00:00:05 ◼ ► If you're building a B2B software as a service app, at some point, your customers are going
00:00:11 ◼ ► to start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication, SKIM provisioning, role-based
00:00:19 ◼ ► WorkOS provides easy to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day
00:00:27 ◼ ► It's used by some of the hardest startups in the world today, such as Perplexity, Vercel,
00:00:34 ◼ ► WorkOS also provides a very generous free tier of up to 1 million monthly active users for
00:00:42 ◼ ► It comes standard with rich features like bot protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and
00:00:51 ◼ ► If you are currently building your SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider
00:01:14 ◼ ► There's only one person to blame, and it's me, that you have never been on this podcast before.
00:01:28 ◼ ► I'm sure everybody listening is familiar with your various work, but especially your home
00:01:57 ◼ ► But I was going to say, this is like one of the trivia items that I would think I would
00:02:03 ◼ ► know, and I think everybody would think John Gruber would know, and that I've often gotten
00:02:32 ◼ ► And for some odd reason, the original Macintosh was slightly more widescreen than 4 to 3.
00:02:39 ◼ ► I mean, that original Mac in particular was basically held together with, like, tape and
00:02:48 ◼ ► And so, I don't know, somewhere Syracuse is rolling over in his grave, but you can have
00:02:59 ◼ ► It was a Christmas present from a family member who didn't know what to get me one year.
00:03:22 ◼ ► You beat me to linking to Dr. Drang's little back and forth that he and I have going on where
00:03:30 ◼ ► he, I mentioned talking about old school Apple retail and how it's like the claim chowder of
00:03:38 ◼ ► The prediction that Apple's initial foray into their own brand of retail stores would prove
00:03:43 ◼ ► disastrous because they need their small independent resellers, which was the downside to them getting
00:03:59 ◼ ► And that they're going to piss off their good partners at Best Buy and Sears Robeck and Company.
00:04:08 ◼ ► Growing up, there was a Gateway store actually kind of around the corner from my parents' house.
00:04:16 ◼ ► If you can look at pictures online, some of them, the early ones were kind of themed like farms
00:04:44 ◼ ► That feels like one of those numbers that there's, it's sort of like the bill of materials.
00:04:49 ◼ ► And which I don't, it doesn't seem like that's as big of a thing anymore, but it would always
00:04:53 ◼ ► be a new iPhone would come out and some analyst with analyst in his title, which makes the whole
00:04:59 ◼ ► thing credible, of course, would come out and say that the entire bill of materials for the
00:05:11 ◼ ► That would come out and then people would be like, well, no, there's R&D and development
00:05:39 ◼ ► They're a secretive company, very good at negotiating and real estate, especially very high end realist retail.
00:05:51 ◼ ► So I don't see how anybody could figure that out, but you know, they're doing pretty well.
00:06:04 ◼ ► It was sort of like a proto Best Buy where you would go and buy like any TVs, stereos, any kind of electronics.
00:06:18 ◼ ► You can think back, you, you probably could to like something that's like a Best Buy, but was smaller than the cavernous size of a Best Buy.
00:06:34 ◼ ► And I think when I was a kid, I remember a lot of TV stores were very dark, like in the same way that our coin-op arcades were dark.
00:06:44 ◼ ► And I remember they sold Macs for a few years at the absolute nadir of Apple's confusing product lines, right?
00:06:59 ◼ ► Cause I mean, nobody at even, nobody at the time could remember them, but there was like a Performa 7300 and a PowerPC 7310.
00:07:09 ◼ ► And they were the same thing, except that the Performa didn't have a CD tray and it's what, and it's, so they had a bunch of the performance and I'd go in and, and I wasn't one of those types of Mac fanatics who would go in and fix the computers for free.
00:07:25 ◼ ► There were, there were like community members who were so worried about Apple making it out of the nineties that they would like go into stores and they'd go on Usenet and say, I was at the such and such store.
00:07:36 ◼ ► And I went in and I updated the software, cleaned up the desktop, but I would just go in and the Macs, they would be in such a sad state.
00:07:43 ◼ ► I mean, they just, they, they look like, like when a school cleans out the computers at the end of the year and they're like, here's the ones that don't even work anymore.
00:07:59 ◼ ► In Memphis, we had a couple of really good Apple authorized like resellers back in the day.
00:08:10 ◼ ► And so it was early on in the run, but I remember going into those resellers and it's like, they knew what they were talking about.
00:08:20 ◼ ► I'm sure in reality, it was like all the software that, that, that there was, I mean, when the Mac was small, but those guys really knew what they were doing.
00:08:29 ◼ ► We still have one right here in center city, Philly, and it's only three blocks from the Apple store called Bundy typewriter, which tells you how long they've been in business.
00:08:43 ◼ ► I guess they've officially, I've just looked it up, but they've officially changed their name to Bundy computer.
00:08:51 ◼ ► But like when I was in college, if you needed something for the Mac locally, you'd go downtown, cross the river from Drexel, go to Bundy.
00:09:03 ◼ ► And now I think they stay in business because they're really good for repairs and you can, and they're still officially authorized.
00:09:09 ◼ ► So when you book a repair with Apple, you can, at times I had a, like an old, really old Mac book air and it, the battery swelled up and you can, you'll appreciate this.
00:09:24 ◼ ► And even though I don't use it anymore, I haven't booted it since I got it fixed at Bundy, but I made the appointment and it was like, you could go to the Apple store and we'll fit you in, I don't know, three, four days from now.
00:09:46 ◼ ► Yeah, so y'all were going back and forth about this and he has, he has a story on lean crew about going to a comp USA and he wanted to see if the G4 cube, which famously didn't have a fan, the heat just sort of came out of the top of it.
00:10:00 ◼ ► If it was actually hot and he put his hand over it and the machine immediately overheated and shut itself down.
00:10:07 ◼ ► And he says he didn't touch it, that his hand was just, I guess, just hovering over it.
00:10:13 ◼ ► But then every time he went in there afterwards, he, he would go in there and cause it to crash like a little, a little game of cat and mouse with a, with a G4 cube.
00:10:21 ◼ ► I believe him because he's, he seems like one of the most believable human beings walking the face of the planet.
00:10:27 ◼ ► I, and I never owned a G4 cube, but I had seen them and I don't recall them being that finicky.
00:10:34 ◼ ► I always thought, I mean, so, but it makes me think that the ones in the store were already running hot because they were configured poorly and had stuff running in the background.
00:10:43 ◼ ► And like, I, I think Drang's post leaves the impression that if you bought a G4 cube and used it like a sensible Mac user, that if you put your hand over it, it would, it would crash, which is not true.
00:11:05 ◼ ► One last subject before like a pre, pre-show subject is I, one of those weird things about this whole career that, that I have is I thought, man, this would be great if I can make this work.
00:11:36 ◼ ► I watched most of it and, and like most years is a lot of stuff that will probably never see the light of day or, or be killed off the, the vaporware to actual shipping product ratio is a little funny at IO.
00:11:49 ◼ ► But it was interesting a few days before IO, they did a stream that was all their Android stuff.
00:12:09 ◼ ► Ars Technica had a piece today about, remember like the horrifying Will Smith spaghetti video from a few years ago.
00:12:27 ◼ ► And they've got a new, I think potentially one of the most interesting things is they've got basically two tiers of paid service to use kind of bigger and better versions of Gemini and notebook LM and stuff.
00:12:55 ◼ ► And I like, I can imagine where if I start hitting limits, I would be like, well, maybe I have to pay more.
00:13:23 ◼ ► Because Google's whole thing from day one has been everything they make is free if you're a consumer.
00:13:35 ◼ ► One, their ad business could be on the verge of being broken up, depending on how their various court cases go in the U.S.
00:13:43 ◼ ► And so maybe they're looking at a post ad business or at least a business that's not so centered on ads.
00:13:54 ◼ ► I've been writing a lot about our local impact of that with XAI because XAI is in my hometown.
00:14:09 ◼ ► Because, and again, I know I'm mixing up the companies here, but it all kind of meshes together.
00:14:14 ◼ ► But one of the numbers that was thrown out when we talk about the other IO of the week, which will be a bigger topic, but that chat GPT or open AI, I guess, overall is expected has themselves have set the expectation that they're going to lose $44 billion between now and 2029 or something like that.
00:14:35 ◼ ► I mean, I love, I've made the joke so many times over the years, billion here, a billionaire, and suddenly you're talking about real money.
00:14:43 ◼ ► But that's just real money right off the, $44 billion is a lot of money for anybody, right?
00:15:16 ◼ ► And then the other thing is that with all of the Google Cloud stuff from, I don't know, probably going on a decade at this point,
00:15:25 ◼ ► they've built a big chunk of their business where they're selling software to corporations effectively, right?
00:15:33 ◼ ► And so signing up for a $250 Gemini account isn't exactly cloud computing at the corporate IT level,
00:15:41 ◼ ► but it's more the same mindset where you're exchanging cash for access to the thing, right?
00:16:01 ◼ ► I wonder sometimes if you roll back the clock at Google and they saw that this was the way things were going to go.
00:16:07 ◼ ► Because I mean, for so long, I mean, I've used a free Gmail account for 20 something years.
00:16:15 ◼ ► And I've, I don't get tons of attachments, so it just keeps piling up and they, every once in a while, I guess they up how much.
