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330: ‘Headline Goes Here’, With Jim Dalrymple

 

00:00:00   Jim, how was your Thanksgiving?

00:00:02   Thanksgiving was good, John. It was quiet, had a bit of gravy and mashed potatoes.

00:00:07   Is the global supply chain issues, are they affecting the flow of Heineken to the west coast?

00:00:12   You know what? I've had a steady flow. We put in orders online and picked them up.

00:00:19   The tanker truck can't sit by my house anymore because, you know, there is a shortage, so...

00:00:28   Can I tell you, shopping in... you know, we live right in the city, so we just walk everywhere.

00:00:34   In most of the whole pandemic, I would just walk places and take my mask. Not a lot of car shopping.

00:00:40   We used the car less than ever over the last two years. But I don't know why that is, because in

00:00:44   theory you'd think we might use it just as much, but we were out in the suburbs visiting family.

00:00:48   And my wife dialed up an order at Target. But you go to the suburbs. Have you ever done this,

00:00:55   where you can just have it curbside delivered? You pay for it like Apple Pay or something,

00:01:00   you know, on the phone. And you just tell them your license plate number. You pull into a special

00:01:06   parking spot. You open the trunk, and some high school kid comes out, loads up your trunk with the

00:01:10   stuff, gives you a wave, and you never even had to open your window. Right?

00:01:16   Nothing. It's great.

00:01:19   It really is.

00:01:20   It is awesome, but it also, like, we just did this a couple weeks ago. It also made me feel like we

00:01:27   were back in the midst of the pandemic, you know what I mean? Like when you're terrified to do

00:01:30   anything. It's like, hey, I would have opened my window. I'm not actually afraid. I'm vaccinated,

00:01:35   you know? But it was kind of crazy. I was like, this would have been awesome, like,

00:01:38   back in like early 2020 when we were like terrified and we're like washing our vegetables and leaving

00:01:46   all the packages like in a vestibule for a 24-hour germ-free period. This would have been great. Just

00:01:53   have a kid put all this crap in your trunk. And the thing is, everybody has those types

00:01:59   of services now, even McDonald's. I mean, you pull up and, you know, you can get food there,

00:02:04   and every business has that type of curbside pickup now. It's funny how businesses have

00:02:10   adapted so quickly. We're two years into this, but still, you know, you can just dial up an order,

00:02:16   like you said, drive in, "Hey, we're here," and out they come.

00:02:20   Tom: All right, let me take a break here and let's get this show going. Let's thank our first

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00:04:09   off. Get it right for this holiday season. Jim, tell me a story about how you got started

00:04:16   writing about Apple and reporting on Apple back in the day. What was the first time that you

00:04:23   started writing about Apple? Jim Collison, Jr. Wow, Ed, that was 1994. There were no

00:04:31   daily Mac news sites then. I do believe that the first actual daily site doing news type of stuff

00:04:44   was Mac Central, the one that we started back in '94. Mac in Touch was around then, I believe.

00:04:51   So they were the original. But yeah, we started writing about Macs just because,

00:04:58   you know, well, we didn't want a boss. We both worked in a newspaper. We didn't want a boss.

00:05:05   So we -- Oh, Stan Flagg. And he's sadly passed away about, what, like 20 years ago?

00:05:15   Well, no, it was probably about 10 years ago, I guess, that he passed away. Yeah, and we started

00:05:23   it as a magazine first, you know, one of those ezines. And then we closed it down, and then

00:05:31   just a couple months later or a month later started to back up again. But this time did

00:05:37   a website. We just wrote and wrote and wrote, and it was so funny. At that point,

00:05:42   companies were sending out press releases via mail. They would mail us press releases,

00:05:51   so the news would be about a week late. But nobody knew it was a week late.

00:05:55   The freshest it could possibly be was already like three or four days old.

00:05:59   Oh, yeah, absolutely. Now we're talking a week late. It's a week late.

00:06:03   Yeah. So I remember we would go home on our lunch break from our jobs. The mail would have

00:06:09   come by then, post whatever news we could, and then go back to work. And I remember one time,

00:06:15   Stan went home and posted a story about Norton Diclock, if you remember that way back,

00:06:24   except he put in the headline "Diclock." So it was there for like a whole afternoon of

00:06:32   Norton Diclock. And I don't know if they ever wrote a letter saying, "Hey," you know,

00:06:38   it's probably not good, but...

00:06:40   We've all been there.

00:06:41   Yeah. So, you know, that's really how it started, and we just never stopped, you know?

00:06:48   But things have changed quite a bit.

00:06:51   You know, everybody has a story like that, like the time that they posted the thing

00:06:56   and walked away from the computer. And at the time, we didn't have cell phones, right? So you

00:07:02   couldn't notify, you know what I mean? Like you were either at your computer, and if you're at

00:07:07   your computer and you're like, "Hey, Stan, the headline has a dick in it," you know, he'd be

00:07:15   like, he would be like, "Oh shit," and he'd fix it right away. But if he's not at his computer,

00:07:20   you can't really get ahold of him.

00:07:21   Right.

00:07:21   I remember in college, the one time we really messed up in the Drexel University paper,

00:07:26   it was the sports section. And the headline was real big. It was like, you know, 96-point type.

00:07:34   Headline goes here.

00:07:36   I'm very proud of my time at the Drexel Triangle back in the '90s, or right around that time,

00:07:46   really, '94, '95, right when you were doing Max Central. We ran a good paper. It was a good-looking

00:07:51   paper. It was well-designed. It was well-written. We made very few mistakes like that. But son of

00:07:55   a bitch, we went to press. And that's the thing, is even with the web, even if you have a dick in

00:08:03   the headline overnight, you could still fix it the next morning. There was nothing to do with

00:08:07   5,000 printed copies of the Drexel Triangle that said, "Headline goes here." But the best part,

00:08:14   the best part was that we had a really good sense of humor. We took it seriously, you know,

00:08:18   in like the front page with the university news, you know, "The president of the university says

00:08:23   such and such." You know, we played it straight. But like our entertainment section, we were always

00:08:28   willing to have fun with stuff. And because we ran lots of funny headlines, there were a lot of

00:08:32   people who thought it was on purpose. And we were like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a joke. It was

00:08:38   a total joke. Yeah, we did that on purpose." Headline. That's how good we are. Headline goes here.

00:08:47   There's always those, like you said.

00:08:49   Would have been, I would have felt so much better if it was like a small article,

00:08:52   you know, like I'm talking this one went right across the whole top of the tabloid sports page.

00:08:58   Like it would have been great. Let's say like the men's tennis team had like a match. Well,

00:09:04   you know, that's like a one column story, right? That would have, oh, headline goes here in a tiny

00:09:09   little one column story. That would have made me feel so much better.

