00:00:00 ◼ ► Yeah, so when I saw that you and Snell went three and a half hours, I joked to some people that I
00:00:05 ◼ ► knew you were going to call me next. And it's funny that you were talking about betting because
00:00:10 ◼ ► I thought, man, if I could bet on it, then I'd make a lot of money. But then I guess I'm not
00:00:14 ◼ ► supposed to bet if I'm one of the participants, right? Well, you should call Shohei Ohtani.
00:00:40 ◼ ► Amy was asking me yesterday. So I grew up and I hope I don't get into trouble for making light
00:00:47 ◼ ► of religion, but I grew up, my parents, we were just talking about my parents off the air,
00:00:52 ◼ ► still kicking around. My dad is 86. My mom is 78. My dad, at least as a devout Catholic,
00:01:00 ◼ ► I grew up Catholic. I used to know the whole thing. I knew the Easter thing. And Amy knows
00:01:06 ◼ ► that I know. And she was asking me yesterday on Friday, what day is it? Is this the day
00:01:13 ◼ ► where they nail them up to the cross? Is this the day where they lock them in the cave?
00:01:22 ◼ ► She didn't know. She grew up Lutheran and I don't think they... I'll just say it. I grew up Catholic.
00:01:34 ◼ ► They indoctrinated us. But for me, the whole thing is like a TV show that I was never really into,
00:01:43 ◼ ► and therefore I forgot from my childhood. Yeah. Well, so I grew up Presbyterian and we were even
00:01:51 ◼ ► ushers at something. My parents tried to get us to go every Sunday and then sort of gave up.
00:01:58 ◼ ► But we celebrated Easter and all that. And we would go... It was one of those things where
00:02:07 ◼ ► we would go to the service Christmas Eve, right? Yeah, Christmas Eve. And my dad would,
00:02:26 ◼ ► No, we used to do that too because we used to go every week and I was very resentful about it
00:02:33 ◼ ► because 48, 49 weeks a year, it's not hard to get a seat in the church. And then all of a sudden on
00:02:40 ◼ ► these holidays, it's standing room only, your parents are trying to get you there an hour early,
00:02:45 ◼ ► and it's like, "Why are we doing this? Why are we dressing up?" Anyway, but happy Easter.
00:02:49 ◼ ► You joke about it, but I do feel like the advantage of me and Jason going into overtime
00:03:08 ◼ ► I would, I think, largely like to avoid talking about the regulatory and antitrust issues facing
00:03:18 ◼ ► Apple. Yeah. And it didn't feel like... I was actually surprised because I was listening as
00:03:23 ◼ ► I was walking the dog and doing some other things. And then I was sort of surprised when you were
00:03:28 ◼ ► starting to wrap up because you weren't like... I mean, he wanted to keep going too. And he had
00:03:33 ◼ ► said at the beginning that he was tired of talking about it and then had no problem talking about it
00:03:39 ◼ ► for three and a half hours. Well, there is a lot to it though, right? I mean, that's sort of part
00:03:46 ◼ ► of the story. And there is some there there, which gets mixed in and doesn't fit with today's world
00:03:55 ◼ ► where everything is binary and it's either exactly right or exactly wrong. Like the notion that maybe
00:04:01 ◼ ► 15, 20% of the antitrust regulatory complaints about Apple actually are sort of like, "Hey,
00:04:13 ◼ ► be looking into for an important industry." And that the rest of it is a bunch of nonsense.
00:04:20 ◼ ► Both things can be true. I do want to bring up the one thing that I kind of stumbled into in a piece
00:04:26 ◼ ► that I thought I was going to publish days ago, but didn't publish until late last night, which
00:04:33 ◼ ► is late on a Friday. So I don't even know if you read it. But looking more into just the general
00:04:40 ◼ ► idea of, "Hey, how big is the EU to Apple?" And there's two parts of it that I thought are
00:04:48 ◼ ► interesting. There's one, just the question of how big is the EU to Apple, which I hung the number
00:04:56 ◼ ► 7% on based on last January's quarterly or February's analyst call for the quarter ending
00:05:04 ◼ ► at the end of the year. And Luca Maestri, the CFO of Apple, who has a delightful accent, but is
00:05:17 ◼ ► transcription error where Jason Snell's published transcript that he double checks. God bless him.
00:05:24 ◼ ► If he didn't do these transcripts, we wouldn't have them. These things would be lost to time.
00:05:29 ◼ ► But there was a question that the analyst—I can't listen to those things. I have to skim
00:05:37 ◼ ► I used to listen to them. Yeah, I used to listen to them religiously. But yeah, I haven't in recent
00:05:44 ◼ ► years. There used to be a lot of arguments about, "Oh, is Apple going out of business?"
00:05:50 ◼ ► And nobody's—that's not happening anymore. And also, they don't give out the unit sales anymore.
00:06:04 ◼ ► used to give out was sort of—I mean, honestly, they would just break out like, "Hey, we sold
00:06:10 ◼ ► 3.8 million Macs last quarter and 12.8 million iPads." And all right. And then at the time,
00:06:18 ◼ ► we used to complain that they wouldn't break it down by model. "Oh, how many of them were
00:06:22 ◼ ► $999 MacBooks and how many of them were $5,000 Mac Pros?" Now they just don't tell you shit.
00:06:30 ◼ ► And we're like, "Ah." What we used to complain about was the good old days when they were open.
00:06:38 ◼ ► But anyway, the question was from an analyst. It was in typical analyst-ese, which is oddly
00:06:45 ◼ ► obtuse. You would think that these financial guys would be like the most rude, curt-to-the-point
00:06:52 ◼ ► people, but they're not for some reason. It's all very deferential. It's almost like talking
00:06:58 ◼ ► to the royal family and there's like code words you have to know. But anyway, the gist of what
00:07:02 ◼ ► the guy was asking was, "Hey, should we be worried about Apple's overall services revenue with this
00:07:09 ◼ ► DMA stuff?" I think that's a fair paraphrasing of the question. And Tim gave an answer that was sort
00:07:17 ◼ ► of a non-answer. And then Luca came on and said that the EU region is only 7% of their App Store
00:07:29 ◼ ► revenue, but the transcription error was App Store came out as absolute, 7% of absolute revenue,
00:07:36 ◼ ► which I just read as financial analyst lingo for overall revenue. I don't know. But the question is
00:07:49 ◼ ► So they gave us a fact. The EU, the countries that comprise the countries that are in the EU,
00:07:57 ◼ ► which is not equivalent to what Apple calls Europe. What Apple calls Europe includes famously
00:08:08 ◼ ► **Trevor Stauffer** I think it was in the papers. There's several other countries in Europe that
00:08:14 ◼ ► are not in the EU. Norway is kind of big. Turkey, I forget who else. Russia, the Ukraine, both of
00:08:21 ◼ ► those countries. I don't know if you've known in the papers together. And it's like all of Africa
00:08:35 ◼ ► call the Europe region, which includes the EU, those non-EU countries in Europe, Northern Africa,
00:08:43 ◼ ► which is big, big countries like Egypt, which has a high GDP, the entire Middle East, Israel,
00:08:48 ◼ ► Saudi Arabia, all those countries over there, is about 20, 25% of Apple's revenue. So does it make
00:08:55 ◼ ► any sense that the EU countries are only 7%? I don't know. And is their app store, if we know
00:09:02 ◼ ► from what they said, which is I guess legally binding these calls, their app store revenue-
00:09:16 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah, Tim Cook was talking about their position in China. And basically,
00:09:22 ◼ ► long story short, said something like, "Yeah, no problem in China." And then they had a problem
00:09:28 ◼ ► in China. And I think it has to do with what they internally actually thought. And I think he
00:09:33 ◼ ► glad-handed it a little bit and didn't paint an appropriate picture of what was happening. And you
00:09:46 ◼ ► investors. I mean, it's like you said you were in a better position than you actually were,
00:09:59 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Not for them, but yeah, but not in some sense, considering it was probably
00:10:09 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Other things that they say, oh, that's what Luca was saying on the call.
00:10:14 ◼ ► **Trevor Stauffer** Oh, right. So he did say that the EU accounts for 7% of their App Store.
00:10:19 ◼ ► My theory is that if the EU countries constitute 7% of App Store revenue, then that's a reasonable
00:10:28 ◼ ► proxy for how much they account for their overall revenue. Because I can't think of a hypothetical
00:10:36 ◼ ► situation where EU countries are, because they're buying way more hardware, like they're buying lots
00:10:48 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** I mean, if they buy more Macs than iPhones, that's possible, right? Because
00:10:59 ◼ ► country economically in the EU is Germany. And in Germany, it's not that Macs are nowhere,
00:11:07 ◼ ► but they're actually a little lower than most countries. So it just as like a just one quick
00:11:13 ◼ ► spitball test, could that be the reason? Are there lots of Mac sales in Germany and France,
00:11:19 ◼ ► which are big economically rich countries that could maybe distort the overall revenue versus
00:11:25 ◼ ► App Store revenue? And that's not true. So I kind of feel as a ballpark figure, that's true.
