The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► - It started in kindergarten.

00:00:02 ◼   ► There was a loudspeaker,

00:00:03 ◼   ► this was like the second day of kindergarten,

00:00:05 ◼   ► and they said, Daniel Frommer, come to the,

00:00:09 ◼   ► whatever, the office.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Your parents are here to pick you up.

00:00:12 ◼   ► And I had no idea who they were talking to.

00:00:15 ◼   ► - So you didn't go.

00:00:16 ◼   ► - No, I didn't go.

00:00:17 ◼   ► I waited for like half an hour and I was crying

00:00:20 ◼   ► and I'm like, what's going on here?

00:00:21 ◼   ► And finally my mom showed up in the classroom.

00:00:24 ◼   ► She's like, I've been waiting here this whole time.

00:00:26 ◼   ► - I've never had a reason

00:00:27 ◼   ► to pronounce your surname before though.

00:00:29 ◼   ► I did not know that it was Frommer and not Frommer

00:00:32 ◼   ► because it's F-R-O-M-M-E-R.

00:00:36 ◼   ► - And I kind of roll with it.

00:00:37 ◼   ► I mean, it doesn't really matter that much.

00:00:39 ◼   ► I think that, you know, I have Fromdome

00:00:41 ◼   ► has been my online identity since like 1995.

00:00:45 ◼   ► - That makes 10 times more sense to me now though.

00:00:47 ◼   ► - Yeah. - As of today,

00:00:48 ◼   ► the fact that your handle like on Twitter, et cetera,

00:00:51 ◼   ► is Fromdome makes 10 times more sense to me.

00:00:54 ◼   ► Never really got it before.

00:00:55 ◼   ► I always thought you were a little,

00:00:57 ◼   ► maybe a little kooky or something.

00:00:58 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:59 ◼   ► You know what I do get?

00:01:00 ◼   ► I do get a significant amount,

00:01:02 ◼   ► especially like at a restaurant or something like that.

00:01:04 ◼   ► I do get grubber.

00:01:06 ◼   ► Which never, see now that doesn't make any sense to me

00:01:09 ◼   ► because I've only got one B and the rules of pronunciation.

00:01:13 ◼   ► It seems very clear to me that you should default to Gruber.

00:01:16 ◼   ► - That would make sense, but maybe, I don't know.

00:01:20 ◼   ► Fairly common, I would say.

00:01:21 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, but you know, I do sympathize though.

00:01:24 ◼   ► I see the confusion.

00:01:26 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm here with Dan Fromer.

00:01:28 ◼   ► You've had a busy year.

00:01:30 ◼   ► When did you leave Business Insider?

00:01:34 ◼   ► - That was last June.

00:01:37 ◼   ► - So it's about a year, that's exactly what I thought.

00:01:40 ◼   ► - It's been a year, yeah.

00:01:41 ◼   ► - And that is where I first got to know your work

00:01:44 ◼   ► on the Apple Beat, more or less, at Ali Insider.

00:01:48 ◼   ► - I think you linked to me the first month

00:01:50 ◼   ► that we started the site, and I think you ridiculed

00:01:55 ◼   ► something I wrote. I found the link not so long ago and I was like, "He was actually

00:02:01 ◼   ► right," but it didn't matter. It was cool. That's when I started reading Daring

00:02:06 ◼   ► Fireball 2. It was 2007 when we started. It was then Silicon Alley Insider. It was supposed

00:02:12 ◼   ► to be a blog about the New York tech scene. Then about three days in, we realized that

00:02:19 ◼   ► most of our traffic was coming from outside of New York. A lot of our best work was about

00:02:23 ◼   ► Google and Apple and Microsoft and the big tech companies.

00:02:26 ◼   ► So we're kind of stuck with the weird name for a long time.

00:02:30 ◼   ► But then they grew the site into kind of, well now as you know, it's like kind of

00:02:35 ◼   ► Huffington Post of all business stuff.

00:02:37 ◼   ► But …

00:02:38 ◼   ► It's kind of all over the place.

00:02:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:41 ◼   ► It's a good idea though because I do think, and I know this, you know, working out of

00:02:46 ◼   ► Philadelphia that for the most part, it doesn't matter where you're working.

00:02:49 ◼   ► In some ways, it's good to be removed from anything.

00:02:54 ◼   ► I find it easier to concentrate.

00:02:56 ◼   ► I don't have face-to-face meetings with people

00:02:58 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:02:59 ◼   ► But in other ways, it is good to be

00:03:01 ◼   ► physically close to sources.

00:03:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I personally struggle a little

00:03:06 ◼   ► with the office environment.

00:03:07 ◼   ► My first job was at Forbes, and I quickly got distracted,

00:03:12 ◼   ► and it was basically spending like 2/3 of the day

00:03:15 ◼   ► just goofing around talking to people.

00:03:16 ◼   ► So it's nice to kind of be removed sometimes.

00:03:21 ◼   ► The first three or four months I was doing SplatF,

00:03:24 ◼   ► I was getting so much work done because I was by myself

00:03:26 ◼   ► and no one was bothering me.

00:03:28 ◼   ► But at the same time, it's also cool to go out at nighttime

00:03:31 ◼   ► and last night I went to a dinner with a VC

00:03:34 ◼   ► and nine entrepreneur startup type people

00:03:38 ◼   ► and it was awesome.

00:03:39 ◼   ► It was like, wow, these people are all in the same room

00:03:40 ◼   ► and it's kind of cool being here with them.

00:03:42 ◼   ► So I don't know how much you want to talk about

00:03:44 ◼   ► what I'm doing. I joined ReadWriteWeb late last year as a contributor. One of the things

00:03:50 ◼   ► I'm doing there is looking at technology beyond just the typical tech industry, how

00:03:57 ◼   ► it applies to governments and civilization and the future as a whole.

00:04:05 ◼   ► The story I'm actually working on right now is about the data center industry in Iceland,

00:04:12 ◼   ► how they're basically, you know, Iceland totally screwed its economy a couple years ago and

00:04:18 ◼   ► they have all this renewable green power that's super cheap and what are they going to do

00:04:22 ◼   ► with it?

00:04:23 ◼   ► Well, they have these aluminum smelting plants which are not very nice and now they're trying

00:04:27 ◼   ► to rebuild themselves partially with data centers.

00:04:31 ◼   ► So it was cool.

00:04:32 ◼   ► I got to go to Iceland for a week for work and go underneath the waterfall in a hydroelectric

00:04:37 ◼   ► power plant and tour this brand new data center.

00:04:40 ◼   ► So that story should be coming out next week and that's some of the cool stuff that I've

00:04:46 ◼   ► gotten to do lately which is very fortunate.

00:04:48 ◼   ► I saw, I forget the name of it, I saw a documentary, I'm almost certain I got it through iTunes,

00:04:54 ◼   ► on the Iceland economy and how they were kind of ground zero for the whole 2008 worldwide

00:05:04 ◼   ► meltdown.

00:05:05 ◼   ► it was the epitome of everything that was wrong

00:05:08 ◼   ► before 2008 and the fact that Iceland is so small.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:05:14 ◼   ► It's like the population is the size of St. Louis,

00:05:18 ◼   ► but it's a whole country.

00:05:19 ◼   ► They have a president and a government and all this stuff.

00:05:23 ◼   ► They're playing way outside of their league.

00:05:27 ◼   ► There's actually a great book by Michael Lewis,

00:05:29 ◼   ► the guy who did Moneyball and The Big Short.

00:05:34 ◼   ► His book is called Boomerang and the first chapter

00:05:36 ◼   ► is just about how ridiculously out of control

00:05:39 ◼   ► the Icelandic banking business got

00:05:42 ◼   ► and that's pretty much what shattered their economy.

00:05:44 ◼   ► So it was cool going there.

00:05:47 ◼   ► It's kind of a weird place.

00:05:48 ◼   ► It's like light 24 hours a day during the summer

00:05:51 ◼   ► so I'm standing there, 2 a.m. on Friday night

00:05:56 ◼   ► having a little fun and eating my kebab sandwich

00:06:00 ◼   ► and the sun is out.

00:06:01 ◼   ► It's kind of weird. - That's mind blowing.

00:06:02 ◼   ► - Two a.m. in the sun is out.

00:06:05 ◼   ► I don't know, man, talk about jet lag.

00:06:07 ◼   ► - No, it was weird.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Although the funny thing is though,

00:06:10 ◼   ► the trip from New York is actually the same length

00:06:13 ◼   ► as basically flying to San Francisco.

00:06:15 ◼   ► So it's not even that,

00:06:17 ◼   ► it was kind of a lame overnight flight.

00:06:20 ◼   ► It was like I got there and my brain still thought

00:06:21 ◼   ► it was like two in the morning or something.

00:06:24 ◼   ► - I'm going down to like,

00:06:30 ◼   ► this is like second grade writing a report level

00:06:33 ◼   ► of knowledge of Iceland.

00:06:35 ◼   ► But is it true, I seem to recall this from grade school,

00:06:38 ◼   ► that Iceland is the beautiful one

00:06:42 ◼   ► and Greenland is the one that's desolate and icy

00:06:45 ◼   ► and that the Vikings gave them the opposite name

00:06:48 ◼   ► so that anybody who wanted to invade

00:06:50 ◼   ► would go to the wrong one.

00:06:51 ◼   ► And what a cool name for a country, Iceland.

00:06:54 ◼   ► - But they're a little defensive about it

00:06:57 ◼   ► because it hurts them in the sense that people think

00:07:01 ◼   ► it's inhospitable there and icy,

00:07:03 ◼   ► and so they're almost a little defensive.

00:07:07 ◼   ► They're like, no, no, no, no, it's not icy here, it's nice.

00:07:09 ◼   ► - Right, but they should roll with it though,

00:07:11 ◼   ► 'cause it's a badass name for a country.

00:07:13 ◼   ► - It is, they should.

00:07:14 ◼   ► I'd like to see that.

00:07:15 ◼   ► - And Fireland is still available,

00:07:19 ◼   ► although Josh Allen has long had that as his website.

00:07:26 ◼   ► Josh Allen, what he should do is he should get one of the,

00:07:29 ◼   ► do one of those things where you get like an oil rig

00:07:31 ◼   ► out in the middle of the ocean and make that a country.

00:07:34 ◼   ► - Or talk to Larry Ellison, do a joint venture.

00:07:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:07:38 ◼   ► Get Larry Ellis to do that.

00:07:40 ◼   ► - He would, I think he would be up for that.

00:07:41 ◼   ► I don't know if you watched the video of him

00:07:43 ◼   ► at the All Things D conference, but he is hilarious.

00:07:46 ◼   ► I had not, I did not expect that at all.

00:07:48 ◼   ► I mean, I expected, I know he's like,

00:07:50 ◼   ► he's friends with Steve Jobs, kind of a mean guy,

00:07:53 ◼   ► but he was hilarious.

00:07:54 ◼   ► He was just talking trash on everyone and in a really funny way.

00:07:58 ◼   ► It was pretty awesome.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And I'm with you because Oracle is just – I know exactly what they – well, I don't

00:08:05 ◼   ► know exactly what they do.

00:08:06 ◼   ► In the 10,000-foot perspective, I know what Oracle does.

00:08:09 ◼   ► They make databases and enterprise software.

00:08:13 ◼   ► But I just had never had any interest in it.

00:08:15 ◼   ► So I don't really follow them that well.

00:08:17 ◼   ► And I know that he's got a reputation for being a personality and that he's a bit

00:08:22 ◼   ► of a womanizer.

00:08:24 ◼   ► I know he's into the yachting, the yacht racing, and stuff like that.

00:08:28 ◼   ► This is a guy who with a couple of billion dollars knows what to do with a couple of

00:08:31 ◼   ► billion dollars.

00:08:33 ◼   ► I knew all that and I did know that he apparently was one of Steve Jobs, if not best friend,

00:08:40 ◼   ► one of his very closest friends.

00:08:42 ◼   ► But seeing that video, you can see why.

00:08:46 ◼   ► That's a guy who could keep Steve Jobs engaged.

00:08:49 ◼   ► Another reason why I could see is that when he was talking about his products, he knew

00:08:53 ◼   ► them front to back in the way that Steve Jobs also did that most tech execs just have no

00:08:58 ◼   ► idea.

00:08:59 ◼   ► It was that video you shared a while ago, I think it was Gil Amelio talking about some

00:09:05 ◼   ► of the old Apple stuff.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Clearly, someone gave him some talking points and maybe a deck or something and he's just

00:09:12 ◼   ► kind of trying to say stuff, words basically.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Whereas Larry was talking about these products like he designed them, like he was still coding

00:09:21 ◼   ► them or something like that.

00:09:22 ◼   ► - And he knew, he knows, you could see that he knows

00:09:26 ◼   ► how Oracle stuff can beat the competition

00:09:29 ◼   ► and how to spin it in a way that it makes it seem

00:09:32 ◼   ► like you're an idiot if you're going with anything

00:09:33 ◼   ► but the Oracle solution.

00:09:35 ◼   ► - I'm interested in seeing how they,

00:09:38 ◼   ► obviously the enterprise is their big thing.

00:09:41 ◼   ► I'm interested in seeing, that's one of those companies

00:09:43 ◼   ► that has the resources and the ambition,

00:09:46 ◼   ► and I thought Cisco might be like this too,

00:09:47 ◼   ► that they would eventually try to do something

00:09:50 ◼   ► more consumer, either with tablets or phones

00:09:55 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:09:57 ◼   ► Cisco tried with the flip thing and totally screwed that up.

00:09:59 ◼   ► - Oh my God, was that like the worst?

00:10:01 ◼   ► It was like, somebody should do a follow-up on that

00:10:04 ◼   ► because at the time, actually I thought

00:10:08 ◼   ► that they maybe bought them a little bit too late,

00:10:10 ◼   ► that it seemed like maybe flip's moment,

00:10:13 ◼   ► like their opportunity had passed.

00:10:15 ◼   ► - But you also think the iPod's opportunity has passed,

00:10:20 ◼   ► and they're still probably selling more iPods than any other company that's selling tablets

00:10:25 ◼   ► right now or something like that.

00:10:27 ◼   ► So.

00:10:28 ◼   ► Dave: No, I thought it's the same thing with Cisco and the Flip.

00:10:32 ◼   ► I thought maybe what they were – I thought what they would do is start with the Flip

00:10:35 ◼   ► and turn it into a phone.

00:10:37 ◼   ► And if – or if not an actual cell phone, at least internet-enabled because that's

00:10:42 ◼   ► what Cisco does, right?

00:10:44 ◼   ► So that's what I thought.

00:10:45 ◼   ► I just thought – I mean, whether it will be an actual telephone or not, I don't know.

00:10:49 ◼   ► But it's got to at least have networking and hopefully like 3G networking so you can like

00:10:53 ◼   ► upload stuff from anywhere.

00:10:55 ◼   ► Right?

00:10:56 ◼   ► And, and like almost like maybe like, you know, in broad terms, turn these flip video

00:11:01 ◼   ► cameras into the video equivalent of Instagram, right out of the box.

00:11:06 ◼   ► As soon as you open it up, you can get videos from others and watch them on the thing.

00:11:10 ◼   ► And as soon as you take videos, you can share them, you know, something like that.

00:11:13 ◼   ► And instead, I don't know what the hell they did.

00:11:15 ◼   ► And that's the thing we keep coming back to,

00:11:20 ◼   ► which is that the hardware companies

00:11:22 ◼   ► really struggle with software,

00:11:24 ◼   ► and that's where Apple, I think,

00:11:25 ◼   ► and some of the companies like Instagram

00:11:28 ◼   ► are really fortunate,

00:11:30 ◼   ► is that they don't suck at software.

00:11:32 ◼   ► They're really awesome at it.

00:11:34 ◼   ► I mean, if you look at Cisco,

00:11:35 ◼   ► the way I used to look,

00:11:37 ◼   ► so covering Cisco was one of my beats at Forbes,

00:11:38 ◼   ► like long ago, my first tech writing job.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And they would do an acquisition every two weeks,

00:11:42 ◼   ► It was random stuff. It was like security cameras and all kinds of crazy stuff.

00:11:46 ◼   ► The justification for all this was, well, Cisco's core business is still selling routers and switches.

00:11:53 ◼   ► So any time they can create more internet traffic, more demand for bandwidth, Cisco wins.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Same way, any time Apple can use iTunes to sell more iPods and iPhones and iPads, Apple wins.

00:12:05 ◼   ► Apple wins.

00:12:06 ◼   ► So that's why with Flip, I'm like, oh, this is exactly what you just said.

00:12:10 ◼   ► This creates more video traffic.

00:12:13 ◼   ► You'll need a better Linksys router at home and your ISP will need to spend $40 billion

00:12:18 ◼   ► on more Cisco switches and stuff like that.

