's like

00:06:17 ◼   ► you don't even know any of the other guys who are in there. You can't even name the

00:06:20 ◼   ► actors. This is a hell of a cast. You've got Javier Barnum, you've got...

00:06:27 ◼   ► Isn't Ralph Fiennes in this? Yeah, Ralph Fiennes is in it, and I have no idea what he is, and

00:06:31 ◼   ► nobody tell me, because I have no idea. It was apparently like a big secret. Is he a

00:06:36 ◼   ► good guy, is he a bad guy, is he a traitor, who knows? What a cast.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Have you ever seen the movie Perfume? It's this kind of strange movie.

00:06:45 ◼   ► I don't think I have.

00:06:47 ◼   ► It's a weird killer with a great sense of spell movie.

00:06:52 ◼   ► But it's an interesting movie.

00:06:53 ◼   ► It's like a quirky thing.

00:06:55 ◼   ► But anyway, that guy is also in the James Bond.

00:06:59 ◼   ► I don't think I'm spoiling anything because it is in the teaser thing where he plays the

00:07:02 ◼   ► new quartermaster.

00:07:03 ◼   ► So Q for the first time.

00:07:04 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:07:05 ◼   ► No, I knew that.

00:07:06 ◼   ► Yeah, he's like, "I'm going to write that down and watch that."

00:07:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:10 ◼   ► No, I love the idea.

00:07:11 ◼   ► I love the idea that Q, that the dynamic now is going to be that he's young.

00:07:14 ◼   ► He's like a 20-something nerd, as opposed to being way older than Bond.

00:07:20 ◼   ► Now he's way younger than Bond.

00:07:24 ◼   ► Going back to the Star Wars thing, here's the thing I remember.

00:07:26 ◼   ► This is why I'm not surprised that there's a 7, 8, and 9 that Lucas—and I don't think

00:07:31 ◼   ► it's a bad idea that Lucas has an outline for him.

00:07:33 ◼   ► I think an outline from Lucas is exactly—it's great.

00:07:38 ◼   ► The outline of what he's done for the original six movies is fine.

00:07:41 ◼   ► Right, it's the execution that was the—

00:07:43 ◼   ► Exactly, and the dialogue. Just keep him away from the dialogue.

00:07:45 ◼   ► Yeah, the dialogue is so bad.

00:07:47 ◼   ► Right. And it's just no surprise that with Empire Strikes Back, he didn't write the

00:07:50 ◼   ► screenplay. He did the story, and then they went to Lee Brackett, who wrote those great

00:07:56 ◼   ► 1940s Humphrey Bogart movies, which were almost entirely—the entire appeal of them was the

00:08:01 ◼   ► great dialogue. So that's, you know, I think that's a great direction.

00:08:06 ◼   ► But here's the thing I remember, is when I was a kid, it was so hard to get information,

00:08:10 ◼   ► Because there was no internet.

00:08:12 ◼   ► And you would get these--

00:08:14 ◼   ► I remember I'd beg and plead and get my mom

00:08:16 ◼   ► to buy these crazy magazines at the supermarket, these movie

00:08:19 ◼   ► magazines, like Fangoria, I think, was one.

00:08:24 ◼   ► Yeah, right, right.

00:08:25 ◼   ► And most of it was just filled--

00:08:27 ◼   ► I liked it all.

00:08:28 ◼   ► But most of it was filled with a seven-page thing

00:08:33 ◼   ► on how they did the makeup for American Werewolf in London,

00:08:36 ◼   ► which is kind of interesting, how they do makeup

00:08:38 ◼   ► and how they do special effects and stuff like that.

00:08:40 ◼   ► But then that's where I would get tidbits of rumors about Star Wars.

00:08:46 ◼   ► And my friends and I would just buy these magazines and consume them just to try to

00:08:49 ◼   ► get the rumors about Star Wars.

00:08:52 ◼   ► And I remember back, and this is, you know, early '80s, maybe even before Return of

00:08:57 ◼   ► the Jedi came out, that we knew, we, as like an eight, nine, ten-year-old kid, I knew that

00:09:06 ◼   ► there were going to be nine movies and that the first three were, you know, these three,

00:09:11 ◼   ► that the next three were going to take place before. We knew, I knew in 1983 that how did

00:09:18 ◼   ► Anakin Skywalker turn into Darth Vader? He had a lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi

00:09:24 ◼   ► and got knocked into a pit of lava. I knew that when I was nine.

00:09:29 ◼   ► You know what so I do believe is kind of abandoned that when he in his most in his recent interviews not recent

00:09:36 ◼   ► But a few years ago after the second trilogy why why abandoned he was just burnt out or what was he thinking?

00:09:41 ◼   ► I don't know my best guess is he just wanted people to shut up about it and stop asking him and so he always knew

00:09:46 ◼   ► He wanted to make nine

00:09:47 ◼   ► But as soon as he finished the second three

00:09:49 ◼   ► He just said there aren't gonna be any more because it's a good way to get people to stop

00:09:52 ◼   ► Asking him when there's gonna be more star. Yeah, that's my guess another thing that wasn't brought up yesterday

00:09:58 ◼   ► He is still in the process of doing like the 3d transformation all these right wasn't that in the works?

00:10:04 ◼   ► I thought yes because I went to see the Phantom Menace in 3d with with

00:10:09 ◼   ► With my son, and I think the other ones haven't haven't come out haven't come out yet, right

00:10:14 ◼   ► So I assume that that's still in the works unless they unless Phantom Menace

00:10:18 ◼   ► I don't know how well it did if it did didn't do well

00:10:20 ◼   ► And it wasn't worth the time and money to I read that it did

00:10:24 ◼   ► It was like middling it did like 105 million at the box office and a reissue which was you know it's 105 million bucks

00:10:31 ◼   ► which is bad but uh

00:10:33 ◼   ► Wonder how much that cost to do yeah, but it wasn't like a sensation

00:10:36 ◼   ► Yeah

00:10:38 ◼   ► One you know one other interesting point on that is someone I saw brought up, and it's just kind of a nice parallel

00:10:45 ◼   ► I think they said that

00:10:49 ◼   ► Mark Hamill will be the same age as Alec Guinness was in the original Star Wars when this new

00:10:55 ◼   ► 2015 Star Wars comes out really kind of yeah see that all parallel or is Alec Guinness younger than I think yeah

00:11:02 ◼   ► I think he was 60 something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's who they said

00:11:07 ◼   ► I think it was Mark Hamill I

00:11:09 ◼   ► Don't know he always looked. Oh, I've always thought that was one of those continuity things that just doesn't seem to add up is that

00:11:17 ◼   ► How old Ewan McGregor looks at the end of episode three when he's handing over baby Luke to the family?

00:11:24 ◼   ► Right compared to and was it 19 years later 20 years later

00:11:27 ◼   ► It's either 19 or 20 years later when when the next one picks up the right right? It looks like he's had all 20 years

00:11:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I've always thought in my back of my mind

00:11:38 ◼   ► I've always thought if I was gonna to commission some sort of parody thing that I thought it would be funny that

00:11:43 ◼   ► you know, in this question of, "Hey, why not in those intervening 20 years, why did

00:11:48 ◼   ► Yoda and Obi-Wan go into hiding rather than, like, try to kick some ass around the galaxy?"

00:11:53 ◼   ► In my—I've always thought the funniest explanation would be that he just drank himself

00:11:58 ◼   ► sick in that cantina day. You know, like, that's why he knows the cantina's—

00:12:02 ◼   ► That's his haggard look. Yeah, that's a—I like that. I like that.

00:12:05 ◼   ► Because it really does seem like he's had a very—a really rough 20 years.

00:12:10 ◼   ► Well, and Ewan McGregor did a good job of the voice stuff, right? Like he's he did a fantastic job

00:12:15 ◼   ► He's constantly mimicking Alec Guinness's voice and yeah, it's just they could have done a little bit more makeup work

00:12:21 ◼   ► I guess and the third one to show him

00:12:23 ◼   ► Slowly deteriorating or something like that

00:12:26 ◼   ► Well, I remember when they were originally casting the new trilogy one of the rumors was that

00:12:33 ◼   ► Kenneth Branagh was up for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi

00:12:37 ◼   ► Okay, so they've been closer in age than at least like for the age discrepancy right and I think that the I think the explanation

00:12:44 ◼   ► Was that he had Lucas reconsidered how big of a span he wanted to cover and wanted to have a truly young

00:12:52 ◼   ► Obi-wan in the first one, you know, like I don't know how old he was, but he was supposed to you know

00:12:57 ◼   ► he was still a padawan and

00:12:59 ◼   ► Right. He has a rat tail. So he's probably like, you know, all right

00:13:03 ◼   ► But I think though that Kenneth Branagh would have made the continuity feel more, by the

00:13:09 ◼   ► end of the three movies, would have made it feel a little bit more like, yeah, that's

00:13:14 ◼   ► about 20 years before Alec Guinness.

00:13:17 ◼   ► So do you think with these new ones, do you think they do continuation or all new characters?

00:13:22 ◼   ► I mean, they'll have to do some obviously tie-ins to the previous original trilogy,

00:13:28 ◼   ► right?

00:13:29 ◼   ► That I really don't know.

00:13:30 ◼   ► And that was the one thing that…

00:13:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:35 ◼   ► And did you see the thing that came out today that Mark Hamill said in an interview that

00:13:40 ◼   ► George Lucas had told…had had lunch with him and Carrie Fisher a year ago and told

00:13:44 ◼   ► them a year ago and said, "Look, you can't tell anybody, but I'm going to do three

00:13:48 ◼   ► more movies."

00:13:49 ◼   ► And I guess there was nothing in the interview that said, "I want you guys in it."

00:13:54 ◼   ► It just…he just said, "I just thought you guys should know because it's going

00:13:57 ◼   ► to come out eventually.

00:13:59 ◼   ► I wanted you guys to know."

00:14:00 ◼   ► going to be sequels that take place later. But whether it's 20, 30 years and those characters

00:14:05 ◼   ► are still alive, or whether it's a thousand generations or something like that, I don't know.

00:14:10 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah. Well, if they want to... Every indication by Disney now is that they want

00:14:16 ◼   ► to keep this going indefinitely, almost like a James Bond type thing, where you have a new one

00:14:20 ◼   ► every few years. So if they do that, then I assume they start pretty soon after the original trilogy

00:14:26 ◼   ► and then just keep going into the future and try and make compelling characters.

00:14:29 ◼   ► It'd be kind of cool if he was just rumored. There's this guy, Luke Skywalker, who's—I

00:14:35 ◼   ► don't know. I feel like it could be—it's very exciting. I feel like it could be great.

00:14:39 ◼   ► But I feel like the worst thing would be if it's Luke and Leia. I can't imagine Harrison

00:14:45 ◼   ► Ford would want anything to do with it. Luke and Leia and Chewbacca saved the galaxy again.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Pretty exciting, though. Yeah. I'm kind of surprised. I don't know. Obviously, I've

00:15:02 ◼   ► never met George Lucas. I'm just surprised, though, from what I thought about him. I guess

00:15:11 ◼   ► he wants to get into charity. And I guess if you can do that, if that's really where

00:15:15 ◼   ► your passion is, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

00:15:18 ◼   ► He clearly has, I think he's already a billionaire, right, from all those movies.

00:15:23 ◼   ► His big thing was that he did such a good job of cutting the deals to get the merchandising

00:15:29 ◼   ► rights, right?

00:15:30 ◼   ► I mean that's where he made most of his money off of all the Star Wars movies.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And the movies themselves made over a billion dollars, but that's small compared to what

00:15:39 ◼   ► they make on the toy sales and all that other stuff.

00:15:42 ◼   ► So yeah, he clearly didn't need the money to do it, but maybe he feels like Disney will

00:15:48 ◼   ► be a good shepherd. I mean, Bob Iger seems to be awesome at cutting these types of deals.

00:15:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I actually just want to take him at his word in that he wasn't going to make

00:15:56 ◼   ► anymore. He wants it to stay evergreen. And who has a better track record of keeping franchises

00:16:05 ◼   ► alive decade after decade than Disney? And they have done a good job with The Muppets.

00:16:10 ◼   ► They've done a good job with—well, Marvel, it's hard to judge so far.

00:16:15 ◼   ► Right, it's too early. But they've done a good job so far with those films, and they

00:16:19 ◼   ► do a great job with the merchandising, which has always been so important to Star Wars.

00:16:22 ◼   ► So yeah, it's a good fit.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Very exciting. I tweeted this, and a lot of people retweeted it, and it does, it weirds

00:16:31 ◼   ► me out, is that it is going to be really weird to have a Star Wars movie open without the

00:16:36 ◼   ► 20th century Fox fanfare.

00:16:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:40 ◼   ► I wonder, did they retain any sort of rights

00:16:44 ◼   ► for like co-distribution of any future properties?

00:16:48 ◼   ► - No. - Okay.

00:16:49 ◼   ► - And it's different with Indiana Jones.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Paramount has, if they do anything with Indiana Jones,

00:16:56 ◼   ► it's gonna have to be with Paramount's cooperation.

00:16:59 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:16:59 ◼   ► - In some degree, or they'd have to buy them out,

00:17:03 ◼   ► or there's something they'd have to buy out.