00:11:35 ◼ ► **Trevor Stauffer** It seems to rub some people in the EU the wrong way. And I feel certain readers
00:11:57 ◼ ► definitely write them the wrong way, but maybe not the former because that's just a number.
00:12:00 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Right. That 7% is actually a number that when you're under active threat,
00:12:07 ◼ ► which they keep reiterating, they do. It's not just that the law says they can find the gatekeeping
00:12:13 ◼ ► designated gatekeepers up to 10% on a first offense, and then up to 20% of global revenue
00:12:20 ◼ ► on subsequent offenses. They keep the commissioners, Vestager and Bretton, keep reiterating
00:12:27 ◼ ► that we're going to find these companies heavily if we find them not in compliance. They don't say
00:12:32 ◼ ► we're going to find them to the full extent of the DMA, but they keep saying heavy fines will
00:12:38 ◼ ► definitely be coming. There's no reason to doubt them. It's sort of like dealing with Trump, take
00:12:43 ◼ ► him at his word, right? This whole idea of, "Hey, he just says crazy stuff. He won't do crazy stuff."
00:12:48 ◼ ► And then we put him in office for four years and he did crazy stuff. Take him at their word.
00:12:52 ◼ ► The idea that maybe under threat of 10 to 20% of your global revenue, it's not worth it to do
00:13:00 ◼ ► business in a region that's only 7% of your global revenue seems to rub people the wrong way. I mean,
00:13:07 ◼ ► but I'm just a columnist with a blog and a podcast. And again, it's sort of why I wanted
00:13:22 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I don't think, I think it's a fair question. I mean, I'm sure it's a question that
00:13:28 ◼ ► they must be asking themselves, right? It's a business. I mean, it is a business decision
00:13:34 ◼ ► to make. I do think that there are many other things that go into it other than just the 7%.
00:13:39 ◼ ► I mean, I think there is, right. If they pull out of the EU, that's a big, well, it's a lot of
00:13:46 ◼ ► things. It's a political problem. It's probably a problem, a perception problem for other, like,
00:14:01 ◼ ► why do you think that it is more of a question to be asking in this situation than say China?
00:14:06 ◼ ► And I think, I mean, I know some of the answers already, but maybe it's just a thing we can talk
00:14:10 ◼ ► about. Because I mean, the things that the EU is asking for are to my mind, less onerous and less
00:14:27 ◼ ► extraordinary regulatory ask in this entire field is the, I forget how many years ago they passed
00:14:35 ◼ ► it, but the law that China faced passed that said that cloud, whatever services, I guess,
00:14:43 ◼ ► cloud, anything services for mainland Chinese customers must be hosted in mainland China data
00:14:51 ◼ ► centers by companies owned by Chinese company by, by in data centers owned by Chinese companies.
00:15:00 ◼ ► And Apple complied by that by commissioning or partnering with some Chinese owned company to be
00:15:06 ◼ ► their designated partner who built out an entire infrastructure for iCloud in mainland China.
00:15:13 ◼ ► So effectively the world has two iClouds. There's the iCloud that all everybody else has,
00:15:19 ◼ ► which is worldwide and global and doesn't really matter. It's sort of the same iCloud if you're
00:15:30 ◼ ► And obviously a big ask, obviously a, people often love to point this out to me and accuse me of
00:15:38 ◼ ► being a hypocrite on the grounds of the privacy angle, right? That how could this proves that
00:15:42 ◼ ► Apple doesn't care about privacy because obviously part of the reason for the Chinese law is so that
00:15:47 ◼ ► the Chinese government has provable access to the data of, of everything that they, because it's
00:15:53 ◼ ► hosted in data in data centers in their country by owned by companies that are Chinese companies,
00:16:00 ◼ ► that they have rights to that. And my counter argument to that is, well, a, the whole thing
00:16:11 ◼ ► Clearly it's, I mean, it's a lot bigger, right? I don't know what the number is, but it's gotta be,
00:16:17 ◼ ► second, second biggest to the Americas in terms of consumer purchasing. And there's the whole
00:16:25 ◼ ► inextricable aspect where that's where the iPhone assembly takes place. And if something were to
00:16:37 ◼ ► happen, some natural catastrophe or some sort of geopolitical conflict that would suddenly cut off
00:16:45 ◼ ► China from Apple. The iPhone just doesn't, it's not that it wouldn't exist, but it would completely
00:16:52 ◼ ► collapse. It would completely Apple cannot make the iPhone as we know it without China and China
00:17:06 ◼ ► violation of the Cook doctrine of owning and controlling the core technologies of blah, blah,
00:17:12 ◼ ► blah. I mean, the ability to make enough iPhones is a core technology for Apple, right? And they
00:17:19 ◼ ► don't own it. It's it's part of China. So there is part of Apple's complicated relationship with
00:17:26 ◼ ► China is just the size of the market, which is second only to the Americas and probably growing
00:17:31 ◼ ► as, as population wise, there's certainly way more room for people to enter the middle class that can
00:17:39 ◼ ► afford iPhones in China than just about anywhere else rivaled only by India where Apple is also
00:17:46 ◼ ► concentrating a lot of effort. So it's the size of the market, but then it's particularly complicated
00:17:52 ◼ ► by the fact that Apple needs to be there to manufacture. So they kind of, I don't, I don't
00:17:58 ◼ ► know how complicated that is in terms of Apple's need to be there as a retailer selling these
00:18:08 ◼ ► products and saying, okay, we'll build out the infrastructure. Would it be less likely that they
00:18:13 ◼ ► would have built out the iCloud infrastructure in mainland China if they didn't depend on China to
00:18:20 ◼ ► make hundreds of millions of iPhones a year? I think they still would have done it just because
00:18:24 ◼ ► of the market size, but it's obviously complicated. Right. Right. And my counter argument to that
00:18:29 ◼ ► though, on the privacy angle is if I lived in China or you lived in China, or most of the
00:18:36 ◼ ► people listening to this show lived in China and you were fortunate enough to have a job or
00:18:42 ◼ ► an income where you could afford an Apple iPhone, wouldn't you want an Apple that's the phone you
00:18:49 ◼ ► would like to buy. So Apple doing what it takes to serve the Chinese market, I think is the most
00:18:56 ◼ ► private option available to the people of China. So if Apple were to put its foot down on principle
00:19:07 ◼ ► and say on principle alone, we're not going to comply with this law that forces us to put
00:19:14 ◼ ► our iCloud servers in China. We're going to only serve customers with servers outside China.
00:19:21 ◼ ► And if that means we can't sell iPhones in China, so be it, which is, I guess what the critics would
00:19:28 ◼ ► like Apple to do to make a statement like that. It would obviously make a statement. It would
00:19:34 ◼ ► obviously be huge news. It would obviously be an humongous hit to Apple's finances in the name of
00:19:41 ◼ ► privacy. And I also think though that it would be bad for the people of China who otherwise could
00:19:54 ◼ ► buy iPhones, right? Like I'm not saying that, I'm not denying that both things are true and that
00:20:00 ◼ ► their interests are mostly guided by the size of the market. But on the other hand, it is the surely,
00:20:06 ◼ ► you know, while the average Chinese or any Chinese customer doesn't really have privacy in their
00:20:12 ◼ ► digital life the way that we outside China expect that we do, I would guess that an iPhone using
00:20:20 ◼ ► Chinese citizen has far more privacy than somebody who's using one of the Android phones over there.
00:20:27 ◼ ► I guess. I'm not sure if it amounts to that much. I mean, because they're using one of those,
00:20:41 ◼ ► Right. Right. But you can make the same argument in the EU still, because I think your complaint
00:20:46 ◼ ► is mostly about user experience stuff. Right. And you could say they're benefiting by staying
00:20:52 ◼ ► in the EU. They're benefiting EU customers by still providing a better user experience than anything.
00:21:02 ◼ ► spitball and just say, hey, maybe they would think about playing out. And as I've been writing,
00:21:07 ◼ ► I think it's of all the designated gatekeepers, the company that I think is the most likely to say,
00:21:12 ◼ ► you know what, screw you guys is meta, honestly, because it's they're the ones who I think the
00:21:18 ◼ ► EU is really putting the screws to in a way that is just far outside the letter of the DMA.
