00:00:32 ◼ ► We record so many of these podcasts using browser-based tools, and almost invariably, they demand that
00:00:43 ◼ ► But I have yet to get a good explanation from Apple about why it has failed to support large
00:00:58 ◼ ► And it's very frustrating because Safari is so compatible in so many ways, and yet they
00:01:32 ◼ ► But on my main Mac, I think I've deleted all other Chromium browsers except one, which is a newcomer
00:01:48 ◼ ► I just saw, I don't have it off the top of my head, but somebody just wrote a review of
00:02:02 ◼ ► And I, for a while, I used Brave, and Brave isn't bad, but it still is trying to steer you
00:02:11 ◼ ► And Helium, it is a plain browser with no opinion on where you search, and it doesn't add any
00:02:48 ◼ ► If it's a free effort, it's like eventually your willpower to keep maintaining a free browser
00:03:00 ◼ ► I mean, that was a good example of this, where somebody was like, I can do a proper Mac version
00:03:24 ◼ ► But it was sort of a weird proof of concept for what became Safari, even though Safari didn't
00:03:43 ◼ ► I think he's still at Apple, but he's just one of these guys who decided to drop off the
00:03:51 ◼ ► You're either full-fledged internet personality, or maybe you just want to get work done.
00:04:01 ◼ ► But in there, that was very much an era where it was sort of like nobody really knew what
00:04:07 ◼ ► a proper Mac app is, and a lot of stuff was built in the sort of, it's Unix, let's just
00:04:17 ◼ ► But it was also an open source project with a small group that was using somebody else's
00:04:25 ◼ ► It just tends to not work in the long run because very few people use it and there's more
00:04:31 ◼ ► overhead and then invariably some part of the API gets cut off and you don't have a way
00:04:42 ◼ ► So it was like this, it was a very long time ago, but Camino was a truly native Mac app,
00:04:49 ◼ ► but wrapped the Firefox engine and the Firefox engine, just the rendering engine so badly wanted
00:05:04 ◼ ► And it was sort of like the way that Firefox was engineered back then that the Firefox app
00:05:21 ◼ ► And Camino was like, no, no, you're just going to render web pages in a rectangle and we're
00:05:29 ◼ ► Yeah, that was, I think the key thing is in that era, they were so focused on building the
00:05:34 ◼ ► engine that they were like, let's just build a basic cross-platform browser framework around
00:05:38 ◼ ► it and the Camino project was like, how about a good app with that at its core, which is
00:05:49 ◼ ► And yeah, it's actually a great example of, I think maybe even in the early days, how there
00:05:54 ◼ ► are a lot of people who are really invested in web technologies and we love them, right?
00:05:58 ◼ ► But a lot of the people invested in web technologies have this moment where they think it's all
00:06:05 ◼ ► We can do everything on the web and the browser Chrome doesn't really matter and it matters.
00:06:13 ◼ ► So you end up with these scenarios where sometimes like Mozilla is a great example or Firefox where
00:06:18 ◼ ► it always felt kind of, to me, it always felt kind of clumsy and not quite right, but good
00:06:36 ◼ ► Chrome is at least one of the original ideas was we're going to build an app around this
00:06:50 ◼ ► The browser engine should be the same everywhere, more or less, because the web should look like
00:07:33 ◼ ► I've aspired to that for a very long time, but I was so trained to be covering breaking
00:07:41 ◼ ► But I decided I was going to fully embrace the sort of slower, deeper set of notes where
00:07:50 ◼ ► And so I felt great sitting next to you because I knew you were also going to just take notes
00:07:56 ◼ ► We also sat either right next to each other or sort of next to each other at the tech talk
00:08:18 ◼ ► Well, we were in the second row, which was the first row they would let us into because
00:08:27 ◼ ► I had Federico next to me because I have a picture of Tim looking up, Tim and Ternus looking
00:08:33 ◼ ► up at Craig Federici on stage, but Federico was to my left and he had that shot that he
00:09:00 ◼ ► Whereas I like mine because I felt like that entire tech talk and maybe some of it was knowing
00:09:05 ◼ ► the context and some of it was just sitting right behind Tim Cook and watching Tim Cook
00:09:13 ◼ ► And my picture is sort of like Craig's on stage working really hard as John Ternus and Tim Cook
00:09:29 ◼ ► He's still got his old title and it's his job right now to deliver some real mission critical
00:09:41 ◼ ► I don't know, but he's on stage sort of sweating and working hard with his team up there
00:09:56 ◼ ► It was a thing and I was glad to have had a, well, I was going to say front row seat, but
00:10:15 ◼ ► Federico, to his credit, was the one who basically was the pioneer and was like, I'm sitting in
00:10:21 ◼ ► And then he just waved us all in and we were like, okay, well, I guess we'll sit in the
00:10:34 ◼ ► Well, one of, I haven't looked it up, but it may or may be the shortest WWDC keynote ever.
00:10:49 ◼ ► And for the last few years, they were all, the last few were like an hour 45, an hour 50 minutes.
00:11:03 ◼ ► So the keynote was short and we had plenty of time to get there, but it's a fairly small room.
00:11:17 ◼ ► It's a small, I mean, it's maybe, yeah, I mean, maybe it's two, 300, but it's, it's wide and not that deep.
00:11:25 ◼ ► And it might be three or 400, but it's not, it's, it's more like a community theater, right?
00:11:30 ◼ ► Yeah, because it's outside, the outside viewing of the keynote, they are pretty liberal with press passes.
00:11:48 ◼ ► But this, because it's a smaller inside thing, it was only a subset of the media who got the, what was it?
00:12:00 ◼ ► We got there, it was supposed to start at noon and it's like 1159 and that's when Jaws and Ternus and Trudy Miller from PR come in.
00:12:15 ◼ ► And Jaws laughed and Ternus laughed and everybody waved and we're like, oh, we got good seats.
00:12:32 ◼ ► No, Trudy, so Trudy from Apple PR, she used to do product PR and I know her from way back.
00:12:41 ◼ ► And so she was in that seat and turned around and just chatting with me for like, there's a long, funny story about how back in the day when Lex Friedman worked for Macworld, he would occasionally leave her messages and she wouldn't call him back.
00:12:56 ◼ ► And he would leave like increasingly long messages where he would have like these kind of like chatty.
00:13:37 ◼ ► He's either, either he knows who we are, like for realsies, or he's really well coached.
00:13:43 ◼ ► But we were at an iPhone event, I think a couple of years ago where the same thing happened.
00:13:50 ◼ ► I am pretty convinced that Tim Cook has no idea who I am, but I did get one kind of like handshake before he goes.
00:13:58 ◼ ► I kind of watched you doing it because we filed out to the left, so I was leaving first.
00:14:03 ◼ ► And then I heard you talking to Tim, and I was like, oh, I'll eavesdrop on that a little bit.
00:14:10 ◼ ► It was, yeah, it was very much like, I think I said something like, thanks for all your work or whatever.
00:14:19 ◼ ► But my feeling was sort of like, I have been writing about you and the work that you do for longer than you've been CEO.
00:14:34 ◼ ► You didn't make me any money, but I did write about all your work, and that's my profession.
00:14:39 ◼ ► I had that moment where it's like, I don't need an interaction with Tim Cook, but I'm never going to get the chance again.
00:14:49 ◼ ► And I always feel like with famous people, especially, the biggest gift I can give a famous person is not bugging them.
00:14:58 ◼ ► When we moved to Marin County, George Lucas is literally at the next table at the shopping mall at Christmas time when we went to get lunch.
00:15:12 ◼ ► But in that moment where Tim's not going anywhere, he's stuck in the middle there waiting for everybody to file out before he can disappear.
00:15:35 ◼ ► And especially just because Six Colors has so thoroughly covered the quarterly calls for so long.
00:15:43 ◼ ► I mean, I would honestly say that it's sort of the canonical site for the quarterly calls.
00:15:48 ◼ ► And it's not like Tim needs to go to the web to get the charts and graphs of Apple's finances, which would be funny if he did.
00:16:11 ◼ ► And it did strike me in that moment in the Tech Talk Theater in the second row with Ternus and Cook.
00:16:32 ◼ ► Ternus was on the talk show live back when people like that used to appear on the show two years ago, three years ago.
00:17:09 ◼ ► I think you might have told this story on the last time I was on, which is like he's literally walking down the street.
00:17:33 ◼ ► But sometimes they'll have us up there in that outside level of Steve Jobs Theater before letting us downstairs for an event.
00:18:12 ◼ ► That was the – and then I wrote about it when Jobs died that it was – because it was like the WWDC, the year that he died.
00:18:23 ◼ ► And I wrote about like I mentioned I just noticed because – and that was one too where I took a good seat.
00:18:28 ◼ ► They let us in and the way I've told the story is it's the closest I'll ever feel to when Lando Calrissian is taking Han and Leia and Chewie to dinner.
00:19:01 ◼ ► And it was like – it was running a little late and they took us – it was like – because it's Moscone.
00:19:24 ◼ ► And I – the way that Han Solo took out his blaster and started shooting, I just like, I'm taking the seat next to Steve.
00:19:49 ◼ ► He walked past me downstairs in one of the years when WWDC was at the San Jose Convention Center.
00:20:13 ◼ ► So if you get to the second set of elevators, the ones that have gold buttons, you've gone too far.
00:20:43 ◼ ► But he didn't stop walking, which is like a patented famous person, important person move.
00:21:03 ◼ ► And all of a sudden there's a hubbub and it's John Ternus has walked, did a walk through and a bunch of, you know, influencers.
00:21:57 ◼ ► So when they're actually human beings in front of you, it's a little bit uncanny, I would say, because they know us and we know them.
00:22:05 ◼ ► And that is the truth is, I don't know if any granted CEO or whatever like Tim knows in detail who I am.
00:22:13 ◼ ► But I will say people below him know exactly every word we write and every word we speak because it's their job too.
00:22:22 ◼ ► So it is this weird thing where I kind of don't want to think about that because it's not my job to care what they are reading of mine.
00:22:30 ◼ ► But it is a weird thing when you're then in the same room with them because we're not, I write about what I think about what they say and talk about what I think about what they say.
00:22:42 ◼ ► And what they say is very carefully crafted not to touch on subjects that then you and I will immediately talk about.
00:23:01 ◼ ► But you do have to, or at least to do the job that we want to do, you have to kind of disassociate from the fact that, well, I know Greg Joswiak personally.
00:23:35 ◼ ► But when I'm writing and I'm in the flow of writing a column on Daring Fireball, I can totally just disassociate from what the people, if it's a negative slant on whatever, and I think those people are going to read it.
00:23:49 ◼ ► I can just disassociate from it if I think this is fair and true and what I want to communicate to the readers.
00:24:00 ◼ ► And you got it exactly right there, which is you're focused on communicating to the people who read your stuff.
