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The Talk Show

179: ‘iPhone Is the New Hitler’ With Ben Thompson

 

00:00:00   Have a question for you. Here's the linguistic question. I have heard this. I've heard it bill Simmons is using it

00:00:06   I've heard other people using it. There's the

00:00:08   The what used to be the something something 1600 podcast though that crew is now have as a new podcast

00:00:16   I think it's pod save the Queen

00:00:19   People are calling podcast episodes pods

00:00:22   I've seen it yet

00:00:25   All over the place. It seems to be, it is to me the linguistic, it's the word of the year so far for 2017.

00:00:34   I'm almost down with it, even though I am generally a curmudgeon on all, anything that jiggers with the language.

00:00:44   What do you think about it?

00:00:46   Well, it makes, I think it's fine, because well one, it's short, right?

00:00:49   And it's both short and it's very descriptive, you know exactly what it's talking about.

00:00:53   And it's also fascinating because we've kind of like our careers have overlapped like the journey of the word pod

00:01:00   from being this

00:01:02   apparatus you plug into your computer the iPod and thus being the podcast and now pod being an entirely like it went through a

00:01:10   Transfamiliaration or whatever the word is. It's really interesting. We actually when you think about it, I

00:01:15   Think it's fascinating

00:01:18   But it in particular it seems like people are using it though to mean episode not

00:01:22   The show even though pike on pod save the Queen. I guess it kind of implies that it's the whole it's the show itself

00:01:30   Yeah, at least part isn't pod save America Oh pod save America, whatever the hell their show is called

00:01:36   But anyway, I'd the thing that stuck out to me is the use of pod

00:01:38   yeah, but that makes sense though because podcast is the

00:01:42   Entity right and then a podcast contains multiple pods

00:01:46   - Yeah.

00:01:47   - I mean, if you think about it too much,

00:01:49   it doesn't make sense, but if you think it

00:01:51   at the appropriate level, it makes perfect sense.

00:01:53   I'm down with it.

00:01:55   I think it's a good addition.

00:01:57   - I wrote about this, I would have to find the link,

00:02:00   but I wrote about this the first time Apple ever put podcast

00:02:05   as a feature in iTunes, which was a long time ago.

00:02:12   I mean, we're talking, it might have been like 2003?

00:02:16   - No, it was 2005 because that was when

00:02:18   Odeo was doing podcasts.

00:02:19   - Was it?

00:02:20   - Odeo, nay Twitter.

00:02:22   - But just how sort of,

00:02:26   at first I was sort of thinking

00:02:31   way back then that, hey, Apple might put the kibosh

00:02:38   on people calling these things podcasts

00:02:40   because they're very touchy-touchy about

00:02:44   trademarks and stuff like that and

00:02:46   Then they like kind of embraced the word and it was like whoa what the heck is that

00:02:53   And I it it hit me way back then like hey

00:03:00   it's kind of genius for them to embrace it because it sort of makes it seem like

00:03:05   Podcasts are only meant for iPods

00:03:09   Like right kind of own the thing

00:03:12   And at this point, I feel like there's

00:03:19   more people who have listened to podcasts, period.

00:03:22   You know, some podcasts.

00:03:24   Now, maybe not my podcast, somebody's podcast,

00:03:26   who've never even owned an iPod.

00:03:29   Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:03:30   But yet the word persists, but the whole origin of the word

00:03:37   is based-- it's clearly based on the word iPod.

00:03:41   - Yep.

00:03:43   Yeah, it's a, no you're right.

00:03:45   It's really, I mean 'cause if you back up

00:03:48   and think about it, the benefit,

00:03:52   the way it pays out to the iPod at least at that time,

00:03:56   you know, it's like a, you know,

00:03:58   it's like there's a classic strategy technique

00:04:01   which is commoditize your compliments.

00:04:03   Basically all the things that make your product really good,

00:04:06   you want to make them be super common and super free.

00:04:08   And this was Apple kind of doing that

00:04:10   from a branding perspective.

00:04:11   Like they made podcasts the name,

00:04:15   they didn't trademark it, they let it spread super wide

00:04:17   and all accrued to the iPod,

00:04:19   which they were raking in all the money on.

00:04:22   - You are indeed, your memory,

00:04:24   if you were recalling it from memory is correct,

00:04:28   it was from July 2005.

00:04:32   2005, I don't know, what do we call those years now?

00:04:35   I don't know what we call them.

00:04:37   - The aughts, mid-aughts?

00:04:38   yachts. It was a post I wrote on the site called "Is That a Podcast in Your Pocket?"

00:04:45   I'll put it in the show notes. It is a long article. I just found it as well. I didn't

00:04:54   have an editor back then. I kind of like calling it "New Pod." That's what Bill Simmons, like

00:05:02   Bill Simmons announcing a new episode. It'll be like, "New Pod!" And then he'll have like

00:05:06   link to the show. I kind of like it. Yeah. The one thing you mentioned before about

00:05:15   people who have never had an iPod, I get more and more of these emails from like,

00:05:20   executive members or whatever that are like, I've officially reached the stage in life where people

00:05:26   just say things in passing that just blows my mind about their relative experience with

00:05:32   technology compared to mine.

00:05:35   Like what?

00:05:35   Give me another example.

00:05:37   Well, just like, I mean, now I'm getting a brain freeze.

00:05:42   It's more I remember the emotion that I

00:05:44   get from reading these emails.

00:05:46   Well, they'll say something in passing

00:05:47   about when they got their first phone

00:05:50   or their memories about something.

00:05:51   And like something they'll remember, oh,

00:05:53   do you remember back when it was this?

00:05:54   I'm like, I remember when that was introduced or something.

00:05:57   Nothing's coming to mind right now,

00:05:58   but it happens frequently enough.

00:06:01   It's one of those things where the emotion of the shock at,

00:06:04   man, I'm old, is the reason that I remember.

00:06:06   I'll give you-- somebody who writes and says they're

00:06:08   a diehard, longtime Apple user, and their first Apple product

00:06:11   was the iPhone 4S.

00:06:14   And you're like, what?

00:06:18   I'm going to send John Siracuso to your house,

00:06:20   and I'm going to have you schooled on what it means

00:06:23   to be a longtime Apple user.

00:06:25   Totally.

00:06:26   But God bless you.

00:06:26   Yeah.

00:06:27   [LAUGHTER]

00:06:29   Oh, shoot.

00:06:30   I am, apparently the, it being 12, 30 in the morning aspect is kicking in, but

00:06:35   Oh, there's something that happened the other day where I officially shifted to

00:06:38   like back, like back in my day mode.

00:06:41   I felt just, Oh, it was about the box.

00:06:43   It was basketball.

00:06:43   I just talked about man, us old timers.

00:06:46   And like, if you started watching, if you started going to games in the nineties

00:06:49   and I felt justified in saying that, like, that was a really long time ago when

00:06:52   like the nineties, like don't feel that far away to me, but it's actually, it has

00:06:57   really been like 20, 30 years or whatever it is.

00:07:00   And yeah, the fact that I felt I could say that and no one called me on it, but

00:07:04   people were on Twitter like, yeah, oh, totally.

00:07:06   I remember going to these games.

00:07:08   It's like, yeah, we're a bunch of old people now.

00:07:10   It's, it's, it's, it's both sort of depressing.

00:07:13   It's also kind of satisfying, like to be able to like sit back and revel in, uh,

00:07:17   in, in your, you know, being a part of what came before I'm embracing it.

00:07:22   I'm leaning into it.

00:07:23   I'm going to do a pot about it.

00:07:25   [LAUGHTER]

00:07:29   Let me take a break right off the bat.

00:07:31   Let's just get this rolling and get a sponsor break out

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00:10:56   Wanna talk about the NFL?

00:10:59   (laughing)

00:11:02   - Well, we were originally gonna record,

00:11:04   what was it, last week, when you waited

00:11:06   until my Packers were humbled after defeating your Cowboys.

00:11:10   - I didn't do that on purpose.

00:11:12   - I didn't get the chance to do a double or nothing

00:11:15   after our unfortunate bet the last time I was on the podcast.

00:11:18   - What do I owe you?

00:11:20   What do I owe you, a drink?

00:11:21   I owe you drinks the next time, the whole bar?

00:11:23   - No, I owe you dinner.

00:11:24   - Why is that?

00:11:25   - Because we bet before the regular season game

00:11:27   between the Packers and the Cowboys.

00:11:31   And we lost soundly.

00:11:34   - It doesn't seem right though.

00:11:36   It doesn't seem right that you owe me

00:11:38   given that the Packers beat the Cowboys in the playoffs.

00:11:41   That doesn't seem right.

00:11:42   - When it counts, when it counts.

00:11:43   I forgot to specify the bet is about when it counts.

00:11:47   - So you're a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan.

00:11:50   I'm a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan.

00:11:53   The Cowboys and the Packers played,

00:11:57   at this point, what was it, 10 days ago?

00:12:00   11 days ago?

00:12:01   Was it honestly, in all, in my opinion,

00:12:04   it was the only good playoff game

00:12:06   the entire NFL playoffs to date.

00:12:08   (laughs)

00:12:09   - Really? - Oh yeah, it's been brutal.

00:12:10   It's been brutal.

00:12:11   Well, it wasn't just one of the only good playoff games,

00:12:13   or these playoffs, it was like one of the all-time

00:12:15   great playoff games of all time.

00:12:16   - Yeah, so it was an all-time great game,

00:12:20   but it was literally the only decent playoff game.

00:12:23   I mean, the only other one that you could even

00:12:25   make an argument for would be the Steelers-Chiefs game

00:12:29   on the same day, which was a game that was won

00:12:32   by a team that kicked six field goals.

00:12:34   (laughs)

00:12:36   So if you want to argue, if you're like in the greater

00:12:40   Pittsburgh area and you want to argue that that was a good game

00:12:43   too, in a game where your team won with six field goals,

00:12:49   OK, fine.

00:12:50   That was a great game.

00:12:51   Yeah, sure.

00:12:53   Otherwise, this was the only good game of the playoffs.

00:12:55   But like you said, it was seriously

00:12:57   like an all-time great game.

00:12:59   And I'm curious about it.

00:13:01   Our two teams have been in a few of those.

00:13:04   I liked it.

00:13:05   I liked it in the 90s when the Packers and Cowboys would meet every single year and every

00:13:13   single year, no matter what happened, the Cowboys would beat them handily.

00:13:17   That's what I like.

00:13:18   Yeah.

00:13:19   I don't like...

00:13:20   Me not so...

00:13:21   I tweeted immediately after the game that that victory was for Favre.

00:13:26   Because yes, all the emotions of those 90s losses came rushing back at the end of that

00:13:35   What I remember from the early, from the first years that this became a rivalry, in the early

00:13:41   Favre years, when Favre was a young up-and-coming quarterback, was the ridiculous distances

00:13:47   that Favre could throw a football.

00:13:49   Like it, you know, they'd be like on like the 30-yard line and time would be running

00:13:55   out in the first half and it would be like, well, I don't know, they're just, you know,

00:14:00   throw it to like the 20 and hope something happens.

00:14:02   And instead he'd throw it all the way into the end zone.

00:14:04   be like, "No, wait, I thought they were at the 30." And then they'd show the replay,

00:14:06   and it was like, "Oh, yeah, they were at the 30." And he still threw it all the way

00:14:09   to the end zone. He could throw the ball silly distances, like throwing in a Robey.

00:14:18   Yeah. No, I mean, it's hard to... I mean, obviously, all the stuff with Favre sort of

00:14:24   ended badly with Green Bay, and there was some enmity there, for sure. But I think...

00:14:29   And he's like, here's where I get a pull

00:14:31   of that re-entorical trick.

00:14:32   For us long time Packers fans who grew up

00:14:36   with the team just being just brutal and awful.

00:14:39   And I started in the '80s, so they've been brutal

00:14:42   for like 20 years before then,

00:14:43   so it's worse for other folks like my dad.

00:14:46   But I mean, the way he utterly and completely

00:14:50   transformed that franchise, I mean, it's,

00:14:52   I mean, over the last, we were talking about this

00:14:54   the other day, like over the last like 25 years, whatever,

00:14:57   Like I believe it's the Packers and Patriots and Steelers

00:15:00   are one, two, three as far as like both record,

00:15:03   number of playoff appearances, all those sorts of things.

00:15:05   And really the guy that made that all happen,

00:15:09   I mean Wolf trade for him and stuff is a great GM,

00:15:12   but Favre was the guy who just transformed that franchise

00:15:15   and what it meant.

00:15:17   - For people who aren't sports fans,

00:15:19   the Packers are an interesting story

00:15:22   because they are unique in America

00:15:24   among all professional sports teams.

00:15:26   Basketball, hockey, football, baseball, all four major sports.

00:15:33   The Packers are unique in that they are owned by their fans, more or less.

00:15:40   I mean, I am an owner.

00:15:43   Can you explain the difference?

00:15:45   I mean, every other team has one rich guy who is the owner of the team and is a jerk

00:15:51   and probably a Trump supporter in all sports.

00:15:56   The Packers are different.

00:15:57   I'm not sure the Packers can argue about that.

00:16:00   Well, because they're from Wisconsin.

00:16:03   Well, not just Wisconsin, but northern Wisconsin,

00:16:05   which is not a left-leaning liberal country.

00:16:09   We'll put it that way.

00:16:10   Can you explain the ownership structure of the Packers?

00:16:13   So the Packers were owned by an owner at some point,

00:16:17   but sometime way back when.

00:16:19   I want to say back in the '20s or something like that.

00:16:23   Like way back when.

00:16:24   they're one of the original football teams. They were going to go out of business or something like

00:16:30   that, but they established the articles and incorporation for the Green Bay Football

00:16:35   Corporation. And it was sold to basically people in the community. They could buy it a piece.

00:16:42   And then it was written into the bylaws that if it was ever sold, that all the money would go to

00:16:47   the local post of the American Legion. So that's still the case today. So if the team has ever sold

00:16:53   All of the proceeds go to the local American Legion post.

00:16:56   And they're probably worth at least, I would guess,

00:17:00   at least like $1 or $2 billion.

00:17:02   Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:17:03   I mean, we always talk about the Americas team, right?

00:17:08   Right.

00:17:08   But there's basically five big teams in the NFL

00:17:12   that have national followings.

00:17:13   Like, their lines in Vegas get set differently

00:17:16   because they attract so much betting from fans.

00:17:19   And that's your Cowboys, the Packers, the Raiders,

00:17:22   the Steelers and then the Patriots are the kind of the newest addition.

00:17:25   Yeah, the Patriots have sort of snuck in just by virtue of 15 years of non-stop winning.

00:17:33   Right, right. And the Packers were pretty dominant in the early part of the NFL.

00:17:38   And so when they won the first two Super Bowls, that was kind of the tail end of their

00:17:41   multi-decade run of dominance. And then in the '70s, obviously the Steelers and the Cowboys,

00:17:48   And then the Raiders came along, and then the Cowboys

00:17:50   obviously had a return to glory.

00:17:54   But yeah, so what happened was then a few years ago

00:17:57   when they wanted to expand Lambeau Field to raise money,

00:18:00   they did another share issuance.

00:18:02   So they sold another 250,000 shares at $250 apiece

00:18:06   and just raised a ton of money for the stadium.

00:18:09   And all these shares are totally worthless.

00:18:11   You can't sell them.

00:18:12   I mean, you could sell them on the side,

00:18:14   but you can't convert them for money or anything.

00:18:17   But yeah, I have one.

00:18:18   So I have it.

00:18:19   It's sitting in a box right now.

00:18:21   I haven't actually put it up here in Taiwan,

00:18:24   but I am a proud owner of the Green Bay Packers.

00:18:28   It is sort of silly, but it is to me,

00:18:31   it's the way most teams should be owned.

00:18:33   Like even though it's the opposite

00:18:35   and the Packers are in fact this odd exception,

00:18:41   it really is the way most teams should be owned.

00:18:44   They should be owned by the local fans

00:18:46   because it would take off the table the extortion

00:18:50   that these owners put their fans through

00:18:52   every time they need new stadiums built.

00:18:54   There's an honesty to it where it's like,

00:18:58   look, the only reason to buy shares in the Packers

00:19:00   is if you're a Packers fan, right?

00:19:02   And the Packers aren't going anywhere.

00:19:04   Nobody is ever, the Packers are never saying,

00:19:07   give us a $500 million expansion of Lambeau Field

00:19:12   or we're moving to Los Angeles.

00:19:14   That's never even on the table, right?

00:19:16   They're not going anywhere.

00:19:17   - Right.

00:19:18   - And every other team, or half the teams,

00:19:21   you know what I mean?

00:19:22   Like maybe Dallas isn't going anywhere.

00:19:24   But look at the Raiders.

00:19:25   The Raiders have moved.

00:19:26   They've moved to Los Angeles.