00:09:13   I can't win them all. No, I remember though, I remember reading Mac Central voraciously. I've

00:09:19   told this before on the show, but at the time you'll remember, there were Mac User and Mac

00:09:26   World were the monthly magazines and they are both big. They, you know, Mac User was sort of

00:09:32   more casual. There was sort of a formality to Mac World. Mac World was sort of like the New

00:09:40   York Times and Mac User was like the New York Post, right? It was sort of the more fun.

00:09:46   And I liked them both. I bought them both and read them both cover to cover every month.

00:09:52   But they had these crazy long lead times, right? Like it, people don't realize it,

00:09:57   but like back then, like printed magazines, like Mac World had like a three month lead time and

00:10:02   Apple knew it. The other companies knew it. So like Apple would like, you know, go to Mac World

00:10:08   or Mac User months before new computers would come out and let them know because otherwise,

00:10:13   by the time they published the information about the new computers, it would be four months late.

00:10:19   But the way to stay on top of the Apple universe was Mac Week, right? Yes, there was Mac Week,

00:10:27   there was Info World and there was PC Week. I think those were the three big ones and they were

00:10:33   weekly newspapers. They would dig in dumpsters, right? They would.

00:10:39   But it was hard to get a subscription. They wouldn't take your money. This is the biggest

00:10:48   thing. Like if you would just be like, I would like to give you $100 a year so you would send me

00:10:53   your Mac Week every week. They would say, no, you had to like fill out a form and claim, you know,

00:11:00   like, well, what company do you work for? How many Macs do you buy? What's your job? How much,

00:11:05   what's your software budget per year? And I would continuously fill out these cards with a series of

00:11:11   fake names trying to get a subscription to Mac Week. And then I would hear from people, they're

00:11:19   like, oh yeah, I filled one out and now they just send one to my house every week. And it's like,

00:11:22   son of a bitch, they will not. I send these cards in all the time and they never, they didn't even

00:11:28   want money. They just wanted somehow to believe that you were a professional who was in the

00:11:34   advertising demographic, you know, to buy software and, you know, desks and chairs and whatever else

00:11:40   they advertised in Mac Week. I could not do it. So I used to have to read it at the Drexel

00:11:45   University library. It was the only thing I ever did in the library. I never took a book.

00:11:51   I would go in and read Mac Week. Yeah, it's amazing how tough it was. I could never get it.

00:12:00   But then, you know, when the web came out and you could suddenly go to Mac Central and Mac in Touch

00:12:06   and a few other sites and get like news on a daily basis instead of weekly basis, and you didn't even

00:12:12   have to go to the library at the university to get the one copy of Mac Week, it was game changing.

00:12:20   Even though it was, you know, four or five days after the fact, it's still breaking news at that

00:12:25   point. Well, and it was great too, because the other thing, it was so hard before, like, let's say

00:12:31   that you, there are apps that are still around, right? There's like Graphic Converter and BB Edit.

00:12:37   There's a couple of apps from that era that are still around. But let's say you were into Graphic

00:12:41   Converter, which is a great, it does exactly what you think it does. It's just a Swiss army knife

00:12:47   of being able to open any image format ever known to mankind and export it to another format. If a

00:12:53   new version came out, you had no idea that a new version came out because the apps didn't check for

00:12:59   versions because they couldn't assume an internet connection. A site like Mac Central to just say,

00:13:04   "Hey, you know, Graphic Converter 1.6 is out. Here's the new features." And it was like,

00:13:10   "This is amazing." And then you would go to the website and download it and, you know. And then

00:13:16   90 minutes later, the download would finish. And you would do that on Netscape 2.02, which crashed

00:13:26   every 30 seconds. Yeah. But that's, it is funny though. And you guys played it so straight.

00:13:35   I never picked up, and I'm an astute reader, and I obviously got into the same racket not too many

00:13:42   years later. It never occurred to me that it was just two of you. I thought you guys had,

00:13:48   I thought you guys had like a small startup, maybe like a dozen people on the staff.

00:13:53   We actually did that on purpose. We thought about that and had like our family names with

00:14:01   their mother's maiden name listed on the one, the masthead. We had all kinds of things going

00:14:07   on just to make it seem bigger because at that point you really, that was the thing, you know,

00:14:12   it's not anymore. I mean, people know that during Fireball was you. But at that point,

00:14:18   you kind of needed that. So yeah, we gamed it a little bit and that's what it seemed. But in

00:14:26   doing that, you know, up until '96, '97, we still had our jobs, but then, you know, things kind of

00:14:36   took off and we quit our jobs at the newspaper and it was just all day long of posting stuff, going,

00:14:47   probably 20 or 30 stories a day up on the website sometimes. Took a lot of work,

00:14:54   but it worked out, you know. I'm still here, it's on. I'm almost 30 years in now. It's a long time.

00:15:15   list and they print labels and they come out of an actual printer, they put them on envelopes,

00:15:21   they put stamps on the envelope, they stuff the press release into the envelope, and then it goes

00:15:25   out in the mail and four days later, Nova Scotia Post delivers it to Jim Dalrymple. And within like

00:15:33   two years, everything went to email and everything was immediate. Even just two years was the

00:15:40   difference between everything goes in the physical mail to nothing goes in the physical mail.

00:15:44   Right. Yeah, it was very, very quick. And I think it started to happen sooner than what they

00:15:52   thought. I mean, companies didn't always have websites. I remember eWorld and AOL, they would

00:16:00   sometimes have those, but once they started updating their website wherever it happened to be,

00:16:07   you know, it could be the day after or two days after, but that was still three days before the

00:16:15   press release would show up by mail, we would get it online and it was this race to get things up.

00:16:24   I'm glad that that doesn't happen so much anymore. It's not that race anymore to get things up,

00:16:31   because, you know, now the things that you write and the things that I write are more

00:16:38   thoughtful, and I like that a whole lot better.

00:16:42   Yeah, I do too. It's funny, it just took a while to settle in, right? To sort of find the equilibrium

00:16:51   of, okay, this is the pace. If you really want breaking news as it breaks, you know which sites

00:16:59   to go to. But for the most part, if you just want to check in once a day, you can check in,

00:17:04   you know, your site is a perfect example. You could just check in once a day, scroll down the

00:17:08   page until you see the post you remember seeing yesterday, and then know that you're caught up and

00:17:14   that nothing major happened, you know. Well, yeah, and Dave Mark does posting on The Loop, and he

00:17:23   does a great job of picking out these great posts that I think people find interesting. And then,

00:17:32   you know, if an event happens and I write something about that and, you know, I have

00:17:39   my thoughts on Apple and what happened, and, you know, I think there's a good mix there.

00:17:45   But I really do like that change. And when it came down to how things started changing,

00:17:52   you were one of the ones that really changed the way that people thought of websites. With

00:17:59   the headline and the blurb, like the thoughtful commentary that you had on the news really kind

00:18:09   of changed the way that news websites started to react to news. It wasn't about being first to get

00:18:17   something up. It was more about, let's think about this for a minute, especially with Big Apple News.