00:24:10 ◼ ► If my job was just to please them, I don't think they would care a little bit about what I do, right?
00:24:16 ◼ ► Like we exist because our job is not there just to please them and to write words that they want to write because they write those words.
00:24:25 ◼ ► And that's our role in the ecosystem is to write what we want and to think about the people who read or listen to our stuff.
00:24:31 ◼ ► And I don't have any close personal relationships with Apple executives, but I know who they are.
00:24:42 ◼ ► I was just reminiscing with Phil because Phil's been there so long and I've been doing this for so long now that like I remember when Phil came to the Macworld offices to demo a version of OS X.
00:25:00 ◼ ► They did a road show about 10-1 or something like that because they really wanted people in the install base to get it.
00:25:07 ◼ ► So it was very much like that was just kind of fun because it's like he remembers stuff from the 90s and I remember stuff from the 90s that nobody else does.
00:25:15 ◼ ► And Jaws is a very similar guy who, I mean, he was like the product marketing manager for the PowerBook back in the 90s.
00:25:23 ◼ ► So, yeah, it's weird because, I mean, I guess that's the classic journalist and subject thing and you just don't want to get captured.
00:25:33 ◼ ► I wouldn't say it's like being a sociopath, but you do have to disconnect a little bit.
00:25:59 ◼ ► A lesson I learned the hard way at Macworld was it's not personal because we had a writer who got in trouble because they were like, it was a really good lesson to learn.
00:26:13 ◼ ► I'm sorry that this writer had to learn it and I just had to observe it as one of their editors.
00:26:16 ◼ ► But like, they made it personal where they're like, oh, Phil Schiller is doing this thing and all of that.
00:26:26 ◼ ► And if you start to personalize it and say like, this person should be fired or this person screwed up and you don't know it for a fact, it's just don't make it personal.
00:26:40 ◼ ► But if you make it too personal, because like, even with somebody like Alan, and I know you, like you may have personal with Alan Dye, right?
00:26:53 ◼ ► And so I try not to make it too personal because that's when I think it becomes problematic.
00:27:12 ◼ ► And I don't know if they're – sometimes I have found behind the scenes that it's exactly who you think it is.
00:27:19 ◼ ► Other times I've found that it's not at all who you thought it was and that the person you thought was responsible was actually fighting the good fight and they lost the fight.
00:27:33 ◼ ► Unless you do actually literally know what went down, and most of the time I certainly don't, and sometimes it happens way after the fact, I just am reluctant to do that.
00:27:49 ◼ ► I just got an email from a reader, and I'm so far behind on email, but I happened to stumble across one where some reader very kindly said something to the effect of, hey, aren't you making this too personal with Alan Dye with the interface stuff?
00:28:05 ◼ ► And my response was, well, I know some things about how it went down and how the culture had developed under his leadership, especially in the last few years.
00:28:16 ◼ ► And I stand behind it to the degree that I've made fun of him personally, but to the effect that if I ever ran into him again, and he's a very – you can't miss him because he's six foot five or something like that.
00:28:30 ◼ ► And I have heard from somebody through the grapevine, somebody who's at Meta or somebody who still knows him somehow, that he's noticed his mentions on Derek Fireball and has been a little confused by them.
00:28:48 ◼ ► And I'm not saying all would be forgiven, but I could – if I saw him, I would go up to him and say, hey, and then he would say, hey, and we would talk it out.
00:29:01 ◼ ► But I mentioned to this reader, you will note that I haven't done the same thing with John Gian and Drea.
00:29:23 ◼ ► And the stories I've heard about his personal style of leadership within the design company, it just seems worth making – fair game to make fun of.
00:29:39 ◼ ► So it turns out I know somebody who worked with John Gian and Drea before at a previous job.
00:29:43 ◼ ► And I had no idea about this until like two weeks ago where he was like, oh, yeah, I work with JG.
00:29:48 ◼ ► And I said, okay, my theory is that they hired JG because they wanted somebody who could help long-term building machine learning models because they know that machine learning models are important.
00:30:01 ◼ ► My theory was he brought a very academic viewpoint, a very kind of like we're here to do research.
00:30:06 ◼ ► And then that moment where the chatbots took off, everybody at Apple was like, oh, no, you need to now – you need to be a product person now.
00:30:13 ◼ ► And he was – and my guess – my read on it is that he was probably the wrong person to do that because that's not what he was hired to do and that's not what his skill set was.
00:30:23 ◼ ► And my friend who turns out work with JG said that is absolutely the right read on him as a person, which is he's a very kind of academic, researchy kind of guy.
00:30:34 ◼ ► So that's my – at least my read on it is that he was not hired to do the job that suddenly became the job because he was about we're going to build some new models.
00:30:46 ◼ ► He was trying to build a new image generation model and a new camera editing model and other research.
00:30:52 ◼ ► They were very much like we're going to do research because remember, Apple before the chatbot revolution was doing a lot of AI stuff, but it was all bespoke training and models to solve specific problems.
00:31:07 ◼ ► And Apple is not, especially post Steve Jobs' return, is not a company that's about pure research as much as they are about shipping the product, right?
00:31:16 ◼ ► And I think that that is what happened is they made the mistake of bringing in a guy who was really, really brilliant at doing the research and building a knowledge base.
00:31:25 ◼ ► But then they asked him, because of what happened with the chatbot thing, then they asked him to kind of like start shipping products, and he's the wrong guy.
00:31:32 ◼ ► Yeah, and the other thing too, and I, again, I am not an AI expert, but I do have a computer science degree, and I do keep one of my artificial intelligence textbooks from college underneath my mouse pad because it's the perfect height for my wrist.
00:32:00 ◼ ► But I also – I do know enough that John Gianandrea, his background in AI was on like a different fork of the whole field than LLMs.
00:32:19 ◼ ► And Gianandrea was on that side and was fully on board and was like, yeah, this is not that big a deal.
00:32:27 ◼ ► Now, that doesn't mean that the biggest proponents of LLMs, that the future pursuing LLMs is artificial – what is it?
00:32:46 ◼ ► Right, or just the super intelligence like creating an intellect that is actually greater than human intelligence.
00:32:54 ◼ ► I kind of feel like what we're seeing is that LLMs are kind of reaching – we can see how the slope of improvement is tailing off.
00:33:02 ◼ ► And that it will keep improving, but that the great orders of magnitude leaps are sort of running out.
00:33:13 ◼ ► Oh, now all of a sudden there's this huge advance in machine learning or hill climbing or whatever the hell Gianandrea was a bigger proponent of.
00:33:20 ◼ ► And that eventually – I think it's pretty obvious that eventually there will be artificial intelligence that is, quote, unquote, super intelligent.
00:33:32 ◼ ► And that it will probably be some kind of combination of technologies in the way that human beings – our brains are combinations of very different parts of our brain that work in very different ways and evolved at very different epochs in history.
00:33:50 ◼ ► We've got parts of our brain that are like a billion years old, and then we've got other parts that are like 10,000 years old, and something like that.
00:34:08 ◼ ► Yeah, I think in the long run what we got here is that this is the place that's the most fruitful, and so everybody's putting their foot to the floor to say we got to do this.
00:34:16 ◼ ► But that in the long run, yeah, general purpose, there's going to be room for things that are not general purpose that are targeted.
00:34:29 ◼ ► But the LLM thing happened, and they were flat-footed, and I think he was the wrong guy.
00:34:32 ◼ ► And, again, that's – and I guess that's my point is you could be mean about John G. and Andrea, but I suspect that it's not that he is bad at his job.
00:34:44 ◼ ► It's that he was hired to do something that suddenly became not what they needed him to do.
00:34:57 ◼ ► I will say, to get us back to this year, that I really got the vibe, and that tech talk was a big part of it, that the message Apple's trying to send is we have a new team and we're on it, basically.
00:35:11 ◼ ► And, like, Mike Rockwell, especially – and we – if you know – so if you accept Mark Gurman's backstory about how Mike Rockwell was – just really thought that the best way to do a Vision Pro UI was Siri, and he was going to build around Siri for Vision Pro, and then the Siri team failed to give him anything useful.
00:35:38 ◼ ► And there's that moment in the tech talk where he said, yeah, about a year ago, we realized Siri was just not going to do it in any way, and we tore it to the ground.
00:35:45 ◼ ► And I was like, that is one of the most outrageous statements I have ever heard from an Apple executive in terms of behind-the-scenes activity of we tore Siri to the ground because it was – and the implication there is very clear.
00:35:59 ◼ ► And I think anybody who's observed Apple struggle with Siri over the last decade probably had come to the conclusion that it couldn't be saved.
00:36:08 ◼ ► And finally, it got so bad that Rockwell was allowed to come in and say, we're going to tear it to the ground.
00:36:15 ◼ ► There are times when companies say things like that, like it's a ground-up rewrite, and you have to kind of – let me see who I can talk to off the record and see just how much.
00:36:25 ◼ ► But this is a case where I think everybody's saying the same thing, and I think the evidence in our hands is, oh, yeah, they tore this to the – this is a ground-up rewrite.
00:36:36 ◼ ► Let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor, and it's our good friends at Factor.
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00:39:41 ◼ ► Well, before we move on, just going back to the whole Cook being a bit, he's not aloof, but he's standoffish.
00:39:50 ◼ ► And he's never really been personally involved with the media in a way that Steve Jobs certainly was.
00:40:00 ◼ ► And like I said, I've already got more of a relationship with Ternus than I had with Cook.
00:40:05 ◼ ► That's it occurred to me as you were saying that to Cook shaking his hand on the way out of the theater.
00:40:21 ◼ ► I mean, they typically never hold events between WWDC and the iPhone event in September.
00:40:27 ◼ ► And Ternus' start date as CEO is September 1st, which is conspicuously at the beginning of the month they do the event.
00:40:42 ◼ ► Like people used to say to me, like when the executives came on my live show, like, hey, maybe it's Tim Cook this year.
00:40:51 ◼ ► And some number of people who were coming or just looking forward to the YouTube version were hoping.
00:41:07 ◼ ► And if they, you know, if anybody, Trudy, if you're listening, and he would like to do my show on his way out.
00:41:17 ◼ ► But I always, especially for the live show, I would have, as nervous and as agitated as I get to do the live show, if Tim Cook had been my guest, it would have been doubled.
00:41:51 ◼ ► But he really has an onstage demeanor, like sitting on the couch, where it seems like he was a regular on Letterman for years.
00:42:22 ◼ ► So here's a theory I have, which is related to this, which is think about Tim Cook's background.
00:42:32 ◼ ► He got recruited by Steve Jobs to come and fix, again, for those who did not live through it, Apple's calamitous supply chain issues.
00:42:45 ◼ ► This idea that they would introduce a new product and they would have thousands of the old product in a warehouse that they would just have to unload.