00:19:28   They went back to Oakland.

00:19:29   Now, is it a done deal?

00:19:32   Are they going to Vegas?

00:19:33   - I think it's all but a done deal.

00:19:34   I don't think it's been announced yet.

00:19:35   But yeah, they're gonna move to Las Vegas.

00:19:37   - Because the, what's it called?

00:19:40   The AOK Stadium and Coliseum in Oakland is,

00:19:43   It really is a shit hole.

00:19:45   So now they're moving to Vegas.

00:19:49   The Eagles have gone through this in Philadelphia.

00:19:55   There are no better fans or more loyal fans or diehard.

00:20:00   Maybe diehard is maybe the way to go

00:20:02   than Philadelphia Eagles fans.

00:20:04   I'm not an Eagles fan, but I'm surrounded by them.

00:20:07   They're great fans.

00:20:08   Years ago, before they built the Lincoln financial field

00:20:12   they have now. There were threats that they were going to move the Eagles to Los Angeles.

00:20:17   It would have ripped the city apart. It's not right. But it's a privately held team.

00:20:25   Yeah, it can really work in the NFL because so much of the NFL is so aggressive in its

00:20:34   revenue sharing and the TV deals are so massive that Green Bay can compete on an even playing

00:20:40   Field even though they make much less money locally.

00:20:44   Although that was part of the refurbishment that they did of Lambeau Field when I was

00:20:47   able to buy my share, my single share, was basically making sort of a year-round destination

00:20:53   and people do like poker niches and stuff there.

00:20:56   But relative to Jerry's, like Jerry Dome or whatever, they don't make as much locally

00:21:02   but because the vast majority of the money that NLT's getting is from the TV deal and

00:21:08   ticket sales have to be shared by and large, I think, except for luxury boxes. They can

00:21:14   do it and pull it off. And then obviously, they're the team for Wisconsin. So their

00:21:20   television market is effectively Wisconsin. And so they certainly do well. But yeah, it's

00:21:27   super unique. They had to be grandfathered into the NFL's governance document because

00:21:32   it does state that no team could have more than X number of owners. And the agreement

00:21:37   hackers have 360,000 of them.

00:21:40   - Right, it's sort of like they want to avoid the situation

00:21:43   where like 10 people, you know, like me and you

00:21:48   and Marco and Guy English join in and buy an NFL team

00:21:54   and then we fight with each other and can't make decisions.

00:21:58   They want to avoid that.

00:22:00   And so that's why they have these rules that, you know,

00:22:03   what they want are guys like Jerry Jones

00:22:06   who just can make decisions on their own,

00:22:08   just to simplify things.

00:22:11   And it's, packers have like a million owners.

00:22:15   - Yes, I'm on the Wikipedia page right now.

00:22:18   Yeah, even though it's referred to as common stock,

00:22:21   a share of packer stock does not share the same rights.

00:22:24   It does not have equity interest, does not pay dividends,

00:22:25   cannot be traded, has no securities law protection,

00:22:28   and brings no season ticket purchase privileges.

00:22:30   - It doesn't even get you a seat.

00:22:34   So Packers have like a 50 year waiting list or something,

00:22:36   which is insane because I actually have very little desire

00:22:39   to go to a game in January in Green Bay,

00:22:42   I can tell you that.

00:22:43   - It's like a college team, insofar as like,

00:22:46   nobody lives there.

00:22:47   I mean, I'm looking at the Wikipedia page

00:22:49   for the Green Bay metropolitan area,

00:22:50   and there's 280,000 people.

00:22:54   It's not even a real city.

00:22:58   - Yeah, no, so people,

00:23:01   so what they did for a long time is they had

00:23:03   six games a year in Green Bay and two games a year in Milwaukee at County Stadium where

00:23:08   the Rouge is to play.

00:23:09   And they did that when the team was in a rough time and kind of built up the fan base or

00:23:15   whatever.

00:23:16   But now all the games are on Lambeau Field and you have these grand caravans that go

00:23:22   up from the...

00:23:23   So all the Milwaukee's season ticket holders got to keep their seats.

00:23:27   So they have seats for two games a year.

00:23:29   And then the Green Bay ticket holders have seats for the other six games a year or something

00:23:33   that is this whole convoluted thing but the net of it is is like I mean Wisconsin is is

00:23:38   I mean it's Packers country I mean more than more than anything else I mean it is it is

00:23:43   you cannot go you know in football season you can't go five feet without encountering

00:23:47   some sort of you know Packers paraphernalia.

00:23:50   Somehow they're taken seriously yet their fans are called cheeseheads.

00:23:53   Oh it's really yeah the the cheesehead thing is something that all Wisconsinites have to

00:23:57   come to grips with eventually.

00:23:59   Apple maps says it's a two hour drive from Milwaukee to Green Bay. Does that sound right

00:24:04   to you?

00:24:05   Yeah. And I think the, yeah, it's a beautiful drive, but I think on stadium days, it's probably,

00:24:11   or game days, it's probably a lot longer because it's a whole caravan moving up.

00:24:15   Yeah. All right.

00:24:17   And yeah, well, the other thing that's more interesting to me is that you need to get

00:24:22   back and do basketball. Because your Philadelphia 76ers are shaping up to be the 76ers, Milwaukee

00:24:31   Bucks rivalry over the next 10 years is going to be—no, I'm serious. It's going to

00:24:35   be amazing.

00:24:36   I know. We've got—what's his name?

00:24:39   Well, indeed.

00:24:41   He's super exciting. I saw him at a restaurant here in Philadelphia a couple—actually,

00:24:47   a couple, actually I was gonna say weeks ago,

00:24:49   might have been months ago.

00:24:51   He was, we went out to dinner

00:24:54   at a nice little steakhouse here,

00:24:56   and he was there, and he's a very tall man.

00:25:01   - Yeah, he draws a lot of attention.

00:25:05   - Yeah.

00:25:06   - I am not, I have been around college basketball players.

00:25:12   I'm, you know, I'm not always,

00:25:16   I've been around Craig Hockenberry.

00:25:18   I know what it's like to not even be close

00:25:19   to being the tallest person in a room.

00:25:22   I'm generally close--

00:25:22   - And you're a pretty tall guy.

00:25:23   - I am pretty tall.

00:25:24   I'm six foot two.

00:25:26   It's pretty tall, and it's usually,

00:25:28   maybe if not the tallest, you're up there.

00:25:31   I'm not used to being around somebody

00:25:33   who would have to stoop to put his chin on top of my hand.

00:25:36   (laughing)

00:25:37   It is very, very large.

00:25:40   But the other exciting thing about the Sixers

00:25:41   is Ben Simmons, his foot is healing quite nicely, they say.

00:25:46   - Yeah, and he'll be back soon.

00:25:49   So, yeah, I know it should be about Tal.

00:25:51   I mean, the Bucks star player is Giannis Antetokounmpo.

00:25:55   - Oh, say it again, say it again.

00:25:57   - Giannis Antetokounmpo, which is a Nigerian name

00:26:01   that was translated into Greek and then now is here

00:26:03   in the US, everyone just calls him Giannis,

00:26:05   including Bucks fans.

00:26:06   - Yeah, they should just change his name.

00:26:08   Just get rid of that last name and just change him,

00:26:10   You know, like Madonna, just like Giannis.

00:26:12   (laughing)

00:26:14   - He might as well be at NBA Twitter,

00:26:15   but he was in Taiwan actually a couple years ago,

00:26:18   and I got the chance to meet him when he was here.

00:26:20   And it's on my Instagram, it's like 86 weeks ago.

00:26:23   But yeah, I come up to below his shoulder.

00:26:26   (laughing)

00:26:27   He is, I mean, he's 6'11", he's just like, it's ridiculous.

00:26:32   - So the Sixers, the Sixers are a good case study to me

00:26:36   of one of my fundamental theories of sports,

00:26:39   which makes no sense, but I believe it firmly,

00:26:42   which is that you don't screw with your uniforms.

00:26:46   You pick a uniform that is gonna last for the ages,

00:26:51   and then you tweak it as minorly as possible

00:26:56   through the decades.

00:26:57   That's number one reason why my favorite team

00:27:00   in the world is the Yankees.

00:27:01   Yankees, they don't screw with the uniforms.

00:27:04   Babe Ruth's uniform was like the same

00:27:06   as the uniform they wear today,

00:27:08   except it was made out of, I don't know, felt or something,

00:27:12   some different material than the polyester

00:27:14   that they can do today.

00:27:15   The Yankees tried cotton in the George Costanza era,

00:27:21   didn't work out.

00:27:22   But in terms of the way the uniform looks,

00:27:24   they don't mess with it.

00:27:25   The Dallas Cowboys don't mess with the uniforms.

00:27:28   When they have, they used to have a special

00:27:31   Sunday night uniform with stars on their shoulders,

00:27:34   and they lost every game they played with those uniforms.

00:27:37   The Green Bay Packers-- - Oh, those are terrible.

00:27:38   Those are bad ones.

00:27:39   - They look terrible.

00:27:39   It's just a stupid excuse to sell a third jersey

00:27:42   to people who wanted to have every jersey.

00:27:45   One of the things that's great about the Green Bay Packers,

00:27:47   Green Bay Packers look like the Green Bay Packers.

00:27:49   If you look at like Super Bowl I

00:27:51   and you see Bart Starr leading the team

00:27:54   to the first Super Bowl 51 years ago,

00:27:57   they look like the team that's playing today

00:27:58   'cause they don't screw with the uniform.

00:28:01   The Philadelphia 76ers had a great uniform.

00:28:05   I mean, it's a great name.

00:28:07   I mean, who knows what sense it makes?

00:28:08   But I mean, Philadelphia's where the country started.

00:28:10   You call them the 76ers.

00:28:12   So there you go, you go patriotic.

00:28:13   You gotta be red, white, and blue, right?

00:28:16   But somehow during the Allen Iverson era,

00:28:18   they changed to black, gold, and red.

00:28:21   How-- - Like a star,

00:28:22   this weird star, yeah.

00:28:23   - Right, how can a team in Philadelphia

00:28:26   that's named after the American Revolution

00:28:30   or independence, whatever you wanna call it, in '76,

00:28:34   not be red, white, and blue.

00:28:36   And yet they did.

00:28:37   And then they had terrible,

00:28:39   of course they had terrible records.

00:28:40   How can you win when you're going against the sports gods

00:28:43   by screwing with your uniform?

00:28:45   Now the Sixers have gone back to,

00:28:47   it's not quite the classic.

00:28:49   I kinda don't like the way they spell out Sixers

00:28:51   on the uniform.

00:28:52   I feel like they oughta go back

00:28:54   to the pure Dr. J era uniform, but it's close enough.

00:28:57   - Yeah, no, I mean, the Bucks are definitely fit with that.

00:29:02   So first off, their classic uniform and their classic logo

00:29:05   are both amazing.

00:29:06   The classic logo is this cartoony butt

00:29:10   kissing a basketball.

00:29:11   - Yeah, I love it.

00:29:12   He's sort of like a--

00:29:13   - He's got a green sweater on.

00:29:15   - Sort of like Bullwinkle, yeah.

00:29:17   - Right, and they had great uniforms back in the '80s,

00:29:19   and that's when the team was good.

00:29:20   They won the title in the '70s with then-Luel Sint-Or,

00:29:23   later-Korean Abdul-Jabbar,

00:29:25   and then they were good in the '80s,

00:29:26   always lost to your 76ers and Celtics,

00:29:29   but very strong team.

00:29:31   Then 1993, they had this awful logo

00:29:35   that's like the purple and this terrible,

00:29:37   it was just awful, the uniforms were bad,

00:29:39   and they've been pretty much terrible ever since.

00:29:40   They had like one good year since then.

00:29:43   And then in 2015, they did a redesign,

00:29:46   which is not the old logo, but the uniforms especially

00:29:49   are definitely go back to the original,

00:29:52   especially this kind of, this paneling on the side

00:29:55   that looks really, really good.

00:29:57   And sure enough, the team's fortunes are looking up,

00:30:01   but there's this hilarious tweet

00:30:02   you gotta put in the show notes.

00:30:04   (laughs)

00:30:05   The tweet reads, you have to read it to appreciate it,

00:30:08   it reads, "America's slow but very real decline

00:30:10   "into a fascist state as told by the Milwaukee Bucks a long

00:30:13   "ago," and just follow the link,

00:30:16   you have to see the tweet to appreciate it,

00:30:17   but I promise you, you will laugh your rear end off,

00:30:19   because it's really funny.

00:30:21   - All right, I will put it in the show notes.

00:30:24   All right, before we get off sports,

00:30:25   let me give you this, I'm gonna toss this out there,

00:30:27   here we go, here's a contentious argument.

00:30:30   top quarterbacks of all time.

00:30:33   - That is a contentious argument.

00:30:37   - You sent me a link last night to a video,

00:30:41   you sent it, right?

00:30:42   Of the, was it you?

00:30:45   - No, I don't think so.

00:30:46   - It wasn't you who sent me the link to the cab

00:30:49   with John Elway in it?

00:30:50   - Oh yeah, I did send that, yeah.

00:30:52   - Yeah. - That was great.

00:30:53   - So then somebody was in a cab in Pittsburgh

00:30:59   and talking to their cab driver about who the greatest

00:31:02   quarterbacks of all time were.

00:31:03   And even though this guy was a cab driver in Pittsburgh,

00:31:05   his number one pick was John Elway.

00:31:07   And it just so happened that among the people in the cab,

00:31:10   one of them was John Elway.

00:31:13   And they let it go on for two or three minutes

00:31:15   before they let the cab driver go.

00:31:18   Whoever was filming in the middle was pretty devious

00:31:20   about it.

00:31:21   Because they're just like, oh, do you think he's attractive?

00:31:23   Would you want to sleep with him?

00:31:24   And then she goes, I bet you'd sleep with him.

00:31:26   And it's like his wife right next to him.

00:31:29   (laughing)

00:31:31   - All right, top quarterbacks of all time.

00:31:33   All right, let me ask you this.

00:31:34   I'll just give you a simple question.

00:31:35   Who's better, Favre or Aaron Rodgers?

00:31:37   - Oh.

00:31:39   (laughing)

00:31:42   I think from a pure between the lines perspective,

00:31:49   Rodgers is probably better.

00:31:53   Just like Favre's recklessness made him great,

00:31:55   but it went, like it cost us a lot of games.

00:31:58   - You're blinded by your fandom.

00:32:00   The answer is clearly Aaron Rodgers.

00:32:03   - No, okay, well, but yeah, that's fair.

00:32:06   But from a meaning, a legendary status

00:32:09   and meaningfulness to the franchise,

00:32:11   I would have to go with, I'd have to go with Favre.

00:32:13   Rodgers needs to win a couple more Super Bowls

00:32:14   to surpass him.

00:32:15   Right now they're both at one,

00:32:17   which is shamefully well in my opinion.

00:32:18   - It doesn't matter.

00:32:19   Aaron Rodgers could never win another Super Bowl

00:32:21   and it doesn't matter.

00:32:22   Aaron Rodgers is a better quarterback than Brad Favre.

00:32:25   - Yeah, fair enough.

00:32:26   But if you dig the totality of their contribution

00:32:29   to the Green Bay Packers, it's more complicated.

00:32:32   But yeah, I would agree with that.

00:32:33   You're right, I am blinded by my being

00:32:36   a impressionable teenage boy and Brett Favre

00:32:38   basically saving my sports life.

00:32:41   - Did you see my link the other day

00:32:43   to Triumph, the insult comic dog at the inauguration?

00:32:48   - I saw it, I haven't watched it though.

00:32:50   - Well at the end, when he first has to utter the words

00:32:54   president and then followed by the word Trump.

00:32:57   Every time he tries to say it, he starts vomiting.

00:32:59   That's how I feel with me saying that among the top five

00:33:06   of all time at this point, you've absolutely positively

00:33:09   gotta include Tom Brady.

00:33:11   There I go.

00:33:12   I'll edit it out.

00:33:13   - It hurts to say it, it hurts to say it.

00:33:14   - I'm gonna edit it out, here I am, I'm puking right now.

00:33:17   Ah, there it goes.

00:33:18   It hurts, there goes my breakfast.

00:33:23   but it's undeniable at this point.

00:33:25   - Yeah, I mean, the record speaks for itself, obviously.

00:33:29   I mean, seventh Super Bowl.

00:33:31   It's always tricky to separate the greatest quarterbacks

00:33:37   from the greatest coaches.

00:33:38   Like, how does that relationship actually play out?

00:33:42   - Because so many of them are in the same conversation,

00:33:44   right?

00:33:45   - Right, well, I mean, what if Rodgers

00:33:47   had been the quarterback of the Patriots

00:33:49   for the last 15 years?

00:33:50   Like would they be better or worse or the same?

