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350: ‘Your Sack of Meat With Teeth’, With Jason Snell

 

00:00:00   Jason Snell, you know what?

00:00:01   This is the first time in two and a half years that I've been able

00:00:05   to say to a guest on this show.

00:00:07   Boy, it was good to see you recently.

00:00:08   Yeah, it was good.

00:00:10   It was good to see you in person for the first time since I want to say

00:00:15   probably maybe the fall of, of 2019.

00:00:20   I don't, I don't know that I may, I can't remember.

00:00:22   I'd have to look at my notes, but I know that I, we were, we were

00:00:25   both at the Mac book pro briefings.

00:00:28   I believe in the, in New York in the fall of 2019, which was my last Apple briefing.

00:00:33   I'm not sure if we were at the same time.

00:00:35   Yeah, we were, I was there for in New York for that, but I missed the September

00:00:41   iPhone one in 2019 with yet another can't get on an airplane eye surgery in August.

00:00:48   So otherwise it would have been three years ago, WWDC 2019.

00:00:52   Yeah.

00:00:53   And why, why were you in New York for that one?

00:00:57   Because that was where the briefing was.

00:00:59   I've had a couple of those where I get a call from Apple that says, I think

00:01:03   that one, it was even, we're going to have you in Cupertino on a Tuesday.

00:01:07   And I was like, okay.

00:01:08   And then they called back and said, actually, we're going to have

00:01:10   you in Tribeca on a Monday.

00:01:13   And I'm like, okay.

00:01:15   And so then I had to make like plane reservations and hotel reservations and

00:01:18   stuff, but they've done a couple events where they, I think it's tied to the fact

00:01:23   that they do, we've done some interviews with them for upgrade and

00:01:27   the people who they wanted to have as the interviewee, they offered somebody

00:01:31   and said, this is a product manager.

00:01:33   We can have them on your podcast, but you they're going to be in New York.

00:01:37   So you have to come to New York because they usually do like a secondary set of

00:01:40   interviews and briefings in, in Cupertino.

00:01:42   But in this case, the interview we was in New York.

00:01:46   So we went to New York.

00:01:47   I don't know why I have deep sympathy for you having to go to New York, but don't

00:01:53   sympathize with myself for going to California all the time.

00:01:57   We're going to California.

00:01:58   Yeah.

00:01:58   Yeah.

00:01:59   It is, it is weird.

00:02:01   I will say having events out here.

00:02:02   It's kind of funny.

00:02:03   Yeah.

00:02:04   Everybody I know comes out in there in the hotel rooms and stuff like that.

00:02:07   And I'm schlepping up and down from, from home.

00:02:10   And it's just a different feeling when you're at home and there's a thing going

00:02:13   on then when you're kind of all in on travel and you know, you're not, you're

00:02:18   not at home and it's just a different kind of feeling, but, but yeah, I, I, they,

00:02:23   they announced WWDC for media 13 days in advance and obviously flights are very

00:02:30   expensive and you got to get a hotel and all those things.

00:02:32   And I was talking to all my friends about all the logistics about all this stuff.

00:02:36   And then I thought, Oh yeah, I just, I'm going to drive down.

00:02:39   It's just not, I am, there are not many of my peers in doing what we do

00:02:46   who actually are in the Bay Area.

00:02:49   And so it's a, it's kind of a funny, it's a funny thing where I feel kind of bad.

00:02:54   Cause it's like, it's really easy for me.

00:02:55   I talked to Apple PR people and they're like, we're going to do this briefing

00:02:58   in Coopertune.

00:02:58   I'm like, okay, two 80.

00:02:59   It's fine.

00:03:00   I can drive down.

00:03:00   It's okay.

00:03:01   It's yeah.

00:03:02   I, I, I, I do want to talk about the meta aspects of getting back to normalcy, but

00:03:07   one of them is I've completely, not completely, but almost completely lost my

00:03:12   ability to function outside the home.

00:03:14   Like, not that I don't leave the home.

00:03:17   I think that I've been, especially, you know, for me and my family, it's been a

00:03:23   very, very decisive line between being fully vaccinated and not, and once we got

00:03:28   fully vaccinated in March of last year, we really stopped sheltering in place or

00:03:33   whatever you want to call it.

00:03:34   But that said, we took some vacations last summer, but vacations aside, work

00:03:40   travel has always been sort of, well, a limited it's an only started to creep

00:03:46   back up in a few weeks before WWDC.

00:03:48   They're new.

00:03:49   Apple had a briefing for Friday night baseball in New York, which was nice, but

00:03:54   it's not even a day trip for me.

00:03:57   It's like an afternoon trip.