00:17:04 ◼   ► But Star Wars--

00:17:05 ◼   ► - And that's because like Spielberg,

00:17:07 ◼   ► This is so incestuous, right? So Spielberg's Amblin group had a deal with Paramount back

00:17:12 ◼   ► then when they were doing that, and then Kathleen Kennedy was his production partner, and now

00:17:16 ◼   ► Kathleen Kennedy is the president of Lucasfilm at Disney. So it's like, all these things

00:17:23 ◼   ► are tied together directly.

00:17:27 ◼   ► I didn't think about that. I didn't put her name together there.

00:17:30 ◼   ► Yeah, the three of them are all like, Lucas, Spielberg, and Kathleen Kennedy obviously

00:17:36 ◼   ► have been close for a long time and now that's all sort of related. So I don't

00:17:40 ◼   ► know, but 20th Century Fox has nothing going forward with the new trilogy. The

00:17:45 ◼   ► only thing that they have, and it is fascinating, is they 20th Century Fox has

00:17:52 ◼   ► perpetual rights into infinity for the original 1977 Star Wars A New Hope for

00:18:00 ◼   ► the distribution of it. Oh that's interesting. They have Empire and

00:18:05 ◼   ► and Return of the Jedi until like 2020 or something like that. And the new ones, Lucas

00:18:13 ◼   ► was in a position of power where they were just a distributor.

00:18:16 ◼   ► John: Yeah. So they must be pushing then to do this 3D stuff because they want to squeeze

00:18:21 ◼   ► as much money before 2020 or whatever as they can out of this.

00:18:24 ◼   ► Tim: Yeah, I think so. And the idea was that once these other three movies are done, figure

00:18:29 ◼   ► 2015, give them two for each year, two years for each, 2015, 17, 19, that by 2020 it would

00:18:38 ◼   ► be nice to be able to buy a nine-movie box set, but that it would never be possible without

00:18:43 ◼   ► either buying 20th Century Fox's rights for that original 1977 one or doing it in cooperation

00:18:52 ◼   ► with them.

00:18:53 ◼   ► That's, you know, that's interesting when thinking about the James Bond series again,

00:18:57 ◼   ► because who is it? It may even be Paramount that owns the rights to one, I think it's

00:19:03 ◼   ► Thunderball, and that's why they redid that Bond movie in the 80s with Connery.

00:19:08 ◼   ► Right, Never Say Never Again.

00:19:10 ◼   ► Never Say Never Again, because that's the only one they own the rights to. That's

00:19:13 ◼   ► the only one that the Broccoli family doesn't have complete rights to, I believe.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like a very—I really got obsessed with it a while ago. It was when Dan Benjamin

00:19:25 ◼   ► and I were going through all the James Bond movies. And we decided to treat it as one,

00:19:29 ◼   ► because if Connery's in it, it's a Bond movie. It's like he had agreed to do a teleplay,

00:19:37 ◼   ► Ian Fleming. And wasn't a James Bond story, I don't think? It was just a spy caper for

00:19:43 ◼   ► like the BBC television with a co-writer. And it fell through, never happened. And he

00:19:49 ◼   ► took the guts of the story, which was just the basic idea of a terrorist organization

00:19:55 ◼   ► steals a nuclear bomb by hijacking, by having a traitor on a pilot, an Air Force pilot is

00:20:03 ◼   ► a traitor for this terrorist group, and that's how they get ahold of a nuclear bomb, and

00:20:07 ◼   ► they just want to ransom it off. Okay, good story. But, and he took it and made it into

00:20:12 ◼   ► a Bond novel, and the litigation started, and it was all ongoing, and the Broccoli

00:20:18 ◼   ► group went ahead and made a movie out of Thunderball anyway, even though they had some of their

00:20:22 ◼   ► advisors were saying, "Maybe we shouldn't do this one. Let's do another one. He's

00:20:26 ◼   ► already got six of these novels. Don't do Thunderball yet because it's legally questionable."

00:20:31 ◼   ► And they did it anyway, and it was a huge hit. I mean, it was, you know, it might have

00:20:35 ◼   ► been...

00:20:36 ◼   ► It might have been the biggest one.

00:20:38 ◼   ► It might have been the biggest one because it was the fourth one, and Goldfinger was

00:20:41 ◼   ► one that kind of broke through as a sensation, and then Thunderball was just an unbelievable

00:20:46 ◼   ► follow-up.

00:20:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:20:48 ◼   ► And it was like more of a spectacular in terms of the effects with all the underwater fighting and stuff

00:20:52 ◼   ► It was like a people were going back to see it again and again because they were seeing things they've never seen

00:20:58 ◼   ► but anyway, they ended up losing the litigation and lost some money on it and and the gist of it was that

00:21:03 ◼   ► Both

00:21:06 ◼   ► Fleming and the original guy got co-writes to the Thunderball James Bond Thunderball story

00:21:11 ◼   ► So the broccoli group if they wanted to could make a new do it fun at all

00:21:16 ◼   ► But there's this other group at you know, I think you're right that it's paramount

00:21:19 ◼   ► Could do it too like they can still make they still could make a James Bond movie

00:21:24 ◼   ► If it follows the plot and I think they were I believe that almost

00:21:29 ◼   ► Happened in the 90s when they were in between the Dalton and Brosnan stuff. I

00:21:34 ◼   ► Think that a group was exploring rebooting before Goldeneye came out for Paramount or whoever the other studio is

00:21:42 ◼   ► But yet they would have had to use that same

00:21:44 ◼   ► They're just gonna remake it every 10 years

00:21:46 ◼   ► I guess and so I wonder if with with Star Wars now since since 20th Century Fox owns those the rights to the first one

00:21:54 ◼   ► if they do like a remake of A New Hope with like 60 year old Mark Hamill and

00:21:59 ◼   ► I don't know I see that would be interesting if they have the rights to do whatever they want like that or just the rights

00:22:06 ◼   ► To distribute the movie as it was made you know yeah, I'd be interested. Yeah, I don't know

00:22:10 ◼   ► Fascinating stuff though.

00:22:14 ◼   ► It really is.

00:22:15 ◼   ► Alright, let's do the nerd stuff too.

00:22:19 ◼   ► The Apple nerd stuff.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Mad Fientist Right, there's actually quite a bit of Apple

00:22:23 ◼   ► news now.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Justin Perdue The Apple, the iPad mini, iPad 4.

00:22:27 ◼   ► Seems like everybody did what I did.

00:22:29 ◼   ► It seems.

00:22:30 ◼   ► I didn't really discuss this with anybody, but I had two review units from Apple, an

00:22:33 ◼   ► iPad 4 and an iPad mini.

00:22:35 ◼   ► But I spent all week with the iPad Mini, and I used the iPad 4 for 15 minutes just to give

00:22:42 ◼   ► it a kick.

00:22:43 ◼   ► Kick the tires, run some benchmarks.

00:22:44 ◼   ► And I was like, "Yeah, it's just like the iPad 3, about twice as fast."

00:22:47 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah, the problem is, and I don't know if

00:22:50 ◼   ► you ran into this, I was trying to test the fourth generation iPad, and the iPad 3 is

00:22:58 ◼   ► already so fast for every app that I try to run.

00:23:01 ◼   ► It's just like, it's hard to gauge.

00:23:04 ◼   ► I think things load faster generally, but it was already loading so fast, so we're really

00:23:09 ◼   ► going to have to wait for developers to come up with kind of crazy apps to take advantage

00:23:13 ◼   ► of the A6X and the new graphics capabilities, and we're just not there yet.

00:23:20 ◼   ► I saw a demo of one kind of during the briefing thing of a game that was specifically built

00:23:28 ◼   ► for the new capabilities, and it looked amazing.

00:23:32 ◼   ► lens flares and all kinds of different things going on graphically. But yeah, it was really

00:23:39 ◼   ► pretty hard to try and review this fourth generation iPad since it is, for all intents

00:23:45 ◼   ► and purposes, an iPad 3S.

00:23:48 ◼   ► Right. And it's true too because you know that the games that are already out there,

00:23:52 ◼   ► the developers aren't going to target hardware beyond what's already out there. So anything

00:23:56 ◼   ► that's already in the App Store is meant to run well on the iPad 3. Or at least on the

00:24:01 ◼   ► iPad 3, if not even older iPads. So the iPad 4 is going to go through that without even

00:24:07 ◼   ► breaking a sweat.

00:24:08 ◼   ► JE: Yeah. So yeah, I think I saw that, too, that pretty much everyone roped in there.

00:24:14 ◼   ► Just a quick mention about the iPad 4th gen in their iPad Mini review.

00:24:17 ◼   ► JF: Yeah. But I really like the iPad Mini. I really do.

00:24:21 ◼   ► JE; Oh, yeah. I think I like it more. I'm going to take a lot of shit for saying that,

00:24:26 ◼   ► but I think I like it more each day. The more I just use it, it just seems to be a much

00:24:30 ◼   ► more natural way to just interact with a tablet, it seems like. And I had a feeling I would

00:24:38 ◼   ► feel that way given my thoughts about the Nexus 7, the form factor in general. And it

00:24:46 ◼   ► just seemed like Apple had an opportunity to really nail this form factor, and I think

00:24:49 ◼   ► they did.

00:24:50 ◼   ► One of the things that struck me, I didn't put it in my review, but I actually just saved

00:24:54 ◼   ► it for the show, because I think it will sound better than it would read better. But it,

00:24:58 ◼   ► to me feels like more of a pad.

00:25:02 ◼   ► Like the core word pad fits better here,

00:25:06 ◼   ► whereas the full-size iPad is more of a tap,

00:25:08 ◼   ► tablet seems like the right word, right?

00:25:10 ◼   ► Like this big thing that Moses came down the mountain with,

00:25:12 ◼   ► a big tablet.

00:25:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a good way to put it, I agree with that.

00:25:16 ◼   ► - This feels more like a pad.

00:25:17 ◼   ► I know people have been comparing it to like,

00:25:20 ◼   ► you know, the weight to like a pad of paper.

00:25:23 ◼   ► It's very similar, it's even smaller

00:25:26 ◼   ► like a Moleskine notebook or the bigger Moleskine notebook. Probably equivalent to the more

00:25:34 ◼   ► pocket-sized Moleskine notebook. It really is a pad, feels like the right word. And I

00:25:39 ◼   ► do feel like this is sort of the natural, especially for someone, and I really emphasize

00:25:43 ◼   ► this, as someone who still has and wants to have a real portable laptop computer, like

00:25:50 ◼   ► like a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro or something like that.

00:25:53 ◼   ► As a secondary portable computer,

00:25:56 ◼   ► this seems like a better form factor.

00:25:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think that's why, you know,

00:26:01 ◼   ► some people are already questioning,

00:26:02 ◼   ► well, how does this fit into the lineup?

00:26:04 ◼   ► I mean, you know, you got an iPad already,

00:26:05 ◼   ► why is someone gonna buy this?

00:26:07 ◼   ► I do think that more people are going to end up

00:26:09 ◼   ► buying an iPad Mini.

00:26:10 ◼   ► I mean, I know it's early,

00:26:12 ◼   ► and who knows how this will actually play out,

00:26:14 ◼   ► especially given the price element of it,

00:26:16 ◼   ► but this just seems like the thing that people

00:26:19 ◼   ► will want, especially the people that you're talking about, which is most people, most

00:26:23 ◼   ► people already have a computer, of course. And so they're wondering, like, "Why should

00:26:27 ◼   ► I get an iPad when I already have a computer? Maybe I'll get an iPad, you know, when my

00:26:30 ◼   ► computer dies," or something like that. But this is a pretty natural transition point

00:26:35 ◼   ► to have both. So, yeah, that's why I think that this thing, maybe as soon as next quarter,

00:26:41 ◼   ► could end up outselling the iPad itself.

00:26:44 ◼   ► I think for the holiday quarter, I really do. And part of the reaction, and I'm basing

00:26:48 ◼   ► it on a sample size of one almost nine-year-old boy, but there is no doubt in my mind that

00:26:55 ◼   ► if you gave my son $400, put him in the Apple store and said, "You can buy whatever iPod

00:27:02 ◼   ► you want, or iPad, well, whatever you want for $400." I think that there's no doubt

00:27:08 ◼   ► in my mind that he would buy the iPad mini. There's no question. He wouldn't even…

00:27:11 ◼   ► How is he... so that's... I'm pretty interested in that because I have no real data point

00:27:17 ◼   ► there yet in terms of like kids using it. So that's a huge thing for the iPad itself

00:27:23 ◼   ► and everyone knows this by now, but what about the iPad Mini with kids? Like how did your

00:27:27 ◼   ► son use it?

00:27:29 ◼   ► He wanted to play games on it and you know and he does read. He does iBooks on... his

00:27:35 ◼   ► iPad is an old... I think it's a first gen iPad actually, the one that we have sitting

00:27:40 ◼   ► around that's for him to use but that's definitely pre-retinin it's either a one or two.

00:27:45 ◼   ► But it always has surprised me that he uses it less than his old last generation knock

00:27:51 ◼   ► around iPhone that we give him.

00:27:54 ◼   ► He plays more games has played, you know, consistently more games on an iPhone than

00:28:00 ◼   ► on an iPad, even when it's not because we were out it out and about and that's what

00:28:05 ◼   ► was easy to take for him.