00:12:21 ◼   ► But then the software comes into it and that's where they just got hosed.

00:12:25 ◼   ► the fact that camera camcorder is an app on an iPhone now,

00:12:30 ◼   ► completely, beyond the fact that it makes

00:12:35 ◼   ► the flip camera itself useless,

00:12:38 ◼   ► Cisco can't build really cool software

00:12:40 ◼   ► to put on the flip either, so.

00:12:42 ◼   ► - Right, and it didn't take long,

00:12:44 ◼   ► and I forget which iPhone it was,

00:12:46 ◼   ► but it wasn't the first one or two,

00:12:48 ◼   ► I mean, the first one didn't even shoot video,

00:12:50 ◼   ► unless I'm having a stroke here.

00:12:51 ◼   ► - No, no, no, it was a 3GS was the one

00:12:53 ◼   ► that started with the video,

00:12:55 ◼   ► That's when it kind of started, although it wasn't that good.

00:12:57 ◼   ► And it wasn't HD yet.

00:12:59 ◼   ► And then the next one, I guess the iPhone 4 shot HD video.

00:13:04 ◼   ► And that's where it got close.

00:13:06 ◼   ► And then you could do like a comparison between the iPhone 4's video and the then top of the

00:13:11 ◼   ► line Flip HD video.

00:13:13 ◼   ► And the Flip one, I remember, had better color, especially outside.

00:13:16 ◼   ► I mean, most people would agree it had better color.

00:13:19 ◼   ► It looked a little bit less camera phony.

00:13:23 ◼   ► But it was really small.

00:13:25 ◼   ► I mean, like in the grand scheme of video quality,

00:13:28 ◼   ► it was close.

00:13:29 ◼   ► It was close enough that they were clearly

00:13:32 ◼   ► in the same ballpark.

00:13:33 ◼   ► And just being in the same ballpark,

00:13:34 ◼   ► it's like why in the world would you carry this thing

00:13:36 ◼   ► that's an inch thick

00:13:38 ◼   ► if you've already got your phone with you?

00:13:39 ◼   ► - The other thing I really liked is that

00:13:41 ◼   ► it automatically rotated the video for you.

00:13:44 ◼   ► So it was true widescreen and not what I call

00:13:48 ◼   ► tall screen video, which is kind of,

00:13:52 ◼   ► it looks fine when you're watching it back on an iPhone,

00:13:54 ◼   ► but the minute it goes on YouTube or something like that.

00:13:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, totally.

00:13:58 ◼   ► - It's absurd.

00:13:59 ◼   ► - But it's a nicer way to hold the device.

00:14:02 ◼   ► - Totally, exactly, yeah.

00:14:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, like I do kind of secretly wish

00:14:05 ◼   ► that Apple will figure out a way

00:14:06 ◼   ► to let you shoot a widescreen video

00:14:09 ◼   ► while holding the phone up and down.

00:14:13 ◼   ► - I thought about that the other day.

00:14:15 ◼   ► I don't know if they would do that.

00:14:16 ◼   ► That seems like one of those things where they're like,

00:14:18 ◼   ► "No, turn the phone."

00:14:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:14:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I see it both ways,

00:14:22 ◼   ► because on the other hand,

00:14:23 ◼   ► it really makes intuitive sense that however you're holding the phone is

00:14:27 ◼   ► exactly how you're shooting the video.

00:14:29 ◼   ► Right, are they going to switch it for still pictures? No, because still pictures, a lot of them you do

00:14:33 ◼   ► one in

00:14:33 ◼   ► portrait format. So I want to talk to you about this Twitter stuff

00:14:38 ◼   ► because... Absolutely, I think it's the biggest... Let's talk about that.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Well, and this is something that you wrote at, you wrote this one at Splat F, right?

00:14:45 ◼   ► That's right. Well, I just want to mention this, this is another thing.

00:14:48 ◼   ► So when you left, you started Splat F right when you

00:14:52 ◼   ► left

00:14:53 ◼   ► Alley insider business insider, whatever the hell they call it, right or did you have it beforehand?

00:14:59 ◼   ► So I kind of got into tech writing by accident. I

00:15:02 ◼   ► Originally wanted to be a radio and TV reporter and I like I had our college radio show called from wing at the mouth from

00:15:09 ◼   ► Like 3 30 to 5 a.m. That was pretty sweet. And then I

00:15:12 ◼   ► Had a great internship at NPR station in Chicago where I was interviewing like Mayor Daley and Barack Obama and Rod

00:15:21 ◼   ► Blagojevich and all these political people.

00:15:23 ◼   ► Really?

00:15:24 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:15:25 ◼   ► That was like my first ... It was through my school, so it was kind of an internship,

00:15:28 ◼   ► but then I continued doing it during the summer.

00:15:30 ◼   ► That was really fun.

00:15:33 ◼   ► I needed to get out of Chicago.

00:15:35 ◼   ► I grew up there and I went to college there and it was time to get out.

00:15:38 ◼   ► I moved to New York and I applied to basically every job that existed.

00:15:42 ◼   ► I applied to work at Frommer's Travel and they thought it was a joke.

00:15:46 ◼   ► I think the first job interview I had in New York was at the Wall Street Journal for a

00:15:51 ◼   ► job that was basically copying and pasting stuff from the print CMS into the web CMS.

00:15:56 ◼   ► And I didn't work there.

00:15:58 ◼   ► I ended up getting a job at Forbes writing about tech.

00:16:01 ◼   ► So that's how I got into it.

00:16:02 ◼   ► But I always wanted to kind of start my own thing and do my own thing.

00:16:06 ◼   ► This is a story I've told a couple of times.

00:16:10 ◼   ► My dad was in the advertising industry in Chicago when I was growing up.

00:16:14 ◼   ► He left his big firm to start his own agency.

00:16:17 ◼   ► I thought that was really cool, working for yourself, small shop, a few people, get to

00:16:23 ◼   ► go on a three-week road trip around France if you want to in the summer, that kind of

00:16:26 ◼   ► stuff.

00:16:27 ◼   ► My goal was always to do something on my own.

00:16:31 ◼   ► The last year or so at business insider, I started to think about how I could plot my

00:16:39 ◼   ► exit there.

00:16:41 ◼   ► I wanted to start a bunch of sites.

00:16:44 ◼   ► I started this travel site in 2004, but I never really did anything with it.

00:16:48 ◼   ► I wanted to start a food site and a cooking show and all this stuff.

00:16:51 ◼   ► But I realized that the thing that I was most known for and probably did the best was the

00:16:57 ◼   ► tech stuff.

00:16:58 ◼   ► The first site I did after I left was Splat F. I did that pretty full-time for like four

00:17:06 ◼   ► months.

00:17:08 ◼   ► I wrote three or four long posts a day and it was fun.

00:17:14 ◼   ► And then the company that I was working with for the ads, this company called Say Media,

00:17:20 ◼   ► they acquired ReadWriteWeb and they wanted me to work with them on that so I joined them

00:17:24 ◼   ► as a contributor for that too.

00:17:26 ◼   ► So I'm kind of all over the place right now.

00:17:28 ◼   ► I'm actually starting also another company this summer doing travel apps for the iPhone.

00:17:34 ◼   ► But I don't have anything to say about that yet because I just started like two days ago.

00:17:38 ◼   ► So anyway, so we were talking about SplatF and Twitter.

00:17:42 ◼   ► But…

00:17:43 ◼   ► Well, and the one thing I just… before we go on to the Twitter stuff, I thought it was

00:17:46 ◼   ► an interesting name when you started it because I always called… it's the references to

00:17:51 ◼   ► the cloverleaf on the command key.

00:17:53 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:17:54 ◼   ► Some people call that Splat and they'll say it like to do command F. I say command

00:17:59 ◼   ► though.

00:18:00 ◼   ► Like if you want to do the shortcut for find, I have always said command F.

00:18:04 ◼   ► So and that was breaking a habit I had from my childhood of saying open up yeah open apple f

00:18:12 ◼   ► and then I really really had to I forget when I broke that habit but it was it was like in the

00:18:17 ◼   ► late 90s and I finally switched to saying command command f command g for find again uh I've never

00:18:23 ◼   ► heard splat I've heard I guess I've heard people call it splat but I've never really and I didn't

00:18:28 ◼   ► know I wasn't sure if that was something that was unique to you know I was like did my dad make that

00:18:34 ◼   ► up because his business partner called it that too.

00:18:39 ◼   ► And that's just what we called it around the house.

00:18:42 ◼   ► I mean, we started using our first Mac was an LC at home

00:18:43 ◼   ► in like 1994 or something like that, or three, I don't know.

00:18:48 ◼   ► And then we had like a 2SI and 2CI and I had my first

00:18:52 ◼   ► Performa and all that stuff.

00:18:56 ◼   ► Actually found some really great old Mac stuff that I'm going

00:19:00 ◼   ► to post, I think maybe next week, last time I was home in

00:19:02 ◼   ► in Chicago, but I'm not going to spoil it.

00:19:07 ◼   ► But anyway, yeah, we call it the Splat Key, I don't know why.

00:19:10 ◼   ► So before I, I was trying to find a name for my tech site.

00:19:12 ◼   ► I didn't want to just host it at FromDome.com

00:19:16 ◼   ► or Dan Fromer.com or something like that.

00:19:19 ◼   ► I wanted it to be something that I could extend away from me

00:19:22 ◼   ► a little if I ever wanted to grow it,

00:19:26 ◼   ► if I ever wanted to hire a staff or if someone ever sued me

00:19:28 ◼   ► and wanted to bankrupt me or something like that.

00:19:28 ◼   ► So I Googled Splat and it showed up as like,

00:19:33 ◼   ► someone had written a website about it being,

00:19:36 ◼   ► or maybe not a website, but maybe it's mentioned

00:19:38 ◼   ► as like an alternative name on the command key

00:19:41 ◼   ► Wikipedia page or something like that.

00:19:43 ◼   ► So I'm like, all right, it's not just me.

00:19:45 ◼   ► I'll go with this.

00:19:48 ◼   ► It was a short domain, it was available,

00:19:50 ◼   ► it was eight bucks from GoDaddy, so I went with it.

00:19:54 ◼   ► It's kind of weird, but people are like,

00:19:56 ◼   ► Dude, what's Splaff?

00:19:57 ◼   ► How's Splaff going?

00:19:59 ◼   ► And I said, no, it's actually Spla-a-f.

00:20:02 ◼   ► - I like it, I like it as a name.

00:20:04 ◼   ► And it's also, it's very difficult

00:20:05 ◼   ► to find a sixcharacter.com.

00:20:07 ◼   ► - Right, and actually the Twitter account was not available.

00:20:11 ◼   ► And I was like, oh man, this sucks.

00:20:13 ◼   ► But then I found out that I knew the people

00:20:15 ◼   ► who had the Twitter account.

00:20:16 ◼   ► They were a startup in New York called Single Platform.

00:20:20 ◼   ► So if you like, if you take a bunch of letters out of it.

00:20:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, Single Platform.

00:20:25 ◼   ► single time.

00:20:26 ◼   ► And they were using it as like a test account to like tweet out some automated list.

00:20:30 ◼   ► So I emailed the CEO who I had met a couple of times and I was like, "Hey, can I have

00:20:35 ◼   ► this Twitter account?"

00:20:36 ◼   ► And so yeah, they hooked me up with that.

00:20:38 ◼   ► So that was pretty sweet.

00:20:39 ◼   ► They just got bought for many millions of dollars.

00:20:41 ◼   ► So good for them.

00:20:43 ◼   ► Hopefully it's because of me.

00:20:45 ◼   ► My last question about the name is what is the F in reference to?

00:20:50 ◼   ► Is it specifically about the find command which Splat F is the universal shortcut for

00:20:54 ◼   ► or is the F for Fromer?

00:20:57 ◼   ► - It's for Fromer.

00:20:58 ◼   ► And that's kind of my, yeah.

00:21:03 ◼   ► I really want to keep it,

00:21:04 ◼   ► now that I've thought about it

00:21:05 ◼   ► and I've been doing it for a while,

00:21:06 ◼   ► I want to keep it basically my site

00:21:08 ◼   ► and only my site forever, you know?

00:21:09 ◼   ► Kind of just do it as much or as little time

00:21:12 ◼   ► as it can afford. - Oh, that will never work out.

00:21:15 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughs)

00:21:17 ◼   ► Yeah, right, exactly.

00:21:18 ◼   ► - That's got no leg.

00:21:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, it does. - One guy doing a site.

00:21:20 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:21:21 ◼   ► But it's cool.

00:21:24 ◼   ► it's find or it's full screen in some app so I was like oh if I have a

00:21:27 ◼   ► conference I could call it splat f full screen or so nobody should ever use that

00:21:30 ◼   ► for full screen it should never be anything other than find you time does

00:21:34 ◼   ► that tell me the apps that do that and I'm gonna have them I think it's VLC oh

00:21:38 ◼   ► that's horrible yeah oh my god well of course it's VLC she's yeah right yeah I

00:21:43 ◼   ► remember the first version of text mate had like a command like a wasn't print

00:21:51 ◼   ► but it was something related to print that that they they bound to option P and

00:21:56 ◼   ► You can't have commands that are only option something because how else would you that's how you type pie, right?

00:22:03 ◼   ► Like it was so crazy like

00:22:05 ◼   ► And it was in Greece. They must be going nuts, right? I have no idea

00:22:10 ◼   ► it's like it's just one of those weird things where it's because I've I'm so ingrained in the Mac and Apple that

00:22:19 ◼   ► There's like a grammar to it

00:22:21 ◼   ► Like when you hear somebody who speaks English as a second language and you just forgive all of these grammatical mistakes

00:22:28 ◼   ► There's a grammar to picking

00:22:31 ◼   ► Command key shortcuts that fit with the platform and somebody who's like new to writing Mac software

00:22:37 ◼   ► Will get it all wrong and it to me

00:22:40 ◼   ► It's it you just like pull down the menu and look at the commands and the shortcuts and it's like oh my god

00:22:45 ◼   ► You're nuts command F for something other than find totally

00:22:49 ◼   ► I remember switching from Quark to, I don't know,

00:22:53 ◼   ► kind of when the web started coming out

00:22:54 ◼   ► and I was using other software to do web graphics

00:22:57 ◼   ► and not just print stuff.

00:22:58 ◼   ► And all the commands I knew from Quark

00:23:00 ◼   ► were totally different things than whatever the other,

00:23:03 ◼   ► I don't know if it was Photoshop or something else.

00:23:04 ◼   ► It was totally confusing.

00:23:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:23:06 ◼   ► - 'Cause everything made sense.

00:23:07 ◼   ► It was like, you know, run around, all this stuff.

00:23:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, the one that always got me,

00:23:13 ◼   ► and I was always a Quark guy too, was that,

00:23:16 ◼   ► And it was also a function of the relatively smaller displays of the era.

00:23:21 ◼   ► That a huge, huge shortcut in all of those apps

00:23:25 ◼   ► was the ability to turn the cursor into the hand,

00:23:28 ◼   ► so you could drag the canvas around.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Ah, interesting.

00:23:31 ◼   ► And in Quark, you held down the Option key.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And then the cursor would turn into a hand,

00:23:36 ◼   ► no matter what you were doing, what mode you were in.

00:23:38 ◼   ► And you could drag the page around the screen.

00:23:42 ◼   ► That's cool.

00:23:42 ◼   ► And in all the Adobe apps, it was the space bar.

00:23:45 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. And I could never ever get used to that because I spent 90% of my time in quark and 10% of

00:23:51 ◼   ► my time in say Photoshop or Illustrator. And, and always when I went to do that would hold down the

00:23:56 ◼   ► option key and click and instead I'm like changing a bezier curve or something like that.

00:24:00 ◼   ► You know, Adobe still screws with you like that, like that. I have like a real Photoshop at home,

00:24:07 ◼   ► but then at work, I had Photoshop elements. And the key to do so if you're selecting an area in

00:24:14 ◼   ► Photoshop and you want it to be a perfect square, you hold the shift key down, right?

00:24:19 ◼   ► That makes it square.

00:24:20 ◼   ► But in Photoshop Elements, it's the control key.

00:24:26 ◼   ► I don't know why.

00:24:27 ◼   ► Maybe they're pulling that from Windows or something.

00:24:28 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:24:29 ◼   ► But it just completely throws me off every single time, which was on a daily basis.

00:24:33 ◼   ► I was trying to crop photos at work.

00:24:35 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: Well, the other thing that made the Quark version of that shortcut more logical

00:24:40 ◼   ► was even if you were in the middle of typing a sentence, so you're in text editing mode,

00:24:44 ◼   ► If you held down the option key, the cursor would change to a hand and you could drag.

