398: ‘You’ve Never Seen Email Like This Before’, With John Moltz

0:00:00Yeah, so when I saw that you and Snell went three and a half hours, I joked to some people that I

0:00:05knew you were going to call me next. And it's funny that you were talking about betting because

0:00:10I thought, man, if I could bet on it, then I'd make a lot of money. But then I guess I'm not

0:00:14supposed to bet if I'm one of the participants, right? Well, you should call Shohei Ohtani.

0:00:20Yeah, right. Perhaps let him know. I could talk to him too. I speak some Japanese.

0:00:27John Moltz, you could read the talk show like an open book.

0:00:30Happy Easter for everybody. Yeah, it's Friday. No, it's not Friday.

0:00:38I think it's Friday, but it's Saturday.

0:00:40Amy was asking me yesterday. So I grew up and I hope I don't get into trouble for making light

0:00:47of religion, but I grew up, my parents, we were just talking about my parents off the air,

0:00:52still kicking around. My dad is 86. My mom is 78. My dad, at least as a devout Catholic,

0:01:00I grew up Catholic. I used to know the whole thing. I knew the Easter thing. And Amy knows

0:01:06that I know. And she was asking me yesterday on Friday, what day is it? Is this the day

0:01:13where they nail them up to the cross? Is this the day where they lock them in the cave?

0:01:18Was she asking you because she didn't know or was she quizzing you?

0:01:22She didn't know. She grew up Lutheran and I don't think they... I'll just say it. I grew up Catholic.

0:01:34They indoctrinated us. But for me, the whole thing is like a TV show that I was never really into,

0:01:43and therefore I forgot from my childhood. Yeah. Well, so I grew up Presbyterian and we were even

0:01:51ushers at something. My parents tried to get us to go every Sunday and then sort of gave up.

0:01:58But we celebrated Easter and all that. And we would go... It was one of those things where

0:02:07we would go to the service Christmas Eve, right? Yeah, Christmas Eve. And my dad would,

0:02:15of course, fall asleep in the middle of the service because he was a few drinks in.

0:02:19The body of Christ. It compelled him to fall asleep.

0:02:26No, we used to do that too because we used to go every week and I was very resentful about it

0:02:33because 48, 49 weeks a year, it's not hard to get a seat in the church. And then all of a sudden on

0:02:40these holidays, it's standing room only, your parents are trying to get you there an hour early,

0:02:45and it's like, "Why are we doing this? Why are we dressing up?" Anyway, but happy Easter.

0:02:49You joke about it, but I do feel like the advantage of me and Jason going into overtime

0:03:03on the antitrust stuff is I do feel like I got an awful lot off my chest and I would,

0:03:08I would, I think, largely like to avoid talking about the regulatory and antitrust issues facing

0:03:18Apple. Yeah. And it didn't feel like... I was actually surprised because I was listening as

0:03:23I was walking the dog and doing some other things. And then I was sort of surprised when you were

0:03:28starting to wrap up because you weren't like... I mean, he wanted to keep going too. And he had

0:03:33said at the beginning that he was tired of talking about it and then had no problem talking about it

0:03:39for three and a half hours. Well, there is a lot to it though, right? I mean, that's sort of part

0:03:46of the story. And there is some there there, which gets mixed in and doesn't fit with today's world

0:03:55where everything is binary and it's either exactly right or exactly wrong. Like the notion that maybe

0:04:0115, 20% of the antitrust regulatory complaints about Apple actually are sort of like, "Hey,

0:04:08this is actually the sort of thing that a democratically elected government ought to

0:04:13be looking into for an important industry." And that the rest of it is a bunch of nonsense.

0:04:20Both things can be true. I do want to bring up the one thing that I kind of stumbled into in a piece

0:04:26that I thought I was going to publish days ago, but didn't publish until late last night, which

0:04:33is late on a Friday. So I don't even know if you read it. But looking more into just the general

0:04:40idea of, "Hey, how big is the EU to Apple?" And there's two parts of it that I thought are

0:04:48interesting. There's one, just the question of how big is the EU to Apple, which I hung the number

0:04:567% on based on last January's quarterly or February's analyst call for the quarter ending

0:05:04at the end of the year. And Luca Maestri, the CFO of Apple, who has a delightful accent, but is

0:05:12perhaps his accent is a challenge for the whisper transcription engine. There was a

0:05:17transcription error where Jason Snell's published transcript that he double checks. God bless him.

0:05:24If he didn't do these transcripts, we wouldn't have them. These things would be lost to time.

0:05:29But there was a question that the analyst—I can't listen to those things. I have to skim

0:05:35the calls. I don't know about you. Because analysts talk—

0:05:37I used to listen to them. Yeah, I used to listen to them religiously. But yeah, I haven't in recent

0:05:44years. There used to be a lot of arguments about, "Oh, is Apple going out of business?"

0:05:50And nobody's—that's not happening anymore. And also, they don't give out the unit sales anymore.

0:05:58So it's less interesting, I guess. Right. The most interesting information that they

0:06:04used to give out was sort of—I mean, honestly, they would just break out like, "Hey, we sold

0:06:103.8 million Macs last quarter and 12.8 million iPads." And all right. And then at the time,

0:06:18we used to complain that they wouldn't break it down by model. "Oh, how many of them were

0:06:22$999 MacBooks and how many of them were $5,000 Mac Pros?" Now they just don't tell you shit.

0:06:29Don't tell you anything. Yeah.

0:06:30And we're like, "Ah." What we used to complain about was the good old days when they were open.

0:06:38But anyway, the question was from an analyst. It was in typical analyst-ese, which is oddly

0:06:45obtuse. You would think that these financial guys would be like the most rude, curt-to-the-point

0:06:52people, but they're not for some reason. It's all very deferential. It's almost like talking

0:06:58to the royal family and there's like code words you have to know. But anyway, the gist of what

0:07:02the guy was asking was, "Hey, should we be worried about Apple's overall services revenue with this

0:07:09DMA stuff?" I think that's a fair paraphrasing of the question. And Tim gave an answer that was sort

0:07:17of a non-answer. And then Luca came on and said that the EU region is only 7% of their App Store

0:07:29revenue, but the transcription error was App Store came out as absolute, 7% of absolute revenue,

0:07:36which I just read as financial analyst lingo for overall revenue. I don't know. But the question is

0:07:44if... All right, so we know one fact. This is like one of those detective games.

0:07:49So they gave us a fact. The EU, the countries that comprise the countries that are in the EU,

0:07:57which is not equivalent to what Apple calls Europe. What Apple calls Europe includes famously

0:08:02the United Kingdom, who I don't know if you heard left the EU.

0:08:05**Matt Stauffer** Yeah, I think that was in the papers.

0:08:08**Trevor Stauffer** I think it was in the papers. There's several other countries in Europe that

0:08:14are not in the EU. Norway is kind of big. Turkey, I forget who else. Russia, the Ukraine, both of

0:08:21those countries. I don't know if you've known in the papers together. And it's like all of Africa

0:08:27and the Middle East. And so it's crazy. And according to Apple's financials, what they

0:08:35call the Europe region, which includes the EU, those non-EU countries in Europe, Northern Africa,

0:08:43which is big, big countries like Egypt, which has a high GDP, the entire Middle East, Israel,

0:08:48Saudi Arabia, all those countries over there, is about 20, 25% of Apple's revenue. So does it make

0:08:55any sense that the EU countries are only 7%? I don't know. And is their app store, if we know

0:09:02from what they said, which is I guess legally binding these calls, their app store revenue-

0:09:07**Matt Stauffer** Yeah, well, they got sued over it.

0:09:09**Trevor Stauffer** Yeah, yeah, recently.

0:09:11**Matt Stauffer** Yeah, to settle that.

0:09:12**Trevor Stauffer** What was that? We can go on an aside here. It was like Tim Cook-

0:09:16**Matt Stauffer** Yeah, Tim Cook was talking about their position in China. And basically,

0:09:22long story short, said something like, "Yeah, no problem in China." And then they had a problem

0:09:28in China. And I think it has to do with what they internally actually thought. And I think he

0:09:33glad-handed it a little bit and didn't paint an appropriate picture of what was happening. And you

0:09:39can't do that on a financial call. Because it's considered defrauding the investment

0:09:46investors. I mean, it's like you said you were in a better position than you actually were,

0:09:50and that's not okay.

0:09:51**Trevor Stauffer** And I think they got dinged for 400 and some million dollars,

0:09:54something like that.

0:09:55**Matt Stauffer** Yeah.

0:09:55**Trevor Stauffer** So not huge, but not-

0:09:59**Matt Stauffer** Not for them, but yeah, but not in some sense, considering it was probably

0:10:02just one question and one quarterly call.

0:10:06**Trevor Stauffer** So where was I? What was the tangent? I forget.

0:10:09**Matt Stauffer** Other things that they say, oh, that's what Luca was saying on the call.

0:10:14**Trevor Stauffer** Oh, right. So he did say that the EU accounts for 7% of their App Store.

0:10:19My theory is that if the EU countries constitute 7% of App Store revenue, then that's a reasonable

0:10:28proxy for how much they account for their overall revenue. Because I can't think of a hypothetical

0:10:36situation where EU countries are, because they're buying way more hardware, like they're buying lots

0:10:46of high-end iPhones and expensive MacBooks.

0:10:48**Matt Stauffer** I mean, if they buy more Macs than iPhones, that's possible, right? Because

0:10:53who uses the Mac App Store? Nobody.