00:33:54   Like it's almost impossible.

00:33:55   I mean, Mike McCarthy is an okay coach.

00:33:57   I think he gets probably more grief than he deserves.

00:34:00   But at the same time,

00:34:02   like he's not even in the same universe as Bill Belichick.

00:34:05   And you know, what difference does that make?

00:34:08   Or someone like Joe Montana and like, you know,

00:34:11   Bill Walsh was so far ahead of everyone

00:34:13   when it comes to his scheme and things like that.

00:34:15   And you had Jerry Rice, I mean like,

00:34:18   but he was a great quarterback,

00:34:19   But that's, and this is why I mean football is tough because it's where do you,

00:34:22   where do you sort of figure out where the boundary is?

00:34:25   Roger Staubach and Tom Landry.

00:34:28   I mean Tom Landry literally invented the shotgun formation.

00:34:30   Like that was something that was like, it's like you watch it now.

00:34:35   There are some teams that never even don't,

00:34:38   they even use the shotgun on running plays now.

00:34:41   And to think that it was like a loophole in the rules.

00:34:45   Yeah.

00:34:47   He read the rule book and he was like,

00:34:49   you know, there's nothing that says you have to hand the ball

00:34:51   from the center to the quarterback.

00:34:53   We could just toss it back five yards.

00:34:56   Basically all football is discovering and exploiting

00:34:59   loopholes.

00:34:59   Right.

00:35:00   The forward pass is basically a loophole, right?

00:35:03   Sort of, yeah.

00:35:04   I think in the long term, yeah.

00:35:06   Dan Marino, Don Shula, right?

00:35:09   All the quarterbacks that you mentioned, almost everyone

00:35:12   who I think you would mention in the--

00:35:14   if you're going to put together a top five list,

00:35:16   coach who is arguably in the top five.

00:35:19   - And that's why John Elway might be the best though.

00:35:22   Like that's why he might be right.

00:35:24   - Right, that Elway's the one who you're like,

00:35:26   who the hell was his coach?

00:35:28   - Yep.

00:35:29   - Right?

00:35:30   - It wasn't like Greaves or Graves or--

00:35:32   - Oh, I don't even know.

00:35:33   - He went to Atlanta later.

00:35:35   But yeah, he finally won with Mike Shanahan

00:35:37   at the end of his career.

00:35:38   But yeah, I mean, to my mind,

00:35:41   I'd almost attempted to pick him for that reason alone.

00:35:43   Because like there's really no one else

00:35:45   can ascribe his greatness to.

00:35:49   All right, let's take another break

00:35:51   and thank our next sponsor.

00:35:52   And then we'll get onto the real meat of the show.

00:35:55   Our next sponsor is a great company, Eero.

00:35:59   E-E-R-O. Look, Wi-Fi is more important today

00:36:03   than it's ever been.

00:36:05   Most of us have our whole house--

00:36:07   we have connected with devices that are on the internet.

00:36:09   And how are they on the internet?

00:36:10   They're on the internet through Wi-Fi.

00:36:12   Outside the smartphone, it's probably

00:36:14   the technology we depend on most. It's a core utility of the 21st century home. But despite

00:36:21   its importance, Wi-Fi is broken. Imagine if your electricity in your house didn't reach certain

00:36:28   parts or like it was intermittent. Like you got really good electricity in your living room,

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00:36:40   don't get electricity.

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00:36:45   But that's what Wi-Fi is like for a lot of us.

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00:38:21   not like a robot, but like a human being who--

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00:39:32   I'm using 'em right now, you're hearing me talk to Ben

00:39:34   over at Eero Wi-Fi routers.

00:39:37   Couldn't work better.

00:39:39   What else is on the agenda, Ben?

00:39:43   - Well, I mean, Eero is, I guess,

00:39:47   the go-to recommendation now

00:39:49   because Apple doesn't make routers anymore.

00:39:50   - Well, they do. - They sell them.

00:39:53   - They sell them, but they don't, arguably,

00:39:56   seemingly don't make new ones,

00:39:58   and then according to Scoop Germin,

00:40:02   they've canceled making new ones.

00:40:04   So who knows?

00:40:05   - Scoop Gerben, that's good.

00:40:08   She's calling that from now on.

00:40:10   - Who knows what the hell's going on with them with that?

00:40:12   I don't know.

00:40:13   - So I did want to talk to you about this

00:40:16   because I haven't really found,

00:40:18   I've kind of mentioned it in passing

00:40:19   in a daily update or two,

00:40:20   but I haven't really found a good occasion

00:40:21   to write about it.

00:40:22   It doesn't necessarily fit.

00:40:24   I don't write about,

00:40:25   like my whole thing is I don't write about products.

00:40:26   I write about business models and stuff like that.

00:40:29   But I find a lot of the Mac, Mac products

00:40:34   to be both understandable, I think I get where it's coming from, and also to be way overwrought

00:40:42   and over the top and not necessarily connected to reality.

00:40:47   The Mac angst, meaning in a nutshell, Apple clearly doesn't care about the Mac anymore.

00:40:54   They want everybody to just use iPads and iPhones, and they're doing everything they

00:40:58   can to undermine the Mac and within a year or two...

00:41:03   gone in five years. It'll be gone. Yeah, it'll be gone. Yeah, I think the, obviously

00:41:10   it's all crescendoed with the release of the MacBook Pro, which much to my great sadness

00:41:17   and consternation did not come with a Apple branded monitor, which I was looking forward

00:41:22   to buying very much. And so, and then obviously there was the, you know, people were pointing

00:41:28   out the memory, they were pointing out the battery life, how thin it was, the port situation,

00:41:31   that. But I think that just happened to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

00:41:37   Because what was so weird about the MacBook Pro being the trigger for all this angst is that the

00:41:45   MacBook Pro is the single best piece of evidence that Apple is still investing in the map.

00:41:49   I mean, say what you will with the touch bar and whether it's going to actually be something that

00:41:53   makes using a Mac better or not. I think that will remain to be seen over the long run. But it

00:41:58   it clearly required a tremendous amount of investment

00:42:02   and effort, which, presuming Apple is a rationally run

00:42:06   company, and by all accounts, the complaints are

00:42:09   that Apple is being too rationally run,

00:42:11   they would not make that investment if they were

00:42:13   gonna abandon the damn platform.

00:42:15   So, we can get into why the angst is there,

00:42:19   but it's really kind of ironic that it happened

00:42:21   around this particular product.

00:42:25   I'm with you, and I don't know how better to make my case.

00:42:29   I got a, I wouldn't say a friend, but a source,

00:42:33   somebody I've known for years who's worked at Apple,

00:42:36   and I hear from occasionally, and like many people

00:42:39   who are long-time Apple employees, seems to, you know,

00:42:43   every 18 months or so moves around within the company

00:42:46   to different teams, worked on a certain aspect

00:42:51   of Touch Bar support.

00:42:53   it was a software side thing, for a while.

00:42:57   And then right after it shipped,

00:42:59   in like maybe like three days,

00:43:02   I had like a DM conversation with him.

00:43:05   And one of the things he said is,

00:43:07   "I hope this puts the rest of the notion

00:43:09   "that Apple doesn't care about the Mac."

00:43:12   Because this is a guy who spent like 18 months

00:43:14   working on that software.

00:43:16   - I know, 'cause it was hardware and a custom chip.

00:43:19   It had this display.

00:43:22   The software support was incredible, right?

00:43:24   All their apps had it built in.

00:43:25   They had all these frameworks developed

00:43:27   so third party developers could use it.

00:43:28   Like it was a multifaceted effort

00:43:33   that involved every single part of the company.

00:43:35   So that trigger that Apple doesn't care about the back

00:43:38   is again, I think there were justifiable reasons

00:43:41   for the angst, but it was just bizarre

00:43:44   that this was the triggering event.

00:43:46   - Right, I will listen to you

00:43:50   And maybe nod my head in agreement

00:43:53   if you say, I'm not happy with the direction

00:43:56   they're taking the Mac.

00:43:57   If your argument is Apple and Tim Cook

00:44:03   don't care about the Mac, period,

00:44:05   and they're letting it wither because they're done with it,

00:44:07   I can't see it.

00:44:09   I really can't.

00:44:10   It doesn't make any sense.

00:44:11   And like somebody else, I've gotten more--

00:44:15   like the reaction, that reaction to these MacBook Pros

00:44:18   really did drive a lot of sources out of the woodwork

00:44:22   at Apple.

00:44:22   I've heard just bits and pieces from a bunch of people

00:44:25   who are so frustrated by the reaction.

00:44:28   And one source who would be in a position to know--

00:44:33   I mean, not super high, but somebody who would know--

00:44:38   said that they literally spent, quote unquote,

00:44:41   "hundreds of millions of dollars developing the new MacBook

00:44:44   Pros.

00:44:45   And that they could have saved all of that

00:44:49   by just putting updated Intel chips into the old MacBook Pro

00:44:54   hardware.

00:44:55   Like, which would be like--

00:44:58   so if we waited this long, and then new MacBook Pros came out

00:45:01   in November or October, or whenever it was,

00:45:04   and they were just exactly like the old ones,

00:45:06   except they had new Intel chips, and maybe they

00:45:11   had the high gamut, high color gamut displays.

00:45:14   but otherwise visually indistinguishable from them.

00:45:18   That would be further fodder for the conspiracy theory

00:45:22   that the Mac is on the way out.

00:45:24   Right, because they just did the minimum viable sort of thing.

00:45:28   But they literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars

00:45:30   developing these.

00:45:31   They expect them to be like the foundation of the product line

00:45:35   for years to come.

00:45:38   And yet people see this as proof that they're trying

00:45:42   to get everybody to buy iPads.

00:45:44   Right.

00:45:45   And it's funny because even the MacBook Pro,

00:45:48   there was a relatively long delay.

00:45:50   The last release of the MacBook Pro was in May of 2015.

00:45:55   And then that was the 15-inch.

00:45:57   The 13-inch was updated in March 2015.

00:45:59   So to wait a year and a half was a relatively long time.

00:46:06   But it wasn't an obscene amount of time.

00:46:11   And before that, it'd be mid-2014, late 2013, early 2013,

00:46:16   retina 2012, mid-2012.

00:46:18   So it's slowed down a little bit,

00:46:19   but for all the things that have been discussed

00:46:20   and I was about Intel and stuff like that,

00:46:21   that's understandable.

00:46:22   And also developing the touch bar

00:46:23   presumably introduced delays, right?

00:46:25   'Cause when you got your review units,

00:46:27   they sent you the touch bar unit

00:46:30   like a week later. - Two weeks later.

00:46:31   No, two weeks later. - Yeah, two weeks later.

00:46:33   So yeah, so the MacBook Pro has certainly been,

00:46:35   it's been fine all along.

00:46:38   The iMac has been fine all along,

00:46:39   although it wasn't updated this year,

00:46:42   which I think added to a little bit.

00:46:44   I mean, clearly it seems to mostly come back

00:46:47   to the sort of MacBook Pro debacle,

00:46:51   and that's why your point about the hundreds

00:46:53   of millions of dollars invested in the MacBook Pro,

00:46:55   I think is actually a really, really interesting

00:46:57   and telling point, because they're not gonna

00:47:02   necessarily make up that money on this version

00:47:05   of the MacBook Pro, right?

00:47:06   Presumably they're gonna be using the touch bar

00:47:09   in for several generations of the MacBook Pro

00:47:12   and hopefully on external keyboards and things like that,

00:47:15   which means they will pay it off over time, right?

00:47:18   And that's how business works.

00:47:19   You make these massive upfront investments

00:47:21   and then every, you try to sell more units,

00:47:24   you could spread out that investment

00:47:27   over more and more units, right?

00:47:29   And the reason why I think that's really telling

00:47:32   is I think it starts to get into what went wrong

00:47:35   with the MacBook Pro, or sorry, the Mac Pro,

00:47:37   But that's more of a sort of a really fascinating screw up

00:47:42   that might have happened as opposed to

00:47:44   an abandonment of the entire platform.

00:47:47   - Yeah, and let's make it clear.

00:47:50   I mean, let's not brush it under the carpet.

00:47:54   The fact is that the Mac Pro is a complete embarrassment

00:47:58   to the company.

00:47:59   It's a debacle.

00:48:02   It is absolutely ridiculous that they're selling

00:48:06   1100 or 1200 day at this point old computer

00:48:10   at the same price with no updated components.

00:48:13   It's clearly a disaster.

00:48:16   And it's not a great sign for the Mac as a platform.

00:48:19   But I don't think you can extrapolate from it

00:48:24   that the entire platform has lost the company's attention.

00:48:28   - Right, so to me this Mac Pro thing is,

00:48:33   again, I don't write about products per se,

00:48:35   so I haven't really dug into it too much.

00:48:37   I did kind of touch on it a little bit

00:48:39   in a daily update for Christmas,

00:48:40   but to me this Mac Pro thing is one of the most

00:48:43   interesting untold stories about Apple right now.

00:48:46   Like there's no, like it's impossible to draw

00:48:49   any conclusion beyond that there was

00:48:51   a massive, massive screw up here.

00:48:54   And my, I mean do you want to theorize?

00:48:59   I have my theory.

00:49:00   - Yeah, that's what podcasts are for.

00:49:03   So the reason I mentioned that bit about the MacBook Pros

00:49:06   and all the investment that goes into it is,

00:49:09   when Apple, the cost that it took to develop

00:49:11   this new Mac Pro, the Trashcan Mac Pro,

00:49:13   was certainly substantial.

00:49:15   Hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm sure.

00:49:17   Maybe even more, who knows?

00:49:19   And Apple would have counted on earning back that investment

00:49:24   over not just this 2013 model,

00:49:26   but presumably a 2014 model, 2015 model, et cetera,

00:49:29   for probably like at least 10 years.

00:49:31   Like they were probably planning on having this design.

00:49:33   - Yeah.

00:49:34   Or the better part of a decade at the very least.

00:49:37   - Right, so my best guess is that this design

00:49:40   is fundamentally flawed in some way.

00:49:42   I think it's fundamentally flawed in general

00:49:44   because I think it makes people buy stuff

00:49:47   they don't need necessarily.

00:49:48   And we can get into like this,

00:49:50   but there's something from a business perspective

00:49:52   that's fundamentally flawed about this model.

00:49:54   Maybe there's a super high failure rate

00:49:56   and they're having to always return them and exchange them.

00:49:59   like that, which totally destroys your margins.

00:50:01   That's possible.

00:50:02   But the problem is if you dropped hundreds of millions

00:50:05   of dollars into a design and it fails,

00:50:10   and you have to decide what are you gonna do now?

00:50:12   Are you gonna stick with it?

00:50:13   Well, that's not an option.

00:50:14   So are you gonna redesign it?

00:50:16   But then you're gonna reinvest hundreds of millions

00:50:18   of dollars into a market that is pretty tiny.

00:50:22   The macro market is not a big market.

00:50:24   And I think my suspicion of what happened

00:50:28   that this was a flawed design that Apple felt they could not continue to make. The problem

00:50:33   was the Mac Pro market, they had to eat hundreds of millions of dollars in losses because they

00:50:39   didn't build enough, because they abandoned the product. They couldn't make the case to

00:50:47   invest another, let's say $500 million to build a new version, and now they're trying

00:50:53   to figure something out.

00:50:56   You could say they should do it.

00:50:57   Do we have a argument they should do it?

00:50:58   They should eat that cost because it's a halo product,

00:51:00   all that sort of thing.

00:51:01   But I can certainly sketch out a scenario

00:51:05   where it just makes zero financial sense

00:51:06   for them to go forward.

00:51:07   Basically, this product doomed the entire line.

00:51:10   That's my best guess about what happened.

00:51:12   - Yeah, I think it was, you know,

00:51:15   something along those lines has to be true, right?

00:51:18   It has to be.

00:51:19   And I think that, and then you can extrapolate from there,

00:51:25   And at a certain point, Apple, even as an institution,

00:51:29   and even as, in my opinion, a relatively straightforward,

00:51:33   realistic institution, they still have

00:51:38   a human side, and there's pride and ego involved.

00:51:45   And logically, if they were purely logical,

00:51:49   you could just say, you know what,

00:51:51   it was a terrible mistake, we're going right back

00:51:53   the old cheese grater big box.

00:51:56   Here you go.

00:51:57   Here's a new Mac Pro with the old cheese grater

00:52:00   and updated state-of-the-art Intel chips and modern ports

00:52:05   on the back.

00:52:06   And an 18-time SuperDrive?

00:52:08   Right.

00:52:10   And there are tens of thousands of people

00:52:13   waiting for new Mac Pro who would be like, thank you.

00:52:16   And they would be happy.

00:52:17   But Apple's not going to do that.

00:52:19   And honestly, I think at some level,

00:52:21   it comes down to pride.