00:28:06 ◼   ► it's in the house when he's on the couch and he's just playing games he likes that because

00:28:10 ◼   ► I think that the weight of the iPad is a it just feels like work whereas he really likes

00:28:16 ◼   ► the size of this he's like why you know his take was I can't believe they didn't make

00:28:19 ◼   ► them all like this. So yeah I wrote in my review and I think I'm not a I'm not a huge

00:28:25 ◼   ► gamer by any stretch but it seems like when I was playing some of the just testing out

00:28:30 ◼   ► some of the different iPad optimized games on this iPad mini this seems like an absolute

00:28:35 ◼   ► killer gaming device. Like, I don't know why people would still buy an Xbox or, you know,

00:28:42 ◼   ► obviously there's going to be games that have, with more, better graphic capabilities and,

00:28:48 ◼   ► you know, some more involved games, but for casual gaming this is an absolute killer device

00:28:53 ◼   ► for that. It's like the perfect size and it almost feels like these games were tailored

00:28:57 ◼   ► for an iPad this size rather than the larger size. Because like where your hands are situated

00:29:02 ◼   ► and you know you have well you don't have a you know the side bezel now

00:29:05 ◼   ► really on the uh... when you're holding it in portrait mode in landscape mode

00:29:09 ◼   ► you still have that

00:29:10 ◼   ► and it's just it seems like a really awesome gaming machine yeah i'd think so

00:29:14 ◼   ► too i i really do think that in some ways maybe it's more of a

00:29:18 ◼   ► devastating competitive move

00:29:20 ◼   ► to nintendo

00:29:22 ◼   ► and joni yes

00:29:23 ◼   ► than it is too

00:29:25 ◼   ► google and amazon you know because specially with um... isn't nintendo you

00:29:30 ◼   ► know I haven't seen too much about it but I know it's coming out the Wii U, their new

00:29:35 ◼   ► gaming system. So they're going to be first to market of the next generation gaming system

00:29:39 ◼   ► with this Wii U thing and I mean it's sort of not too different from what the iPad mini

00:29:45 ◼   ► is doing right? It's like the handheld touchable hold it with two hands type thing and I think

00:29:52 ◼   ► I mean this is going to be huge for kids in gaming and for just people who like casual

00:29:57 ◼   ► games.

00:29:58 ◼   ► count Nintendo out, because I'm a huge fan of Nintendo's work, and I think they really

00:30:02 ◼   ► do sweat the details in an Apple-like way about getting gameplay right and buttons right

00:30:07 ◼   ► and stuff like that. But I just think that the iPad could risk taking so much oxygen

00:30:12 ◼   ► out of the room that there's not enough left for Nintendo, no matter how good the product

00:30:17 ◼   ► they come out with is.

00:30:18 ◼   ► Yeah. And I mean, this gets brought up every quarter at least. But how awesome would it

00:30:24 ◼   ► be if Apple just bought Nintendo. I mean it would be such a great selling point for these

00:30:30 ◼   ► devices. It makes sense for Apple to do because that will get people specifically just to

00:30:35 ◼   ► buy an iPad mini to be able to play Mario and Zelda and those types of IP. It seems

00:30:40 ◼   ► like Nintendo, like the reports out of Japan, they're a very proud company obviously, they

00:30:44 ◼   ► don't want to do that, but Apple has the money of course to do it and it's just a question

00:30:48 ◼   ► of would it work, could they make it work? And would it make sense to maybe keep them,

00:30:53 ◼   ► them out of the hardware game and keep them as like an almost independent content game.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Just focus on making games. We'll make the devices you focus on your library, you know,

00:31:06 ◼   ► almost again like Star Wars, this great library of classic characters and games and innovative

00:31:13 ◼   ► new stuff that's really, really super engaging.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think that they would avoid what would be the potential pitfall of this, which

00:31:24 ◼   ► is that, well Apple's moving into gaming now, everyone else watch out, but the gaming environment

00:31:29 ◼   ► is such a big thing and this has worked well for Nintendo in the past and all these other

00:31:32 ◼   ► guys.

00:31:33 ◼   ► They make their games, everyone makes their own games, but then they have the larger ecosystem

00:31:37 ◼   ► and it's kind of like pushing the envelope forward.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Nintendo's always been good at setting a new high bar and kind of the other guys trying

00:31:43 ◼   ► to match it and Apple could do the same thing with their own gaming studio under Nintendo

00:31:47 ◼   ► if they did that.

00:31:50 ◼   ► Or if they worked out some kind of deal.

00:31:53 ◼   ► Maybe they'd have to acquire them, but do some kind of licensing deal where they encourage

00:31:56 ◼   ► them to somehow do the exclusively producing stuff.

00:32:01 ◼   ► I have to imagine that all of those guys have been talking about this for years.

00:32:05 ◼   ► Microsoft, Sony, well maybe not Sony.

00:32:08 ◼   ► I don't know what the rivalry is with Sony and Nintendo.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Maybe they hate each other.

00:32:12 ◼   ► Microsoft certainly has to have constantly been approaching Nintendo to try and make

00:32:18 ◼   ► those games available on Xbox, because it's such a gold mine, right?

00:32:21 ◼   ► Well, it's two things.

00:32:23 ◼   ► Number one, Nintendo has tremendous talent, you know, and consistently.

00:32:30 ◼   ► They just have great game designers and artists.

00:32:34 ◼   ► And the second thing they have is this library of characters, which, like the Marvel acquisition

00:32:40 ◼   ► and the Star Wars acquisition show has unbelievable value.

00:32:43 ◼   ► I mean, it's been long enough that there's no doubt that these guys like Mario and Donkey

00:32:49 ◼   ► Kong and those guys are, maybe they're not quite up at the level of the Disney characters

00:32:54 ◼   ► like Donald Duck and Mickey and those guys, but they're very, very close.

00:32:57 ◼   ► And maybe, I wouldn't be surprised if in Asia they're greater.

00:33:00 ◼   ► Yeah, oh yeah.

00:33:03 ◼   ► I wouldn't be surprised either if Disney tries to acquire Nintendo.

00:33:05 ◼   ► I mean, this seems like right in their wheelhouse.

00:33:07 ◼   ► Nope.

00:33:08 ◼   ► seems like their strategy is if you've got Evergreen ensemble of these characters that

00:33:15 ◼   ► we're, you know, and it's family and they're family friendly, then we're, we want them.

00:33:19 ◼   ► Yeah, no doubt about it. I'll tell you what the game I think of, and I don't play enough

00:33:26 ◼   ► games to really, to be a great judge of it, but I know the one game I sometimes like to

00:33:30 ◼   ► play is the real racing games on the iPad. And it's, it's, I think it's definitely better

00:33:35 ◼   ► better on the Mini, no doubt in my mind, because it's just far less to hold out in front

00:33:40 ◼   ► of you. I mean, your arms are sticking straight up and then doing this thing where you're

00:33:44 ◼   ► turning the screen with a pound and a half versus seven tenths of a pound. It's a huge

00:33:52 ◼   ► difference. So I do think that. Gaming alone, I think iPad Mini is going to be a hit.

00:33:57 ◼   ► So, let's talk about the screen, because that's obviously—I mean, every review

00:34:03 ◼   ► had to say it because it's just right in front of you.

00:34:06 ◼   ► Anyone who's used a retina display for an extended period

00:34:08 ◼   ► of time will be immediately kind of turned off at first

00:34:14 ◼   ► by the screen because it's not retina quality.

00:34:17 ◼   ► And to me, that kind of faded over time.

00:34:20 ◼   ► But then I switched back to both a retina Mac and, of course,

00:34:24 ◼   ► a retina iPhone and the retina iPad.

00:34:26 ◼   ► And so it's pretty jarring.

00:34:29 ◼   ► But the larger point is that most people still

00:34:32 ◼   ► don't have iPads and there's plenty of people still with non-retina displays on their various

00:34:38 ◼   ► devices who won't, you know, this is still a great display, it's just not a retina display.

00:34:45 ◼   ► Yeah. You know, that was my first thought was I was just really disappointed and after

00:34:49 ◼   ► a week I got used to it, especially because I stopped using the other iPads. I wanted

00:34:53 ◼   ► to, you know, because most people, normal people aren't going to have more than one

00:34:55 ◼   ► iPad that they use, so I just used the Mini for a week and I got used to it. But I also,

00:35:01 ◼   ► clearly I am very self-aware that I am far more obsessed with screen resolution

00:35:08 ◼   ► than most people and also specifically with the rendering of type on screen.

00:35:13 ◼   ► Yeah. You know, I mean I know how to recognize Arial from Helvetica. Normal

00:35:18 ◼   ► people don't. Normal people just don't see that big a difference between

00:35:22 ◼   ► retina and non-retina. And I really do think I am convinced, absolutely, well I'll

00:35:29 ◼   ► I'll say 99.8% convinced that the iPad 2 has continued to sell very, very well, maybe even

00:35:37 ◼   ► surprisingly well at $399 alongside the Retina iPad 3s, that people are going into Apple

00:35:44 ◼   ► stores for the last seven months, seeing the iPad 2 right next to the Retina iPad 3s and

00:35:51 ◼   ► saying, "Wow, $399, I'll take this one."

00:35:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and I tried to get some sort of answer out of Apple about that. They won't give you

00:35:58 ◼   ► anything specific but it seems like certainly education comes into play there. You know

00:36:04 ◼   ► they're selling the cheaper versions and they, I think they sell them at a discount right

00:36:07 ◼   ► if they sell them in bulk. And so education is a part of that but yeah there's no question

00:36:14 ◼   ► that they're selling the iPad 2 for a reason even though they discontinued the third generation

00:36:18 ◼   ► iPad right like rather than doing fourth generation move the iPad 3 down to the $399 price they

00:36:24 ◼   ► They just killed that off and now they're just doing the iPad 2.

00:36:28 ◼   ► And so that says all you need to know right there that obviously it had to have been selling

00:36:32 ◼   ► well.

00:36:33 ◼   ► So…

00:36:34 ◼   ► Dave Asprey It's existence proof that right now, today,

00:36:36 ◼   ► you do not need a retina display and an iPad to sell well.

00:36:39 ◼   ► It would be nice and surely, eventually, whether it's a year from now or 18 months from now

00:36:46 ◼   ► or two years from now, there's going to be an iPad Mini with a retina display.

00:36:49 ◼   ► It's just right as rain.

00:36:52 ◼   ► As sure as night follows day.

00:36:54 ◼   ► But — and that's going to be great, and I'm going to love it, and I'm going to

00:36:57 ◼   ► be so happy.

00:36:58 ◼   ► But, in the meantime, there's absolutely no reason that this isn't going to continue

00:37:01 ◼   ► to sell really well.

00:37:02 ◼   ► And I think the iPad 2, whether Apple did it intentionally or not, it made the timing

00:37:09 ◼   ► of this iPad mini pretty perfect because had there been nothing but a Retina display iPad

00:37:17 ◼   ► out there, so the 4 and 3, the downgrade would have been much more dramatic, but the fact

00:37:22 ◼   ► that they are still selling the two, they don't have to come in with a product that's

00:37:28 ◼   ► really downgraded in any way. It's just a better iPad 2, right? It's not a downgraded

00:37:33 ◼   ► iPad 4.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Dave Asprey No. No, it's a great product. All right, let

00:37:37 ◼   ► me take a break here and do the first sponsor. First sponsor is Appsfire. Appsfire, it's

00:37:43 ◼   ► an alternative interface to the App Store. Here's the problem that they try to solve.

00:37:46 ◼   ► The problem they try to solve is that it is insanely difficult to find the best apps in

00:37:51 ◼   ► App Store. It's easy to find the most popular apps, right? Apple makes these lists of categories

00:37:56 ◼   ► where you can find the current most popular apps. But how do you find the best apps, the

00:38:03 ◼   ► ones that are actually either the highest quality, the hidden gems that should be more

00:38:07 ◼   ► popular but aren't yet? And all sorts of great apps just aren't even in these top lists,

00:38:13 ◼   ► right? Marco Arman's the magazine not in the top list right now. Clear, great to-do list

00:38:19 ◼   ► a claim by all sorts of interface critics,

00:38:23 ◼   ► not in the top downloads list right now.

00:38:26 ◼   ► These are the type of apps that if you don't know about,

00:38:28 ◼   ► you'd like to be able to discover,

00:38:29 ◼   ► and that's what AppsFire helps you do.

00:38:31 ◼   ► Here's how they do it.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Number one, they have a great user experience

00:38:35 ◼   ► to help you find apps.

00:38:36 ◼   ► The app itself, AppsFire app, is fast and beautiful,

00:38:40 ◼   ► really, really fast, really beautiful,

00:38:42 ◼   ► and unlike the new updated iOS 6,

00:38:45 ◼   ► App Store app shows a lot more information

00:38:48 ◼   ► at a time on a screen.

00:38:49 ◼   ► They've really worked hard to sort of put

00:38:52 ◼   ► a lot of information on the screen

00:38:53 ◼   ► without making it look cluttered.

00:38:54 ◼   ► It's very, very beautiful.

00:38:58 ◼   ► Two, they have this thing they call the App Score.

00:39:00 ◼   ► Now, this is their equivalent of something

00:39:02 ◼   ► like the Rotten Tomatoes meter for apps.