0:10:54**Trevor Stauffer** Exactly. Right. But I looked into that and by far the biggest

0:10:59country economically in the EU is Germany. And in Germany, it's not that Macs are nowhere,

0:11:07but they're actually a little lower than most countries. So it just as like a just one quick

0:11:13spitball test, could that be the reason? Are there lots of Mac sales in Germany and France,

0:11:19which are big economically rich countries that could maybe distort the overall revenue versus

0:11:25App Store revenue? And that's not true. So I kind of feel as a ballpark figure, that's true.

0:11:30**Matt Stauffer** Yeah. I mean, it's probably close.

0:11:35**Trevor Stauffer** It seems to rub some people in the EU the wrong way. And I feel certain readers

0:11:42of the website, listeners of the podcast-

0:11:43**Matt Stauffer** What rubs them the wrong way? Assuming that it's 7% or you're-

0:11:48**Trevor Stauffer** Yes. And that 7% might-

0:11:52**Matt Stauffer** You're frequent questioning whether it's worth it to Apple.

0:11:54**Trevor Stauffer** Right. Because I think the latter would definitely,

0:11:57definitely write them the wrong way, but maybe not the former because that's just a number.

0:12:00**Matt Stauffer** Right. That 7% is actually a number that when you're under active threat,

0:12:07which they keep reiterating, they do. It's not just that the law says they can find the gatekeeping

0:12:13designated gatekeepers up to 10% on a first offense, and then up to 20% of global revenue

0:12:20on subsequent offenses. They keep the commissioners, Vestager and Bretton, keep reiterating

0:12:27that we're going to find these companies heavily if we find them not in compliance. They don't say

0:12:32we're going to find them to the full extent of the DMA, but they keep saying heavy fines will

0:12:38definitely be coming. There's no reason to doubt them. It's sort of like dealing with Trump, take

0:12:43him at his word, right? This whole idea of, "Hey, he just says crazy stuff. He won't do crazy stuff."

0:12:48And then we put him in office for four years and he did crazy stuff. Take him at their word.

0:12:52The idea that maybe under threat of 10 to 20% of your global revenue, it's not worth it to do

0:13:00business in a region that's only 7% of your global revenue seems to rub people the wrong way. I mean,

0:13:07but I'm just a columnist with a blog and a podcast. And again, it's sort of why I wanted

0:13:14to have you on because nobody's better at spending Tim Cook's money than me and you.

0:13:18This is a recurring theme when you're on the show, right?

0:13:22Well, I mean, I don't think, I think it's a fair question. I mean, I'm sure it's a question that

0:13:28they must be asking themselves, right? It's a business. I mean, it is a business decision

0:13:34to make. I do think that there are many other things that go into it other than just the 7%.

0:13:39I mean, I think there is, right. If they pull out of the EU, that's a big, well, it's a lot of

0:13:46things. It's a political problem. It's probably a problem, a perception problem for other, like,

0:13:51other regions becomes an issue. And I guess the one thing I would ask you is the why,

0:14:01why do you think that it is more of a question to be asking in this situation than say China?

0:14:06And I think, I mean, I know some of the answers already, but maybe it's just a thing we can talk

0:14:10about. Because I mean, the things that the EU is asking for are to my mind, less onerous and less

0:14:20bad than the things that China asks for. Right. China asked for, I would say the most

0:14:27extraordinary regulatory ask in this entire field is the, I forget how many years ago they passed

0:14:35it, but the law that China faced passed that said that cloud, whatever services, I guess,

0:14:43cloud, anything services for mainland Chinese customers must be hosted in mainland China data

0:14:51centers by companies owned by Chinese company by, by in data centers owned by Chinese companies.

0:15:00And Apple complied by that by commissioning or partnering with some Chinese owned company to be

0:15:06their designated partner who built out an entire infrastructure for iCloud in mainland China.

0:15:13So effectively the world has two iClouds. There's the iCloud that all everybody else has,

0:15:19which is worldwide and global and doesn't really matter. It's sort of the same iCloud if you're

0:15:24here in the United States or in Germany or Japan, and then there's Chinese iCloud.

0:15:30And obviously a big ask, obviously a, people often love to point this out to me and accuse me of

0:15:38being a hypocrite on the grounds of the privacy angle, right? That how could this proves that

0:15:42Apple doesn't care about privacy because obviously part of the reason for the Chinese law is so that

0:15:47the Chinese government has provable access to the data of, of everything that they, because it's

0:15:53hosted in data in data centers in their country by owned by companies that are Chinese companies,

0:16:00that they have rights to that. And my counter argument to that is, well, a, the whole thing

0:16:06is about the fact that the Chinese market is so singularly important to Apple.

0:16:11Clearly it's, I mean, it's a lot bigger, right? I don't know what the number is, but it's gotta be,

0:16:17second, second biggest to the Americas in terms of consumer purchasing. And there's the whole

0:16:25inextricable aspect where that's where the iPhone assembly takes place. And if something were to

0:16:37happen, some natural catastrophe or some sort of geopolitical conflict that would suddenly cut off

0:16:45China from Apple. The iPhone just doesn't, it's not that it wouldn't exist, but it would completely

0:16:52collapse. It would completely Apple cannot make the iPhone as we know it without China and China

0:17:00knows that Apple knows it. It's it's an uncomfortable situation and it is absolutely a

0:17:06violation of the Cook doctrine of owning and controlling the core technologies of blah, blah,

0:17:12blah. I mean, the ability to make enough iPhones is a core technology for Apple, right? And they

0:17:19don't own it. It's it's part of China. So there is part of Apple's complicated relationship with

0:17:26China is just the size of the market, which is second only to the Americas and probably growing

0:17:31as, as population wise, there's certainly way more room for people to enter the middle class that can

0:17:39afford iPhones in China than just about anywhere else rivaled only by India where Apple is also

0:17:46concentrating a lot of effort. So it's the size of the market, but then it's particularly complicated

0:17:52by the fact that Apple needs to be there to manufacture. So they kind of, I don't, I don't

0:17:58know how complicated that is in terms of Apple's need to be there as a retailer selling these

0:18:08products and saying, okay, we'll build out the infrastructure. Would it be less likely that they

0:18:13would have built out the iCloud infrastructure in mainland China if they didn't depend on China to

0:18:20make hundreds of millions of iPhones a year? I think they still would have done it just because

0:18:24of the market size, but it's obviously complicated. Right. Right. And my counter argument to that

0:18:29though, on the privacy angle is if I lived in China or you lived in China, or most of the

0:18:36people listening to this show lived in China and you were fortunate enough to have a job or

0:18:42an income where you could afford an Apple iPhone, wouldn't you want an Apple that's the phone you

0:18:49would like to buy. So Apple doing what it takes to serve the Chinese market, I think is the most

0:18:56private option available to the people of China. So if Apple were to put its foot down on principle

0:19:07and say on principle alone, we're not going to comply with this law that forces us to put

0:19:14our iCloud servers in China. We're going to only serve customers with servers outside China.

0:19:21And if that means we can't sell iPhones in China, so be it, which is, I guess what the critics would

0:19:28like Apple to do to make a statement like that. It would obviously make a statement. It would

0:19:34obviously be huge news. It would obviously be an humongous hit to Apple's finances in the name of

0:19:41privacy. And I also think though that it would be bad for the people of China who otherwise could

0:19:54buy iPhones, right? Like I'm not saying that, I'm not denying that both things are true and that

0:20:00their interests are mostly guided by the size of the market. But on the other hand, it is the surely,

0:20:06you know, while the average Chinese or any Chinese customer doesn't really have privacy in their

0:20:12digital life the way that we outside China expect that we do, I would guess that an iPhone using

0:20:20Chinese citizen has far more privacy than somebody who's using one of the Android phones over there.

0:20:27I guess. I'm not sure if it amounts to that much. I mean, because they're using one of those,

0:20:34you know, super apps anyway. So most of their actions right through that.

0:20:38WeChat. Right. So most of it goes to WeChat and they don't need it anyway. Right.

0:20:41Right. Right. But you can make the same argument in the EU still, because I think your complaint

0:20:46is mostly about user experience stuff. Right. And you could say they're benefiting by staying

0:20:52in the EU. They're benefiting EU customers by still providing a better user experience than anything.

0:20:57Yeah. And that's why I think they're doing all of this. And again, it's easy for me to

0:21:02spitball and just say, hey, maybe they would think about playing out. And as I've been writing,

0:21:07I think it's of all the designated gatekeepers, the company that I think is the most likely to say,

0:21:12you know what, screw you guys is meta, honestly, because it's they're the ones who I think the

0:21:18EU is really putting the screws to in a way that is just far outside the letter of the DMA.

0:21:27Right there. This whole payer OK thing where it's OK. Option A is you opt into being targeted for

0:21:35advertising and you can continue to use Facebook and Instagram free of charge and we'll serve you

0:21:40the same targeted ads. We serve everybody around the world, which are incredibly lucrative for meta

0:21:45or will they said a couple of months ago, you could pay ten dollars a month and use them without

0:21:53ads. And then they were like, that's too much. And they're like, OK, we'll cut it to six dollars

0:21:58a month. And then now they're like, no, you can't charge anything at all.