00:42:53 ◼ ► Whereas the goal, which seemed impossible and has turned out to essentially be real, is that for everyone that ships, one is sold.
00:43:21 ◼ ► And then Steve Jobs felt this is the person I can trust to be a steady hand at the wheel after I'm gone.
00:43:38 ◼ ► And Steve Jobs was probably thinking, also, there's all those other people who are going to be around there to support him.
00:43:47 ◼ ► And I defy anybody to say that Tim has not been a steady, efficient hand at the wheel all of this time.
00:43:54 ◼ ► And he's done what he feels he needs to do for Wall Street and all of those things that are kind of the CEO job, while also encouraging the people around him to design products that fit Apple's approach.
00:44:25 ◼ ► And so, I don't want to overstate this, but John Ternus is one of us, and Tim Cook isn't.
00:44:34 ◼ ► That, like, Tim was spotted by Steve and brought in and brings a level of competence and all of those things to the table.
00:44:45 ◼ ► But, and he professes being a true believer in Apple's mission and understanding what it is.
00:44:56 ◼ ► But somebody like John Ternus, who has been working at Apple since basically the turn of the century, and building products at a low level, is more, I just, I don't think it's outrageous to say he gets what Apple is about and what Apple customers want and what makes Apple products special at a level that Tim Cook has never and can never.
00:45:27 ◼ ► But one of the things that excites me about Ternus is that Ternus understands Apple at a level that Steve Jobs did and that Tim Cook didn't.
00:45:44 ◼ ► Because John Ternus was in the trenches at Apple, whereas Tim has, like, been optimizing at Apple at a high level from the beginning.
00:45:55 ◼ ► And I think that's one of the reasons that John Ternus, like, knows our names is because he's been marinating in this stuff for 25 years.
00:46:04 ◼ ► Yeah, and there's just, like, when you said, I'll just go back to when you said he is the talking points.
00:46:22 ◼ ► And I think that after Steve, not just after Steve died, but in the aftermath where all the people like Johnny Ive who are sort of, like, kind of done, needed to kind of, like, move on with their lives.
00:46:34 ◼ ► And they needed to figure out what they were going to do and where the iPad was going to go and how the Mac was going to fit and all of that.
00:46:41 ◼ ► And, like, Tim was like, this is awkward, but also we're going to make a lot of money and it's going to be fine in the iPhone and all of that.
00:46:48 ◼ ► I can't complain about it, but it is kind of refreshing to see a CEO coming in who I think sees Apple the way we do in a way that I don't think Tim did because Tim, it was not his perspective.
00:47:01 ◼ ► It was not his job to see it the way we do because he was coming at it from a very different level.
00:47:06 ◼ ► And he's just a – there's that old adage, measure twice, cut once, and Tim's more of a measure three or four times.
00:47:25 ◼ ► And let's measure with the best rulers in the world four times, and then let's cut with the best saw, and that's it.
00:48:00 ◼ ► On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I'd gotten my final, quote, Steve's health is a private matter, end quote.
00:48:14 ◼ ► You think I'm an arrogant asshole who thinks he's above the law, and I think you're a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.
00:48:21 ◼ ► After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record.
00:48:45 ◼ ► He's not going to call up and say, you think I'm an arrogant asshole who thinks he's above the law, and I think you're a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.
00:48:57 ◼ ► And I'm not saying Ternus is going to call me up and call me a slime bucket or that he's going to call you up and say, you think I'm an arrogant asshole.
00:49:08 ◼ ► But I don't know, I think it's not out of the question that we might hear from Ternus more than we ever heard from Cook, which is zero.
00:49:19 ◼ ► I think there might be a little bit of a return to a more back and forth with the media than there was under Tim Cook.
00:49:31 ◼ ► I think he was true to himself and that that was his vision for how Apple should be, but that it is a little bit more isolated and just cautious in what I think he thought was a good way.
00:49:48 ◼ ► There was that whole stock options backdating thing under Cook or under jobs around the same time, like 2008.
00:49:55 ◼ ► And I don't think it was any kind of it was, I guess, technically illegal, but it wasn't like an attempt to to do something devious.
00:50:28 ◼ ► And it was just an open secret that he took the fall for the antenna thing and he was out of the company.
00:50:34 ◼ ► It's like when Gian Andrea left, it was a year long goodbye and he got to retire on his own terms in December and golden parachute.
00:50:44 ◼ ► I feel like there's a chance here that media relations are going to change a bit under Ternus is basically where I'm going.
00:50:50 ◼ ► You've got a CEO who has different, he's totally different in terms of his dynamic and he's going to make some decisions about how he wants to play it.
00:51:00 ◼ ► But like, it's hard to think that the John Ternus playbook will be, eventually will be the Tim Cook playbook just used for John Ternus.
00:51:10 ◼ ► In the short term, that may be true because as a new CEO, you may, I don't know if John Ternus is like, I don't like how Tim's interviews were handled.
00:51:27 ◼ ► But in the long run, I think he may have different opinions and honestly, some of his people may have different opinions.
00:51:34 ◼ ► We can deploy him in a very different way than we deployed Tim because it's a different guy and he's got different skills.
00:51:45 ◼ ► It just felt like it at WWDC and that tech talk, me and you and Federico and Mike being right there in the second row.
00:51:54 ◼ ► It really felt like, hey, we've got front row seats to like this physical manifestation of the transition.
00:52:17 ◼ ► This was when the real Apple intelligence launched and this was the last cook WWDC, right?
00:52:31 ◼ ► Other than probably the end of July, he'll be on the results call for his final farewell, but that's not quite the same as a public.
00:53:00 ◼ ► I've seen, I didn't see him this time, but within the last handful of years, I've seen Bertrand floating about WWDC.
00:53:26 ◼ ► It was like, I, and it's not like I was famously, again, I don't peck away on a keyboard at those events.
00:53:31 ◼ ► I write in a notebook and I was like the, one of the last press members to leave one of those Yerba Buena things.
00:53:37 ◼ ► And everybody else had filed out and Gore was, I guess, hanging around the front of the room.
00:53:57 ◼ ► And I just said, Hey, John Gruber, Daring Five, I have no idea if Al Gore reads my site.
00:54:16 ◼ ► I, I, I always got the sense that Al Gore was one of those people who was out on Apple's board because he thought Apple was cool and he liked Apple stuff.
00:54:25 ◼ ► I was impressed the one time when they showed, when he was like the making of one of the things that he hasn't done anything recently.
00:54:34 ◼ ► He just is, I think it's like the 20th anniversary of that or something that he's, he, that he went around and was talking about it.
00:54:39 ◼ ► But it's been a while since your, Apple doesn't hold, I was thinking about this the other day.
00:54:46 ◼ ► That's, I was actually thinking how that is an amazing example of how much bigger Apple is than it used to be.
00:54:53 ◼ ► That they just went up to San Francisco to this little theater and, and said, we're going to release like major new products.
00:55:07 ◼ ► They, they're, it, when you grow by whatever, an order of magnitude, that stuff doesn't happen anymore.
00:55:12 ◼ ► So, yeah, I mean, one way or the other, Tim Cook will be around at those events, but I think the odds that he's ever going to sit down for like a sit down interview on upgrade is that time has passed.
00:55:28 ◼ ► And, and what I keep thinking is the guy seems like such a type A workaholic kind of guy.
00:55:54 ◼ ► I could see him as a sports owner, but it's also seems like a hard thing to get into at age 65, but I don't know.
00:56:06 ◼ ► And, and, and, and I think that'll probably be enough for him is my guess, but I don't know.
00:56:11 ◼ ► He's got a lot of money, but I just hope it's just on a personal scale as a human being, not even that it's Tim Cook specifically, somebody who's worked that hard and seems that obsessed with his job to step back.
00:56:24 ◼ ► I hope he uses that time to do something he loves because he, he should, that's a thing that all human beings should do, especially when they're at retirement age is enjoy their retirement a little bit.
00:56:40 ◼ ► And I hope he doesn't just sit around forever wishing I was, he was still CEO of Apple.
00:56:49 ◼ ► Because you say that, but then there's guys like Warren Buffett who just retired this year at, I think the age of 93 at Berkshire Hathaway.
00:56:57 ◼ ► I heard people speculated he might go on some other corporate boards and that wouldn't surprise me.
00:57:01 ◼ ► It wouldn't surprise me if he, he ended up on like the, whatever, the board of, of Auburn or Duke or something like that too.
00:57:17 ◼ ► And I know that Phil and his wife are, are very big financial donators to a bunch of environmental causes that they're actively involved with.
00:57:35 ◼ ► Also, in addition to like corporate boards and Duke or Auburn, I could see him getting involved with some environmental organizations.
00:57:49 ◼ ► That's the, Dan Morin ran into him at, at Logan airport and he was flying back to Apple having been to a BC board of trustees meeting.
00:57:59 ◼ ► And, and so that's when I realized, oh, I didn't even realize he was on the board of trustees there.
00:58:09 ◼ ► It's like his entire life has just been focused on Apple for so long now that it just as a human being, I hope, I look forward to seeing what he might choose to do, but also I just hope he has a good, like, I'm not kidding.
00:58:19 ◼ ► When I say, I hope he has a nice pool party at his Palm Springs mansion because like, yeah, have, have a good time.
00:58:37 ◼ ► I waved hello to him at WWDC, but at, I ran into him for a few minutes also at the Neo event in New York separately from when I photographed you talking to him.
00:59:00 ◼ ► Maybe he's still working 80 hours a week on Apple stuff, but I get the impression that he's busy, but he's rebalanced how much stuff because before he took the new position, he had so much on his plate.
00:59:18 ◼ ► I know he's involved with the compliance stuff because, or at least as it pertains to the App Store, which is a lot of the compliance stuff, but that it leaves more time for non-Apple and stuff too.
00:59:33 ◼ ► And I think that's the way it should be, even if you're still involved with Apple to a significant degree, as the executive chairman of the board surely will be.
00:59:45 ◼ ► But I think for the last, probably the entirety, not just the 15 years that he had the title CEO, but I think the entirety of Tim Cook's time at Apple, he's been pretty busy.
00:59:58 ◼ ► I could argue that after those very first years with Steve, like Steve cared about products and that was what he cared about.
01:00:09 ◼ ► Steve Jobs, he cared about operating a corporation only in the sense that he needed to keep it running with the money that would fuel the engine, which was making products.
01:00:33 ◼ ► But like, I get the feeling that very quickly, Tim Cook and I guess I think Fred Anderson was the CFO at that time.
01:00:47 ◼ ► On another level, I think very quickly Steve Jobs left that part of running the company to Tim and probably Fred Anderson.
01:00:57 ◼ ► Because once he knew that Apple was up and running and was going to have a money pipeline that meant they weren't going to go out of business and they weren't going to be in trouble and they could develop new products.