00:16:38 ◼ ► It feels like if I were just wandering around inside of Apple, I would be looking for low-hanging fruit to make people happy.
00:16:53 ◼ ► What was the storage tier that they were stuck at for so long with iPhones as the minimum?
00:17:37 ◼ ► A lot of us, I think, were like, I don't know, maybe they're never going to, maybe it's always going to be 16.
00:17:43 ◼ ► But the iCloud storage is a totally different, I mean, it's been five gigabytes from day one, which was, I don't know, what, 15 years ago?
00:18:57 ◼ ► But I seriously got a dose of very mature, middle-aged, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, groups.
00:19:05 ◼ ► Like, when I was younger, I would have waited 48 hours to see if anybody had, like, a disaster.
00:19:22 ◼ ► But I think it is going to be somewhat complicated when I have to go past two terabytes to add another two terabyte.
00:19:29 ◼ ► Or maybe, and it might be that I get the two terabytes for free because I pay for Apple One.
00:20:09 ◼ ► And I do have spots because at this point, with a 21-year-old heading into his senior year of college, I'm pretty sure my wife and I are done having children.
00:20:30 ◼ ► Look, BetterHelp, let's face it, this audience for this show, there's a lot of you out there who are men.
00:20:37 ◼ ► And there's sort of, I guess, stigma around men's mental health and getting help, getting therapy, stuff like that.
00:21:01 ◼ ► Real strength comes from opening up about what you're carrying, what's going on in your life, what's going on in the back of your mind.
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00:22:59 ◼ ► I know there's sort of a weird, fun, cold war between OpenAI and Google that last year, or maybe for two or three years in a row, they've scheduled big announcements during Google's I.O. conference.
00:23:14 ◼ ► And I saw some people speculating that the name for this new company that's acquired and now within OpenAI was a tweak over Google's previous quote-unquote ownership of I.O. from their developer conference.
00:23:33 ◼ ► I think the timing definitely may not be coincidence, but I think the fact that Johnny Ive and his team at Love From named the company I.O. was purely coincidence.
00:23:50 ◼ ► It is a good name, and I think it's – I mean, they – if you watch the video, right, they're looking at new ways for us to interface with our computers away from legacy products like laptops.
00:24:01 ◼ ► And so, yeah, if they're looking to see how we could reintegrate technology into our lives, it's a pretty good name from that angle.
00:24:13 ◼ ► It's both – the AI is currently – and I guess it is sort of – I mean, I don't know, maybe something can come after it, but it is ultimately the highest level of abstraction of computing, right?
00:24:24 ◼ ► Like famously, even the experts in the field admit that they don't fully understand how LLMs work, right?
00:24:35 ◼ ► You start with these algorithms, and you've trained them on massive, massive ocean-sized corpuses of data, and then out comes a thing that you can – that'll start predicting natural language or start predicting pixels in an image based on the patterns that it gleaned from the thing.
00:25:18 ◼ ► And I think it gets to what Johnny Ive recently talked about on his delightful and intriguing onstage interview with Patrick Collison from Stripe, where I thought Johnny Ive very deftly danced around his feelings about Apple today, five-plus years after his departure.
00:25:41 ◼ ► But I think part of it is his discomfort with the time that people spend on their phones.
00:25:47 ◼ ► Yeah, it's fascinating to me that that was one of the driving things behind the Humane pen, too.
00:26:17 ◼ ► And I think at the root of it, that's a compelling idea, whether something you wear or something that you have with you that talks from an LLM.
00:26:39 ◼ ► And I do wonder if these folks who were there in the early days, if they were trying to kind of reconcile their feelings of responsibility over that.
00:26:56 ◼ ► I think if you look at the transcript of his interview with Collison, he kind of comes out and says it to some degree, that he's maybe not guilty or feels complicit in doing something bad, but that at least he questions the role he played in getting to where we are.
00:27:18 ◼ ► And I think the problematic nature of our society-wide addiction, let's call it what it is, to phones, the problematic side is when it's very one-way.
00:27:35 ◼ ► It's not – the problem isn't like when you and I are texting each other like, hey, we're going to be late to start the recording of the show, and you're like, oh, okay.
00:27:44 ◼ ► But that sort of two-way communication, I don't – I think that's just been purely additive to the world.
00:27:51 ◼ ► It's really – texting in particular, Ben Thompson and I have been talking a lot about how to really take a step back.
00:28:07 ◼ ► It's fantastic for – it's literally the only interface we have so far really for interacting with all of these AI systems.
00:28:24 ◼ ► But I think that the problematic nature is more – I'm not just to throw TikTok singularly.
00:28:30 ◼ ► But TikTok, Instagram, but the sort of swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, sort of stone-faced, and there goes two hours.
00:28:52 ◼ ► Or – I mean there's – I've been reading a lot about this as someone who's got a high school daughter.
00:28:57 ◼ ► Like the – truly the epidemic of body image and other issues that come from social media.
00:29:08 ◼ ► But if that stuff is all bad and they're trying to right the ship, steer the world back in a better direction, a lot of people would look at AI and LLMs and say, well, that's not the direction we should be steering.
00:29:38 ◼ ► In all the years I've paid attention to this stuff, this feels like the most complicated thing to cover or talk about that I've ever had to do because everyone has feelings about it.
00:29:56 ◼ ► And it's only been things like ChatGPT or Gemini, AI tools on phones where I see like the normal people in my life or like family and friends who maybe they only ask me about tech when it's time to buy a new iPhone.
00:30:12 ◼ ► Like they're talking about these things because they're using them or they feel really bad about them.
00:30:18 ◼ ► It just – it feels like such a big, complicated topic and God bless him, but Johnny Ive like dove into the deep end this week.
00:30:37 ◼ ► Go back to my youth and like the era portrayed on Halt and Catch Fire of the early PC and it was like anybody with real money was like, what are you nerds talking about with these computers?
00:30:56 ◼ ► I mean it's nobody really – nobody except the real – the nerds who really were living it got the potential, right?
00:31:05 ◼ ► And fast forward to the last few decades and look at like the top companies in the world by market cap and they're all computer companies or Berkshire Hathaway who's bought and sold tons of shares of Apple and other computer companies in recent years, right?
00:31:29 ◼ ► So in some ways it's good for the world that like the market cap monsters of the 90s, those ExxonMobiles and a bunch of other dig up fossilized dinosaur remains and burn it and pump the carbon in the air profit.
00:31:47 ◼ ► That this is better but we've just come around to that all of this excitement is about these endeavors that involve massive amounts of energy.
00:32:00 ◼ ► And there are – I think that the knee jerk, hey, all of AI is bad because the energy consumption is too high and it's going to kill the planet is kind of silly because it's – I don't know.
00:32:10 ◼ ► Somebody's done some of the math where it's using chat GPT all day for one day is like – you know, like taking – or like if you take one fewer airplane flight in your life, like you could use chat GPT all day every day for the rest of your life and come out ahead carbon-wise.
00:32:28 ◼ ► I've heard a lot of that from my readers and listeners because I've been writing about XAIs.
00:32:37 ◼ ► And I've been writing a lot about it because the utility company here is not ready for that yet.
00:32:45 ◼ ► The amount of power they need, TVA and our local utility company, they don't have the juice yet for that.
00:32:52 ◼ ► And so they're using these big gas turbines, which are like the size of 18 wheelers, right?
00:33:05 ◼ ► And problematic when you're pumping a bunch of gas into like the poor zip codes in Southwest Tennessee.
00:33:16 ◼ ► And I can on one hand use chat GPT for some things in my life or in my work, but also be concerned about the pollution and all those things.
00:33:26 ◼ ► And I feel like there's a lot of kind of one side or the other right now on this topic because it's such a big topic, because it's so important.
00:33:34 ◼ ► But the reality is it's just it's really complicated and people are going to have feelings that sometimes even like conflict within themselves over it.
00:33:47 ◼ ► Amazon is a tricky company and it's hard to and like any of these giant companies, they're all unique in their own ways.
00:33:57 ◼ ► They're as unique as people and largely because they're so they're each so obviously informed by their founders, right?
00:34:06 ◼ ► That Apple is so Steve Jobsy still and Microsoft is so Bill Gatesy still and Amazon is still so Jeff Bezosy.
00:34:16 ◼ ► But there was something weird about the way Amazon got off the ground or unprecedented where they weren't turning a profit.
00:34:24 ◼ ► But every few quarters when investors would get antsy about that, they'd turn a little bit of a profit just to show that they could do it if they would.
00:34:33 ◼ ► And they kept telling them the reason we're not turning a profit, even though we could, is we think we should be pumping all of the money that we could book as profit into continuing to build out our infrastructure.
00:34:58 ◼ ► But we'll but we're going to build out an infrastructure that will give us a dominant position.
00:35:03 ◼ ► And all of that was true, including the fact that they've built out a dominant position that nobody can catch up on because nobody else can afford to do that.
00:35:13 ◼ ► I mean, Walmart a little, but like when you kind of dwarf Walmart's ability to spend with you on building out infrastructure, you've reached a really dominant position because that was Walmart was like, hey, that's our game, squeezing out the little retailers.
00:35:38 ◼ ► They built the tools they needed and then built the tools like relay stuff like we run on AWS.
00:35:53 ◼ ► And I think that's the term we're starting to see with these AI companies a little bit, right?