00:24:48 ◼   ► With Adobe's where you held down the space bar, if you were typing something and you

00:24:52 ◼   ► hit space, it's going to insert a space.

00:24:55 ◼   ► You had to leave text editing mode before you could actually even use the command.

00:25:00 ◼   ► So it always made me angry.

00:25:02 ◼   ► All right.

00:25:03 ◼   ► So we're going to talk about Twitter.

00:25:04 ◼   ► But before we do that, I want to do the first – thank our first sponsor.

00:25:10 ◼   ► Our first sponsor is a terrific, wonderful iPad app called the Adventures of Alex Electricity.

00:25:19 ◼   ► And it's the first installment of what's going to be a series of interactive stories for

00:25:23 ◼   ► the iPad.

00:25:24 ◼   ► It tells the story of Alex, a smart, inquisitive boy who wants to discover the origins of electricity.

00:25:31 ◼   ► So is it a game?

00:25:32 ◼   ► Is it a book?

00:25:34 ◼   ► It's sort of all of the above.

00:25:36 ◼   ► It is really, really well done.

00:25:38 ◼   ► It is obviously it's for children.

00:25:40 ◼   ► But I think it's almost like a Pixar movie in that it's also easily.

00:25:45 ◼   ► I went through the whole thing and had a blast.

00:25:50 ◼   ► The artwork is all hand-drawn, all retina quality.

00:25:53 ◼   ► The music is so good that it's actually sold on its own in the iTunes store as a soundtrack

00:26:00 ◼   ► and absolutely deserves to be pulled out like that.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Terrific music.

00:26:07 ◼   ► So yeah, you're learning about science, you're learning about electricity, but it's just

00:26:12 ◼   ► fun. It is like, I don't even know where to draw the line on this app between where they're

00:26:16 ◼   ► calling it an interactive book or a game, an educational game. It is a perfect, perfect

00:26:23 ◼   ► example of the sort of thing you can do on the iPad that I just don't think you could

00:26:28 ◼   ► have done before. It is absolutely not just like a static book with a couple of buttons

00:26:33 ◼   ► you can click to play sounds. It is interactive, you move stuff around, but it involves reading,

00:26:38 ◼   ► you touch something, everything you touch shows up, the words show up on screen to help

00:26:42 ◼   ► kids learn to read. A whole bunch of fun. Really, really good. $4.99 in the App Store

00:26:50 ◼   ► for the iPad and it's called the Adventures of Alex Electricity. You can learn more about

00:26:56 ◼   ► it at a website, the adventures of Alex.com. Anybody with grade school kids absolutely

00:27:05 ◼   ► go look at this app, you're going to love it, your kids are going to love it. And I

00:27:10 ◼   ► thank them for sponsoring the show.

00:27:11 ◼   ► Jared Polin Is that cool though? I don't have kids, but

00:27:14 ◼   ► I remember, you know, yeah, being a kid, not yet. But being I remember being a kid and,

00:27:19 ◼   ► you know, books were like 20 bucks, they were, you know, of course, they were static, we're

00:27:23 ◼   ► lucky you know they were color and they were cool but the stuff the kids get

00:27:27 ◼   ► these days they're really they're really spoiled oh absolutely and I'm telling

00:27:31 ◼   ► for $4.99 and it is a remarkable the artwork is astounding I mean it is easy

00:27:37 ◼   ► I mean I I would go to a bookstore and buy the equivalent book for my kid for

00:27:41 ◼   ► 15 bucks with this level of artwork and the size you get you know an iPad size

00:27:45 ◼   ► book easily 15 bucks for a kid's book it is way more way more engaging I think oh

00:27:53 ◼   ► Oh, and I should also add, I honestly have no idea how big our Spanish speaking contention

00:27:59 ◼   ► is, but the entire thing is available in both Spanish and English.

00:28:04 ◼   ► So I don't know, maybe it's even a good way for kids to start learning Spanish.

00:28:07 ◼   ► Nice, yeah.

00:28:09 ◼   ► Amazingly well done, though.

00:28:11 ◼   ► It's just incredibly – the production values are just absolutely top tier.

00:28:16 ◼   ► It could not be better done.

00:28:17 ◼   ► It's a terrific app.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Anyway, Twitter.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Cool.

00:28:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, so let's talk about Twitter.

00:28:23 ◼   ► - You wrote a piece on Splat F right before the July 4th

00:28:28 ◼   ► called Understanding Twitter.

00:28:30 ◼   ► I don't even wanna begin to summarize it

00:28:31 ◼   ► because I thought it was, you just nailed it,

00:28:33 ◼   ► but I'll let you take it from here.

00:28:35 ◼   ► - Sure, and so the context is that once again,

00:28:39 ◼   ► there's this kind of shitstorm of,

00:28:43 ◼   ► so Twitter, oh, Twitter posted a blog post, oh no,

00:28:45 ◼   ► end of the world coming.

00:28:47 ◼   ► And of course, in typical Twitter fashion,

00:28:51 ◼   ► It's a little vague, it's kind of written in the California vernacular.

00:28:56 ◼   ► We don't really know what they mean.

00:29:00 ◼   ► But they're kind of suggesting that, they're kind of reiterating that they don't think people should be building Twitter clients anymore.

00:29:03 ◼   ► And that there's changes coming to the API and all that stuff.

00:29:11 ◼   ► API terms.

00:29:16 ◼   ► And of course, no one knows what that means because they don't really spell it out.

00:29:17 ◼   ► They will someday, I'm sure, and then they'll probably massage it again there.

00:29:22 ◼   ► But the fundamental question is what's happening to this beloved Twitter of ours, right?

00:29:27 ◼   ► In the post is, the post from Twitter was ominous, I thought.

00:29:32 ◼   ► And part of what makes, I thought was ominous wasn't that it flat out said things like,

00:29:36 ◼   ► this is going away or that's going away.

00:29:38 ◼   ► But it, like you alluded to this, but the tone of it was this sort of marketing ease

00:29:44 ◼   ► double speak, right?

00:29:47 ◼   ► - And part of that is just that's kind of the way

00:29:49 ◼   ► they talk out there, which is fine, it's cool.

00:29:52 ◼   ► And I know Michael Sippy, the guy who wrote it.

00:29:54 ◼   ► - Right, I do too. - I see what his name's on.

00:29:56 ◼   ► I don't know how much of it he actually wrote.

00:29:57 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm sure you've known him for a long time.

00:30:00 ◼   ► He's a great dude.

00:30:01 ◼   ► So I don't know what Twitter's gonna do.

00:30:05 ◼   ► But the post that I wrote,

00:30:07 ◼   ► and the post that I like to write are,

00:30:11 ◼   ► my background was as a business journalist.

00:30:14 ◼   ► And a lot of the writing and discussion that we do about Apple and apps and startups and

00:30:21 ◼   ► products is about the product and the design and the user experience and that's wonderful.

00:30:28 ◼   ► But there's also a business involved for a lot of these companies. Now, not all of them.

00:30:34 ◼   ► The model right now in Silicon Valley is get a million bucks, get 10 million users, sell

00:30:40 ◼   ► company for 50 million bucks or something like that. If you're lucky, you get a billion

00:30:45 ◼   ► dollars. If you're not lucky, you get 20 million and a job at Facebook or something like that.

00:30:52 ◼   ► For many years, that was kind of maybe what Twitter was angling for. They could raise

00:30:59 ◼   ► basically unlimited amounts of money at increasing valuations. No one was getting screwed. People

00:31:05 ◼   ► People were getting rich, in fact, early employees, executives, founders, that kind of stuff.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And there was absolutely no pressure to build a business because maybe someday every minute

00:31:19 ◼   ► that they spent trying to build a business in 2009 would have been wasted.

00:31:25 ◼   ► Their mission at that point was to get to whatever, 100 million, a billion users or

00:31:29 ◼   ► something like that.

00:31:30 ◼   ► And that's still part of their mission that they talk about.

00:31:33 ◼   ► But at some point, it seemed that Twitter made a decision.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And actually, there's a video where Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, is talking about this

00:31:42 ◼   ► where they realized, "You know what?

00:31:44 ◼   ► No.

00:31:45 ◼   ► We actually want to keep Twitter to ourselves.

00:31:47 ◼   ► We don't want to sell to Google.

00:31:49 ◼   ► We don't want to sell to Facebook.

00:31:51 ◼   ► We want to keep Twitter as Twitter."

00:31:53 ◼   ► So you could raise money forever and ever and ever to do that, but now especially they

00:32:00 ◼   ► have to start building...

00:32:01 ◼   ► Well, you can't do it forever and ever and ever.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:03 ◼   ► Okay, I retract.

00:32:08 ◼   ► You can't because then what happens?

00:32:10 ◼   ► So right now it's time to build a business.

00:32:13 ◼   ► It's time to figure out whether Twitter

00:32:17 ◼   ► can make money for itself or not.

00:32:20 ◼   ► And right now they've had all these different

00:32:22 ◼   ► business models that were an opportunity for them.

00:32:25 ◼   ► I wrote an article in what, 2009 or something

00:32:29 ◼   ► where Biz Stone was talking about how they're going to start

00:32:29 ◼   ► selling premium pro services at some point.

00:32:33 ◼   ► Well, that never happened.

00:32:35 ◼   ► But there's any number of different business models that Twitter could choose and they've

00:32:39 ◼   ► chosen advertising.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Part of that is because of the audience size they have.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Part of it is because Dick Costolo has been trying to do real-time social advertising

00:32:48 ◼   ► forever.

00:32:49 ◼   ► That was kind of his thing at FeedBurner.

00:32:51 ◼   ► That's what I've heard.

00:32:52 ◼   ► He was working on a Google after FeedBurner was acquired.

00:32:55 ◼   ► And now that's kind of the thing that he could probably do the best at Twitter.

00:33:00 ◼   ► So the comments in my post, some of them were really good,

00:33:05 ◼   ► talking about how there's all kinds of different other business models,

00:33:08 ◼   ► selling data mining and all that kind of stuff.

00:33:13 ◼   ► But clearly the business model that Twitter has chosen is advertising.

00:33:16 ◼   ► And that means that there's going to have to be some changes to Twitter.

00:33:23 ◼   ► that as someone who's sitting in front of Twitter probably for 10 hours a day, not actively,

00:33:30 ◼   ► but it's sitting there open on my computer for 10, 12 hours a day, I personally hope

00:33:35 ◼   ► they don't change it, degrade it to a point that I don't find it interesting and amusing

00:33:40 ◼   ► and useful anymore.

00:33:41 ◼   ► But certainly they're going to have to do some things to attempt to make money because

00:33:47 ◼   ► they weren't before.

00:33:48 ◼   ► So, and there's something, I am like you, I am personally very invested in Twitter as

00:33:56 ◼   ► something I use all day.

00:33:58 ◼   ► And it also makes me a lot of money.

00:34:01 ◼   ► I don't know about you, but the traffic that I get from Twitter, you know, it doesn't pay

00:34:06 ◼   ► my rent, but it, you know, buys dinner a couple days a week, you know, once a month or something

00:34:11 ◼   ► like that.

00:34:12 ◼   ► I, you know, that is true.

00:34:13 ◼   ► I assume though, I'm not quite sure though whether the, I mean, Twitter URLs are at the

00:34:20 ◼   ► top of my incoming referral list every day.

00:34:23 ◼   ► I mean, I honestly should probably rejigger my analytics to not even count them because

00:34:29 ◼   ► they're so disproportionate.

00:34:30 ◼   ► You know, Tico links are always at the top.

00:34:33 ◼   ► I don't know though if Twitter didn't exist or went away or changed in a way such that

00:34:38 ◼   ► the Daring Fireball audience would no longer use it.

00:34:43 ◼   ► I'm not sure that it would decrease my readership, it's just that I think people would get to

00:34:46 ◼   ► it in a different way.

00:34:47 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:34:48 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:34:49 ◼   ► But it's certainly there.

00:34:50 ◼   ► And of course, like, well, we can't really, we will never know, you know, but where I'm

00:34:55 ◼   ► more concerned about it professionally is that I get a remarkable amount of the stuff

00:35:00 ◼   ► that I link to from the people I follow on Twitter.

00:35:05 ◼   ► Like I absolutely when I see somebody who, you know, has, you know, is that that that

00:35:11 ◼   ► logic you go through when you decide should I follow this person or not like you get you

00:35:15 ◼   ► see their at username in a comment stream or a you know a conversation in Twitter parlance

00:35:22 ◼   ► and hey this person seems interesting and I'll load up their profile and look at like

00:35:26 ◼   ► maybe their last day's worth of tweets and if I see two links in there like last just

00:35:31 ◼   ► within the last day to things like wow that's interesting maybe I should post that to during

00:35:34 ◼   ► Fireball. Boom, that's a follow. And after years of this, I have, you know, my incoming

00:35:41 ◼   ► Twitter stream is, to me, a gold mine of material. I don't know what I would do without that.

00:35:49 ◼   ► I honestly…

00:35:50 ◼   ► I haven't touched an RSS reader since 2008, maybe. You know, it's all Twitter for me.

00:35:55 ◼   ► And I unsubscribe from pretty much every newsletter I was getting. It's really kind of my main

00:36:04 ◼   ► incoming source of information.

00:36:09 ◼   ► So news, entertainment, social,

00:36:10 ◼   ► I find music and videos to watch on their books

00:36:14 ◼   ► to read, all kinds of stuff.

00:36:18 ◼   ► So it's really an amazing service.

00:36:19 ◼   ► And I think you'll agree with me,

00:36:22 ◼   ► I really hope that whatever changes happen,

00:36:24 ◼   ► don't ruin Twitter.

00:36:28 ◼   ► And I think they're actually sensitive to that too.

00:36:30 ◼   ► The pushback that I got was that, to my article,

00:36:33 ◼   ► from concerned people was,

00:36:38 ◼   ► well, Twitter cares about the product more

00:36:41 ◼   ► than they care about the revenue.

00:36:43 ◼   ► Now, I don't know if that means Twitter cares

00:36:46 ◼   ► about the product vision that they have

00:36:48 ◼   ► that may be widely different than today's Twitter,

00:36:52 ◼   ► or that they care about what exists today

00:36:57 ◼   ► in the whole developer ecosystem

00:36:59 ◼   ► and excellent apps like Tweetbot and that sort of stuff.

00:37:03 ◼   ► Because the end, secondarily, the other reason that I'm so personally invested in it is the

00:37:07 ◼   ► literal social aspect of it, where not talking about it as an RSS feed or a way of finding

00:37:16 ◼   ► information, but the way that I stay in touch with friends who I don't see very frequently.

00:37:21 ◼   ► And it seems crazy. And at the beginning, back in 2006, when I first signed up, I never

00:37:27 ◼   ► really anticipated that it would grow in that way, that I would feel like it's the way that

00:37:31 ◼   ► I stay connected to a lot of friends in a way like I've often described it as the modern

00:37:38 ◼   ► day water cooler for the work day.

00:37:40 ◼   ► The brilliance of Twitter is that in hindsight, I mean it really, and I think so many of the

00:37:46 ◼   ► world's best ideas and ideas that have gone on to change the world and make, you know,

00:37:50 ◼   ► tons of money for somebody somewhere along the line, in hindsight are like head-slappingly

00:37:56 ◼   ► obvious.

00:37:57 ◼   ► Twitter conceptually is one of the simplest things ever conceived. You sign up, you choose

00:38:05 ◼   ► whose messages to see, and everybody who's involved can send these 140 character or fewer

00:38:13 ◼   ► messages that are nothing but text, and the only people who see them are the people who've

00:38:17 ◼   ► chosen to see those from you. That's it. And obviously it's evolved a bit since then, and

00:38:24 ◼   ► taking it in new directions now with these embedded things. But they're still kind of

00:38:30 ◼   ► doing it kind of cleverly, where like, like one of the new features they've rolled out

00:38:33 ◼   ► on the website is if you link to a Kickstarter campaign, and it recognizes that the URL is

00:38:40 ◼   ► pointing to Kickstarter slash, you know, whatever the the URL is for that campaign, it instead

00:38:45 ◼   ► of just showing you a link, it shows you a little embedded. I don't know what you would

00:38:52 ◼   ► call it a little… what would you call it?

00:38:56 ◼   ► I haven't seen the kick start.

00:38:58 ◼   ► I haven't seen it.

00:38:59 ◼   ► It's like an embedded…

00:39:02 ◼   ► Is it the video?

00:39:03 ◼   ► Because if you do a YouTube video, now you can actually watch the video straight in the

00:39:07 ◼   ► stream even in the iPhone client, which was kind of cool.

00:39:10 ◼   ► Like a little template.