01:01:11 ◼ ► So Tim Cook's been doing parts of that job for way before Steve Jobs handed the role to him.
01:01:18 ◼ ► I wrote a column once, I forget if it was when Steve Jobs took a medical leave or maybe when it was official and it was permanent.
01:01:26 ◼ ► But at some point, one of those times I wrote that if you just wrote what Steve Jobs does, like on a day to day, week to week, yearly base, annual basis at Apple, what his responsibilities are and where he spends his time.
01:01:42 ◼ ► And then you just handed this is what these two senior executives at a computer company do.
01:01:53 ◼ ► And then this guy, I don't know, maybe he's like chief product officer or senior product officer or something like that.
01:01:59 ◼ ► I think his job description in plain language sounded like the CEO of the company all along.
01:02:07 ◼ ► And it wasn't that there was any sense that I don't think when Tim speaks of Steve Jobs, you can tell he knew who was in charge, right?
01:02:22 ◼ ► But like when he speaks about Steve Jobs, you could tell that he knew he was the number two guy, right?
01:02:29 ◼ ► You know, like Commander Riker never asserted, you know, maybe there's like one or two episodes where he disagreed with Picard, but it was like a private disagreement.
01:02:40 ◼ ► There was no doubt who was in charge, but I think with Steve, and this is going to be a question for John Ternus, I firmly believe that the CEO has to be the CEO of the entire company and the buck does stop with them and they need to make the big picture decisions.
01:03:10 ◼ ► John Ternus is going to be more like Steve Jobs, just in the sense that he's more closely attached to the product process.
01:03:17 ◼ ► And I think it may be that Sabi Khan and Kevin Parik, who are the COO and CFO, will be more involved, more sort of like, not even necessarily responsible, like more directly involved with that part of the business where Tim might have had a little more informing him.
01:03:42 ◼ ► I think every CEO is going to take it a little differently because Steve Jobs was clearly number one.
01:04:02 ◼ ► And John Ternus' brainpower is not going to be best used in the same place as Tim Cook or Steve Jobs.
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01:08:00 ◼ ► Yeah, that's what I thought, too, that they would, because there's some Macs that are overdue for updates.
01:08:06 ◼ ► And I do think that so many years now since 2020 of no live events that they see, you know,
01:08:14 ◼ ► and there was a live aspect to the Neo event in New York a couple months ago where they had, like, a little movie that they played before it.
01:08:39 ◼ ► I don't think the iPhone events are ever going to be live the way they were before 2020.
01:08:58 ◼ ► I thought that was one of the most interesting things to happen in the whole week at WWDC.
01:09:02 ◼ ► How do you add value when you've decided that, look, having a controlled video release, and it's always been true of the WWDC or any Apple event,
01:09:11 ◼ ► but even just even a developer event that was theoretically open to the public, you had to be a developer and you had to sign up and you had to get a ticket and all of that.
01:09:29 ◼ ► So I think having that completely controlled thing up front is the smart thing to do, and having all the prerecorded sessions is the smart thing to do.
01:09:40 ◼ ► I think what they have learned, or what they're trying, is we're doing a live in-person event in conjunction with the video release.
01:09:54 ◼ ► And one of the things you could do is have a not-streamed, not-video, live, on-the-record event with members of the media.
01:10:04 ◼ ► Or they also had, I heard some people online grumbling about this, they had some developer sessions in person for the in-person developers.
01:10:26 ◼ ► But if you were there, and you had the purple card on your badge, you got to go to see an actual live event.
01:10:35 ◼ ► And I don't know, I think maybe uncoupling your got-so-big-and-gets-so-much-attention-that-maybe-you-need-to-have-complete-control-of-it keynote thing.
01:10:57 ◼ ► They experimented with that two years ago, right, where they did the thing with iJustine.
01:11:00 ◼ ► I think having it be a presentation with a small amount of questions sent in from the audience, it was a tiny amount.
01:11:12 ◼ ► It was very much like the earnings calls where it was like a long pre-planned thing followed by an FAQ where the frequently asked questions were posed by Craig to Craig.
01:11:32 ◼ ► This is your opportunity to do more for the people that you cared about enough to bring to Cupertino.
01:11:39 ◼ ► And I think there's something about being there that it's – I think being in a lecture hall to hear a lecture live is a better way to learn than watching the same lecture on YouTube.
01:11:57 ◼ ► And there was much to explain about the architecture of the new Apple intelligence and the new private cloud compute and the way it's going.
01:12:08 ◼ ► It was a really good explanation with the right amount of slides and a thing that would have been off for the WWDC keynote itself.
01:12:34 ◼ ► Secondly, especially if they have no new hardware announcements, it's not for people who care about new Apple products.
01:12:39 ◼ ► It's not for people who care about the OSs because I can tell you, and you know this probably, but I definitely know this through Macworld sales figures and traffic numbers over many, many years.
01:12:49 ◼ ► It is absolutely 100% true that you can tell the regular people who care about Apple stuff about an OS in June.
01:13:19 ◼ ► It's for the press and the industry and the developers and kind of a customer base, but not really.
01:13:31 ◼ ► And it's not Craig Federighi putting up a chart with, like, a flow chart of how AI sequences happen, right?
01:13:46 ◼ ► It's like a coach putting up, like, John Madden at a chalkboard being like, boom, it goes over here and it does this thing.
01:13:56 ◼ ► I think that's a great venue for it because a keynote, keynote is not the place to do that.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Whatever the keynote is, and it is weird, and it has many audiences and also no audience in kind of, in some ways, it's not the place for that.
01:14:09 ◼ ► I wish they would do, I mean, the last couple of years, it used to be like you'd go and then you'd leave.
01:14:17 ◼ ► The last couple of years, for a lot of us press who go there, it's like a two-day extravaganza where you are being taken from one place to another for a briefing or an experience or a demo or a Q&A session.
01:15:04 ◼ ► But I do, and I remember passing at one point Tuesday morning, the crowd of invited lucky lottery winner developers, not press,
01:15:14 ◼ ► coming down from Steve Jobs' theater after the Apple intelligence session they had in person there.
01:15:44 ◼ ► And it's cool that people who, you know, but it's also cool they had something to do the next day.
01:15:50 ◼ ► And it was, again, with live demos of Apple intelligence and technical explanations of how, what's available to third-party developers
01:16:13 ◼ ► I think those of us on the outside, either whether we're press or developers who are attending,
01:16:30 ◼ ► who had something to do with the Tuesday morning thing that the developers went to at Steve Jobs Theater.
01:16:42 ◼ ► Like, I'm not saying that they've already decided to, but they were like, yeah, that felt great.
01:16:50 ◼ ► It's ineffable what it's like when there's 500, 600 people in front of you, and you're getting these, you're in the same room.
01:17:21 ◼ ► And, like, COVID made them slam the door, and now they're rediscovering what could we do to get back some of the stuff that was lost, even if they're very happy with the idea of the pre-recorded keynote, which I think they are.
01:17:42 ◼ ► And, like, iPhone day, if you get to go to the iPhone event, like, there's a lot of stuff going on on the iPhone event day, too.
01:17:49 ◼ ► But, like, WWDC is a good fit for developer stuff and also for press to kind of, like, check in about where they're doing it.
01:18:00 ◼ ► And although some of it I can understand tactically why they might not want to do it anymore, I like the idea that they're realizing they did lose some stuff that they could get back.
01:18:20 ◼ ► That's your opportunity to explain yourself to the people who are communicating about what you're doing.
01:18:29 ◼ ► It's one of my big takeaways is that this was – and also, I know Neela and Joanna and I talked about it on stage, but I'll just say it again.
01:18:42 ◼ ► But there was no high production bit, no – nothing like the Phil Schiller's flying an airplane and all the senior executives are parachuting out into – there was no – somebody's driving a race car or anything like that.
01:18:58 ◼ ► And maybe it's the simple explanation, and again, nobody at Apple who knows is going to explain it, at least not now while it's fresh.
01:19:05 ◼ ► Maybe it's just that all of this was so – we don't know what we can announce in sort of much more last minute than most years.
01:19:16 ◼ ► Like, maybe there was a – hmm, are we going to pull all this together to announce in June?
01:19:28 ◼ ► If you really want to ask somebody at Apple, hey, how come you guys stopped making the mini after the iPhone 13 mini?
01:19:45 ◼ ► But it's like, what do you think the – if it was selling like hotcakes, why would we stop making it?
01:19:53 ◼ ► And it's like, why do you think – they don't talk about the – they do put them on YouTube, and YouTube, they don't have an exemption from YouTube's download or views or whatever they call the number.
01:20:15 ◼ ► Or if you go to apple.com in a web browser when the keynote's on, they're not playing the YouTube version.
01:20:29 ◼ ► And it's like, are these prerecorded keynotes more popular than the ones that were on stage and put to tape?
01:20:43 ◼ ► As a marketing exercise, the prerecorded keynotes that are at a cinematic pace of editing are just more conducive to watching.
01:20:55 ◼ ► And it's the same way that, like, people liked it when they put Hamilton on Disney+, like a video of the live production of Hamilton.
01:21:20 ◼ ► And you can enjoy a live production that is put to tape, but it doesn't hit the same way.
01:21:28 ◼ ► And there's millions of people who watch these prerecorded infomercial style videos, to borrow Neela's term.
01:21:43 ◼ ► I think what you end up with and where Apple may be evolving to is the idea that, like, look, doing an infomercial, doing a commercial video thing is the right thing to do because of all those reasons.
01:21:56 ◼ ► And it doesn't have to be either or live event or a commercial because we had the live event.
01:22:17 ◼ ► So, yeah, I feel like they're just kind of letting the video be what it is and what it needs to be and how it evolves.
01:22:23 ◼ ► And then also saying that doesn't have to be our whole strategy when we're talking to the media or when we're talking to developers.
01:22:32 ◼ ► My favorite word that Neelai and Joanna said on your stage is Joanna said that it was boring.
01:22:50 ◼ ► And I was struck by that word because what it said to me is it says everything about how companies always have an incentive to do big tentpole features every year because that's the stuff that's exciting.
01:23:07 ◼ ► And that initial 15-minute block where they talked about making everything on all the devices you use faster, more efficient, less buggy, fixing all these annoyances that you've had for a decade.
01:23:25 ◼ ► It was actually kind of dull as it was because I keep saying to people, it's like sand running through your fingers.
01:23:34 ◼ ► And this is the dichotomy is we need as users updates that fix the broken stuff and make everything faster.
01:23:56 ◼ ► The good news is fixing Siri and Apple intelligence is such a big A-plus tentpole feature that it allowed them to say, beyond this, just make everything work better.
01:24:19 ◼ ► But sometimes not being entertained and having them fix the stuff that's broken is better for us, but is not as entertaining.