00:35:58 ◼ ► Where they've they built tools to build the tools and they built tools for nerdy people.
00:36:07 ◼ ► It's it's there's still lots of rough edges when it comes to it being a product, right?
00:36:12 ◼ ► Like my word, if all Johnny Ive does is fix their naming of their models and like he's worth the six billion or whatever it is.
00:36:25 ◼ ► A bunch of these companies are, but they are starting to make the turn into we're making products for regular people.
00:36:37 ◼ ► Amazon proved you could lose money for a long time and build a dominant position and then make lots of money forever.
00:36:48 ◼ ► Like, how can it even be that it's even plausible that a company could say, oh, yeah, we expect to lose 44 billion.
00:36:56 ◼ ► I mean, try going back 40 years and explaining to somebody back then that that and even take the inflation out of it.
00:37:12 ◼ ► Nobody who anybody who would invest in this is a lunatic and they don't have money because they're lunatics.
00:37:54 ◼ ► And at some point they'll have to kind of mature into what we think of as a sustainable business.
00:38:08 ◼ ► It's like we were going to make money or we're going to have to go back to our jobs, right?
00:38:15 ◼ ► There is, to me, a sort of ick factor to a business strategy that's lose a ton of money for a long while.
00:38:26 ◼ ► I think that the path to that, though, is by somehow it causes a lot of destruction along the way.
00:38:39 ◼ ► And it was with Amazon and retail, it was that Amazon got effectively de facto permission from investors, the people who owned its publicly held stock after they went public, that we don't expect you to turn a profit for quite a few years.
00:39:01 ◼ ► And no other company had that kind of permission from their ownership, whether they were private or public.
00:39:06 ◼ ► And it gave them, it's a very subtle thing that Bezos pulled off there, but it was genius.
00:39:18 ◼ ► I don't think it was, in the pre-internet world, the position that Amazon holds in retail is, it's almost unfathomable.
00:39:28 ◼ ► I mean, there were Kmart's and Walmart, of course, has been around since I think the 50s or 60s.
00:39:40 ◼ ► And I guess was sort of the proto-Amazon with their catalog, which was the way that people could buy stuff from a major retailer, even when they lived in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the middle of the United States.
00:39:55 ◼ ► Because you'd get the Sears catalog once or twice a year, and you could buy everything that was in a Sears, even though you lived 500 miles away from Chicago or something like that.
00:40:15 ◼ ► I mean, even when I was a little kid, it was still a cool store to go to, you know, and it was kind of cool because they sold, like, everything.
00:40:38 ◼ ► But sort of never, it just never would have possibly, there was no imaginable way that, everybody knew it, but there's no way that it would be as ubiquitous as Amazon is, right?
00:40:56 ◼ ► Like, we both think, sort of just fuck Jeff Bezos and with the whole Washington Post thing.
00:41:13 ◼ ► We get Amazon stuff all the time because there's so much stuff that you just can't get anywhere else.
00:41:28 ◼ ► And I had not really linked in my mind, like, Amazon's route to where they are now to what OpenAI could be doing.
00:42:08 ◼ ► Something I think you and I both pointed out that on Humane's website, when they launched, it was, like, capitalized in different ways on different pages.
00:42:42 ◼ ► But, you know what, they did walk away from, they know, when they first launched Love From, they were trying to get people to spell it.
00:43:04 ◼ ► You can't just pretend that your name has a comma at the end because it's going to interrupt the flow of every single sentence your name appears in.
00:43:12 ◼ ► Yeah, it looks like it's still the title of their webpage, but once you dig in, they've dropped it.
00:43:18 ◼ ► Yeah, someone tapped them on the shoulder and be like, you're impossible to write about.
00:43:27 ◼ ► If you could legally insist and force everybody to include a punctuation character in your name, what would be worse than a comma at the end?
00:43:45 ◼ ► But a semicolon, I think, would also be complicated, mostly because most people don't know how to use them.
00:43:55 ◼ ► What if you tried to start your name with an open parentheses, but you don't have a closed parentheses in your name?
00:44:24 ◼ ► Because that's the other thing, when I don't go with a company styling of their name spelling, then there's the, well, then what do I do, right?
00:44:33 ◼ ► So famously, or at least famously in our circles, like I spell Mac OS with a capital M.
00:44:44 ◼ ► And my rule is if you say the letters out loud, you're allowed to have a lowercase one at the beginning.
00:45:16 ◼ ► It's like, but I feel like I want to add, I have to add to the rule, which now it suddenly feels like I'm like a Trump judge, right?
00:45:24 ◼ ► Like, right, a Trump justice on the Supreme Court trying to backwards engineer a way to sign a thing that says, yes, I think the president of the United States has legal immunity from all crimes he may commit while in office.
00:45:38 ◼ ► Now I want to add a rule that you can start with some lowercase letters if they're pronounced letter by letter, but you've still got to have some uppercase letters in there.
00:46:04 ◼ ► It's just in Apple Notes, because sometimes I forget how I stylize things, and I wrote one for our friend Underscore, because he was just, like, capitalizing stuff all over the place.
00:46:44 ◼ ► And sometimes when I'm adding a new one and I look above and it's something that really I haven't written about since 2006, I'm like, should I take that out?
00:46:59 ◼ ► The humane thing is, to me, the knee-jerk refutation of, hey, why is everybody excited about this IO thing with Love From and OpenAI?
00:47:15 ◼ ► And isn't it the same folly of thinking that people even want to move past their phones?
00:47:36 ◼ ► I mean, the second someone was like, yes, laser projectors are the future, then they probably lost, right?
00:47:44 ◼ ► But it is hard, I think, just because we're so used to interacting with things with screens.
00:48:01 ◼ ► And even before that, the teletype was sort of a screen that just was printed on paper.
00:48:24 ◼ ► Like, because, I mean, Johnny Ive did make some of the most incredible products that the world has ever seen.
00:48:31 ◼ ► Also made some weird ones that maybe shouldn't have left the lab, but very clearly the most important product designer of our time.
00:48:48 ◼ ► I've been talking recently for, I forget why, but it's come up on a couple of podcasts I've been on.
00:49:09 ◼ ► Or they had the iPod Mini, which was a big hit because it was so much smaller, seemed so much smaller, than the bigger hard drive, traditional, original iPod size.
00:49:25 ◼ ► And then they threw it away and said, nope, we're getting rid of the most popular iPod, and we're coming out with the iPod Nano, which is going to switch from tiny little hard drives to Flash.
00:49:40 ◼ ► But I think they rightfully figured, and probably with data, that, hey, people don't have, like, one gigabyte is fine.
00:49:48 ◼ ► Like, for most, almost everybody out there, like, a one gigabyte or two gigabyte of MP3 files.
00:49:53 ◼ ► And compression had gotten better in the intervening years, because everybody was listening to compressed AAC files and MP3 files.
00:50:13 ◼ ► And then one year, it was like 2011 or 2009, I forget, they came out with the Fat Nano, which was more like a square.
00:50:31 ◼ ► But directionally, they were spot on exactly right, which was, hey, people want to watch video on a little thing in their hands.
00:50:45 ◼ ► That they've maybe underestimated just how badly people and how much time they would spend watching video.
00:50:52 ◼ ► And so they made a device that was optimized for video, widescreen rather than horizontal.
00:50:58 ◼ ► I think what they got wrong with that design, clearly, if you just watch the way people use their phones, is not just thinking, hey, just hold the device sideways.
00:51:13 ◼ ► Because if I'm watching video, it's in YouTube, and they have a player that will go horizontal.
00:51:19 ◼ ► And then, but the rest of the world has moved on to vertical video, because that's how we hold our phones.
00:51:29 ◼ ► The no-button shuffle that you mentioned, that's an interesting one, because I wonder how much that informs what they're building at I.O., right?
00:51:40 ◼ ► I mean, vastly more complicated than something that only played audio through a wired headphone connection.
00:51:59 ◼ ► I mean, it is, I think, the biggest mystery in Silicon Valley now is, like, what are they doing?
00:52:05 ◼ ► And whether or not it's successful or not, it'll be very, very interesting to see what it is and their explanation behind the decisions they made.
00:52:20 ◼ ► There's going to be a whole thing about every little detail about it, because it's Johnny Ive, and that's what he loves.
00:52:37 ◼ ► I think one of the ways that Humane went wrong was, I think, fundamentally, it was hubris at a very almost profound level.
00:52:46 ◼ ► And part of that hubris was that their original marketing, like, a year in advance of shipping, or maybe even more, I forget, when they first started putting out the bizarre teaser video.
00:52:58 ◼ ► You know, like the one where the lady was staring into the eclipse, which is, it's like, everybody except, like, the current president of the United States knows that you don't stare into an eclipse.
00:53:08 ◼ ► Oh, I've forgotten about that and then saw a gif of it the other day where he's, like, pointing at the sun and just, oh, my gosh.
00:53:17 ◼ ► I know, but they, Humane made a video about some woman in a, she was, like, in a sea of people staring at their phones, and she noticed there's a solar eclipse going on, and so she stares at it.
00:53:32 ◼ ► But I think that they somehow had the hubris of thinking that they were building a replacement for the phone, which wasn't going to happen.
00:53:42 ◼ ► And Sam Altman has spoken, and I forget where, because they made the video, and he did some interviews, and there was some reporting on what he told the team.