00:18:23   I think even with reviews still, your embargo time can come and go, and yours still isn't there.

00:18:33   Mine often goes, it just goes whooshing right overhead.

00:18:39   Yeah. But, you know, people wait for your review because it is so thoughtful. And that's the way

00:18:47   that things should be. You know, you could see the change coming a couple of years after you started

00:18:54   during Fireball. I remember in 2009 when I started The Loop after I left Macworld, I called you

00:19:03   and said, "Hey, you know, I'm doing this thing. I'm going to do a daring Fireball type of thing.

00:19:12   I just want to make sure that you're okay with it." I was more than okay. I was like,

00:19:16   "Please start so I can start linking to your articles." Right? Yeah, that was exactly it.

00:19:22   No, you said it. Go for it.

00:19:23   I do not like to toot my own horn. I really don't. You're making me uncomfortable. I've broken out

00:19:28   into a bit of a flop, so I care. But I will say one of my all-time favorite quotes about computers

00:19:38   in general is it... I actually don't have the actual quote, but Larry Wall, the creator of the

00:19:43   Perl programming language, and he might be just quoting something that was floating around the

00:19:48   Unix circles forever, but he said that, you know, "Good programmers are lazy." And the idea is that

00:19:56   they're lazy because they don't want to repeat themselves. So if there's something they do over

00:20:00   and over again, then they write a program that does the thing over and over again, and they just

00:20:04   keep writing programs so that they don't have to do more work. And that's sort of the mentality

00:20:09   behind the link items on Daring Fireball. And at the beginning, you know, and Kottke was doing

00:20:17   stuff like this, not technical or Apple specific, but Kottke had links and Andy Bayo had a little

00:20:24   sidebar on his blog where he'd have like little 10-word links. Jim Kudall, kudall.com, is...

00:20:31   The whole middle column is just really brief links. To me, that captures the entire magic

00:20:37   of the web, right? What is the difference between getting a printed copy of Mac Week every Friday

00:20:44   in the mail, and you can read it and be like up to the week on Apple News versus the web,

00:20:53   and the first thought was, well, printing is expensive, incredibly expensive, always has

00:21:01   been expensive, and so you cut down on this cost. The mail is incredibly expensive. You know,

00:21:06   I was talking about my student newspaper, you know, when I was at university. Printing was

00:21:11   incredibly expensive. That was like our whole budget. Like, everything we did was just to,

00:21:16   you know, actually print these copies of the paper and then distribute them around campus. But

00:21:21   we had a thing called the Green Machine. It was like a John Deere, like a little go-kart

00:21:28   tractor type thing, and we had a guy named Ryan. He was a great guy. He had nothing to do with the

00:21:34   actual editorial of the newspaper. He wasn't a writer. He didn't edit, but he was always

00:21:40   enthusiastic. But what he liked to do was get up early on Friday morning, pick up all these

00:21:45   printed papers, put them on the Green Machine, and then drive them around campus, and every building

00:21:50   where there were classes, then there was like a, you know, big pile of student newspapers that you

00:21:55   could pick up for free. But we didn't have to mail them, right? Like, mailing was incredibly

00:21:59   expensive. So the first thought any of us had in the '90s as to how to build a website, it was just

00:22:07   like, well, this is sort of like having a print publication, but we don't have to pay for printing

00:22:11   or the mail. And all you have to do is wait two minutes for your modem to download this tiny little

00:22:20   web page, you know, by today's standards, you know, that was measured in kilobytes, but it still took

00:22:25   forever to render. But, you know, it was certainly better than waiting for paper to come to your

00:22:32   house. It shifted then, though, right? It was like the first idea was we could just do what we did in

00:22:38   print but not pay for the print. And then it became, hey, wait a minute, we don't have to do,

00:22:43   like, a once a week issue. We could, like, just publish everything as it comes in. That, to me,

00:22:50   was the mind blown. And I know it dates me. I know that it, you know, because today, you know,

00:22:57   kids today, like our kids, they would never think about running a publication where you wait until

00:23:04   Friday morning and then you have seven days worth of material queued up, ready to go, and an issue

00:23:11   comes out, right? But that was the way it had to be with print. And the early web mimicked it because

00:23:20   every new medium always incorrectly copies the medium that came before it.

00:23:25   >> Correct, yeah. I remember when at the newspaper when I told them I was quitting to do this

00:23:32   online publication, they said, "You're crazy. That'll never work. It will never work."

00:23:40   And I said, "No, I think it will. I really do. I think that this is where it's going. And,

00:23:47   you know, you guys, one day you guys are going to have to have a website." And they said, "Oh,

00:23:53   we'll never have a website. We don't need a website. That stuff, it's not going to work."

00:23:57   And it did. You know, luckily for us, a few years later, Macworld bought Mac Central, and

00:24:06   that was in '99. >> But that really was sort of the intersection

00:24:12   of exactly what I'm talking about, where Macworld was the gold standard in the Apple journalism

00:24:20   space, the Apple-specific space. It was the premier publication. But it was a printed publication with

00:24:29   tons and tons of print ads, you know. And back in those days, those issues were like half a

00:24:35   phone book, you know. They were huge, crazy thick, but they had these crazy long lead times. So it

00:24:43   was like the two extremes where Macworld the magazine had like a two or three month lead time

00:24:49   and was a printed thing that was super thick and had just the absolute utmost of production

00:24:56   quality. Printed on the best paper, the super high quality professional photography for all the

00:25:03   product shots. And then on the other end, there's Mac Central, which, you know, it wasn't like it

00:25:10   didn't look professional, but it looked quick. And there was no way to do high resolution graphics on

00:25:17   the web at the time. And the last thing you would want is something that would take longer to

00:25:22   download over these crazy slow modems. It looked professional. Like I told you, I couldn't believe

00:25:27   it that when I found out that it was just two people and one of them was you.

00:25:30   [Laughter]

00:25:36   You know, it's funny how much we learned after that when we came into the Macworld. You know,

00:25:44   Jason Snell, I love Jason. He's so smart. And, you know, sitting down talking about magazines,

00:25:51   we were just dumbfounded, like how much went into that. And, you know, Rick LePage was around then

00:26:00   I mean, just so many great people. And, you know, Jason is still going strong. I mean,

00:26:06   he knew more about magazines than I'll ever know.

00:26:10   All right. All right. Let me take another break here. Thank our next sponsor. It's our good

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00:28:33   Pete: You know, you got to do that by the books, you know what I mean? That's a lot of laws around

00:28:37   it. It's the holidays, you know, there's not that much going on. I thought having you on,

00:28:44   it would be interesting, the trip down memory lane with the early days of Max Central.