00:03:58   You know, it's a 90 minute train ride up, go to the meeting 90 minute train ride

00:04:03   back to Philly and I'm home for dinner.

00:04:06   So it still feels like I'm somewhat tethered to home.

00:04:10   I really, I should have booked my air travel to WWDC many more weeks in advance

00:04:16   than before Apple made it official, which I do, I realize I do in most years.

00:04:21   I take a good guess as to when WWDC is going to be, even if they haven't

00:04:25   announced dates yet.

00:04:26   And it seemed pretty clear that it was going to be June 7th or whatever it

00:04:31   actually was, my guess would have been correct and I would have got direct

00:04:34   flights, but because I waited until it was official, I only had indirect

00:04:39   flights and it was sort of a disaster.

00:04:42   It's exactly, it reiterates why I go out of my way to only take nonstop flights.

00:04:46   I was supposed to fly.

00:04:48   I did have the foresight to go out on Saturday instead of Sunday.

00:04:53   Oh, usually I fly in on a Sunday if it's a Monday keynote, you know, the day before

00:04:56   and I, you know, just take a morningish flight from the East coast and figure if

00:05:00   something goes wrong, if there's a delay or whatever, I'll just get in late.

00:05:04   But I thought, you know, everybody's saying all these flights are getting

00:05:07   canceled.

00:05:07   Maybe I should go on Saturday just in case.

00:05:10   And it turned out like 20 minutes before my flight, I was supposed to go Philly to

00:05:14   Chicago, Chicago to SFO, 20 minutes before my flight was supposed to start boarding.

00:05:18   It just went from on time to canceled.

00:05:22   Just wasn't delayed.

00:05:24   It was on time.

00:05:25   I just gone through security where there was nobody and the, and my notif- I got a

00:05:30   notification on the phone that, and I had my phone out to go through security and

00:05:34   use the boarding pass on the phone.

00:05:35   So I knew it was fine.

00:05:37   90 seconds later canceled and quickly scrambled to an American desk, rebooked

00:05:42   four hours later that day.

00:05:44   So I did still get there on Saturday, but I did, I didn't get into like, I don't

00:05:47   know, like 1130 at night Pacific time.

00:05:49   It was a very long day and very close to, to being a day late, you know, it was very

00:05:54   close to, you know what, you better go tomorrow.

00:05:57   But yeah, that's the, that's the world we live in.

00:06:00   I mean, it's good.

00:06:01   We got there.

00:06:01   I I'm with you.

00:06:02   I did not have, I'm really out of practice.

00:06:05   It was interesting seeing people, but I had that moment where I'm like, oh yes, I

00:06:08   need to be interacting with humans and looking them in the eye.

00:06:11   And it was because I, I, my wife go work as a librarian.

00:06:18   She goes to the library every day and works with the public.

00:06:20   My son just finished high school.

00:06:22   So he was going to high school every day and dealing with all the high school stuff.

00:06:25   I work in my garage.

00:06:27   So I, even before the pandemic, I was a little bit of a shut-in and then the

00:06:33   pandemic just kind of magnified that.

00:06:35   And so I am way out of practice with seeing other human beings.

00:06:39   I had a, I had a, just a doctor's appointment checkup yesterday and then

00:06:43   went and, and went to the, the local liquor store, basically, and bought

00:06:47   some beer because we were out of beer.

00:06:48   And I, I thought to myself, it's like, how many times have I made multi-stops for

00:06:55   anything outside the house in the last three years?

00:06:58   And the answer is not very many times.

00:07:00   I just don't.

00:07:01   So I'm trying to do it more, but it is, it is being back in that social

00:07:04   atmosphere of an Apple event was a real, it was a kick, but it was also a

00:07:09   reminder of how long it has been since we've had anything like that.

00:07:14   I, one thing I noticed the whole time out there was I've really lost my ability to

00:07:19   keep track of more than two items at once.

00:07:22   I, and I'm not really a leave person, a leave stuff behind person, you know,

00:07:27   like, but during the keynote, I almost left my jacket at my seat and some kind

00:07:32   person was like, Hey, is this your jacket?

00:07:33   And as I was about to wander over to the Steve Jobs theater where the hands-on

00:07:38   area for the media was, I was like, yes, that is my jacket because it was hot and

00:07:43   sunny and so I took my jacket off even though I was in the shade.

00:07:46   It gets, you know, and I wasn't like I had a lot of stuff.

00:07:49   I just had like a water bottle and my bag with my laptop and notebook in it.

00:07:55   And that was enough though.

00:07:56   I had the water bottle, had the bag, left the jacket.

00:07:59   And I found myself nearly doing that at every step of the way as I went about.

00:08:04   Like if I couldn't have it in, I had like one thing in my left hand, one thing in my

00:08:08   right hand and anything else, couldn't remember it.