01:24:32 ◼ ► Like, if you're measuring excitement, you're like, hey, we need more exciting features.
01:24:41 ◼ ► But I think that it leads to a cycle where Apple lost track of, okay, there are some unexciting things that will resonate and create affection.
01:25:16 ◼ ► And it wasn't, as John Syracuse has gone on at length on ATP, it was not a no-new-features release.
01:25:34 ◼ ► Including, you know, with Grand Central Dispatch, an entirely new way of doing multitasking and multi-threading in EOS.
01:25:44 ◼ ► I got Macworld to repost my review of it, which also has buying advice because it's back when you...
01:25:59 ◼ ► I remember they put up a slide at some point that was like, it's actually hundreds of new features.
01:26:11 ◼ ► So they're like, for example, you walk out your front door and your iPhone just doesn't connect to anything for a while because it can't bear to let go of your Wi-Fi, even though your Wi-Fi is not talking to it anymore.
01:26:20 ◼ ► And until you leave your house and drive halfway down the block and the cellular connection finally cuts in, that you can...
01:26:27 ◼ ► I can't tell you how many times I've stopped the stop sign at the end of my street in order to get my maps directions to work because I can't do it.
01:26:34 ◼ ► Everybody, when you talk about this feature, everybody knows this feature because almost everybody leaves the house.
01:26:44 ◼ ► And I applaud them for doing it because it does require Apple to have a little bit of humility because they do have to say, this is a thing that didn't work as well as it should have.
01:26:53 ◼ ► And I could be mad that it's gone on this long, but I think I'm just going to be grateful that maybe it's fixed.
01:27:01 ◼ ► One of the answers is, well, we were busy working on all those tentpole features that were super dramatic in the keynote instead of fixing this thing you deal with every time you leave your house.
01:27:17 ◼ ► It was like a sort of briefing specifically about the performance updates and little tweaks.
01:27:38 ◼ ► And the answer was, I mean, it's very funny because the answer was, well, quite frankly, we were just looking at signal attenuation.
01:27:55 ◼ ► It's like, yeah, you should be looking at the Wi-Fi and saying, I can't get any data on the Wi-Fi and immediately just pulling that data off of cellular.
01:28:02 ◼ ► And I did make them laugh because I said, it's like my iPhone is mourning for its Wi-Fi for a little while.
01:28:37 ◼ ► That can happen in one ten thousandth of a second and use almost no battery life or energy.
01:28:50 ◼ ► They didn't mention this one specifically, but maybe they can tie the accelerometer in, too, and be like, yeah, the iPhone's been in motion.
01:29:12 ◼ ► They mentioned in that briefing, they mentioned the word Snow Leopard to me, to my group.
01:29:27 ◼ ► And maybe it's one of those things where because iOS releases don't get names, I don't have them.
01:29:37 ◼ ► But at least inside Apple, that's how they saw iOS 12 as a sort of, hey, let's stop with the exciting new features or slow down on exciting new features.
01:29:52 ◼ ► And the way that they presented it was like, oh, yeah, I guess it does kind of make sense, though, that these things just ebb and flow through multi-year cycles.
01:30:14 ◼ ► We're not going to do iPhone first and other platforms the next year or two years later for some of them.
01:30:27 ◼ ► And this year is obviously AI, but it's obviously with a bunch of – and I think it is related to Siri AI, right?
01:30:35 ◼ ► Like, obviously, like the, hey, let's tear Spotlight down and do an entirely new version of Spotlight is both beneficial just for searching through your email messages.
01:30:54 ◼ ► If the search index is bad, it's not going to be able to find the personal context, right?
01:31:05 ◼ ► It's like all of a sudden the whole company is on board with this is the year we're going to fix things.
01:31:32 ◼ ► But all I'm saying is I understand why all tech companies are predisposed to do big things and not worry so much about fixing the old things because the big things are what people notice.
01:31:47 ◼ ► And when I just had a briefing for BB Edit, the new version of BB Edit came out, and I talked to Rich Siegel about it.
01:32:24 ◼ ► I do wish Apple had a little more cultural focus on keeping the bug fixes and improvements party rolling every year a little more than they tend to do.
01:32:46 ◼ ► I've heard stories where people are like, I'm aware that bug exists and I cannot get permission to fix it.
01:32:58 ◼ ► And there are some people who have – who would – every single year for the last 20 years would have said this year over last year Apple software quality is in decline and they would have voted the same way for 20 straight years.
01:33:12 ◼ ► But if that were true, Apple software quality in 2026, 20 years later would be unusable, right?
01:33:23 ◼ ► Their software portfolio is so broad that there are – and you can look at specific things.
01:33:34 ◼ ► But I do think in broad strokes – and I think this goes back to one of the last years that I did my live show in San Francisco.
01:33:59 ◼ ► And they were adamant that their software quality is up, not down because they measure it.
01:34:31 ◼ ► And I think switching from Objective-C to Swift has fixed other classes of bugs, memory management bugs.
01:34:38 ◼ ► And those are good, but if you think that's the only measure of software quality, like, hey, our app doesn't crash – Apple Notes doesn't crash.
01:34:54 ◼ ► You could say that's fantastic, but that doesn't mean there aren't bugs in Apple Notes that don't cause crashes.
01:35:05 ◼ ► Also, I feel like – and people at Apple agree or disagree, but from the outside, it feels like there is a culture at Apple that – and sometimes I think this is also about their hiring process because famously, like, Apple's bad at hiring people.
01:35:26 ◼ ► But I think also they have a – I think personal opinion, just as I think Apple's hiring processes, at least as I have come to know them over the last few years talking to people, seem really old and hidebound and slow.
01:35:38 ◼ ► And I think that it may lead to one of the things that I'm about to describe, which is I get the feeling like they decide to do a big feature.
01:35:59 ◼ ► And in year two, you're like, you're going to fix all the things that were broken in the thing you shipped last year, right?
01:36:17 ◼ ► But that's the thing that troubles me most about sort of Apple software quality in general is the feeling like they don't have the people to own the thing that they launch.
01:36:27 ◼ ► They build the thing that they launch, and then those people go off and do something else.
01:36:33 ◼ ► And, like, whether it's time machine, things that are often really system critical that are, like, super quirky, and then they will do a brush up, and you'll be like, yay, but there's still this bug, and then it's good luck.
01:36:48 ◼ ► Or I think the one that we're all thinking of this year is screen time, which they have a big revamp, and they're doing all these things.
01:37:03 ◼ ► But on another level, if you've talked to anybody who's tried to use screen time, it's broken.
01:37:14 ◼ ► Which ties into the parental controls, which there's an overlap where some of the parental controls are about screen time.
01:37:19 ◼ ► It's basically, yeah, that screen time was launched in the digital well-being era, and now people are more concerned about kids using technology.
01:37:28 ◼ ► And I think screen time's a great example because screen time launched with a lot of fanfare, and it had problems.
01:37:45 ◼ ► And that's the part that I would like to see Apple get better at is just if you're going to launch something, you've got to maintain it.
01:37:54 ◼ ► And sometimes I feel like Apple is willing to spend the money and time and effort to launch something, but then they're not really willing to do anything other than walk away.
01:38:09 ◼ ► And if you're not willing to put a team together to, instead of making it a circus, to use your analogy, that has tents, and then the tents, it's a big fanfare, and you go, but it's not built to last.
01:38:34 ◼ ► Because we've all had that issue where sometimes you even hear from somebody at Apple and you get the distinct senses like, oh, that's the guy who does this.
01:38:47 ◼ ► Feels like there should be people on this thing that's super important and is a core of all of Apple's operating systems.
01:38:53 ◼ ► And sometimes you get the sense that that code is just there and nobody really knows about it.
01:38:59 ◼ ► And it's very disturbing when you get that sense that things are kind of abandoned inside of Apple's operating systems.
01:39:07 ◼ ► All right, let me take one more break here and thank our third and final sponsor, and it's our good friend at Finalist.
01:39:14 ◼ ► Finalist, they sponsored my live show, and I say they, but it's really just one developer, Slavin Radic.
01:39:28 ◼ ► I said it on stage that I still use it after he first sponsored Daring Fireball in December.
01:39:44 ◼ ► I wouldn't have really been able to use it the way I've been using it if it didn't have a good Mac app months ago.
01:39:54 ◼ ► And it's – I keep saying over and over again, the reason it works for me is that you have days and days have tasks, not a list of tasks and the tasks have dates assigned to them.
01:40:06 ◼ ► This works for my brain in a fundamental way that a lot of other to-do lists and management type apps don't.
01:40:14 ◼ ► And if you've ever thought, hey, none of these apps really fit with the way I work, and if you kind of have the mentality that fits with a paper planner, you should really check out Finalist.
01:40:27 ◼ ► And it's – the pace of development is just amazing, especially for a one – well, I say especially for a one-person team, but maybe it's because it's a one-person team and in a way that a really, really productive developer can move faster than a team ever could.
01:41:17 ◼ ► It's such a great ecosystem app where the calendar events come from the system-level calendar.
01:41:27 ◼ ► But then those events from Fantastical, because they're in the system database, they show up in finalist.
01:42:09 ◼ ► Well, I heard, when I first heard the idea, you and Mike Hurley, your co-host of Upgrade, are launching a new podcast.
01:42:17 ◼ ► It's currently, and this is coincident with your appearance here, because we still, I think you still have two weeks left on the Kickstarter.
01:42:40 ◼ ► And I'm like, yeah, an Apple history podcast with Mike and Jason, and that would be great.
01:43:06 ◼ ► And I, I, so I knocked that off and there may be some other stuff that I, I stopped, but I did.
01:43:11 ◼ ► Look, we did Kickstarter because we knew this would be a lot of work and we didn't want to do it.
01:43:17 ◼ ► We couldn't do it the way that you usually do, which is you launch a podcast and see if anybody shows up because it's so much work.
01:43:24 ◼ ► That if we're going to commit to that level of work, we need to know there's an audience for it.
01:43:32 ◼ ► If you want to get the ad free feed with a whole bunch of bonus features, you can do it.
01:43:37 ◼ ► There will be a regular free feed with ads and stuff as well, but there's some good deals and there's some merch.
01:43:49 ◼ ► But it literally is what Kickstarter was meant to do, which is validate this idea and allow it to happen in the world.
01:43:54 ◼ ► It's not like some of these like pre-cooked products where they put it on Kickstarter as a marketing ploy.
01:43:58 ◼ ► Like literally we didn't know whether we were going to, it was going to make sense for us to make the effort.
01:44:20 ◼ ► We're kind of like producing a month's worth at once in a cycle and we get time because it's not timely.
01:44:26 ◼ ► Like all these shows that we do, it's got, it's scripted and it's about the past and we can take our time on it and do that.