00:28:49   But the other thing too, I think it's interesting this year with the current political climate

00:28:56   and with the, you know, Apple's in the midst of this. The EU is seemingly heading towards

00:29:05   passing some laws and regulations that are definitely going to affect Apple if they pass,

00:29:11   you know, like this thing about mandatory sideloading for mobile phones and just here and

00:29:16   there all over the place. Did you see the thing where Italy fined Google and Apple, I don't know,

00:29:21   it's just a couple million dollars, whatever. It's pocket change to Apple and Google. But the

00:29:26   publicity adds up that Italy found them to be, you know, breaking some kind of antitrust law,

00:29:35   whatever. It doesn't even matter. It's optics, you know? And it's funny having written about Apple as

00:29:42   long as I have and as we were just talking, you're, you know, you're a little bit ahead of me, a couple

00:29:48   more years ahead of me. But it would have been bananas in 1996 to say, "Hey, 25 years from now,

00:29:56   Apple is going to be facing worldwide antitrust scrutiny."

00:30:00   Well, 25 years ago, it was almost incredible to think that Apple would still be around.

00:30:08   Right. That would have been, it would have been good enough to hear that they're still around.

00:30:12   You'd be like, "Whoa, thank God." And you'd be like, "Oh, no, no, they're not still around. They're

00:30:16   actually in big, big trouble for their overwhelming success." And they're facing the barrels of

00:30:22   regulators in the EU and in America and in Asia. And it's like, "What? You're kidding me. They're

00:30:29   still in business?" Yeah, true. So I'm curious. And to me, one of the things that makes it

00:30:38   salient is that Apple has a, if you want to put it in negative terms, I would use the word insular.

00:30:51   But I think it's good. I think it has served the company well that for the most part, they promote

00:30:58   from within. And it's a company where a lot of people spend their whole careers.

00:31:03   A lot of people I know. And even people whose overall career isn't one continuous stint at

00:31:12   Apple, they leave and then they come back three, four, five years later at a higher level because

00:31:19   they left, went elsewhere, leveled up in their career, and then come back. And maybe instead

00:31:25   of being an engineer, now they're an engineering manager or something like that. I think overall,

00:31:31   it has served the company well because there is an Apple way of doing things. And it served

00:31:36   the company. And we can all complain about this, that, the other thing, our own pet peeves about

00:31:41   Apple products and where we have minor complaints. But for the most part, they've clearly stuck to it.

00:31:49   There's, if you went back to our 1996 cells, you editing Max Central, me reading Max Central at

00:31:59   Drexel University, and showed us modern Apple products, we would recognize them as Apple

00:32:04   products. We'd be like, "Oh, the future is going to be amazing. I love these retina screens. Look

00:32:10   at that. You can't see the pixels." There's an Apple flavor to them, right? That is very

00:32:18   consistent. But I really wonder if one of the biggest problems Apple is facing though,

00:32:24   is that the fact that so many people at Apple, including senior leadership at this point,

00:32:30   have been there for their whole careers, that they've internalized that mentality of being

00:32:37   the little guy who we're worried is still going to be in business in a year. And that attitude,

00:32:46   that perspective doesn't serve them well now that they're the most valuable company on the planet,

00:32:51   and that they continue to make mistakes based on that. I don't know. Do you see that?

00:32:57   Tom: It's kind of tough because one of the things that we love about Apple is that they

00:33:04   do continue to have that mentality. I see Apple as having the thoughts of doing things

00:33:16   the right way for the customer. And, you know, through the years, we've seen

00:33:24   Apple take stances that were not popular, whether it's, you know, in products, I mean, way back,

00:33:32   removing floppy disks, or political stances or semi-political stances with privacy. Like, no,

00:33:40   we are not going to take your information. We don't want your information. As a matter of fact,

00:33:46   we're going to proactively make sure we never see your information.

00:33:51   You know, in a lot of ways, that could have held Apple back in features that they could

00:33:57   have implemented that maybe we would have liked, but they made sure that they did it

00:34:02   the right way. They won't open up back doors for governments. They won't unlock phones for

00:34:10   law enforcement agencies. They do things, I think, for the right reasons. And that comes back,

00:34:18   for me, that comes back to the mentality that you're kind of talking about here. So

00:34:24   there are a lot of things that are good and bad about that.

00:34:29   A perfect example of that is my last episode of the show, David_Smith was my guest, and we

00:34:36   were talking about widgets. And the most popular thing people use with his app, WidgetSmith, is to

00:34:44   create like a photo frame widget, where you pick one photo, you're like, this is it, this is me,

00:34:51   and my family, and we're at the Grand Canyon, and I just love this family photo. I would like to have

00:34:58   it on my second home screen always. And you can make like a photo widget frame like that.

00:35:04   But we were talking about the official Apple Photos widget, which the only option you have is to take

00:35:11   their AI-powered recommendations. But they're amazing, right? Everybody loves to talk about it.

00:35:16   They surface amazing photos, the machine learning, however they programmed it, and whatever model

00:35:24   they have, it's really almost astonishingly good how it surfaces these photos. But it's absolutely

00:35:32   the case that four or five years ago, everybody was talking about Apple being behind in that exact

00:35:39   area, right? Because maybe Google and Facebook and the places that had your photos in the cloud

00:35:47   on their servers were running similar, but just as amazing at surfacing these photos. But because

00:35:56   they could run it in the cloud, they didn't have to worry about not even the privacy type stuff,

00:36:03   but just the fact that, hey, it's our server in the cloud. It's not your battery-operated phone,

00:36:09   so we're not going to deplete the battery on your phone while trying to analyze which are the best

00:36:13   pictures of your kids from 10 years ago. Because nobody wants that, right? Everybody wants these

00:36:18   great pictures to be surfaced, but they don't want their phone to be dead because it figured

00:36:22   out which ones they are. And Apple's responses over the years, interviews with me, interviews

00:36:28   with other people, and they would say, "We're confident that our on-device strategy is going

00:36:34   to work out in the long run." And it has. And now that it has, people don't really talk about it

00:36:40   anymore. It's one of those things where it was like when it seemed like Apple was behind,

00:36:44   everybody wanted to talk about the fact that Apple's privacy stance and

00:36:48   adamant that everything run on device was holding them back. And then once it was clear that it

00:36:54   wasn't holding them back, now nobody talks about it. Right. Apple has that a lot where people are

00:37:01   great about coming out and saying, "Oh, God, this will never work with Apple." And then it just goes

00:37:09   away because it does work. I mean, how many times has Apple been the first at doing something? You

00:37:18   know, if you look even at products, back to the iPod, you know, Apple wasn't the first one with

00:37:26   a music player. They weren't, you know, the first one with USB, but they made these things so

00:37:32   popular. Firewire. Firewire. I mean, just so many things. But it wasn't that amazing that the first

00:37:41   iPod was Firewire. Apple has popularized so many technologies that they, you know, they didn't

00:37:50   actually invent, but they did it in a way that made it available to the mass market. And they're