00:39:11 ◼   ► It's a little template with information about the campaign.

00:39:14 ◼   ► Oh, that's cool.

00:39:15 ◼   ► So it's like a little widget or something.

00:39:16 ◼   ► Yeah, a widget is probably perfect.

00:39:18 ◼   ► And it's sort of exactly along the same lines.

00:39:20 ◼   ► A lot of stuff is evolving in this way where if you know what it is and it's a known thing,

00:39:26 ◼   ► a type of thing, instead of just showing it as something like a URL, which really in the

00:39:33 ◼   ► original vision of the web was never even meant to be user exposed.

00:39:37 ◼   ► I mean that's like a developer thing, but we've just – they're so useful that we've

00:39:40 ◼   ► passed them around.

00:39:41 ◼   ► But if you know it's a Kickstarter campaign and you know how you can format into a widget

00:39:45 ◼   ► the basic gist of a Kickstarter campaign, that's what they show you.

00:39:49 ◼   ► So it's sort of like what Siri does and what Google now does with search results for things

00:39:54 ◼   ► like sports scores.

00:39:57 ◼   ► What was the score of the All-Star game?

00:40:01 ◼   ► And well, I know exactly what you mean by that.

00:40:03 ◼   ► That it's a baseball game and I can format it exactly right for showing you the results

00:40:08 ◼   ► of a baseball game.

00:40:10 ◼   ► And that's where they're sort of taking Twitter.

00:40:11 ◼   ► But input-wise, you don't have to like create the widget.

00:40:15 ◼   ► You're not going through this complex creation

00:40:17 ◼   ► to post the tweet where you have to format a widget.

00:40:20 ◼   ► You just paste in the URL to a Kickstarter campaign.

00:40:23 ◼   ► - And what I'm wondering is if that's better,

00:40:26 ◼   ► I guess it's better.

00:40:28 ◼   ► I mean, you're getting more information,

00:40:29 ◼   ► but it is adding complexity and weight

00:40:32 ◼   ► to the Twitter experience.

00:40:35 ◼   ► One of the things that I love the most about Twitter

00:40:38 ◼   ► is completely just how simple it is.

00:40:41 ◼   ► And every time they add more to it.

00:40:44 ◼   ► - So do you ever use the activity view of Twitter?

00:40:49 ◼   ► - Seldom.

00:40:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's kind of buried, maybe on purpose, I don't know,

00:40:54 ◼   ► but it basically tells you what other people

00:40:56 ◼   ► are doing on Twitter.

00:40:56 ◼   ► So I could see what you're favoriting or faving or whatever,

00:41:01 ◼   ► who you're following, that kind of stuff.

00:41:03 ◼   ► And I think that the people at Twitter

00:41:05 ◼   ► actually are really gung ho about that.

00:41:07 ◼   ► And I'm wondering if they're gonna ever try

00:41:09 ◼   ► to put that sort of stuff into the feed.

00:41:14 ◼   ► And that would be like really kind of disruptive

00:41:17 ◼   ► to what the Twitter legacy experience has been.

00:41:20 ◼   ► And I wonder if that might be why they're starting

00:41:23 ◼   ► to kind of push developers down.

00:41:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:41:26 ◼   ► That's kind of my crazy, my wacky ass idea

00:41:28 ◼   ► of like what they might be doing with it going forward.

00:41:31 ◼   ► But I have no idea.

00:41:33 ◼   ► - My concern with the direction we're going

00:41:35 ◼   ► is that to me, adding all that rich stuff into the stream,

00:41:39 ◼   ► it breaks the scanability.

00:41:42 ◼   ► by which I mean like, remember the old days of email,

00:41:46 ◼   ► where all you would see when you go to read your email

00:41:48 ◼   ► is a list of subjects, and you know,

00:41:51 ◼   ► they're marked, read and unread with bold

00:41:53 ◼   ► or something like that, or bullets,

00:41:54 ◼   ► and then you'd see who it is and what the subject is,

00:41:57 ◼   ► which would give you some idea of, you know,

00:41:59 ◼   ► you knew before you clicked on the message

00:42:00 ◼   ► what it would be, and then you'd click on the message

00:42:02 ◼   ► to read it, and there's a lot of clicking,

00:42:04 ◼   ► or up and downing on the arrow keys, or something like that.

00:42:07 ◼   ► And now think about the way Apple has gone,

00:42:11 ◼   ► and other people too, I mean,

00:42:12 ◼   ► And I know Outlook, I think Outlook maybe even pioneered this.

00:42:16 ◼   ► But this idea that the list of messages would in addition to just who and the subject would

00:42:21 ◼   ► show you the first couple of like maybe the first sentence or so or two, two or three

00:42:24 ◼   ► lines of the email in the list of messages.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Well, all of a sudden, you don't you don't even have to open some of those messages,

00:42:31 ◼   ► you can actually get the gist of it.

00:42:32 ◼   ► And if it's a really short email, you could read the whole thing right in the list.

00:42:36 ◼   ► I always resisted that.

00:42:39 ◼   ► I love the old Eudora where it was just the subject,

00:42:44 ◼   ► and I forgot what I switched to,

00:42:45 ◼   ► or maybe it was like Eudora Pro or something like that.

00:42:48 ◼   ► Then you almost, or maybe it was MailApp,

00:42:50 ◼   ► I don't remember, with OS X, mail.app,

00:42:53 ◼   ► and then you kind of had to have the preview.

00:42:55 ◼   ► And that, oh, I think maybe it was Netscape,

00:42:59 ◼   ► boy, remember Netscape Communicator?

00:43:01 ◼   ► That was like the biggest bloated, that was the worst.

00:43:05 ◼   ► - Well, you know what though,

00:43:06 ◼   ► and it's a funny analogy though,

00:43:07 ◼   ► because isn't that the concern about the direction

00:43:10 ◼   ► Twitter's going, that they're gonna take this thing

00:43:11 ◼   ► that was simple and tight?

00:43:13 ◼   ► - Exactly, it was so light,

00:43:14 ◼   ► that it took no bandwidth to download,

00:43:16 ◼   ► it was super fast on your phone,

00:43:18 ◼   ► and now you're downloading YouTube metadata

00:43:20 ◼   ► and 300K photo, or probably they're probably shrunk down,

00:43:25 ◼   ► but images and all this stuff.

00:43:27 ◼   ► And this goes back to the business thing.

00:43:31 ◼   ► Well, maybe that's a better environment for ads.

00:43:34 ◼   ► Maybe if they wanna sell an ad to,

00:43:36 ◼   ► whatever. Chevrolet, Chevy wants not only their promoted tweet, but they also want their

00:43:41 ◼   ► YouTube video to show up in the stream or something like that. And maybe Twitter is

00:43:46 ◼   ► trying to train us to click on more stuff within the tweet stream to make the ad click-through

00:43:52 ◼   ► rate higher. I don't know.

00:43:54 ◼   ► The mismatch with email and that preview view is that email can be of arbitrary length.

00:44:00 ◼   ► And so some messages, maybe that preview gives you almost everything you need to know. And

00:44:04 ◼   ► others it isn't even more useful than showing you any preview at all because

00:44:08 ◼   ► the email is so long whereas Twitter all there is is the preview right that you

00:44:15 ◼   ► don't have to you don't have to click the tweets to read the tweets you just

00:44:21 ◼   ► read the list and they flow by and you have to the the hundred and forty

00:44:25 ◼   ► character limit as frustrating as it can be sometimes when you have a hundred and

00:44:28 ◼   ► 60 character thought it forces it's not like 140 in particular was magic like if they had chosen

00:44:36 ◼   ► 148 instead or 150 or something like that would make no difference but by having a relatively

00:44:42 ◼   ► terse thing something like my at reply stream immediately after I post a longer article the

00:44:49 ◼   ► daring fireball is incredibly more useful for me to go through than my email you know to get

00:44:57 ◼   ► feedback from readers and thoughts and stuff like that.

00:45:02 ◼   ► It's almost a perfect length because it's long enough that you can have a real idea,

00:45:06 ◼   ► but it's not too long that you can't have too many ideas.

00:45:12 ◼   ► I almost wish that comments like on – well, you have comments often during Fireball.

00:45:17 ◼   ► I turned them on on Splat F just to see how it worked, but I wish that comments had a

00:45:21 ◼   ► 140 limit because then people could give me their two cents and then that was it.

00:45:27 ◼   ► I didn't have to read a six paragraph essay.

00:45:30 ◼   ► It's almost a perfect limit and it's very scannable.

00:45:34 ◼   ► I can't say this enough, the fact that Twitter is so mobile friendly is so huge for the service,

00:45:41 ◼   ► but also for the business I think.

00:45:43 ◼   ► If you look at where everything is going in mobile and you look at how completely behind

00:45:47 ◼   ► Facebook is and some of the other big companies are.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Like that's such a huge advantage for Twitter

00:45:52 ◼   ► that the product and in theory the ad product as well

00:45:56 ◼   ► are super friendly to small screens and slow connections.

00:46:00 ◼   ► - It is, I definitely consider Twitter to be the effective,

00:46:05 ◼   ► the equivalent of comments for Daring Fireball.

00:46:08 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:46:08 ◼   ► - And it's for me, it's been way better.

00:46:11 ◼   ► I think it's worked out way better than if I had,

00:46:13 ◼   ► in every way than if I had actually ever added

00:46:16 ◼   ► traditional comments to Daring Fireball.

00:46:18 ◼   ► And I can't imagine, in hindsight, in so many ways,

00:46:22 ◼   ► I just can't imagine how I did the site

00:46:24 ◼   ► for the first four or five years without it.

00:46:26 ◼   ► And it's funny, it's also funny to me--

00:46:29 ◼   ► - It's almost like having a Mac without the internet, right?

00:46:31 ◼   ► You're like, you're unplugged for a few hours,

00:46:33 ◼   ► like, "Oh, what do I do with this thing?"

00:46:34 ◼   ► - Well, and it's funny to me that Twitter

00:46:36 ◼   ► is about as old as the iPhone, because they're, you know,

00:46:40 ◼   ► and they're very, very much married to me.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I know I signed up for Twitter I think in like November 2006.

00:46:47 ◼   ► So a little bit before the iPhone was announced and six, seven months before it actually shipped.

00:46:52 ◼   ► But in the grand scheme of things, that's pretty close.

00:46:55 ◼   ► And one of the big things I immediately started doing with my iPhone the day I got it was

00:47:01 ◼   ► using Twitter on the iPhone, which at the time required the mobile site.

00:47:06 ◼   ► And –

00:47:07 ◼   ► Or you could jailbreak and use what was it, Twinkle or something like that?

00:47:11 ◼   ► Twitterrific was a jailbreak.

00:47:12 ◼   ► - Terrific, oh, that also was too.

00:47:13 ◼   ► I didn't have the first iPhone,

00:47:16 ◼   ► but the reason that I wanted one so badly,

00:47:18 ◼   ► one of the main reasons was Twitter.

00:47:20 ◼   ► I was stuck on like a Sprint contract with a Palm Trio,

00:47:23 ◼   ► so I had to wait for the 3G.

00:47:25 ◼   ► But no, the iPhone and Twitter go so well together,

00:47:29 ◼   ► and that's why I'm actually happy

00:47:31 ◼   ► that Apple and Twitter kind of work together.

00:47:34 ◼   ► - The original m.twitter.com was meant

00:47:38 ◼   ► for pre-iPhone mobile phones that could render HTML.

00:47:41 ◼   ► So it was super, super rudimentary.

00:47:44 ◼   ► I mean, it worked, it was good for reading,

00:47:45 ◼   ► but it was really meant for like a BlackBerry

00:47:50 ◼   ► that could render HTML, not something like mobile Safari.

00:47:54 ◼   ► - Did you see they updated that this week also?

00:47:56 ◼   ► There was something yesterday, I don't know.

00:47:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, but they've long since gone into full on HTML5,

00:48:03 ◼   ► pushing the limits of what a mobile web thing can do.

00:48:08 ◼   ► I don't, I'm not quite sure,

00:48:09 ◼   ► I still don't know why they do that though,

00:48:10 ◼   ► because their app, I mean, why would you,

00:48:12 ◼   ► I don't know why you would want to use that

00:48:14 ◼   ► instead of an app.

00:48:15 ◼   ► And the only phones that are capable of taking advantage

00:48:20 ◼   ► of everything they do on their new mobile site

00:48:23 ◼   ► are ones that have apps available.

00:48:25 ◼   ► - Right, well, so the new, but then,

00:48:26 ◼   ► so I guess what they just recently rebuilt

00:48:29 ◼   ► was the old mobile site, which was not,

00:48:32 ◼   ► it's not HTML5, it's like the old technology,

00:48:35 ◼   ► and they're testing it on feature phones

00:48:37 ◼   ► and that kind of stuff.

00:48:38 ◼   ► - Oh, I didn't see that.

00:48:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it came out last night or something like that.

00:48:44 ◼   ► And Nick Bilton had a good post about this,

00:48:52 ◼   ► but the message was,

00:48:54 ◼   ► Twitter wants to have a consistent user experience.

00:48:57 ◼   ► And I think the put-up or shut-up as a user

00:49:00 ◼   ► that I would say to them is,

00:49:05 ◼   ► "Well, then do it."

00:49:06 ◼   ► Because here we have the iPad app,

00:49:06 ◼   ► which is completely not the same as the iPhone app,

00:49:09 ◼   ► even close, you know, there's big features that are missing.

00:49:12 ◼   ► The Mac app is completely, probably deserted.

00:49:16 ◼   ► I don't know if you know anything I don't know about it.

00:49:19 ◼   ► - I know a little bit more than you know about it.

00:49:20 ◼   ► But it is obviously, I mean the most important,

00:49:24 ◼   ► I don't think it's dead.

00:49:26 ◼   ► I do think there will be an update,

00:49:27 ◼   ► but it's clearly the lowest priority of everything,

00:49:32 ◼   ► anything they have.

00:49:32 ◼   ► And the danger is, even though they,

00:49:35 ◼   ► I am my understanding is that they definitely intend to update it. But at a low enough priority,

00:49:41 ◼   ► even if you intend to get around to it, you never do. Right? Because there's always something

00:49:45 ◼   ► of one of the higher priority things that rises atop it. But it I mean, do you have

00:49:50 ◼   ► you have do you have a you don't have a new MacBook Pro retina display to you? I don't

00:49:55 ◼   ► but it's Twitter, the Twitter app is it's all unreadable. Yeah, because the way just

00:50:01 ◼   ► at a technical level, the way that it was engineered, does all the drawing to an off

00:50:05 ◼   ► screen thing and then pushes it to the screen. But that means even text is not retina. Whereas

00:50:12 ◼   ► most almost all apps, even if they're not updated for retina, it's the stuff like the

00:50:18 ◼   ► buttons and the icons that are not retina, but text is retina automatically, which is

00:50:24 ◼   ► familiar to anybody who upgraded like an eye, you know, just like with the iPhone, the one

00:50:27 ◼   ► to the iPhone 4, before the apps were retina, at least text was retina. Well, with the Twitter

00:50:33 ◼   ► app for Mac, even the text isn't retina. And it's, it's, I mean, it's just unbelievably

00:50:39 ◼   ► unreadable. You just got to think that Apple is leaning on them a little to kind of take

00:50:44 ◼   ► care of that, right? I mean, they're showing them off in the, I think it was in the keynote,

00:50:48 ◼   ► right for the notification center and all that stuff. So yeah, I would think so, especially

00:50:53 ◼   ► with the way that now you can in mountain lion, you know that mountain lion gains the

00:50:58 ◼   ► iOS like ability to add a system level add your Twitter account.

00:51:02 ◼   ► Presumably, they'll have the same little promotion, hey, get the Twitter app in the app store.

00:51:09 ◼   ► I think the fact that they there is no way that Apple is going to promote that app while

00:51:13 ◼   ► it looks like this. I mean, it looks so bad on retina display that it would if you thought

00:51:19 ◼   ► Twitter was important, it would make you say, well, I'm not buying this computer yet because

00:51:22 ◼   ► because it's horrendous.

00:51:24 ◼   ► - Doesn't the fact that it supports the notifications

00:51:27 ◼   ► at all mean that they have to at least update it for that?

00:51:30 ◼   ► - I hope so.

00:51:31 ◼   ► - 'Cause I don't think the current app itself

00:51:34 ◼   ► could support the notification center.

00:51:36 ◼   ► 'Cause what's it sending notifications to right now?

00:51:38 ◼   ► I don't think to anything.

00:51:39 ◼   ► So I think they'll fix that.

00:51:43 ◼   ► I hope so, I don't know.

00:51:45 ◼   ► - So bottom line, what do you think,

00:51:48 ◼   ► how do you think it's gonna work out with Twitter?