01:44:32 ◼ ► But it's still going to be a lot of work, which is why we calculated it out of like the minimum amount possible to do it.
01:44:39 ◼ ► I've already stopped working on some stuff because I'm going to do this instead, which is great.
01:44:55 ◼ ► It was inspired by the rest is history, which is a great podcast about all of history, not 50 years of Apple history.
01:45:09 ◼ ► There's so many books about Apple and so many stories that you could tell if you zero in on a particular topic.
01:45:15 ◼ ► And also doing this for as long as you and I have, you've come to realize there are a lot of people out there who are in our audience who actually don't know those stories.
01:45:33 ◼ ► It was going to be a follow up to that 20 Max for 2020 series I did, my pandemic project, but I hadn't quite figured it out.
01:45:40 ◼ ► And then I got sidetracked by two things, which is I got sidetracked by having a month's warning to be on Jeopardy.
01:45:49 ◼ ► So I had to do a lot of studying and sidetracked by the Wall Street Journal asking me to review David Polk's 650 page book about Apple history.
01:45:56 ◼ ► And when I finished doing those two things, it was almost the 50th anniversary of Apple.
01:46:01 ◼ ► And I was like, okay, Mike, why don't I write a script like the script I was writing last year?
01:46:05 ◼ ► But instead of it being about whatever that script was about, let's make it about the founding of Apple.
01:46:15 ◼ ► I'm going to be writing the episodes, but Mike's going to be doing a lot of the production and the marketing and all sorts of other stuff, too.
01:46:35 ◼ ► And so that's part of the things we have to figure out is, like, I got an email about one of the, we're doing previews in the upgrade feed this month.
01:46:43 ◼ ► And I got an email from somebody who said there's a detail in one of our stories that may not be right.
01:46:50 ◼ ► But our friend Harry McCracken interviewed one of the people who was involved, and he said that book got it wrong.
01:47:01 ◼ ► And it's, like, fascinating because it's, like, it's not, it is in the book, but the book isn't maybe right.
01:47:10 ◼ ► So, yeah, I'm digging through all the old books and oral histories, and I imagine that at some point we're going to do an episode or a series about the transition from classic macOS to macOS 10.
01:47:36 ◼ ► I mean, really, it's, part of this is going to figure out what is this show ultimately going to be like.
01:47:57 ◼ ► And like Pogue's book, I'll grant you the last 10 or 15 years are a much tougher nut to crack because not only is everybody who's listening probably lived through those, right?
01:48:08 ◼ ► But even, like, at this point, like, even to the start of the iPhone, and there are so many great stories to tell.
01:48:35 ◼ ► Or maybe it was a driving thought because I just drove back from my son's graduation in Oregon.
01:48:43 ◼ ► And one of the thoughts I had is, if we're going to do the Microsoft and Apple frenemies story, I probably need to do an entire episode about Microsoft.
01:49:00 ◼ ► Is the ability to take the time to say, like, have you ever really heard the story about Microsoft?
01:49:10 ◼ ► But, like, I had no idea that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took an Apple II prototype with them on a red eye to Philadelphia in the summer of 1976 to go to a trade show in Atlantic City.
01:49:25 ◼ ► And that their arch rivals were sitting right behind them looking over their shoulders and laughing at this bare computer board that was in a cigar box.
01:50:04 ◼ ► But if more people want to support us, what I'm excited about, too, is that there are so many podcasts like this one where we talk about current events.
01:50:18 ◼ ► So I'm hoping that people who listen to the talk show and ATP and other places like that, and people who don't even listen to news shows about Apple, might be into it.
01:50:28 ◼ ► And if you care anything about, like, the tech industry or Silicon Valley or Apple, hopefully you will get fun stories out of it.
01:50:35 ◼ ► Like, I get out of The Rest is History, where they're telling stories about parts of history I know nothing about.
01:50:42 ◼ ► But to listen to a couple of people who've done the research or, you know, have read the primary sources and then put it together in an entertaining story.
01:51:00 ◼ ► that when I was going on and on about having – admitting that I'm very late to have stumbled upon the Acquired podcast, which has been going on for years and is a huge success and is one of the most popular podcasts there is, let alone in tech.
01:51:16 ◼ ► And I've just fell in love with it, with these – and the Acquired show is, like, each episode is, like, a three to four hour deep dive on one specific company's entire history.
01:51:29 ◼ ► In addition to just loving the episodes I've listened to, I'm absolutely in love with the use of the podcast, the audio podcast – I wish I didn't have to say that – audio podcast form to tell the story.
01:52:06 ◼ ► I know they're super popular and I know people who have long – if they're driving back and forth from California to Oregon frequently, you need something to listen to.
01:52:15 ◼ ► Because I read faster than I can listen and that's how I – it just doesn't work for my brain.
01:52:21 ◼ ► But I do listen to lots of current event or at least I think I listen to Apple News and political current event, like stuff happening this week podcasts.
01:52:30 ◼ ► The idea – but there is a middle ground of using the podcast in the conversational form for something that is historical.
01:52:47 ◼ ► I love Acquired, but I don't think a transcript of Acquired is something that I would enjoy reading.
01:53:07 ◼ ► Yeah, this is – so it's a little bit different because that was more like edited collage of interviews and stuff.
01:53:12 ◼ ► And this is more just sort of me selling stories and Mike asking me questions about it and us going back and forth about it.
01:53:20 ◼ ► You're not just telling the story, although you are telling the story, but you've also got somebody else who knows the subject matter who is asking you – like Michael asked me questions in the sample episodes we did that I'm like, I hadn't really thought of it that way, right?
01:53:38 ◼ ► One of the things that I came to in doing this – the thing that we're doing in Upgrade as bonus episodes and will be the first four episodes of the show when it airs in probably September-ish – is the Apple II.
01:53:54 ◼ ► There's so many details that I didn't realize about it, including my favorite anecdote is that Steve Wozniak's dad decided to make Steve Jobs cry so that he'd give the company back to Steve Wozniak.
01:54:10 ◼ ► But when Steve Jobs was like, look, if you want the whole thing, you can take it, but I'm adding value here.
01:54:22 ◼ ► But the moment – and Mike – having a give and take with Mike is really good because we talked about Steve Jobs' obsession with the finished product.
01:54:34 ◼ ► But the Apple II was a finished product with a plastic shell, painted beige, and he cared about the details of it.
01:54:44 ◼ ► They were other people's genius, like the power supply, which was by a totally different – this random socialist biker dude named Rod Holt designed that, and that was a revolutionary power supply.
01:54:55 ◼ ► And Mike and I are talking about this, and I realized, based on what we were talking about, that this is the moment where Steve Jobs shows Steve Wozniak's dad why it's a 50-50 partnership.
01:55:08 ◼ ► It's because it's the first moment that Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs, recognizably Steve Jobs.
01:55:14 ◼ ► You can see his traits before, but that product is the result of Steve Jobs thinking about the end product for a consumer market and saying,
01:55:22 ◼ ► we need not just the technical brilliance of Steve Wozniak, but we also need the power supply, which he got from Rod Holt.
01:55:30 ◼ ► They needed the case design, and every other case looked like it belonged in a lab and it was made out of metal.
01:55:37 ◼ ► I want it to look like a Cuisinart, which is such a leap to think of it as a consumer product.
01:55:44 ◼ ► And I came to the realization at the end, this is like, oh, this is the appearance of a familiar Steve Jobs for the first time.
01:55:50 ◼ ► And he spent the rest of his career trying to do the same thing again and again in a way,
01:55:57 ◼ ► which was take this very technical thing and try to apply as much consumer sensibility to it as possible so that it could be used by regular people.
01:56:07 ◼ ► The Apple II couldn't really be used by regular people, but like more than the Apple I.
01:56:20 ◼ ► Anyway, it's stuff like that where it's good having the rapport with Mike, too, because he gets the Apple stuff.
01:56:47 ◼ ► I went on a used book buying Binge, and that's been fun because a lot of this stuff is not widely available.
01:57:00 ◼ ► The Steve Jobs biography is not great by Walter Isaacson, but it has a lot of details in it that are interesting.
01:57:19 ◼ ► And what I think we have going for us is we're going to focus in on some specific stories and do it in this way.
01:57:30 ◼ ► So it's the books and where I can find them, the magazines, some of which I wrote, but they're in there.
01:57:36 ◼ ► And oral histories at the Computer History Museum and all sorts of other stuff to try and tell a fun story about the history of this company that I would argue is,
01:57:46 ◼ ► and you might agree with me, is one of, if not the most influential company in the last 50 years.
01:57:54 ◼ ► I think it has to be, especially, and I don't think that was, I thought so all along, but I think it's almost undeniable.
01:58:07 ◼ ► And the other gift, I talked about this when Pogue was on my show for his book a couple weeks ago.
01:58:12 ◼ ► What a remarkable, I mean, 50 is a real close, about as close to an even number within a human lifespan that you can get to, right?
01:58:32 ◼ ► But combined, though, with the fact that so much of the origin was from 20-year-olds, like in Espinosa's case, 14-year-olds,
01:58:42 ◼ ► that 50 years on, so many of them are still around, that they're only in their 70s and are there to tell the story.
01:58:51 ◼ ► And yeah, the last 10 to 15, and Pogue talked about it too, that the last 10 or 15 years is not as comprehensive.
01:59:02 ◼ ► But it's also, even if Apple were a more open company and was more willing to talk about five-year-old stuff, like, yeah, we're still going to be secretive about what's coming and what's current.
01:59:16 ◼ ► But yeah, five years ago, sure, we'll tell you the real origin story of the – or 10 years ago, right?
01:59:27 ◼ ► What's the inside story on getting rid of the home button and going to round corners and the new swipe up?
01:59:35 ◼ ► And even if they were like that, I don't think that's – history needs time to settle before you know it, right?
01:59:43 ◼ ► And I do think – I remember as I listened to the entirety of the 20 for 20 podcast, of course some recent Macs made the list.
02:00:03 ◼ ► But I think the episodes for the older ones were better because they were more – we know that that's – the SE30 is an all-time great Mac.
02:00:13 ◼ ► We could think the M1 MacBook Air was an all-time great Mac, and it probably is, but it's like – it's so soon you don't know, right?
02:00:33 ◼ ► And then you can see – if you can project back from 10 or 20 years in the future, looking back at that event, now you can see that – I mean, not to use a cliche, but that arc of history.
02:00:47 ◼ ► Like, a thing that Mike brought up repeatedly when we were talking about these early days of Apple is Apple is not special in 1976, 1975.
02:01:05 ◼ ► He's like, there are dozens of these companies, aren't there, that are literally just two kids selling tech stuff in the garage and companies that got some funding and had some salespeople in suits.
02:01:24 ◼ ► There were – the people at Processor Technologies thought that the Sol was going to be a huge hit and that Processor Technologies was on its way.