00:21:27 ◼ ► Right there. This whole payer OK thing where it's OK. Option A is you opt into being targeted for
00:21:35 ◼ ► advertising and you can continue to use Facebook and Instagram free of charge and we'll serve you
00:21:40 ◼ ► the same targeted ads. We serve everybody around the world, which are incredibly lucrative for meta
00:21:45 ◼ ► or will they said a couple of months ago, you could pay ten dollars a month and use them without
00:21:53 ◼ ► ads. And then they were like, that's too much. And they're like, OK, we'll cut it to six dollars
00:22:10 ◼ ► Vestager herself, before she knew that if it were I think what happened just a few years ago,
00:22:16 ◼ ► she said, what I would like to see is Facebook offer a paid option. I would like that a paid
00:22:21 ◼ ► option with no ads. And now they're offering a paid option with no ads. And it turns out
00:22:26 ◼ ► 90 some percent of Europeans choose the other option. And therefore they're like, well,
00:22:32 ◼ ► if 90 percent of people want it free, then you have to offer it to them free without the targeted
00:22:42 ◼ ► Unless they come from the EU's perspective, though, is it's the Walmart thing, right? I mean,
00:22:57 ◼ ► because that's not I mean, saying saying that you can either be targeted or pay doesn't seem like
00:23:04 ◼ ► that great an option to me. And as someone who used to be on Instagram and left because I didn't
00:23:10 ◼ ► care for meta, basically. I have yet to be able to find an alternative. I paid for Flickr,
00:23:23 ◼ ► everybody else is on Instagram, right? I mean, there's no there is no other place where I can go
00:23:28 ◼ ► in the morning and scroll through pictures of cats and stuff and waste 15 minutes before I get out of
00:23:34 ◼ ► bed to get my mind straight. So it's the and I don't know, maybe they're not approaching it the
00:23:41 ◼ ► right way. But I mean, the problem from I look at these things as a as like a as a user. So like the
00:23:46 ◼ ► thing about the startup experience on iOS that that they're implementing, where like, you have
00:23:54 ◼ ► to give them choice in browsers. Okay, so we gave him choice in brothers. Well, you didn't give them
00:23:58 ◼ ► all of the browsers. I think that's a bad user experience as someone who who might consider
00:24:04 ◼ ► picking something else. I mean, I don't when I pick a search engine, I don't pick Google,
00:24:08 ◼ ► I use DuckDuckGo. So I do want a choice. But I don't think I think it's a bad user experience
00:24:15 ◼ ► to put up like 27 browsers on the onboarding. But that said, I also think that saying you can get
00:24:24 ◼ ► you have two choices, but they're both that meta is not really. A choice, particularly.
00:24:30 ◼ ► But the third choice is not to use it, especially, I know, but I don't I don't get I'm out of the
00:24:36 ◼ ► pool, basically. I mean, I'm still struggling to find a bed because everybody else is in that pool.
00:24:43 ◼ ► I mean, the problem is that it's a monopoly. Right? And that's what their that's what their
00:24:48 ◼ ► their issue is. Right. And everybody thinks that I'm or not everybody, but lots of people think
00:24:52 ◼ ► I'm knee jerk against everything the European Union has regulated in recent years. And it's,
00:25:00 ◼ ► that's not true. A lot of the stuff regarding data privacy is terrific. There are some of the
00:25:06 ◼ ► privacy aspects of their laws are clearly the best in the world. And they also have laws that have
00:25:12 ◼ ► insisted that you have access to your data so that you can say to a company that has built a targeted
00:25:18 ◼ ► dossier about you, hey, I would like to download what you think my interests are and stuff like
00:25:23 ◼ ► that, which I think that there that is, to me, a perfectly reasonable thing for government to insert
00:25:29 ◼ ► itself and to say, this is a reasonable thing for the law to say you have to be able to have,
00:25:34 ◼ ► I just sort of think they're overreaching. And before we move on, the other thing that I found,
00:25:46 ◼ ► that were after they announced that they're investigating, of course, every single company
00:25:51 ◼ ► is has an investigation, who's been designated a gatekeeper as an investigation launched against
00:25:56 ◼ ► it already. But in terms of there was something in the announcement of the investigation that
00:26:12 ◼ ► And I actually went through my phone and started trying to delete apples, the default apps that
00:26:21 ◼ ► come with the iPhone and see which ones don't let you actually remove it. Some of them like settings,
00:26:27 ◼ ► for example, and I think settings would be one that even the the most vigorous regulator would
00:26:34 ◼ ► agree kind of can't can't be deleteable. I don't know. I mean, who knows what these people but
00:26:42 ◼ ► I would think of all apps, if there's one app that everybody could agree, that users should not be
00:26:49 ◼ ► able to delete from their iPhone and replace with the third party, it would be settings,
00:26:53 ◼ ► you can hide it from your home screen, but then it's still in your app library. And the ones that
00:26:58 ◼ ► I found there was Safari settings, messages, phone, and photos and camera. And it turns out in her
00:27:08 ◼ ► comments, messenger mentioned photos and that they're looking at the fact that photos can't
00:27:14 ◼ ► be deleted and can't be replaced by a third party app for cloud sync. And my eyes just rolled so far
00:27:23 ◼ ► back in my head that they hurt. Because it's I get where you could think, hey, I would love to use
00:27:28 ◼ ► a I can imagine a mobile operating system that is so component based that even something like
00:27:36 ◼ ► the system level photos library is a swappable Lego brick that you could just take out and put
00:27:43 ◼ ► a third party in. But that's not the way iOS is designed, right? Like part of the system design
00:27:50 ◼ ► of iOS is that there's a system level camera role the system has. And in just this year with iOS 17
00:27:58 ◼ ► increased the fine grain controls over what apps have access to in terms of apps that would like
00:28:06 ◼ ► to access your pictures from your system camera role. And that's one of the things that I really
00:28:13 ◼ ► like about the operating system, honestly. And when there have been several apps where I have
00:28:19 ◼ ► launched some try this app and I get the app and I try and then it says it wants access to your
00:28:23 ◼ ► entire photos library. I'm like, absolutely not. Absolutely no. And that is probably that's a
00:28:36 ◼ ► or some other thing, I think you would have to lose that sort of granular control. Right?
00:28:48 ◼ ► these things is to me, this is a thriving, it has been from the inception of the app store onwards.
00:28:56 ◼ ► Some of the smash hit apps from the debut of the app store were camera apps and photo filtering
00:29:03 ◼ ► apps and stuff like that. I mean, my, my personal iPhone is lousy with apps that hook up to the
00:29:10 ◼ ► system library and let me pick recent photos and apply filters. It's one of the most thriving
00:29:18 ◼ ► markets of third-party apps and they don't know, they don't get to take over at the lowest level
00:29:28 ◼ ► But that's, this is, this is the system Apple has designed where here's the level where we think
00:29:35 ◼ ► third-party integration makes sense. It's slightly above the system level. And so you can't replace
00:29:43 ◼ ► photos itself, but you can certainly not really use the photos app and use dark room or after
00:29:50 ◼ ► what's it called? Forget. I'll think of it in a second, but there's dozens and dozens of popular
00:29:57 ◼ ► apps that let you manage your photo library. Lightroom from Adobe can hook up to your photo
00:30:02 ◼ ► library. It, to me, that after light after light photo is app I was thinking of sort of like a
00:30:08 ◼ ► rival to dark room, but there's just dozens and dozens of them. And I think anybody who's looking
00:30:14 ◼ ► for one can find one that they're happy with. And I just see this as complaining about a problem
00:30:19 ◼ ► that nobody actually has. Yeah. Yeah. I think there is a, there is a compulsion to want everyone
00:30:29 ◼ ► to have a choice and it's the same. It's the same thing that led to these pop-ups about cookies.
00:30:35 ◼ ► Right. Right. You want everyone to have a choice and then the choice is, is so obnoxious that it
00:30:43 ◼ ► doesn't actually make things better. Right. My, my take on the whole cookie thing, which
00:30:49 ◼ ► again drives people in the EU nuts or some people, because some people judge them only by their
00:30:57 ◼ ► intention and the intention of the cookie law is fine. Right. I think most people would agree
00:31:02 ◼ ► absolutely intention. The intention is obviously pro-consumer, but the actual practical effect of
00:31:08 ◼ ► it, what they seem to have thought would happen is they, they said, if you're going to use cookies,
00:31:14 ◼ ► browser cookies to track users across websites and whatever complicated list of things that were
00:31:22 ◼ ► considered part of the law, then you have to get consent to do it in, in some certain way.
00:31:36 ◼ ► users willy nilly, and this tracking will end. And instead what happened is that everybody was like,
00:31:43 ◼ ► okay, so we have to show these obnoxious banners all the time. Okay. We'll just do that. Right.
00:31:50 ◼ ► And I, I can't emphasize enough. And I, every time I bring it up, people are like, yeah,
00:31:54 ◼ ► I just went to France or I just went to Germany or on vacation with my family or whatever.