00:39:04 ◼   ► It's a daily rank of dozens of parameters on apps

00:39:08 ◼   ► from in and from outside the App Store,

00:39:11 ◼   ► like independent review sites.

00:39:13 ◼   ► They aggregate that information so they

00:39:14 ◼   ► can filter out the low quality apps

00:39:16 ◼   ► and highlight only the best.

00:39:18 ◼   ► By default, App Store only shows good apps.

00:39:20 ◼   ► They don't even show apps that they think

00:39:22 ◼   ► based on these criteria are bad apps.

00:39:24 ◼   ► Here's the thing, you can personalize it.

00:39:30 ◼   ► You tell App Store what type of stuff you're interested in.

00:39:34 ◼   ► Are you interested in games

00:39:35 ◼   ► or you're not interested in games, right?

00:39:37 ◼   ► Are you a traveler?

00:39:38 ◼   ► Are you, do you use a lot of travel apps?

00:39:40 ◼   ► Do you use weather apps?

00:39:41 ◼   ► Are you a weather app junkie?

00:39:45 ◼   ► Discovery shouldn't be the same for every user.

00:39:48 ◼   ► It should be based on what you are interested in,

00:39:50 ◼   ► and that's what AppsFire lets you do.

00:39:52 ◼   ► The app itself, here's the thing.

00:39:54 ◼   ► It's free.

00:39:54 ◼   ► It's a free app, and it's universal,

00:39:57 ◼   ► and it's retina ready.

00:39:59 ◼   ► They've already shown me the beta of their next version.

00:40:01 ◼   ► It's going to be submitted to the store soon,

00:40:04 ◼   ► even better than before.

00:40:05 ◼   ► The app as it stands right now is all those things--

00:40:07 ◼   ► free, universal, retina ready.

00:40:10 ◼   ► All the features I've talked about are there.

00:40:12 ◼   ► But the new version is even better,

00:40:14 ◼   ► And they've really, really worked on performance.

00:40:16 ◼   ► It's even faster, super, super fast.

00:40:18 ◼   ► And the other thing, best of all, they're

00:40:20 ◼   ► a repeat sponsor of the talk show.

00:40:23 ◼   ► It's a free app.

00:40:24 ◼   ► It's a great service.

00:40:26 ◼   ► There's no reason that everybody out there

00:40:28 ◼   ► shouldn't go and download AppsFire right now

00:40:30 ◼   ► for your iPad, your iPhone, your iPod Touch.

00:40:34 ◼   ► You can get more information at appsfire.com, A-P-P-S-F-I-R-E.com.

00:40:41 ◼   ► or just go to the App Store and search for Appsfire and check them out.

00:40:46 ◼   ► Last week I went to the

00:40:51 ◼   ► Microsoft Windows 8 event. Oh, you did? I didn't know that. Yeah, I came in on a red eye

00:40:56 ◼   ► from the West Coast after the Apple thing and after being in LA to record last week's talk show.

00:41:01 ◼   ► Uh huh. But I was so happy that they had invited me

00:41:06 ◼   ► And I really didn't want to miss it because I really wanted to see it and I really am glad that I went.

00:41:10 ◼   ► I haven't been to a Microsoft event before.

00:41:14 ◼   ► So before you get into that, let me bring up something here.

00:41:18 ◼   ► It's fascinating that they invited you. I've heard

00:41:22 ◼   ► specifically now from a few different people that they do not want me

00:41:26 ◼   ► to have a Surface. And I've heard that from internally

00:41:30 ◼   ► within the company. I have friends there and stuff who are trying to see if I could do it.

00:41:34 ◼   ► it. Just, you know, either do a review or just play around with it. Whatever. And they

00:41:39 ◼   ► do not want me to have one. And I don't know if that speaks to the fact that

00:41:43 ◼   ► obviously they think I'm going to be biased in some way, shape, or form. But I

00:41:47 ◼   ► mean they should understand that if I take a shit on it and then it ends up

00:41:53 ◼   ► being a good device, I look like an ass. Exactly. That's what everybody doesn't

00:41:57 ◼   ► seem to get. Right. And it's like... I have to be honest about it. So I don't know

00:42:02 ◼   ► what they're afraid of or whatever it is. And I've had a fine relationship with Microsoft

00:42:07 ◼   ► in the past. They just seem to not want me to have this device.

00:42:11 ◼   ► So…

00:42:12 ◼   ► I just saw the same thing with Harry McCracken's review of the iPad Mini for Time. And somebody

00:42:17 ◼   ► in the comments or in Twitter was like, "Wow, what a surprise. Another positive review of

00:42:21 ◼   ► an Apple device in Time. Five in a row." And his response was, "Well, look at those

00:42:27 ◼   ► five devices? In hindsight, are they good devices? I actually think that I've done a

00:42:32 ◼   ► good job. I've called it as accurately. These have been great devices. It's so ridiculous,

00:42:37 ◼   ► right?

00:42:38 ◼   ► Dave Asprey And to Google's credit, they're great at

00:42:39 ◼   ► this. They know that I'm not the biggest Android fan in the world, but they still send me all

00:42:45 ◼   ► these units to try out, see what I think about it. They seem to appreciate, at least, my

00:42:51 ◼   ► take on it, whether or not they agree with it.

00:42:53 ◼   ► And your Nexus 7 review was actually very, very positive.

00:42:57 ◼   ► Right. And that's how it's going to be. Right, right. Yeah.

00:43:01 ◼   ► So, I don't know. So it's good to hear that Microsoft invited you to the event, though,

00:43:05 ◼   ► that they're not blackballing all of us. If they are blackballing me, I don't know. I've heard this a couple

00:43:09 ◼   ► times now to believe it to be true.

00:43:13 ◼   ► They should re-read what you write. If they think I'm fair, I think

00:43:17 ◼   ► they should have a similar opinion of you, honestly. Anyway, it seems that Sinofsky

00:43:21 ◼   ► I don't know if he's a fan of Darren Fireball, but at least that Sinofsky reads it and respects

00:43:25 ◼   ► it.

00:43:26 ◼   ► So, I want to write about it, but it's just been such a busy week that I haven't gotten

00:43:34 ◼   ► around to it yet.

00:43:36 ◼   ► Just off the cuff, the gist of it, it was so interesting to me because it was…

00:43:39 ◼   ► Number one, just think about it from a PR standpoint, a product marketing standpoint.

00:43:44 ◼   ► What a tough position they were in, where they wanted to unveil two things.

00:43:48 ◼   ► wanted to unveil the new operating system, which is for all these ecosystem partners,

00:43:53 ◼   ► and they wanted to unveil their own Surface device, which competes with those partners.

00:43:59 ◼   ► How do you do that at one event?

00:44:01 ◼   ► So, the way they did it was by having two events the same day. That's what I found

00:44:07 ◼   ► so interesting. The morning was like a reverse Apple event. Ten o'clock, the door's

00:44:13 ◼   ► So when you come in and you do your registration, and the first thing you have is a big hands-on

00:44:18 ◼   ► area with all of these devices from Acer and Asus and Samsung and HP and Dell, ThinkPad.

00:44:27 ◼   ► So you tried them out before they talked about that?

00:44:31 ◼   ► Yup.

00:44:32 ◼   ► First thing you do is you come in and there's a nice big area and a coffee and juice and

00:44:36 ◼   ► stuff like that, but all these hands-on things.

00:44:39 ◼   ► And just anything that was ready on day one was there.

00:44:42 ◼   ► very few desktops. There was like one or two iMac-esque all-in-one desktops, but almost

00:44:49 ◼   ► entirely tablets and convertible tablets. Any way that you can imagine that there's

00:44:57 ◼   ► a way to secure a touchscreen tablet to a keyboard dock type thing, there's one that

00:45:05 ◼   ► was there. I mean, everyone – I can't even – I was saying – I was walking around

00:45:08 ◼   ► with Clayton Morris from Fox, and we were seriously trying to think, "Well, what else

00:45:11 ◼   ► could there even conceivably be? You know, ones that snap together. There were ones that had—it's

00:45:17 ◼   ► so awkward to me. There's like a frame. Like, think of a window frame, and it connects in the

00:45:23 ◼   ► middle, so you pivot it. It like spins around, so you can close it back up with the keyboard,

00:45:30 ◼   ► and the keyboard is there underneath it, but the screen is now facing up. You understand what I

00:45:35 ◼   ► mean? Like, imagine a laptop— Sort of. Yeah. I don't think that one's—I forget who made that

00:45:39 ◼   ► That one I think is DOA.

00:45:42 ◼   ► I mean, it's really weird.

00:45:44 ◼   ► But anyway, first you have the hands-on.

00:45:46 ◼   ► Then about an hour in, they had the big keynote.

00:45:51 ◼   ► And it was kind of, again, opposite of Apple where they had nothing new to announce.

00:45:55 ◼   ► Because that's not a fault.

00:45:57 ◼   ► That's just the nature of being a provider of OS to these partners.

00:46:03 ◼   ► They had to have announced everything in advance.

00:46:05 ◼   ► Otherwise there would be no one who did.

00:46:06 ◼   ► There wouldn't be any hardware available.

00:46:08 ◼   ► So it was just a way of reiterating what Windows 8 is all about.

00:46:13 ◼   ► And they talked about what it does, and then they started talking about here's some of

00:46:17 ◼   ► the great devices that are here today.

00:46:19 ◼   ► And they, you know, one by one started showing them and showing what's interesting about

00:46:23 ◼   ► this one and about that one.

00:46:25 ◼   ► Then at the very end, they did, you know, they got to, and now, you know, finally, you

00:46:29 ◼   ► know, for the first time we have Windows running on ARM systems.

00:46:33 ◼   ► And here's two great ones.

00:46:34 ◼   ► And there was one from Asus and one from Microsoft, the Microsoft service.

00:46:38 ◼   ► So they didn't even, in that first event, didn't even hold the surface up on like

00:46:43 ◼   ► a slide on screen or on stage by itself once.

00:46:47 ◼   ► They did it alongside a thing from ASIS that shared the stage.

00:46:51 ◼   ► And then Balmer came out and did his thing and then that was it.

00:46:58 ◼   ► And then we broke for lunch.

00:46:59 ◼   ► So it was hands-on first, then the keynote, then we broke for lunch.

00:47:02 ◼   ► And then after lunch, it was like a totally separate event.

00:47:07 ◼   ► It was the same press invitations.

00:47:08 ◼   ► It wasn't like yet, you know, I had to have a separate invitation, but they had a second

00:47:11 ◼   ► keynote that was first.

00:47:14 ◼   ► And they even did it in a different room.

00:47:16 ◼   ► Like, they had this whole big pier in New York, and they even did the keynote in a different

00:47:20 ◼   ► room.

00:47:21 ◼   ► It was a little bit smaller, and this time it was mostly Sinofsky, and it was all about

00:47:24 ◼   ► Surface.

00:47:25 ◼   ► So, that's, that almost, it sounds like, okay, we're putting the kids to bed and now the

00:47:30 ◼   ► parents are going to talk.

00:47:31 ◼   ► Yeah, that's, yeah, totally.

00:47:33 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:47:34 ◼   ► Yeah, we put the kids to bed, now it's serious.

00:47:36 ◼   ► And then when we got out of that keynote, then they'd opened up a separate, different

00:47:40 ◼   ► hands-on area that had nothing but surfaces.

00:47:43 ◼   ► And plenty of them, and as many…

00:47:46 ◼   ► I mean, like they had… if anything, they had more keyboard covers than surfaces, because

00:47:51 ◼   ► I guess they wanted you to be able to try both.

00:47:55 ◼   ► So they did not…

00:47:56 ◼   ► I do not have one.

00:47:57 ◼   ► They did not get one as like a review unit, but I spent at least, I don't know, an hour

00:48:01 ◼   ► playing with it.

00:48:02 ◼   ► So, initial thoughts without spoiling anything you're going to write about it. What did

00:48:07 ◼   ► you actually think of it?

00:48:10 ◼   ► It is not designed for me. I'm trying to keep an open mind about it, though. But it's

00:48:21 ◼   ► not bad. And it's good in some of the ways that Microsoft has always been good, where

00:48:27 ◼   ► And a lot of it does feel very snappy and that the touch seems really good in a way

00:48:32 ◼   ► that a lot of Android stuff hasn't in terms of tracking your finger and scrolling smoothly.

00:48:40 ◼   ► But exactly – and this is what I thought.

00:48:44 ◼   ► Is it my prejudice, what's presupposition?

00:48:49 ◼   ► My bias before I came in, my bias from the last eight months ever since they announced

00:48:53 ◼   ► it.

00:48:54 ◼   ► just me reinforcing it or is it really the truth? But it really felt like it as I used

00:48:59 ◼   ► it, which is this, that the desktop, the whole idea of having the desktop mode there, it

00:49:04 ◼   ► just sticks out like a sore thumb. And I know that they're not letting anybody add – you

00:49:10 ◼   ► can't have third-party desktop apps. It's only the ones that are built in, which is

00:49:16 ◼   ► IE, which to me is really crazy, that there's IE in Metro and IE in the desktop and the

00:49:26 ◼   ► Office suite. None of that really seemed to perform well. And it's not even just about

00:49:33 ◼   ► the touch targets are small in Office. They actually, like they've said, they've done

00:49:37 ◼   ► a pretty good job. And I would have to say that a lot of the touch targets in Office

00:49:43 ◼   ► on the surface are at least as big as the touch targets in, for example, iPhoto for

00:49:51 ◼   ► the iPad and iPhone, which has a lot of little finicky controls along the bottom. But it

00:49:57 ◼   ► really kind of felt laggy, though. It just felt like when you're in that desktop mode,

00:50:00 ◼   ► it kind of felt like when you're at a kiosk in a museum and you know that they're just

00:50:04 ◼   ► running some piece of crap touchscreen thing.