00:08:11   Very strange.

00:08:12   Yeah.

00:08:13   Well, you get out of habit of all of that stuff.

00:08:16   I had to have the exact same thing, which is like, you know, I'm walking over here.

00:08:19   I'm going to go see these people.

00:08:20   I'm going to, you know, I've got to make sure that I've got the stuff with me.

00:08:23   And do I have packing for the, for the day was also like, like what do I need?

00:08:28   And what do I not need?

00:08:29   And it was all just like, I know how to do this, but I'm way out of practice.

00:08:34   And, and these are not little scripts that I've been running in my head all this time.

00:08:38   And so I've got to get back to it.

00:08:39   I did, I did have one funny thing that I want to share, and I know Apple doesn't

00:08:43   love a lot of the inside baseball stuff, but this is, this is little, and it's a

00:08:46   little fun, you know, they don't like the magic is don't talk about PR, but I did

00:08:50   have a funny moment where they did a bunch of briefings and I saw you there in

00:08:53   shadow with you at the Steve jobs theater where they have a briefing center.

00:08:56   They built it there, even though the event wasn't at the theater, the briefings were

00:08:59   there and I got a text from Apple PR person saying, Jason, can you come to the

00:09:04   entrance to Apple park so I can take you to your briefing?

00:09:07   And I texted her and I said, I'm sitting in the, in the.

00:09:10   See jobs theater.

00:09:11   Is this where I need to be?

00:09:13   And she was like, oh yeah, nevermind.

00:09:15   And it was just a funny moment where they're also kind of getting up to speed on it.

00:09:18   And they had obviously there you have to usher you in.

00:09:21   If you're outside of Apple park, they have to usher you in and vouch for you in order

00:09:24   for you to get inside and then they can send you to the theater.

00:09:27   They walk you to the theater.

00:09:28   And so I know why they did it that way, but it was just kind of funny.

00:09:31   Cause they, they didn't have it so wired that they like knew that I was already

00:09:37   waiting for a different briefing and therefore didn't need to be sort of

00:09:40   brought out and brought back in.

00:09:41   Yeah.

00:09:42   It was just, you know, we're all getting up to speed.

00:09:43   It was all dead briefings.

00:09:45   It all went very well.

00:09:47   I'd, you know, give Apple, I'd give them an a plus for everything that

00:09:51   had to go right for this to work.

00:09:53   Absolutely.

00:09:54   They did such a good job and, and, you know, and everything to go right.

00:09:57   I think I could be proven wrong.

00:09:59   Maybe somebody at Apple would say something different, but my sense when I

00:10:02   was there and before was, I don't think having people in the ring was ever part

00:10:09   of the plan, right?

00:10:10   Like the whole layout of the Steve jobs theater, you come in at Tantau Avenue

00:10:16   to the entranceway, their little like guard station where that PR person

00:10:19   wanted me to go and you turn left to go to the Steve jobs theater and

00:10:22   you turn right to go to the right.

00:10:24   And so they built Steve jobs theater on the corner of the campus away from

00:10:29   everything else and filled it with briefing rooms and the theater itself

00:10:33   and the showcase area and all those things.

00:10:35   It was built for these kinds of events and COVID happens and they're like,

00:10:39   oh, we really need to do it outside.

00:10:41   Well, you know, we, we can't count on having a big indoor audience.

00:10:44   And, and so they, to their credit, they said, you know what, let's, somebody

00:10:49   said, it's okay to have civilians.

00:10:51   In the ring, or at least at the edge of the ring, we can do this at cafe max and

00:10:57   put up a screen and we can show off our campus and, and this is the funny thing

00:11:02   is I don't think it was ever part of the original plan, but it was spectacular.

00:11:06   It really, they, they carried it off really well.

00:11:08   And that building is so amazing that to get.

00:11:12   Us like I've never been anywhere near it.

00:11:15   I've only ever turned left, gone to the Steve jobs theater.

00:11:18   So it, I don't think it was their plan, but it all worked out for them.

00:11:22   It was kind of neat being inside.

00:11:25   I've been close.

00:11:26   There was an event a couple of years ago where I think it definitely

00:11:30   involved a new Apple watch.

00:11:32   I don't know if it was probably like 2019, maybe 2018, something like that.

00:11:36   Where part of the media tour was to go to their fitness center, which is, I

00:11:42   couldn't tell you on a map, but I mean, I actually, I guess if you look at

00:11:45   Apple maps, it would show you, but it's similarly, I think it's the opposite

00:11:49   side of the camp of the square from the Steve jobs theater, but it is similarly

00:11:53   in a corner, but they insisted on everybody taking golf carts and I was

00:11:57   like, I could walk in there.