0:22:02Even though even though just a few years ago, Margaret Margretta,

0:22:10Vestager herself, before she knew that if it were I think what happened just a few years ago,

0:22:16she said, what I would like to see is Facebook offer a paid option. I would like that a paid

0:22:21option with no ads. And now they're offering a paid option with no ads. And it turns out

0:22:2690 some percent of Europeans choose the other option. And therefore they're like, well,

0:22:32if 90 percent of people want it free, then you have to offer it to them free without the targeted

0:22:37ad, at which point I honestly wonder why meta why even do business there.

0:22:42Unless they come from the EU's perspective, though, is it's the Walmart thing, right? I mean,

0:22:49when you when Walmart comes into your town and wipes out everybody else and says,

0:22:53well, you can buy Coke or Pepsi here, but you have to buy it from Walmart, basically,

0:22:57because that's not I mean, saying saying that you can either be targeted or pay doesn't seem like

0:23:04that great an option to me. And as someone who used to be on Instagram and left because I didn't

0:23:10care for meta, basically. I have yet to be able to find an alternative. I paid for Flickr,

0:23:19I paid for Glass, I paid I was happy to pay for those services. But the problem is

0:23:23everybody else is on Instagram, right? I mean, there's no there is no other place where I can go

0:23:28in the morning and scroll through pictures of cats and stuff and waste 15 minutes before I get out of

0:23:34bed to get my mind straight. So it's the and I don't know, maybe they're not approaching it the

0:23:41right way. But I mean, the problem from I look at these things as a as like a as a user. So like the

0:23:46thing about the startup experience on iOS that that they're implementing, where like, you have

0:23:54to give them choice in browsers. Okay, so we gave him choice in brothers. Well, you didn't give them

0:23:58all of the browsers. I think that's a bad user experience as someone who who might consider

0:24:04picking something else. I mean, I don't when I pick a search engine, I don't pick Google,

0:24:08I use DuckDuckGo. So I do want a choice. But I don't think I think it's a bad user experience

0:24:15to put up like 27 browsers on the onboarding. But that said, I also think that saying you can get

0:24:24you have two choices, but they're both that meta is not really. A choice, particularly.

0:24:30But the third choice is not to use it, especially, I know, but I don't I don't get I'm out of the

0:24:36pool, basically. I mean, I'm still struggling to find a bed because everybody else is in that pool.

0:24:43I mean, the problem is that it's a monopoly. Right? And that's what their that's what their

0:24:48their issue is. Right. And everybody thinks that I'm or not everybody, but lots of people think

0:24:52I'm knee jerk against everything the European Union has regulated in recent years. And it's,

0:25:00that's not true. A lot of the stuff regarding data privacy is terrific. There are some of the

0:25:06privacy aspects of their laws are clearly the best in the world. And they also have laws that have

0:25:12insisted that you have access to your data so that you can say to a company that has built a targeted

0:25:18dossier about you, hey, I would like to download what you think my interests are and stuff like

0:25:23that, which I think that there that is, to me, a perfectly reasonable thing for government to insert

0:25:29itself and to say, this is a reasonable thing for the law to say you have to be able to have,

0:25:34I just sort of think they're overreaching. And before we move on, the other thing that I found,

0:25:39where I wrote about this last night was in those comments from vestiges and Bretton,

0:25:46that were after they announced that they're investigating, of course, every single company

0:25:51is has an investigation, who's been designated a gatekeeper as an investigation launched against

0:25:56it already. But in terms of there was something in the announcement of the investigation that

0:26:03alluded to Apple's compliance plan being deficient in terms of deleting default apps.

0:26:12And I actually went through my phone and started trying to delete apples, the default apps that

0:26:21come with the iPhone and see which ones don't let you actually remove it. Some of them like settings,

0:26:27for example, and I think settings would be one that even the the most vigorous regulator would

0:26:34agree kind of can't can't be deleteable. I don't know. I mean, who knows what these people but

0:26:42I would think of all apps, if there's one app that everybody could agree, that users should not be

0:26:49able to delete from their iPhone and replace with the third party, it would be settings,

0:26:53you can hide it from your home screen, but then it's still in your app library. And the ones that

0:26:58I found there was Safari settings, messages, phone, and photos and camera. And it turns out in her

0:27:08comments, messenger mentioned photos and that they're looking at the fact that photos can't

0:27:14be deleted and can't be replaced by a third party app for cloud sync. And my eyes just rolled so far

0:27:23back in my head that they hurt. Because it's I get where you could think, hey, I would love to use

0:27:28a I can imagine a mobile operating system that is so component based that even something like

0:27:36the system level photos library is a swappable Lego brick that you could just take out and put

0:27:43a third party in. But that's not the way iOS is designed, right? Like part of the system design

0:27:50of iOS is that there's a system level camera role the system has. And in just this year with iOS 17

0:27:58increased the fine grain controls over what apps have access to in terms of apps that would like

0:28:06to access your pictures from your system camera role. And that's one of the things that I really

0:28:13like about the operating system, honestly. And when there have been several apps where I have

0:28:19launched some try this app and I get the app and I try and then it says it wants access to your

0:28:23entire photos library. I'm like, absolutely not. Absolutely no. And that is probably that's a

0:28:30problem with, Oh, if you said you could swap out photos for Google photos or whatever,

0:28:36or some other thing, I think you would have to lose that sort of granular control. Right?

0:28:42Right. And part of what makes this to me so frustrating in terms of don't you even use

0:28:48these things is to me, this is a thriving, it has been from the inception of the app store onwards.

0:28:56Some of the smash hit apps from the debut of the app store were camera apps and photo filtering

0:29:03apps and stuff like that. I mean, my, my personal iPhone is lousy with apps that hook up to the

0:29:10system library and let me pick recent photos and apply filters. It's one of the most thriving

0:29:18markets of third-party apps and they don't know, they don't get to take over at the lowest level

0:29:24of the operating system in terms of controlling the entire library.

0:29:28But that's, this is, this is the system Apple has designed where here's the level where we think

0:29:35third-party integration makes sense. It's slightly above the system level. And so you can't replace

0:29:43photos itself, but you can certainly not really use the photos app and use dark room or after

0:29:50what's it called? Forget. I'll think of it in a second, but there's dozens and dozens of popular

0:29:57apps that let you manage your photo library. Lightroom from Adobe can hook up to your photo

0:30:02library. It, to me, that after light after light photo is app I was thinking of sort of like a

0:30:08rival to dark room, but there's just dozens and dozens of them. And I think anybody who's looking

0:30:14for one can find one that they're happy with. And I just see this as complaining about a problem

0:30:19that nobody actually has. Yeah. Yeah. I think there is a, there is a compulsion to want everyone

0:30:29to have a choice and it's the same. It's the same thing that led to these pop-ups about cookies.

0:30:35Right. Right. You want everyone to have a choice and then the choice is, is so obnoxious that it

0:30:43doesn't actually make things better. Right. My, my take on the whole cookie thing, which

0:30:49again drives people in the EU nuts or some people, because some people judge them only by their

0:30:57intention and the intention of the cookie law is fine. Right. I think most people would agree

0:31:02absolutely intention. The intention is obviously pro-consumer, but the actual practical effect of

0:31:08it, what they seem to have thought would happen is they, they said, if you're going to use cookies,

0:31:14browser cookies to track users across websites and whatever complicated list of things that were

0:31:22considered part of the law, then you have to get consent to do it in, in some certain way.

0:31:30And therefore what will happen is people, companies will stop using cookies to track

0:31:36users willy nilly, and this tracking will end. And instead what happened is that everybody was like,

0:31:43okay, so we have to show these obnoxious banners all the time. Okay. We'll just do that. Right.

0:31:50And I, I can't emphasize enough. And I, every time I bring it up, people are like, yeah,

0:31:54I just went to France or I just went to Germany or on vacation with my family or whatever.

0:31:59And I have not stepped foot in Europe in, I don't know, five, six, seven years. It's been a while,

0:32:05but people who have been say that it's however many cookie banners you think you get here in

0:32:10the United States or elsewhere in the world, when you're in Europe is way worse. You just,

0:32:16the entire web experience is just nonstop, okay. And permitting cookie banners, which is complying

0:32:22with the law, but it's, it wasn't the intended effect. The intended effect of the law wasn't

0:32:27that you're going to spend all day clicking. Okay. Give me cookies to every single website

0:32:33you visit. The intention was, Oh, this would make companies not do the tracking, but they sort of

0:32:39wash their hands. They're like, Hey, we took care of your privacy. We're done. We're going to move

0:32:43on 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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0:35:32I had to go there just to be to marvel at the fact that they have the URL nuts.com.

0:35:36That's isn't it great. That's just love to say it. What other now let's talk fun stuff.

0:35:44I'm guessing I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing you don't own a vision pro.

0:35:52I do not own a vision pro now. Okay. So you have not seen this week. It doesn't seem like I missed

0:35:58much. You have not seen the new immersive content, which is a five minute, five minute highlight reel

0:36:06of the MLS soccer highlights from last year. Last year. Yeah. From four months ago, I wrote

0:36:14when they announced this, I kind of wrote I I'm that I'm kind of surprised to me, the most

0:36:19surprising aspect of Apple's launch of this is that they don't have any new immersive content

0:36:26where I sort of expected like a weekly drip. Like once a week, there'd be like a new thing coming

0:36:31out. Like here's another new thing only on vision pro. Here's another new thing. So here's another

0:36:37thing like a mountain climber and here's another one for the sports fans. And then the third week

0:36:43would be like another thing like that Alicia keys thing. Here's a, here's another famous pop singer.