00:50:07 ◼   ► You ever see that? And I know there's some airlines, a couple of the airlines, like when

00:50:10 ◼   ► check in with their touchscreen like when you touch things you actually see

00:50:13 ◼   ► the white windows arrow cursor appear right right yep a split second before it

00:50:18 ◼   ► it actually clicks through yep you don't see that when you're using the

00:50:22 ◼   ► touchscreen on the surface but it all it does kind of feel like that in the

00:50:26 ◼   ► desktop not when you're using the native metro apps but it just so what why do

00:50:31 ◼   ► you think they did because like this is the most confounding thing to me like I

00:50:36 ◼   ► I think I have my own thoughts on the surface without having played with it.

00:50:40 ◼   ► I think it's strange how much of the emphasis they're putting on the keyboard of it.

00:50:45 ◼   ► It's just the same thing as a laptop, essentially.

00:50:48 ◼   ► But I think that the real problem that Microsoft will have is this weird dichotomy between

00:50:56 ◼   ► the don't call it metro-metro interface and the old school interface.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And I don't know why...

00:51:01 ◼   ► Well, I do know why.

00:51:03 ◼   ► There's no compromise, right?

00:51:05 ◼   ► quote unquote, no compromise as to why they merged the two together.

00:51:08 ◼   ► But how do people not understand, because every review that I've read about it now is

00:51:13 ◼   ► saying the same thing that you're saying, like, just the, there's too big of a leap

00:51:17 ◼   ► between the two of them.

00:51:18 ◼   ► So how in the years leading up to this development of this and just in the months leading up

00:51:23 ◼   ► to the release of it, how do people inside Microsoft who are playing with this thing

00:51:27 ◼   ► day in and day out realize that they just shouldn't release that part of it?

00:51:31 ◼   ► like either bring it on later, postpone, do something, but like if it's just not up to

00:51:37 ◼   ► par, why are they doing that? Is it because they couldn't get Office nailed for Surface,

00:51:44 ◼   ► for Windows RT in particular? I mean, is that it?

00:51:47 ◼   ► I really don't know. I guess so. I guess that's the idea. The only thing I can think of is

00:51:51 ◼   ► that they didn't have time to do a true pure Metro. I'm just going to keep calling it Metro

00:51:57 ◼   ► because it's such a convenient shorthand. A pure Metro Office thing that's compatible,

00:52:04 ◼   ► which is that compatibility across, you know, if everybody's on the same version of Office,

00:52:08 ◼   ► then these files will just work. That they couldn't do that, and that this was what they

00:52:13 ◼   ► had to do, and they didn't think they could sell a product without Office, you know, whether

00:52:17 ◼   ► it's really based on actual market research and people wouldn't buy it, or it's just their

00:52:22 ◼   ► internal bias that, you know, Windows and Office forever. I don't know. But I do feel

00:52:28 ◼   ► like, I feel like as long as you've started with this, at this starting point of we're

00:52:33 ◼   ► going to do two surfaces, an Intel one and an ARM one, and let's just concede for the

00:52:39 ◼   ► sake of argument right now that that's a good idea. I don't know. We'll see how it plans

00:52:43 ◼   ► out. But if you start with that idea, though, then why not take the liberty of saying with

00:52:50 ◼   ► the ARM one, we're only going to do Metro, even if it doesn't have Office to start. Because

00:52:55 ◼   ► if, all right, hey, hey, we hear you if Office is your thing, buy this one.

00:52:59 ◼   ► Aaron Alexander The pro one, yes, exactly. That's exactly

00:53:02 ◼   ► right. And that's so obvious. And how, why did they not do that? I just, it's very perplexing.

00:53:08 ◼   ► I don't, I just don't understand.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Eric Bischoff We hear you. We know you love Office. We are,

00:53:12 ◼   ► we have all sorts of ideas for the future of Office. And we could not be working harder

00:53:16 ◼   ► on it. We have great stuff coming next year and the year after for ARM. But right now,

00:53:21 ◼   ► if Office is a deal breaker for you, and we hear you, we know that's why you didn't buy

00:53:26 ◼   ► other competing tablets. But here's the one you want, this one. And it's an Intel-based

00:53:31 ◼   ► system, you know, and it'll run Office as you know it. I just, I don't know. It does

00:53:36 ◼   ► stick out a little bit. The other thing I noticed was that the browser, and again, this

00:53:43 ◼   ► is something I had this was my my guess coming in and it's backed up by using it

00:53:50 ◼   ► I used a lot of the browser and the hands-on area is it's just it like

00:53:54 ◼   ► WebKit has passed ie it is you know what are they even using what are what do

00:54:01 ◼   ► they use it's some sort of you know that they've done with the ie rendering

00:54:06 ◼   ► engine what Apple's done with WebKit is make a mobile touch version of it and

00:54:11 ◼   ► And it's not bad, you know, and you can flick and scroll, but it's just not WebKit.

00:54:20 ◼   ► It reminds me of being a Mac user back in like 1999, 2000, 2001, when, you know, there

00:54:28 ◼   ► were all sorts of reasons where I stuck with the Mac and I still thought the Mac was better

00:54:31 ◼   ► in many ways, but web browsing clearly was not one.

00:54:35 ◼   ► That you were a second-class citizen on the web, even whatever your favorite Mac web browser

00:54:40 ◼   ► because you were not getting the fastest, highest fidelity rendering. And that's what

00:54:45 ◼   ► it feels like on surface.

00:54:48 ◼   ► The big one to me was I wanted to open something in a new tab. So I saw a link, and I thought,

00:54:55 ◼   ► "I'll open it in a new tab." And I thought, "Well, how do I do that?" And I thought, "Well,

00:54:57 ◼   ► it's got to be tap and hold." So I tapped and held, and then nothing happened. And I

00:55:01 ◼   ► thought, "Oh, I don't know what to do." And we just couldn't figure it out. It was me

00:55:05 ◼   ► and Clayton Morris, and we just couldn't figure it out. And then we asked a guy, and he said,

00:55:08 ◼   ► you just tap and hold. We just weren't holding long enough. And it just was like the amount

00:55:13 ◼   ► of time you have to hold seems too long. And there's a weird, I don't know, it's almost

00:55:18 ◼   ► like a mode switch. I don't know, it's just the feel of it is off. It's just like you

00:55:22 ◼   ► have to hold your finger there way too long to get that context menu up. But then once

00:55:27 ◼   ► you do it, you can open in a new tab. And what about third party apps? Were there any

00:55:32 ◼   ► any on on the one you played with um trying to think I trying to think what

00:55:38 ◼   ► counts as third party they had the new Skype but that's not third party because

00:55:42 ◼   ► that's Microsoft now oh yeah they did have some third-party stuff they had

00:55:46 ◼   ► like some media stuff they had like a New York Times app yeah they had a cut

00:55:52 ◼   ► and I think it was a lot of media stuff they you know and there's weird stuff too

00:55:55 ◼   ► where they're just not as polished as Apple so they had pre-loaded on it was

00:55:59 ◼   ► the Kindle app yeah they did have third perhaps they had the Kindle app

00:56:01 ◼   ► preloaded but no books that's kind of funny yeah you know and that meant that

00:56:10 ◼   ► what are you gonna I mean I'm not gonna put my right I'm not gonna log in with

00:56:12 ◼   ► my Amazon credentials on the demo unit in the hands-on area right we get a

00:56:17 ◼   ► certain number of devices yeah and I'm not gonna lock one up on this but it

00:56:21 ◼   ► just seems like a weird thing like that's funny now and I guess sure the I'm

00:56:24 ◼   ► sure the menus on that Kindle app are great though they were you could just

00:56:29 ◼   ► you could just tell how much work was put into those menus, even though you couldn't

00:56:33 ◼   ► see an actual book.

00:56:35 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:56:36 ◼   ► You know, the New York Times app looked good. It wasn't quite as good as the iPad one, and

00:56:44 ◼   ► it didn't have custom fonts like the iPad one, which really brands that iPad. New York

00:56:49 ◼   ► Times app is very New York Times-y because it shares the same fonts as the print edition.

00:56:56 ◼   ► But it was nicer than reading the New York,

00:56:58 ◼   ► it was, you know, just like what an app should be.

00:57:01 ◼   ► It was nicer than reading the New York Times

00:57:03 ◼   ► in a web browser.

00:57:04 ◼   ► - So what did you think of the keyboards then?

00:57:08 ◼   ► - I just cannot, I can't judge the touch one

00:57:14 ◼   ► because I'm just gonna say that I didn't spend enough time.

00:57:16 ◼   ► But in the time that I did spend on it,

00:57:18 ◼   ► my typing was horrendous.

00:57:20 ◼   ► I typed way worse.

00:57:21 ◼   ► I typed fine on the on-screen key.

00:57:23 ◼   ► So I tried three keyboards.

00:57:24 ◼   ► I tried the touch cover keyboard, the one that's like magic capacitive hardware keyboard.

00:57:31 ◼   ► I tied the actual classic clicky keyboard cover and the on-screen keyboard.

00:57:37 ◼   ► The on-screen keyboard was great.

00:57:39 ◼   ► I would say it was on par with iPad for on-screen typing and in a way that all of the muscle

00:57:45 ◼   ► memory I have from typing on an iPad carried right over.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And it was good.

00:57:52 ◼   ► I think Windows Phone has a good on-screen keyboard.

00:57:55 ◼   ► And when I've used Windows Phone, it's, you know, it has been very, very friendly to my

00:57:59 ◼   ► iPhone habitualized thumbs.

00:58:03 ◼   ► So that's good.

00:58:04 ◼   ► I think that's a win.

00:58:05 ◼   ► The Clicky keyboard, really nice, I think.

00:58:08 ◼   ► I think that, you know, something like that that you could sell for the iPad would be

00:58:12 ◼   ► a huge hit.

00:58:13 ◼   ► It is, seems like a very nice compromise between making it thick enough that the keys can actually

00:58:18 ◼   ► move a little and keeping it thin enough that it's not making your tablet, you know, as thick as a

00:58:23 ◼   ► notebook. Is it, uh, have you, have you used the Logitech one for, Logitech Thin one for the iPad?

00:58:29 ◼   ► Yes, I, in fact, I did at, uh, I know you're a huge fan of that. I got to use it at Singleton,

00:58:34 ◼   ► and I'm drawing a blank on who the kind of, uh, well, who I, he's a regular listener of the talk

00:58:40 ◼   ► show, and I'm drawing a blank on your name, but thank you for letting me try it. And yeah, it's

00:58:43 ◼   ► nice. It's equivalent to that, but it's a slicker integration with the way that the

00:58:49 ◼   ► Microsoft one just magnetizes, and you don't have to go through Bluetooth pairing or anything

00:58:53 ◼   ► like that.

00:58:54 ◼   ► Okay, that is nice. And what about the thing at the bottom? Like, it has the touch element

00:58:58 ◼   ► at the bottom, right? The trackpad stuff.

00:59:00 ◼   ► Yeah. When you have it on, you get a mouse cursor on screen. A mouse cursor just appears

00:59:04 ◼   ► on screen when it's connected, and you have a trackpad. I thought the one on the clicky

00:59:09 ◼   ► keyboard cover worked better than the one on the Touch One. I thought the Touch One

00:59:13 ◼   ► was… I don't know. To me, it's a funny demo, but it really doesn't seem like a

00:59:18 ◼   ► good product. It just wasn't good for typing for me. But maybe if you're used to it,

00:59:23 ◼   ► maybe if you give it a long time, you get used to it.

00:59:26 ◼   ► But…

00:59:27 ◼   ► And am I right in thinking that you still can't rest your hands on the keys, or your

00:59:30 ◼   ► fingers on the keys with the Touch One? Is that right?

00:59:34 ◼   ► I ran into some problems with that. It's definitely not that you can't. You know,

00:59:39 ◼   ► You could do it at sometimes. Sometimes it would register touches and sometimes it wouldn't.

00:59:44 ◼   ► And I think you're supposed to be able to rest your fingers on it, but I was definitely

00:59:49 ◼   ► running into problems. And I was absolutely missing. The big problem I was having was

00:59:52 ◼   ► just missing letters.