00:31:59 ◼ ► And I have not stepped foot in Europe in, I don't know, five, six, seven years. It's been a while,
00:32:05 ◼ ► but people who have been say that it's however many cookie banners you think you get here in
00:32:10 ◼ ► the United States or elsewhere in the world, when you're in Europe is way worse. You just,
00:32:16 ◼ ► the entire web experience is just nonstop, okay. And permitting cookie banners, which is complying
00:32:22 ◼ ► with the law, but it's, it wasn't the intended effect. The intended effect of the law wasn't
00:32:27 ◼ ► that you're going to spend all day clicking. Okay. Give me cookies to every single website
00:32:33 ◼ ► you visit. The intention was, Oh, this would make companies not do the tracking, but they sort of
00:32:39 ◼ ► wash their hands. They're like, Hey, we took care of your privacy. We're done. We're going to move
00:32:43 ◼ ► on to, we're going to move on to cell phones from web tracking. All right, let me take a break here
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00:35:36 ◼ ► That's isn't it great. That's just love to say it. What other now let's talk fun stuff.
00:35:44 ◼ ► I'm guessing I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing you don't own a vision pro.
00:35:52 ◼ ► I do not own a vision pro now. Okay. So you have not seen this week. It doesn't seem like I missed
00:35:58 ◼ ► much. You have not seen the new immersive content, which is a five minute, five minute highlight reel
00:36:06 ◼ ► of the MLS soccer highlights from last year. Last year. Yeah. From four months ago, I wrote
00:36:14 ◼ ► when they announced this, I kind of wrote I I'm that I'm kind of surprised to me, the most
00:36:19 ◼ ► surprising aspect of Apple's launch of this is that they don't have any new immersive content
00:36:26 ◼ ► where I sort of expected like a weekly drip. Like once a week, there'd be like a new thing coming
00:36:31 ◼ ► out. Like here's another new thing only on vision pro. Here's another new thing. So here's another
00:36:37 ◼ ► thing like a mountain climber and here's another one for the sports fans. And then the third week
00:36:43 ◼ ► would be like another thing like that Alicia keys thing. Here's a, here's another famous pop singer.
00:36:48 ◼ ► So keep hitting different markets, sports, adventure, music, whatever else it could be.
00:36:54 ◼ ► And instead it's been nothing and not, not just nothing, but most of the immersive content that
00:37:00 ◼ ► they have available was actually stuff that they showed back in June at WWDC when they first
00:37:08 ◼ ► announced all of this it's, it's really kind of odd. And then they came, they said this week,
00:37:12 ◼ ► they have a five minute immersive video of MLS playoff soccer highlights. I watched it before
00:37:19 ◼ ► we recorded and it is amazing, but it absolutely is what I thought going in. I was like, if it's
00:37:30 ◼ ► only five minutes long, isn't it just going to feel like a long trailer? And that's exactly what
00:37:35 ◼ ► it feels like. Yeah. It, it feels like a very long trailer for what should be like a 90 minute, okay,
00:37:43 ◼ ► now go watch the actual 90 minute documentary showing the entire saga of last year's MLS cup.
00:37:55 ◼ ► isn't even game footage. It's like players running out of the the locker room, high fiving each other
00:38:02 ◼ ► and signing autographs. And it's very, very odd. Yeah. And Jason talked about a strange effect
00:38:12 ◼ ► because they, they changed the perspective. Right. And so you'll be in it's 180, you know, and so
00:38:18 ◼ ► you could be watching something and then I guess the camera perspective moves and you're looking
00:38:23 ◼ ► at nothing and you have to like, you have to turn around and try and figure out what you're looking,
00:38:27 ◼ ► what you're supposed to be seeing. Yeah. It almost find the action, you know, in a way that there
00:38:32 ◼ ► are other immersive content that I've watched all the stuff that you know about the tight rope
00:38:38 ◼ ► Walker and the other stuff they've shown. This is the first time where it feels like this is new
00:38:58 ◼ ► Because when you're, you know, cutting between camera angles, like it, whether it's sports or
00:39:11 ◼ ► understand cutting from one camera angle and perspective to another, which might be from a
00:39:16 ◼ ► closeup to a wide shot to a reverse shot. People, it, our brains handle it and 99% of the public
00:39:25 ◼ ► doesn't even really notice it. It just is the way watching TV and movies works. But with this,
00:39:32 ◼ ► it is, it is odd when it cuts because you are in any particular shot. It is 180 degree perspective
00:39:44 ◼ ► and you're the one controlling, am I looking left? Am I looking right? Am I looking up?
00:39:48 ◼ ► Am I looking down? There's actually a lot of neat stuff. When you look down, you can see in some of
00:39:54 ◼ ► these shots from behind the goal, you can see if you look down, like where the goalkeeper keeps his
00:40:00 ◼ ► water bottle and like, you know, like a little bag of snacks. It's, it's actually kind of cool.
00:40:06 ◼ ► Like stuff from nuts.com. Yeah. Stuff from nuts.com maybe, but that's what it looks like.
00:40:13 ◼ ► It's, you know, just out of bounds, but there's like a water bottle and like a bag of snacks,
00:40:17 ◼ ► like an extra pair of gloves or something like that. It's kind of neat. You don't see that on TV.
00:40:23 ◼ ► But you're there looking down and then all of a sudden the camera angle of the footage shifts to
00:40:30 ◼ ► the corner. You're right behind the goal, looking at the goalies water bottle, right next to the net
00:40:36 ◼ ► of the goal. And then the movie switches to the, to the corner for a corner kick or something like
00:40:42 ◼ ► that. And it, it, it, it is disconcerting, right? Because within any shot you're choosing,
00:40:50 ◼ ► you're the editor choosing where you're gauging, but gazing, but at the same time, the movie keeps
00:40:57 ◼ ► moving along in real time and they're cutting between shots. It's kind of, I'm not sure what
00:41:02 ◼ ► the answer is, but it's not this. I wonder, do you think that this is the kind of thing where
00:41:10 ◼ ► they were trying to decide if they were going to release it as a sort of a more of a developer kit
00:41:15 ◼ ► and try and get more people on board. And then they were waffling between what to do and finally
00:41:22 ◼ ► decided to ship it for public release and just don't have enough content. I don't know. I, cause
00:41:30 ◼ ► I don't, it's so, I know people have used that phrase developer kit so often with this, but
00:41:35 ◼ ► that's so unlike Apple. Yeah. And, and they're not, you know, when they do that, I mean, they've done
00:41:43 ◼ ► that in the past, right? Did they, when the Intel switch happened, didn't they, they gave out some
00:41:49 ◼ ► Intel max. Yeah, they did. They did it with both processor switches. They had, well, both of the
00:41:56 ◼ ► recent ones, not going back to the Motorola to power PC, but with the power PC to Intel,
00:42:03 ◼ ► they had a Mac pro. I think it was the cheese, you know, what we called the cheese grater
00:42:08 ◼ ► or frame where you'd, you could get one. And it was just sort of a run of the mill PC motherboard
00:42:14 ◼ ► inside. And then six months after they shipped it, they wanted them all back. They didn't sell them
00:42:20 ◼ ► to developers. They leased them and they wanted them all back and they didn't wind up resembling
00:42:26 ◼ ► any actual Intel max that ever shipped in terms of their architecture. It was just sort of
00:42:33 ◼ ► like a Hackintosh really. It was sort of like an Apple branded Hackintosh. And then in 2020,
00:42:48 ◼ ► 12 or something like that. I forget what, what, what eight they obviously the M ones did not
00:42:53 ◼ ► appear until the actual max, but they shipped like a Mac pro box with like an eight, 12 chip inside,
00:43:02 ◼ ► just so you could run this. Right. And emphasize this is absolutely positively not what we're
00:43:09 ◼ ► actually going to ship. This is just a wave for you, a developer, true dev kit. I, they, they,
00:43:15 ◼ ► I can't see them doing that in any way, shape or form deliberately with a new product like
00:43:21 ◼ ► vision pro. Yeah. Yeah. But in, it does seem to be in a gray area though, right? Because
00:43:27 ◼ ► it doesn't seem like they expect this model to sell to lots and lots of people. No, they don't.