0:36:48So keep hitting different markets, sports, adventure, music, whatever else it could be.

0:36:54And instead it's been nothing and not, not just nothing, but most of the immersive content that

0:37:00they have available was actually stuff that they showed back in June at WWDC when they first

0:37:08announced all of this it's, it's really kind of odd. And then they came, they said this week,

0:37:12they have a five minute immersive video of MLS playoff soccer highlights. I watched it before

0:37:19we recorded and it is amazing, but it absolutely is what I thought going in. I was like, if it's

0:37:30only five minutes long, isn't it just going to feel like a long trailer? And that's exactly what

0:37:35it feels like. Yeah. It, it feels like a very long trailer for what should be like a 90 minute, okay,

0:37:43now go watch the actual 90 minute documentary showing the entire saga of last year's MLS cup.

0:37:50And instead, no, this five minute thing is it. And the first half of the five minutes,

0:37:55isn't even game footage. It's like players running out of the the locker room, high fiving each other

0:38:02and signing autographs. And it's very, very odd. Yeah. And Jason talked about a strange effect

0:38:12because they, they changed the perspective. Right. And so you'll be in it's 180, you know, and so

0:38:18you could be watching something and then I guess the camera perspective moves and you're looking

0:38:23at nothing and you have to like, you have to turn around and try and figure out what you're looking,

0:38:27what you're supposed to be seeing. Yeah. It almost find the action, you know, in a way that there

0:38:32are other immersive content that I've watched all the stuff that you know about the tight rope

0:38:38Walker and the other stuff they've shown. This is the first time where it feels like this is new

0:38:45and it really sort of shows that maybe the language, I know this sounds highfalutin,

0:38:52but that sort of the language of cinema needs to be reinvented for this format, right?

0:38:58Because when you're, you know, cutting between camera angles, like it, whether it's sports or

0:39:05a movie or a talk show on TV or whatever, people are just, it's very natural. People

0:39:11understand cutting from one camera angle and perspective to another, which might be from a

0:39:16closeup to a wide shot to a reverse shot. People, it, our brains handle it and 99% of the public

0:39:25doesn't even really notice it. It just is the way watching TV and movies works. But with this,

0:39:32it is, it is odd when it cuts because you are in any particular shot. It is 180 degree perspective

0:39:44and you're the one controlling, am I looking left? Am I looking right? Am I looking up?

0:39:48Am I looking down? There's actually a lot of neat stuff. When you look down, you can see in some of

0:39:54these shots from behind the goal, you can see if you look down, like where the goalkeeper keeps his

0:40:00water bottle and like, you know, like a little bag of snacks. It's, it's actually kind of cool.

0:40:06Like stuff from nuts.com. Yeah. Stuff from nuts.com maybe, but that's what it looks like.

0:40:13It's, you know, just out of bounds, but there's like a water bottle and like a bag of snacks,

0:40:17like an extra pair of gloves or something like that. It's kind of neat. You don't see that on TV.

0:40:21Yeah, really? I would never would've noticed that. Yeah.

0:40:23But you're there looking down and then all of a sudden the camera angle of the footage shifts to

0:40:30the corner. You're right behind the goal, looking at the goalies water bottle, right next to the net

0:40:36of the goal. And then the movie switches to the, to the corner for a corner kick or something like

0:40:42that. And it, it, it, it is disconcerting, right? Because within any shot you're choosing,

0:40:50you're the editor choosing where you're gauging, but gazing, but at the same time, the movie keeps

0:40:57moving along in real time and they're cutting between shots. It's kind of, I'm not sure what

0:41:02the answer is, but it's not this. I wonder, do you think that this is the kind of thing where

0:41:10they were trying to decide if they were going to release it as a sort of a more of a developer kit

0:41:15and try and get more people on board. And then they were waffling between what to do and finally

0:41:22decided to ship it for public release and just don't have enough content. I don't know. I, cause

0:41:30I don't, it's so, I know people have used that phrase developer kit so often with this, but

0:41:35that's so unlike Apple. Yeah. And, and they're not, you know, when they do that, I mean, they've done

0:41:43that in the past, right? Did they, when the Intel switch happened, didn't they, they gave out some

0:41:49Intel max. Yeah, they did. They did it with both processor switches. They had, well, both of the

0:41:56recent ones, not going back to the Motorola to power PC, but with the power PC to Intel,

0:42:03they had a Mac pro. I think it was the cheese, you know, what we called the cheese grater

0:42:08or frame where you'd, you could get one. And it was just sort of a run of the mill PC motherboard

0:42:14inside. And then six months after they shipped it, they wanted them all back. They didn't sell them

0:42:20to developers. They leased them and they wanted them all back and they didn't wind up resembling

0:42:26any actual Intel max that ever shipped in terms of their architecture. It was just sort of

0:42:33like a Hackintosh really. It was sort of like an Apple branded Hackintosh. And then in 2020,

0:42:41they did the same thing with the, with Apple Silicon, but it was like an eight,

0:42:4812 or something like that. I forget what, what, what eight they obviously the M ones did not

0:42:53appear until the actual max, but they shipped like a Mac pro box with like an eight, 12 chip inside,

0:43:02just so you could run this. Right. And emphasize this is absolutely positively not what we're

0:43:09actually going to ship. This is just a wave for you, a developer, true dev kit. I, they, they,

0:43:15I can't see them doing that in any way, shape or form deliberately with a new product like

0:43:21vision pro. Yeah. Yeah. But in, it does seem to be in a gray area though, right? Because

0:43:27it doesn't seem like they expect this model to sell to lots and lots of people. No, they don't.

0:43:36Price wise, it's obviously not going to. Right. Price wise, it's not everything we know about the

0:43:41supply chain with the supply of these, these Sony made displays in front of each eye is that

0:43:46no matter how surprisingly popular this thing could have possibly been, there was an upper bound

0:43:52on how many they could sell in the first year. And so in effect, even though I think Apple doesn't

0:43:57think of it as a dev kit, I don't think it's weird that people outside the company sort of think of

0:44:02it that way. Right. Does that make sense? Where I think Jaws, if he was on the show would swear up

0:44:08and down, no way, this is not a dev kit is a great, it's a great product. That's, that's not what

0:44:13we're thinking at all. And for some people it is, if you really just want to use it, this is

0:44:19my personal opinion. If you really just want to use it to watch regular movies and TV shows,

0:44:25it's absolutely phenomenal. And arguably on its own, just worth $3,500. I, that if bang and

0:44:33olives and sold something like this and all you could do to watch, all you could watch on it is

0:44:38like Netflix and other streaming services like that, just movies. They'd sell it for five or

0:44:45$6,000. It is that good, that compelling when you're watching a movie. It sounds good. It's

0:44:51great just for that alone, but that's obviously not how Apple's billing it. They're not calling

0:44:55it a home entertain or a personal immersive entertainment system. They're calling it spatial

0:45:01computing. Right? I mean, it's Apple who's hanging their hat on that term. And it just, I don't know.

0:45:09And it just, it is compelling to watch regular and I say 2D, but even when you watch like the

0:45:18Jim Cameron avatar movies, which were shot in 3D, that's not immersive. That's it. And if you've

0:45:25never tried the vision pro or any of these headset, it's hard to explain the difference,

0:45:29but when you're watching avatar and vision pro, you're still seeing

0:45:32a rectangle in front of you. And there's an aspect ratio. It's, and you see into the rectangle and

0:45:44things come out of the rectangle towards you, but it still is a framed aspect ratio movie. Whereas

0:45:50like the immersive content, like this new MLS highlight clip is not, it's like being in a

0:45:56planetarium where you've got this 180 degree dome view. Yeah. Just very, it just feels like the one

0:46:04thing that's out of sync with the release of vision pro is the production of immersive content

0:46:09that whatever wing of the company should be producing more of this stuff. Like Mr. Memo.

0:46:15I don't know how else to say it. Right. And it, and it just seems, and I think the thing that's

0:46:22so surprising about it is like if Apple had somehow come out with something like this,

0:46:29when the iPhone came out in the mid two thousands and Steve jobs is still there and the company was

0:46:37doing well in that run up post iPod and, and the, the everything that happened from the debut of

0:46:46MacOS 10 and the debut of the iPod and iTunes and all the, you know, the great keynotes in those

0:46:54two thousands, the company wasn't massive, right? They weren't one of the richest company in the

0:47:02world. They weren't the most valuable company on the stock exchange. They were thriving and they

0:47:06were growing. And there was tremendous optimism, even from people who in years, a decade past

0:47:13thought the company was doomed, but they weren't filthy stinking rich. Right. Whereas today

0:47:20launching this, you think, well, they, however expensive it is for them to make 50 new immersive

0:47:2730 minute shows a year, they could afford it right. As sort of a loss leader to,

0:47:32to give people the FOMO, right? The fear of missing out. Like, you know,

0:47:37every week there's this new immersive thing that's only for Apple vision pro because Apple's

0:47:43footing the bill to shoot this stuff. And I, I I'm just, I'm not flabbergasted that they didn't do it,

0:47:51but I'm very, very surprised that that wasn't part of the rollout plan.

0:47:56Although they create, they create that buzz and then people will rush to the store to buy them.

0:48:00They might not be able to write enough to, to sell them. So, right. Maybe they feel they're,

0:48:06they're cutting this the right way, but maybe it should be, maybe it should be at least a little

0:48:10bit more than that. Faucet that faucet should be turned on a little more than this slow drip.