00:11:58   A couple other of us who were like, Hey, you know, we're from the East coast,

00:12:01   you know, we're enjoying this weather.

00:12:03   We can walk in there.

00:12:04   Like, please take a cart.

00:12:05   And it's like, okay, I get it.

00:12:06   You don't, you don't want us wandering around.

00:12:08   I get it.

00:12:09   It's not really for our wear and tear on our shoes.

00:12:13   It is, you don't want us wandering around.

00:12:15   So, okay, I'll take it.

00:12:16   But at some point that it took us right by the main ring building.

00:12:21   And so I was like on the pathway right around it and sort of saw the scope.

00:12:24   I mean, that's the one thing I, I can only compare it to like Disney world and

00:12:29   the way that Disney very famously plays perspective tricks to make things look

00:12:37   bigger or smaller, like the main street in Disneyland and Disney world and the

00:12:41   Magic Kingdom and all the other parks around the world.

00:12:45   They, they make the second floor of the buildings smaller than the first floor,

00:12:52   which makes, but, but use perspective tricks to make them seem normal size.

00:12:57   So it looks to you like you're walking down a street of two story buildings, but

00:13:01   they're really more like one and a half story high so that they don't interfere

00:13:06   with the sight lines from other parts of the park and vice versa.

00:13:09   They do tricks to make the castle in the center seem bigger

00:13:12   than it really is, et cetera.

00:13:14   I think that Apple very much has done the same thing with the ring building

00:13:18   where it is a very humble appearance.

00:13:22   It wouldn't make any sense.

00:13:23   And I'm sure zoning wise, it just wouldn't even be allowed in Cupertino.

00:13:27   It doesn't make any sense to build it as a skyscraper, which is what most single

00:13:32   building corporate headquarters of the last 100 plus years are like the Chrysler

00:13:37   building, the Sears Tower in Chicago.

00:13:39   It doesn't make sense to build a skyscraper in Cupertino, but if you took

00:13:43   the ring and just, you know, straightened it out and put it up end to end, it

00:13:49   would be a very high skyscraper.

00:13:51   It is a big building.

00:13:52   You can kind of, you know, just do some simple math about square footage and

00:13:55   think, wow, it is a big building.

00:13:57   But when you see pictures of it, it just looks low to the ground, very humble.

00:14:02   Being next, whatever your mental image is of the ring building, double in size.

00:14:08   Like that's how I felt.

00:14:09   It's like, I thought I knew how big it was and I was not even remotely close.

00:14:13   I couldn't believe it.

00:14:14   Like the, the, the area they had for the media to get coffee, Danish water,

00:14:19   whatever else before the keynote was on the second floor, but it took

00:14:23   four flights of stairs to get there.

00:14:25   Right.

00:14:27   It's like, well, that's cause cafe max is open air.

00:14:30   And so I think that there's like a floor that is not there for that.

00:14:34   And then you're overlooking it, but it's yeah, it's a huge space.

00:14:36   And then there's still more floors above.

00:14:38   We were in like the little balcony, essentially overlooking cafe max for that.

00:14:42   And it was all, and it's all like an Apple store.

00:14:44   I mean, that's the, that's the thing.

00:14:45   Like I expected this, but it's still, it's one thing to see it where it's

00:14:48   like literally the stairs they've got the handrails, just like at the Steve

00:14:52   Jobs theater, they're incredible attention to detail, all the wood is that

00:14:55   kind of light wood from the Apple store.

00:14:57   It's an enormous facility where every single bit of it, other than the elevator

00:15:01   in the parking garage with the buttons that are misaligned, your favorite feature.

00:15:04   And when you're inside, it's all like super high attention to detail

00:15:07   at every turn in around every corner.

00:15:09   It is the world's largest Apple store.

00:15:12   It's what it is.

00:15:13   It's amazing.

00:15:13   Did you, I think cable Sasser, of course, who I actually ran into there.

00:15:17   He was attending and it was so good to see him.

00:15:19   But he had a Twitter thread about it that all the elevators in Apple

00:15:24   Park are there's like, there's Otis and some other company in the U S that

00:15:28   make like, I don't know, probably almost every elevator that's of use in the

00:15:32   United States, but outside the U S especially in Asia, I think it's Mitsubishi

00:15:37   who of course makes like everything.

00:15:38   It's like a typical Japanese conglomerate where they make everything from

00:15:42   like toasters to cars, to elevators.

00:15:44   Apple of course got their elevators because they're generally regarded

00:15:48   as the best elevators in the world.

00:15:50   And one of the features that they have standard, it's not just special

00:15:54   for Apple, but it's a mystery.