00:51:49 ◼   ► Do you think Twitter is going to shoot the ability for third-party clients to work?

00:51:57 ◼   ► That's the fear that I have.

00:51:59 ◼   ► That's the fear that most of us have is that the direction they're going is that they're

00:52:02 ◼   ► going to say, "Okay, third-party – they'll spin it in the direction of this consistent

00:52:08 ◼   ► interface."

00:52:09 ◼   ► And by consistent interface, they mean our interface, our website and our apps.

00:52:14 ◼   ► and you'll either go to twitter.com

00:52:16 ◼   ► or you'll use the twitter.app for your platform

00:52:19 ◼   ► and that's it.

00:52:20 ◼   ► - So here's what we're missing.

00:52:23 ◼   ► We're missing the data of like what number,

00:52:26 ◼   ► what percent of tweets are sent currently

00:52:29 ◼   ► from outside clients?

00:52:30 ◼   ► - Right, and my guess is it is minuscule.

00:52:34 ◼   ► - Right.

00:52:35 ◼   ► - And that it's largely, my guess also,

00:52:37 ◼   ► is that those tweets are disproportionately from

00:52:44 ◼   ► high popular people, people who are like us,

00:52:49 ◼   ► like people who don't just follow me

00:52:52 ◼   ► because they know me personally,

00:52:53 ◼   ► but follow me because I'm the guy

00:52:55 ◼   ► who rides Daring Fireball.

00:52:56 ◼   ► And like you--

00:52:58 ◼   ► - I would bet that it's more early Twitter users

00:53:02 ◼   ► than late Twitter users.

00:53:03 ◼   ► Like if you look at the first 10 million users

00:53:06 ◼   ► and then the last, the most recent 10 million users,

00:53:09 ◼   ► I bet 99% of the most recent ones

00:53:12 ◼   ► only use official Twitter stuff.

00:53:17 ◼   ► And the first 10 million it's probably

00:53:20 ◼   ► disproportionately using third party apps.

00:53:22 ◼   ► Because that's what we grew up with, right?

00:53:25 ◼   ► Like we had Twitterrific and Twinkle and Tweety

00:53:26 ◼   ► and all these other things.

00:53:31 ◼   ► But now the people now, they don't even know

00:53:31 ◼   ► about that stuff.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And Twitter has time and time again made decisions

00:53:37 ◼   ► that are in the favor of the next 50 million,

00:53:41 ◼   ► 100 million users at the expense of the first batch of users.

00:53:46 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:53:54 ◼   ► I don't think they'll one day just turn off

00:53:56 ◼   ► the API to clients, but they might, and that's kind of crazy.

00:54:01 ◼   ► So one option they would have would, by the way,

00:54:08 ◼   ► which is like, okay, we could just start spitting the ads

00:54:09 ◼   ► into Tweetbot and cut that revenue with you.

00:54:14 ◼   ► And then the way that Google AdSense brings Google ads

00:54:18 ◼   ► to the whole web, they could bring Twitter ads

00:54:21 ◼   ► to the whole Twitter ecosystem.

00:54:23 ◼   ► But I think that's probably not,

00:54:26 ◼   ► I think they're not really betting on that

00:54:28 ◼   ► the way they maybe once were.

00:54:30 ◼   ► - Right.

00:54:31 ◼   ► - And I also--

00:54:32 ◼   ► - What if they want to change the ads or something

00:54:34 ◼   ► and then, you know, they don't have any control

00:54:36 ◼   ► over Tweetbots display or anything like that.

00:54:40 ◼   ► - And you know, like an idea that I know,

00:54:43 ◼   ► everybody, you know, people out there listening to the show,

00:54:46 ◼   ► I'm sure there's 95% of them are thinking

00:54:49 ◼   ► the same thing I'm about to say,

00:54:51 ◼   ► which is why not just let people pay?

00:54:54 ◼   ► And if you pay, then you can use third-party client,

00:54:56 ◼   ► I'll, you know, charge me $20 a year,

00:55:01 ◼   ► and then I have pro Twitter account,

00:55:02 ◼   ► and I can use third-party clients,

00:55:05 ◼   ► and other people don't.

00:55:06 ◼   ► And the masses, of course, most people won't pay

00:55:08 ◼   ► and they'll just use Twitter.com or the free Twitter app.

00:55:11 ◼   ► And for those of us who really, really care, we'll do it.

00:55:15 ◼   ► We'll just pay 20 bucks.

00:55:16 ◼   ► And that might not be good for the Tweetbot people.

00:55:19 ◼   ► That might really put a damper in, you know,

00:55:23 ◼   ► 'cause it's one thing to pay four bucks for the app

00:55:26 ◼   ► or three bucks for the app and that's it.

00:55:28 ◼   ► You pay once and then you use the app

00:55:30 ◼   ► but it might be something different

00:55:31 ◼   ► if you had to pay 15 or 20 bucks a year

00:55:33 ◼   ► just to have your account upgraded to that.

00:55:36 ◼   ► But I just don't think Twitter has any interest

00:55:38 ◼   ► in that whatsoever, in the same way that Google

00:55:40 ◼   ► doesn't let you pay 20 bucks to get

00:55:42 ◼   ► a search or ad-free search results.

00:55:45 ◼   ► - Right, and that also gets back to my post a little,

00:55:47 ◼   ► which is it's not that Twitter needs to start making money,

00:55:51 ◼   ► it's that they need to figure out how to make a lot of money

00:55:54 ◼   ► because this is not 19, if they started doing that in 2007

00:55:59 ◼   ► and made a couple million bucks a year,

00:56:02 ◼   ► and that would have been probably cool back then,

00:56:04 ◼   ► but they have publicly kind of leaked

00:56:08 ◼   ► that they want to have a billion dollar ad business by 2014.

00:56:12 ◼   ► So you're not gonna make a billion dollars

00:56:15 ◼   ► from subscriptions.

00:56:16 ◼   ► I don't think anyone, maybe Comcast does.

00:56:19 ◼   ► - Right, even if you said,

00:56:21 ◼   ► and I think let's just throw out a ballpark number

00:56:24 ◼   ► that $5 in revenue per year per user from the ads

00:56:29 ◼   ► probably, I mean, that might be reasonable, you know, that if they have 200 million users,

00:56:34 ◼   ► and they make an average, they make a billion dollars in advertising, that's like $5 per

00:56:39 ◼   ► user. So why not let me give you $15, which is three times the average you get from the

00:56:46 ◼   ► ads? Why not just let me give you that money to keep using these third party clients, even

00:56:51 ◼   ► if they don't show the ads, but it it it's not that they don't want the money from you,

00:56:55 ◼   ► the one person, it's that it doesn't work out in the aggregate, right?

00:56:58 ◼   ► Yeah, every person that they take out of the potential ad-viewing population shrinks their

00:57:05 ◼   ► reach to the advertisers. That's their big sales pitch is, "Hey, we have 100, 200 million

00:57:11 ◼   ► users buying ads here."

00:57:13 ◼   ► It's the fact that they need that billion-dollar idea.

00:57:15 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:57:16 ◼   ► Not that they need – it doesn't really work out if it's just $15 from John Gruber

00:57:20 ◼   ► so he can keep using Twitterrific.

00:57:21 ◼   ► Totally, yeah. And if this billion-dollar idea doesn't work, then they have to find

00:57:25 ◼   ► another one because there's never a point where they won't have to find a billion-dollar

00:57:30 ◼   ► idea.

00:57:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:57:32 ◼   ► I mean, who are the companies that they're looking to join?

00:57:34 ◼   ► They're looking to join Facebook, all advertising, Google, all advertising.

00:57:39 ◼   ► Apple is a huge company, but they sell hardware.

00:57:42 ◼   ► So that's irrelevant to them.

00:57:44 ◼   ► Twitter is not making hardware, I don't think.

00:57:47 ◼   ► Yahoo makes, has a multiple billion-dollar advertising business.

00:57:51 ◼   ► I think AOL might also.

00:57:53 ◼   ► But there aren't that many of them.

00:57:55 ◼   ► especially on mobile.

00:57:56 ◼   ► And mobile advertising is actually

00:57:59 ◼   ► a surprisingly small industry.

00:58:01 ◼   ► I think it's in the billions, but it's not,

00:58:06 ◼   ► I don't think it's in the tens of billions.

00:58:08 ◼   ► So it's, and this is actually an opportunity

00:58:11 ◼   ► for them to really be a pioneer.

00:58:12 ◼   ► So they can't not take it seriously.

00:58:15 ◼   ► But I hope they don't do anything mean.

00:58:20 ◼   ► - I could live with it, but would,

00:58:23 ◼   ► I would I think it would be a bad move if they said if they instead of cutting off the

00:58:28 ◼   ► API, if they cut off new access to the API, and other and I think that's also something

00:58:36 ◼   ► a lot of people worry that they're going to do, which is in other words, say, okay, no

00:58:40 ◼   ► more third party clients, but the ones who are there are grandfathered in.

00:58:45 ◼   ► And you're allowed to keep going.

00:58:46 ◼   ► I think I could live with that, because I'm pretty happy with the developers who are making

00:58:52 ◼   ► Twitter clients today and I really trust that, you know, I feel like we still have a plethora

00:58:59 ◼   ► of amazing Twitter clients. Like my third favorite Twitter client is a fantastic Twitter

00:59:05 ◼   ► client that I would be happy to use if the first two went away. You know, 345 deep on

00:59:10 ◼   ► the iPhone, I think.

00:59:13 ◼   ► I haven't thought about that as a possibility. I wonder if they would, yeah.

00:59:16 ◼   ► I think that's a very good possibility that they're just going to say no more. I could

00:59:21 ◼   ► live with that, but I still think it would be a mistake because I don't think you should

00:59:25 ◼   ► ever bet against the innovations that could come out of the future. That somebody a year

00:59:31 ◼   ► from now is going to come up with an idea for a Twitter client that is truly innovative.

00:59:37 ◼   ► And the thing that I really hope that Twitter remembers is that so much of what we take

00:59:42 ◼   ► for granted now with Twitter, both with apps and just the way people use it, was not from

00:59:48 ◼   ► them that it was invented by by users. Garrett Murray had a post the other day

00:59:54 ◼   ► about the invention of at replies that that was great that was awesome that

01:00:01 ◼   ► wasn't a feature that wasn't something people did it was like all of a sudden

01:00:04 ◼   ► like a couple of months in people just started doing it and it does I do he

01:00:08 ◼   ► attributed it to Flickr and I do think that's right where Flickr for years had

01:00:13 ◼   ► a sort of it wasn't a feature it was just like a what would you call it like

01:00:18 ◼   ► a tradition among the users that, you know, if you wanted in a comment stream, you'd post

01:00:26 ◼   ► a photo to Flickr and three or four of your friends would post comments and I want to

01:00:30 ◼   ► write back to the one you wrote. You wrote like the second comment was you. I would write

01:00:34 ◼   ► @ and then Fromdome because that's your Flickr name, colon. In other words, this comment

01:00:40 ◼   ► is a response to Fromdome's two above. And it wasn't hooked up in any way. It wasn't,

01:00:47 ◼   ► you know, there was no technical connection.

01:00:49 ◼   ► It was just a convention.

01:00:51 ◼   ► The word I'm looking for was it was just like a convention.

01:00:53 ◼   ► - Convention, yeah, that's right.

01:00:54 ◼   ► - Twitter didn't come up with that.

01:00:56 ◼   ► It was just something users started doing at the same time,

01:01:00 ◼   ► like at late 2006 or early 2007 or something like that.

01:01:04 ◼   ► Hashtags, right, which is like--

01:01:08 ◼   ► - That's another one, yeah,

01:01:08 ◼   ► which is like their marketing thing now, you know?

01:01:10 ◼   ► - Right. - Which is like on every,

01:01:12 ◼   ► every time I turn the TV on,

01:01:13 ◼   ► there's a hashtag or two of them, you know?

01:01:16 ◼   ► It's unbelievable to me.

01:01:18 ◼   ► And I don't even use hashtags.

01:01:19 ◼   ► I still think it's line-wise.

01:01:20 ◼   ► No, it's gauche.

01:01:21 ◼   ► It's like, I only, you know, well, I use them ironically or like, you know, by force.

01:01:28 ◼   ► I would never, I don't willingly.

01:01:29 ◼   ► But I was watching the, I was watching the Home Run Derby.

01:01:34 ◼   ► Yeah, and they were both.

01:01:36 ◼   ► So they're posting during the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby, they're showing

01:01:41 ◼   ► tweets from guys like Justin Verlander who stunk up the goddamn game the next night,

01:01:46 ◼   ► by the way, ruined the American League chances of getting a World Series home field advantage.

01:01:51 ◼   ► Nice job, Verlander, you choker. Anyway. And just the fact that when you turn on the home

01:01:58 ◼   ► run derby and there's, on the show, while you're watching it, Justin Verlander's

01:02:04 ◼   ► showing up and CC Sabathia and these guys the the the magnitude of that sort

01:02:11 ◼   ► of public awareness of the service is unbelievable it's just truly

01:02:16 ◼   ► unbelievable I mean I think said this a couple times but the person or or team

01:02:21 ◼   ► at Twitter whose job it is to get hashtags on TV like those people need a

01:02:25 ◼   ► bonus yeah like they've it's a it's on the end you know it's on the backboard

01:02:29 ◼   ► of the NBA, it's on every commercial, it's on, my wife watches these shows where every

01:02:35 ◼   ► scene has a different hashtag and for amusement I looked at the tweets that were on that hashtag

01:02:42 ◼   ► and they were pretty hilarious, you know, a lot of like teenage girls and that kind

01:02:46 ◼   ► of stuff.

01:02:47 ◼   ► People know what it means though.

01:02:48 ◼   ► You show hash, hash sign, pound sign, and then a word and it's just, people know, oh,

01:02:54 ◼   ► that's a thing on Twitter and you can go to Twitter and type that in and see what everybody

01:02:57 ◼   ► else is typing.

01:02:58 ◼   ► It's an amazing, that's just astounding.

01:03:01 ◼   ► - And that tells me that Twitter, I mean, okay,

01:03:04 ◼   ► it could go away, 'cause maybe you probably

01:03:06 ◼   ► could say this about Myspace URLs a few years ago,

01:03:11 ◼   ► but it's gonna be hard to torch itself.

01:03:14 ◼   ► So even if they did, I think, piss off

01:03:18 ◼   ► a sizable population, I think that they would be okay.

01:03:21 ◼   ► I think that whatever losers that they,

01:03:24 ◼   ► whatever users they lose,

01:03:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:03:28 ◼   ► I think they'll gain that back pretty quickly.

01:03:32 ◼   ► Well, let me just stop here and do our second sponsor.

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01:03:46 ◼   ► Boom.

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01:03:49 ◼   ► I just couldn't wait to say that.

01:03:51 ◼   ► Boom is a utility for the Mac.

01:03:57 ◼   ► It's a volume booster and system-wide equalizer.

01:04:01 ◼   ► So you install it and then you get more volume out of your speakers.

01:04:07 ◼   ► I don't know how this works.

01:04:08 ◼   ► I didn't believe it.

01:04:09 ◼   ► I installed it.

01:04:10 ◼   ► It does work.

01:04:11 ◼   ► It's kind of – I don't know what these guys are doing to make this work.

01:04:17 ◼   ► But if you do stuff like watch movies like from Netflix or Hulu or iTunes or you listen

01:04:24 ◼   ► the music and you're using the speakers on your Mac if you don't if you're not

01:04:28 ◼   ► hooking it up to your hi-fi system or something like that boom makes this

01:04:33 ◼   ► stuff sound better makes it sound bigger makes it sound better it's not just me

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01:04:42 ◼   ► the best of show award from Mac world magazine at Mac world Expo and Mac world

01:04:50 ◼   ► hailed not just the way that it actually worked and made you know actually

01:04:54 ◼   ► made your audio sound better. But the simplicity and the elegance and the it's just a beautiful,

01:05:00 ◼   ► beautiful interface. Really simple. And it's from our friends at Global Delight. You might

01:05:10 ◼   ► recall them, careful listeners of the talk show may remember Global Delight from sponsoring

01:05:16 ◼   ► the show two weeks ago for Camera+ Pro. If you like that app, you're going to love this

01:05:21 ◼   ► app for the Mac. Really, really cool. It's a 699 app, you can get it at the App Store

01:05:28 ◼   ► or on global global delights website store. But here's the deal. They've got a $2 off

01:05:34 ◼   ► sale now you think well two bucks Well, hell that's 30% for a 699 app. You can get it for

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01:06:00 ◼   ► convinced yet for five bucks to buy boom if you go to boom volume booster.com you

01:06:05 ◼   ► get a seven-day free trial install it see if it works see if it makes your

01:06:11 ◼   ► audio sound better. And if it does, get it now you'll save two bucks $5. Boom. What a

01:06:19 ◼   ► great name for an app.