00:53:51 ◼ ► But either in one place or in multiple places, Sam Altman has said this week, now that they've decloaked with I.O., that they see what they're building as, you know, in the same way that the phone didn't replace laptops, and that we all still have laptops, but we also still have phones.
00:54:07 ◼ ► This will be, like, this will be to the phone what the phone was to the laptop, which sounds plausible to me.
00:54:21 ◼ ► Like, but it maybe, eventually, it has to, at some point, become less important, right, that something is going to do to the phone what the phone did to the laptop.
00:54:35 ◼ ► But I think, and I only really thought, I didn't really think, all the snark that I've written at Humane's expense over the years, the one thing that never really hit me until this week, thinking about this partnership, is that their A.I. sucked anyway, right?
00:55:00 ◼ ► They were, and I think if my timeline is right in my head, Humane came out of the shadows before the chat GPT moment.
00:55:10 ◼ ► And I think some people, including me, like, we had that question in our minds of, like, how far along were you before you settled on Open.A.I. helping you power this?
00:55:20 ◼ ► Like, was your plan to do it all in-house, or did you just, like, bolt A.I. onto this product that was going to do something else?
00:55:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I, and so I think that the profound difference here is obviously this new endeavor is truly a partnership by all accounts, right?
00:55:41 ◼ ► And so it's going to be, like, the full power of Open.A.I. doing the A.I. for the device, not just, oh, here's what you can pay and get through an API bill or just a regular account.
00:55:58 ◼ ► And so I think, if I had to guess, that it is putting aside speculation on what shape the device will be, and will it be, like, a pendant you wear around your neck, or is it, I really doubt it's going to be a pin, but is it a watch?
00:56:24 ◼ ► I think what they, Johnny Ive and Sam Altman seem to be hinting at, but don't want to come out and say, is that it is a much grander ambition for the actual A.I. itself than going from ChatGPT3 to ChatGPT4 and going from ChatGPT4 to 4.1.
00:56:48 ◼ ► And the closest I think Altman came to dropping a hint about that this week was talking about current A.I. being in the equivalent of the terminal era.
00:57:04 ◼ ► And that this will be, like, the Macintosh, what the Macintosh was to the terminal command line character-based computers that came before it.
00:57:17 ◼ ► Not that Ive was there at the original Macintosh, but he was, he's, he's the person people think of when they think of Apple hardware.
00:57:26 ◼ ► And, but he's not wrong in that, yeah, if I'm going to use ChatGPT, I'm opening the Mac app or I'm opening the app on my phone or maybe I'm using a web browser, right?
00:57:35 ◼ ► And even with the Mac, where there's a lot of integration with different applications now, which I think is actually pretty cool in some situations, even that, like, feels like new technology kind of living within the frame of old technology in a way.
00:58:01 ◼ ► And I, the other thing in their shared history, I keep thinking about Johnny Ive's role.
00:58:06 ◼ ► I mean, who knows how, how much effort he put into it, but that he supposedly informed or hinted or suggested aspects of Eve, the robot and Wally.
00:58:18 ◼ ► And that's sort of, it's, Eve certainly feels a very, looks and feels very Johnny Ivey, right?
00:58:35 ◼ ► And the beeps and boops she communicates with and the way she moves and the fact that I'm calling her she and not it.
00:58:43 ◼ ► I could see him aspiring to build a gadget that you become attached to in the same way that you would imagine.
00:58:50 ◼ ► If you owned a real working Wally, if Wally could be made real and put Roomba out of business, that you would feel affection to Wally.
00:58:59 ◼ ► Well, it's why it's one of my favorite movies, not just Pixar movies, but one of my favorite movies, period, ever made.
00:59:10 ◼ ► But one of them is just, just how much of a character that robot is and how much emotion it, it carries.
00:59:29 ◼ ► Like the Roomba is like, and I've got a pretty decent one, but it's still basically just like bouncing around my house and will like run over a thing of ribbon that my daughter left out and try to choke itself, right?
00:59:40 ◼ ► So take those feelings that we have towards technology now, and then you pair them with something that knows you and you communicate with.
01:00:01 ◼ ► We're going to make something that is more of a companion than anything we've had in technology so far.
01:00:22 ◼ ► And then it's sort of a sick way of looking at it, but the better the thing is, the more risky and uncertain the eventual outcomes of it will be, right?
01:00:36 ◼ ► It's the fact that the iPhone was so spectacularly amazing that here we are 18 years later talking about how it's too addictive, right?
01:00:47 ◼ ► And so you can certainly imagine if they pull it off and make something that's more of a companion that you talk to throughout the day, that it gives you companionship, that it could maybe not be so good for a lot of people.
01:01:03 ◼ ► I mean, there's definitely people who have unhealthy relationships with the chat, GPT, et cetera, as they are today.
01:01:11 ◼ ► There was the guy at Google who a couple years ago, before these things became public, who was working with an early version of what I guess became Gemini, who, remember, there was a story that the guy became convinced that it was sentient and that he felt like it's not a human right.
01:01:26 ◼ ► It's like, I don't know, an intelligence right activist, that it was immoral for the company to have created this thing and trapped it within the system.
01:01:39 ◼ ► It's really, really just like sort of a complicated regular expression system that just predicts patterns that come out.
01:01:55 ◼ ► And imagine what something really good along those lines that you talk to and that beeps and boops at you in truly appealing ways, you know, how, I was going to say corrupting, but how, I don't know what the word is, but I don't know.
01:02:21 ◼ ► There was a story a few days ago about users have like uploaded pictures of people to Grok and asked Grok to undress them, right?
01:02:38 ◼ ► And so like there is a danger to that sort of technology, I think, for a lot of people.
01:02:50 ◼ ► But there's evidence that people with hearing loss are more prone to things like dementia because they don't hear words clearly.
01:02:58 ◼ ► And so you could also see that technology like this could be helpful to people who live alone or who are elderly.
01:03:13 ◼ ► And it's up to product people like John Hive and Sam Altman and this team they've put together to navigate those things and to take, I think, the rough edges off of them.
01:03:33 ◼ ► And what I walked away from it all is like, these guys, they're doing something really weighty in a way that we haven't seen out of Silicon Valley or San Francisco.
01:03:45 ◼ ► It was like a whole section of the video, which is not how I feel about San Francisco personally.
01:03:51 ◼ ► But their San Francisco, as pictured in the video, does not smell like the San Francisco that I have experienced.
01:03:57 ◼ ► Although I do love the city of San Francisco and consider it one of my favorite places in the world.
01:04:18 ◼ ► But it's weighty in a sense that we haven't seen from Silicon Valley or from these companies maybe since the iPhone.
01:04:33 ◼ ► I mean, I'm not saying they're not real or that people don't enjoy taking pictures with them.
01:04:46 ◼ ► And I think the jury will – I think we need to see the next few generations before you can make that judgment.
01:04:53 ◼ ► But Vision Pro might be something as ambitious as what they're doing, but maybe in the wrong way in terms of actually being something that really makes people just die to use it.
01:05:05 ◼ ► And the computer history is littered with the corpses of products and companies that didn't make it but were on the right track, right?
01:05:23 ◼ ► For every one company whose name people remember, like Commodore, there were a whole bunch of companies that you will never come across on the modern internet because they live and died in such a short period of time.
01:05:46 ◼ ► And I don't – my money is on them not being the next humane AI pen if they have anything to say about it.
01:05:56 ◼ ► I think they're taking it super seriously and hopefully taking all those, like, safety and societal concerns at the same level as what's the finish like on the clip.
01:06:08 ◼ ► Like, those things deserve equal weight if not one more than the other in these conversations.
01:06:18 ◼ ► Just the names that are already publicly known, let alone some of the ones that I know aren't publicly known.
01:06:23 ◼ ► But Evans Hankey and Tang Tan and Mike Mattis, who I don't know is at IO, but he's at Love From.
01:06:30 ◼ ► A whole bunch of people who helped build the iPhone and iPad and great stuff from the last 20 years are now working on this.
01:06:41 ◼ ► And I'm not saying there's not tons of talent still at Apple right now, including younger talent and stuff.
01:07:02 ◼ ► That the only people – as the years go on after Steve Jobs has died, we know fewer and fewer of the people making things at Apple who aren't the executives on the senior leadership page.
01:07:22 ◼ ► We're seeing more people like, oh, this person's involved with health or with Apple Pay or something.
01:07:30 ◼ ► I think where the difference is, though, is that we know the name of Johnny Ives and his lieutenants because at the time Apple had design at a higher level both, I think, organizationally but also sort of in the way they talk about things than they do now, right?
01:07:57 ◼ ► And Johnny Ives is on stage at town hall talking about, oh, like we used to make this with a bunch of little parts we screw together and now we're carving it off aluminum, right?
01:08:11 ◼ ► And that sort of highlighting or spotlighting the design process, we still see it from Apple sometimes, right?
01:08:19 ◼ ► The Vision Pro announcement a couple years ago had quite a bit of that, but it's in line with all these other things where it used to be more on a pedestal, I think.
01:08:34 ◼ ► I think back to some of the Phil Schiller-led iPhone keynotes where he'd really sort of nerd out on subpixels in a very, hey, it's not going to take more than 90 seconds, maybe two minutes tops.