00:37:58   still doing that. If you look at the new stuff that they're working on, I mean, AR, I don't know

00:38:07   that they'll be big into VR, but augmented reality, I think, is going to be a huge thing for Apple in

00:38:13   the coming years. And who knows what they're going to be able to do with it? We see glimpses of it

00:38:20   every now and then, like in maps with walking directions. I actually used that once, and it was

00:38:26   fascinating. You know, that's one of the few things where it defines why I do what I do,

00:38:33   is I feel like my ability is much more suited to being a critic of things that have come out,

00:38:41   both good and bad. Say both, this is what's good about it, this is what's bad about it. And

00:38:47   I try never to pretend that that's in any way better than being the designers and engineers

00:38:57   who are actually in the arena making the new things. But one of the things that I've thought

00:39:03   was so obvious for years is that you should be able to just hold your phone up when you're like

00:39:10   walking around a city. Your phone has a camera, it has GPS. The phone, based on the camera and the

00:39:16   GPS, should obviously know where it is, where it's oriented, and should be able to give you

00:39:22   a heads-up display to tell you, "Here's how to walk to the restaurant you're looking for."

00:39:27   And I get why we're not quite there yet, you know, but it's clear that that's where we're going,

00:39:34   and that if you could project that onto eyeglasses, that would be fantastic, right?

00:39:38   Just see what you normally see through your eyeglasses, except there's like a green arrow

00:39:45   in front of you telling you which way to go. Keep going, keep going, go across this intersection,

00:39:50   all right, now make a left. I mean, the things that are coming are going to be as incredible

00:39:57   to people now as some of the products that they brought out early on. They are just going to keep

00:40:05   going, and that's one thing that I have respect for too, the whole industry. I mean, it moves so

00:40:15   fast. We talked about this with how our businesses moved quickly, but all of this is moving very

00:40:23   quickly, and that's where when Apple puts in things like privacy as one of the standards that

00:40:31   has to be met before these features go out, that's why that is so important. And, you know, when you

00:40:38   look, you know, mention the sometimes political fallout from some of this, I don't quite understand

00:40:46   or agree with the politicians that say, "Well, you know, we need access. I understand why they do,

00:40:55   but, you know, the fact that Apple is willing to protect users is very important to me."

00:41:03   Tom: So let me circle back and try to pick your brain on where you think Apple's senior leadership

00:41:15   is. Are they in the right place in terms of preparing for the next 10 years of innovations,

00:41:23   or are they too focused on keeping the incredible success that they have right now

00:41:31   with the...if you just freeze-frame Apple's business today, it is incredibly profitable.

00:41:38   The iPhone is an incredibly profitable device, and the App Store model makes for an incredible

00:41:46   services add-on to the phone. And Tim Cook has said it. I think it goes all the way back to

00:41:54   Steve Jobs even, that, "Hey, if anybody's going to cannibalize one of our successful businesses,

00:42:00   it should be us." And famously, they really, truly did what they said with the iPod and the way that

00:42:08   the iPhone just absolutely almost instantly extinguished the iPod business.

00:42:14   Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Absolutely did.

00:42:16   Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Right. They really did. They did not try to protect it,

00:42:19   and it was their fastest-growing segment. It was the thing that made them relevant to an entirely

00:42:26   new generation of younger people. It also exposed them to people like our generation, who never used

00:42:35   Macintosh computers, maybe still haven't used Macintosh computers, but suddenly had a reason

00:42:40   to buy an Apple product, because even if you used a Windows PC, the iPod was still the best

00:42:46   music player. And they just...they made a product that just made it irrelevant.

00:42:54   Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Yeah, and they were very happy to do it.

00:42:57   Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Do you think they're willing to do that again? And what happens if that next product

00:43:04   is not a $1,000 product? What if it's only a $500 product? You know, are they willing to cannibalize

00:43:09   $1,000 iPhones with $500 eyeglasses?

00:43:13   Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Oh, yeah, I definitely think so. Because to me, it's about Apple moving ahead with

00:43:22   the product line. If they weren't willing to do that, you know, with the iPhone, you know,

00:43:28   that they weren't willing to put a music player on an iPhone and make that, you know, readily available,

00:43:34   I don't think that the iPod business would have kept going at the pace that it was.

00:43:40   And I think the same with the products now. They have to advance the product lines. And if one

00:43:48   cannibalizes the other, then that's going to happen. You know, and it all comes down to sales

00:43:54   after that.

00:43:55   Dave Vega To me, it's about being honest with yourself.

00:44:00   That's what I think is that there was a sense circa 2005, 2006, where anybody who's just looking

00:44:10   at the, hey, what type of gadgets can I put in a pants pocket, you know, the iPods, cell phones,

00:44:18   there's, you know, and you, you could look at the cell phone and say, this is going to be the iPod,

00:44:24   it's going to one way or the other, whether, you know, Apple got involved, even if Apple had stayed

00:44:30   out of the market, and maybe cell phones evolve, and we're all using BlackBerry style devices with

00:44:38   a hardware keyboard to this day, I think that was a feasible future. And it's not disrespectful

00:44:48   to the people who made the iPod in 2001 2002 2003 in the early years, when making it easy,

00:44:57   wasn't easy, right? I don't want to act as though it was easy for them to make it.

00:45:04   But by the mid 2000s, it was pretty clear that everything that could play

00:45:10   mp3 music was going to be able to play mp3 music. Yeah. And it was, you know, time to move on. I

00:45:18   feel like, you know, where I clearly nothing like that is on the horizon for cell phones at this

00:45:25   moment. But it will be eventually and it will be Yeah. And the eyeglasses thing is the best guess

00:45:33   we have at the moment, you know, that you'll, you know, everybody will just wear spectacles of some

00:45:38   sort. And you'll have this permanently, you know, anytime you need it, user interface in your field

00:45:45   of vision, because you're wearing these glasses. That's the best guess. But I could see that I can

00:45:51   also see a future where that never happens. Yeah. And, you know, we've seen that future

00:46:02   in a way. When you look back at you remember netbooks, everybody had a netbook, which was

00:46:08   the worst computer of all time. And I remember, so it was probably around the 2010. Because I

00:46:21   remember writing about this on the loop where people were saying Apple has to have a netbook.

00:46:29   And it was mostly amazingly PC analysts that said Apple has to have a netbook in order to keep up.

00:46:37   And I said Apple will never have a netbook. And they didn't because it was just a piece of junk.

00:46:45   And, you know, those eventually went away. So I don't think that Apple was willing to follow

00:46:57   conventional wisdom or wisdom at the time just to put out a product and compete with something else

00:47:03   that's out there. They're going to improve that to the point where they can offer something.

00:47:09   And that's where this new technology that we have, you know, is it glasses?

00:47:12   It could be. But by the time Apple perfects what they're doing and is ready to release it,

00:47:19   is it something completely different that we don't know yet? It could be that too.