01:06:20 ◼   ► But no, so I just picked up boom. And I'm so happy that you told me it exists because

01:06:25 ◼   ► you know, I've been using iTunes, of course has an equalizer and it makes music sound

01:06:31 ◼   ► great. But Spotify does not and even if you pay extra for the high quality music on Spotify,

01:06:37 ◼   ► it still sounds pretty muddy.

01:06:39 ◼   ► I have pretty nice speakers,

01:06:40 ◼   ► and it makes me not want to use Spotify,

01:06:44 ◼   ► 'cause they don't have an equalizer,

01:06:45 ◼   ► or at least they didn't last time I looked.

01:06:47 ◼   ► - It works, it works.

01:06:48 ◼   ► - So I'm really excited to look for it.

01:06:49 ◼   ► Did you ever use, there was a great old

01:06:51 ◼   ► rogue Amoeba app called Detour?

01:06:53 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:06:54 ◼   ► - I used to love that app.

01:06:55 ◼   ► It reminds me a little of that.

01:06:56 ◼   ► It doesn't do quite the same thing,

01:06:58 ◼   ► but anything that makes your system audio sound better

01:07:01 ◼   ► is awesome in my book, so I'm pumped that I have it now.

01:07:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's a terrific example,

01:07:06 ◼   ► a terrific example. Anything that doesn't anything listen to him door is another one

01:07:10 ◼   ► to where it's like, great, free music. Awesome. Oh, sounds like it's coming out of my fridge

01:07:16 ◼   ► or something like that. So or it's coming out of a speaker that you've got in a drawer.

01:07:22 ◼   ► Like clothes behind a drawer. No, it's great. And it is a perfect example is any app that

01:07:27 ◼   ► you listen to audio from itself doesn't have equalizer controls and you want to dittle

01:07:31 ◼   ► with it. Just get boom, it works across your whole system.

01:07:36 ◼   ► Have you seen the, I think it's HP has PC laptops

01:07:40 ◼   ► with Beats audio.

01:07:41 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:07:42 ◼   ► - I've never tried those, but I can't imagine

01:07:44 ◼   ► that actually is better.

01:07:46 ◼   ► I don't know, it always looks to me as like,

01:07:49 ◼   ► wow, this is kind of trashy.

01:07:51 ◼   ► - And there was a phone, wasn't there a phone that came--

01:07:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, because HTC bought Beats or bought Apple.

01:07:57 ◼   ► - Yes, HTC, yeah.

01:07:58 ◼   ► - I can't think of a better example of why HTC

01:08:02 ◼   ► is losing its, all the momentum it had built up,

01:08:05 ◼   ► the fact that it's gonna go out and buy beats.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Like that's just the,

01:08:10 ◼   ► it's such a lame mainstream type thing.

01:08:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, it doesn't seem like you needed to do that.

01:08:15 ◼   ► Just seems like just make the shit sound better.

01:08:17 ◼   ► - Right, exactly. - Just make it sound better.

01:08:19 ◼   ► Hire some audio guys and that's it.

01:08:23 ◼   ► You don't need to, I don't know, it just seemed weird to me.

01:08:26 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:08:27 ◼   ► - Let's talk tablets.

01:08:30 ◼   ► - Yes, let's, I've been thinking about them.

01:08:33 ◼   ► I had a dream.

01:08:34 ◼   ► I've been having weird dreams.

01:08:36 ◼   ► I don't know what that's about, but I had a weird dream, a Steve Jobs dream where I

01:08:42 ◼   ► had a five-inch iPad.

01:08:45 ◼   ► Every Steve Jobs dream, he yells at me about something stupid.

01:08:47 ◼   ► He's like, "Why do you have a five-inch iPad?

01:08:51 ◼   ► That's idiotic," or something like that.

01:08:53 ◼   ► I was in Korea a couple of months ago and that Galaxy Note is pretty big there, at least

01:09:03 ◼   ► in terms of literally in stores. Yeah, literally, it's quite big there. But it was in all the

01:09:09 ◼   ► windows and all the little cell phone shops and actually sell a lot of people using it.

01:09:14 ◼   ► You know, maybe that was just the name. I've heard that that's true. And I've because I've

01:09:18 ◼   ► made fun of the galaxy note that the galaxy note is a five inch phone that comes with

01:09:22 ◼   ► the stylus and it is truly enormous even if you've seen like a galaxy Nexus or something.

01:09:26 ◼   ► I mean, it's five inches is astounding. But it Samsung's reported you know, like what

01:09:32 ◼   ► what their best selling phones are worldwide

01:09:33 ◼   ► and it's up there.

01:09:34 ◼   ► And apparently it's really, really popular,

01:09:37 ◼   ► not that popular in the US,

01:09:38 ◼   ► but apparently really popular in Asia.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Where would you say you work, Korea?

01:09:42 ◼   ► - I was in Korea, which is the home of Samsung.

01:09:46 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:09:46 ◼   ► - And so that was surprising to me.

01:09:49 ◼   ► And I think your take is right on the Dan Lyons post

01:09:52 ◼   ► that you linked to recently,

01:09:54 ◼   ► which is that the tweener sizes are interesting.

01:09:58 ◼   ► I would not wanna replace my iPhone with one,

01:10:01 ◼   ► But I could see myself using a tablet in more places if it were not so bulky.

01:10:07 ◼   ► Well, and another way, I just want to – I filed a note from 15 minutes ago on the show

01:10:15 ◼   ► when we were talking about 11 versus 13-inch Airs.

01:10:18 ◼   ► And I think that this purported – I still – I've used the word "purported" more

01:10:23 ◼   ► times in the last two weeks than I think the last year combined.

01:10:26 ◼   ► But this purported iPad mini that's 7.85 inches diagonal.

01:10:30 ◼   ► To me, why would they do that?

01:10:32 ◼   ► Well, to me, it's why do they make an 11 and a 13-inch Air?

01:10:35 ◼   ► - Hmm. - You know?

01:10:36 ◼   ► And everything I've heard is that the 13-inch Air

01:10:39 ◼   ► is the best seller.

01:10:40 ◼   ► I like the 11-inch, though.

01:10:43 ◼   ► I really do.

01:10:43 ◼   ► My thinking is, number one,

01:10:45 ◼   ► my eyes are at least still good enough

01:10:47 ◼   ► that I don't mind how small the screen is.

01:10:50 ◼   ► And two, my thinking is,

01:10:52 ◼   ► if you're gonna go portable, go portable.

01:10:54 ◼   ► You know, and I want a big-ass 30-inch display on my desk,

01:10:58 ◼   ► and I want the smallest possible thing

01:10:59 ◼   ► to use on an airplane and on my lap and stuff like that.

01:11:02 ◼   ► - And that's why I bought the,

01:11:03 ◼   ► that's the exact conversation I had

01:11:05 ◼   ► with the guy at the Apple store

01:11:06 ◼   ► when I bought the 11 inch Air.

01:11:08 ◼   ► He's like, you know, well he's not allowed to give me advice

01:11:11 ◼   ► but I was like fuck it man, I'm going with the smallest

01:11:14 ◼   ► this one possible, which was,

01:11:16 ◼   ► that used to be my phone buying strategy too.

01:11:17 ◼   ► It was like which Sony Ericsson feature phone can I buy

01:11:20 ◼   ► that's literally the smallest phone possible.

01:11:23 ◼   ► And Canon little digital cameras too.

01:11:26 ◼   ► So it makes sense.

01:11:28 ◼   ► And I don't think that seven inch tablets

01:11:31 ◼   ► have sold poorly because they're seven inch tablets.

01:11:34 ◼   ► I think it's just 'cause most of them

01:11:37 ◼   ► have terrible software and they suck.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Like I think that, well now, I'm with you,

01:11:43 ◼   ► I'm calling it the eight inch iPad.

01:11:46 ◼   ► If it comes out, I think it will be phenomenally successful,

01:11:51 ◼   ► not just because of the portability,

01:11:53 ◼   ► which I think, people who think about this stuff

01:11:56 ◼   ► we'll get that, but I think the price thing

01:11:58 ◼   ► is really gonna be big.

01:11:59 ◼   ► For the same reason that you linked to my site this week,

01:12:02 ◼   ► and you think that the main reason that the iPod blew up

01:12:07 ◼   ► so big was the Mini and the Nano,

01:12:11 ◼   ► I think that that's kinda what made it so mainstream

01:12:14 ◼   ► was that it's cheap enough that you can kinda buy it,

01:12:18 ◼   ► and yeah, it's not gonna fit all your music,

01:12:20 ◼   ► but it doesn't matter, 'cause most people don't buy

01:12:24 ◼   ► They buy albums anyway, they buy singles, so what do they care?

01:12:26 ◼   ► I remember, well at the time, that was the big thing with when the iPod mini shipped

01:12:32 ◼   ► and it was $50 difference from the lower end bigger white iPod, which I think was 15 gigabytes

01:12:41 ◼   ► at the time.

01:12:42 ◼   ► So maybe I'm wrong.

01:12:43 ◼   ► I think it was like $249 for the mini and $299 for the 15 gigabyte thing.

01:12:49 ◼   ► And everybody was like, "Why in the world wouldn't you spend 50 more bucks and get…"

01:12:53 ◼   ► I think it wasn't even five gigabytes, it was four gigabytes on the mini.

01:12:57 ◼   ► You'd get more than three times the storage.

01:13:00 ◼   ► But I've heard this numerous times is that the average, I don't know what the number

01:13:04 ◼   ► is at now, but that the average iPod user only had like two gigabytes of music.

01:13:09 ◼   ► Like the whole library.

01:13:10 ◼   ► The whole library.

01:13:11 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:13:12 ◼   ► And at that point, most people, you know, and it was skewed, the average was skewed

01:13:16 ◼   ► heavily by the people with huge libraries and that the masses that like the teenagers

01:13:23 ◼   ► - The median, yeah, the median was probably

01:13:25 ◼   ► like a gig or something.

01:13:26 ◼   ► - Oh my, and the teenagers, they just listen

01:13:28 ◼   ► to the same 30 songs over and over again.

01:13:31 ◼   ► - Exactly, and I think that we, like we geek,

01:13:35 ◼   ► old school Mac people, we rationalize every $50 we spend.

01:13:40 ◼   ► But in normal people, they go to the store,

01:13:42 ◼   ► they're like, I kinda want an iPad,

01:13:44 ◼   ► oh, this one's 50 bucks cheaper, I'm buying it.

01:13:49 ◼   ► And also I think that $250, $200 price is actually meaningful.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Like that's a kind of, you're getting into impulse purchase range there.

01:13:57 ◼   ► I think Apple hit it out of the park with the original iPod in 2001 where they said

01:14:02 ◼   ► "A thousand songs in your pocket."

01:14:05 ◼   ► And people hear that and almost everybody hears "A thousand songs on a device that's

01:14:09 ◼   ► on your..."

01:14:10 ◼   ► Well I'll never, I don't have a thousand songs.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Whether they did or not they have no idea but that number was big enough.

01:14:16 ◼   ► That's a hundred CDs.

01:14:17 ◼   ► That's like you know.

01:14:18 ◼   ► even when they when they reduced it, the original iPod had five

01:14:22 ◼   ► gigabyte drive and the first iPod mini and we had a four

01:14:25 ◼   ► gigabyte drive, but they had since switched the default

01:14:28 ◼   ► format from mp3 to AAC and got like the the compression

01:14:35 ◼   ► increase was enough that they could still say 1000 songs and

01:14:38 ◼   ► which is good enough that they've never in 12 years or 11

01:14:42 ◼   ► years, they've you know, 1000s they already had the right number

01:14:46 ◼   ► of storage space.

01:14:48 ◼   ► And was it the mini or the nano that Steve pulled out of like the little tiny pocket

01:14:53 ◼   ► in the jeans?

01:14:54 ◼   ► The nano.

01:14:55 ◼   ► Okay, yeah.

01:14:56 ◼   ► When the nano came out, that just blew my mind.

01:14:57 ◼   ► I was like, how is it that small?

01:15:00 ◼   ► That's crazy.

01:15:01 ◼   ► I got to make a note to ask about that because I still think that his jeans had to be rigged

01:15:05 ◼   ► because he wears 501s and I've tried that with a nano and it doesn't quite fit.

01:15:09 ◼   ► I think that he had like a rigged pair of jeans.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Like the width, it wasn't cheating width wise, but I still think that in terms of the depth,

01:15:16 ◼   ► I think you had to have a rigged pair of jeans.

01:15:19 ◼   ► - That'd be a great forensic look back into the--

01:15:23 ◼   ► - And for people who don't think that I look

01:15:25 ◼   ► into the critical issues surrounding Apple Incorporated,

01:15:29 ◼   ► I'm on the case. - Is it Zap-router?

01:15:30 ◼   ► Is that how you pronounce it?

01:15:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I would do a Zap-router of the--

01:15:34 ◼   ► - Zap-router, I believe. - Zap-router, okay.

01:15:36 ◼   ► So one thing that you said a long time ago

01:15:40 ◼   ► that's intrigued me is the potential someday

01:15:43 ◼   ► for a bigger iPad, and that's actually something

01:15:46 ◼   ► that I would love.

01:15:47 ◼   ► I'm staring right now at my switched off 27 inch iMac

01:15:52 ◼   ► across the room and I'm like, man, I would love

01:15:54 ◼   ► like a, I don't know, a 18 inch iPad on my lap on the couch.

01:15:59 ◼   ► That would be kind of cool.

01:16:01 ◼   ► You could do all sorts of stuff with that.

01:16:04 ◼   ► It would probably be expensive and fragile

01:16:06 ◼   ► and that sort of stuff, but I would pay 1,000 bucks for that.

01:16:09 ◼   ► That'd be pretty cool.

01:16:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think long term it's inevitable

01:16:15 ◼   ► because I really do think that the,

01:16:18 ◼   ► you know, I'll group it with the iPhone,

01:16:22 ◼   ► but I really think that iOS is to,

01:16:26 ◼   ► the computing landscape today,

01:16:28 ◼   ► what the Mac was to PCs in 1984.

01:16:32 ◼   ► And don't get obsessed, if you went back historically

01:16:35 ◼   ► and wanted to argue, traveled back in time to 1985

01:16:38 ◼   ► and got in an argument with John Dvorak

01:16:41 ◼   ► about the future of computing, like,

01:16:43 ◼   ► Don't get hung up on the fact that the Mac you have today,

01:16:48 ◼   ► this is 1985, is only nine inches in black and white,

01:16:52 ◼   ► and it doesn't even ship with a hard drive,

01:16:54 ◼   ► it's only got a floppy drive.

01:16:56 ◼   ► Just take a step back and think about the way

01:16:58 ◼   ► that technology is inevitably advancing.

01:17:00 ◼   ► Like the screen is not gonna be nine inches

01:17:02 ◼   ► in black and white forever, right?

01:17:04 ◼   ► The same thing with the iOS.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Don't get hung up on the fact that the iPad

01:17:10 ◼   ► shipped at 9.7 inches.

01:17:13 ◼   ► It's just a starting point.

01:17:15 ◼   ► I think it's going to go in both directions.

01:17:18 ◼   ► Although I think that the big difference though is that I think that they can do this.

01:17:22 ◼   ► I really do think that they can go to 8 inches, parenthesis 7.85 inches exactly, without changing

01:17:30 ◼   ► the software at all.

01:17:31 ◼   ► I think that apps that are 1024 by 768 apps that run on the iPad today will just run at

01:17:38 ◼   ► 24 by 768, two inches smaller diagonally, about what was it was it work I think

01:17:45 ◼   ► it's 80% area or something like that or 66% of the area that it'll work out. I

01:17:51 ◼   ► think if they go bigger though or when they go bigger I do think that will be

01:17:56 ◼   ► one of those developer schisms where you know existing apps will run in a in a

01:18:03 ◼   ► mode where they're blown up but to really take advantage of it you're gonna

01:18:07 ◼   ► to have to start over.

01:18:12 ◼   ► You're going to have to do a new size.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Well, also at that point you might want more than one app

01:18:16 ◼   ► on the screen at a time, or at least multiple windows.

01:18:19 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

01:18:21 ◼   ► Which is the interesting thing from Windows 8.

01:18:23 ◼   ► I mean, I don't have that much to say about it,

01:18:26 ◼   ► but to me the idea that they're already kind of thinking

01:18:28 ◼   ► about that sort of stuff, how to have multiple apps

01:18:32 ◼   ► on screen at the same time.