02:01:48 ◼ ► It's like, this is a story that matters because of what happened over 50 years, not because of what – in that moment, it's important.
02:01:57 ◼ ► But it's only important because we can look back at it now and trace the line and say that was important.
02:02:05 ◼ ► And the sweet spot for it is when time has given you that, but the people creating the work, documenting it, lived through it and can kind of put that first-person angle.
02:02:22 ◼ ► And I'm not saying that people who write about 17th century geopolitics are wasting their time, you know, or that new history isn't being – useful history isn't being forged of the founding of America 250 years ago.
02:02:44 ◼ ► And anybody who's doing that work today for something that far in the past has to rely on the history work that was done 20, 30 years after the fact, right?
02:02:56 ◼ ► So there might be – again, on the 100th year anniversary of Apple, there might be some really good history work being done, whether Apple is still around then or not.
02:03:07 ◼ ► But it's going to be relying on things that were written today or recorded today, as the case may be.
02:03:15 ◼ ► Well, talking to Jeffrey Cain, who did the Steve Jobs in Exile book, which is really good, he spent a lot of time in the Apple Archive at Stanford.
02:03:23 ◼ ► And he spent looking at papers and a lot of time at the Computer History Museum, I think, working with their historians.
02:03:31 ◼ ► So, like, that is one of the benefits of this is that they're – right now is a good time in some ways because a lot of the people who are involved in this, they may not be around or they may not be around much longer.
02:03:54 ◼ ► But also, yes, the fact is, at David Pogue's book event at the Computer History Museum, John Scully was just there.
02:04:04 ◼ ► The guy who designed the original Apple logo and was the third partner in the partnership for about two weeks, Ron Wayne, who's in his 90s, was there.
02:04:17 ◼ ► I'm not planning on writing a book and doing a lot of original research for this, but I anticipate what's going to happen is I am going to hear from people who know what happened.
02:04:39 ◼ ► And that's, at a certain level, that's fundamentally what human beings evolved to pick up.
02:05:04 ◼ ► And the way we're planning on architecting this is, like, we'll do that and that'll be four episodes.
02:05:32 ◼ ► We, fortunately, we have reached the point in the Kickstarter where every dollar that we
02:05:37 ◼ ► get, it is just going to allow us to do, like, I realized that because we blew past our number,
02:05:46 ◼ ► I'm going to get people to read my scripts in advance and compare them to the sources and
02:05:52 ◼ ► That's probably not something I could have done at $40,000 because we would be at the bare
02:05:59 ◼ ► So, like, all of this stuff just gets better because people have shown, almost 2,000 people
02:06:08 ◼ ► But it does allow us to make the show actually better in ways that if it was super bare bones,
02:06:17 ◼ ► Every Kickstarter I link to, I do it because I think it is going to hit for a significant,
02:06:29 ◼ ► And then there are Kickstarters where I'm like, well, who isn't going to contribute to this one?
02:06:48 ◼ ► Like, if you're listening to this and you haven't already contributed, go to design.fm and do what
02:06:55 ◼ ► I suspect you're probably doing with your thumbs right now on your phone and contributing because
02:07:00 ◼ ► if this isn't right up the alley of the audience that I think that I have, then I don't understand
02:07:09 ◼ ► And the plug I'll get for the people who are backing who are going to be members, essentially,
02:07:12 ◼ ► I'll also say is when I say we're going to record four episodes at one time, the free feed
02:07:27 ◼ ► episodes, six hour-long episodes appeared in my feed that are about national anthems, which
02:07:35 ◼ ► National anthems and the history behind them of six countries that are in the World Cup.
02:07:41 ◼ ► That's what we listen to on the drive to and from Oregon, I'll tell you, is we listen to
02:07:55 ◼ ► And the free feed will get part one and then wait a week for part two and then wait a week
02:08:26 ◼ ► Well, the one more thing for me is, did you see that they've, I think for iPhones, it's
02:08:50 ◼ ► And it's one of those things where it's like, I don't want to complain because, well, it is
02:09:02 ◼ ► But if I, if it were easy to go back to iPadOS 18, if it was just like, go through system
02:09:27 ◼ ► And because I don't really care too much about my iPad, I installed the beta last summer and
02:09:37 ◼ ► Like, at times, it breaks the number one rule of iOS, which is that even scrolling doesn't
02:09:56 ◼ ► And even with, and I thought, as I left the keynote, well, maybe with the optimizations and
02:10:01 ◼ ► the new CPU scheduler and stuff, maybe it'll actually bring my old iPad back to usable life.
02:10:21 ◼ ► It's not surprising, but like one of the things Joanna said to you on your live show is it
02:10:27 ◼ ► feels, in the nerdiest comment I've ever heard Joanna Stern make, honestly, she said it feels
02:10:38 ◼ ► which if it's, I guess if you spent your entire development cycle trying to be, find efficiency
02:10:55 ◼ ► Is that this is the debug, more efficient release, and therefore why would it be riddled with bugs
02:11:17 ◼ ► It got super jittery and janky and stuff, and it's still indexing on that device, so that's
02:11:23 ◼ ► I will give everybody the advice that was given to me, and you probably got it too, which is
02:11:28 ◼ ► if you're planning on later on this summer or even in the fall going to 27, get on the 26.6
02:11:39 ◼ ► Because my understanding is that if you're on 26.6, all that spotlight indexing happens
02:11:56 ◼ ► But it means that the moment you update to 27, it just picks up the index, and it doesn't
02:12:21 ◼ ► I mean, I guess that's the thing I'll talk about last here on this show, is I've been...
02:12:44 ◼ ► I mean, they've shipped a build that they figure will not destroy everybody, but is not always
02:12:51 ◼ ► And I think it's often the case that that first developer build for WWDC, there's some,
02:12:56 ◼ ► at least two or three major tenfold features that really were just like, yes, we're going
02:13:02 ◼ ► to get this together by September, but ooh, boy, we're going to give this to millions of
02:13:20 ◼ ► There's like a build of iOS that has this new thing, and other people are testing a version
02:13:29 ◼ ► I feel like we've been so focused on AI and Apple's failing from two years ago that I feel
02:13:36 ◼ ► like we haven't given enough attention to the fact that they seem to have actually fixed
02:13:43 ◼ ► I know it's there, but perspective, it's been like a decade where we've been saying Siri isn't
02:13:53 ◼ ► I filled in for somebody who is absent, I don't know why, on MacBreak Weekly this week.
02:14:06 ◼ ► But I said, Leo asked me about you spending a week with Siri AI and iOS 27 on an iPhone.
02:14:16 ◼ ► The whole reason I switched my SIM to this phone at WWDC to start using it as my daily main phone
02:14:39 ◼ ► And every once in a while, I'll catch myself doing something, searching the web or going to
02:14:58 ◼ ► But I've had those things, just like Joanna said last week, I've had those moments where
02:15:04 ◼ ► So like I do a, it was originally a pandemic project and we just do it now in the summer
02:15:09 ◼ ► for fun podcast with Phil Michaels and David Lohr, where we watch old episodes of Magnum
02:15:18 ◼ ► We record those two at a time and we plan it in an iMessage thread where we will at the
02:15:55 ◼ ► Because it was able to formulate a spotlight search on that, that, that turned up the message
02:16:04 ◼ ► that was most recent because there are plenty of messages that list episodes, but it was
02:16:09 ◼ ► And I was like, okay, that is useful because what's better than me searching messages is
02:16:28 ◼ ► I might not know whether it's an email or in message thread or something else, but like
02:16:38 ◼ ► And telling it to do whatever search it needs to formulate to get where it needs to go.
02:16:57 ◼ ► He moved from one place and he opened his own place in a building where it's like a shared,
02:17:03 ◼ ► it's like a whole floor where stylists and nail salons and stuff can rent like a very small
02:17:28 ◼ ► And then it said the door code is one, two, three, four, and showed me the text message where
02:17:50 ◼ ► And my only complaint about the answer is that verbally, cause I'm, and I'm, I did this as
02:17:57 ◼ ► I was walking down the city street to go is I had my AirPods in and the verbal answer from
02:18:21 ◼ ► Mine felt like somebody from like not Canada or, but something like that, where it's like
02:18:45 ◼ ► But it was like, well, this person obviously comes from some weird part of North America
02:19:06 ◼ ► You know, this is what, look, I don't know if you got the shortcuts experience that I did,
02:19:19 ◼ ► I've had a few moments in the last week where I've thought this is actually fulfilling stuff
02:19:32 ◼ ► And it's things like, what if I ask you for information and you figure out where it might
02:19:37 ◼ ► be in search for it and what the search terms might be and look at what the results are and
02:19:44 ◼ ► And with shortcuts, it's like all those dreams, all the way back to hyper talk in hyper card
02:19:50 ◼ ► and Apple script and everything else that's been shortcuts is literally every weekday morning
02:20:14 ◼ ► Even if you talk to Sal Segoian, he will tell you, Mr. Apple script, he will tell you that
02:20:19 ◼ ► ultimately the dream is that a user could just tell their device what it wants from it.
02:21:06 ◼ ► I often leave WWDC with a long list of, oh, shit, I should have asked this question, that question.
02:21:11 ◼ ► I only had like three questions this year on the plane ride home where I'm like, oh, I should have asked that.
02:21:22 ◼ ► And they haven't said, and that's one of my questions for them is, is this one of those things where we might see that in a future beta?
02:21:28 ◼ ► Or is that one of those things where it's like, we're not talking about it, which means it's not going to ship with that?
02:21:31 ◼ ► Clearly, it's a direction that they would go is it should know what apps you've got installed and be able to use them too.
02:21:38 ◼ ► For that, it's kind of like a core part of Siri AI, this idea to have app knowledge, but it's not there yet.
02:21:44 ◼ ► Federico, of course, took the model apart and knows that there's a database and it's of all the actions of all the Apple built apps in the system.
02:21:55 ◼ ► I have a very simple automation that I was comfortable building in shortcuts, which is when my phone connects to my shower speaker because I listen to podcasts in the shower.
02:22:24 ◼ ► In in 27, you can just say when I connect to my shower speaker, put me in do not disturb and you hit return and it says which one of these Bluetooth devices is your shower speaker and you pick it and it says done.
02:22:41 ◼ ► All the automation is attached to the shortcut now instead of being in a separate place.
02:22:45 ◼ ► And like, I don't know, I think it's really exciting because that's the kind of stuff that people have been talking about for like 40 years.
02:22:51 ◼ ► Could you use natural language to control your device where it's intelligent enough to do the programming for you?
02:23:04 ◼ ► It's even it's it's a remarkable aspect of being a human being just looking at us as as machines that even human beings who are on the wrong side of the 50 yard line IQ wise, everybody learns how to talk.