00:15:55   I think it's Mitsubishi, but whatever the company is, if you press a button by

00:15:59   accident and you didn't mean to go there, like let's say you get in on ground

00:16:02   floor one and you want to go to four, but you press three by accident.

00:16:07   Well, in a U S elevator, guess what the door is going to open on three you're

00:16:12   stuck, but in a Mitsubishi elevator, if you press the button by accident, you can

00:16:16   double press it and it'll it'll unstick.

00:16:18   It'll go away, which is a neat feature.

00:16:21   They're also very smooth elevators and that's, they have like glass

00:16:25   doors to show off.

00:16:26   They, they look good, right?

00:16:28   Like the, it's almost like the old see-through iMac from 1998.

00:16:32   Like, Hey, the inside is so cool.

00:16:34   We want to show it to you.

00:16:35   It's like, you can kind of, it's like the, here, you can see the wheels and

00:16:39   the cables of the elevator system while you're waiting because they're so pretty.

00:16:42   I also noticed that all of the buttons, the little signs, whatever legal

00:16:49   stuff has to go inside an elevator.

00:16:51   It's all typeset in San Francisco.

00:16:53   Of course.

00:16:54   Of course it is.

00:16:55   That's, that's the thing is that that's what actually makes the weird misaligned

00:16:59   thing in the sub basement parking garage.

00:17:01   So funny is like very clearly a line was drawn.

00:17:05   That's like, we don't care beyond this point, but everything on the inside, they

00:17:09   care so much about things that, that most companies wouldn't care about.

00:17:12   And I know it's silly.

00:17:13   I mean, it's just, it's a corporate facility.

00:17:15   It is what it is, but they, they it's very Apple in its way.

00:17:18   And I did have that moment when I was sitting there.

00:17:20   We've, we've all thought about how Apple park is sort of Steve jobs, his last

00:17:25   product and, and Steve jobs and Johnny Ives last collaboration.

00:17:28   And I, I took a moment while I was thinking about it.

00:17:30   Be like, yeah, I can see it.

00:17:31   Like it is, I'm glad we got that experience to go in there.

00:17:35   Cause like I said, I'm not sure they ever really wanted outsiders.

00:17:39   A large group of outsiders to be at Apple park, but I'm glad I got to see it.

00:17:45   Cause it is a fascinating look into sort of like, not only this thing, we talk

00:17:49   about all the time, but also that the, into the last collaboration of, of Steve and

00:17:54   Johnny.

00:17:54   Yeah, because they really did build it from scratch.

00:17:57   I mean, they just built a whole, bought a whole lot of land that I think all of, I

00:18:01   don't know if all of it or most of it was previously owned by Hewlett Packard, but

00:18:05   raised it, did all the landscaping.

00:18:08   It is truly, you know, Disney ask in its control of everything from the sightlines

00:18:13   to the, the greenery to just every aspect of it was designed and is, is the way it

00:18:21   is for better or for worse by intention.

00:18:24   And it, to me does give insight into the company's culture.

00:18:28   It is a manifestation of the jobs, the Ivy collaboration and the, the sort of state

00:18:37   of the company when it was, when it was constructed.

00:18:39   And I would say one thing you talk about Disneyland.

00:18:43   One of the things that struck me, I was talking to David Sparks, who obviously

00:18:46   spends a lot of time at Disneyland.

00:18:47   The, one of the perspective things that they do is the way that the, the building

00:18:52   is situated.

00:18:53   When you look out at the interior of the ring, all you see other than the trees at

00:18:58   the interior of the ring and the rainbow stage and all of that is the other side of

00:19:01   the ring.

00:19:02   And then the Hills in the background.

00:19:04   And, and you are, when you are there, you feel very much like there's nothing around

00:19:10   you.

00:19:10   When Steve Jobs said it, it's like a spaceship landed when you're at the ring.

00:19:14   It's a little bit like you are in a spaceship that just landed and there's no

00:19:18   world outside of that space.

00:19:21   And I think that's very intentional.

00:19:22   So you can't see, they're not like other buildings you see outside.

00:19:25   Like the, the ring is high enough that.

00:19:27   That, uh, from at least ground level in the first few floors, all you can really see

00:19:33   is the ring and the Hills beyond.

00:19:35   And that's about it.

00:19:36   There's no city, you know, there's no city views there.

00:19:38   They're all blocked by that giant ring.

00:19:40   And the trees on the outside block it too.

00:19:41   It's it's right.

00:19:42   So it is, you know, kind of a world away and you can say positive or negative things

00:19:46   about that.

00:19:46   You can say it's isolated.

00:19:47   Are they trying to cut themselves off from the world, but, or are they trying to create

00:19:51   a beautiful space for their people to do their best work?