00:47:24   Yeah. And that's what I mean that you have to be honest with yourself, right? You have to honestly

00:47:32   look at the state of the next thing. And instead of thinking, well, I really wish that this were

00:47:40   ready to go. And to me, that's ultimately where Apple went wrong with the Newton is.

00:47:47   And I know that everybody likes to tell the story that the 10-second version is that it was a big

00:47:55   flop. It wasn't a hit. It obviously was not a hit product. But it wasn't really a flop. It actually

00:48:01   existed in a weird sort of netherworld where it was good enough to keep going and within a handful

00:48:12   of years got much, much better. Like the Newton 2000, like the last models that they made were

00:48:19   really, really credible and were much, much better than like the Palm pilots of the day,

00:48:24   even though the Palm was the one that everybody thinks was sort of the successful PDA of the era.

00:48:29   But there was sort of a wishful thinking aspect to Apple launching the Newton when they launched it.

00:48:42   That it was like, we know that this sort of basic... And they were right, that the basic idea

00:48:48   of something you could fit in one hand and would have wireless connectivity and...

00:48:55   They were on the scent of what we now consider to be the smartphone. They were on the trail.

00:49:03   It just was clearly so far away that it really needed to bake in the oven some more. But I feel

00:49:11   like not to put John Sculley on the psychiatric couch, but maybe the itch to prove himself

00:49:20   post Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs has left and he's next and he's doing some interesting stuff there.

00:49:26   What is going to be John Sculley's first product post Steve Jobs? I kind of feel

00:49:35   like they rushed it because he really wanted to get something out.

00:49:40   Yeah. And I think he said it right, that the Newton, that whole technology, when you look at

00:49:49   what it did for people, it was pretty incredible. And there was as much of a group around how great

00:49:58   the Newton was as any other product. It was small, yeah, but it was pretty incredible. I remember

00:50:08   Stan had one of those and he was just fascinated with it.

00:50:14   The potential was so high, but it was... It always, to me, I forget which one I had.

00:50:21   I couldn't afford the 2000, but I got like a discounted version of one that was discontinued.

00:50:27   But it was clearly like, this is the future, but whereas the Macintosh to me was always,

00:50:37   this is the present. Even in the '80s when the Mac was still dripping wet, brand new,

00:50:46   black and white, monochrome displays and so much of its future was ahead of it.

00:50:52   Even then it was like, already right now, this is the best way to do word processing. This is the

00:50:59   best machine to use Excel on. This is the way to do spreadsheets. This is just a fabulous metaphor

00:51:08   for personal computing. It was already great, whereas the Newton was always about the future.

00:51:14   And I feel like that's the mistake that companies always are tempted to make is to come out too

00:51:21   early. And that's sort of where I feel like Facebook has gone with this whole VR meta thing,

00:51:30   where they're so anxious to change the negative stories about the social stuff on Facebook to get

00:51:42   people talking about us as a company that's building this metaverse, blah, blah, blah,

00:51:46   Oculus headsets, all this stuff. But they're so focused on what it's going to be as opposed to

00:51:54   what it is now. And if you lose sight of what it is now, to me, you never get there. You never get

00:51:59   to where you want to go. Well, yeah. And I think that's kind of a crazy ass company. I try and stay

00:52:12   away from them as much as possible. So it's hard when I don't trust them. So I don't trust what

00:52:26   they're trying to do, what they will do. I don't trust anything about it, which is a huge difference

00:52:32   when you look at what Apple is doing. I think that Apple is keeping their eye on

00:52:39   what's happening now. But they always seem to be able to plan for the future in a way that,

00:52:51   what was the old saying, a delight in, I don't know, surprise and delight. They were always

00:53:02   able to surprise and delight. And I just don't see that. I see Facebook as being like the CES.

00:53:09   You know, CES would have products that never, ever came to fruition because companies were just

00:53:15   throwing stuff out there to see what would happen. But I see Apple as being, they're trying to be

00:53:24   responsible, but they're also trying to have some of the surprise and delight that will put products

00:53:31   out there. And you asked earlier if the executive team is where it should be. And I think it is

00:53:41   because Apple is looking at least five years out for products. So is Apple still pushing things

00:53:52   forward? Well, I think the Mac is certainly pushing the envelope of computing way beyond

00:54:01   where the PC industry is. So that was a huge change. Making their own chips for the Mac

00:54:07   was a massive change because it had software implications, it has developer implications,

00:54:15   and they made a massive change. So that alone shows me that they are looking

00:54:23   towards the future and they're not worried about what's going on right now.

00:54:27   Pete: I've mentioned this, but isn't the most amazing thing about that the fact that

00:54:32   they clearly didn't have to do it. Because if they don't pursue Apple Silicon for the Mac and move

00:54:42   the Mac to their own Silicon platform, then what would they have done? Well, they would have just

00:54:47   stuck with Intel and x86. And what performance would they have? They would have the same

00:54:53   performance as the rest of the industry because that is the industry. So they could totally

00:55:01   differentiate the Mac purely by the operating system alone, which is what effectively they

00:55:09   did ever since they went to Intel in 2006. The whole story was, "Okay, we give up. We're not

00:55:17   going to do this PowerPC thing anymore. We'll just go Intel and we'll use PC graphic cards and

00:55:23   we'll just design better enclosures and compete on the platform." They didn't have to do it.

00:55:32   It's this incredible amount of work that they've really executed just so deftly.

00:55:40   Everybody knows people now, especially now that the new M1 Pro and M1 Macs

00:55:48   MacBooks are out. I know people who were holding out and it was the longest year of their life,

00:55:56   number one. It was a terrible year. It was a pandemic year. We're all locked in. So it was

00:56:02   a long year for that. But everybody has friends who were like, a year ago did not buy the initial

00:56:09   M1 MacBook Pro because they're like, "I'm going to wait for the real Pro Pro MacBook Pro. And I'll

00:56:16   wait." And I don't think anybody was surprised that it took a year, but it was a long year

00:56:22   because everybody's looking at these benchmarks from these $999 MacBook Airs that are blowing away

00:56:29   $4,000 PC rigs. Everybody knows it that now that people are adopting the Apple Silicon Macs,

00:56:44   it continues to blow people's minds. Even though it's year-old news, they're like, "I know

00:56:49   everybody's been bragging about this for a year, but I didn't have it until now. And holy crap,

00:56:54   now my shit runs really fast." Yeah, absolutely. I was one of the ones that went out and got one.

00:57:01   I got a MacBook Air M1. Yeah, incredible. It's absolutely... But it's like you said, though.

00:57:19   It shows their commitment to it and that they're not sitting on their heels as the iPhone company.