00:59:54 ◼   ► And the other thing too, here's the big thing for me, is that typing on the clicky

01:00:01 ◼   ► key keyboard one is exactly what you think. You're just typing on a relatively small,

01:00:05 ◼   ► like iPad style clicky keyboard and I did just fine.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Typing on the actual screen, just like with iOS and like Windows Phone, it does a lot

01:00:16 ◼   ► of auto correction work as you're typing and it's always trying to make suggestions and

01:00:22 ◼   ► it's using a dictionary and it's doing a really smart job and there's an animation when it

01:00:26 ◼   ► does, when it sees that I spelled, you know, Siggler, S-I-G-L-E-R, it knows that you're

01:00:35 ◼   ► in my contact dictionary and takes a guess that I wanted to put an extra E in there to

01:00:39 ◼   ► get your name right. And you see a little animation. Nice, nice. The thing that I found

01:00:44 ◼   ► was using the touch keyboard, the touch cover keyboard, it treats it like a hardware keyboard

01:00:51 ◼   ► where it's not in that aggressive autocorrect mode. And I really needed it to be. Like,

01:00:56 ◼   ► I would type "the" and it wouldn't be "th." I would just get "th" and the E wasn't even

01:01:01 ◼   ► there.

01:01:04 ◼   ► That's an interesting point because that seems like it makes some sense because the touch

01:01:09 ◼   ► keyboard is essentially a soft keyboard like you would find on a screen but they've made

01:01:16 ◼   ► it of an actual tangible product and it's right in between the actual physical keyboard

01:01:23 ◼   ► and the soft keyboard on screen right?

01:01:25 ◼   ► So you'd think they just obviously decided to go with it being more like the nice actual

01:01:31 ◼   ► key keyboard rather than the on-screen one, but they should have probably done it more

01:01:34 ◼   ► like the on-screen one with software.

01:01:36 ◼   ► Exactly. That is a perfect encapsulation of what I was trying to say. And maybe they can

01:01:40 ◼   ► fix that in software. Maybe they can just sort of switch to that mode and get into that.

01:01:45 ◼   ► And there is a clear advantage to that if they could get it to work out, which is that

01:01:49 ◼   ► when you're using an on-screen keyboard on a tablet, half the screen is covered by the

01:01:53 ◼   ► keyboard, whereas if you're using this soft cover, you have the whole screen available.

01:01:57 ◼   ► But it really needs to be treated software-wise like a software keyboard where we're going

01:02:03 ◼   ► to guess that you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

01:02:06 ◼   ► And you know, even the Logitech one with iOS 6 now, they do the auto-correction element

01:02:12 ◼   ► in the software too, even with physical keyboard.

01:02:15 ◼   ► It's really nice.

01:02:16 ◼   ► I mean, you're not going to make nearly as many typing mistakes using the physical keyboard,

01:02:20 ◼   ► but they still do the software aspect to it too.

01:02:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm actually not sure why they do turn that off for the keyboard.

01:02:26 ◼   ► I guess the idea is, I don't know, I guess that if you're annoyed, if you really are

01:02:30 ◼   ► typing something, you want to be precise, that autocorrect isn't going to work. If you're

01:02:34 ◼   ► typing code or something like that. I don't know. But it didn't, I don't know. After just

01:02:42 ◼   ► half an hour, if I were going to buy one, I would get the clicky keyboard.

01:02:48 ◼   ► And it's expensive, right? It's like $100 and some dollars.

01:02:51 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's not that much more expensive than the touch one. The touch one's kind of

01:02:54 ◼   ► expensive, you know. And it just seems like another case of Microsoft not making a decision

01:02:59 ◼   ► for you, but letting you make the decision, as opposed to telling you what's best, letting

01:03:04 ◼   ► you figure out what's best.

01:03:05 ◼   ► And they have, with the pricing, right, the cheapest one does not come with the keyboard

01:03:10 ◼   ► at all, but then they have bundles that start coming with them, right?

01:03:13 ◼   ► Right.

01:03:14 ◼   ► But it's the touch one, I believe.

01:03:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so. I think that they seem to be kind of pushing the touch one. And I kind

01:03:20 ◼   ► of, in my experience, tinkering around with an hour, I think they're going the wrong

01:03:24 ◼   ► way on that. I feel like if you want a keyboard and you're going to buy an expensive cover

01:03:29 ◼   ► that, relatively expensive cover that combines the cover with the keyboard, I don't know.

01:03:35 ◼   ► I feel like if you're that into typing, you want that clicky one.

01:03:38 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** I have heard.

01:03:40 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein:** And it definitely, definitely makes a better

01:03:42 ◼   ► first impression. Because anybody who goes into one of these Microsoft stores to buy

01:03:45 ◼   ► one is not, they're going to spend less time with it than I did. And if I didn't do that

01:03:50 ◼   ► well on the touch cover typing, I don't see how a typical consumer would compare to the

01:03:55 ◼   ► clicky one.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Adam: I have heard good things about the kickstand itself. I don't know how much you played with

01:04:02 ◼   ► that.

01:04:03 ◼   ► But it seems good.

01:04:04 ◼   ► But it's there.

01:04:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:06 ◼   ► Steven: The one that only hits, and it was funny because I thought it, and other people

01:04:11 ◼   ► were coming out, it just seemed like everybody was saying the same thing, was that, and it

01:04:14 ◼   ► seems like one of those things that strikes you the first five minutes you use it, and

01:04:17 ◼   ► maybe once you know it, then you get used to it and it's not a problem. But that there's

01:04:19 ◼   ► only a little tick mark for your fingernail to go in to separate it. It's only on the

01:04:26 ◼   ► one side. So if you go to the one, I think it's, you know, if you're facing the screen,

01:04:30 ◼   ► it's on the right, I think, behind it. And it's real easy. You just kind of stick your

01:04:34 ◼   ► thumbnail in there and give it a little flick, and it just pops right out. And if you go

01:04:38 ◼   ► to the other side, it's like you can't get it open. But I think once you realize that

01:04:42 ◼   ► you go to this side to do it, it would – and then, you know, it is – it absolutely does

01:04:46 ◼   ► feel very well crafted and it feels like something that is built to last. That if you buy one and you

01:04:51 ◼   ► use it all the time, eight months from now the kickstand is still gonna click open and click

01:04:56 ◼   ► shut and stay shut. It does seem, you know, seems good. What about the hardware itself? I've heard

01:05:02 ◼   ► mixed reviews of people who've played with it of this. Like they say the quality of the build is

01:05:07 ◼   ► nice but it's too bulky. Is that fair, do you think? It's hard to say because I was already

01:05:13 ◼   ► three days into using my iPad mini. So it did feel a little...

01:05:18 ◼   ► Right, which is the exact opposite of this.

01:05:19 ◼   ► Right, it felt a little heavy, but it felt roughly iPad-shaped. I guess the other thing

01:05:24 ◼   ► that really struck me... Build quality was good, and maybe not quite... Well, I would

01:05:31 ◼   ► say definitely not quite Apple quality. It doesn't seem like that magnesium, whatever

01:05:36 ◼   ► they call it. It does...

01:05:38 ◼   ► It's like MG, I think it's called.

01:05:39 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. They ripped you off. They should definitely send you one. They ripped off your

01:05:43 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:05:44 ◼   ► But Marco wrote this when his store impressions is it feels like super nice plastic. It is

01:05:50 ◼   ► technically a metal, but it feels like really good plastic. And that's not even necessarily

01:05:54 ◼   ► bad. I love the polycarbonate plastic, whatever they call it, that Nokia is using on the Lumias.

01:06:00 ◼   ► It's really, really high quality stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if someday Apple puts

01:06:05 ◼   ► out a thing that uses something that is technically a plastic. I mean, plastic doesn't necessarily

01:06:09 ◼   ► mean junkie.

01:06:12 ◼   ► But it's just maybe not quite as nice.

01:06:16 ◼   ► Marco also had the comment, and I agree with it, whereby putting all these extra ports

01:06:21 ◼   ► on it, it junks up the feel of it.

01:06:24 ◼   ► It makes it look junkier.

01:06:25 ◼   ► Right, it has a USB port, SD card?

01:06:27 ◼   ► Does it have a SD card?

01:06:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it does.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:32 ◼   ► And it kind of jumps up.

01:06:33 ◼   ► You know, Apple obviously, they actually made a point with this latest revision to the regular

01:06:37 ◼   ► iPad, right, that they now have even more peripherals to be able to...

01:06:41 ◼   ► They actually gave me a few of them to test out, like an SD card reader, the lightning

01:06:46 ◼   ► to SD card reader, lightning to USB.

01:06:50 ◼   ► That's a little bit of an annoyance if you're going to use, I guess, an SD card reader or

01:06:56 ◼   ► USB all the time, but how often are you...

01:06:57 ◼   ► I mean, I never use any of that stuff with the iPad, so...

01:07:02 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:07:05 ◼   ► Maybe that's what appeals to the people who don't want to buy an iPad, though, is they

01:07:08 ◼   ► want...

01:07:09 ◼   ► Sure.

01:07:10 ◼   ► end up using it, they want it there. The other thing that really struck me is, and it always

01:07:15 ◼   ► strikes me when I use a 16-9 tablet, is that it seems like it only ever wants to be used

01:07:22 ◼   ► in landscape. Holding it in portrait just seems so skinny.

01:07:26 ◼   ► It just…

01:07:27 ◼   ► It looks weird.

01:07:28 ◼   ► It looks weird.

01:07:29 ◼   ► …from the pictures I've seen. It looks like it's almost top-heavy, that you're

01:07:34 ◼   ► going…you're getting ready to ride on a surfboard or something.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Yeah, and it just looks like a really weird format to read something like a magazine or

01:07:41 ◼   ► a book where I always hold it on my iPad, hold it in portrait, and it just seems like

01:07:45 ◼   ► you're so off from the proportions of a regular piece of paper or book that it just seems

01:07:51 ◼   ► way too skinny.

01:07:53 ◼   ► And look at the way it's got this built-in kickstand that only works in portrait.

01:08:00 ◼   ► It just seems like it wants to be held that way as opposed to the iPad sort of, "I don't

01:08:04 ◼   ► even care if you hold it upside down sort of ambivalence towards how you hold it. That

01:08:11 ◼   ► was the other thing that struck me about the Surface. I know you got to go soon, but I

01:08:18 ◼   ► do have one more thing. I want to talk about the Forstall stuff. But before I do, let me

01:08:22 ◼   ► do the second sponsor. I'm super excited to have this app on board. It's Check the

01:08:29 ◼   ► Weather. You got Check the Weather app for your iPhone yet?

01:08:32 ◼   ► I don't know. Oh man. This is I now I recommend I recommend this whether at long before

01:08:39 ◼   ► It became a sponsor of the show as soon as I saw it. I had fell in love with it

01:08:43 ◼   ► You know the guy behind it David Smith

01:08:46 ◼   ► is a longtime listener and fan of the talk show and

01:08:50 ◼   ► The way he he describes the app to me is just perfect. He's he's got five points. He wants to make clear accurate fast

01:08:58 ◼   ► beautiful layered

01:09:00 ◼   ► And it's all of those things you look at it and

01:09:03 ◼   ► At a snap, you know what's going on where you are

01:09:07 ◼   ► You have detailed hourly forecast information for what's going to go on the rest of the day and you have

01:09:15 ◼   ► Nice little overview of what's going to go on in the next few days

01:09:19 ◼   ► and the other thing that he wanted to solve by making this app is

01:09:27 ◼   ► to stop having to check more than one app just to sort of get the gist of what you want to know about the weather.

01:09:32 ◼   ► And the big one with that is Dark Sky, which is the app that lets you see,

01:09:37 ◼   ► "Hey, is it going to rain in the next hour or so? And if so, how much? How strong? And what, you know, what's the

01:09:43 ◼   ► the precipitation radar map look like?"

01:09:47 ◼   ► So here's the best news about that. The guys at Dark Sky, in addition to making a very good app,

01:09:53 ◼   ► They have an API that other apps can subscribe to and that's what check the weather uses

01:09:59 ◼   ► So you open the app you've got what's going on if you want to do a sort of dark sky type

01:10:05 ◼   ► Hey, is it gonna rain soon? And what's the

01:10:07 ◼   ► what's the radar look like you just swipe up from the bottom and

01:10:10 ◼   ► You've got a detailed precipitation forecast near term

01:10:15 ◼   ► Precipitation forecast and you've got a beautiful

01:10:18 ◼   ► Weather map

01:10:22 ◼   ► Which I happen to like a lot better than the dark sky maps because the colors in the dark sky map

01:10:27 ◼   ► I can't tell the difference between

01:10:29 ◼   ► water and

01:10:31 ◼   ► precipitation in the air

01:10:32 ◼   ► It's just beautiful

01:10:34 ◼   ► One of the other things that's beautiful about this app

01:10:37 ◼   ► I love the typography really really opinionated strong bold typography using a great font Idyllwild

01:10:44 ◼   ► From from our friends at hoffler and Frere Jones if it's not to your liking though version 1.1 added

01:10:51 ◼   ► options to use Futura or Helvetica they look great too. And even better version

01:10:58 ◼   ► 1.2 coming soon submitted not yet available in the App Store as I speak

01:11:05 ◼   ► but I've been using the beta and it's just great is a universal app for the

01:11:11 ◼   ► iPhone and the iPad. This is my favorite weather app I used it all last week

01:11:16 ◼   ► during the whole hurricane sandy thing I was opening this app I don't know every

01:11:21 ◼   ► 20-30 minutes and it was just great.

01:11:25 ◼   ► Get it in the App Store.

01:11:26 ◼   ► You can check it out.

01:11:27 ◼   ► You get more information at checktheweather.co, that's .co, .com, checktheweather.co/thetalkshow.