00:19:53   I'm struck.

00:19:54   I grew up in the countryside.

00:19:55   We had 45 acres in the middle of nowhere.

00:19:58   And I believe the interior of the ring is larger than the property that I grew up on.

00:20:03   And it's again, one of those things where you don't think about how big it is.

00:20:07   And then you're there and you realize, no, that's an enormous space on the inside of the

00:20:12   ring, let alone all the space on the outside.

00:20:14   So I'm glad I, I'm glad I got to see it because the pictures don't really do it justice.

00:20:19   Yeah, you really have to experience it.

00:20:21   You really do.

00:20:22   And it really was something to see.

00:20:23   I have to say one of the things that's so incongruous to me as somebody who lives in the

00:20:30   middle of a city and really does not drive very much at all is how Cupertino itself, I

00:20:38   stayed at a hotel.

00:20:39   I did.

00:20:39   One of the weird things is I didn't know where to stay.

00:20:41   So I just booked a Hilton that's literally across the street from Apple Park, but it's the

00:20:45   opposite side of Apple Park as the visitor center.

00:20:49   So it's, it's amazing because you'd get to the street outside the hotel I stayed at and you

00:20:54   can even see the ring.

00:20:55   It's right there.

00:20:56   It's right across one street.

00:20:58   Yep.

00:20:58   And not really walkable.

00:21:00   It is, Cupertino is not a walking city.

00:21:04   It is a driving city.

00:21:06   It is very California in that regard.

00:21:08   Even calling it a city is, I mean, it is technically, but the truth is, and this is for

00:21:14   people who have not been to Silicon Valley or spent a lot of time there.

00:21:18   It's this area with suburbs and it still is basically like suburbs.

00:21:23   There, there is, so you turn it's Wolf Road and Tan Tao, and then I forget, is it, is it

00:21:28   Homestead that's in between them that you'd make a turn on, but like literally you're on the

00:21:32   street that Apple Park on one side of you as you're driving to the Tan Tao visitor center on

00:21:36   one side of you is the metal fence and the giant berm and all the trees.

00:21:41   And then behind it is the ring, right?

00:21:42   On the other side of the street are houses, literally single family homes sitting on that

00:21:49   street.

00:21:50   And this is the great, and where do you find a hotel?

00:21:54   Where is there a restaurant?

00:21:55   There are, there are like a couple of restaurants and a hotel where you stayed.

00:21:58   There's nothing on the other side at all.

00:22:00   There's no downtown per se.

00:22:02   And it's all because this is just a suburb that's had, it's not urban, it's suburban.

00:22:07   And I think as a result, Silicon Valley culture is very much like, well, we need to

00:22:12   provide for our employees because like the places that I've worked in cities have generally

00:22:17   had, like you just go out to lunch and like all the stuff is out in the city.

00:22:22   So you don't, we don't need to provide it.

00:22:23   In the suburbs, you kind of need to provide it.

00:22:25   And so you get that insular campus kind of thing that happens in a lot of Silicon Valley

00:22:30   companies and including Apple.

00:22:32   It is weird though, coming from WWDCs in San Francisco and San Jose, that like, where do

00:22:38   you stay?

00:22:39   We stayed in Sunnyvale, which is just north, a couple of miles north of Apple park.

00:22:43   And there is like a shopping center and stuff around there.

00:22:45   So I was able to get dinner and stuff like that.

00:22:47   But again, and Sunnyvale has a little downtown, but really it's the burbs.

00:22:52   And like, if you think San Jose is a sleepy city, it is, but at least it's a city.

00:22:57   Cupertino, I mean, again, it's just, it's just not, it's a suburb with a bunch of

00:23:01   corporate campuses in it.

00:23:02   And, and it's, it's weird.

00:23:04   It's different.

00:23:05   It's not what you would expect if Apple had, I'm not sure they ever would have done

00:23:09   this, but if Apple had said, no, we're going to be like Twitter, we're going to go to

00:23:12   downtown San Francisco.

00:23:14   It would be a very different kind of vibe, but they're, they're not, they're a, they're

00:23:19   a classic Cupertino company and they have most of the, most of the buildings in

00:23:23   Cupertino, my understanding are Apple offices even now, because they have so many

00:23:28   employees.

00:23:29   It is the incongruity to me is that as unwalkable or not clearly not meant to be

00:23:35   walked as all of Cupertino is the actual Apple park campus is clearly designed for

00:23:41   walking both inside the ring and then outside the ring to go there's foot paths and

00:23:47   hills and you know, it, that it really was clearly informed famously Steve Jobs liked

00:23:54   to take people if he had something to say, he'd say, let's go on a walk and, you know,

00:23:58   employees, Walt Mossberg, other people, this is what he liked to do clearly was.