0:48:15Right. Right. I feel like there should be more of a reward. Like maybe what they're thinking inside

0:48:20is, Oh, we're on it. And we've got somebody somewhere in eddy Q's organization has this

0:48:26big whiteboard with a whole list of all these immersive content productions that have been

0:48:31green lighted or currently yellow lighted. And they're waiting for a director or something like

0:48:36that, various stages of production. And it's all sorts of stuff is scheduled to come out in 2025

0:48:43and 2026, blah, blah, blah. But I just, and they're like, they're thinking that's when there'll be

0:48:50enough people who have vision pro or, or vision air lower priced versions of the vision hardware

0:48:56lineup. And by that time, Oh, we'll be set. We, we, we are going to have a steady strip of this

0:49:02stuff or steady drip of this stuff, but I don't know. You kind of feel like for 3500 to $4,000

0:49:09right now, there ought to be a little more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like it's not the,

0:49:15I mean, there was all that, that, that talk about, Oh, so many people are returning the vision pro,

0:49:22you know, in that two week window when they could, and some of that didn't seem to little

0:49:28bit overblown. But at the same time, from what I hear from people who own them,

0:49:35it is a little bit, it seems like some of them are kind of like, not sure I should have gotten this.

0:49:43I, I, I kind of feel that way. I mean, I honestly go,

0:49:49I kind of wish that there was a way I wish that I could like, maybe I should see if a widget Smith

0:49:55can, if I can somehow figure out a way to do it, but it would be interesting if every time I put

0:49:59it on, if I could see a widget that tells me how long it's been since the previous time I put it on

0:50:04right. Six days. And it's hot geez. Cause I, at times it would be, and it's,

0:50:11I'm not surprised that I don't use it as all that often. But again, famously money runs through my

0:50:19fingers like water. I hold water better than money. You know, well, you also live with someone,

0:50:25right? I think, yeah, I think it is the kind of thing. It really depends on your life,

0:50:30but it was going to say that even if, even if the people who own one don't really regret it

0:50:35from the outside, it doesn't seem as compelling a buy, right? Like I don't feel like I don't have

0:50:43FOMO at all right now. Yeah. And that says a lot really. And, and it comes to, you know, cause a

0:50:48lot of the stuff that it does do, right. It does have email and messages and Safari and it's, you

0:50:58how many do you, do you feel like you don't have enough ways to do messages, mail and Safari right

0:51:03now? I mean, I say this honestly, I, I kind of feel like maybe iPad, iPhone, Mac is too many.

0:51:11Yeah, really. Yeah. Right. Like to me, the way to inspire FOMO is the only on vision pro stuff,

0:51:19right. And email and Safari are never going to be that right. It's never going to be,

0:51:24Oh man, you've never seen email. Yeah. You've never seen email like this before.

0:51:30I mean, yeah, there's a weird, there's a weird gap between like the, when they, you know, they,

0:51:38they shipped the watch and I would say watch zero, not really as complete a product as maybe it could

0:51:46have been for sure. I mean, it was slow. I don't know that there were other than notifications,

0:51:52not that feature full as it later turned out to be, but it did later turn out to be,

0:51:58and that worked out really well for them. And then you could look at the touch bar,

0:52:04which similar thing, but then developed into absolutely nothing.

0:52:09Right. Yeah. And they never, they never took it.

0:52:12Maybe it's somewhere in between leaning more towards watch for sure, but like,

0:52:16Yeah. Cause I think they invested a lot more in it.

0:52:19And I don't think they're going to give it up easily like the touch bar.

0:52:22Yeah. But it is true. They never made a 2.0 touch bar, which to me is it's a tangent, but,

0:52:29and I could kind of see how even if they had tried a 2.0, maybe we'd still be like,

0:52:34give me back the actual buttons, but I kind of wish they had at least done two. Right.

0:52:39I kind of wish they'd taken a second at the touch bar.

0:52:42Right. But yeah, they didn't. It seemed like there was potential there that never

0:52:48was, was explored. Not, not only not achieved, but not explored.

0:52:53All right. I'm going to take a break here and thank our second sponsor.

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0:55:32All right. So I want to go back to my other complaint about the immersive content.

0:55:39Because it's immersive, it's impossible to drink anything while you're watching.

0:55:44Because, and I never, I don't know why it never occurred to me before, because I guess the other

0:55:51times I've watched immersive content wasn't the morning, but I was watching the soccer thing in

0:55:55the morning while trying to drink coffee. And I realized as it's playing, I'm like reaching out

0:56:01and it's, I don't know where my car, and I'm like, I don't, I need to take this off. This is

0:56:05dangerous. I could get burned. Yeah, really. Problems I never expected to have with computers.

0:56:13Yeah. I wonder if that's one of the reasons why they can want to keep it short. I don't know.

0:56:17Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. It's weird. It does seem like it's not the environment that

0:56:22you necessarily want to be in for a long period of time. Yeah. I don't know. It's weird. Anyway,

0:56:28I said we talk about happy stuff and here's a happy one. This one makes me happy.

0:56:32Gurman hinted at it a week ago and then MacRumors followed up. It seemed, I don't know if it was

0:56:37prompted by Gurman, if they got the okay from it, but then MacRumors with the original inside

0:56:43sources said that iOS 18 is going to have a much more customizable home screen system for icons.

0:56:52So it would be more like Lego where you could just sort of snap icons into place wherever you

0:56:59want them and make, if you only want two rows of them and then you want to just go to the next page,

0:57:03you could do that. If you just want them like a column with a gap in the middle, you could do this.

0:57:08You can kind of lay widgets out like that now. It's kind of weird in iOS 17. You can kind of

0:57:13put widgets wherever you want, but you can't still can't put app icons wherever you want.

0:57:18And I would say non-ironically, finally.

0:57:25Isn't it kind of weird that we're at the 18th annual iteration of iOS and

0:57:31when you arrange your icons on the home screen, they're still sort of in a row, like in order

0:57:40from top left of the first screen. And it's just sort of like a snaking queue of icons

0:57:49that is very, very irritating to try to move more than one at a time.

0:57:55I don't imagine this is going to make it easier though, right? I mean, the way that press and

0:58:00hold thing and then reorder rearranged stuff, I always have, if I want to get an icon to be the

0:58:07first one, it's always a problem because it always seems to want to make a group.

0:58:12Yeah, yeah.

0:58:14And this seems like it's going to be, I don't know, madness, but I'll have to wait and see

0:58:19what happens.

0:58:19Well, as ever, whoever leaked it hasn't leaked everything, so we don't know quite how it works.

0:58:25So we're in the glorious two month stretch, or I guess the 10 week stretch, where WWDC has been

0:58:34announced and we can just dream that these features will be implemented in the perfect way that isn't

0:58:41annoying. Yeah. Well, the only other thing that so far has really come out is the AI stuff, right?

0:58:48As things that are going to get...

0:58:50Well, that's the other thing we can do. We can talk about that too. I don't know if you're

0:58:54going to be able, maybe you'll be able to use AI to arrange your icons on your home screen.

0:58:57See, that would work. I mean, that's what I'm saying. I feel like I need another way to arrange

0:59:03things as opposed to another mechanism as opposed to positioning.

0:59:09I'll just say that there are certain aspects of iOS that...

0:59:13exemplified by just the existence of cut, copy and paste, which I think was...

0:59:21we had to wait till iOS 3, maybe it was even iOS 4. I think it was iOS 3 though.

0:59:26But we went at least two years, maybe three years, where you couldn't even copy and paste.

0:59:31Right.

0:59:34It was a new platform. It was a new paradigm. It wasn't really text-oriented. It was

0:59:39sort of more important for viewing than for actual writing. And they wanted to ship,

0:59:47and then they did. And I think the general way cut, copy and paste that they came up with worked

0:59:52was worth waiting for. But there are lots of other things that here we are 18 years in, which sounds

0:59:59crazy, right? I mean, the iPhone can vote. I mean, that's... it's kind of wild, right?

1:00:06But there are certain things that are so frustrating on iOS, including the iPad,

1:00:14compared to even a 1984 Macintosh. The first Macintosh running System 1.0

1:00:22had rubber band select so that you could drag a rectangle... if you wanted to select three or

1:00:28four icons on your desktop, instead of like shift-click, shift-click, shift-click, you just

1:00:34drag a box. And any icon that wound up within the region of the rectangle you dragged would become

1:00:41selected. And then they're all selected, and then you could drag them together. It was...

1:00:45The first version of the Mac had much better move multiple icons at the same time

1:00:54than 18 years into the iPhone than we have. It is very, very weird and tricky. And I think

1:01:0390-some percent of iPhone users would be shocked to find out that there is a way to move more than

1:01:10one icon at a time, that you put it into jiggle mode and start dragging one icon, then get your

1:01:17other hand involved and start tapping other icons. And then they shoot over into a stack, which is a

1:01:23neat trick to know, but is something that I'm guessing 95% of iPhone users have no idea they

1:01:28can possibly do. And even if you know about it, it still isn't that great of a way to sort of rearrange

1:01:36your phone. It does have the virtue of being something that you are unlikely to trigger by

1:01:41accident. Unlike some of the multitasking stuff where you can get into a situation where you've

1:01:49got things, windows and positions, and you can't figure out how to get them out of those positions.