00:52:23   They're just not going to do it for pride alone, which

00:52:25   is frustrating if you're the pro waiting for modern 2016,

00:52:31   or honestly, even 2015 level pro hardware

00:52:36   here in the beginning of 2017.

00:52:39   But they're not going to do that.

00:52:40   They really, in a figurative sense,

00:52:43   painted themselves in a corner with this.

00:52:46   Yeah, absolutely.

00:52:47   And I think you winked to a really insightful article about this.

00:52:54   And someone making the point that that 2013 introduction was like Apple.

00:53:00   It was also pride.

00:53:01   It was Apple's hubris seeing the best of them.

00:53:03   And like people are complaining we're not innovating.

00:53:05   Well, screw them.

00:53:06   Look at this.

00:53:07   And you ended up with a design that looked amazing, was beautiful.

00:53:12   But again, whether it was reliability or just the core architecture or whatever it was,

00:53:19   was fundamentally flawed.

00:53:21   Again, we're speculating, but was fundamentally flawed in some way that had they not set out

00:53:29   to prove the world to the world that they could innovate my ass, might have come up

00:53:33   with something a little more practical that would pay itself off as necessary to continue

00:53:41   as a viable product.

00:53:42   And I still firmly believe, I think they were way,

00:53:46   it's a case of being way too far ahead of their time.

00:53:50   I still think that fundamentally,

00:53:53   it is the future of pro-computing.

00:53:55   And I think that having a big box that you plug things into,

00:53:59   like internal drives and internal cards,

00:54:03   is the way things were, but it's not the way of the future.

00:54:06   And I think the way of the future

00:54:07   is a smaller self-contained box

00:54:11   that you do need to expand it for true pro reasons,

00:54:15   you're gonna expand on the outside

00:54:17   through very high bandwidth.

00:54:20   I mean, whether USB-C and Thunderbolt 3

00:54:23   is fast enough to be that or not, I don't know.

00:54:27   Maybe it's the next generation thing,

00:54:28   but at some point, I firmly believe that pro hardware

00:54:33   is just a simple small box,

00:54:35   and then the expansion will all be external,

00:54:38   and you just, with one simple thing that you plug in,

00:54:42   and there it goes, you get enough power,

00:54:43   you get enough bandwidth that you don't need to open the box

00:54:46   and put the thing inside.

00:54:48   Because to me, and you know I've gotten pushback on this

00:54:52   on private channels and Slack that we're on,

00:54:54   but whether the world is there right now in 2017 or not,

00:54:59   I don't know, but I still think that's firmly

00:55:01   where the future is.

00:55:02   But this Mac Pro launched at three or four,

00:55:06   was it 2013, 2014?

00:55:07   A long time ago, long enough ago.

00:55:09   - 2013.

00:55:10   - And the world wasn't there yet, you know,

00:55:13   for all expansion to be on the outside.

00:55:15   I think it's the right design for the long term,

00:55:16   but it wasn't the right design for then,

00:55:18   and it certainly isn't for now.

00:55:20   But--

00:55:21   - Yeah, well, the other thing too is,

00:55:22   I feel like pro hardware should be the most conservative,

00:55:26   though, in some respects, in the way it progresses.

00:55:29   I mean, in some aspects it can be faster,

00:55:31   pros will pay for it, they'll do the upgrades,

00:55:33   things like that, but like, especially when it comes

00:55:35   anything performance related because I think the the the Mac Pro has

00:55:40   Thunderbolt 2 which Thunderbolt 2 I can't remember how many lanes it's PCI

00:55:46   Express but it has not very many lanes and so you know yeah I think you're

00:55:51   right there was the idea wasn't necessarily wrong the timing was wrong

00:55:55   and you know you know if they were to do the other thing too is I think this

00:56:00   forcing people to buy two at least at the time high-end video cards and today

00:56:05   You still have to pay like the high-end video cards, even though they're super obsolete.

00:56:08   I think that this had two big problems.

00:56:10   One is that video card technology is progressing much faster than processor technology,

00:56:14   which means that the Mac Pro got older faster.

00:56:18   The processors in the Mac Pro are still totally relatively viable today.

00:56:23   They're not that far behind, particularly in single-thread performance.

00:56:26   But the GPUs are way behind.

00:56:29   And for a computer that's predicated on GPUs, that's a big problem.

00:56:32   And the other thing is you had people like developers in particular who wanted to buy this, they don't need two GPUs.

00:56:37   They don't need a processing GPU per se or a high-end GPU.

00:56:42   They just need an integrated GPU to be totally fine for them.

00:56:47   And so if they were going to do, they're going to really make it integrated.

00:56:50   I think they need to wait until they could get to a point where they could have a computer that's basically a processor in memory and a boot drive.

00:56:52   And then once Thunderbolt 4 or 5 comes along, it can actually really saturate high-end graphics and stuff.

00:57:00   saturate high-end graphics cards over the bus,

00:57:03   that then you break those out too, right?

00:57:06   You drop the cost by a thousand bucks,

00:57:07   it becomes a much more,

00:57:10   you know, a computer that makes a lot more sense.

00:57:12   - So Mac Pro, totally screwed.

00:57:15   Not necessarily, and in my opinion, definitely not,

00:57:19   in my opinion, not indicative that the Mac platform

00:57:21   as a whole is screwed or painted in a corner.

00:57:25   The other thing I like to point out,

00:57:27   And it's as much proof as the MacBook Pros,

00:57:31   the new ones with the touch bar,

00:57:33   that Apple hasn't lost interest institutionally in the Mac

00:57:36   is the fact that the OS is still

00:57:38   on a yearly annual upgrade schedule.

00:57:40   And they're pretty good upgrades.

00:57:42   - And we'd all like it to be slower.

00:57:44   - Right, if anything, I would rather have them

00:57:46   go to a two-year schedule and spend entire years

00:57:49   on just like fixing bugs and spit and polish,

00:57:53   you know, as opposed to adding new features.

00:57:57   But it's on a much more vigorous upgrade schedule, and rigorous and vigorous, than it was in

00:58:03   the early years of the iPhone, when they literally had to issue a press release saying, "We've

00:58:09   had to delay the upgrade to Mac OS because we've pulled engineers to finish the iPhone

00:58:14   OS."

00:58:15   Right.

00:58:16   Yeah, it's been this way for a long time.

00:58:19   Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, too, yes, there's the Swift playgrounds or whatever on the iPad.

00:58:24   But Apple's not stupid, right?

00:58:34   We'll probably talk about the App Store in a little bit.

00:58:38   And there's lots of things to complain about Apple's treatment of developers from a business perspective.

00:58:41   I certainly have plenty of opinions in that regard.

00:58:44   But from a development perspective,

00:58:49   I mean, Apple has always been very cognizant

00:58:53   of what its developers need and whatnot,

00:58:58   and to suggest that they're going to abandon the platform

00:59:00   that makes their moneymakers possible.

00:59:03   I mean, it's ascribing, it just doesn't make sense.

00:59:07   Like, there is an Occam's razor explanation here,

00:59:11   which I think explains the Mac Pro.

00:59:13   It explains why it's not updated.

00:59:16   It explains why there's probably not going to be another Mac Pro.

00:59:19   Because you can, I could sketch it on a spreadsheet right now.

00:59:21   Why it probably makes zero sense to build another one.

00:59:23   Um, and that sucks.

00:59:24   It was a total screw up.

00:59:26   Hopefully someone will write the tell article sometimes.

00:59:28   It'd be really fascinating to, to get the full story of when Apple just

00:59:32   really did totally screw up a product.

00:59:34   But yeah, to extrapolate from that, there's just, it doesn't make sense.

00:59:40   No.

00:59:40   I am still bummed. I'm still irritated about the no Apple logo display though.

00:59:48   Yeah that is and it's true because it's not just a product for Mac Pro users.

00:59:57   I would guess that out over the years Apple has probably sold more standalone

01:00:03   displays to MacBook Pro users than to Mac Pro users because I think the

01:00:09   The Thunderbolt display was pretty explicitly marketed as a,

01:00:12   the box itself has a Thunderbolt display

01:00:15   attached to a laptop.

01:00:16   Like it's pretty clear what it's for.

01:00:18   - Yeah, I would be shocked if there are more of them

01:00:24   that were hooked up to Mac Pros than to MacBook Pros.

01:00:26   And that's saying that knowing that most MacBook Pro users

01:00:29   never use any display other than the one

01:00:31   that's built into the laptop.

01:00:33   But even so, I think that the number of

01:00:37   laptops that are sold compared to desktops

01:00:42   is so extraordinarily lopsided,

01:00:45   and that most of those laptops that are sold are iMacs

01:00:48   that have a built-in display.

01:00:49   I think it's so lopsided that it's clearly meant for that.

01:00:54   And so it is disappointing.

01:00:55   And it does seem from early going

01:00:58   that people who've bought the LG 5K display,

01:01:01   some of them love it,

01:01:02   but people are having weird problems with it.

01:01:06   out. I had somebody I didn't link to it and it's so anecdotal but somebody wrote

01:01:11   in to during fireball I mean it's a perfect podcast material but so I won't

01:01:15   write about it but I'll talk about it where somebody wrote in and they had

01:01:18   problems and they had like weird interference and they were taking it

01:01:24   into the store and then they couldn't reproduce it at the Genius Bar and you

01:01:28   know just imagine what a pain in the ass it is to bring a 27 inch display back

01:01:33   and forth to an Apple store, etc. And it turned out that moving, he had his airport router,

01:01:40   he had an Apple airport router on his desk and moving it away from his desk fixed the

01:01:45   interference on the LG 5K display. That literally, you know, and he said it's, you know, and

01:01:51   he, you know, again, I'm not going to write about it because it's like one guy with one

01:01:55   case and I don't know, but I've seen other people with these interference, you know,

01:01:59   with weird problems on this and like what a weird problem, but it's like, it's the sort

01:02:02   that a normal person is never gonna figure out.

01:02:04   If it turns out that for whatever reason

01:02:07   having their airport route or too close to the display

01:02:10   causes it to have weird interference,

01:02:14   how is a normal person gonna figure that out?

01:02:16   And it's the sort of thing that Apple,

01:02:18   Apple branded displays,

01:02:21   they're not just aesthetically pleasing.

01:02:22   They really are just terrific displays, always were.

01:02:26   I can't say-- - Well, they are tanks.

01:02:30   I actually have mine sitting on my desk

01:02:33   because not using one of those mounts

01:02:34   because I couldn't, it weighs like five times

01:02:38   as much as a normal monitor of similar size.

01:02:41   So I'm guessing that's probably why it handles

01:02:42   the shielding better.

01:02:44   But yeah, it's one of those things

01:02:46   I could never understand why you would pay so much

01:02:48   for a monitor until I had a job that bought one for me.

01:02:52   It was like, oh, okay, I get it now.

01:02:53   I will never not buy another one of these again.

01:02:56   And now my Thunderbolt display's failing

01:02:58   and I can't find another one and I'm very sad.

01:03:01   - I had a 20 inch, I don't know what the name was,

01:03:05   but it was, I couldn't, at the time when I bought it,

01:03:08   I couldn't get a bigger one.

01:03:09   I think there was, it was like 20 and 23s

01:03:11   and I bought the 20 inch.

01:03:13   I mean, it was probably like 2000 or something like that.

01:03:15   - Was that the plastic framing and like the two--

01:03:17   - No, it had, it was aluminum.

01:03:18   It had an aluminum frame.

01:03:20   I had it and I had it, I mean,

01:03:23   I went through like three or four max while I was using it

01:03:26   And I'm sure it was more or less,

01:03:31   like when I finally got rid of it,

01:03:32   it wasn't because it was broken,

01:03:34   it was just like I,

01:03:35   I think I used it up until I got this 20,

01:03:38   yeah, I probably had it on my desk

01:03:40   until I got this 27-inch iMac two and a half years ago.

01:03:42   It just ran and ran and ran.

01:03:45   It was unbelievable.

01:03:47   - Yeah, my monitor works fine.

01:03:49   It's the USB, all that stuff,

01:03:53   no longer works or works very sketchily.

01:03:56   And so I've been using that for the camera,

01:03:58   and also I had all my stuff plugged into it.

01:04:00   So now I do the laptop and I move around a lot.

01:04:03   And so every time I sit down,

01:04:03   I have to plug in five things every single time.

01:04:06   And I have to use the sound for my laptop speakers.

01:04:08   And yeah, so the display itself is fine.

01:04:11   It's the sort of docking capability that is gone.

01:04:15   - All right, let me take a break here and thank our third.

01:04:18   - What, sorry, just a second.

01:04:20   I do think though the one thing that is worth,

01:04:22   as long as we're here,

01:04:23   Because abandoning the Apple display,

01:04:27   we started the airport thing.

01:04:29   This stuff I think does fit more

01:04:31   in the kind of critique of Apple

01:04:33   as being too quote unquote spreadsheet driven

01:04:37   or operational driven or whatever the critique is

01:04:40   of sort of Tim Cook and Apple generally.

01:04:43   And I think that is a fair one

01:04:44   because what that gets into is,

01:04:47   Apple never sold routers to make money on routers.

01:04:52   They sold routers because it would ensure that the experience of using your Apple device

01:04:56   was better than it would be otherwise.

01:05:00   And same thing with the display.

01:05:02   Apple didn't sell display because they were going to make money on displays.

01:05:05   Well, they probably made money given how much they charged for them.

01:05:08   But it kind of like, it lets you be a...

01:05:11   It kind of lets you...

01:05:12   Some respects, it was a better experience, that's true, but also having that big tank

01:05:16   on your desk with the Apple logo on it.

01:05:17   I mean, it lets you be an Apple person in some respects.

01:05:21   And I think that part, to me that is more concerning in a way because it's, Apple is

01:05:29   making decisions that are driven by, it seems like anyway, they're making decisions driven

01:05:33   by the bottom line, not driven by this sort of halo sort of thinking about what it means

01:05:40   to be an Apple customer, if that makes sense.

01:05:42   Take a step back, take a deep breath and just be there as a customer and see what the overall

01:05:49   experience is like.

01:05:50   And again, to draw an analogy, I make it all over and over

01:05:52   and over again, but just to compare Apple to Disney.

01:05:55   And you go to a Disney theme park.

01:05:57   You go to any other theme park, and you

01:05:59   buy a hot dog and a soda.

01:06:01   And then when you're done with it, you go to the trash can,

01:06:04   and the trash can is filled to the brim, overflowing.

01:06:07   And it's like, what do you do?

01:06:08   Do you kind of rest the thing on top?

01:06:11   What do you do with your garbage when

01:06:12   the trash can's already full?

01:06:14   You go to a Disney theme park, and the trash cans

01:06:16   are never full because they spend the money

01:06:19   to have people constantly emptying the trash cans

01:06:23   so that they're always, and they're never filthy,

01:06:27   you never feel like you're grossed out

01:06:30   by putting your garbage in there.

01:06:32   It just works, right?

01:06:33   And it's such a little thing to have garbage cans

01:06:38   that are not full and not covered with grime

01:06:43   and you can just always throw your trash away.

01:06:47   That's what having Apple branded Wi-Fi routers was like

01:06:52   back in the day, where it was like,

01:06:54   they didn't need to make them.

01:06:55   You could buy Netgear or whatever other ones there were.

01:06:59   But the fact that you could just go in the Apple store

01:07:01   if you needed to and just say,

01:07:03   "Just give me, I gotta set up Wi-Fi in my house.

01:07:05   "Tell me what to buy."

01:07:06   And you buy it and go home and hook it up and it would work.

01:07:10   It was the same sort of thing.

01:07:11   It wasn't about making money for the company.

01:07:13   It was like, look, you're an Apple customer.

01:07:15   it's gonna, you know, we'll take care of you.

01:07:18   - Yep.

01:07:19   - It doesn't matter whether we're making money

01:07:21   on this or not, right?

01:07:22   Do you really, does, you know,

01:07:24   would Disney theme parks make less money

01:07:27   if they cut their number of people

01:07:29   emptying the trash cans in half?

01:07:31   Probably not, or at least not for a long time.

01:07:33   It would take a while for it to show up.

01:07:35   But, you know, it's just part of the experience,

01:07:39   you know, that you can do it.

01:07:40   - Right, and that feels like the part

01:07:44   that is, that's the concerning part.

01:07:48   That's more, like the Mac Pro,

01:07:50   I really feel like there's a business explanation for it

01:07:52   that you can make.

01:07:53   The, and it's one of those ones where it's just, you know,

01:07:57   I can see it being a hard decision,

01:07:59   but it's just gonna have to be made.

01:08:01   The router, in this case, it's like the business decision

01:08:04   is like too obvious.

01:08:05   Like it's like, it's very clear,

01:08:07   like this is a distraction, we're not making money,

01:08:10   blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be.