01:08:47 ◼ ► But here's Phil Schiller who really knows his shit about photography, giving you the lowdown on a legit breakdown in sensor technology that allows this tiny little iPhone camera to shoot a lot better photos than last year.
01:09:16 ◼ ► I'm trying to think of some Steve Jobs examples, but there were times where Steve Jobs would just want to nerd out on something.
01:09:21 ◼ ► Like, hey, by the way, we got this, his little, I just linked to it, his little mini lecture on what a retina display was, was great.
01:09:36 ◼ ► Who's the Mike Mattis who makes the slider, the slide to unlock slider, look so good that you just want a slide to unlock just to actually just watch it go across the screen?
01:09:53 ◼ ► Yeah, because he was from Canada and couldn't get his SIM card to work in it because it was U.S. only.
01:09:57 ◼ ► He had an iPhone that had no cell service and he would just slide to unlock and sort of figure out, try to figure out how the animation algorithm was working, that it was tracking his fingers so perfectly.
01:10:10 ◼ ► And there are people, you know, the folks who think it's time for change at Apple and the high ranks, they would look at that part of our conversation or that change over time and be like, well, it's because Tim Cook's not a product guy.
01:10:24 ◼ ► I don't know exactly where you come down on that debate, but it is clearly a difference from the jobs era to now, that those things aren't given the time, at least in public, that they once were.
01:10:36 ◼ ► I have a draft that I should, maybe by mentioning it here on the show with you, it'll force me to finish it up and get it out over the weekend.
01:10:47 ◼ ► But basically where I fall on that is, I don't think, I don't really think it's worth spending that much time arguing about whether it's time for Tim Cook to retire or step upstairs to chairman of the board or something, because it's not going to happen anytime soon.
01:11:05 ◼ ► It's fan fiction, you know, and I know that's, I'm not accusing Syracuse of having done that because he didn't really call for Cook to be asked to retire.
01:11:17 ◼ ► By the board, he's what I think fairly encompassing, encapsulating his argument is just, I think Apple really needs to do X, Y, and Z.
01:11:29 ◼ ► And we're kind of needed to already, but the sooner they've changed their mind on X, Y, and Z, the better.
01:11:55 ◼ ► What I think is, I think Tim Cook is a man who has shown that he can change his mind on very profound topics.
01:12:12 ◼ ► So what I would like to see from Tim Cook, and again, I've been down a nostalgia streak of late at Daring Fireball, but I reread Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash, which was so much longer than I read.
01:13:05 ◼ ► I think if the election had gone differently, maybe he'd be looking at retiring sooner.
01:13:11 ◼ ► But I think as long as Trump's in office, Cook feels like a personal obligation to be there because he can't somewhat manage the chaos.
01:13:27 ◼ ► I started linking to Syracuse's essay and then I started my own commentary and it kept growing and growing.
01:13:36 ◼ ► I want to, I really wanted to just link to it and blurb a little, quote a little bit of it and just encourage everybody to go read it and let it speak for itself.
01:13:56 ◼ ► Sometimes I just stare at Mars at it and the little field that has the link list item is like, is that, which one of these is this?
01:14:04 ◼ ► Yes, you know, sometimes I'll even end up switching it after the fact because I'm like, that was too long to be a link list item.
01:14:13 ◼ ► But I even included that part in the folly of thinking that Tim Cook might go anytime soon.
01:14:18 ◼ ► That I also think it's not just that what Tim Cook thinks about his obligations to Apple politically in the world right now with with Trump in America, Xi Jinping in China and the threat to TSMC in all of Taiwan.
01:14:44 ◼ ► But that as much as developer relations in general is, I think, problematic for Apple and growing and getting worse because they seem to be not seeing it.
01:14:57 ◼ ► And my response to that is, even if they're right, this is my response to anybody at Apple who thinks that they have an overall correct stance on developer relations.
01:15:13 ◼ ► I don't see how anybody could deny that the developers in the outside world do not see it that way.
01:15:39 ◼ ► The most obvious thing they could just change at the snap of a finger is the commission rate.
01:15:44 ◼ ► Even if they really do feel in their bones that this is just and fair, and if a omnipotent Solomon-like deity could come, whose judgment everybody would say, oh, this deity is always correct.
01:16:13 ◼ ► There's no way to, even if it is the correct fair commission, there's no way to convince everybody outside the company that it is.
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01:19:17 ◼ ► Letterman used to have this phrase – or he still has it, I'm sure, but he just – I don't even know what the hell it means, but I know Snell loves it too.
01:19:48 ◼ ► But, yeah, I know a few days ago – because one thing Apple's been doing is they've been trying to move some of their supply chain stuff out of China and diversify, right?
01:19:59 ◼ ► India has been kind of at the top of the list, I feel like, in the last couple years at least of moving some production stuff there.
01:20:09 ◼ ► And then this morning said that a 25% tariff must be paid by Apple to the U.S. unless the phone is made in America.
01:20:25 ◼ ► I keep calling his Truth Social his blog, which I actually – I have a side rant on that.
01:20:34 ◼ ► Like, one of the little mini-mysteries of the whole Trump-Elon Musk partnership that I've been curious about for a year, like before the election, but even just when Musk threw himself in as all-in on trying to get Trump elected.
01:20:49 ◼ ► Is the conflict between Trump owning his bespoke Twitter-like Truth Social social network and Musk famously was talking about $44 billion or $42 billion, having purchased Twitter and renamed it X, and Trump having been previously one of the most famous users of Twitter.
01:21:14 ◼ ► Like, has Elon ever – has he ever said to him, like, hey, why don't you just shut that thing down and come back to Twitter?
01:21:32 ◼ ► But I think when this whole thing is over is going to make all these people look so bad.
01:21:37 ◼ ► The lickspittleism of everybody that Trump has selected for the Trump 2.0 administration in every position and how he's a genius and it's all about him.
01:21:48 ◼ ► And they have these cabinet meetings where they just go around the table and say what a great job he's doing.
01:22:02 ◼ ► Pam Bondi, when she tweets, or the Justice Department or whoever, they do it on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it.
01:22:15 ◼ ► Maybe somebody – if somebody mentions it to him, maybe he'll get on everybody's case and get little Marco Rubio to start posting on True Social.
01:22:46 ◼ ► And I'm back to reading more political news than I was hoping to be by this point in his administration.
01:22:54 ◼ ► And I see links to posts that so-and-so or the Justice Department or Doge or somebody posts to Twitter over and over and over again.
01:23:20 ◼ ► I've never once seen anybody post anything to True Social other than one person, which sort of makes it a blog.
01:23:30 ◼ ► But, you know, when the president of the United States makes an announcement like, hey, I'm going to impose a 25% tariff on India-made iPhones, I link to the original source.
01:23:46 ◼ ► Like, they're so much worse and so much more illiterate than Twitter replies, which is saying something.
01:24:08 ◼ ► And just every four seconds, a little pop-up comes up in Chrome saying, I'm not authenticated to do that action.
01:24:24 ◼ ► If Trump can't – if doesn't get distracted by something else or forget about it or Cook can't do whatever he whispers into his ear to talk him down from these ledges.
01:24:39 ◼ ► There is no possible – I've tried to explain it, and I don't even think it's that complicated a story.
01:24:50 ◼ ► The typical person on the street thinks – not crazily so, because I think for many common everyday objects, this is the explanation.
01:25:04 ◼ ► Because it's cheaper to make them outside the United States, because labor is cheaper, and it's cheaper to just make them in Vietnam or China or South America somewhere and ship them all to the United States than it would be to pay U.S. wages here.
01:25:31 ◼ ► And people think, well, that must be the situation with the iPhone, too, that it would just – it would make the iPhone more expensive.
01:25:39 ◼ ► Because they'd have to pay people $20 an hour to put the screws in the iPhone instead of paying them $4 an hour over in China.
01:25:50 ◼ ► The strength of what Apple has built is that it's not just the production, although that is obviously a huge part of it, but it's all the little parts.
01:26:02 ◼ ► There's a zillion things in there, and Apple's really the only thing in recent time product-wise that I'm aware of that they've assembled in the U.S. has been the Mac Pro.
01:26:12 ◼ ► Famously, the last – in Trump 1, Tim Cook went and showed it to him, and the guys on Connected were like, you think that's your Mac Pro?
01:26:29 ◼ ► But there were reports even then that they had trouble getting some of the components they needed to Texas for the final assembly.
01:26:46 ◼ ► And, I mean, for every one of Mac Pro they make, how many millions of iPhones do they make, right?
01:26:58 ◼ ► I think that the thing – and even when Steve Jobs was alive, I remember there was a story.
01:27:07 ◼ ► It must have – I guess, based on when he died, it must have been the first Obama administration.
01:27:22 ◼ ► And Jobs' explanation was – and Tim Cook has spoken about this too, about what we used to call in the U.S.
01:27:34 ◼ ► And they had to take, like, regular history in English and a math class in the morning.
01:27:38 ◼ ► And then they would go to vo-tech and they would learn trade skills, fixing cars or becoming a plumber in high school.
01:27:45 ◼ ► And that in China, for decades, they've had vocational, technical training like that for something that's more akin to engineering-level talent.
01:28:05 ◼ ► Yeah, you could be, like, a nurse practitioner or a registered nurse, like that sort of thing.
01:28:11 ◼ ► Yeah, that's what my mom was and is sort of – I couldn't believe I couldn't – yeah, like an RN is a higher level of education and is not quite the same as, like, a bachelor's degree.