00:43:36 ◼ ► Price wise, it's obviously not going to. Right. Price wise, it's not everything we know about the
00:43:41 ◼ ► supply chain with the supply of these, these Sony made displays in front of each eye is that
00:43:46 ◼ ► no matter how surprisingly popular this thing could have possibly been, there was an upper bound
00:43:52 ◼ ► on how many they could sell in the first year. And so in effect, even though I think Apple doesn't
00:43:57 ◼ ► think of it as a dev kit, I don't think it's weird that people outside the company sort of think of
00:44:02 ◼ ► it that way. Right. Does that make sense? Where I think Jaws, if he was on the show would swear up
00:44:08 ◼ ► and down, no way, this is not a dev kit is a great, it's a great product. That's, that's not what
00:44:13 ◼ ► we're thinking at all. And for some people it is, if you really just want to use it, this is
00:44:19 ◼ ► my personal opinion. If you really just want to use it to watch regular movies and TV shows,
00:44:25 ◼ ► it's absolutely phenomenal. And arguably on its own, just worth $3,500. I, that if bang and
00:44:33 ◼ ► olives and sold something like this and all you could do to watch, all you could watch on it is
00:44:38 ◼ ► like Netflix and other streaming services like that, just movies. They'd sell it for five or
00:44:45 ◼ ► $6,000. It is that good, that compelling when you're watching a movie. It sounds good. It's
00:44:51 ◼ ► great just for that alone, but that's obviously not how Apple's billing it. They're not calling
00:44:55 ◼ ► it a home entertain or a personal immersive entertainment system. They're calling it spatial
00:45:01 ◼ ► computing. Right? I mean, it's Apple who's hanging their hat on that term. And it just, I don't know.
00:45:09 ◼ ► And it just, it is compelling to watch regular and I say 2D, but even when you watch like the
00:45:18 ◼ ► Jim Cameron avatar movies, which were shot in 3D, that's not immersive. That's it. And if you've
00:45:25 ◼ ► never tried the vision pro or any of these headset, it's hard to explain the difference,
00:45:32 ◼ ► a rectangle in front of you. And there's an aspect ratio. It's, and you see into the rectangle and
00:45:44 ◼ ► things come out of the rectangle towards you, but it still is a framed aspect ratio movie. Whereas
00:45:50 ◼ ► like the immersive content, like this new MLS highlight clip is not, it's like being in a
00:45:56 ◼ ► planetarium where you've got this 180 degree dome view. Yeah. Just very, it just feels like the one
00:46:04 ◼ ► thing that's out of sync with the release of vision pro is the production of immersive content
00:46:09 ◼ ► that whatever wing of the company should be producing more of this stuff. Like Mr. Memo.
00:46:15 ◼ ► I don't know how else to say it. Right. And it, and it just seems, and I think the thing that's
00:46:29 ◼ ► when the iPhone came out in the mid two thousands and Steve jobs is still there and the company was
00:46:37 ◼ ► doing well in that run up post iPod and, and the, the everything that happened from the debut of
00:46:46 ◼ ► MacOS 10 and the debut of the iPod and iTunes and all the, you know, the great keynotes in those
00:46:54 ◼ ► two thousands, the company wasn't massive, right? They weren't one of the richest company in the
00:47:02 ◼ ► world. They weren't the most valuable company on the stock exchange. They were thriving and they
00:47:06 ◼ ► were growing. And there was tremendous optimism, even from people who in years, a decade past
00:47:13 ◼ ► thought the company was doomed, but they weren't filthy stinking rich. Right. Whereas today
00:47:20 ◼ ► launching this, you think, well, they, however expensive it is for them to make 50 new immersive
00:47:37 ◼ ► every week there's this new immersive thing that's only for Apple vision pro because Apple's
00:47:43 ◼ ► footing the bill to shoot this stuff. And I, I I'm just, I'm not flabbergasted that they didn't do it,
00:47:56 ◼ ► Although they create, they create that buzz and then people will rush to the store to buy them.
00:48:00 ◼ ► They might not be able to write enough to, to sell them. So, right. Maybe they feel they're,
00:48:06 ◼ ► they're cutting this the right way, but maybe it should be, maybe it should be at least a little
00:48:10 ◼ ► bit more than that. Faucet that faucet should be turned on a little more than this slow drip.
00:48:15 ◼ ► Right. Right. I feel like there should be more of a reward. Like maybe what they're thinking inside
00:48:20 ◼ ► is, Oh, we're on it. And we've got somebody somewhere in eddy Q's organization has this
00:48:26 ◼ ► big whiteboard with a whole list of all these immersive content productions that have been
00:48:31 ◼ ► green lighted or currently yellow lighted. And they're waiting for a director or something like
00:48:36 ◼ ► that, various stages of production. And it's all sorts of stuff is scheduled to come out in 2025
00:48:43 ◼ ► and 2026, blah, blah, blah. But I just, and they're like, they're thinking that's when there'll be
00:48:50 ◼ ► enough people who have vision pro or, or vision air lower priced versions of the vision hardware
00:48:56 ◼ ► lineup. And by that time, Oh, we'll be set. We, we, we are going to have a steady strip of this
00:49:02 ◼ ► stuff or steady drip of this stuff, but I don't know. You kind of feel like for 3500 to $4,000
00:49:09 ◼ ► right now, there ought to be a little more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like it's not the,
00:49:15 ◼ ► I mean, there was all that, that, that talk about, Oh, so many people are returning the vision pro,
00:49:22 ◼ ► you know, in that two week window when they could, and some of that didn't seem to little
00:49:35 ◼ ► it is a little bit, it seems like some of them are kind of like, not sure I should have gotten this.
00:49:49 ◼ ► I kind of wish that there was a way I wish that I could like, maybe I should see if a widget Smith
00:49:55 ◼ ► can, if I can somehow figure out a way to do it, but it would be interesting if every time I put
00:49:59 ◼ ► it on, if I could see a widget that tells me how long it's been since the previous time I put it on
00:50:11 ◼ ► I'm not surprised that I don't use it as all that often. But again, famously money runs through my
00:50:19 ◼ ► fingers like water. I hold water better than money. You know, well, you also live with someone,
00:50:30 ◼ ► but it was going to say that even if, even if the people who own one don't really regret it
00:50:35 ◼ ► from the outside, it doesn't seem as compelling a buy, right? Like I don't feel like I don't have
00:50:43 ◼ ► FOMO at all right now. Yeah. And that says a lot really. And, and it comes to, you know, cause a
00:50:48 ◼ ► lot of the stuff that it does do, right. It does have email and messages and Safari and it's, you
00:50:58 ◼ ► how many do you, do you feel like you don't have enough ways to do messages, mail and Safari right
00:51:03 ◼ ► now? I mean, I say this honestly, I, I kind of feel like maybe iPad, iPhone, Mac is too many.
00:51:11 ◼ ► Yeah, really. Yeah. Right. Like to me, the way to inspire FOMO is the only on vision pro stuff,
00:51:30 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, there's a weird, there's a weird gap between like the, when they, you know, they,
00:51:38 ◼ ► they shipped the watch and I would say watch zero, not really as complete a product as maybe it could
00:51:46 ◼ ► have been for sure. I mean, it was slow. I don't know that there were other than notifications,
00:52:22 ◼ ► Yeah. But it is true. They never made a 2.0 touch bar, which to me is it's a tangent, but,
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00:55:44 ◼ ► Because, and I never, I don't know why it never occurred to me before, because I guess the other
00:55:51 ◼ ► times I've watched immersive content wasn't the morning, but I was watching the soccer thing in
00:55:55 ◼ ► the morning while trying to drink coffee. And I realized as it's playing, I'm like reaching out
00:56:01 ◼ ► and it's, I don't know where my car, and I'm like, I don't, I need to take this off. This is
00:56:05 ◼ ► dangerous. I could get burned. Yeah, really. Problems I never expected to have with computers.
00:56:13 ◼ ► Yeah. I wonder if that's one of the reasons why they can want to keep it short. I don't know.
00:56:17 ◼ ► Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. It's weird. It does seem like it's not the environment that
00:56:22 ◼ ► you necessarily want to be in for a long period of time. Yeah. I don't know. It's weird. Anyway,
00:56:32 ◼ ► Gurman hinted at it a week ago and then MacRumors followed up. It seemed, I don't know if it was
00:56:37 ◼ ► prompted by Gurman, if they got the okay from it, but then MacRumors with the original inside
00:56:43 ◼ ► sources said that iOS 18 is going to have a much more customizable home screen system for icons.
00:56:52 ◼ ► So it would be more like Lego where you could just sort of snap icons into place wherever you
00:56:59 ◼ ► want them and make, if you only want two rows of them and then you want to just go to the next page,
00:57:03 ◼ ► you could do that. If you just want them like a column with a gap in the middle, you could do this.
00:57:08 ◼ ► You can kind of lay widgets out like that now. It's kind of weird in iOS 17. You can kind of
00:57:13 ◼ ► put widgets wherever you want, but you can't still can't put app icons wherever you want.
00:57:31 ◼ ► when you arrange your icons on the home screen, they're still sort of in a row, like in order
00:57:55 ◼ ► I don't imagine this is going to make it easier though, right? I mean, the way that press and
00:58:00 ◼ ► hold thing and then reorder rearranged stuff, I always have, if I want to get an icon to be the
00:58:14 ◼ ► And this seems like it's going to be, I don't know, madness, but I'll have to wait and see
00:58:19 ◼ ► Well, as ever, whoever leaked it hasn't leaked everything, so we don't know quite how it works.