01:11:37 ◼   ► That's checktheweather.co/thetalkshow or just search the App Store for Check the Weather.

01:11:44 ◼   ► Buy this app and support the talk show and support great, great independent app developers.

01:11:51 ◼   ► So again check the weather dot co slash the talk show and again putting the done there just shows you that this is this is a

01:11:58 ◼   ► Developer who knows this show

01:12:01 ◼   ► Knows that I paid for that done one it used so check them out and thank them very much

01:12:05 ◼   ► I thank them very much buy this app and help support the talk show best way you can support the talk show by this app

01:12:10 ◼   ► So for stall and then we'll get we'll get out of here

01:12:15 ◼   ► Right, so this is this is big bombshell were you surprised?

01:12:20 ◼   ► I

01:12:22 ◼   ► Will say that I was not I was surprised at the timing of it, but I was not surprised overall

01:12:28 ◼   ► Just everything that I've heard in the past year or so has been

01:12:33 ◼   ► That things were eventually going to come

01:12:36 ◼   ► to this or or the other way right that there needed to be some kind of resolution of

01:12:42 ◼   ► Sort of the internal conflicts within the within the company and I don't know if you read the thing today

01:12:47 ◼   ► I think it was I did all things D talking about more of the information of why Mansfield

01:12:54 ◼   ► Went from retiring to non retiring now coming back for two years

01:12:57 ◼   ► No, supposedly they according to their sources and I haven't heard this directly but

01:13:03 ◼   ► That Mansfield had an actual real beef with forest all as well and he wasn't going to say me or him

01:13:10 ◼   ► But the fact that forest all is now out led to him correctly

01:13:14 ◼   ► coming back in full force

01:13:17 ◼   ► Huh. Yeah, the way I've put it to people is I was surprised but not shocked. And somebody

01:13:27 ◼   ► on Twitter had pointed this out, and I do think it's—I think it may be really be

01:13:31 ◼   ► very—it sounds a little glib, but I think it actually might be kind of insightful, is

01:13:36 ◼   ► that this might be the first major situation with Apple where this wouldn't have happened

01:13:43 ◼   ► if Steve Jobs was still around.

01:13:44 ◼   ► Yeah, right. I mean, they had the same design, aesthetic tastes, right? And obviously this

01:13:51 ◼   ► was his guy from Next. They'd been together for a long time. And yeah, I think that's

01:13:59 ◼   ► right.

01:14:00 ◼   ► And if he didn't get along with the other executives, it was okay under Steve because

01:14:03 ◼   ► that's the sort of thing that Steve had a true genius for, a gift, was making it,

01:14:13 ◼   ► putting it all together. All that matters is that you guys are all talented and very,

01:14:17 ◼   ► very smart, and I will make this work. My personality—this is the perspective of Steve

01:14:23 ◼   ► Dobbs—or his personality, I should say, is so strong, was so strong, that it could

01:14:29 ◼   ► patch over any personality clashes from anybody under him, because his personality was just

01:14:36 ◼   ► so dominant. And without that, there's just—and I don't think it's an indictment of two

01:14:43 ◼   ► Tim Cook. I think it's an acknowledgment.

01:14:45 ◼   ► Right. It just speaks to Jobs.

01:14:47 ◼   ► Right. That maybe the worst thing would have been for, again, for Tim Cook to sort of try

01:14:53 ◼   ► to be Steve Jobs and try to think that he can do that same thing.

01:14:57 ◼   ► Yeah. And someone had a great comment this morning. I think it was on there. I saw it

01:15:02 ◼   ► in my Tumblr feed, actually. But it was going back and referencing what Cook said at the

01:15:07 ◼   ► memorial for Jobs, which was of course the line that, you know, don't think about,

01:15:13 ◼   ► don't worry about what I would do, just do what's right. And, you know, this is

01:15:17 ◼   ► like the first time where Cook is doing something that Jobs would probably not have done, but

01:15:23 ◼   ► it is the right thing to do for Apple in the current state of Apple.

01:15:26 ◼   ► Right. Maybe a better way to put it isn't that Steve Jobs wouldn't have done it, but

01:15:29 ◼   ► that he wouldn't have had to do it.

01:15:31 ◼   ► Yes, yes, that's exactly right, I think.

01:15:34 ◼   ► I mean, because the thing is, this is, I mean, the things that are kind of, doesn't even

01:15:40 ◼   ► seem to be any argument over, is that Forstall was, what are the words, divisive, and that

01:15:48 ◼   ► he was ambitious, and that he guarded his, I don't want to be pejorative here, because

01:15:56 ◼   ► I honestly don't have the beef with the guy. I was going to say fiefdom, but fiefdom

01:16:00 ◼   ► seems to imply—I don't want to impugn any sort of negative political aspirations

01:16:06 ◼   ► on him, but he did. I mean, he had—IOS was his fiefdom, and he ruled over it.

01:16:13 ◼   ► And to his credit, you know, a lot of—I think there's been a lot of, yeah, kind

01:16:17 ◼   ► of negativity around him, and certainly it seems like some of that is justified. But

01:16:22 ◼   ► there's, you know, I mean, he is the guy who made iOS what it is now, and there's

01:16:27 ◼   ► disputing that that's an incredible feat and maybe he couldn't have done that without being

01:16:32 ◼   ► so passionate about the way that he viewed that iOS had to go and Jobs of course had

01:16:40 ◼   ► the ultimate say in the matter but it was, by all accounts, it was forced all. Remember

01:16:44 ◼   ► when they were thinking about how to do the stories that you hear now when they were thinking

01:16:47 ◼   ► about how to do the iPhone and they were considering using just some random kind of generic iPod

01:16:53 ◼   ► OS that wasn't at all related to that was the only thing that Tony fidel side

01:16:58 ◼   ► of it and that's effectively that sealed his fate for yeah for stall and

01:17:05 ◼   ► and my understanding of the stories it was forced all in and Bertrand surlay on

01:17:09 ◼   ► on that side on the we should we can do this we can use OS 10 we can take the

01:17:15 ◼   ► next step stuff and make a my you know take strip it down and we can use this

01:17:20 ◼   ► and a phone and it's going to be great. And if we get it, we're going to have this great

01:17:25 ◼   ► app development framework already there ready to go. And it was Fidel and I think maybe

01:17:31 ◼   ► Rubenstein on the other side saying we should build it like an iPhone. Effectively, it would

01:17:37 ◼   ► be like the OS that they have in the iPod Nano.

01:17:40 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Right. Right.

01:17:42 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein** And definitely, like you said, that sealed Fidel's

01:17:46 ◼   ► that he won. And look at where Apple is from there. Who knows how many other people in

01:17:52 ◼   ► that argument. It would be a great story to hear someday from the insiders. It really

01:17:56 ◼   ► would be maybe the greatest story of the last 15 years of Apple to hear. Because Apple before

01:18:03 ◼   ► the iPhone was doing just fine, but they were not a sensation. And Apple after the iPhone

01:18:08 ◼   ► has become the biggest corporation in the world. And it really did seem to come down

01:18:12 ◼   ► to a very, very tough decision on Steve Jobs' part, you know, and that Forstall was, if

01:18:19 ◼   ► not the leading proponent, one of only two on that side of the argument. And, like you

01:18:27 ◼   ► said, in the five years since, iOS has been great. It really has. Nobody can take that

01:18:33 ◼   ► away from him.

01:18:34 ◼   ► I mean, and, you know, so now you think about going forward, what this means exactly, and

01:18:40 ◼   ► it's impossible to know that right now, but I think that some of the criticism of iOS

01:18:47 ◼   ► has been fair, that it's been so much polish and polish and polish, and they haven't really

01:18:54 ◼   ► taken any risks with the operating system in the past few years.

01:18:58 ◼   ► And I think at first, that's absolutely understandable, and I think that that has helped them in many

01:19:03 ◼   ► ways because it is so polished now.

01:19:06 ◼   ► But how much more can you polish, and how much more can you change?

01:19:08 ◼   ► 6. You know, there were differences, of course, with iOS 5, but mainly seems like polish,

01:19:15 ◼   ► polish, polish. And so now does this change that? Do we get something that's going to

01:19:20 ◼   ► be the most significant departure since kind of the beginning of it?

01:19:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the big question mark in this as it goes forward, I don't think anybody

01:19:29 ◼   ► really has a problem with Johnny Ive taking over software HI across the board. I think

01:19:36 ◼   ► That's super exciting.

01:19:38 ◼   ► I really do think that that's gonna work out well for Apple.

01:19:41 ◼   ► But you don't know though,

01:19:42 ◼   ► because he hasn't done it before.

01:19:43 ◼   ► You don't know.

01:19:44 ◼   ► I think the question mark though is Federighi.

01:19:46 ◼   ► Is, you know-- - Yeah, he's in charge now.

01:19:48 ◼   ► He's in charge by the last-- - And everybody, you know,

01:19:50 ◼   ► seems to think, I think Mountain Lion turned out really well.

01:19:53 ◼   ► So I, you know, and I think Entide the Company,

01:19:56 ◼   ► I think is regarded as having successfully led that project.

01:19:59 ◼   ► Now-- - And he's, I mean,

01:20:01 ◼   ► he's just ascended so quickly, right?

01:20:04 ◼   ► he was uh... he was just elevated to s_p_p_ in that last in that last round

01:20:08 ◼   ► and now all of a sudden well is he going to be able is mackos ten going to keep

01:20:11 ◼   ► going forward at this enjoyable pace that it's been going at while he's also

01:20:16 ◼   ► got i_o_s_ to be responsible for because clearly you know if one's gonna have to

01:20:20 ◼   ► slip it's still going to be mackos ten

01:20:22 ◼   ► of course and and is he going to be able to do what you just said which is sort

01:20:26 ◼   ► of not just keep polishing i_o_s_ but is he going to be able to make

01:20:30 ◼   ► take i_o_s_ and give it a

01:20:32 ◼   ► oh wow, look at that, you know, sort of.

01:20:35 ◼   ► - Right, moving the entire,

01:20:38 ◼   ► the idea of what a mobile OS is forward.

01:20:41 ◼   ► Also, you know, last year obviously,

01:20:45 ◼   ► all of us were surprised with OS X Mountain Lion

01:20:48 ◼   ► because we just didn't expect it so soon,

01:20:49 ◼   ► and Apple legitimately surprised everyone with it.

01:20:53 ◼   ► Are they still, are they going to do that again?

01:20:55 ◼   ► How far into development does the iOS

01:20:57 ◼   ► coming under Federighi change that?

01:21:00 ◼   ► And, you know, one question I kept getting was, "What does that mean for iOS 7?"

01:21:05 ◼   ► You have to assume that it was already well into development, right?

01:21:10 ◼   ► Does this change knock that out?

01:21:13 ◼   ► I can't imagine that they won't do something at WWDC still this year, right?

01:21:17 ◼   ► They either—

01:21:18 ◼   ► Oh, I think they've got to, yeah.

01:21:19 ◼   ► They've got to, right.

01:21:20 ◼   ► Well, one thing—and, you know, and I'm sure people who are really deeply inside—maybe

01:21:25 ◼   ► I'm way off the base here—but my understanding, though, is that the way a lot of this stuff

01:21:28 ◼   ► is that everybody is on Teams.

01:21:31 ◼   ► And Teams are all relatively small

01:21:33 ◼   ► and have a relatively direct and clear chain of command

01:21:36 ◼   ► that the team reports to somebody, a manager,

01:21:39 ◼   ► and the manager probably reported directly to Forstall

01:21:42 ◼   ► if you're working on something related to iOS.

01:21:44 ◼   ► And if your team has something that's ready to ship

01:21:48 ◼   ► or looks like it's ready to ship,

01:21:49 ◼   ► there's a list of, here's the stuff we might now,

01:21:52 ◼   ► here's where we've gotta start tying the line

01:21:53 ◼   ► for what's gonna be iOS 7.

01:21:55 ◼   ► And there's this team and that team and that team.

01:21:58 ◼   ► You know, so I don't know that it's, you know, it may not really be a setback for, you know,

01:22:03 ◼   ► the forestall being gone, because it's these teams that are doing stuff, and now it's somebody else

01:22:07 ◼   ► who's going to be making these decisions about this is ready, or this should be ready, let's

01:22:12 ◼   ► greenlight this for next year, you know, but here's what you've got to do. Here's what I want to see

01:22:17 ◼   ► by next week, you know, in terms of getting this to where we can actually ship it. You know, I don't

01:22:24 ◼   ► don't think you should think of it as an entire, you know, that the entire iOS is just

01:22:29 ◼   ► like a single product.

01:22:30 ◼   ► Right, that has to be from the top down.

01:22:33 ◼   ► And it has a team of 100 people working on it.

01:22:35 ◼   ► It's more like it's 20, 30 different little things that each have a team of three or four

01:22:40 ◼   ► people working on it.

01:22:42 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:44 ◼   ► You know, the biggest question I think that both of us have gotten is the question of

01:22:49 ◼   ► are the is this the end of the green felt are they gonna get rid of the

01:22:53 ◼   ► skew amorphous ism stuff I think I have no idea it seems like there was that

01:23:01 ◼   ► report of Johnny I've being against it well forced always for it I would

01:23:06 ◼   ► expect I tend to think I mean I think what we will see is a minor course

01:23:13 ◼   ► correction with regard to skeuomorphism. I think that it's a ship that's slightly off course and

01:23:20 ◼   ► a little bit bent a little bit toward the tacky as opposed to the cool. I do not expect to see

01:23:28 ◼   ► a radical 180 degree reverse in that. I don't think that they're going to drop all textures.