00:24:02   And he lived in a kind of hilly, more, more rural part of still not very far from

00:24:07   Silicon Valley, but a little town kind of off on the outskirts where they could, where

00:24:11   they had that.

00:24:12   And so it is replicating that you're totally right.

00:24:13   If you want to go for a walk by yourself and you work at Apple just to clear your

00:24:18   head, gather your thoughts.

00:24:19   It is wonderful for that.

00:24:20   If you want to go for a walk with with a colleague or two colleagues and talk out an

00:24:26   issue or something like that, it is truly wonderful for that quiet, isolated and locks

00:24:31   in.

00:24:31   Yeah.

00:24:32   You know, it and once you're walking around inside, you don't feel like you're at a

00:24:36   place where literally thousands of your colleagues all work at the same time.

00:24:40   You really feel like you're on your own.

00:24:42   It is, it's remarkable.

00:24:44   It's, it's really something to see.

00:24:45   I don't know if it didn't feel very populated.

00:24:48   I think some of that is the pandemic, right?

00:24:50   And we were there on an event day, so probably even fewer people were there who were not

00:24:54   part of the event management, but I would imagine it's so huge that even if it was

00:24:58   fully packed with people, it would be, it's so huge that you could, you could get away,

00:25:03   you know, down a path, past some trees and clear your head a little bit.

00:25:07   It's yeah, it's, it's very interesting, very interesting design and a very interesting

00:25:13   use use of space.

00:25:14   And the building is not small, right?

00:25:15   But it is, they did make a point of having all that open space and all those trees.

00:25:19   And it's yeah, it's, it's, it's a landmark.

00:25:22   I mean, it's already a landmark.

00:25:23   When I was coming in, I flew in from, I forget where I'm visiting my mom.

00:25:26   Maybe I flew into SFO and like, you can't miss it as you're flying in.

00:25:31   Like there's nothing like it.

00:25:32   There's city grids and suburban grids, and then there's this ring with trees.

00:25:37   It's it's like nothing else.

00:25:39   All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor.

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00:26:39   Before we move on to the actual content of the show, I will say this.

00:26:42   It was weird.

00:26:42   One of the cool things I have, like, it clarified to me, to me, they blurred

00:26:47   together my circles of Apple event friends, right?

00:26:51   But the event was very, it's like the prototypical guy who goes to the

00:26:56   gym and only works on his arms and his legs remain like toothpicks.

00:26:59   It's like my media friends were all there, right?

00:27:04   And for all of the sort of, Hey, they only announced it 10 or 11 days in advance.

00:27:09   And there seemed like a bit of a down low and the actual email invitations

00:27:12   that everybody in the media got.

00:27:14   Weren't about attending in person.

00:27:17   They were like, here, watch online on Monday, you know, 10 AM or whatever time

00:27:21   it, or 1 PM Eastern, 10 AM Pacific.

00:27:24   Yep.

00:27:25   But then they called everybody.

00:27:26   It seemed like they called everybody, everybody I know in the media, you

00:27:29   know, friends, acquaintances, it seemed like everybody was there and

00:27:33   it was so good to see everybody.

00:27:34   And I have another smaller, much smaller circle of friends of people who work at

00:27:40   Apple, who I often run into at WWDC.

00:27:44   I ran into several of them and it was good to see them.

00:27:47   But most of my developer friends weren't there.

00:27:50   Most of the people I know who were developers either didn't enter the lottery

00:27:54   to get those special day passes or entered and weren't selected.

00:28:00   Cause I, it sounds like there were only about a thousand of them from around

00:28:03   the world as opposed to the 5,000 attendees at a traditional in-person WWDC.

00:28:10   In a convention center.

00:28:12   And that seemed weird.

00:28:13   It was like, so good to see everybody.

00:28:14   It's like, Hey, how come everybody I'm running into is in the media?

00:28:17   Oh yeah.

00:28:17   Cause that's the only people who are here.

00:28:18   It is.

00:28:20   I mean, and I think this is the future.

00:28:24   Who knows, but this feels like a model for them for the future.

00:28:27   Perhaps it'll be at the Steve jobs theater next year.

00:28:29   Right.

00:28:29   I think they would like to get it in the theater because that's why they built it.

00:28:32   But the model is WWDC is online.

00:28:35   There's a media event because the keynote is always a media event.

00:28:39   It's not just for developers.

00:28:40   In fact, I don't know if you noticed, but in the keynote, they refer to developers

00:28:45   in the state of the union, they refer to you and it's like literally the state

00:28:49   of the union is for developers.

00:28:51   The keynote is about developers sort of, but not, but it's for everybody.