00:58:25 ◼ ► So we're in the glorious two month stretch, or I guess the 10 week stretch, where WWDC has been
00:58:34 ◼ ► announced and we can just dream that these features will be implemented in the perfect way that isn't
00:58:41 ◼ ► annoying. Yeah. Well, the only other thing that so far has really come out is the AI stuff, right?
00:58:50 ◼ ► Well, that's the other thing we can do. We can talk about that too. I don't know if you're
00:58:54 ◼ ► going to be able, maybe you'll be able to use AI to arrange your icons on your home screen.
00:58:57 ◼ ► See, that would work. I mean, that's what I'm saying. I feel like I need another way to arrange
00:59:26 ◼ ► But we went at least two years, maybe three years, where you couldn't even copy and paste.
00:59:47 ◼ ► and then they did. And I think the general way cut, copy and paste that they came up with worked
00:59:52 ◼ ► was worth waiting for. But there are lots of other things that here we are 18 years in, which sounds
01:00:22 ◼ ► had rubber band select so that you could drag a rectangle... if you wanted to select three or
01:00:28 ◼ ► four icons on your desktop, instead of like shift-click, shift-click, shift-click, you just
01:00:34 ◼ ► drag a box. And any icon that wound up within the region of the rectangle you dragged would become
01:00:41 ◼ ► selected. And then they're all selected, and then you could drag them together. It was...
01:00:54 ◼ ► than 18 years into the iPhone than we have. It is very, very weird and tricky. And I think
01:01:03 ◼ ► 90-some percent of iPhone users would be shocked to find out that there is a way to move more than
01:01:10 ◼ ► one icon at a time, that you put it into jiggle mode and start dragging one icon, then get your
01:01:17 ◼ ► other hand involved and start tapping other icons. And then they shoot over into a stack, which is a
01:01:23 ◼ ► neat trick to know, but is something that I'm guessing 95% of iPhone users have no idea they
01:01:28 ◼ ► can possibly do. And even if you know about it, it still isn't that great of a way to sort of rearrange
01:01:36 ◼ ► your phone. It does have the virtue of being something that you are unlikely to trigger by
01:01:41 ◼ ► accident. Unlike some of the multitasking stuff where you can get into a situation where you've
01:01:49 ◼ ► got things, windows and positions, and you can't figure out how to get them out of those positions.
01:01:54 ◼ ► >> So that's my hope. My hope is that this is actually more... I know it sounds insignificant,
01:02:00 ◼ ► "Oh, you can arrange or put gaps in your home screen with your icons." I don't know. I kind
01:02:04 ◼ ► of hope that this is a serious rethinking from the ground up of how you organize your home screens,
01:02:09 ◼ ► and that they've really put their top new UI design minds onto the problem. And that it's,
01:02:23 ◼ ► "Hey, this actually... All right, sure, we can complain that it's too late, but it's better
01:02:28 ◼ ► late than never. This is actually very, very clever and flexible and makes me feel like I have much
01:02:35 ◼ ► more control over the organization of my home screens." I think that's a reasonable ask of Apple
01:02:41 ◼ ► after AT&T. >> Apart from that, I mean, I don't know if that... I don't imagine that's the only
01:02:46 ◼ ► thing, being able to put things in different positions than you have been able to in the past,
01:02:51 ◼ ► but it has been described as the biggest update for iOS ever, right? Even bigger than iOS 7.
01:03:00 ◼ ► >> I wonder about that, though. I know that's Germin's rule. And I don't know if that just
01:03:05 ◼ ► means the home screen angle or the whole OS or what that... I mean, so far, judging by the leaks,
01:03:23 ◼ ► how it would be more than... Having gone... I recently had reason... I don't even remember
01:03:29 ◼ ► where it was, but I went back and booted up a bunch of old iPhones that I had lying around.
01:03:36 ◼ ► And my mom had sent me her iPhone 3GS, and she famously, for a number of years, she doesn't...
01:03:50 ◼ ► and then she would turn it off and put it back in the box. And so it is in very nice shape.
01:03:57 ◼ ► It's not pristine, but it's really close. And so I booted that up, and man, it's not just nostalgia,
01:04:39 ◼ ► where you spin the wheel, you know what I mean? Like a wheel, and that you'd spin these things,
01:04:44 ◼ ► and that they had shadows and depth, and it was just extraordinarily clear what you're supposed
01:04:50 ◼ ► to do. Well, that looks like a wheel, it's three-dimensional, I'm obviously supposed to spin it.
01:04:58 ◼ ► obviously you can look at it and you can tell what you're supposed to do. And many things,
01:05:04 ◼ ► I mean, if it's gotten better, but many things when we switched to iOS 7 were not that clear.
01:05:08 ◼ ► >> No, and they've obviously stuck with it, and the whole industry followed. Again, I know...
01:05:23 ◼ ► it was Hugo Barra on Ben's Stratechery, saying that iOS borrowed as much from Android as Android
01:05:30 ◼ ► borrowed from iOS. And I mean, I have to disagree. I know, I think that you could make a list of
01:05:38 ◼ ► things that were borrowed that's equally long, or they did this first, then this came to the
01:05:42 ◼ ► other platform, and this one did that first, and this one came... So you could make two lists
01:05:47 ◼ ► that are equally long, but at a fundamental level, Android started as a BlackBerry-looking thing,
01:05:56 ◼ ► and ended up very much like an iPhone-looking thing. But there is, yeah, there's like a lot
01:06:04 ◼ ► that we've... I look back at that, it's kind of hard to believe, too, that we're up to 18,
01:06:10 ◼ ► and we only had six releases of iOS with the old style. I know, and it was weird when we got to
01:06:16 ◼ ► like iOS 14, I guess, or 13, wherever you'd want to call the halfway point, where it was like,
01:06:26 ◼ ► >> Right. But where I was going with that was that the whole industry sort of followed Apple's lead
01:06:31 ◼ ► post that, like everything kind of looks like iOS now. Stuff on the web looks like that,
01:06:35 ◼ ► Android looks like that, Windows sort of looks like that, everything has sort of got flat, and
01:06:41 ◼ ► lots of buttons are just text without an outline, and it's not so obvious what it is. Is this going
01:06:47 ◼ ► to be a drop-down menu, or is this just a push button? Is this a spinner? No, I don't know.
01:07:10 ◼ ► So that's about as close as Jaws was going to come to say, yes, we're going to talk about AI,
01:07:32 ◼ ► I think it was last fall, it must have been the iPhone announcement, it was like, oh yeah,
01:07:44 ◼ ► is, and I'll compare it, and it's not just because Bankman Fried just got sentenced to his prison
01:07:51 ◼ ► term, but to compare it to crypto, which was of hype cryptocurrency three years ago-ish, I don't
01:07:59 ◼ ► know where the peak of cryptocurrency mania was, but was a similar hype cycle to LLM, large
01:08:07 ◼ ► language model AI. And I think it's an interesting contrast because I think the cryptocurrency thing,
01:08:22 ◼ ► and somebody who did get in early on Bitcoin when held has done very, very, very well. I mean,
01:08:29 ◼ ► there is some kernel of reality there, but in terms of matching up to the hype, clearly,
01:08:47 ◼ ► >> If this doesn't turn out to be, like cryptocurrency didn't really turn out to be the
01:08:55 ◼ ► wave that was expected, but they managed to get by because now AI has completely filled the gap
01:09:01 ◼ ► for them. But if this doesn't turn out, I mean, and/or they just spent out there churning these
01:09:14 ◼ ► >> Yeah, this definitely feels much more, this is here to stay as opposed to cryptocurrency.
01:09:21 ◼ ► >> For better and for worse, lots of stuff is different already permanently and will always,
01:09:30 ◼ ► henceforth, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, right? Just the way that, I mean,
01:09:37 ◼ ► one of the ways we're already seeing it for the worse is using AI to just generate content farm
01:09:59 ◼ ► has your career been affected by AI? Well, no, my career has been affected by the crash of
01:10:26 ◼ ► the way that most of us, I don't see a lot of it, but I mean, it's hard to avoid it when you're
01:10:31 ◼ ► asking questions on a search engine, right? And you're like, I don't know, like your toilet is
01:10:38 ◼ ► running and it's, I don't know, how do I fix a running toilet? And it's for a long time,
01:10:43 ◼ ► it was like everything was steering you to YouTube videos, right? Which always annoys me. I'd rather
01:10:48 ◼ ► just read and see instructions. Don't make me watch a four minute video. Please, if you could
01:10:53 ◼ ► just show me the instructions of how to fix this, it would take me 20 seconds to read it. God.