01:23:35 ◼   ► I don't think they're going to drop everything. I mean, I think Game Center is an example of one

01:23:39 ◼   ► where the skeuomorphism is fine. I actually think that making it look like a game is actually

01:23:44 ◼   ► pretty good, or pretty apt. I think it's like iCal, where it's, you know, it really—and

01:23:51 ◼   ► it's in addition to the fact that it just gets in the way. It's not just that it's

01:23:56 ◼   ► ugly, but that it makes it look like you can do things you can't do, because it looks

01:23:59 ◼   ► like a pad of paper, but you can't treat it like a pad of paper. You have to click

01:24:03 ◼   ► a little arrow button to go to the next month. It doesn't seem like it's genuine. And

01:24:07 ◼   ► To me, that's where I think Ivy's—I can't speak for him, obviously—but everything

01:24:12 ◼   ► he's ever said, though, is about keeping things true and genuine to themselves.

01:24:17 ◼   ► And that's where things go wrong.

01:24:18 ◼   ► Like iCal and Address Book or Contacts, whatever, they call it, Contacts Now.

01:24:24 ◼   ► Those are apps where, to me, the skeuomorphism is wrong, not because of whether it looks

01:24:27 ◼   ► good or not, but because it just seems to make the apps harder to use.

01:24:30 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, and the one that people keep coming to now recently is the shredder of the of

01:24:37 ◼   ► the passbook thing, right? Like, people just seem to hate that with the passbook thing.

01:24:40 ◼   ► I don't know why, though.

01:24:41 ◼   ► It takes longer to delete, I guess, is the idea.

01:24:43 ◼   ► I guess, but I don't know about, I don't know if I would expect things like that to go away,

01:24:48 ◼   ► you know? And for example, the podcast app with the reel-to-reel, making a skeuomorphic

01:24:53 ◼   ► reel-to-reel thing isn't necessarily in and of itself a bad idea, as long as usability-wise

01:24:58 ◼   ► it provides you a very effective direct way of skipping around the timeline of a podcast.

01:25:04 ◼   ► If it doesn't, then it's bad. It's how it works that matters. And if it works really

01:25:11 ◼   ► well but looks skeuomorphic to some degree, that's still good. I would not expect a radical

01:25:17 ◼   ► revision. If you think that iOS 7 is going to come out looking like…

01:25:21 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Like all glass or something.

01:25:23 ◼   ► Yeah, or some kind of, just like Windows 8 but with round recs instead of sharp cornered

01:25:29 ◼   ► recs. You're nuts. I don't think anything radical is going to change.

01:25:37 ◼   ► One thing you and I talked about briefly after the event last week was the timing elements

01:25:43 ◼   ► of this and how this all plays in. Obviously, we didn't know about the huge shakeup from

01:25:47 ◼   ► the exec time level at that point. But it makes it more interesting, right? Because now Apple has

01:25:54 ◼   ► fully aligned itself with all of its products to be in this kind of fall Q1 quarter that they're

01:26:01 ◼   ► going to be shipping all this stuff. So do they now take off, quote unquote, "six months" of

01:26:06 ◼   ► releases and not do anything, not even say anything again until WWDC because we have this

01:26:11 ◼   ► new iPad now, the fourth gen, it seems like they're not going to do something, it seems likely they

01:26:16 ◼   ► won't do something in March now, which they typically do for the iPad. And it seems like

01:26:21 ◼   ► TV, wherever that's at, that's still a ways off. So maybe they do something with OS X like they

01:26:28 ◼   ► did last year in between, but maybe they don't. And maybe that's good for the timing of all this

01:26:33 ◼   ► exact shakeup stuff, right? Because now they have some time to make sure that everything is aligned

01:26:39 ◼   ► from the top down, and they keep working on what they've been working on, of course, but they have

01:26:43 ◼   ► time just not to have to rush to get anything done.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I agree with everything you just said, where

01:26:49 ◼   ► I feel like this is, in hindsight, a remarkably perfect time for Cook to execute this move.

01:26:57 ◼   ► Because like you said, all the stuff is lined up now for this holiday quarter, which is

01:27:02 ◼   ► still disproportionately Apple's most important quarter. If these guys have new responsibilities

01:27:10 ◼   ► and it might take a while to shake out, they've got the time now to do it.

01:27:14 ◼   ► And I almost felt like it read like that in Cook's statement about it, where he's just

01:27:18 ◼   ► said like, "This has been a tremendous run for Apple.

01:27:21 ◼   ► We've just released the iPad mini, fourth generation iPad, new Retina MacBook, new iPods,

01:27:31 ◼   ► iPhone 5, etc."

01:27:32 ◼   ► And so he just kind of like, "We've done a lot in the past few months."

01:27:38 ◼   ► And so, you know, now it's time to kind of reevaluate what we've done, where we're going,

01:27:44 ◼   ► and we think that these changes will help streamline our process going forward.

01:27:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:51 ◼   ► I really do mean it.

01:27:53 ◼   ► And talking to people last week, that the euphemistic though it was, the headline of

01:27:57 ◼   ► that PR really was what it was all about, the key is about increasing collaboration.

01:28:01 ◼   ► And that's really what the problem was deemed to be with Forstall, was that Forstall did

01:28:07 ◼   ► his stuff and wasn't collaborating with the…

01:28:09 ◼   ► I didn't hear anything about Mansfield, but now you're saying, "I believe it though,"

01:28:13 ◼   ► and that he wasn't saying that.

01:28:14 ◼   ► What I heard, I heard that, for example, that Forstall's team, the iOS team, kept Schiller's

01:28:22 ◼   ► product marketing division in the dark about everything until the last possible minute,

01:28:26 ◼   ► and that there's just no back and forth between Schiller's product marketing division

01:28:32 ◼   ► and Forstall's iOS division, and that those two guys just did not get along.

01:28:37 ◼   ► I mean, and it wasn't just like one or two incidents.

01:28:39 ◼   ► It was like institutional intransigence that, you know, Forstall's team just wasn't collaborating

01:28:46 ◼   ► with product marketing.

01:28:47 ◼   ► I mean, you know, collaboration is the word, and it just wasn't there.

01:28:51 ◼   ► And, you know, the other element that we haven't even hit on yet is, of course, the maps situation,

01:28:58 ◼   ► and to a lesser extent Siri, but there have been issues with both, and both were under

01:29:02 ◼   ► Forstall, and now interestingly enough both aren't transferring under Federighi, they're

01:29:07 ◼   ► going to Eddy Cue, so they're going to be in the more long lines of the services and

01:29:12 ◼   ► content division, and that seems like the right move to make, but I think that the fact

01:29:18 ◼   ► that Apple highlighted that also in the release says what you needed to know, and what of

01:29:22 ◼   ► course was then reported afterwards that, of course, Forstall was...

01:29:27 ◼   ► Eddy Cue is like the fixer. He's like the guy who takes like, "All right, here's this

01:29:32 ◼   ► thing that's garbage. Eddy, get your boots on." And people gave me some stuff, like,

01:29:40 ◼   ► "Oh, come on, he's in charge of iCloud." iCloud's not that great. iCloud's actually

01:29:44 ◼   ► pretty good. And remember, it really is. Names change, but it really is the evolution of

01:29:50 ◼   ► MobileMe. I mean, he started with—

01:29:52 ◼   ► He, you know, and he wasn't in charge.

01:29:55 ◼   ► You know, the mobile me that was the disastrous initial like 2008 mobile me, he had nothing

01:29:59 ◼   ► to do with it.

01:30:00 ◼   ► He was just running the iTunes store.

01:30:01 ◼   ► He was given something that was like a, probably the most famous disaster in Apple's recent

01:30:08 ◼   ► decade.

01:30:09 ◼   ► You know, a Steve Jobs tie right in front of the entire company about it being, you

01:30:13 ◼   ► know, this is embarrassing, you know.

01:30:15 ◼   ► Here at EdiQ, go fix it.

01:30:17 ◼   ► And he did.

01:30:18 ◼   ► It's really, you know, it's gone from this hundred dollar a year paid thing that nobody

01:30:23 ◼   ► liked to a free thing with millions, what, maybe a hundred million users?

01:30:28 ◼   ► That's working pretty well.

01:30:30 ◼   ► So he's really become like the fix-it man.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Here, take maps.

01:30:34 ◼   ► Yeah, take maps please and figure out what to do with it.

01:30:38 ◼   ► But there was actually a good story about him too, I think it was yesterday in CNET,

01:30:42 ◼   ► I think it was Greg Sandoval wrote it about kind of Q's relationship now.

01:30:46 ◼   ► I mean, Q also is the one now, it seems, like doing these Steve Jobs-type meetings with

01:30:52 ◼   ► the content execs, right?

01:30:53 ◼   ► And just is going to all these things and playing hardball, it seems like, by all…

01:30:59 ◼   ► No, I do think that's all.

01:31:00 ◼   ► I do think that's his…

01:31:01 ◼   ► I think he was very much involved with it alongside Steve Jobs, but without Steve, it's

01:31:07 ◼   ► down to Eddie and Eddie's still doing a really good job, and clearly leading any of

01:31:12 ◼   ► of Apple's competitors in terms of worldwide distribution rights of everything other than

01:31:17 ◼   ► books. And even in books, they're a very nice second place to Amazon.

01:31:22 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah, and even with all the legal issues going

01:31:25 ◼   ► on right now, they're still doing pretty well there. The Mansfield thing strikes me

01:31:30 ◼   ► as particularly big though. Obviously, he was retiring, and then a few weeks later,

01:31:36 ◼   ► there was the report that they just threw a ton of money at him to come back and at

01:31:41 ◼   ► at least help transition the hardware team or whatever.

01:31:44 ◼   ► And then now he has a completely new role

01:31:47 ◼   ► talking about the kind of a vague,

01:31:49 ◼   ► working in wireless technologies

01:31:51 ◼   ► and also the chip side of things, right?

01:31:53 ◼   ► So he's gonna be exploring-- - His reputation

01:31:54 ◼   ► within the company though is stellar.

01:31:56 ◼   ► I mean, he just has a reputation of just kicking ass

01:32:00 ◼   ► and doing really good work that comes out on time, on price.

01:32:05 ◼   ► You know, just unbelievable.

01:32:07 ◼   ► And I think the other thing too is not just the wireless.

01:32:10 ◼   ► The big thing is that he's also in charge of the semiconductor group.

01:32:13 ◼   ► I think a lot of people have written about it, but Apple taking more and more ownership

01:32:17 ◼   ► over the chip production of the systems on a chip is every year now.

01:32:23 ◼   ► Ever since they've started it with the original iPad, that was the first A4?

01:32:29 ◼   ► Adam: Yeah.

01:32:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:31 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Ever since then, the A5 was more Apple-controlled

01:32:34 ◼   ► than the A4, and now the A6 is an entirely custom Apple design, which our friends at

01:32:40 ◼   ► and on tech have done a double-plus job examining. It's a huge deal, and it's all Mansfield

01:32:50 ◼   ► now.

01:32:51 ◼   ► Eric Meyer At least for two years. It's kind of interesting

01:32:54 ◼   ► that he has a two-year timeline, but yeah, that's good.

01:32:58 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah. I still think it's interesting, and I do think my friend Guy English said

01:33:04 ◼   ► that he's written about it, and he said that this is just another example of it, though.

01:33:09 ◼   ► This whole thing, though, shows that the biggest risk for Apple over the next five to ten years

01:33:14 ◼   ► is retention of talent.

01:33:18 ◼   ► At the top and at the engineering ranks.

01:33:20 ◼   ► And that's the other under the surface thing is, how many people – and I know there are

01:33:25 ◼   ► some.

01:33:26 ◼   ► There is no doubt about it.

01:33:27 ◼   ► Make no mistake.

01:33:28 ◼   ► It's not like Forstall was universally hated within Apple.

01:33:30 ◼   ► There are people who worked for Forstall who are very, very loyal to him.

01:33:33 ◼   ► And what happens to them now?

01:33:35 ◼   ► Is there going to be a talent loss underneath him?

01:33:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I mean, it may depend on where he lands.

01:33:42 ◼   ► I mean, if he gets another high-profile job

01:33:45 ◼   ► and maybe he brings over some of his people with him,

01:33:47 ◼   ► you know, that's typically what tends to happen.

01:33:49 ◼   ► And so I think that, but they're saying right now

01:33:51 ◼   ► that what, he's the special advisor,

01:33:54 ◼   ► just like Fidel was before him,

01:33:56 ◼   ► and he's gonna be with the company for another year

01:33:59 ◼   ► or something like that, so, yeah.

01:34:02 ◼   ► - All right, well, I wanna thank you, MG Siegler,

01:34:05 ◼   ► for being here.

01:34:06 ◼   ► I wanna thank our sponsors, Appsfire,

01:34:08 ◼   ► and check the weather.

01:34:10 ◼   ► Awesome apps, two awesome apps for iOS.

01:34:13 ◼   ► for iOS.