01:28:26 ◼ ► And you go to real school and you're doing real medical things, but it's a little less aspirational.
01:28:33 ◼ ► I don't know what the word is, but that China has tens of millions of people with this skill set, like sort of an engineer but not quite an engineer.
01:28:42 ◼ ► And then they go and do this incredibly intricate technical work that you really can't do.
01:28:49 ◼ ► I don't even know what some of these things are, but you can't really do them without a very high level of skill.
01:29:15 ◼ ► And part of that is a response to, like, these parts are hard to come by, that everything's old.
01:29:20 ◼ ► But within those conversations, like, if you read through those forum posts, every single time the person with the project idea runs into this problem.
01:29:29 ◼ ► Like, oh, I want to get these boards made and sell them on my side or give them to my friends.
01:29:34 ◼ ► It's like – you run into the problem of there's basically one company in the United States that does that kind of work.
01:29:51 ◼ ► Like, that's a small project made with love, and they may not ever make their money back.
01:30:00 ◼ ► Like, I mean, I think about, like, projects I've done over the years and, like, the sort of logistics that go into them.
01:30:07 ◼ ► I can't even imagine what it takes to build an iPhone, let alone hundreds of millions of them.
01:30:15 ◼ ► Like, that machinery and those muscles have been built over decades, and you can't just pick it up and move it because the guy in charge at the White House wants you to.
01:30:45 ◼ ► But the people putting iPhones together at Foxconn in China are still making wages that wouldn't give you a living here.
01:30:51 ◼ ► And so you can say, well, you know, $20 an hour, $30 an hour, something like that, and then the iPhone price would go up a little.
01:30:59 ◼ ► But you can't find people that skilled here in the U.S. who would want to spend eight hours a day putting tiny screws into an iPhone.
01:31:08 ◼ ► And the last time I mentioned that, Ben Thompson called me out on it and laughed and said, eight hours a day?
01:31:18 ◼ ► And obviously, you know, in the United States, we have different labor laws, but to run a factory 24 hours a day would take three shifts, not two, which would also increase the cost.
01:31:33 ◼ ► But then there's the whole tradeoff inefficiency of having, well, at eight in the morning every day, everybody leaves and a new crew comes in and it's downtime.
01:31:47 ◼ ► And that exercise I did a month or so ago with Ryan Jones, when they first came out with the story that Apple was trying to hurry up and fly as many iPhones out of India as possible ahead of the worldwide tariffs.
01:32:05 ◼ ► And we did the math based on the weight of the plane or Ryan Jones did really originally.
01:32:14 ◼ ► I think it's big, big numbers, like hundreds of millions of phones or 100,000, 150,000 phones a day.
01:32:22 ◼ ► But when you think of filling six jumbo jets, the biggest jets Boeing makes that are entirely used for shipping freight, and fill them from the entire cargo capacity with brand new iPhones and give the benefit of the doubt to how small the packaging is for the iPhones, that's 12 days of inventory in the United States.
01:32:45 ◼ ► It's 100 – on a typical April, May, this quarter, Apple sells around 150,000 iPhones per day in the U.S.
01:32:54 ◼ ► So if they were making them all here – and, again, that's not even accounting for the rush in September when they do preorders for new ones.
01:33:28 ◼ ► That's not to meet the demand everywhere else in China and Japan and Europe and everywhere else they sell them, right?
01:33:33 ◼ ► So I don't know how many – you could do the math on how many more they're making elsewhere.
01:33:36 ◼ ► But to meet Trump's demands of U.S. sold iPhones being made in America, they'd have to figure out a way to produce 104 of them every minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
01:34:02 ◼ ► I mean, so even if you could just concede for the sake of argument that Apple could hire enough Americans who would want to do the work and have the skills or could be taught the skills to do the work,
01:34:16 ◼ ► the infrastructure build out to build out that sort of capability, in a best-case scenario, would take years.
01:34:24 ◼ ► I mean, what kind of a maniac would start laying out that investment now knowing how erratic Trump's tariff policies have been just for the last, what, six weeks, five weeks?
01:34:42 ◼ ► That was one thing that was so interesting with the CHIPS Act and companies like TSMC coming to Arizona, right, where they're going to build products there.
01:34:52 ◼ ► And there was reporting, I think earlier this year or late last year, about sort of the conflict within TSMC between what they're used to overseas and what American workers are used to, right?
01:35:05 ◼ ► And you can say things about both sides of, yes, the conditions and working hours should be better overseas and maybe some Americans, we've got it too soft here, whatever.
01:35:19 ◼ ► They're building legacy products in Arizona, I think is what the reporting has been, and probably not the scale of the iPhone, right?
01:35:30 ◼ ► So much of that is in-house, where Apple is extremely dependent on a bunch of different vendors, right?
01:35:36 ◼ ► And it's not as simple as, say, it comes in one end and, like, A15s come out the other, right?
01:35:45 ◼ ► But the iPhone has all of these different components from all of these different companies.
01:35:57 ◼ ► But the anecdote, which I'll butcher a little from memory, was basically that, like, in Taiwan, if an engineer who's responsible for a certain critical machine gets a call at 1 in the morning that the machine is down,
01:36:11 ◼ ► he or she just gets out of bed and puts their pants on and goes in to fix it immediately.
01:36:19 ◼ ► And in the U.S., it would be like, oh, I'll come in early tomorrow morning, which I think most people would say, well, that's a healthy life.
01:36:29 ◼ ► Instead of coming in at 9, come in at 7 in the morning because the critical machine is down.
01:36:39 ◼ ► Like, oh, that machine's down, all right, I'll be right in at 1, 2, whatever time of day.
01:36:52 ◼ ► Anybody listening who's a Trump fan who still listens to my show, I mean, thank you, number one, for having an open mind.
01:37:03 ◼ ► And he knows he kind of knows it, too, because and I've called it out at least a week ago where his whole rhetoric throughout the whole election is this nonsense that tariffs are paid by the countries that you impose them on.
01:37:17 ◼ ► So that a tariff imposed on Indian-made iPhones would be paid by India to the United States and that China pays tariffs on Chinese-made goods.
01:37:27 ◼ ► But here's Trump last week telling Walmart that they should eat the tariffs before they raise prices on everything in their stores.
01:37:36 ◼ ► And now here today, he's saying – he even said in his stupid little post that this is a 25% tariff that Apple will have to pay.
01:37:48 ◼ ► I was talking to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago who – he owns a product company and some of their metal fixtures for their product are made overseas.
01:37:58 ◼ ► Like, he told me literally no one in the United States could make this part that we needed.
01:38:21 ◼ ► He's like, we're going to have to scale down because this decision destroys my business.
01:38:44 ◼ ► Walmart got yelled at by Trump because they were going to pass it along to their consumers.
01:39:06 ◼ ► There was that story that the iPhone costs are going to go up and Apple was going to, like, do some ninja PR work and be like, oh, try not to blame the tariffs.
01:39:20 ◼ ► And in a way, Apple's position with the tariffs and the whole global anxiety in the system right now is much more precarious than somebody like Walmart or Target or Home Depot or big box stores.
01:39:38 ◼ ► But as long as the products show up to their warehouses, they can still sell them, right?
01:39:46 ◼ ► But if Apple's in a situation where they can't bring their phones in, it's why they were rushing them out of India, to your point, a second ago, right?
01:39:53 ◼ ► It's why today I saw a thing at lunch of Apple has a short-term, like, increase on trade-in values on phones.
01:40:10 ◼ ► Somebody else sent that to me and said that there's speculation that it's sort of a play to get even just recycled material and stuff ahead of the tariffs.
01:40:31 ◼ ► Like, people are buying phones who would – they wouldn't wait for the fall because there's going to be –
01:40:39 ◼ ► But people who are like, I'm not really due for an upgrade yet, maybe next year, right?
01:40:45 ◼ ► People like my wife, Mary, she basically upgrades her phone when she feels like the camera is no good.
01:41:02 ◼ ► Where you can guarantee yourself today that if you walk into an Apple store, you can buy today's iPhone 16 whatever model at today's price.
01:41:17 ◼ ► But the other thing is in the last few years, we kind of – even casual users like both of our wives kind of have the sense of how incremental one-year difference would make camera quality-wise, right?
01:41:31 ◼ ► You're not going to be like, oh, my God, I really made the dumbest mistake of my life buying an iPhone 16 in 2025, right?
01:41:39 ◼ ► But do you want to gamble that the price of the phone won't go from $1,200 to $1,400 or $1,500?
01:41:48 ◼ ► And knowing that that incremental increase in the quality of the device is to most consumers not worth $200, $300, $400 in price.
01:42:18 ◼ ► And Trump certainly isn't calming anybody's anxieties that the tariffs are going to get more predictable.
01:42:30 ◼ ► Or JAWS, really, because JAWS is the one who might be stuck trying to figure out the narrative to explain, oh, these prices are higher, but look at how much more you get.
01:42:42 ◼ ► The last several years, there's this very funny trope in Apple's iPhone keynotes to me.
01:42:47 ◼ ► There's the regular iPhone is announced and it's someplace like beautiful and well lit.
01:43:10 ◼ ► Like the whole iPhone keynotes starts and it's all at night and it's like gloomy looking.