01:08:11   But yeah, it's hard to explain that away

01:08:16   as anything other than focusing on resources and margins

01:08:21   and not focusing on the experience.

01:08:24   Because even today, things have gotten better,

01:08:28   but I don't know how you can say that we are focused

01:08:30   on delivering the best possible experience

01:08:32   and becoming these peripherals.

01:08:35   I mean, again, if you take the experience holistically,

01:08:37   and yeah, you can go to Apple Store and say,

01:08:39   oh, my computer's Wi-Fi isn't working.

01:08:40   oh, it's probably a bad router.

01:08:42   Yes, is that Apple's fault?

01:08:46   No, maybe not.

01:08:47   But does that make their customer's life more challenging?

01:08:50   It does, and it's a shame that they seem

01:08:53   to not care about that as much.

01:08:56   - Yeah, I totally agree.

01:08:57   I kind of feel it's like,

01:09:00   the problem isn't that they don't care about the Mac period.

01:09:04   It's kind of, like, which would be alarming.

01:09:09   And I've said this before too, like I am a diehard Mac user.

01:09:12   If I had to choose between only ever using iOS devices

01:09:20   or only ever using Mac OS devices,

01:09:23   as much as I love my iPhone, I would rather

01:09:26   switch to an Android phone and have a Mac to work

01:09:31   than to have an iPhone and iPad and use anything else

01:09:34   at my desk for work.

01:09:36   Because that's how much the Mac means to me

01:09:39   in terms of my workflow for working.

01:09:41   If I didn't, if I like somehow retired,

01:09:45   or if I, you know, I don't know, became a lumberjack,

01:09:48   whatever else I would do as a career,

01:09:50   and didn't work in a way that I use the Mac,

01:09:55   I would rather have an iPhone, I guess.

01:09:57   You know, I know I would rather have an iPhone,

01:10:00   and I guess I would choose to use iOS over Mac, period.

01:10:03   But because my work is at a computer,

01:10:07   the Mac means that much to me.

01:10:08   That's how much.

01:10:09   And so I care about this profoundly, whether Apple cares.

01:10:15   But the way I see it, it's not so much that Apple

01:10:18   is like moving away from the Mac,

01:10:20   but more or less that Apple is just giving the Mac shit work.

01:10:25   Almost like they're taking advantage of the Mac.

01:10:29   - I mean, that's okay, though.

01:10:32   I mean, I think the point that people are

01:10:33   kind of vaguely aware of, but certainly front and center

01:10:36   me being on this side of the world in Asia is that here people kind of skipped over PCs

01:10:44   in some respects.

01:10:45   That makes mobile really interesting because the way people use mobile here is just way

01:10:49   more in-depth and pervasive than it is in the States where everyone had a computer at

01:10:54   one point and people still use computers out of habit.

01:10:59   That's where the growth is for Apple.

01:11:00   Apple does make the vast majority of their money on the iPhone.

01:11:04   The iPad is the future, and you see your kids

01:11:08   use these devices and all that sort of thing.

01:11:09   I totally get it, and it's a totally valid thing to say.

01:11:13   But that's also where the router thing

01:11:17   is particularly interesting, because the router

01:11:20   is just as important to the iPhone as it is to,

01:11:23   and I guess the iPhone can fall back on cellular networking.

01:11:25   Maybe they think that home Wi-Fi is gonna go away.

01:11:27   And again, I guess you think about it,

01:11:29   in emerging markets, it is more the case

01:11:31   that you may not have home Wi-Fi, but you do use Wi-Fi.

01:11:33   Maybe that's it.

01:11:35   Maybe that is, this is just looking forward to the future

01:11:39   and the way things are.

01:11:41   But yeah, I mean, I guess that's the other thing too

01:11:45   is like the, you talked about the Mac Pro evolution,

01:11:50   like putting in a new set of processors

01:11:52   and an updated screen would have sounded great to me.

01:11:56   I mean, in some respects, it's almost like this weird,

01:11:59   it's like this weird codependent relationship

01:12:01   between Apple and Mac.

01:12:03   - You mean the MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro.

01:12:05   - Yeah, sorry, MacBook Pro.

01:12:06   Like, I mean, MacBook, Apple is like,

01:12:11   we need to support the Mac, you're right,

01:12:12   it's the truck, quote unquote,

01:12:15   we're gonna dump all our shitty work on it and whatnot.

01:12:18   And we all MacBook Pro users are like, that's fine,

01:12:21   all we want to do is like do our shitty work.

01:12:24   Just give us updated internals, we'll be totally happy.

01:12:27   But I was like, no, we need to update it,

01:12:29   we need to innovate it.

01:12:30   It's like this weird sort of relationship

01:12:35   between the two sides that is kind of weird.

01:12:38   That's all I can say, it's weird.

01:12:40   - All right, let me take a break here

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01:16:20   All right, what else is going on?

01:16:25   How about this Chris Latner story?

01:16:27   So Chris Latner, creator of LLVM compiler,

01:16:34   C Lang, the original engineer behind Swift.

01:16:39   He kind of worked on Swift for like a year or two

01:16:41   before showing it to his teammates at Apple,

01:16:44   and then it was like a small team that worked on it.

01:16:46   Sort of, you know, he fairly said the father of Swift

01:16:50   has left Apple and is joining Tesla within a week or two.

01:16:54   And a couple of other people, I mean, there's sort of,

01:17:00   I wouldn't call it, like a couple of people

01:17:05   have written to me and said like,

01:17:06   "Wow, you're linking to all these people

01:17:07   "who are leaving Apple for Tesla.

01:17:08   Does this mean that there's like this huge brain drain going on where all the talent from Apple is leaving for Tesla?

01:17:15   And that's I don't think that's the case and I've asked around I I don't I just think it's a couple of high-profile cases

01:17:22   But I do think there's more people leaving Apple for Tesla than leaving Tesla for Apple

01:17:26   Yeah, and you know, it's it's

01:17:34   - It's hard to say.

01:17:35   I mean, in some respects,

01:17:36   I mean, what Latner has accomplished is incredible.

01:17:39   And I think if you don't really know about,

01:17:42   and most Apple customers have no need to know about,

01:17:45   sort of the developer tool chain,

01:17:48   it's hard to appreciate the contribution

01:17:52   this guy has made to Apple.

01:17:53   I mean, like--

01:17:54   - And the stature that he has in the industry.

01:17:57   I mean, it's very hard to say,

01:17:59   who else is like Chris Latner?

01:18:01   I mean, he's sort of a singular figure

01:18:03   in terms of what he's accomplished and what he's done.

01:18:06   - Oh, absolutely.

01:18:08   I mean, the entire LLVM architecture,

01:18:11   and now Clang is kind of a part of that now,

01:18:14   that that's the front-end compiler.

01:18:15   It's one, it's totally taken over the industry,

01:18:20   for one, and for two, it's a,

01:18:26   yeah, so for one, just the impact broadly.

01:18:28   It's widely adopted, it's used everywhere,

01:18:31   there's all sorts of custom tool changes

01:18:32   but on top of it, it supports all sorts of things.

01:18:34   And then, LLVM is sort of a broader architecture.

01:18:37   Clang is for C-type languages primarily,

01:18:40   so it's a narrower sort of thing that sits on top of it.

01:18:43   But the other thing, I mean, just from a,

01:18:45   so from an industry perspective, absolutely spot on.

01:18:47   Like this guy's a giant in the field.

01:18:49   I mean, like Richard Stallman level,

01:18:52   like Richard Stallman is a GCC or whatever.

01:18:53   Like this is kind of his, in some respects,

01:18:55   his successor in that sort of thing.

01:18:57   - Linus Torvald's, you know,

01:19:00   there's only a handful of people you can compare to Latner.

01:19:02   And for some reason, all the other ones

01:19:04   are a bunch of assholes.

01:19:05   And Latner is a really nice guy.

01:19:09   Right.

01:19:10   So yeah, he's an absolute giant.

01:19:12   And then for Apple, I mean, the way--

01:19:15   I mean, Apple talks about wanting

01:19:16   to own their primary technologies, right?

01:19:19   Like, what Latner did was made it possible for Apple

01:19:23   to not only own its developer tool stack in a way

01:19:27   they didn't before.

01:19:28   and they were at the mercy of third parties.

01:19:30   Like you remember the whole MetroWorks and Code Warrior

01:19:32   and all that sort of stuff.

01:19:34   And they ended up owning the entire stack.

01:19:37   And he did it in a way that is like

01:19:41   the best of Apple's strategy.

01:19:43   I talked about the commoditizing the compliments part.

01:19:45   What Apple, like people talk about Apple

01:19:47   being this integrated, right?

01:19:49   Because they do the OS and the hardware.

01:19:51   If you think about the hardware, Apple is very modular.

01:19:53   Apple's like 600 suppliers or something like that

01:19:55   all over the world building all these pieces,

01:19:58   competing against each other to get the lowest possible price,

01:20:03   Apple can dual-source suppliers, et cetera, et cetera.

01:20:05   And so Apple reaps all the benefits of having

01:20:08   this massive ecosystem making their products better

01:20:12   on an individual component basis.

01:20:15   And then Apple fuses it all together into one thing

01:20:17   and ties it to the software and says,

01:20:19   "Oh, look, we're integrated."

01:20:20   And they are.

01:20:22   Everyone's integrated at different parts of the stack.

01:20:22   That's what Latiners work what Apple do

01:20:24   on the developer side.

01:20:24   There is a massive community that is working on LVM,

01:20:29   that's working on Clang, that now is working on Swift,

01:20:33   it's a part of it being open source.

01:20:36   They're working, they're making it better,

01:20:37   they're contributing patches,

01:20:39   they're building up new languages, new use cases,

01:20:40   making it a more attractive language for students to learn

01:20:42   so that new students come along who already know Swift

01:20:44   and can code on Apple's platforms.

01:20:46   There's all these benefits that accrue to all this stuff

01:20:48   being open source and being the standard

01:20:52   for all kinds of things,

01:20:50   that it all accrues to Apple's benefit,

01:20:55   because it's going into their core technology,

01:20:57   and then Apple owns the top and the bottom parts of it.

01:20:59   They own how it ties into their platforms.

01:21:02   They own the IDE that you have to use Xcode

01:21:05   at some step to compile iOS apps or whatnot.

01:21:09   And so from a strategic and business perspective,

01:21:13   his contribution is massive.

01:21:17   It's absolutely massive, and it's equal to someone

01:21:17   like the more famous folks you see,

01:21:19   like Ivan, Ivan Industrial Design,

01:21:21   or the people in the software stack,

01:21:23   or in the hardware, the chip stack,

01:21:25   like building a custom thing for Apple.

01:21:27   It's difficult to overstate the contribution he's made,

01:21:31   both to the industry and to Apple,

01:21:33   and their sort of strategic position going forward.

01:21:35   - Yeah, I'll probably miss this,

01:21:39   'cause I wasn't directly involved,

01:21:40   but Apple's developer tools are incredibly important

01:21:45   to a platform.

01:21:47   It's hard to overstate that.

01:21:48   And it's one of those things that Microsoft has aced,

01:21:53   I think, from the very earliest days

01:21:56   through to the current day.

01:21:58   Say what you want about using their platform as a user.

01:22:01   I find Windows 10 to be as unpalatable as ever.

01:22:05   But their developer tool story has always been top notch,

01:22:08   from everything from the compiler to debugger

01:22:11   to the languages.

01:22:16   And Apple really missed out on that.

01:22:20   Back in the early days, the Macintosh Developer Tools

01:22:25   was called MPW, Macintosh Programmer's Workshop.

01:22:31   And it was this sort of weird, for the Mac perspective, hybrid.

01:22:36   It was sort of like a command line shell

01:22:40   that on a system that didn't have a terminal

01:22:45   or didn't have a command line, when you ran MPW,

01:22:47   there was a shell and it had its own shell scripting language.

01:22:52   And I remember I used to have a version of Perl

01:22:55   that you could run in MPW.

01:22:56   It was like, people would say, oh, you

01:22:59   can't run Perl on a Mac.

01:23:00   Well, you could if you had MPW.

01:23:01   And there was also a thing called

01:23:02   MacPerl, which was a standalone application,

01:23:04   and the way you would run scripts in--

01:23:07   I mean, this is really way out in the weeds.

01:23:09   But you could send it like an Apple event.

01:23:12   You'd send like an AppleScript command to MacPerl

01:23:14   with the Perl script file you wanted to run,

01:23:18   and then it would send you the results.

01:23:19   So you could run Perl on a classic Mac,

01:23:21   even though it didn't have anything resembling

01:23:23   a traditional Unix command line.

01:23:26   But eventually this became outdated,

01:23:29   and by the mid '90s, just about every serious Mac developer

01:23:34   I knew was using Code Warrior,

01:23:37   which was a third-party IDE.

01:23:39   - IDE, yep. - Right, integrated

01:23:44   development environment. Right, so instead of just putting scripts together to

01:23:49   compile your app, you'd have an actual visual thing. And there was, you know, the

01:23:52   predecessors to that were from a company called Think. There was Think C and Think

01:23:58   Pascal, which were very well regarded. I know people to this day who would

01:24:05   argue that Think Pascal's debugger was the best debugger they've ever used.

01:24:08   Great products, and you know, and in a Mac style where you had these projects

01:24:13   that were in a window and it was click and drag

01:24:16   to organize the project.

01:24:17   With Mac OS X, what they inherited from Next

01:24:24   was the GCC toolkit, which, and again,

01:24:29   we could go on for an hour about this,

01:24:31   and it's over, you know, it's really outside my expertise,

01:24:33   but, you know, GCC, the best thing you could say about it

01:24:37   was that it worked.

01:24:38   (laughing)

01:24:40   - It was flexible and it worked

01:24:41   and it had all the trade-offs that came with

01:24:43   working on everything and for everything.

01:24:45   - Right, that you had the C and C++ compiler

01:24:50   that Next had jerry-rigged over the years

01:24:52   to also compile Objective-C.

01:24:55   (laughing)

01:24:59   Nobody was happy about it.

01:25:01   And I was at, I mean, during this transition period,

01:25:05   it was a good time to work at a company like Barebones

01:25:08   in 2000 to 2002 to talk to people,

01:25:12   back engineers who were switching from code warrior

01:25:19   to the GCC.

01:25:21   What was the Xcode called before it was Xcode?

01:25:24   I forget, what was it?

01:25:25   Project Builder. - I don't remember.

01:25:27   - Right? - Oh yeah, that's right.

01:25:28   - Project Builder and Interface Builder.

01:25:30   And the bare bones, the engineers were great.

01:25:35   I mean, they were very,

01:25:36   They're pragmatic, as engineers should be,

01:25:39   where they had BB Edit compiling under GCC long before they had

01:25:44   to just to make sure that the source code was going to pass

01:25:48   through a different C compiler.

01:25:51   But it was very crude and rudimentary.

01:25:54   Whereas the whole LLVM CLang stack

01:25:59   is very much what Apple would have if they could just

01:26:02   snap their fingers and say, we wish we had a toolkit that

01:26:04   worked like this.

01:26:06   That's pretty much what LLVM is, I think it's fair to say.

01:26:09   - Yeah, and LLVM is really amazing.

01:26:11   It's basically like, it makes the entire bottom part

01:26:15   of the compiler like totally modular,

01:26:17   where you compile into this intermediary language

01:26:20   and then it can recompile for particular processors

01:26:22   or GPUs or whatever it might be,

01:26:25   but it made it totally modular.

01:26:27   Basically GCC was like this spaghetti soup of stuff

01:26:31   where to add on support for anything,

01:26:32   you would kind of just add to the spaghetti,

01:26:35   but a new kind of spaghetti, and it was totally impenetrable.

01:26:39   And LLVM made this very neat sort of modular approach.

01:26:42   And Latner developed LLVM to sit underneath GCC.

01:26:46   So basically, GC would just compile

01:26:48   to the intermediate language.

01:26:49   But eventually, yeah, he built all the way

01:26:51   up to the top of the stack to do the entire compiler itself,

01:26:54   which then let Xcode do way more interesting things,

01:26:57   because Apple now controlled the entire thing

01:26:59   from top to bottom.

01:27:02   Yeah, if we didn't bore people with the sports,

01:27:05   to support them with talking about compilers.

01:27:07   But the net of it is is that not only is he

01:27:10   super only good on the industry,

01:27:12   but he is important to Apple like strategically.

01:27:16   Like what he has done for Apple is

01:27:18   very few people in the company can really match that.

01:27:24   - Yeah, and one of the practical effects of his work

01:27:29   that really has an effect on Apple

01:27:30   is it made it much easier for Apple.

01:27:34   I mean, I think they could have done it anyway,

01:27:36   even if they were stuck on the GCC tool chain.