1:01:54>> So that's my hope. My hope is that this is actually more... I know it sounds insignificant,

1:02:00"Oh, you can arrange or put gaps in your home screen with your icons." I don't know. I kind

1:02:04of hope that this is a serious rethinking from the ground up of how you organize your home screens,

1:02:09and that they've really put their top new UI design minds onto the problem. And that it's,

1:02:23"Hey, this actually... All right, sure, we can complain that it's too late, but it's better

1:02:28late than never. This is actually very, very clever and flexible and makes me feel like I have much

1:02:35more control over the organization of my home screens." I think that's a reasonable ask of Apple

1:02:41after AT&T. >> Apart from that, I mean, I don't know if that... I don't imagine that's the only

1:02:46thing, being able to put things in different positions than you have been able to in the past,

1:02:51but it has been described as the biggest update for iOS ever, right? Even bigger than iOS 7.

1:03:00>> I wonder about that, though. I know that's Germin's rule. And I don't know if that just

1:03:05means the home screen angle or the whole OS or what that... I mean, so far, judging by the leaks,

1:03:12we don't know. So who knows? >> iOS 7 was pretty big.

1:03:16>> Yeah, I would say iOS 7. >> That was a huge change.

1:03:18>> It's really hard to top that one. >> No, it's very... Yeah, I can't imagine

1:03:23how it would be more than... Having gone... I recently had reason... I don't even remember

1:03:29where it was, but I went back and booted up a bunch of old iPhones that I had lying around.

1:03:36And my mom had sent me her iPhone 3GS, and she famously, for a number of years, she doesn't...

1:03:45She no longer does this, but when she would use her iPhone, she would use her iPhone,

1:03:50and then she would turn it off and put it back in the box. And so it is in very nice shape.

1:03:57It's not pristine, but it's really close. And so I booted that up, and man, it's not just nostalgia,

1:04:05I don't think, but it does feel like we lost a few things in that transition to iOS 7.

1:04:14>> Yeah, I... >> It's sort of skeuomorphism, but

1:04:18just not just felt and leather. >> Right.

1:04:22>> It's like the feel of things moving. >> Yeah, yeah, like the date picker or the

1:04:29time picker, where it clearly looked like a... >> Rolling...

1:04:34>> A rolling dial. >> Yeah, like the thing on The Price is Right,

1:04:39where you spin the wheel, you know what I mean? Like a wheel, and that you'd spin these things,

1:04:44and that they had shadows and depth, and it was just extraordinarily clear what you're supposed

1:04:50to do. Well, that looks like a wheel, it's three-dimensional, I'm obviously supposed to spin it.

1:04:54>> Yeah, I think that's probably the thing, right? It's looking, I mean,

1:04:58obviously you can look at it and you can tell what you're supposed to do. And many things,

1:05:04I mean, if it's gotten better, but many things when we switched to iOS 7 were not that clear.

1:05:08>> No, and they've obviously stuck with it, and the whole industry followed. Again, I know...

1:05:19>> I just heard somebody on a podcast saying just this, oh, I know what it was,

1:05:23it was Hugo Barra on Ben's Stratechery, saying that iOS borrowed as much from Android as Android

1:05:30borrowed from iOS. And I mean, I have to disagree. I know, I think that you could make a list of

1:05:38things that were borrowed that's equally long, or they did this first, then this came to the

1:05:42other platform, and this one did that first, and this one came... So you could make two lists

1:05:47that are equally long, but at a fundamental level, Android started as a BlackBerry-looking thing,

1:05:56and ended up very much like an iPhone-looking thing. But there is, yeah, there's like a lot

1:06:04that we've... I look back at that, it's kind of hard to believe, too, that we're up to 18,

1:06:10and we only had six releases of iOS with the old style. I know, and it was weird when we got to

1:06:16like iOS 14, I guess, or 13, wherever you'd want to call the halfway point, where it was like,

1:06:22oh, it's like we're halfway into the new era, and now we're...

1:06:24>> Yeah, it's one of those, you want to feel old.

1:06:26>> Right. But where I was going with that was that the whole industry sort of followed Apple's lead

1:06:31post that, like everything kind of looks like iOS now. Stuff on the web looks like that,

1:06:35Android looks like that, Windows sort of looks like that, everything has sort of got flat, and

1:06:41lots of buttons are just text without an outline, and it's not so obvious what it is. Is this going

1:06:47to be a drop-down menu, or is this just a push button? Is this a spinner? No, I don't know.

1:06:54I'd love to see a lot of that come back, but none of that's rumored yet.

1:06:57>> Yeah.

1:06:58>> So you mentioned AI. What was the pun? Jaws, when he tweeted the dates for WWDC,

1:07:04said it's going to be capital A, absolutely, capital I, incredible.

1:07:10So that's about as close as Jaws was going to come to say, yes, we're going to talk about AI,

1:07:16shut up. Shut up and wait until June 10th. >> Yeah. They have been surprisingly

1:07:23defensive about it, I guess, and maybe they should be, but...

1:07:28>> Yeah, I think... >> Yeah, they're constantly, I mean,

1:07:32I think it was last fall, it must have been the iPhone announcement, it was like, oh yeah,

1:07:38there's so much AI in here already. >> Yeah, yeah. I think that the difference

1:07:44is, and I'll compare it, and it's not just because Bankman Fried just got sentenced to his prison

1:07:51term, but to compare it to crypto, which was of hype cryptocurrency three years ago-ish, I don't

1:07:59know where the peak of cryptocurrency mania was, but was a similar hype cycle to LLM, large

1:08:07language model AI. And I think it's an interesting contrast because I think the cryptocurrency thing,

1:08:16there's a kernel of utility there, right? You actually can buy these cryptocurrencies,

1:08:22and somebody who did get in early on Bitcoin when held has done very, very, very well. I mean,

1:08:29there is some kernel of reality there, but in terms of matching up to the hype, clearly,

1:08:37no. >> Yeah, yeah. It makes me wonder

1:08:40about Nvidia too, right? Because Nvidia is probably the biggest beneficiary of both of

1:08:44these two technologies. >> Yeah, it's definitely started.

1:08:47>> If this doesn't turn out to be, like cryptocurrency didn't really turn out to be the

1:08:55wave that was expected, but they managed to get by because now AI has completely filled the gap

1:09:01for them. But if this doesn't turn out, I mean, and/or they just spent out there churning these

1:09:05things out in order to keep themselves behind the scenes, pulling the strings.

1:09:09>> Yeah, I think the difference is that the AI stuff is really a game changer.

1:09:14>> Yeah, this definitely feels much more, this is here to stay as opposed to cryptocurrency.

1:09:21>> For better and for worse, lots of stuff is different already permanently and will always,

1:09:30henceforth, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, right? Just the way that, I mean,

1:09:37one of the ways we're already seeing it for the worse is using AI to just generate content farm

1:09:44content on the web, right? It is- >> Yeah, yeah. I went to the eye doctor

1:09:49Thursday and the optometrist saw that I was a freelance writer. And she was like,

1:09:59has your career been affected by AI? Well, no, my career has been affected by the crash of

1:10:06advertising on the web, but- >> Well, but it's not wholly unrelated,

1:10:12really. >> No, yeah.

1:10:13>> Because the whole idea with the content in, I mean, we really are-

1:10:16>> I just thought it was interesting that she was like, she knew that that was a thing

1:10:19and thought to ask me that question. >> Whenever I think about it, and I think

1:10:26the 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

1:10:31asking questions on a search engine, right? And you're like, I don't know, like your toilet is

1:10:38running and it's, I don't know, how do I fix a running toilet? And it's for a long time,

1:10:43it was like everything was steering you to YouTube videos, right? Which always annoys me. I'd rather

1:10:48just read and see instructions. Don't make me watch a four minute video. Please, if you could

1:10:53just show me the instructions of how to fix this, it would take me 20 seconds to read it. God.

1:11:00But now it's just this AI crap, right? And you can just tell, it's such a telltale. And it makes me

1:11:07sympathize with teachers because you just know that there's so much very horribly patched up AI

1:11:18submitted homework being done, right? And it's so telltale, right? It's so bad. But it's all about

1:11:25trying to Hoover up advertising money, right? And it really is like the parable of a view of a

1:11:30million monkeys on a million typewriters typing for a million years. And it's, oh yeah, that's

1:11:35an interesting hypothetical. And there's these people building websites now. That's a great idea.

1:11:40>> Brilliant. >> I mean, I love to make fun of it when it doesn't work or when

1:11:48people find ways around. I mean, there was that thing going around where someone used a

1:11:54car dealerships. I don't even know if this was real, but.

1:11:57>> Oh, I think it is real. No. >> Yeah. Yeah. Car dealerships,

1:12:01chat, talk to us, talk to our chat bot and got it to make some sort of Pearl script or something.

1:12:07It's like why pay for chat GPT when my local Toyota dealer will take care of it for me.

1:12:16>> Right. All that they were worried about is like how to use their prompts to prepare their chat

1:12:23bot not to offer people good of a deal on a car. But in the meantime, that never occurred to them

1:12:28that people would be using their open AI API account to write PHP scripts and.

1:12:34>> Yeah. And as funny as these things are, there's definitely, there's obviously very

1:12:40real applications for this and using it for programming problems is a very good one. I

1:12:46mean, that seems like from the people that I've talked to who rely on this stuff regularly,

1:12:50it's actually a boon. >> Yeah. And I've been of the opinion for

1:12:56an entire year that Apple is not late. They're obviously not early.

1:13:02>> I don't think so either. >> They're not early, but that's the thing.