01:11:00 ◼ ► But now it's just this AI crap, right? And you can just tell, it's such a telltale. And it makes me
01:11:07 ◼ ► sympathize with teachers because you just know that there's so much very horribly patched up AI
01:11:18 ◼ ► submitted homework being done, right? And it's so telltale, right? It's so bad. But it's all about
01:11:25 ◼ ► trying to Hoover up advertising money, right? And it really is like the parable of a view of a
01:11:30 ◼ ► million monkeys on a million typewriters typing for a million years. And it's, oh yeah, that's
01:11:35 ◼ ► an interesting hypothetical. And there's these people building websites now. That's a great idea.
01:11:48 ◼ ► people find ways around. I mean, there was that thing going around where someone used a
01:12:01 ◼ ► chat, talk to us, talk to our chat bot and got it to make some sort of Pearl script or something.
01:12:07 ◼ ► It's like why pay for chat GPT when my local Toyota dealer will take care of it for me.
01:12:16 ◼ ► >> Right. All that they were worried about is like how to use their prompts to prepare their chat
01:12:23 ◼ ► bot not to offer people good of a deal on a car. But in the meantime, that never occurred to them
01:12:46 ◼ ► mean, that seems like from the people that I've talked to who rely on this stuff regularly,
01:13:05 ◼ ► They're clearly not early. They're not leading the way. So that is true, but that doesn't mean
01:13:21 ◼ ► >> Right. But I will say the one area, and I said this before last year's WWDC, the one area where
01:13:28 ◼ ► they are late is integration with Xcode, right? Because, and of course programmers take care of
01:13:34 ◼ ► themselves first. I mean, it's a little bit selfishness and it's just a little bit, well,
01:13:40 ◼ ► kind of, of course, because the people who are figuring out how to make practical applications
01:13:48 ◼ ► of large language models are computer programmers. So kind of, of course, they're going to hook it up
01:13:55 ◼ ► to their developer tools first. I mean, it's not even making fun of them for being selfish. It's
01:14:01 ◼ ► just the way it's going to just make sense. And Xcode has like no integration with anything like
01:14:07 ◼ ► this in terms of, oh, I'm beginning to type a function. Can you auto complete the rest of this
01:14:12 ◼ ► function? Or I need to make a SQL query that's going to, I have a SQL table with the following
01:14:27 ◼ ► And okay, here's the SQL query, put it in your source code. All of that stuff is in other major
01:14:38 ◼ ► announcements last year. I'm not shocked that it wasn't, but this year I think it kind of has to be,
01:14:43 ◼ ► or it's really going to be conspicuous. If part of their AI story has to be AI integration with
01:14:49 ◼ ► Xcode, but also at this point, and with JAWS teasing it, I mean, JAWS is not the developer
01:15:10 ◼ ► some writer for some mainstream publication reached out to me as like a particular Apple
01:15:14 ◼ ► nerd just to say, Hey, I'm writing an article that I actually think that the dictation on the iPhone
01:15:21 ◼ ► has gotten better this year. Is that AI? Am I nuts? And I'm like, no, it really has. Like auto,
01:15:26 ◼ ► what they promised last year. And I don't know if it's the exact same language model. I think it is,
01:15:31 ◼ ► but both software keyboard autocorrect and talk to the keyboard dictation, both are definitely better
01:15:47 ◼ ► those annoying like completion thing that I never use. And that's, that was the big benefit was it's
01:16:08 ◼ ► I'm in Apple mail and I'm typing an email and it's I'm going to R and then I just typed the word R
01:16:14 ◼ ► and I wanted to write recommend. And just by typing R recommend that you gets put in gray text.
01:16:22 ◼ ► And I'm like, that's what I was. That is exactly what I was going to write tab. You know, now I
01:16:27 ◼ ► keep going, like I'm taking those suggestions because they are literally the exact words I
01:16:33 ◼ ► was thinking of. And it's kind of uncanny that, you know, I only typed one letter of the word R
01:16:50 ◼ ► I mean, the thing that they said was it's not going to be chat type things, but something to
01:16:55 ◼ ► help people with their day to day lives or something. Yeah. Well, think about some of the
01:17:00 ◼ ► stuff they've done. I think one of Apple's great underappreciated software products of the last
01:17:06 ◼ ► 10 years is the photo widget, right? Like the thing that shows I've got it on my second home
01:17:12 ◼ ► screen, but it's like the way the pictures it picks chooses to put in my photo widget every day
01:17:19 ◼ ► are really good. I mean, I don't know what other features like that they can come up with and use
01:17:26 ◼ ► AI to drive, but you know, I, yeah, I believe that they've got, they must have something.
01:17:33 ◼ ► And I totally see that it's not going to be chat, but on the other hand, I guess that does leave
01:17:44 ◼ ► has to be part of this, the conversation. Right? I mean, that to me is the elephant in the room is
01:17:50 ◼ ► that they've had this thing since Steve Jobs was alive, right? I mean, it was like announced at the
01:18:05 ◼ ► right? But that it's a long time ago and it's however much frustration people have had with
01:18:11 ◼ ► Siri over the years. I think it's never been further behind. Yeah, but look at this thing
01:18:19 ◼ ► over here from some other company, some other product, whether it's the open AI chat and a
01:18:24 ◼ ► web browser or whatever else, even like the humane pin, which I know isn't out yet, but it does seem
01:18:31 ◼ ► like when you talk to the humane pin, you get more of a conversation than you do talking to your
01:18:37 ◼ ► Siri devices at this point. At this point, you can point to other things from other companies based
01:18:43 ◼ ► on these large language models and say, this is unacceptable. Yeah. Yeah. And they have bought
01:18:51 ◼ ► a number of, well, at least they bought, I know they bought at least one, but I think it's more
01:18:55 ◼ ► than that for sure, but AI companies. And recently, so not necessarily stuff that would be integrated
01:19:02 ◼ ► yet into what's coming for WWDC. But I think they did, like the other day I was talking to,
01:19:10 ◼ ► Siri was telling me, reading my messages to me and it managed to combine three messages that came in
01:19:23 ◼ ► I don't think that's, that's not great for the state of the industry, but I thought that was
01:19:27 ◼ ► good for Siri. Have you had Siri describe a photo to you? I didn't even know that. I didn't even
01:19:34 ◼ ► know this was a feature, but I often, my Siri experience is largely through AirPods while I'm
01:19:41 ◼ ► walking, running errands or just taking walks in the city. But now it's, if you send me a photo,
01:19:46 ◼ ► Siri will sometimes, but not always say, John Moltz texted you with a picture of a cup of coffee
01:19:53 ◼ ► or something. And then I'm like, what? And then I look and it's, you sent me a picture and it's,
01:19:58 ◼ ► oh, it's a humorous coffee mug. Really, really. I didn't, I don't remember them saying that Siri
01:20:02 ◼ ► would do that, but you know, it does it and it's pretty cool. And you can see how that could be.
01:20:07 ◼ ► I think it came up in, yeah. I mean, I think it was one of those things that maybe was on a slide,
01:20:15 ◼ ► Right. But there's lots of stuff like that, that they can add throughout the system that doesn't
01:20:19 ◼ ► involve making it just a chat interface to it, but clearly making Siri smarter, it's gotta be part of
01:20:26 ◼ ► it. I mean, it's at this point, it's pretty frustrating. What else is on the rumor mill?
01:20:32 ◼ ► The rumor mill is people keep waiting for new iPads. Now we're told May, which is weird. May
01:20:39 ◼ ► is usually like a dead month for Apple. Usually Apple's schedule is they'll do stuff in April
01:20:52 ◼ ► well, I think it's because they couldn't get the OLED screens, right? I mean, it seems like they
01:20:57 ◼ ► had more trouble than they thought, I suppose. And so they had to kick it back a month or two.
01:21:20 ◼ ► And again, the Department of Justice's claim that Apple sells products that are too expensive,
01:21:27 ◼ ► and it only does that because it has market power and not because it makes good products.
01:21:32 ◼ ► The iPhone and particularly I think the iPad are cases against that because the bottom line iPad
01:21:41 ◼ ► is a really good device. Karen's got, I forgot, like a nine, I think, or an eight. I can't remember
01:21:46 ◼ ► now, but she's got one that she's had for a number of years and it's still kicking and she still
01:21:51 ◼ ► loves it. And I keep asking her if she wants a new one and she's like, "No, it's fine."
01:21:56 ◼ ► I've still got a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro and it does feel a little slow to me now in certain ways,
01:22:04 ◼ ► but not in the way that for the entirety of my life that a "six-year-old computer" has felt.
01:22:25 ◼ ► the fact that I had this M1 MacBook Air, I kind of wish it would be slower so I could justify
01:22:34 ◼ ► buying a new MacBook Air because I've got the wedge form factor and it's a little dinged up.