01:43:25 ◼ ► I forget if we talked about this on stage in one of the recent years or not because of the on stage shows, the WWDC, not iPhone.
01:43:35 ◼ ► He likes to wake up very early in the morning and he, I guess, runs on like Tim Cook's schedule.
01:44:14 ◼ ► There was a lot of conversation about how the injunction that has opened the door to web payment processing on the App Store.
01:44:20 ◼ ► That doesn't really address can Fortnite come back because they did break their developer agreement, right?
01:44:32 ◼ ► And they submitted it and then Apple sat on it and they had to resubmit it for some technical reasons.
01:44:39 ◼ ► It seemed like, but then the judge is like, you guys got to deal with this or you have to come see me next week.
01:44:51 ◼ ► I think it makes the iPhone a better platform to have one of the world's most popular games available for it, right?
01:44:59 ◼ ► It's not original to me, but Apple was making no money from Fortnite for the last five years.
01:45:11 ◼ ► If anything, I was thinking about this in context of my own family, because I've got two teenagers, they have iPhones.
01:45:16 ◼ ► They, we have the thing set up where they have to ask permission to download an app, right?
01:45:22 ◼ ► Even if it's just that mechanism being a requirement in some family setups, Apple's going to make something from Fortnite.
01:45:59 ◼ ► The only comment we've seen from Apple about it during the whole, will they, won't they, how's this going to work out, was the letter Apple's lawyers sent to Epic's lawyers that Epic put on Twitter.
01:46:11 ◼ ► But I'm sure Apple thought, knowing that Epic has done that in the past, wrote the letter, expecting it to be posted publicly.
01:46:18 ◼ ► But without making any public statements, no comments, I often don't ask for comment, but I did right from the first day when Tim Sweeney said that Fortnite would be coming back.
01:46:42 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure Apple was on perfectly firm legal ground to not reinstate Epic's U.S. developer account.
01:46:48 ◼ ► And it was adjudicated in the first trial in 2021 with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, where the fact that they had revoked it.
01:47:05 ◼ ► Like, there's the one that Fortnite is, the game is published through, was different than the developer account for their game toolkit.
01:47:24 ◼ ► So for at least a brief time, it was going to seem as though nobody who's making a game with Unreal Engine for the Mac would even be able to get an updated version of Unreal Engine.
01:47:32 ◼ ► And briefly, what she had ruled is it was perfectly fine that because of the blatant violation of the App Store guidelines that the Fortnite developer account was revoked.
01:47:50 ◼ ► It stood as, yes, this was perfectly legit for Apple to kick Fortnite out of the App Store.
01:47:55 ◼ ► And if only Apple had ever conceded on the most blatant anti-steering policy they have, the link outs and the just telling, being able to tell users what to do, right, which is just bananas.
01:48:11 ◼ ► It's not just that the Kindle app couldn't put get book buttons next to the book in the iOS Kindle app.
01:48:18 ◼ ► They couldn't even put text that says, due to App Store policies, we're not permitted to sell books within this app.
01:48:27 ◼ ► To get a Kindle book, visit Amazon.com slash Kindle in any browser, including on this phone, buy them, and they will sync here.
01:48:44 ◼ ► And if they had just conceded on that point, there wouldn't have been anything left for Epic to appeal.
01:48:49 ◼ ► It was Epic appealing on link outs and informing users of outside the app deals that this whole thing was on.
01:48:57 ◼ ► So if they had conceded that point a few years ago, they would have already had a clean win.
01:49:02 ◼ ► And instead, with this one remaining issue, and which her original injunction, clearly what they claim was complying, did not comply with her injunction.
01:49:14 ◼ ► I mean, that was one part where I really questioned my, well, I'm not a lawyer, you know, and maybe if I were, I would get it.
01:49:22 ◼ ► Because I just remember thinking at the time when Apple came out with all of the crazy scare sheets, and especially the whole scheme of taking 27% of the transit.
01:49:34 ◼ ► All right, you can link to the web, but you've got to use a screen that looks exactly like this, that is really scary looking and full of warnings.
01:49:45 ◼ ► And anything they purchase, whether it's on their iPhone or any other device, after they've gone from the iPhone, your iPhone app to the website, for seven days, you'll owe us a 27% commission on.
01:49:57 ◼ ► And to make sure that you're paying it, you're going to have to open your company's books to our auditors at our request.
01:50:03 ◼ ► I mean, the idea that that complied with the plain language of her injunction, which was basically what Apple's now doing.
01:50:10 ◼ ► Like, you have to let people put links and buttons that link out to the web and tell people about offers.
01:50:21 ◼ ► They must know something I don't, because I don't see the plain, I don't see it in this injunction.
01:50:26 ◼ ► And one, I think, really, really great part of U.S. law is that if it's not written down, like, in the injunction or the order, it's not real.
01:50:40 ◼ ► It's not like, okay, her injunction makes it seem like they have to put link out buttons and allow apps to inform users of deals outside the web.
01:50:49 ◼ ► But maybe, like, in her chambers, she told Apple's lawyers, like, yeah, sure, you know, if you want to make it really hard and impossible, sure, you could do that.
01:51:15 ◼ ► Like, you said, what's, at this point, five years later, what's the point of keeping this incredibly popular game with ongoing enthusiasm out of the store?
01:51:41 ◼ ► And I remember scrolling through it and being like, this can't actually be what they're doing.
01:51:59 ◼ ► And if Apple had done the right thing then, they could have, from their perspective, limited the damage to a degree.
01:52:08 ◼ ► But now, because they did that, because they tried to hold on to the control, they've lost even more of it.
01:52:24 ◼ ► Because when you open it up to the web, like, there's been a lot of evidence from companies like Revenue Cat and Superwall.
01:52:32 ◼ ► Like, you actually lose some conversion rate going to the web because people maybe aren't familiar with it.
01:52:47 ◼ ► Because, right, so much autofill works in so many places where now if you have to look it up and,
01:52:58 ◼ ► And so, like you said, you know, you lose, I don't know, some percentage of sales that you otherwise would have gotten in the App Store.
01:53:11 ◼ ► I know Marco said, I wish I had the exact quote, but on the last ATP, that, all right, now this is the law in the U.S.
01:53:18 ◼ ► And let's say it stands and Apple's emergency injunction to get this revoked so they can take the rule back doesn't happen.
01:53:30 ◼ ► Three months from now, six months from now, when Apple reports their services revenue, is there any?
01:53:45 ◼ ► We'll have to overlay Snell's charts exactly in Photoshop and see what the height difference is.
01:53:52 ◼ ► The idea that everybody's going to abandon in-app purchase when it's offered alongside for a 20% discount or whatever they're offering is just as wrong-headedly zealotous as Apple's obstinacy and even permitting it in the first place.
01:54:09 ◼ ► The idea that the whole world is looking to get away of consumers or looking to get away from in-app purchase is bananas.
01:54:17 ◼ ► And it's one of the strongest legs Apple has to stand on is it is a very consumer-friendly purchasing system.
01:54:30 ◼ ► Because, you know, Riley with Delta like buried it in a support screen, which is just very funny to me.
01:54:37 ◼ ► Now, they are leveraging the fact that they have other games and other platforms and they have a V-Bucks system, which I'm too old to really understand.
01:54:55 ◼ ► Apple could, if they chose to engage in competition here, they could strengthen their position with some developers by making in-app purchase even better, right?
01:55:08 ◼ ► They already do offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to subscription and one-time payments and different trial links.
01:55:20 ◼ ► If they were forced to contend with the open web and companies like Stripe and RevenueCat and others building tools, it would make their own payment system better.
01:55:43 ◼ ► Maybe Apple knows something I don't and services revenue will drop noticeably because of this.
01:55:49 ◼ ► I don't think so, and I certainly don't think so after Apple adjusts its strategies and commission rates and ideas.
01:55:57 ◼ ► If I were in charge of the service revenue at Apple, I would be much more worried about the government versus Google and that $30 billion or whatever it is potentially going away.
01:56:10 ◼ ► Even if it's the most adverse judgment against Google and they're not allowed to pay for not just default placement but any search engine integration, then Apple will switch to something that has some ads that make some number of tens of billions of dollars.
01:56:28 ◼ ► I think the most interesting thing about the – I'm going to try to make it the album art for this chapter in the show so people can just look and see it.
01:56:34 ◼ ► But this screenshot that Epic has of what their payment flow looks like, it's, you know, to purchase $2,800 V-Bucks for $23.
01:57:10 ◼ ► Now, spelling in-app purchase in all lowercase letters and not putting an Apple logo there to show that you're using the Apple system, Epic clearly thinks they're steering people towards the Epic Storm.
01:57:42 ◼ ► So I'm kind of thinking, even if I'm a casual user, I'd be very tempted to just hit in-app purchase here.
01:57:56 ◼ ► I think what's funny about this is that Epic's screen for this is way more generous to in-app purchase than Apple's ScareSheet link-out screens from their original design were to link-outs.
01:58:13 ◼ ► You're not going through a screen that's like, hey, you're – I mean, basically, like, your identity may get stolen.
01:58:18 ◼ ► They did the thing – the grossest thing to me about it is they used the developer's name instead of the app name.
01:58:28 ◼ ► And there's lots of companies that have – like, when I made Vesper, we were Q-Branch LLC, which is a funny little in-joke for the James Bond fans of the world.