02:23:23 ◼ ► And you could just take a person with low IQ as a baby and just put them in the world and they just listen and they learn they learn how to talk and to understand language.
02:23:39 ◼ ► That's why I said to that stories are the reason the the way of learning things that we either best learn and most enjoy learning.
02:23:57 ◼ ► We really can we can say I would like to be able to just play a podcast and go into do not disturb and here and it'll do it.
02:24:13 ◼ ► And because the shortcuts thing is iterative, you can do the vibe coding thing where you say do this thing and then you can add actually do this thing every day.
02:24:36 ◼ ► And it might be maybe it would have come out this way either way, but it's great that shortcuts has already existed for as long as it has.
02:24:45 ◼ ► And as frustrating as I and many others who are used to typing a programming language find the block-based nature of shortcuts to be just like just the nested if thens and stuff like that.
02:25:00 ◼ ► And this, what's great about it is the new default view of a shortcut in iOS 27 and macOS 27 is you just open the shortcut and it's a shortcut that with a play button and you just play it.
02:25:13 ◼ ► And because I think the assumption is most of them are going to be made by just talking to Siri AI and having it made, but then there's a tab at the top where you can just see the traditional view.
02:25:24 ◼ ► So you don't have to ever look at it, but if you have never really done it or you've just kind of clicked around and you're like, I know that there are so many people building things that they know they would never have made otherwise.
02:25:37 ◼ ► Right, like our friend Adam Lissagore, friend of the show and the guy at Sandwich Video, he's made, I've linked to it, the Hovercraft.
02:25:48 ◼ ► He'd be the first to admit that he isn't a Mac developer and now he's made this Mac app that does a kind of complex thing.
02:25:55 ◼ ► But before you get to using AI to vibe code, a thing that you know you couldn't have made without AI is the first step of, oh, I could make that on my own.
02:26:08 ◼ ► I know I could make that on my own, but I probably I'm not going to carve out the time to do it.
02:26:14 ◼ ► But if I just tell the thing and because, you know, you could build it, you know, it's possible, right?
02:26:21 ◼ ► You know that you could build a shortcut that turns on do not disturb when you go in the shower or when you're playing a podcast.
02:26:26 ◼ ► It's it comes to your mind to build that habit in the same way that I have to build a habit now of remembering, oh, use Siri for that.
02:26:41 ◼ ► But the whole list of things I know shortcut can do, but that I've never taken the time to build a shortcut to do because it seems like it would be a pain in the ass and I wouldn't want to do it.
02:26:53 ◼ ► And if I want to make a small tweak, maybe I won't do it iteratively through the vibe coding.
02:27:08 ◼ ► Like, I don't mean I'm sure somebody out there heard me just rave about typing a thing into shortcuts using Apple's technologies only and was like, come on, Jason.
02:27:25 ◼ ► It's like being a developer requires like a vision and detail and all these things that most people do not want to do.
02:27:35 ◼ ► Simple tasks and shortcuts, I totally think, even then, it's only going to be like 10% of the people are going to want to do even that.
02:27:42 ◼ ► Almost nobody is going to want to do all the work required to get an app when there's a person who's used their brain for weeks or months or years to come up with an app that solves problems, that's listened to the customer needs and has built a good app.
02:27:57 ◼ ► And just because you can vibe code something and you can make something good, most people don't want to do that level of work.
02:28:04 ◼ ► So there is a future for people who care, but I also do think it's amazing that we are seeing, I wrote a piece about this, like how many longtime Mac users are building Mac apps now because they can and they're the ones who care.
02:28:21 ◼ ► And like, that's great that the code is no longer the limitation for them, but be clear, that is a, it's a fraction of a fraction of the user base.
02:28:31 ◼ ► And the shortcuts thing alone, like what I like about it is it's so simple that maybe in the long run, you're just telling Siri, hey, could you do this thing?
02:28:48 ◼ ► And I also think I know that one of the things, you know, and I thought, who knows, I don't know what Apple's going to do at WWDC, especially with developer tools where they can keep it secret is, are they going to have the whole Xcode vibe coding thing for making whole apps?
02:29:04 ◼ ► I mean, there's, there's, there's features, AI features and people, but people are already, developers are already doing it, right?
02:29:14 ◼ ► You can use Cursor, you can use Codex, you can use other people's things to drive Xcode to make Mac apps.
02:29:26 ◼ ► And as a longtime Mac user, Xcode is so not a good normal Mac app that Cloud would say like, hey, you need to click on this thing in Xcode and do this thing for me.
02:29:39 ◼ ► And I felt like such a dummy, but it's like, I am really good at reading Mac user interfaces.
02:29:45 ◼ ► And it's because like, it's in a pane in a tab that has opens another window that has another set of tabs under it.
02:29:54 ◼ ► And that's why I think Apple should make an effort to make it easier to create Mac apps or iOS apps using Vibe coding tools.
02:30:13 ◼ ► But like, I just, I hit a wall with Xcode and I asked Claude to handhold me through it and it did.
02:30:18 ◼ ► But like, I think a quick win to make Apple's development platform that much better for people who have ideas.
02:30:28 ◼ ► Some people have really good ideas for a thing that they want to exist in the world and nobody else makes it.
02:31:08 ◼ ► And I just linked to some young artist who made a super hit song in GarageBand on an iPad when she was in high school, like when she was supposed to be in class.
02:31:35 ◼ ► But I still feel like the shortcuts thing that they did announce and is here to use today in the betas is actually a better first step because it's more people are going to use it because more people have a shortcut scope thing.
02:31:52 ◼ ► I wish I would like a 5 a.m. daily email sent to me with this, this, this, and this from these four sources.
02:32:13 ◼ ► And then you're like, the first day you get one on Saturday, you're like, oh, I forgot.
02:32:59 ◼ ► It's like, I don't mind it now if I can just talk to the damn thing and have it do these things.
02:33:05 ◼ ► Also, I have to say one of my favorite things that happens at WWDC is when there are longstanding
02:33:09 ◼ ► grievances with Apple features and then a new Apple feature requires them to be better,
02:33:14 ◼ ► which in this case, like, yes, if else has not been in existence in shortcuts, which is
02:33:30 ◼ ► And I mean, we all know what happened, right, is that the people who are doing the vibe coding
02:33:48 ◼ ► And I think the one that nobody was surprised by, including the team building Siri AI, is
02:34:10 ◼ ► And so after years where we've all been like, guys, the Spotlight Index isn't very good.
02:34:18 ◼ ► Like, finally, Apple rolls in with Siri AI and they're like, this is all predicated on Spotlight
02:34:27 ◼ ► Because this is one of those ways that computer interfaces in general, it's a very slow transition.
02:34:35 ◼ ► But it was effectively, if you really think about it, very radical, which is in the classic
02:34:53 ◼ ► And it's I'm not just talking about BB edit where you had regular expression searching all
02:35:00 ◼ ► But any app that had search would have a pretty complex list, you know, word processors, everything
02:35:09 ◼ ► that had search almost every time if the app gained any success had a pretty powerful set
02:35:18 ◼ ► And over time, that got reduced to no, there's just an oval in the corner of the window and
02:35:25 ◼ ► And yeah, there are like in Apple Mail, you can type from colon Jason and then you hit return.
02:35:37 ◼ ► I don't want anything that mentioned somebody named Jason just emails from because I don't
02:35:46 ◼ ► You can do that, but now you have to know something that's even nerdier than if they had a little
02:36:17 ◼ ► But all Apple Notes has for search is an oval up in the corner where you start typing and
02:36:28 ◼ ► I know I made an Apple Note telling me how to change the propane tank on the grill or whatever
02:36:48 ◼ ► And it's such a better interface for search because you can just say it in a sentence what
02:37:00 ◼ ► It surfaces the right note in a big pile of notes in a way that the Notes app itself really
02:37:08 ◼ ► This is the best thing maybe about LLMs is this idea that if I tell you what I am trying
02:37:18 ◼ ► to look for, if I type that in a traditional search box, it doesn't find anything, right?
02:37:24 ◼ ► Because it's, oh, oh, you were searching for this word, but conceptually that's right, but
02:38:22 ◼ ► Yeah, that's kind of where I'm going is the next step here after they get the, like maybe
02:38:36 ◼ ► with a couple of pop-ups for things like the from or the subject or the title or whatever
02:38:42 ◼ ► so that I can do a more complex search than just typing words in an oval, make it a Siri
02:38:50 ◼ ► And if I'm typing in the search field in Apple Notes, it can already prompt Siri to be like,
02:39:01 ◼ ► I don't have to type search this notes database for blank, blank, blank about my grill on the
02:39:14 ◼ ► I can't remember feeling one week after WWDC, like I kind of have to, I guess I'm going
02:39:20 ◼ ► to wait for beta two just to have a couple more bugs shake out, but I've got to put this
02:39:53 ◼ ► I can't find a single interface change they have made since last year on any of these platforms
02:40:00 ◼ ► There are some that I think like, I don't really care, but for the most part, every single
02:40:10 ◼ ► I saw Jaws after the keynote and he laughed and he said his favorite moment from the keynote
02:40:16 ◼ ► was when they mentioned the corner radiuses being the same and that everybody laughed and
02:40:42 ◼ ► It's like the only ones that are left by default are ones where it actually does improve the
02:40:50 ◼ ► They just said, you know what, effectively by getting rid of it, they're like, yeah, that
02:40:57 ◼ ► In addition to the fact that I've entire, I'm going to no doubt entirely skip Tahoe, except
02:41:04 ◼ ► now I'm wondering, is it better to upgrade to Tahoe and then upgrade to 27 because the upgrade
02:41:16 ◼ ► But I honestly, I think I'm going to go from skipping an entire year's Mac OS on my main
02:41:36 ◼ ► And I feel like it's not a huge difference, but it's like the decline in the artistic value
02:41:43 ◼ ► of application icons coming from Apple and their direction for the platform bottomed out
02:41:53 ◼ ► It's not to get personal, but I'll say it's as if there was a real change in philosophy in
02:42:20 ◼ ► Feels good about what they showed last week and feels good about the direction they're going.
02:42:48 ◼ ► Six colors, com, and as I always like to note, you can spell colors whichever way you feel
02:43:32 ◼ ► You can even go to sixcolo.rs if you want to, because I give money, I tithe to the Republic
02:43:52 ◼ ► It was during the brief time when link shorteners looked like they were going to be a thing.
02:44:02 ◼ ► Upgrade, of course, is your regular podcast with Mike Hurley and anything else you want
02:44:08 ◼ ► No, I'm very grateful that I got to talk about the new podcast here, and hopefully people
02:44:14 ◼ ► The thing is, we announced it, and then there's WWDC, and then I'm going for my son's graduation
02:44:21 ◼ ► And it's like, only now am I at the point where I'm like, I could actually start working