01:18:35 ◼   ► Easily, by far and away, I think the single most intriguing idea

01:18:36 ◼   ► in all of Windows 8 as a tablet OS is the, what do they call it? They don't call it docking

01:18:41 ◼   ► snapping? I think they call it, you snap it in?

01:18:44 ◼   ► Yeah, the snaps. Right.

01:18:45 ◼   ► Yeah, that and then the way that those apps can talk to each other, whatever that was

01:18:49 ◼   ► called through the, I don't know, the handoffs or whatever.

01:18:52 ◼   ► So you can have, you can have your email taking up a list of one-third and a web browser taking

01:18:58 ◼   ► up the other two-thirds. And so you could sit there and as you read your email and people

01:19:03 ◼   ► say I mean a huge part of my email is people sending me links and so one of the inefficiencies

01:19:10 ◼   ► of going through my email on the iPad is that I'm constantly flipping between mail and Safari

01:19:18 ◼   ► and back totally you know it's not a huge inconvenience but I can totally imagine you

01:19:25 ◼   ► know how doing it with just those two things on screen a narrow skinny column of email

01:19:30 ◼   ► messages and a square, a nice wide square of web browser content would make it way easier

01:19:36 ◼   ► and more efficient to go through emails on a tablet.

01:19:41 ◼   ► And you know, so I watch a lot of video on the iPad, but it would be nice to have Twitter

01:19:45 ◼   ► open at the same time too, you know, for commercial breaks or whatever. You know, if I'm watching

01:19:50 ◼   ► the baseball game, it's kind of annoying. You have to stop the MLB TV app, you've

01:19:54 ◼   ► got to quit the stream, open up Twitter, you know, it's…

01:19:58 ◼   ► Yeah, another perfect example and maybe even a better example of something that can really get by with a skinny

01:20:03 ◼   ► Sort of yeah one-third sliver of the window. Yep easily

01:20:07 ◼   ► I think the best idea that they've had and you know, they can hang their hat on the fact that they're first

01:20:12 ◼   ► Nobody else's has solved that

01:20:15 ◼   ► And they're doing it in I think in a very smart way where it's not like an arbitrary

01:20:20 ◼   ► You get to move that divider around and make it 40 60 or 35

01:20:25 ◼   ► 65 it's nope it's one-third two-thirds

01:20:28 ◼   ► I think but whatever it is it snaps into place and you don't have to decide and

01:20:32 ◼   ► Developers can take advantage of that and they know they only have to code it to take advantage of this you know

01:20:37 ◼   ► These two proportions, maybe I'll be full screen. Maybe I'll be two-thirds. Maybe I'll be one-third. That's it

01:20:43 ◼   ► so this is kind of looking bigger picture at this but

01:20:48 ◼   ► Why do you think that I mean you know we?

01:20:54 ◼   ► Why do you think the iPad is so successful

01:20:57 ◼   ► and the other ones aren't?

01:20:58 ◼   ► But do you think that it's actually possible

01:21:01 ◼   ► that this iPad and iOS platform theory concept thing

01:21:06 ◼   ► is actually, that Apple can actually hold on

01:21:08 ◼   ► and be a winner with this for the long term?

01:21:11 ◼   ► Is Apple now good enough at winning

01:21:14 ◼   ► that they can really follow through with this?

01:21:17 ◼   ► - I do, I do think so.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And I think that they've gotten it to the point

01:21:21 ◼   ► where they have to keep innovating.

01:21:24 ◼   ► And I do think it is institution,

01:21:27 ◼   ► I think it is one of the core values of the company,

01:21:30 ◼   ► is a sort of healthy paranoia

01:21:33 ◼   ► that you don't take success for granted

01:21:36 ◼   ► and think you're done and that you keep pushing.

01:21:38 ◼   ► And that, you know, I really think that the way,

01:21:41 ◼   ► you know, and it was so much smaller stakes,

01:21:42 ◼   ► as important as the iPod was

01:21:45 ◼   ► to Apple's resurgence as a company,

01:21:47 ◼   ► and the way that it really made them

01:21:50 ◼   ► a mass market company and got people who never bought anything from Apple before to buy a

01:21:55 ◼   ► couple of things from Apple.

01:21:57 ◼   ► The way that I remember going to the mall in 2003 and hearing teenagers talk about going

01:22:04 ◼   ► to the iPod store.

01:22:05 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah, it really made the retail stores.

01:22:07 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Right.

01:22:08 ◼   ► It really helped make the retail stores a success and the retail stores have become

01:22:12 ◼   ► the thing.

01:22:13 ◼   ► But in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money they made selling iPods pales in

01:22:16 ◼   ► comparison to the money they're making now selling iPhones and iPads.

01:22:19 ◼   ► it's smaller stakes. But the way that they evolved those iPods year after year after year, every year,

01:22:28 ◼   ► either shrinking them, introducing sibling form factors, like where in addition to you know, we're

01:22:36 ◼   ► not just getting rid of the old one, we'll keep the old one, if you want us 80 gigabytes of storage,

01:22:42 ◼   ► that's the one to get. But now we've got this new one that is thinner. And now we're adding color.

01:22:46 ◼   ► and now we're adding video.

01:22:47 ◼   ► And now, you know, even make ridiculous,

01:22:49 ◼   ► they'll even make mistakes.

01:22:51 ◼   ► They'll even do things like make one

01:22:52 ◼   ► that didn't have any buttons,

01:22:53 ◼   ► and then a year later be like,

01:22:54 ◼   ► "Oh, I got that." - Yeah, or the fat nano.

01:22:56 ◼   ► - Right.

01:22:56 ◼   ► And kept aggressively pushing the price down, right?

01:23:01 ◼   ► So that you could keep, year after year,

01:23:03 ◼   ► you could keep getting one for $50 less

01:23:06 ◼   ► until all of a sudden,

01:23:06 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden they'd hit these marks.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And I, you know, it's one of those things

01:23:10 ◼   ► where Apple I think has been, you know,

01:23:12 ◼   ► often surprisingly open in public. I believe it was Schiller one time on stage who just said like

01:23:19 ◼   ► $1.99 is a magic price point. And, you know, now that once we hit it, it, you know, and then it like

01:23:27 ◼   ► next slide, it was like a graph of like sales. And, you know, the sales just shot up because

01:23:32 ◼   ► it's a magic price point in consumers minds. And we're so happy to be able to say this year,

01:23:37 ◼   ► we're going to $1.49, you know, and just sold gazillions of them. I think it really bodes well

01:23:42 ◼   ► for their future with this stuff, that they're not going to—they're not stuck on this

01:23:47 ◼   ► idea, I don't think, that the iPad starts at $499 or now it's $399.

01:23:54 ◼   ► I think they'll be aggressive at moving down in price.

01:23:57 ◼   ► I think so too.

01:23:59 ◼   ► If they can hit $200 or $250 with the smaller iPad if it actually happens, I think it's

01:24:05 ◼   ► going to be huge.

01:24:08 ◼   ► I love the retina display.

01:24:09 ◼   ► I think most people probably could care less for if they can save 200 bucks.

01:24:13 ◼   ► I think it could easily sell at least as many or maybe even like twice as more big iPads

01:24:22 ◼   ► in addition to whatever big iPads they sell.

01:24:24 ◼   ► So …

01:24:25 ◼   ► Dave Asprey And clearly, I mean, no doubt in my mind,

01:24:27 ◼   ► I think they're going to do it.

01:24:28 ◼   ► I think they're going to do it this year.

01:24:29 ◼   ► I don't think it's going to have a retina display.

01:24:31 ◼   ► I think it's going to have a 1024x768 display.

01:24:34 ◼   ► But obviously, either a year from now or two years from now, they're going to come out

01:24:37 ◼   ► with what assuming the thing sells well it's they're gonna come out with one

01:24:40 ◼   ► with a retina display

01:24:42 ◼   ► it's a you know no brainer future okay

01:24:43 ◼   ► here's the other thing that makes me think that they're gonna do it and

01:24:46 ◼   ► they're gonna be really really aggressive on price

01:24:48 ◼   ► is

01:24:50 ◼   ► that event they had in new york last winter for textbooks

01:24:54 ◼   ► and the i book store which is all about education

01:24:58 ◼   ► and the big catch with that whole initiative is this is great these this

01:25:03 ◼   ► whole thing sounds great. The prices are great. It's a great idea. I think it's clearly a

01:25:09 ◼   ► great idea for the future of textbooks. But how do you get this into schools if you need

01:25:15 ◼   ► to buy a $4.99 device for every kid to get started? Right? And I think that for the education

01:25:21 ◼   ► market alone, getting it to a radically lower price point to get in the door is huge. And

01:25:29 ◼   ► combine that with the fact that who would be best suited

01:25:33 ◼   ► for a device where the on-screen tap targets

01:25:37 ◼   ► are a little bit smaller and text is rendered smaller.

01:25:40 ◼   ► - Is it funny that I was just thinking of saying that too?

01:25:42 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly, like it's--

01:25:44 ◼   ► - Kids, right? - Yeah, exactly.

01:25:46 ◼   ► - So who's got the eyes that are best suited

01:25:48 ◼   ► to reading a thing that maybe ideally

01:25:50 ◼   ► is best rendered at 9.7 inches

01:25:53 ◼   ► but is now rendered at 7.85 inches?

01:25:55 ◼   ► Kids, right?

01:25:56 ◼   ► Who's got the fingers that are gonna work better

01:25:58 ◼   ► on a keyboard that's smaller.

01:25:59 ◼   ► Kids.

01:26:00 ◼   ► - Yep, no, totally.

01:26:01 ◼   ► Kids, and also women too.

01:26:03 ◼   ► Remember the Palm?

01:26:04 ◼   ► Palm had like a smaller trio,

01:26:06 ◼   ► and that was huge with women.

01:26:08 ◼   ► I forgot what it was called, but kids and,

01:26:11 ◼   ► I don't know, I don't think I'll get one,

01:26:15 ◼   ► but I think they'll be awesome.

01:26:16 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:26:17 ◼   ► - Maybe I'll get one, who the hell knows?

01:26:18 ◼   ► But I don't think the Google thing's gonna sell

01:26:21 ◼   ► that well though.

01:26:22 ◼   ► I haven't tried it, the Nexus 7 or whatever.

01:26:25 ◼   ► I just, they don't really have good retail distribution

01:26:30 ◼   ► and I think that it's gotten a lot of attention

01:26:35 ◼   ► in the tech press because it's Google

01:26:36 ◼   ► so people feel obligated to write about it.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And I'm sure it's fine, but I don't think

01:26:42 ◼   ► that many people are gonna buy it.

01:26:43 ◼   ► - And I wonder if it doesn't sell well,

01:26:48 ◼   ► that one of the things people might draw from,

01:26:51 ◼   ► they're like, well, it should sell well

01:26:53 ◼   ► because they finally licked a lot of these interface problems,

01:26:56 ◼   ► that the interface is better, it looks better.

01:26:59 ◼   ► There's no doubt in my mind,

01:27:00 ◼   ► I believe that the thing actually scrolls a lot better

01:27:03 ◼   ► because even Android 4.0 on the Galaxy Nexus phone

01:27:08 ◼   ► really solved a lot,

01:27:10 ◼   ► it's certainly not up to Apple caliber

01:27:12 ◼   ► for animation smoothness and stuff like that,

01:27:14 ◼   ► but it was a lot closer.

01:27:15 ◼   ► They really got over a hump.

01:27:17 ◼   ► And if they really worked a lot on between 4.0 and 4.1

01:27:20 ◼   ► on improving that, it should at least be good enough.

01:27:23 ◼   ► But I think that it gets back to the old days in the 90s where Apple struggled with the

01:27:29 ◼   ► Mac against Windows despite having a superior interface, that that's not enough.

01:27:35 ◼   ► No, A, a lot of people don't even notice that sort of thing or don't care.

01:27:40 ◼   ► And B, it's like maybe their ninth priority on the list of things.

01:27:45 ◼   ► First of all, I did a poll at Business Insider, I don't know, a couple of years ago, and

01:27:51 ◼   ► I asked, "If you're going to buy a tablet, where would you buy it?

01:27:56 ◼   ► Would you buy it from Best Buy?

01:27:57 ◼   ► Would you buy it from a carrier store?

01:27:59 ◼   ► Would you buy it from whatever?"

01:28:00 ◼   ► And by far, the biggest response was, "I'll go to the Apple Store."

01:28:04 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay.

01:28:06 ◼   ► Well, you can't buy a Google tablet at the Apple Store."

01:28:13 ◼   ► I think it's great.

01:28:14 ◼   ► I'm glad that Google is doing stuff like this.

01:28:17 ◼   ► Good for them.

01:28:18 ◼   ► I don't think anyone is going to be picking that one up.

01:28:21 ◼   ► I want to do a follow up. I don't have a huge number of points, but I want to do a follow

01:28:25 ◼   ► up to the iPad mini piece that I wrote earlier this week with a couple more points of contention

01:28:30 ◼   ► from readers and other people who are out there. One of them is still this idea that

01:28:38 ◼   ► Apple wouldn't do a new device without a retina display, that all the new devices come with

01:28:44 ◼   ► retina displays, and so they're not going to do it without retina. I don't think that's

01:28:48 ◼   ► true. And the way I look at it, and I think I added this to the article after I published

01:28:53 ◼   ► it, but that the better way to think of it is they've never shipped a new iOS form factor

01:28:59 ◼   ► that started retina. They start non-retina and then as they groove their ability to hit

01:29:05 ◼   ► that price point two years later, three years later, they come out with a retina. I don't

01:29:10 ◼   ► think they'll hesitate. And I think it'll help establish it that look, the best one

01:29:14 ◼   ► This one is the big one, that's the one that's Retina.

01:29:16 ◼   ► This one is the cheap one.

01:29:18 ◼   ► - Right, and they're still selling,

01:29:21 ◼   ► they're very happily selling the 3S, which is 3GS,

01:29:24 ◼   ► which is kind of crappy compared to a 4S.

01:29:28 ◼   ► So I don't think that, I don't think they care that much,

01:29:32 ◼   ► and they're still selling the Air with a non-Retina display

01:29:35 ◼   ► and every Mac except one of them.

01:29:38 ◼   ► And by the way, this is Tim Cook,

01:29:40 ◼   ► the guy who proudly loves his iPod Shuffle.

01:29:42 ◼   ► So not everything is about, and I think that is one of the differences between the old

01:29:47 ◼   ► Apple and the new Apple.

01:29:50 ◼   ► It's not necessarily that they want to sell flimsy stuff, but not everything has to be

01:29:55 ◼   ► the absolute best thing that you could buy because that's not the way to the mass market.

01:29:59 ◼   ► So…

01:30:00 ◼   ► What about the "came out on the same day" reports last week from Bloomberg in the Wall

01:30:05 ◼   ► Street Journal that Apple is going to do a smaller iPad?

01:30:11 ◼   ► That to me reeks of a leak, a deliberate leak from Apple.

01:30:15 ◼   ► - I think it has to be, I mean, you know,

01:30:18 ◼   ► they like you, they don't like me so much,

01:30:20 ◼   ► but Apple PR is the best in the business.

01:30:23 ◼   ► I mean, they are--

01:30:25 ◼   ► - They really, they don't like you?

01:30:27 ◼   ► - Nah, I don't know.

01:30:28 ◼   ► - They dislike you or they don't like you?

01:30:32 ◼   ► - Somewhere between those two, I think.

01:30:34 ◼   ► - Interesting, I'll put in a good word for you.

01:30:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, thanks.

01:30:37 ◼   ► No, I don't know, maybe it's--

01:30:39 ◼   ► do like me, but they I don't get stuff like that. They don't they

01:30:43 ◼   ► don't give stuff. People ask me people ask me stuff like that.

01:30:46 ◼   ► And when I find out stuff like I do, I've heard stuff about the

01:30:48 ◼   ► iPad mini. I never heard stuff about the iPad mini from Apple

01:30:51 ◼   ► PR. I've heard stuff from like I call them the rank and file. I

01:30:55 ◼   ► almost think that there might even be like a I don't know if

01:31:00 ◼   ► there's like, sec type stuff, but I think there Yeah, some of

01:31:04 ◼   ► the stuff about like material disclosures have to go to a I

01:31:08 ◼   ► - I don't actually know, I'm making this up,

01:31:10 ◼   ► but it seems like they have to give it

01:31:12 ◼   ► to like the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg

01:31:14 ◼   ► or something that has like enough reach

01:31:17 ◼   ► that it's gonna be actually widely disclosed

01:31:19 ◼   ► so there's no like insider trading type stuff.

01:31:23 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:31:23 ◼   ► I may have completely invented that in my head.

01:31:25 ◼   ► - I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised

01:31:27 ◼   ► if there's ramifications there.