01:27:39   They could have, but I think it was,

01:27:41   I don't think anybody would argue with the fact

01:27:43   that it's easier for Apple to have things that run on ARM,

01:27:48   things that run on Intel, have switched to new ARM 64

01:27:54   and stuff like that.

01:27:55   It makes them less dependent on the specific hardware

01:28:01   that they're targeting.

01:28:03   They can pretty much--

01:28:04   - Well, when the Apple came out, it was still GCC,

01:28:07   but yeah, but I think the 64-bit transition

01:28:10   is a perfect example of where it just got

01:28:13   way easier for them, and in all future changes

01:28:16   will be much easier.

01:28:17   - Yeah, like they can go to something in the future

01:28:20   that's not there yet, and it'll be easier.

01:28:22   They can, you know, anyway.

01:28:25   Is it a problem, is it a bad sign

01:28:27   that Latner has left for Tesla?

01:28:29   - I mean, Latner himself, it's really hard

01:28:32   to take too much out of it.

01:28:34   I mean, the guy, he was on the ATP podcast,

01:28:38   which was, Accidental Tech podcast, which was great.

01:28:42   - Absolutely. - And--

01:28:43   - Terrific.

01:28:44   I've linked to it, and I'll just say,

01:28:46   I mean, if you haven't listened to it, it was terrific.

01:28:50   And for a show where they almost never have guests,

01:28:54   - He's really the idealized ATP guest.

01:29:00   - Yeah, the three of them did a great job.

01:29:02   as hosts of an outside guest.

01:29:06   Good questions, kept the conversation going,

01:29:07   covered just about everything I hoped that they would cover.

01:29:10   It was really, really a terrific show.

01:29:12   - Yeah, and what you really get from him,

01:29:15   and if you look at his career, you can see this.

01:29:16   I mean, the guys developed LLVM as a graduate student,

01:29:20   and then Apple gave him the opportunity

01:29:23   to care to completion.

01:29:24   He did C Lang, or Clang, is it C Lang or Clang?

01:29:26   - Clang.

01:29:29   - Yeah, I say Clang.

01:29:31   I mean, he initiated that and carried it to completion.

01:29:33   He initiated Swift basically on his own.

01:29:36   Like this is a guy that likes to take on

01:29:39   hard and difficult problems from first principles

01:29:43   and figure them out.

01:29:44   And right now the core,

01:29:47   like Apple's sort of development stack

01:29:49   is set for the next 20 years, basically.

01:29:52   I mean, there's lots of work to do on Swift.

01:29:55   It's not finished,

01:29:56   but like the conceptual portion of Swift is finished, right?

01:30:00   Now it's like problem solving and implementation by and large.

01:30:05   And I can totally see for a guy like this, what's left?

01:30:09   He's built out the Apple's entire developer stack

01:30:13   from literally from top to bottom, and what's left for him?

01:30:17   And you have this opportunity with Tesla.

01:30:22   Who knows what he's going to do?

01:30:27   Tesla is built currently on an NVIDIA stack,

01:30:26   where NVIDIA has this setup where you can basically use their GPUs for general processing.

01:30:31   And it's built on LLVM.

01:30:37   NVIDIA has their own implementation of it.

01:30:39   It's called NMVM or something like that.

01:30:41   And Tesla also hired one of Apple's original A-chip designers last year.

01:30:44   And you got to imagine they might be coming up with something totally custom

01:30:49   and integrated on both sides.

01:30:53   I don't know, it's fun to speculate,

01:30:52   But I can totally see why someone like Latner,

01:30:55   who has a remarkable history of solving

01:31:00   really hard problems from first principles,

01:31:02   just wouldn't have anything left for him at Apple.

01:31:05   And there is something at Tesla.

01:31:08   He's the guy, the guy's not voted by money.

01:31:11   I'm sure Apple's made him rich

01:31:13   beyond his wildest dreams, without question.

01:31:15   You know, it's something deeper than that.

01:31:18   - Yeah, and at a certain level,

01:31:19   if he's just looking after his career in terms of

01:31:24   if he's at Apple and he's in software,

01:31:28   just in general, let alone the toolkit or whatever,

01:31:30   I mean, there's already Craig Federighi at the SVP spot.

01:31:38   You know what I mean?

01:31:39   There's nowhere up for him to go at Apple.

01:31:41   Whereas, effectively, I think he's now

01:31:43   the Craig Federighi at Tesla.

01:31:45   He is the head of software at Tesla.

01:31:47   So there's a company where there's an opening for a,

01:31:51   reports directly to the CEO head of software,

01:31:55   whereas at Apple that position is not open

01:31:58   and probably is not going to be open anytime soon.

01:32:01   - One thing that is interesting is,

01:32:04   speaking of reporting to the CEO,

01:32:05   is at least a few of the guys that have left,

01:32:08   the high profile ones,

01:32:09   were ones who did work with Steve Jobs.

01:32:12   And it's almost like they're,

01:32:16   you can get the sense that they kind of miss the fire,

01:32:21   for lack of a better word.

01:32:23   You know, like it was brutal,

01:32:24   but it was brutal in a very energizing sort of way,

01:32:29   which you're certainly gonna get, I think,

01:32:32   with Elon Musk.

01:32:34   I mean, there's a reason people compare the two.

01:32:37   - Yeah, like one of the, this isn't a new poaching.

01:32:44   poaching, but Boss Ording, I hope I'm pronouncing his first name right, but he left Apple in 2014, and as of March 2015, he was designing user interfaces at Tesla.

01:33:01   And I linked to this the other day, but he--

01:33:04   this was before he went to Tesla, but after he left Apple.

01:33:09   And he said why he left was, one,

01:33:13   because he was spending a lot of time in court defending patents,

01:33:18   because his name was listed on these patents,

01:33:20   and they're suing HTC and Samsung, et cetera.

01:33:24   And it's not complicated.

01:33:27   I mean, he wanted to be designing user interfaces.

01:33:29   He did not want to be putting on a suit and tie and showing up in court and answering lawyers stupid questions about

01:33:35   interfaces

01:33:37   And any other thing he said was I spent more time in court than designing aside from that

01:33:41   I missed the interaction with Steve Jobs. We discussed matters every 14 days

01:33:45   Yeah

01:33:48   yeah, I mean, you know I

01:33:50   the reality is and

01:33:53   You know, I for all the great things that Apple has accomplished, you know

01:33:59   I tend to be a bit of a fatalist about things.

01:34:02   I mean, companies like people have life cycles.

01:34:06   I mean, Apple came roaring back from the dead.

01:34:09   They did the iPod, which really juiced the company.

01:34:12   That led directly to the iPhone.

01:34:14   The iPhone led directly to the iPad,

01:34:16   and the Mac came along for the ride,

01:34:18   but I mean, there was a very natural progression

01:34:22   for Apple to reach the heights it made now.

01:34:24   I mean, to be clear, what's happened is extraordinary,

01:34:26   and Apple deserves all the praise

01:34:27   and all their credit for what they've done.

01:34:30   But if you look back at the broad history of business

01:34:34   in all sectors or whatever,

01:34:35   the reality is to presume that Apple is going to

01:34:40   make the next world-changing product

01:34:42   for all the great products they made,

01:34:45   and I'm not telling that at all,

01:34:47   that really is to challenge all of history.

01:34:50   And it's not an issue of,

01:34:51   you don't make products

01:34:53   because you really want to make products.

01:34:55   Apple's filled with humans just like every other company.

01:34:59   And what goes into making great products is great people,

01:35:02   it is great culture, but it's also,

01:35:04   there's a hunger, there's a need,

01:35:07   there's a market opportunity,

01:35:08   and you're forming your company around that opportunity.

01:35:12   The fact of the matter is that Apple has a product

01:35:15   that makes up 70 to 80% of its profits.

01:35:18   It's the most profitable product in the history of ever.

01:35:21   And it's just impossible to form the company-wide incentives that are necessary to drive a startup

01:35:29   or to drive a Tesla, to drive any number of these other companies.

01:35:33   And that's not a function of Apple being a bad company or executives being bad executives

01:35:37   or people being bad people.

01:35:42   It's a fact of life.

01:35:43   It's like a law.

01:35:45   You cannot have the incentive structure of a startup when you're a $750 billion company.

01:35:52   You just can't.

01:35:53   And there's people that want that that thrive on that, and it's natural that they pursue

01:35:58   that.

01:35:59   I still think that in hindsight, nobody really foresaw that the iPhone was the culmination

01:36:05   of personal computing.

01:36:08   But in hindsight, it's obvious that it was, that this is where everything was going along.

01:36:11   Right.

01:36:12   Apple's been making the same thing all along, right?

01:36:13   From day one.

01:36:14   making the personal computer from day one.

01:36:17   And the iPhone fits perfectly in the evolution of Apple

01:36:20   as a whole.

01:36:21   And the one thing that Apple missed, Steve Jobs missed,

01:36:25   everybody, I think, missed up until--

01:36:29   and I'm not a huge Netscape fan.

01:36:32   I'm not a huge Mark Anderson fan.

01:36:35   Andreessen, how do you say his name?

01:36:36   I don't know.

01:36:36   Andreessen, I think.

01:36:37   But I do think that he and Netscape saw something that

01:36:41   was missed in the entire PC.

01:36:43   and I think Bill Gates missed, everybody missed,

01:36:47   was that ultimately, personal computing

01:36:52   was destined to fundamentally be a personal communication

01:36:57   technology, that it's about people

01:36:59   communicating with each other.

01:37:01   And where Apple really missed out up until the last decade,

01:37:08   a decade ago, when the comeback in the 2000s

01:37:12   with post-iPod and when the Mac finally started picking up

01:37:17   share and then ultimately with the iPhone,

01:37:20   was that most people have no need or care

01:37:24   for a personal computing device.

01:37:26   Forget the word PC, whether you mean like Windows or Mac

01:37:29   or the iPhone or whatever.

01:37:31   Just a personal computing device in plain language

01:37:34   until the internet.

01:37:35   And the only reason they wanted the internet

01:37:36   was to communicate with other people and read and write.

01:37:40   And so everything pre-internet that Apple did

01:37:43   was falling on deaf ears.

01:37:44   I mean, it's fundamentally why, in my opinion,

01:37:48   it's fundamentally why the Newton failed.

01:37:51   Because the form factor was entirely

01:37:53   about being more personal than a Mac, that it was smaller.

01:37:58   It wasn't pocket-sized, but they could have made one pocket-sized

01:38:01   if it had taken off.

01:38:02   Surely, if it had gotten any kind of traction in the market,

01:38:06   surely they would have made a Palm Pilot size one.

01:38:09   But it was pre-internet and it didn't have,

01:38:14   there wasn't a, therefore wasn't a communication device

01:38:17   and therefore it gained no traction.

01:38:19   And that's what the iPhone fundamentally is.

01:38:21   I mean, for, you know, other than games,

01:38:23   if you took away all the apps that people use

01:38:26   to communicate with each other,

01:38:28   they wouldn't use their phones at all.

01:38:30   - Yep, this is exactly right.

01:38:32   I wrote this piece last spring

01:38:35   called Everything as a Service

01:38:36   that basically the point of it is that the iPhone

01:38:41   was the ultimate, the culmination,

01:38:43   the best ever sort of manufactured device,

01:38:46   broadly, and PC specifically.

01:38:49   And the reason is because it was empowered by the future.

01:38:53   What makes the iPhone, we talk about mobile,

01:38:57   and people would make fun of Sasha Nadal as saying

01:39:00   Microsoft's going to be cloud first, mobile first.

01:39:02   But the reality is those are the same thing.

01:39:05   The phone is nothing without the cloud.

01:39:08   Facebook is nothing without the servers in the cloud.

01:39:11   Google is nothing without servers in the cloud.

01:39:12   Snapchat, Twitter, whatever you want to be.

01:39:14   It all depends on, it's a yin and yang sort of thing.

01:39:18   The iPhone was better than any other PC that came before it,

01:39:24   any other device that came before it,

01:39:26   because it was lit up, it was enabled by the future.

01:39:31   But the future means that the iPhone is the end, right?

01:39:35   the end of the line in some respects because the future will be fully in the future.

01:39:39   Yeah, I totally, I think that's true, right? Like the watch is not the new phone. I think the watch

01:39:45   is undersold as a success. I think Apple is, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if 2017 they become

01:39:52   the number one by revenue watch company in the world. I mean, I think they were what,

01:39:56   number two last year to Rolex? I mean, certainly in the top five. That's nothing to sneeze at.

01:40:02   It's a fine business, but it's not the new iPhone.

01:40:05   It is clearly something different.

01:40:07   And as the watch has evolved, it's

01:40:09   become less like the iPhone.

01:40:11   The 1.0 watch was more like an iPhone

01:40:13   where they were talking about this grid of apps

01:40:15   that you would launch.

01:40:16   And the watchOS 3, second generation hardware,

01:40:20   third generation OS, is a lot more like, hey,

01:40:24   it's a fitness tracker and notification display.

01:40:26   Yep.

01:40:27   It's an accessory.

01:40:28   Which is better because it's more clearly

01:40:30   what the wrist is good for, but it's not a replacement for the phone.

01:40:37   Yep.

01:40:38   Yeah, I agree. I think the future, when and if we get there, is probably some sort of

01:40:43   thing where, in the very long run, where we're carrying some sort of, maybe it's the watch,

01:40:48   but some sort of identification device where basically any screen around us can become

01:40:52   our personal computer. But the reality is the phone is clearly a sort of endpoint, I

01:40:59   I think, and that's fine, that's good for Apple

01:41:02   'cause Apple sells the most profitable phone by far

01:41:04   and they will make a lot of money off it

01:41:07   for a very long time and as a company,

01:41:08   as an ongoing enterprise, that's great.

01:41:11   But I do think it really raises really fundamental questions

01:41:15   about if you wanna look at 20, 30 years out,

01:41:19   what is Apple's future?

01:41:21   Because going all the way back to the late '70s,

01:41:25   I mean, Apple's been a personal computer company

01:41:27   And the iPhone, it was the future.

01:41:32   It was the internet broadly that let the Mac sort of come back

01:41:36   and be a viable platform for everyone,

01:41:40   beyond the diehards like you, for like everyone else.

01:41:44   But it was the cloud generally and what that enabled

01:41:47   that made the iPhone the juggernaut that it is,

01:41:49   but that's also the future that's gonna eventually

01:41:53   obsolete the PC.

01:41:55   And that's okay, again, that's the way things go.

01:41:58   And better to have shown brightly

01:42:03   than to have not shown at all, as it were,

01:42:05   and nothing's shown brighter than the iPhone.

01:42:08   - I'm not counting them out,

01:42:10   but I don't know that it's any more likely than not

01:42:13   that the next big thing would come from Apple.

01:42:16   I don't know.

01:42:17   - Yeah, no, I'm not counting them at all either,

01:42:19   but I can understand why some of these really

01:42:24   you know noteworthy employees who've been with Apple for a long time why they

01:42:28   suddenly want to go somewhere else like you know for one maybe they just want to

01:42:32   change but for two I mean if you think about the future I mean it not only are

01:42:38   we moving out of Apple's sweet spot which is personal computing not only it

01:42:45   but but also the you know just the company it's so consumed by the iPhone

01:42:51   appropriately so.

01:42:53   That's like Apple's in execution mode,

01:42:55   it's not in innovation mode,

01:42:56   and that's the mode it should be in.

01:42:58   - Right, it's, you know, they're at the point

01:43:01   where they're going from a 99% good product

01:43:04   to a 99.9% good product to a 99.99% good product

01:43:09   to keep adding nines as the product keeps getting better.

01:43:13   And you know, I would argue that in some ways,

01:43:15   the Mac is, you know, that's one of the reasons

01:43:17   Mac hardware has slowed to such a degree,

01:43:19   where there might be future directions for desktop

01:43:23   computing that are big new areas or big new ideas or whatever.

01:43:29   But the basic idea of you've got these windows you drag around

01:43:33   on a screen and menus and apps that run and a mouse pointer

01:43:37   that you either use a mouse or a trackpad and a keyboard

01:43:40   and you sit there and do it, it's at a--

01:43:44   It is what it is.

01:43:45   It's an old paradigm, and it is what it is.

01:43:48   and it's really getting polished out to a very large 99 point--

01:43:53   it's not a new thing.

01:43:55   Yeah, like we said, we would rather Apple slow down

01:43:57   the OS X updates, right?

01:43:58   It's fine.

01:43:59   Just let it be.

01:44:00   Right.

01:44:00   Whereas a lot of the most talented people at Apple

01:44:02   from the last 10 years are the people who stood up the iPhone

01:44:05   from the world where a quote unquote smartphone was

01:44:08   a ridiculous BlackBerry or Symbian thing from Nokia

01:44:15   running not really a real OS, but some kind

01:44:18   of embedded OS and as like an up, down, left, right metaphor

01:44:22   that they stood up this entire paradigm

01:44:25   of touch-based computing in a rich, gooey environment

01:44:30   with no perceptible latency when you scroll.