01:58:37 ◼ ► But there are surely many, many, many Vesper users who had no idea that the company behind Vesper was named Q-Branch.
01:58:45 ◼ ► So all of a sudden, if we had had in-app purchase at the time and it says the company Q-Branch LLC wants to charge your credit card on their own, people would be like, what the fuck is that?
01:59:04 ◼ ► And that was one of the embarrassing things that came out in the latest injunction that required this, you know, some of the evidence that Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers included, included the Slack transcripts from Apple employees saying, oh, you know,
01:59:20 ◼ ► somebody came up with the idea of putting it as the developer's name and somebody else was like, oh, yeah, the execs are going to love that.
01:59:36 ◼ ► Because it encourages, it encourages, it's like we said before about chat, it encourages a level of flippancy that I don't think email encourages or more formal systems.
01:59:47 ◼ ► I don't know that that would have been put into writing using another system of tickets or in-person conversation.
01:59:57 ◼ ► And I think people don't think about Slack being like, like Slack logs are stored if you pay for it, right?
02:00:12 ◼ ► It's not illegal to make them put the developer's name in scare quotes, but it sure does look bad.
02:00:18 ◼ ► I mean, even at Relay, like between Mike Hurley and myself, like we run Relay on Slack.
02:00:44 ◼ ► But even so, there are times where it's just more natural to spitball ideas without a permanent record of it.
02:00:54 ◼ ► And it's not just about talking about sex or talking about crimes or talking about sex crimes.
02:01:00 ◼ ► There are just certain things that people are more comfortable knowing that this is not permanent.
02:01:11 ◼ ► The angle to it that keeps rattling around in my head is like that bit about, oh, they're going to love it, right?
02:01:16 ◼ ► That someone's boss is going to be pleased with them because of this is like what that says about the culture, at least in that corner of the company.
02:01:25 ◼ ► We both know a lot of great people there who I've talked to employees of Apple who don't like how this is going down.
02:01:32 ◼ ► But look, seeing the part of the culture that liked this or that was pursuing this or at least doing it because someone above them wanted them to, that's not good.
02:01:53 ◼ ► I don't even think he mentioned the App Store, but I linked to a Benedict Evans Threads post of all things.
02:02:00 ◼ ► But Benedict Evans had a great little Threads thread, which is awkward to say, that I linked to.
02:02:07 ◼ ► But I, that, you know, that Apple has great customer service and tries to make customers happy.
02:02:23 ◼ ► Like we were talking about just obtaining enough screws or metal parts to put the computers together.
02:02:28 ◼ ► And that somehow they lost sight of the fact that third-party software developers are both customers and suppliers, depending on how you look at them.
02:02:39 ◼ ► But that it's a different sort of relationship, but that they've wound up treating them just like suppliers.
02:02:51 ◼ ► And again, it comes back to what I said to you earlier, where it doesn't matter if you're at Apple and you really think it's true that, no, we treat our third-party developers great.
02:03:26 ◼ ► Whether they're actually wronging developers or not, the perception is more important than the actual reality.
02:03:34 ◼ ► That they should be bending over backwards to repair those relationships and that there is – and again, maybe it's the perfect end of the episode.
02:03:45 ◼ ► But another thing, Johnny, I've said in that interview with Patrick Collison, and I have to believe it was something of a very subtle jibe at where Apple has gone in the last 15 years,
02:04:00 ◼ ► is the belief that trying to assign a number to everything that actually has value so that you can say six is greater than four, so go with the one that's six.
02:04:12 ◼ ► But that there are many parts of design and relationships that you cannot assign a number to, right?
02:04:40 ◼ ► And Apple has squandered so much goodwill that – and you cannot put a dollar amount on it.
02:04:47 ◼ ► There's no way to say it's $4.3 billion worth of developer goodwill has been squandered over the last five years because of the App Store policies and commissions or something.
02:05:03 ◼ ► I mean, but you have to go with a bones feeling that they've squandered more developer goodwill from companies big and small down to individuals and up to their biggest peers in the industry.
02:05:17 ◼ ► They've squandered more developer goodwill and enthusiasm for creating unique and exclusive software for Apple's platforms than they have squeezed out of the App Store by being – to borrow Princess Leia's – I'll probably butcher this quote too.
02:05:47 ◼ ► But when you talk especially about the big companies, right, it's why would we build for another Apple platform if the deal is just the same?
02:06:30 ◼ ► And I think parts of these various concerns we have about Apple currently, parts of them are closer to breaking than others.
02:06:44 ◼ ► It's more than just – say a few days before WBC, Phil Schiller just sits down with somebody like, hey, look, we're doing 90-10 across the board.
02:07:12 ◼ ► It would make an instantaneous difference to switch to 85-15 or 90-10 or some combination or something like that.
02:07:29 ◼ ► So anyway, that's my ultimate – I mean, I'm not holding my breath for thoughts on the App Store before or after WWDC.
02:07:42 ◼ ► Several times over the last few years, they've taken the week before DubDub to announce something, right?
02:07:53 ◼ ► But there have been several times where they've used that sort of – like what, going back to I.O., they did it with Android.
02:08:04 ◼ ► And if you want developers to be excited about, say, embracing your redesign of your OSs or embracing new technology or a new platform and the foundation is bad, you're never going to get the traction you want.
02:08:18 ◼ ► And so they have an opportunity to address some of these things, but I'm not holding my breath either.
02:08:25 ◼ ► And it's the sort of thing, too, that would, in my opinion, probably play better as a pre-WWDC announcement just because then they don't have to put it in the keynote.
02:08:35 ◼ ► And it's like, yeah, the keynote's supposed to be all celebratory and it's all sunshine and good vibes.
02:08:42 ◼ ► And there's no way to talk about reducing the commission in the App Store without it feeling like a concession.
02:08:49 ◼ ► I mean, there's – Apple's really good at messaging and they'd be really good at Phil or Joswiak or whoever would get the job to do the sit-down about it.
02:09:03 ◼ ► It's the famous Apple way where it drives people who don't like the company's products nuts where – and Jobs was the best at it is everybody else is doing X.
02:09:12 ◼ ► Apple says we're not going to do X and then the next year Apple does X but they say – but they act like they invented it, right?
02:09:19 ◼ ► Like somehow come up with a way to make a 90-10 split feel like a grand innovation in online payments.
02:09:26 ◼ ► Apple could – if anybody could do it, it's Apple and it will drive the haters crazy, right?
02:09:34 ◼ ► It would make them competitive with the web and they would, I think, retain more business than they will otherwise.
02:09:40 ◼ ► So many of these things are just – they seem so obvious to those of us on the outside, right?
02:09:56 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like they've stuck to principles that there's no advantage to sticking to, whether they're right or wrong about them, right?
02:10:02 ◼ ► And it's like the buying books from the Kindle app instead of in the Kindle app or whatever.
02:10:07 ◼ ► But the fact that you weren't able to do any of it or even know how to do it, how did they not see that as – this is the example that should have made them say, you know what?
02:10:25 ◼ ► Normal users, when they can't do something that they think they're supposed to be able to do.
02:10:30 ◼ ► And I think a normal user who figures out that they can read Kindle e-books in an app called Kindle on their iPhone and iPad probably thinks there's probably a way that I can buy books here too, right?
02:10:44 ◼ ► Because they sell books and that's where I get the books that I am reading somewhere on Kindle.
02:10:47 ◼ ► And when they can't figure out how to do it, they blame – a lot of them blame themselves and think, ah, I'm not good at computers.
02:11:19 ◼ ► Tens of millions of joint customers of Apple and Amazon who are trying to use the Kindle on the iOS platform have surely blamed themselves for not being able to figure out how to buy books.
02:12:15 ◼ ► And the idea that they set up a system where tens of millions of Kindle users probably blame themselves for the fact that there weren't get book items or buttons for 15 friggin' years, 16 years in the app, it fundamentally shows it's broken.
02:12:31 ◼ ► Whatever they're thinking inside Apple for all those years where they hung on to it, thinking, well, the hell with Amazon.
02:12:44 ◼ ► If it was user first, there would have been get book buttons in 2010 or 2011 or whenever.
02:12:49 ◼ ► Or something as simple as if you want a refund from a purchase in the app store and you find the developer's email or you hit the button in their app to contact them.
02:13:10 ◼ ► And you end up with a one-star review in the app store because maybe the refund request was completely valid.
02:13:16 ◼ ► Maybe they misunderstood or they didn't mean to purchase and they did or the trial ran out and they didn't realize it.
02:13:21 ◼ ► There's lots of legitimate reasons for refunds, but Apple's kept that on their side of the deal.
02:13:27 ◼ ► You and I know developers, indie developers who are just like regular crafts people or people who run a cafe or something, you know?
02:13:33 ◼ ► And it's like if you go into your corner cafe and all they have, you know, and somehow you've prepaid, but all they have is caffeinated coffee, but you can't drink caffeinated coffee.
02:13:44 ◼ ► Any normal place run by a small business owner would be like, oh, let me give you your money back.
02:13:49 ◼ ► I know developers who people think the app is going to print PDFs upside down, and it turns out the app doesn't do that.
02:14:02 ◼ ► That's how the rest of the world works, and the rest of the world is fine, it turns out, in this regard.
02:14:08 ◼ ► You know, it's, again, they've got tariffs to worry about, but it's not on the App Store, so.