01:31:29 ◼   ► But to me it's Apple's version of FUD, right?

01:31:32 ◼   ► Fear, uncertainty, doubt.

01:31:33 ◼   ► Like it is not coincidental that they,

01:31:36 ◼   ► that the two, I would say, I, Bloomberg and, well Wall Street Journal is clearly the most

01:31:44 ◼   ► read business publication. Bloomberg is certainly one of the most read and certainly they're

01:31:49 ◼   ► both very highly respected. And in terms of a relationship with Apple and previous leaks

01:31:55 ◼   ► of stuff like that, they've both, you know, they're both aces. Bloomberg was the first

01:32:01 ◼   ► one that got the story that Steve Jobs was having a liver transplant, the Wall Street

01:32:06 ◼   ► Journal.

01:32:07 ◼   ► But I don't know if that was a leak.

01:32:08 ◼   ► I don't think so either.

01:32:09 ◼   ► I don't think so either.

01:32:10 ◼   ► You actually called me on the phone.

01:32:11 ◼   ► We talked on the phone.

01:32:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:13 ◼   ► That's weird.

01:32:14 ◼   ► That was like…

01:32:15 ◼   ► I actually don't think that was a leak.

01:32:16 ◼   ► I think that was good reporting.

01:32:17 ◼   ► I'm just saying no reputation-wise though.

01:32:19 ◼   ► No, totally.

01:32:20 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:32:21 ◼   ► Those are the kinds of places where, you know, if it's in print there, you can almost reasonably

01:32:26 ◼   ► assume that it's completely true.

01:32:27 ◼   ► Well, my favorite example of that is with the journal, which was before WWDC 2000 whatever,

01:32:33 ◼   ► when Apple was going to announce the switch to Intel, which I didn't believe. And I wrote

01:32:38 ◼   ► a piece. It's probably one of the best like, you know, haha, John Gruber has to eat claim

01:32:42 ◼   ► chowder. I was a skeptic. I really was until Friday before the WWDC keynote. And the journal

01:32:49 ◼   ► said Apple's going to switch to Intel. And I wrote a piece on during Fireball. I was

01:32:53 ◼   ► like, I don't know how to interpret this because if the Wall Street Journal says it's going

01:32:57 ◼   ► to happen. I think it's going to happen because they're not saying it might happen.

01:33:00 ◼   ► They're saying it's going to happen and they're the journal and they're never

01:33:02 ◼   ► wrong. Or they wouldn't be wrong unless they had a – they wouldn't publish this

01:33:06 ◼   ► if they didn't know it was true. But on the other hand, as far as I know, this is

01:33:10 ◼   ► technically impossible. There's no way Apple can do this unless they've figured out a

01:33:14 ◼   ► way to emulate Power PC software at full speed.

01:33:19 ◼   ► And so in a sense, I was right because that's actually what they did do with Rosetta where

01:33:22 ◼   ► where they had this emulator that ran at heretofore unbelievably efficient binary translation

01:33:32 ◼   ► performance. Way, way better than like the old 68K emulator on PowerPC, etc. like that.

01:33:41 ◼   ► But the fact that the journal printed it made me, it got me to wrap my mind around the fact

01:33:45 ◼   ► that it was going to happen.

01:33:50 ◼   ► One lesson I've learned from Apple is never underestimate

01:33:53 ◼   ► their ability to do something that seemed physically

01:33:56 ◼   ► and scientifically impossible the day before.

01:33:58 ◼   ► Which was like how I felt about the iPhone

01:34:01 ◼   ► and the retina iPhone 4 when that came out too.

01:34:04 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh my God, you couldn't even do that?"

01:34:07 ◼   ► Like I didn't even know.

01:34:08 ◼   ► But then also, but didn't the Wall Street Journal report

01:34:11 ◼   ► this year that Apple was going to launch

01:34:14 ◼   ► some like developer analytics software at WWDC?

01:34:18 ◼   ► - I don't remember. - That was weird.

01:34:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, there was something about that.

01:34:21 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't remember.

01:34:22 ◼   ► - But anyways, I was saying,

01:34:24 ◼   ► as in a lot of the stuff they do,

01:34:28 ◼   ► they're really brilliant at PR

01:34:31 ◼   ► and at doing little things like that,

01:34:33 ◼   ► at perfectly timing their launch dates

01:34:35 ◼   ► to come between this thing and that thing.

01:34:38 ◼   ► I don't know who decided that Michael Dell

01:34:42 ◼   ► would be the guy who gets screwed

01:34:43 ◼   ► by giving his CES keynote at the exact time of the iPhone.

01:34:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:34:48 ◼   ► iPhone keynote, but that was just, I mean, in hindsight, that was brilliant. A lot of

01:34:52 ◼   ► the stuff they do like that is really smart. So, you know, I would absolutely not be surprised

01:34:57 ◼   ► at all if that was deliberate.

01:34:59 ◼   ► And, you know, one last thing before we wrap up the show that I want to run by you on this,

01:35:04 ◼   ► and this is the idea that the $199 price point, and I could totally see that Apple's 7.85

01:35:15 ◼   ► tablet, maybe it'll start at $249. I can't believe it would be $299. I really can't.

01:35:20 ◼   ► I think it has to be $249 if it's not $199. But I think they could do one. If they can

01:35:25 ◼   ► do $199, they will do it because they don't want to leave that price umbrella for these

01:35:29 ◼   ► other tablets like the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire or something like that.

01:35:34 ◼   ► But the argument I've gotten, I've seen it on Twitter from a couple of smart people,

01:35:37 ◼   ► and I've gotten it in an email too, is that they can't sell a $199 iPad at 8 inches next

01:35:43 ◼   ► to a 199 iPod touch that's so much smaller that if this thing is eight inches and 199

01:35:51 ◼   ► how can this thing that's so much smaller cost 199 to and they can't really reduce the

01:35:56 ◼   ► price of the iPod touch by that much I don't I don't believe that they maybe they can well

01:36:02 ◼   ► I don't think they need to though I think yeah I don't think they do either they're

01:36:05 ◼   ► totally different things I mean one is something you give to a kid to play to play games on

01:36:09 ◼   ► the funnest iPod ever, and then another one, maybe not.

01:36:14 ◼   ► I wouldn't worry about that.

01:36:15 ◼   ► That's the kind of thing, the nitpicky type thing,

01:36:18 ◼   ► like when I used to write articles saying,

01:36:20 ◼   ► of course Apple's gonna do a Verizon iPhone.

01:36:23 ◼   ► They have to, and people will go,

01:36:24 ◼   ► no, that means they would have to support CDMA.

01:36:27 ◼   ► That's adding more complexity.

01:36:29 ◼   ► Apple doesn't do complexity, and it was like,

01:36:31 ◼   ► they'll do complexity for a 90 million subscriber carrier.

01:36:35 ◼   ► You're damn right they will.

01:36:36 ◼   ► Right, it's not just like the one and only CDMA carrier in the US was, you know, Bum

01:36:44 ◼   ► Phillips.

01:36:45 ◼   ► It's not Metro PCS, sorry, US Cellular or whatever in Chicago they have there.

01:36:50 ◼   ► Yeah, with a million subscribers.

01:36:53 ◼   ► Yeah, this is, so I'm not so worried about that.

01:36:57 ◼   ► I think what actually might be bigger is what Amazon announces later this year.

01:37:03 ◼   ► Oh, I definitely think so.

01:37:04 ◼   ► How cheap is the Kindle Fire going to get?

01:37:05 ◼   ► Is it A, is it going to be much better or only a little better?

01:37:08 ◼   ► And B, will it be 100 bucks or something like that?

01:37:12 ◼   ► Because there was a great, Farhad Manju, of course, always writes smart stuff, but his

01:37:17 ◼   ► thing about Amazon yesterday was smart.

01:37:20 ◼   ► And he's written some good stuff about Amazon recently.

01:37:22 ◼   ► But as we've seen, they will ruthlessly do crazy stuff just to do it.

01:37:28 ◼   ► And if Apple has to respond, I don't know how much they would actually have to respond

01:37:33 ◼   ► to a $99 tablet, but it might force them to make it $199 instead of $249.

01:37:42 ◼   ► The other thing is they have so much money and there's only a finite number of these

01:37:46 ◼   ► they can make and sell.

01:37:49 ◼   ► The original iPhone, I think the first time you ever linked to me is when I wrote some

01:37:53 ◼   ► article about how Apple would have to sell twice as many iPhones to make the same amount

01:37:58 ◼   ► a profit on the iPhone one after they did the price cut or something like that.

01:38:03 ◼   ► And yeah, whatever, it doesn't matter because they only made like 10 million of them.

01:38:07 ◼   ► So who even cares?

01:38:09 ◼   ► This is the first iPad mini or whatever they'll call it.

01:38:13 ◼   ► They'll probably make 10, 15 million of them.

01:38:17 ◼   ► If the margin sucks on them, it doesn't matter anyway because the iPhone has such a huge

01:38:22 ◼   ► margin.

01:38:24 ◼   ► And they have, what, $70 billion in the bank or something like that or more?

01:38:28 ◼   ► So who cares?

01:38:29 ◼   ► I think they'll do whatever they think they need to do to do it right and not necessarily

01:38:35 ◼   ► base it on profitability or something like that.

01:38:39 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:40 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing too with the holes, can they sell it alongside the iPod Touch

01:38:44 ◼   ► at almost the same price?

01:38:45 ◼   ► And I think the difference with these is it's different than with laptops.

01:38:50 ◼   ► laptops the expectation that smaller is cheaper makes sense but that's because

01:38:55 ◼   ► the minimum size and I think the 11 inch air is about as small as I would want a

01:38:59 ◼   ► Mac to be I think that the the little like 8 inch and 9 inch PC laptops are

01:39:04 ◼   ► way too small yeah but even if they did if Apple were to do a 9 inch MacBook Air

01:39:11 ◼   ► it would probably be even cheaper than the 11 inch but that's because it's the

01:39:14 ◼   ► these expenses the display is smaller and it's cheaper whereas the iPhone and

01:39:20 ◼   ► and iPod Touch are so small that there's an incredible amount of cost into just getting

01:39:26 ◼   ► the thing to be that small.

01:39:29 ◼   ► And –

01:39:30 ◼   ► Yeah, the miniaturization –

01:39:31 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think – and I'm stealing this from somebody else on Twitter who pointed

01:39:34 ◼   ► this out. I think it might have been my friend, Nevin Mergin, but who pointed out that –

01:39:37 ◼   ► Love that guy.

01:39:38 ◼   ► You really shouldn't think about when you compare the fact that the iPad costs more

01:39:42 ◼   ► than the iPhone, you're locked into this US-centric contract pricing. In the rest of

01:39:49 ◼   ► the world where lots and lots of people buy their phones without a contract the

01:39:53 ◼   ► iPhone cost more than the iPad and way more yeah an unlocked iPhone costs more

01:40:00 ◼   ► than an iPad even I bought an unlocked iPhone and it cost more than well six

01:40:04 ◼   ► seven hundred bucks it's like 900 would you get the big one you know it's like

01:40:08 ◼   ► yeah totally yeah so I have a question what what what Apple brand do you think

01:40:14 ◼   ► will last longer, iPod or Mac?

01:40:17 ◼   ► They've already phased out iPod as an app,

01:40:26 ◼   ► so that seems to me like they didn't care about it enough

01:40:30 ◼   ► to make the media app any longer.

01:40:32 ◼   ► But I always wonder, 'cause it's like,

01:40:37 ◼   ► they still sell, they sell more iPods than Macs still,

01:40:40 ◼   ► but you need a Mac to make iOS software.

01:40:43 ◼   ► brand which one will be an active SKU longer I hate to say it but I'm gonna

01:40:51 ◼   ► say iPod yeah yeah that's that's what I would have picked I think now maybe Mac

01:40:58 ◼   ► but I don't know I don't know any I don't want to I know the reason the main

01:41:03 ◼   ► reason the Mac exists is is that it does these things that you can't do on the

01:41:08 ◼   ► iPad or can't do as well on the iPad including the fact that you needed to

01:41:13 ◼   ► write iPad software that's not gonna be forever like you will have you know

01:41:17 ◼   ► sooner than they're enough sooner than all of us think you'll be able to write

01:41:21 ◼   ► your apps on the iPad and maybe you'll require your hypothetical 15-inch iPad

01:41:27 ◼   ► yeah how do I run flash and the other thing I was gonna ask you it's a good

01:41:33 ◼   ► - That's a good question though.

01:41:34 ◼   ► That's a really good question.

01:41:35 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:41:36 ◼   ► - Which brand do you think will be around the longest?

01:41:40 ◼   ► I think the single brand that they have

01:41:42 ◼   ► that might outlive us all is iPad.

01:41:46 ◼   ► I can't imagine.

01:41:48 ◼   ► I think iPad is already at a point where it's here forever.

01:41:51 ◼   ► - Especially if it continues to be successful

01:41:54 ◼   ► in the way it has been.

01:41:55 ◼   ► The phone, who knows what's gonna happen

01:42:00 ◼   ► if it doesn't work in China

01:42:02 ◼   ► if Huawei knocks them? Well, the thing that would have me bet against the iPhone brand

01:42:09 ◼   ► is that I can foresee a future where some kind of networking technology exists that

01:42:14 ◼   ► obliterates, just completely disrupts and annihilates the carriers. And it's just this,

01:42:20 ◼   ► you know, it's the equivalent of Wi-Fi. It's some other kind of IP over the air with sufficient

01:42:26 ◼   ► range that, you know, the problem with going Wi-Fi only now is that you can't get phone

01:42:31 ◼   ► calls if you're not on a Wi-Fi network. If you're in your car or whatever, you can't

01:42:36 ◼   ► get calls or anything. Whereas if there was some kind of super long-range wireless thing

01:42:40 ◼   ► that – I could just totally see that happening where we don't call them phones anymore.

01:42:45 ◼   ► You're not dealing with AT&T or Verizon or anything. You're dealing with this new

01:42:48 ◼   ► thing and therefore the iPhone brand goes away. Apple still makes something that size,

01:42:54 ◼   ► but it's called something else.

01:42:55 ◼   ► Steve: It's called the iTouch.

01:42:56 ◼   ► Dave Bausch I don't know. I wouldn't bet on the iPhone

01:42:59 ◼   ► brand.

01:43:00 ◼   ► Yeah, no that makes sense or phone calls become something, you know voice tweets or something like that. I don't know

01:43:06 ◼   ► Interesting. Do you do you get into any of this like wearable computer stuff?

01:43:11 ◼   ► Like I saw you backed a couple of those Kickstarter watch things

01:43:14 ◼   ► But like do you care about the Nike fuel band or anything like that? I don't even know. What is that?

01:43:18 ◼   ► I don't know what that is. Okay. Well, I might I don't know. I think there's a future in that stuff

01:43:23 ◼   ► I I don't know what it is. I backed the I also backed the pebble watch. I think it's calm

01:43:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's the one I'm thinking of. I don't even know where they did. They sending them out yet

01:43:32 ◼   ► I back these I still haven't got my elevation doc yet. I've backed these. Yeah, I haven't either

01:43:36 ◼   ► I haven't know what's gonna be first the new iPhone with the new doc or right?

01:43:40 ◼   ► I back all these Kickstarter prod

01:43:43 ◼   ► Projects and I'm glad to do it

01:43:45 ◼   ► But it's actually kind of a nice surprise because it takes them long enough to ship the product that I kind of forget about it

01:43:50 ◼   ► And then it's like totally I'm getting a present from my former self. Yeah, it's like thank you 2011 John Gruber

01:43:57 ◼   ► what a very thoughtful gift this is an awesome doc for my iPhone yeah I

01:44:02 ◼   ► completely forgot about it all right I'm gonna call it a show yeah let's do that

01:44:08 ◼   ► Dan Fromer thank you so much people can can can and should follow you at splat

01:44:14 ◼   ► f.com where you write you're also writing it read write web we're gonna

01:44:19 ◼   ► keep our eyes open for your your big feature on Iceland Iceland next week I'm

01:44:26 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to that.

01:44:29 ◼   ► From Dome, @fromdome on Twitter.

01:44:32 ◼   ► And I want to thank our sponsors again.

01:44:34 ◼   ► We've got Boom, this very cool utility for your Mac that boosts audio volume and provides

01:44:40 ◼   ► a system-wide equalizer.

01:44:44 ◼   ► And we've got the Adventures of Alex, electricity, a super cool sort of combo interactive book

01:44:52 ◼   ► game for the iPad.

01:44:55 ◼   ► and you can find that on online

01:44:58 ◼   ► at the App Store

01:44:59 ◼   ► the adventures of Alex, electricity. Thanks!

01:45:01 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]