1:13:05They're clearly not early. They're not leading the way. So that is true, but that doesn't mean

1:13:10that they are late. But the one. >> It's typical Apple.

1:13:14>> Yeah. Very typical Apple. >> I mean, it's waiting,

1:13:17they're going to disappear in 60 days if they don't ship a watch type of thing.

1:13:21>> Right. But I will say the one area, and I said this before last year's WWDC, the one area where

1:13:28they are late is integration with Xcode, right? Because, and of course programmers take care of

1:13:34themselves first. I mean, it's a little bit selfishness and it's just a little bit, well,

1:13:40kind of, of course, because the people who are figuring out how to make practical applications

1:13:48of large language models are computer programmers. So kind of, of course, they're going to hook it up

1:13:55to their developer tools first. I mean, it's not even making fun of them for being selfish. It's

1:14:01just the way it's going to just make sense. And Xcode has like no integration with anything like

1:14:07this in terms of, oh, I'm beginning to type a function. Can you auto complete the rest of this

1:14:12function? Or I need to make a SQL query that's going to, I have a SQL table with the following

1:14:19rows and columns. Write me a query that finds just some plain English description.

1:14:27And okay, here's the SQL query, put it in your source code. All of that stuff is in other major

1:14:33IDEs and it's not in Xcode. I kind of thought maybe that might've been one of Apple's

1:14:38announcements last year. I'm not shocked that it wasn't, but this year I think it kind of has to be,

1:14:43or it's really going to be conspicuous. If part of their AI story has to be AI integration with

1:14:49Xcode, but also at this point, and with JAWS teasing it, I mean, JAWS is not the developer

1:14:55tools guy. Clearly they're going to have some sort of features to announce.

1:14:59**Matt Stauffer** Front end.

1:15:00**Justin Jackson** Yeah. Front end for regular consumers.

1:15:03I will say I just was emailing somebody, some writer, I forget where, but somebody,

1:15:10some writer for some mainstream publication reached out to me as like a particular Apple

1:15:14nerd just to say, Hey, I'm writing an article that I actually think that the dictation on the iPhone

1:15:21has gotten better this year. Is that AI? Am I nuts? And I'm like, no, it really has. Like auto,

1:15:26what they promised last year. And I don't know if it's the exact same language model. I think it is,

1:15:31but both software keyboard autocorrect and talk to the keyboard dictation, both are definitely better

1:15:41this year than they've ever been on the iPhone. No doubt about it.

1:15:44**Matt Stauffer** Yeah. I'm getting so many less,

1:15:47those annoying like completion thing that I never use. And that's, that was the big benefit was it's

1:15:54now like it's learned. Okay. He's never going to pick this. So I'm just going to stop,

1:15:57stop offering it to him.

1:15:59**Justin Jackson** I find myself using it on the Mac too,

1:16:03where, where I can type as fast as I can think, but I keep finding like I'm writing,

1:16:08I'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

1:16:14and I wanted to write recommend. And just by typing R recommend that you gets put in gray text.

1:16:22And I'm like, that's what I was. That is exactly what I was going to write tab. You know, now I

1:16:27keep going, like I'm taking those suggestions because they are literally the exact words I

1:16:33was thinking of. And it's kind of uncanny that, you know, I only typed one letter of the word R

1:16:40and it just filled in the rest. It's it's pretty good. Obviously they've got more,

1:16:45more stuff to come. I mean, yeah. So we'll see. I guess,

1:16:50I mean, the thing that they said was it's not going to be chat type things, but something to

1:16:55help people with their day to day lives or something. Yeah. Well, think about some of the

1:17:00stuff they've done. I think one of Apple's great underappreciated software products of the last

1:17:0610 years is the photo widget, right? Like the thing that shows I've got it on my second home

1:17:12screen, but it's like the way the pictures it picks chooses to put in my photo widget every day

1:17:19are really good. I mean, I don't know what other features like that they can come up with and use

1:17:26AI to drive, but you know, I, yeah, I believe that they've got, they must have something.

1:17:33And I totally see that it's not going to be chat, but on the other hand, I guess that does leave

1:17:38the thing that's most like chat, which is Siri, right? Which has to be part of the,

1:17:44has to be part of this, the conversation. Right? I mean, that to me is the elephant in the room is

1:17:50that they've had this thing since Steve Jobs was alive, right? I mean, it was like announced at the

1:17:57iPhone event where he was on 4S, right? Yeah, he died literally days afterwards,

1:18:05right? But that it's a long time ago and it's however much frustration people have had with

1:18:11Siri over the years. I think it's never been further behind. Yeah, but look at this thing

1:18:19over here from some other company, some other product, whether it's the open AI chat and a

1:18:24web browser or whatever else, even like the humane pin, which I know isn't out yet, but it does seem

1:18:31like when you talk to the humane pin, you get more of a conversation than you do talking to your

1:18:37Siri devices at this point. At this point, you can point to other things from other companies based

1:18:43on these large language models and say, this is unacceptable. Yeah. Yeah. And they have bought

1:18:51a number of, well, at least they bought, I know they bought at least one, but I think it's more

1:18:55than that for sure, but AI companies. And recently, so not necessarily stuff that would be integrated

1:19:02yet into what's coming for WWDC. But I think they did, like the other day I was talking to,

1:19:10Siri was telling me, reading my messages to me and it managed to combine three messages that came in

1:19:17one after the other and summarize them in one sentence basically, which I was like,

1:19:23I don't think that's, that's not great for the state of the industry, but I thought that was

1:19:27good for Siri. Have you had Siri describe a photo to you? I didn't even know that. I didn't even

1:19:34know this was a feature, but I often, my Siri experience is largely through AirPods while I'm

1:19:41walking, running errands or just taking walks in the city. But now it's, if you send me a photo,

1:19:46Siri will sometimes, but not always say, John Moltz texted you with a picture of a cup of coffee

1:19:53or something. And then I'm like, what? And then I look and it's, you sent me a picture and it's,

1:19:58oh, it's a humorous coffee mug. Really, really. I didn't, I don't remember them saying that Siri

1:20:02would do that, but you know, it does it and it's pretty cool. And you can see how that could be.

1:20:07I think it came up in, yeah. I mean, I think it was one of those things that maybe was on a slide,

1:20:11but not talked about very much in the presentation.

1:20:15Right. But there's lots of stuff like that, that they can add throughout the system that doesn't

1:20:19involve making it just a chat interface to it, but clearly making Siri smarter, it's gotta be part of

1:20:26it. I mean, it's at this point, it's pretty frustrating. What else is on the rumor mill?

1:20:32The rumor mill is people keep waiting for new iPads. Now we're told May, which is weird. May

1:20:39is usually like a dead month for Apple. Usually Apple's schedule is they'll do stuff in April

1:20:45and then they go silent in May in the lead up to WWDC in June. But now they're saying,

1:20:52well, I think it's because they couldn't get the OLED screens, right? I mean, it seems like they

1:20:57had more trouble than they thought, I suppose. And so they had to kick it back a month or two.

1:21:03Yeah. But that's exciting. I mean, cause that's a product in our lineup.

1:21:09Huh. But joking aside, it does seem of all of the products Apple sells,

1:21:17certainly among the popular ones, it is the one that is-

1:21:20And again, the Department of Justice's claim that Apple sells products that are too expensive,

1:21:27and it only does that because it has market power and not because it makes good products.

1:21:32The iPhone and particularly I think the iPad are cases against that because the bottom line iPad

1:21:41is a really good device. Karen's got, I forgot, like a nine, I think, or an eight. I can't remember

1:21:46now, but she's got one that she's had for a number of years and it's still kicking and she still

1:21:51loves it. And I keep asking her if she wants a new one and she's like, "No, it's fine."

1:21:56I've still got a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro and it does feel a little slow to me now in certain ways,

1:22:04but not in the way that for the entirety of my life that a "six-year-old computer" has felt.

1:22:11For most of my life, it's, "Oh my God, this thing's six years old. It feels like it's

1:22:16covered in molasses." Yeah. Yeah. But that's another good point in terms of,

1:22:22yeah, well, we keep saying this, but we've probably been saying this for 20 years, but

1:22:25the fact that I had this M1 MacBook Air, I kind of wish it would be slower so I could justify

1:22:34buying a new MacBook Air because I've got the wedge form factor and it's a little dinged up.

1:22:39I've dropped it a couple of times. I would love to get a shiny new device,

1:22:43but I have no real reason to because it's just not slow.

1:22:46This, I did four years old. That's exactly what I went through with my,

1:22:52I have the M1 MacBook Pro and it's the Max and it's got lots of 64 gigs of RAM.

1:22:59And then I got the review unit for the M3 that's actually space black. And I do really prefer the

1:23:05colors. The darker, the better. I like it. And I thought, "I'm going to buy this and maybe I'll

1:23:10give this to my son because he could use it." And I checked with him and he said, "Do you need a new

1:23:14MacBook?" And no. What kind of kid says no? But he's like, "No." Because he has an M1,

1:23:21he's got the M1 and it's the lateral move. It's my MacBook's fine. And then I went back,

1:23:31I closed the review unit and went back to mine and I was like, "Oh, please feel slow. Please feel

1:23:36slow." And no, so super. I'm like, "I'm going to be using this for 10 years because I don't do it."

1:23:41And I think that's an issue with the, I mean, an issue with the M series, right? I mean,

1:23:46because they're going to last, I think they're going to last longer than the Intel stuff did.