01:44:35   And all of these things that we just take for granted

01:44:38   as the oxygen of the device in our pocket,

01:44:43   they stood it up from nothing to a thing.

01:44:47   And that's what they're good at,

01:44:49   is going, taking an idea that doesn't even exist

01:44:53   and getting it to the 98%, 98% good.

01:44:57   That's what they live for.

01:45:00   - And the other thing too is like,

01:45:01   that's always been their business model.

01:45:04   Like their business model has been to deliver

01:45:06   the best possible experience

01:45:08   and charge a premium for it, right?

01:45:10   And that's the other thing,

01:45:11   you get to these other categories.

01:45:13   Like services is not about charging a premium

01:45:16   for a differentiated product, right?

01:45:18   A car is, right, today it is,

01:45:21   but that's from Mercedes or BMW makes money,

01:45:24   but in the future, if you get to transportation as a service

01:45:27   like these sort of Uber-style networks

01:45:29   or car sharing or whatever it might be,

01:45:32   like the business model, it's not clear

01:45:34   that they have a business model going forward,

01:45:36   and licensing or building fleets or whatever,

01:45:39   that's not an Apple business model.

01:45:41   And again, it doesn't mean the company's

01:45:43   not gonna be a viable concern going forward.

01:45:44   Just that everything about the iPhone,

01:45:48   if you back up far enough,

01:45:49   it was no different than everything about the original Mac.

01:45:52   The business model was the same, the approach was the same,

01:45:56   the needs it was seeking to serve was the same.

01:45:59   And that's because the personal computer is,

01:46:02   Steve Jobs from data saw this for anyone,

01:46:05   talking about the power of the personal computer,

01:46:06   I will transform people.

01:46:08   And I've said before,

01:46:09   my all time, one of my all time favorite Steve Jobs moments

01:46:12   was his second to last keynote,

01:46:14   the iPad 2 introduction. It was right after they demoed iMovie and they had demoed GarageBand.

01:46:20   It was after the GarageBand demo, Steve Jobs, always a lover of music and stuff. He came

01:46:24   out and this look of contentment on his face. He's like, "Now anyone can make music."

01:46:32   You could see it. I actually typed on Twitter at the time, "I think this might be his

01:46:35   last keynote," because it was like his salutation, like, "My wife's work is completed here."

01:46:42   an amazing thing, and that's fantastic. But the world goes on. It does.

01:46:50   Did you watch—I don't think Dau Rumple and I talked about it on my last show, but the 10-year

01:46:58   anniversary of the original iPhone introduction was a couple weeks ago. Did you rewatch the—

01:47:06   I looked at parts of it. It's a world-changing event. It really is.

01:47:13   I remember I was there. It was early, and I'm so glad that I was, but it was early in the era when

01:47:18   I was regularly attending Apple keynotes. Even just a year or two before, I think I'd been to a

01:47:25   WWDC note or two before that. But like Macworld keynotes, I wasn't going to because I was just a

01:47:34   a guy who never left his house.

01:47:36   But I was at the--

01:47:39   - It's left until 11 in the morning.

01:47:40   - Macworld 2007 keynote, I had a press pass for it.

01:47:43   It was one of the first that I got a press pass for it,

01:47:45   so I had a good seat close to the front.

01:47:46   And I just remember thinking at the time

01:47:49   that this is it, this is the keynote that we've,

01:47:54   every single other keynote has ever has been,

01:47:57   'cause we wanted this one.

01:48:00   This is the one, and it somehow,

01:48:03   Logically, it's the one that that we collectively want Apple to give every single time

01:48:07   Right, we've changed the world again, you know

01:48:10   But that they literally did but the thing that struck me was when I was looking for like YouTube clips of it

01:48:15   Is that a whole bunch of them?

01:48:17   Cut out like the first five or six minutes of the keynote and just start with when he starts talking about the iPhone and

01:48:25   To me they're missing what was so amazing about that keynote

01:48:31   Which was that the first five or six minutes were about like the Mac and something else

01:48:37   No is more than that. I wrote all this the first 30 minutes were about the Apple TV

01:48:41   Was that would do it? No that way I thought that came at the end after the iPhone

01:48:45   No, they open with the with the Apple TV and like and that's it's kind of remarkable when you think about it, right?

01:48:51   I mean clearly the jobs knew they had something right?

01:48:54   I mean you don't build up like we like we did the you the my the Mac and the iPod now

01:48:59   or doing a new thing and da da da da da da.

01:49:01   But at the same time, you don't put in 20 to 30 minutes

01:49:05   about the Apple TV if you're introducing one of the most,

01:49:08   if you're making one of the biggest

01:49:10   and most meaningful product announcements of all time.

01:49:13   And again, it's not just the iPhone,

01:49:15   it's the entire world today and the upheaval that's in it

01:49:18   is all tied back to that product and what it did.

01:49:23   I mean, it's remarkable in retrospect.

01:49:27   - Well, the line that I remember

01:49:28   was when he gave a brief update about the Mac

01:49:31   at the very beginning.

01:49:32   But then he said, but we're not here

01:49:33   to talk about the Mac today.

01:49:36   And it was like the oxygen just came out of the crowd.

01:49:40   Because the context to remember is that leading up

01:49:44   to that keynote, it was widely rumored

01:49:46   that Apple was going to introduce a phone.

01:49:49   And somehow, just the simple fact

01:49:52   that Apple was going to introduce an iPhone,

01:49:56   something called an iPhone, was leaked.

01:49:58   And I don't know if that came just because

01:50:00   of their negotiations with Singular.

01:50:02   I don't know.

01:50:03   But somehow, just that pure information leaked.

01:50:07   But what it was going to be like didn't leak at all.

01:50:10   There was absolutely no word, no rumors, no guesses.

01:50:15   Nobody knew whether it was gonna be an iPod

01:50:18   that could make phone calls or something else.

01:50:20   And I remember that somebody reported it

01:50:26   like on Saturday, like I don't know,

01:50:29   like the Journal or the New York Times,

01:50:31   just that it's widely rumored

01:50:32   that they're going to introduce a phone.

01:50:34   And I remember I got to San Francisco on Sunday,

01:50:37   you know, an early flight, and it was like the afternoon,

01:50:40   and I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco,

01:50:43   and I ran into James Duncan Davidson and Daniel Steinberg,

01:50:48   who's like a tech book author.

01:50:50   They were having coffee somewhere, and they knew me,

01:50:52   and I came over and joined them.

01:50:54   And they were like, "What do you think's going on tomorrow?"

01:50:56   and I was like, you know what the weird part is?

01:50:58   Usually if something like this is widely rumored

01:51:01   and it's not true, Apple somehow gets word out

01:51:04   to sort of set expectations accordingly.

01:51:08   Like if somebody reports that Apple is going to

01:51:12   announce cold fusion on Monday and it's not true,

01:51:18   they haven't invented cold fusion,

01:51:19   somebody else will come out with it,

01:51:23   somebody else will get the story that no,

01:51:25   they're not going to have cold fusion.

01:51:27   And it may not get everybody to calm down,

01:51:29   but it'll calm things down.

01:51:30   But Saturday, somebody said they're

01:51:33   going to introduce a phone.

01:51:34   And Sunday, it was just pure silence.

01:51:37   And I was like, I really think they're going to do it.

01:51:39   And I think everybody else is sort

01:51:41   of thinking the same thing.

01:51:42   So everybody kind of went in to the keynote

01:51:44   with their breath held.

01:51:45   And two minutes in, Steve Jobs says,

01:51:47   we're not going to talk about the Mac today.

01:51:49   And it was like, whoa.

01:51:53   The excitement in that room was so palpable,

01:51:55   it's just impossible to describe.

01:51:58   - Oh, it would have been amazing to be there.

01:52:00   I mean, that, yeah.

01:52:01   And I mean, it's the greatest keynote ever.

01:52:04   I mean, there's, it was in the tech industry.

01:52:06   It's remarkable.

01:52:08   And the whole thing, like it's a widescreen iPod,

01:52:12   it's a phone, it's an internet communicator,

01:52:14   and everyone cheers loudly on the first two

01:52:16   and kind of mumbles on the third.

01:52:21   And again, because this is the flip side, right?

01:52:24   I write a lot of major theme on trajectory is beyond the bismuth stuff, but it's about

01:52:29   the internet and its impact on not just business, but society generally, right?

01:52:34   But again, it's yin and yang.

01:52:37   It's the internet plus mobile.

01:52:38   It's those two things go together because it's not just sitting down at your desk and

01:52:43   having access to the internet.

01:52:44   you having full access to everything anywhere all the time

01:52:49   in every place, in every location.

01:52:51   And these two things are hand in hand,

01:52:54   you can't divorce their impact from the other.

01:52:57   And the iPhone changed the world.

01:53:00   Like Steve Jobs didn't more than put it

01:53:02   dense in the world, he fundamentally changed

01:53:04   the course of history, it really did.

01:53:08   I can, not to be hyperbolic, but I believe you can trace

01:53:12   what's happening these few years

01:53:15   and the upheaval in society to that keynote.

01:53:18   - Yep.

01:53:19   - It's remarkable.

01:53:22   (laughing)

01:53:24   - If it wasn't, I mean, you know,

01:53:27   let's delve into it a little bit,

01:53:29   but if it wasn't for the iPhone,

01:53:31   there wouldn't be Android as we know it.

01:53:34   Android might have still existed.

01:53:35   It was an existing project before the iPhone was introduced,

01:53:38   but it was like a Blackberry clone type thing.

01:53:41   And if that's what Android had been,

01:53:43   I don't think Donald Trump would have used it.

01:53:46   And I don't think Donald Trump

01:53:47   would be a presence on Twitter.

01:53:49   And if Donald Trump wasn't a presence on Twitter

01:53:52   and ever presence on Twitter,

01:53:53   I don't think he would have become president.

01:53:56   - No, it's not just that though.

01:53:58   It's the polarization and the tribalism.

01:54:02   Oh, I completely agree.

01:54:03   I completely agree. - I don't think

01:54:03   it's like a trick pull shot.

01:54:05   I don't think it's like the cue ball hits the nine

01:54:08   and the nine hits the sidebar and then it hits the seven

01:54:11   and the seven hits the two

01:54:13   and the two goes in the corner pocket,

01:54:14   I think it's a straight shot

01:54:15   between the iPhone and Trump as president.

01:54:18   - It is, and I mean, it was the iPhone

01:54:21   and the internet combined that really broke down

01:54:25   the hold that the mainstream media had

01:54:28   on information dispersal,

01:54:30   and that broke down the limits of geography

01:54:32   when people came to kind of banding together, right?

01:54:35   Now you could, on Facebook, find all kinds of people

01:54:38   that agreed with you that weren't necessarily next to you

01:54:41   in your hometown.

01:54:42   And you could build basically-- it removed geography

01:54:44   as a limitation on all sorts of things.

01:54:46   And it made media less powerful.

01:54:48   And you could get your news from anywhere.

01:54:49   You could go around it, do whatever you wanted.

01:54:51   And it broke down all these things that held society

01:54:54   together as it was.

01:54:56   And no, I 100% without question agree

01:54:59   that you can draw a straight line from the iPhone

01:55:02   introduction to Donald Trump being president.

01:55:07   So clearly what we need to do is invent a time machine

01:55:10   go back in time and prevent the iPhone.

01:55:13   Stop the iPhone.

01:55:13   Stop the iPhone.

01:55:16   The iPhone is the new Hitler.

01:55:18   Oh, there's a title for your podcast.

01:55:23   What else do we have to talk about this week?

01:55:27   Oh, you want to talk about a pay spot.

01:55:31   Oh, yeah, it's a tradition.

01:55:33   So we always talk about our drinks.

01:55:35   I'm having a couple of beers tonight.

01:55:38   I still do have a sparkling water as well.

01:55:40   Oh, you mentioned the sparkling water is explode, right?

01:55:43   So I realize I do have one of the original, it's the original soda stream,

01:55:46   which I have, and there's no pressure release.

01:55:49   You have to manually pressure release it.

01:55:51   Like when you pump it and you kind of pull the bottle out and release the

01:55:53   pressure. Well, I, whereas I got a new one,

01:55:55   so I went from my office and went from my home, one from my house.

01:55:57   I got a new one for the house and that one releases pressure automatically.

01:56:01   So I'm pretty sure that the ones that exploded were using the original one and

01:56:06   didn't know you had to release pressure every single time.

01:56:09   You know, that's my SodaStream update.

01:56:10   - For those who don't follow, this is my philosophy.

01:56:13   My philosophy on being a successful internet writer

01:56:18   is you need a fussy way to make coffee.

01:56:21   You need endless supply of fizzy water,

01:56:25   and you need a clicky keyboard.

01:56:26   And so for years-- - I disagree

01:56:29   on the clicky keyboard.

01:56:30   - Well, you can disagree.

01:56:34   I would actually put the fizzy water first,

01:56:37   and the fussy way to make coffee second,

01:56:38   and the clicky keyboard third.

01:56:40   Because I would rather, I'd probably rather have

01:56:43   shittier coffee, but still have fizzy water,

01:56:47   than to have great coffee and have to drink flat water.

01:56:50   Flat water, every time I take a sip of flat water,

01:56:52   I feel like I'm sick, like I'm getting a cold.

01:56:55   (laughing)

01:56:57   - And you're gonna get more Twitter responses

01:56:59   'cause we get it every time you complain about fizzy water.

01:57:01   - Well, the funny part too.

01:57:03   - Well, one of the funny parts about that

01:57:05   is my wife hates fizzy water, absolutely hates.

01:57:07   So like when we go out to dinner, if we get water,

01:57:11   a lot of times we'll get two bottles of water,

01:57:12   and one flat, one still.

01:57:14   And sometimes like if she accidentally takes the wrong glass

01:57:18   or something like that, she'll like, you know.

01:57:21   As bad as it is, if you're expecting fizzy water

01:57:23   and you take a sip of still, it's like dangerous

01:57:26   if you think you're gonna take a big gulp of still water

01:57:28   and you get a highly carbonated.

01:57:31   - Right, 'cause you have the natural tendency

01:57:32   spit it out, plus it's like moving around in your mouth, so it kind of accentuates it.

01:57:36   Right. And so for those who are not long-time listeners, I years ago found out about a company

01:57:41   called SodaStream that lets you make your own fizzy water at home, which is a true game

01:57:46   changer, so that you're not buying bottles of Pellegrino or whatever.

01:57:50   Perrier.

01:57:51   Yeah, which is expensive, and it's a pain in the ass, and you end up with all these

01:57:55   glass bottles. I could just make endless supplies of my own fizzy water. But I have the model

01:57:59   I don't know if that's what they call it, the penguin,

01:58:01   but it looks like a penguin.

01:58:03   And I think I can't get my bottle out

01:58:05   without doing a pressure release.

01:58:07   But anyway.

01:58:09   - The original, the Genesis is different.

01:58:11   So, but yeah, but every time I'm on your podcast,

01:58:13   we talk about blogger drinks.

01:58:16   My favorite saying is, I think from you and Merlin,

01:58:20   you can tell what time of day it is by what you're drinking.

01:58:23   - Yes.

01:58:24   (both laughing)

01:58:26   - So usually I'm on whiskey now, but I'm just trying to take,

01:58:29   I feel like I got a little tipsy last time

01:58:30   I was on the podcast with you,

01:58:31   so I'm trying to take it easy.

01:58:32   - It was a holiday party.

01:58:33   (laughing)

01:58:35   - But the other thing is I feel like I've talked

01:58:37   about utilities on the Mac,

01:58:39   which is one of the reasons I make Mac great.

01:58:39   - Yeah, but before we move on to that,

01:58:41   I do have to say that the other thing is that,

01:58:42   like right before Christmas, I did send you a link,

01:58:44   I don't know if I can find it,

01:58:45   but I sent you a link to somebody who is also a writer

01:58:50   whose SodaStream blew up in his face.

01:58:52   I mean, I don't mean to--

01:58:53   - Right, no, that's a popular name, yeah.

01:58:55   - But literally, it broke the glass.

01:58:57   He had like shards of glass.

01:58:58   I mean, it was all right, didn't go in his eye,

01:59:00   but I mean, he really looked like he had been

01:59:02   like in a terrible car accident or something.

01:59:04   Like his face was all messed up

01:59:07   and it scared the shit out of you.

01:59:08   - It did, it did.

01:59:11   'Cause it turned out it is this specific model

01:59:14   and they don't sell it anymore.

01:59:16   But I'm still powering through

01:59:17   'cause I think I know how to release pressure,

01:59:19   so I think it's okay.

01:59:20   - And then the other thing you like to talk about

01:59:22   are clipboard utilities.

01:59:24   - Yeah, so I've talked about it almost every time.