00:57:25   Yeah. All right, let me take a break here. Thank our third and final sponsor of the show,

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00:58:41   Last but not least, let's talk about the future. And it's funny because Apple is a very secretive

00:58:49   company, right? And this has always been true. They keep their powder dry until they're ready

00:58:57   to fire it, right? But we do kind of know when they're working on things, right? Like before

00:59:05   the iPhone came out, nobody knew what it was going to look like. It blew us away. Everybody was sort

00:59:09   of, a lot of people were thinking it was going to be an iPod phone, which would have made sense.

00:59:14   I would have bought it. I would have bought an iPod phone. Sure. But you can't start making a

00:59:22   cell phone and go to the major carriers and not have the news leak out in some degree, right?

00:59:28   Like there was a general sense that, hey, nobody knows what it is, but Apple's working on a phone.

00:59:34   And it was the same thing with the iPad where it was like, I don't know what they're doing. Is it

00:59:39   like a cut down Mac? Is it a scaled up iPhone? But they're doing a tablet, right? And everybody knew

00:59:46   they were doing a tablet. At this moment, everybody quote unquote knows Apple's doing two things.

00:59:53   They're working on AR and VR, which may or may not be two different products, right? AR meaning like

00:59:59   glasses you just normally see through that project a heads up display. VR meaning complete occlusion

01:00:07   of your visual field and some kind of high resolution thing. And of course, the other thing

01:00:13   is the car. AR and VR seem like Apple is arguably the best suited company to make the first,

01:00:26   oh, this is the way that product's supposed to be, right? And then we're all going to be like,

01:00:30   oh yeah, duh, that was the way it was supposed to be. The car, I continue to think,

01:00:37   I'm not trying to sell them short. I'm just saying I don't get it. I don't get what business Apple

01:00:44   has in that market. And I'm curious what you think. So if I look at the car, I try and think about

01:00:56   where Apple could be best. And I keep coming back to the software and the hardware to make that

01:01:06   software work. And that to me doesn't spell a physical car, it's a system.

01:01:15   And I'm not sure if, does Apple really want to get into the car manufacturing business?

01:01:23   I can't imagine they do. Or the licensing business, right? And there's a lot of people

01:01:29   who keep tossing that out. And I know that a lot of the, I mean, we're talking five, six years

01:01:35   of rumors, right? But there's been a lot of speculation over the various resets that project

01:01:43   Titan has had over the years, that Apple might just be making effectively an operating system

01:01:49   for a car. In theory, it sounds like something somebody should make. It absolutely sounds like

01:01:57   something Microsoft should be in advanced stages on, right? Maybe Google too. It does not sound at

01:02:06   all like the type of thing Apple ever has done, ever should do, right? They're not a company that

01:02:14   licenses operating systems. And the brief time that they did in that 25-year-ago period when

01:02:24   you were writing Mac Central, right? I mean, that was chief Mac clone era. It was a disaster for the

01:02:33   company financially. They were licensing copies of the operating system for $25 or something like

01:02:38   that, as opposed to selling $4,000 computers with a 30% profit margin. I don't get the car thing.

01:02:49   And the other thing that scares me, like if I were Tim Cook, is I don't see where the whole

01:02:56   car market is going. It feels to me, and maybe it's like I said before, that I live in a city,

01:03:08   I walk most days, very seldom drive my car. I don't have to drive my car. But the other thing,

01:03:16   like my wife and I have been talking about it lately, and she dug up, you know, Philadelphia is

01:03:20   a very old city, one of the oldest here in North America. But there were some pictures from right

01:03:26   around the corner from us from like 100 years ago before cars took over. And it's like, there are

01:03:32   streets here that you think like, "Ah, that's kind of a narrow street." You kind of have to,

01:03:37   you know, maybe you want to slow down driving down the street. But it's because we have parking on

01:03:41   both sides of the street. And if you just got rid of the parked cars, which like this picture

01:03:45   from like 100 years ago shows you what this exact street looked like before cars were parked,

01:03:51   it was like, "Hey, this is actually a very wide street." We're kind of moving to that sort of,

01:03:58   not that nobody's going to own a car, but a lot fewer people will own a car and will just use

01:04:05   ride sharing. And it's way more efficient because instead of having all of these cars that are parked

01:04:13   for 23 hours a day, we could have these cars that are, you know, mostly in use all the time and

01:04:19   taking people places. That doesn't sound like a business Apple would want to get into. There's

01:04:26   obviously money to be made for some people in that market, but like selling the type of cars that a

01:04:33   ride sharing service would use for robot driven... Let's just say, you know, let's say they pull it

01:04:39   off with the self-driving, you know, you don't have to have a human being at the wheel. You could

01:04:45   just get into a robot car and say, you know, "Take me to Target or take me to Trader Joe's."

01:04:53   That doesn't seem like a business for Apple, right? Stylish AR/VR glasses that people would

01:05:02   use and maybe replace their phones with, that sounds to me like the future Apple.

01:05:06   And I mean, I'm going to turn this around on the end in a second, but there's also,

01:05:13   don't forget, the liability aspects of stuff like that.

01:05:16   Right, right. Which is humongous, right?

01:05:19   That would be just, I mean, we talked about optics earlier. This isn't optics. This will be

01:05:26   real stuff, especially, and forgive me if I say something wrong here, but in a litigious society

01:05:34   like America, people will be looking to sue the shit out of Apple at every turn. And if there's

01:05:41   robot cars out there, you can bet that people are going to want to sue them for whatever they can

01:05:47   get. So I'm not sure that they can do that. So in turning it around on you, if we know that Apple is

01:05:56   they are actually, Project Titan is a thing, and they've had several high-ranking people at Apple

01:06:05   working on this project, if it's not a car and it's not licensing a software system,

01:06:11   what do you think it is?

01:06:13   So it's funny that you would go there. So here's the thing. Do you have a Roomba?

01:06:20   No. So we do. We have the Roomba. You know what the Roomba is, right?

01:06:25   Yeah, I'm the Roomba.

01:06:27   He's a little saucer-shaped vacuum, but he's a robot. And we have him in our powder room

01:06:38   off the kitchen, and every day at like five in the morning, I forget what time my wife has him

01:06:44   set. I call him him, you know, and then he wakes up. He wakes up, and then he's got like a mental

01:06:51   map. You can like use the Roomba app to see the Roomba's map of your house, what they think it is.

01:06:58   It's a fabulous idea, and the Roomba absolutely sucks. I mean, he is really, he's so dumb.

01:07:11   He's the worst robot you could ever imagine, but he's so bad that I have tremendous sympathy for

01:07:17   him, where like I'll come down in the morning to make coffee, and I look, and there he is. He

01:07:23   got lost under the dining room table, right? No, it happens. It absolutely happens. And there he is,

01:07:29   and I feel bad for him because he was like, there he was like vacuuming up crumbs all around our

01:07:35   house, but then he got under our dining room table and just ran his battery out trying to get out

01:07:43   from under the table, and he couldn't do it. And then I pick him up, you know, and he's like a

01:07:47   little, like having a little sick puppy, and then I take him into the powder room, put him on his

01:07:52   charger, and then he makes a little bloop bloop noise like, "Hey, I'm charging up."