01:22:59 ◼ ► And then I got the review unit for the M3 that's actually space black. And I do really prefer the
01:23:05 ◼ ► colors. The darker, the better. I like it. And I thought, "I'm going to buy this and maybe I'll
01:23:10 ◼ ► give this to my son because he could use it." And I checked with him and he said, "Do you need a new
01:23:21 ◼ ► he's got the M1 and it's the lateral move. It's my MacBook's fine. And then I went back,
01:23:31 ◼ ► I closed the review unit and went back to mine and I was like, "Oh, please feel slow. Please feel
01:23:36 ◼ ► slow." And no, so super. I'm like, "I'm going to be using this for 10 years because I don't do it."
01:23:41 ◼ ► And I think that's an issue with the, I mean, an issue with the M series, right? I mean,
01:23:46 ◼ ► because they're going to last, I think they're going to last longer than the Intel stuff did.
01:23:49 ◼ ► Right. Well, and now they're one of the other news things that's come out in the last month is this
01:23:53 ◼ ► deal, seeming deal with Walmart, maybe with Best Buy too, to sell the M1 wedge MacBook Air,
01:24:01 ◼ ► just the base model. So only eight gigs of RAM and only 256 of storage, which to me, the storage is
01:24:08 ◼ ► the one where I kind of wish that if they were only going to sell one config, I really wish,
01:24:12 ◼ ► I'm fine with eight gigs of RAM for typical people. And I just wish it was 512 because I
01:24:18 ◼ ► feel like, man, then I could just wholeheartedly tell family members, "Yeah, just go seriously,
01:24:25 ◼ ► go to Walmart and buy the MacBook Air that they sell. You don't even have to, and don't even worry
01:24:30 ◼ ► about the specs. They only have one. Just go into Walmart and buy it." Like, it's kind of beautiful,
01:24:36 ◼ ► right? It is sort of an Apple-like simplicity. Just go to Walmart and buy the one MacBook they sell.
01:24:41 ◼ ► It's great. And the only hesitation I have for it is the storage. But on the other, maybe, I don't
01:24:48 ◼ ► know, I guess I'd have to look at- I think for an average user, that's not unreasonable.
01:24:56 ◼ ► It would definitely be for mine, yeah. The single thing they have that possibly takes up any space
01:25:00 ◼ ► at all is photos, and photos can be in the cloud. And again, we're getting into the nature of photos
01:25:07 ◼ ► as a part of the system as opposed to an app that you can replace. Well, and there's a case,
01:25:11 ◼ ► I mean, I think that's a case, and I think you talked about this with Jason, that if anything,
01:25:22 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, absolutely. Right. But yeah, I'm excited for that. But it does seem weird
01:25:28 ◼ ► that the iPads would come in May. But again, if that's what the supply chain- if it's not what-
01:25:34 ◼ ► it seems like it's clear it's not what they wanted, but it is what it is. I don't know.
01:25:39 ◼ ► And I guess it's kind of interesting that they might, according to Germin, do it anyway
01:25:45 ◼ ► rather than wait for WWDC, which would probably suggest that they've got plenty of stuff that they
01:25:51 ◼ ► have to announce. Because that's the other thing that usually happens in May, is you can sort of-
01:26:45 ◼ ► It's either coming in three years or never going to happen. So it's just a minor detail.
01:27:09 ◼ ► So maybe a foldable phone would solve part of my pocket problem, I guess is what we're going
01:27:16 ◼ ► to call it. But I don't really. And I mean, just the fact that you're taking a bigger phone and
01:27:20 ◼ ► folding it in half, really making it smaller, you're just changing the length. I would have
01:27:28 ◼ ► to see it to be really wowed by it. And so I don't feel like I'm missing that much by not having a
01:27:37 ◼ ► And again, I don't want to over index on Apple always blowing away whatever came before it.
01:27:46 ◼ ► But every foldable I've seen to date to me has looked like there's no way Apple would do it that
01:27:53 ◼ ► way. Because everything seems to involve, whether it folds up and down or folds more like a book,
01:28:00 ◼ ► it's eventually, it's like you've got two phones stacked together. And it's like to me,
01:28:06 ◼ ► if Apple ever is going to pursue folding or rolling phones or whatever other ways a screen might be
01:28:26 ◼ ► in its folded state, it's only as thick as an iPhone is now, right? It needs to get more
01:28:31 ◼ ► science fictiony where it's more like just just a screen. And there's not a quarter inch thick
01:28:39 ◼ ► thing in your pocket. But right, I it really amused me that they're like, it's three years from now.
01:29:08 ◼ ► anything, any kind of movies or TV shows that you've watched recently that you'd like to recommend?
01:29:12 ◼ ► Brian Kardell I just watched The Three Body Problem. And I read the first book, so this is
01:29:16 ◼ ► on Netflix, I read the first book and didn't, I mean, I enjoyed it, but I didn't, I started the
01:29:22 ◼ ► second, but there were things that I didn't like about it. I think it went into too much detail in
01:29:25 ◼ ► certain sections anyway. So I didn't read the rest of the series, but I thought the first one was
01:29:28 ◼ ► good. And I really enjoyed the show. I think maybe they kind of conglomerate and invent some
01:29:34 ◼ ► characters and stuff like that. And I think some of the dialogue is a little bit clunky, but the
01:29:41 ◼ ► We just finished that. It's funny because that's what I was going to mention as well. And I'm going
01:29:45 ◼ ► to give it a thumbs up, but I'm going to give it like a thumbs up with a, it's not great, but it's
01:30:04 ◼ ► There's one incident in particular that is, I remember reading in the book and being like,
01:30:14 ◼ ► Yeah. I think I know what you're talking about. I won't say anymore, but it was pretty bold.
01:30:24 ◼ ► put up with it and watched all eight episodes along with me, but she's not really a science
01:30:28 ◼ ► fiction fan. So it was sort of a, my pick now I kind of owe her one. But even she said after
01:30:36 ◼ ► episode three, wow, that was a better episode. And I thought so too. I thought episode three was
01:30:41 ◼ ► really good. And then as soon as the episode ended, it said directed by Andrew Stanton.
01:30:46 ◼ ► And I was like, oh no, no wonder. And then I looked up, I quick, I was like, that's great of
01:30:53 ◼ ► Pixar fame. I forget which. And then I looked up in call sheet, which I have active on my phone when
01:30:59 ◼ ► I'm watching TV from our friend Casey List. And I'm like, Ooh, I hope Andrew Stanton directed a
01:31:04 ◼ ► bunch of other episodes and it's nope. That was it episode three. So if I, if I've spoiled anything
01:31:11 ◼ ► for anybody out there who hasn't watched three body problem, it's that episode three is the best
01:31:15 ◼ ► episode. I don't know. Does that count as a spoiler? I guess it is. I don't know. I don't
01:31:20 ◼ ► think that way. I mean, maybe some people do consider stuff like that's where some people
01:31:24 ◼ ► consider just saying whether it's good or not a spoiler. Yeah. So I guess, I guess it's sort of an
01:31:29 ◼ ► anti-spoiler because what I'm saying is that if you have tastes similar to mine, you're going to be
01:31:33 ◼ ► disappointed in the last five episodes, mild, at least mildly, it peaks. I was not, I would say that
01:31:39 ◼ ► I was just a counterpoint that I was not disappointed. I mean, I, I went into, I hesitated. Well,
01:31:44 ◼ ► I didn't, I knew I was going to watch it eventually, but I didn't jump on it immediately.
01:31:49 ◼ ► And then once I started watching it and I do think it, yeah, the first two, like the first two
01:31:53 ◼ ► episodes I watched maybe slowly, but then once I did get to three, I blew through the rest of them.
01:31:58 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. And I liked them. So it's one of my, one of my favorite things in science fiction is
01:32:04 ◼ ► just sort of a very original, huh? I never thought of that. Like what if blank? And there's a couple
01:32:10 ◼ ► of those, what ifs involved in the science fiction scenarios of three body problem that are like that.
01:32:17 ◼ ► I've never seen anybody think about it that way before. That's kind of interesting. What would,
01:32:23 ◼ ► what would happen? And it's, this seems kind of reasonable. I, and so it's very enjoyable to me
01:32:28 ◼ ► in that way, in that way that as a fan of science fiction, it's always pleasing to me when there's
01:32:35 ◼ ► some just the premise itself is so novel where it's right. And now there's like a part of my
01:32:49 ◼ ► You want to, you wanted to, you were trying to soft stuff, slip your way into that, right?
01:33:06 ◼ ► recently, just cause there's not that many superheroes shows anymore right now. Anyway,
01:33:15 ◼ ► All right. And I will thank our two sponsors for the episode, our good friends at Squarespace,
01:33:20 ◼ ► where you should go to start out if you need, if you or someone, you know, needs a website or a
01:33:25 ◼ ► new website and my favorite sponsor to say aloud, nuts.com. Let's just go there for any kind of