01:59:26   And I have a new update.

01:59:27   I think I use something called copy and paste, which actually did have search.

01:59:30   I said it didn't last time, but I have switched to paste spot, uh, by, by, uh,

01:59:36   yeah, the tapouts guys make tweet bot and it's, it's fantastic.

01:59:41   Uh, and I felt bad because he released it, I think at 20 bucks and then quickly

01:59:45   lower the price, I think people thought it was too high or whatever I pay 20 bucks.

01:59:48   I didn't ask for a refund because it's, it's fantastic work and it's, it's.

01:59:52   It's, I mean, you can, not only do you have the pace generally clipboard history, but it has

02:00:00   its conversion functions where you can convert from like HTML to plain text or to markdown or

02:00:06   whatever it might be. Like totally built in is amazing. You can search just by typing. You have

02:00:10   to click a search field, which I had to my old one to find an old clip. You can store clips. So I

02:00:16   use it for customer support for Shrekery, where I just store emails that I send regularly.

02:00:22   I just use that instead of... I was using TextExpander, but I don't really use TextExpander.

02:00:27   I was only using it for text support basically anyway, and this is much better and nicer.

02:00:30   Anyhow, I just want to say I've switched to Payspot. It's fantastic. And since I talk about

02:00:37   it every time, I felt the need to update. I have it installed. I like it. It is my new...

02:00:42   I was previously using Launch Bar's built-in clipboard

02:00:45   manager, and I still use Launch Bar.

02:00:50   But I've switched to Payspot, and I like it better.

02:00:56   I still think Launch Bar's is my second favorite,

02:00:58   but I like it.

02:00:59   One of the little things they do that's nice

02:01:01   is you bring it up with a little keyboard shortcut

02:01:04   and then to start searching to not get one of your--

02:01:08   you can just use the up and down arrows

02:01:10   to get whichever one you want, and then you

02:01:12   and it just pastes whichever one you want.

02:01:14   But if you have one, like you said, that's older,

02:01:17   I love the way that to search,

02:01:20   you just start typing to search.

02:01:21   - Right, there's no extra click or anything.

02:01:23   - You don't have to click in the field,

02:01:24   you don't have to hit tab to switch.

02:01:25   You just start typing and it just switches to search

02:01:29   and I find that to be incredibly useful.

02:01:32   - Right, 'cause by far the biggest thing in my list is URLs.

02:01:35   I just have tons and tons and tons of them.

02:01:37   And generally speaking,

02:01:38   if a site has relatively sane URLs,

02:01:41   you can just start typing the general word.

02:01:42   It finds it every time, it's fantastic.

02:01:45   - Right, or it'll match a substring of it.

02:01:49   You can type wiki and it'll just show,

02:01:54   filter it down to the ones with Wikipedia links

02:01:56   or something like that.

02:01:57   - Right, exactly.

02:01:59   - Or Verge or whatever, and it'll just filter down to that

02:02:02   and you don't have to match from the beginning of the string

02:02:05   or something like that.

02:02:07   - Yeah, 'cause it'll do anywhere in the URL.

02:02:08   So if the URL has the name of the article in the URL,

02:02:12   like most sites do, like I'm looking at one here,

02:02:15   like the ringer.com/wizders-auto-porter.

02:02:18   You can remember I ran an article auto-porter,

02:02:20   I start typing auto-porter, and it pops up right away,

02:02:23   because it finds it in the middle of the string.

02:02:26   - I feel like I haven't entirely internalized

02:02:29   what PasteBot can do.

02:02:32   Like, I understand it, but I haven't automated it.

02:02:35   'Cause there's another feature it has,

02:02:36   I forget what they call it,

02:02:37   but you can copy three things and put it in,

02:02:41   you can use a keyboard shortcut to put it

02:02:43   into a certain mode where--

02:02:46   - I've just started using that.

02:02:47   'Cause yeah, it's a new thing,

02:02:48   you have to teach yourself how to use it, right?

02:02:50   But yeah, you enter a certain mode

02:02:51   and you copy like 15 things in a row,

02:02:53   and then you can paste them back in order.

02:02:56   So I actually do use that,

02:02:57   'cause I have corporate accounts,

02:02:59   and I'll get like 20 names in a spreadsheet, right?

02:03:01   And I want you to put them into my software to track them.

02:03:05   So I'll just go through the spreadsheet

02:03:06   and do name email address, name email address,

02:03:08   and it'll all the way down the list.

02:03:09   And then I switch to my other software and just,

02:03:11   like just can just put them right in.

02:03:13   - It's a great, great app.

02:03:14   And if you don't have some sort of clipboard manager

02:03:18   for your Mac, it really, you're missing out.

02:03:22   - Yeah, why are you using a Mac?

02:03:23   - Right, it's exactly, and it's the exact sort of thing

02:03:26   that, again, I'm not disputing that there are people

02:03:31   who are like, you know, totally power users

02:03:35   who just use iPads exclusively

02:03:37   and have moved away from the Mac.

02:03:40   But it's the sort of thing that would keep me

02:03:41   from ever being able to do that.

02:03:44   Like I always feel slightly crippled on iOS,

02:03:49   whether I'm on an iPhone or iPad,

02:03:51   that I've only got one,

02:03:52   just the most recent thing I've copied

02:03:54   is the only thing I can paste.

02:03:56   - Yep.

02:03:57   - Whereas on the Mac, I can paste,

02:03:58   I always feel like I can paste anything

02:04:01   that I've done in the last few hours,

02:04:02   I can still paste again.

02:04:04   - Oh, totally, and it filters into your entire work

02:04:08   for everywhere, like you just start copying stuff

02:04:09   'cause you know you're gonna want it eventually.

02:04:12   - That's true, I do that.

02:04:13   - Yeah, and you know it's there, right?

02:04:15   It's like your scratch pad that is just always present.

02:04:19   Yeah, Clipboard Manager is by far my number one

02:04:24   most essential utility and why I could never not use a PC.

02:04:28   - All right, let me ask you this.

02:04:31   I have not used PaySpot's ability to store frequently used snippets.

02:04:36   When you do that, do you have to switch a mode or when you search, do they always…

02:04:41   No, search.

02:04:42   Yeah, so you can label them so they have regular things.

02:04:46   So like if someone…

02:04:47   Like I mentioned, the corporate things, right?

02:04:49   So someone inquires about a corporate thing.

02:04:50   I just type "corporate" and it immediately goes to my saved snippet.

02:04:55   That's an entire email that explains the program that I have and et cetera, et cetera.

02:04:59   I just see that right now.

02:05:00   I see it. I see it with their little, they have like, they come, they ship with one called Creative Quotes,

02:05:05   and I started searching for crazy one, crazy, and it just says, "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels."

02:05:10   So it just shows up. Wow, that is incredible. I'm gonna start using that.

02:05:14   Have you used the text conversion too?

02:05:16   I don't. I don't. But I don't know what I would need to use it for.

02:05:20   Oh, so I use it a lot, like, uh...

02:05:24   So when I edit the Exponent podcasts, I always do the show notes in the text pane in Logic.

02:05:32   This is actually where I end up using the most, just because it's there and I'm already in the app.

02:05:37   But if you ever paste a link in, it just pastes with style, and I want to paste plain text.

02:05:43   So if you go and paste spot, and there's a little filter thing, and you click it,

02:05:48   and you can convert to plain text, convert to smart,

02:05:51   you can do the convert to smart,

02:05:53   uppercase, lowercase, title case,

02:05:55   like this super powerful text conversion engine

02:05:59   that is super easy to use.

02:06:00   Like my old one had it,

02:06:02   but you had to click into a specific mode and click a thing,

02:06:05   whereas this is just,

02:06:06   it's very straightforward in what to do.

02:06:08   So you could basically do conversion operations on text

02:06:11   that's on the clipboard as you're pasting it.

02:06:14   - Yeah.

02:06:15   I don't know why I never need that.

02:06:17   I guess I always, I don't know.

02:06:19   - You just live in plain text all the time?

02:06:20   - Yeah, I just live in plain text,

02:06:21   so it's never a problem for me.

02:06:22   But I can see why it would be.

02:06:24   - Yeah, if you're pasting into plain text editors,

02:06:26   no problem, it's only if you're ever pasting

02:06:27   into a stylized editor that it comes up.

02:06:32   - Anything else you wanna talk about this week?

02:06:34   I feel like that's a good show.

02:06:37   - Yeah, I think it's a pretty solid show.

02:06:39   We didn't really talk about the App Store,

02:06:40   which it's fine, it's not that big a deal though.

02:06:42   I mean, I'm still waiting on trials and upgrades.

02:06:46   Yeah, the App Store changes--

02:06:48   we can cover it in like a minute.

02:06:50   I mean, more or less they've added--

02:06:52   they announced this week with the upcoming--

02:06:55   now shipping betas and the upcoming next point releases

02:06:59   of iOS and Mac OS, they are adding the ability

02:07:04   for developers to respond to reviews in the App Store.

02:07:08   So in other words, if a user writes a review that says,

02:07:12   I bought this app to do blah, blah, blah, and when I do it,

02:07:15   it crashes, and the developer knows,

02:07:18   oh, I know exactly what that bug is, I have a workaround.

02:07:21   For the last 10 years, or nine years,

02:07:26   the developer has been completely hamstrung

02:07:28   'cause they have no way to respond,

02:07:29   no way to contact that user, no way to post a response,

02:07:33   even though they know exactly what it is

02:07:36   that the user is complaining about.

02:07:38   Or maybe the user says, I bought this app

02:07:40   because I wanted to do X, Y, and Z,

02:07:44   and the app only does X and Y.

02:07:45   but it does do X, Y, and Z, but they just don't know how to do Z,

02:07:48   and the developer knows exactly how to tell them how to do Z,

02:07:51   now the developer can chime in and put a response in the App

02:07:54   Store.

02:07:55   So that's--

02:07:56   This is what happens after nine years of the App Store,

02:07:59   innovative features like this.

02:08:02   And then the other change is on iOS, in particular,

02:08:06   they are adding new APIs, official APIs,

02:08:10   for developers to prompt the user

02:08:13   to leave a review in the App Store.

02:08:15   And it's got a limit of three.

02:08:18   It's only right that we talk about this

02:08:20   'cause this has been sort of a hobby horse of mine

02:08:21   for a while.

02:08:22   Three times per year or per 365 days.

02:08:28   So it's not really like calendar based.

02:08:29   That's the limit of how many times any particular app

02:08:34   will be able to prompt you.

02:08:36   And if you've already left a review

02:08:37   within the last 365 days,

02:08:39   it won't be able to prompt you at all,

02:08:41   which is super welcome.

02:08:42   The one app in particular that gets me on a weekly basis

02:08:47   is fucking OpenTable.

02:08:49   'Cause I use it because it's,

02:08:51   I don't, I mean I don't wanna keep you here,

02:08:54   we've been on the show for two hours,

02:08:55   but I don't know how the hell OpenTable cornered this market.

02:08:58   But they've cornered the entire market

02:09:00   on making online reservations.

02:09:02   And I use it because I hate making phone calls.

02:09:05   I don't even like to call a restaurant

02:09:06   to make a review of reservation.

02:09:09   I just, I love using OpenTable,

02:09:11   But the goddamn app, every fucking week,

02:09:14   it asks me to leave a review.

02:09:15   And I actually do what I always threaten to do with OpenTable,

02:09:19   is every time they prompt me, I go and I go to the app store

02:09:22   and I leave a review, and I complain that it's always

02:09:26   badgering me for reviews.

02:09:27   So here's your review, one star.

02:09:29   And I give it one star.

02:09:31   Arrogation theory, John.

02:09:33   Arrogation theory.

02:09:33   That's how OpenTable wins.

02:09:35   I'm hoping that the ability to respond to reviews

02:09:38   comes to podcasts, because there's this one review.

02:09:41   There's this one review in the, well, you hope for it, especially, but there's this

02:09:45   one review of Exponent that says they talk about topics that are too complex.

02:09:50   It'd be better if they had a blog and it enrages me.

02:09:54   Like, that's, that is amazing.

02:10:00   I wish I could tell you that I wrote that review.

02:10:03   I get, I get more people who email, like if they clearly didn't read the blog

02:10:10   They just responded to the podcast and it's mildly irritating

02:10:13   But that one in the iTunes store is just like it it's been there for like a year and it just drives me up the fucking

02:10:18   wall

02:10:20   I do think it it some sense. There's a way that you can complain say wow after nine years

02:10:26   They're finally adding these things but I do think that in some sense. It's you know, it's only been a year since Schiller took over

02:10:33   The app stores and it's they that they've sort of had an official like hey

02:10:40   the buck stops here, leader.

02:10:42   So, you know.

02:10:43   - Yeah, it's the second meaningful change.

02:10:46   I mean, because they did this description pricing

02:10:48   in the summer.

02:10:49   So, yeah, I still think, I mean, again,

02:10:51   I will bang the trials and upgrade drum until they come.

02:10:56   But, you know, and, you know,

02:11:00   clearly there's an infrastructure issue here.

02:11:03   Hopefully this means they're actually making changes.

02:11:08   And those changes would by definition take time.

02:11:13   Building software is hard,

02:11:16   and building software that has to handle

02:11:18   the App Store is really hard.

02:11:21   So yeah, it's a good signal.

02:11:22   It's a good signal, I think, is the biggest positive.

02:11:25   - Yeah, that they actually are listening

02:11:32   and they're doing something that developers

02:11:34   have actually asked for for a long time.

02:11:35   - Yeah, and I hope they change the resetting ratings thing,

02:11:36   Because right now, if you're a developer,

02:11:37   you're incentivized to not update your app

02:11:39   if you have good ratings.

02:11:41   Because to update your app resets the ratings,

02:11:43   and that's the exact wrong incentive Apple should want.

02:11:46   They should want developers fixing bugs,

02:11:47   updating their apps.

02:11:49   And so that's something that I hope they take care of.

02:11:53   - Yeah, it's two incentive problems.

02:11:55   Where one, if you already have a version

02:11:58   that has a bunch of great reviews and ratings,

02:12:01   you're incentivized not to update it

02:12:03   even with a minor bug fix.

02:12:04   And second, if you do issue regular minor updates,

02:12:08   which in theory is a good thing

02:12:10   because you're fixing bugs on a regular basis

02:12:12   or making small improvements on a regular basis,

02:12:15   you're incentivized to keep asking people for reviews

02:12:17   because every time you update one,

02:12:18   you have to get new reviews. - Right, exactly, yep.

02:12:20   - So I asked them about it.

02:12:22   I spoke to someone at Apple about it,

02:12:25   and they did not have a good answer.

02:12:28   They did not have an official answer to that,

02:12:30   but they completely acknowledged

02:12:32   that they are well aware of the fact that this is not right.

02:12:37   So I'm optimistic that sometime, maybe by WWDC,

02:12:43   maybe they'll have an answer to that.

02:12:45   That some--

02:12:46   - They should just give the developer the option.

02:12:48   Ask them if they want to reset the ratings or not.

02:12:50   - That-- - If they invested

02:12:52   to do a new app, they got a new developer,

02:12:54   let them reset it.

02:12:55   And if they have a great rating, let them keep it.

02:12:57   - That's a pretty good answer.

02:12:59   'Cause then what's the worst case scenario there?

02:13:01   a shitty app that keeps getting bad reviews

02:13:04   and the developer keeps resetting it.

02:13:05   Well, that's the same situation that they, you know,

02:13:08   that's no worse than the current situation.

02:13:10   - Exactly.

02:13:11   - Whereas a good developer with a quality app

02:13:14   that has quality reviews,

02:13:16   yeah, I think you just solved the problem.

02:13:21   That's actually pretty smart.

02:13:23   I wish I had thought of that.

02:13:25   - Well, that's what happens at 2.30 in the morning.

02:13:27   - I'm gonna steal that and put that on Darren Fireball.

02:13:30   - Go ahead.

02:13:30   Alright, Ben Thompson, I cannot thank you enough for your time. I wish your Packers

02:13:36   the best of luck in the upcoming Super Bowl.

02:13:39   Ah, that's not funny. By the way, the website, the blog is Stratechery.com for those who

02:13:47   only listen to podcasts.

02:13:49   Stratechery.

02:13:50   Yeah, Stratechery.

02:13:51   Stratechery. Whatever you want to call it.

02:13:53   Just Google Ben Thompson.

02:13:54   Exactly.

02:13:55   - No, that's exactly what I do and it works.

02:13:59   - It will come up.

02:14:00   You've got a terrific newsletter

02:14:02   I look forward to getting every single day.

02:14:04   And you're a fine presence on Twitter @BenThompson.

02:14:11   - That's me.

02:14:13   - Thank you, Ben.

02:14:16   Oh, my thanks to our sponsors.

02:14:18   I should thank our sponsors.

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