01:07:56   Thank you, Jon.

01:07:59   It's clear though, but I have heard, you know, Tim Cook is sort of coy when he talks about the future.

01:08:08   You know, he's not, obviously he's a super smart guy, and he's not going to be tricked into spilling

01:08:14   the beans on anything that he doesn't want to reveal. But I remember a couple of years before

01:08:19   the Apple Watch, somebody was asking like, "Hey," you know, and again, like we said, like, we kind

01:08:24   of know what Apple's working on, like we kind of knew they were working on a watch thing before we

01:08:30   knew what it was going to be. And what I remember Tim Cook saying was, "The wrist is an interesting

01:08:35   location to us." And whoever was interviewing him was like, "Whoa, whoa, you actually said something

01:08:42   interesting there." And then they were like, "Tell us more." And he's like, "No, no, that's it. The

01:08:47   wrist is interesting. That's all I have to say." But it said a lot, and it turns out it was very

01:08:53   interesting to them. I've heard Tim Cook talk about this, and he does talk about cars, and

01:09:00   people ask about it. All he'll say, though, is that autonomy is interesting, something to that effect.

01:09:06   And what makes me think about where Apple might be going with Project Titan is not just,

01:09:14   you know, robot vacuums, but clearly, five years from now, maybe too soon. But like, by the time

01:09:23   you and I are ready to hang it up and retire, will we have robots who can go to the fridge and get us

01:09:28   a Heineken? You know, like, maybe, right? You'll be able to say to some sort of dingus in your house,

01:09:37   "Hey, dingus, go get me a beer." And the dingus, you know, a little robot can go out to your

01:09:44   kitchen and maybe get you a beer or something like that, or get you a paper towel or whatever you

01:09:48   need. That seems feasible, and that is autonomy? And is it that different programming-wise as

01:09:57   opposed to making a car, except that the risks are so much lower, right? So if you had a smart

01:10:06   Apple robot who could vacuum up crumbs and go get you a beverage from the fridge, what's the worst

01:10:14   thing that could happen? Maybe it, like, falls down the stairs or something, right? As opposed

01:10:19   to a car, where the worst thing that happens is you get in a terrible car crash and a human being

01:10:24   gets hurt. So you're saying that these are, it's autonomous devices as opposed to a vehicle?

01:10:33   Right. That's just as a spitball idea of maybe where Apple might be going. And

01:10:42   obviously somebody's going to make these things, right? I mean, there's no question. I mean,

01:10:46   again, go back to laziness. It's a virtue. We are a lazy species. We are going to make robots that

01:10:55   do as much work as we can possibly trick them into doing, right? I mean, we're going to do it.

01:11:02   It's just a question of, is it a five-year thing, a 10-year thing, a 20-year thing?

01:11:08   Yeah, no. And I don't think that we know where Apple is going to take all this technology. But

01:11:16   the way that you put it is very interesting because we've always said this about patents,

01:11:22   too. Don't think that because Apple filed for a patent that this is going to be a new feature or

01:11:27   a new product. It could be something that they just have out there. It could be something that

01:11:32   they're going to integrate into another product, software or hardware. So it makes perfect sense,

01:11:39   I guess, in that light that, yeah, they could do that with this.

01:11:44   Tom Bilyeu (00;01;00;00): If Apple turned every patent into a product,

01:11:48   Apple stores would be as big as an Ikea, right? And you'd have this cavernous Raiders of the Lost

01:11:54   Ark style warehouse down with thousands and thousands and thousands of products.

01:12:00   Yeah, absolutely true.

01:12:02   But I really do. I don't know. There's something I can't shake about the fact that Apple at its best

01:12:14   makes personal computers. And I know that we've had this term PC for 30 years, 40 years. But it

01:12:24   still is true, though. They're personal computers. And the more personal, the better Apple is at it.

01:12:31   That's why the watch is such a sneak hit, right? Where it just sort of everybody was like, "Hey,

01:12:39   this thing's a flop. Nobody wants it." And now it's like, you can't even get your hands on them

01:12:43   for Christmas. Everybody wants an Apple Watch because it's super personal. It's on your wrist.

01:12:50   It is a statement of personal style. I think cars are getting less personal, whereas the 20th century

01:12:58   model, like when you and I grew up, your car said something about you. And you'd pick a style of car

01:13:06   or color of car that was a personal statement. I think we're moving away from that, where your car

01:13:12   is just a rectangular box that gets you from A to B, and a robot drives it.

01:13:17   Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the car, back in our days when we were

01:13:26   starting to drive, it really did say something about you. But yeah, now it's more, I mean,

01:13:33   if anything, a car is probably a political statement now, whether you have electric or

01:13:38   hybrid or a big gas guzzling thing. But yeah, it's more of a tool, a utility thing now.

01:13:49   I don't drive a whole lot anymore. I mean, I live in a suburb in California, but I don't drive as

01:14:01   much as what I used to. So the devices that I have, you mentioned the watch. I'd even put Apple TV in

01:14:09   there as being a personal thing, the way that you use that. But the watch is so personal. It's on my

01:14:15   wrist all day long, and I love it. I use it for sleep tracking now. So I'm actually charging it

01:14:22   right now while I'm doing this with you so that it'll be ready for tonight and track my sleep.

01:14:28   I track my sleep every night with it. It's got the safety features for heart, and it doesn't get more

01:14:34   personal than that. It's actually warning you or helping you with your heart rate and tracking all

01:14:42   of that stuff. I love my watch. And to me, that's where they're going is just go by the number of

01:14:52   human senses. So we've got AirPods in our ears. We've got the watch on our wrist that's monitoring

01:14:59   our pulse and et cetera. The eyes are next. It just feels to me, in terms of what we'll be

01:15:07   talking about when you're on my show five years from now, way more likely to me that we're talking

01:15:12   about some kind of product that goes in front of our eyes or multiple products if AR and VR remain

01:15:17   separate than the car thing. That's just what I think. I just can't shake that feeling.

01:15:23   - Yeah. Well, and they're gonna keep going.

01:15:27   - Jim, I'm gonna wrap up. I really appreciate it that you took time out of your holiday weekend

01:15:37   'cause I know you're a busy man. - I love talking to you.

01:15:40   It's always so much fun. - I can't wait to see you, right?

01:15:44   Don't you feel like it's like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he's

01:15:51   got his finger on the Holy Grail and he could just roll it a little bit and his dad, Sean Connery,

01:15:58   is like, "Let it go." But I feel like we're that close to getting back to actually going to press

01:16:04   events again. It's crazy how long it's been since you and I have seen each other because we always

01:16:09   take time at these events to hang out a little bit.

01:16:12   - Yep. I know it is. I can't wait to see you again. Be fun.

01:16:16   All right. Have a good rest of your holiday weekend. All right. You too.