1:23:49Right. Well, and now they're one of the other news things that's come out in the last month is this

1:23:53deal, seeming deal with Walmart, maybe with Best Buy too, to sell the M1 wedge MacBook Air,

1:24:01just the base model. So only eight gigs of RAM and only 256 of storage, which to me, the storage is

1:24:08the one where I kind of wish that if they were only going to sell one config, I really wish,

1:24:12I'm fine with eight gigs of RAM for typical people. And I just wish it was 512 because I

1:24:18feel like, man, then I could just wholeheartedly tell family members, "Yeah, just go seriously,

1:24:25go to Walmart and buy the MacBook Air that they sell. You don't even have to, and don't even worry

1:24:30about the specs. They only have one. Just go into Walmart and buy it." Like, it's kind of beautiful,

1:24:36right? It is sort of an Apple-like simplicity. Just go to Walmart and buy the one MacBook they sell.

1:24:41It's great. And the only hesitation I have for it is the storage. But on the other, maybe, I don't

1:24:48know, I guess I'd have to look at- I think for an average user, that's not unreasonable.

1:24:52No, I know for my parents it would be because the only thing they-

1:24:56It would definitely be for mine, yeah. The single thing they have that possibly takes up any space

1:25:00at all is photos, and photos can be in the cloud. And again, we're getting into the nature of photos

1:25:07as a part of the system as opposed to an app that you can replace. Well, and there's a case,

1:25:11I mean, I think that's a case, and I think you talked about this with Jason, that if anything,

1:25:16the price of their storage or iCloud storage is the thing that is overpriced.

1:25:22Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, absolutely. Right. But yeah, I'm excited for that. But it does seem weird

1:25:28that the iPads would come in May. But again, if that's what the supply chain- if it's not what-

1:25:34it seems like it's clear it's not what they wanted, but it is what it is. I don't know.

1:25:39Yeah.

1:25:39And I guess it's kind of interesting that they might, according to Germin, do it anyway

1:25:45rather than wait for WWDC, which would probably suggest that they've got plenty of stuff that they

1:25:51have to announce. Because that's the other thing that usually happens in May, is you can sort of-

1:25:58they start announcing weird random things that clearly got cut from the WWDC keynote.

1:26:05Oh, here's a random new app or a feature or something like that, and it's released

1:26:11or announced on May 20th. Oh, somebody just got that cut from the keynote.

1:26:16Yeah.

1:26:18What else is going on? Oh, I know. I wanted to talk to you about this,

1:26:22and I know you highlighted it in your This Week in Apple. Did you see the big

1:26:26total news, very definitive, about a foldable iPhone?

1:26:30I did see that, yeah. I think it's the MacRumors headline is "Foldable iPhone

1:26:37Could Arrive in 2027 or Be Postponed Indefinitely."

1:26:41So they've narrowed it down.

1:26:44It's definitely one or the other.

1:26:45It's either coming in three years or never going to happen. So it's just a minor detail.

1:26:54Yeah. I don't know. I still have my mini, and I'm clinging to it with dear life.

1:27:09So maybe a foldable phone would solve part of my pocket problem, I guess is what we're going

1:27:16to call it. But I don't really. And I mean, just the fact that you're taking a bigger phone and

1:27:20folding it in half, really making it smaller, you're just changing the length. I would have

1:27:28to see it to be really wowed by it. And so I don't feel like I'm missing that much by not having a

1:27:34foldable phone particularly.

1:27:37And again, I don't want to over index on Apple always blowing away whatever came before it.

1:27:46But every foldable I've seen to date to me has looked like there's no way Apple would do it that

1:27:53way. Because everything seems to involve, whether it folds up and down or folds more like a book,

1:28:00it's eventually, it's like you've got two phones stacked together. And it's like to me,

1:28:06if Apple ever is going to pursue folding or rolling phones or whatever other ways a screen might be

1:28:13able to be made smaller.

1:28:16Brian Kardell Yes. And it does seem like they still run into problems where

1:28:20the hinge part doesn't look very well.

1:28:24Dave Asprey There needs to be some kind of step change where

1:28:26in its folded state, it's only as thick as an iPhone is now, right? It needs to get more

1:28:31science fictiony where it's more like just just a screen. And there's not a quarter inch thick

1:28:39thing in your pocket. But right, I it really amused me that they're like, it's three years from now.

1:28:45Brian Kardell Yeah.

1:28:46Dave Asprey Possibly never.

1:28:47Brian Kardell Well, that way they know that they can't be

1:28:50said that they were wrong, right? I mean, yeah. Either way, either way, they're right.

1:28:55Dave Asprey Well, that's always the case, right? That's the

1:28:58Brian Kardell Yeah, that's the classic rumor mill conundrum

1:29:02that they've that they've solved in this instance.

1:29:04Dave Asprey That's about all I've got for the show. Is there

1:29:08anything, any kind of movies or TV shows that you've watched recently that you'd like to recommend?

1:29:12Brian Kardell I just watched The Three Body Problem. And I read the first book, so this is

1:29:16on Netflix, I read the first book and didn't, I mean, I enjoyed it, but I didn't, I started the

1:29:22second, but there were things that I didn't like about it. I think it went into too much detail in

1:29:25certain sections anyway. So I didn't read the rest of the series, but I thought the first one was

1:29:28good. And I really enjoyed the show. I think maybe they kind of conglomerate and invent some

1:29:34characters and stuff like that. And I think some of the dialogue is a little bit clunky, but the

1:29:38science fiction stuff I really enjoyed. So. Dave Asprey

1:29:41We just finished that. It's funny because that's what I was going to mention as well. And I'm going

1:29:45to 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

1:29:52like over the 50 yard line of I'm glad I watched all eight episodes. Brian Kardell

1:29:56Some of the things, the things that are in the book that they brought to life

1:29:59without going into details or spoilers is, are very satisfying. I would say.

1:30:04There's one incident in particular that is, I remember reading in the book and being like,

1:30:11wow. And then seeing it again, being like, wow. Dave Asprey

1:30:14Yeah. I think I know what you're talking about. I won't say anymore, but it was pretty bold.

1:30:20Brian Kardell I will say the other thing and Amy, God bless her,

1:30:24put up with it and watched all eight episodes along with me, but she's not really a science

1:30:28fiction fan. So it was sort of a, my pick now I kind of owe her one. But even she said after

1:30:36episode three, wow, that was a better episode. And I thought so too. I thought episode three was

1:30:41really good. And then as soon as the episode ended, it said directed by Andrew Stanton.

1:30:46And I was like, oh no, no wonder. And then I looked up, I quick, I was like, that's great of

1:30:53Pixar fame. I forget which. And then I looked up in call sheet, which I have active on my phone when

1:30:59I'm watching TV from our friend Casey List. And I'm like, Ooh, I hope Andrew Stanton directed a

1:31:04bunch of other episodes and it's nope. That was it episode three. So if I, if I've spoiled anything

1:31:11for anybody out there who hasn't watched three body problem, it's that episode three is the best

1:31:15episode. I don't know. Does that count as a spoiler? I guess it is. I don't know. I don't

1:31:20think that way. I mean, maybe some people do consider stuff like that's where some people

1:31:24consider just saying whether it's good or not a spoiler. Yeah. So I guess, I guess it's sort of an

1:31:29anti-spoiler because what I'm saying is that if you have tastes similar to mine, you're going to be

1:31:33disappointed in the last five episodes, mild, at least mildly, it peaks. I was not, I would say that

1:31:39I was just a counterpoint that I was not disappointed. I mean, I, I went into, I hesitated. Well,

1:31:44I didn't, I knew I was going to watch it eventually, but I didn't jump on it immediately.

1:31:49And then once I started watching it and I do think it, yeah, the first two, like the first two

1:31:53episodes I watched maybe slowly, but then once I did get to three, I blew through the rest of them.

1:31:58Yeah. Yeah. And I liked them. So it's one of my, one of my favorite things in science fiction is

1:32:04just sort of a very original, huh? I never thought of that. Like what if blank? And there's a couple

1:32:10of those, what ifs involved in the science fiction scenarios of three body problem that are like that.

1:32:17I've never seen anybody think about it that way before. That's kind of interesting. What would,

1:32:23what would happen? And it's, this seems kind of reasonable. I, and so it's very enjoyable to me

1:32:28in that way, in that way that as a fan of science fiction, it's always pleasing to me when there's

1:32:35some just the premise itself is so novel where it's right. And now there's like a part of my

1:32:41brain that's lit up that I never even knew existed before. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

1:32:46So kudos for that. So anyway, you stole my recommendation. Thanks, John.

1:32:49You want to, you wanted to, you were trying to soft stuff, slip your way into that, right?

1:32:55What, what podcast would you like to promote that you are also on?

1:32:59I do the rebound weekly with Dan Morin and Lex Friedman and then Biff every two weeks

1:33:06recently, just cause there's not that many superheroes shows anymore right now. Anyway,

1:33:10they kind of, they kind of ran that barrel dry. And our good friend got English. So.

1:33:15All right. And I will thank our two sponsors for the episode, our good friends at Squarespace,

1:33:20where you should go to start out if you need, if you or someone, you know, needs a website or a

1:33:25new website and my favorite sponsor to say aloud, nuts.com. Let's just go there for any kind of

1:33:32snacks or pantry staples. I love it. And that's.com/thetalkshow. All right. Thank you, John.

1:33:38Thank you.