00:28:57   And so that's a media event.

00:28:59   So of course we were all there for the media because we're the media event people.

00:29:02   We come for that.

00:29:03   And then they had their small group of developers, which was great.

00:29:06   And like, you can still make it the trip of a lifetime.

00:29:08   I got to go to Cupertino.

00:29:09   I got to see the ring.

00:29:10   It wasn't that great.

00:29:11   And, and it gives Apple a, an excited audience that may be in a theater live

00:29:15   setting would be really great for applause and things like that, whether it was at

00:29:18   the theater or whether it was just outside again, but I feel like that

00:29:21   that's a good mixture and they've got their developer center, right?

00:29:24   That's a good mixture to have.

00:29:26   And the truth is if you think about it, it's like, yeah, it's not the 5,000

00:29:30   people or whatever who came to San Jose.

00:29:32   But the truth is whether it's a thousand people or 500 people or 5,000 people who

00:29:37   go as developers, it's still just a, how many nines after 99.9% of Apple

00:29:45   developers are watching online.

00:29:46   Like you will never get a representative sample because unless you did it like a

00:29:51   stadium and even then you wouldn't really.

00:29:53   So what you really want is have the opportunity for some developers, key

00:29:58   developers and lucky developers to come and make the pilgrimage and have that

00:30:02   moment to be really excited, get the media there for your event.

00:30:06   And then the rest of the world gets the sessions as videos.

00:30:09   And that's not a bad package.

00:30:12   I think they, I think this was really viable for the future of this conference.

00:30:16   Yeah, I know.

00:30:17   And it's funny because Apple famously, I don't know if you know this, but Apple

00:30:20   often seems not to want to speak about the future, but they, they didn't say

00:30:25   anything.

00:30:25   Nobody told me anything off the record about like what they planned to do long

00:30:29   term, but just what they did say about how they thought this was going and what

00:30:34   they thought about the future was surprisingly forthright that the actual

00:30:39   content, the sessions of WWDC almost certainly, I mean, I would say in 99.9%

00:30:49   sure, are going to be like this forevermore that this is, this is just a total

00:30:54   win for everybody involved.

00:30:56   It's better because all developers around the world get the same access to the

00:31:01   sessions.

00:31:01   It is better for the Apple employees who present them because they, they're all

00:31:07   filmed in advance and it removes any sort of stage fear of public speaking, you

00:31:13   know, that, that, that you, you know, you can rehearse, rehearse, rehearse in front

00:31:16   of, you know, your colleagues, and then all of a sudden you're on stage in front of

00:31:20   hundreds of, or maybe thousands for certain sessions, attendees speaking, you

00:31:26   know, and you've never spoken in front of more than a few dozen people before it.

00:31:30   Now there's 500 people in front of you.

00:31:31   It's different.

00:31:32   In my time going to old WWDCs, the speakers from Apple were always, you know,

00:31:37   very good.

00:31:37   It wasn't like there was a lot of, Ooh, that person really was scared up there,

00:31:40   but it's easier this way.

00:31:42   I think I also think the actual, what you get on the video is just better when it

00:31:47   was meant for video than when it was presented on a stage.

00:31:51   It's just, they're just better.

00:31:53   And, and there's no going,

00:31:55   I was going to mention time slots, right?

00:31:57   Like that used to be, you had to fill a 30 minute or 60 minute time slot and

00:32:00   sometimes they'd put different groups together and be a mishmash or you get a

00:32:03   session that would be short and then you'd be like, well, what do I do for the

00:32:06   next half hour?

00:32:07   And these sessions, if it only, if it only needs to be 12 minutes long, it's 12

00:32:12   minutes long.

00:32:12   And then you move on.

00:32:13   If it needs to be 45 minutes long, it's 45 minutes long.

00:32:16   And then they go in the archive where they can be viewed forever at your leisure

00:32:20   for reference.

00:32:21   It's, it's just, it's better in every conceivable way, I guess, other than the

00:32:26   fact that there's no interaction, but you know, Apple took interactivity out of WWDC

00:32:30   like 10 years ago.

00:32:31   There used to be feedback sessions.

00:32:33   There used to be Q and A at the end of sessions.

00:32:35   And for the last, you know, five or 10 years there, there's no interactivity in

00:32:40   the sessions themselves.

00:32:41   So at that point, this is, if you're going to not have interactivity in the sessions,

00:32:46   they've got other ways that they do that.

00:32:47   Now, this is way, way better all the way.

00:32:50   Have you ever been to a WWDC where you've gone into a session saying, I'm really

00:32:53   excited about this and you get five minutes in and they put up the code and as

00:32:57   a media person, you're like, I want the big picture, but I'm not a developer.

00:33:00   And you're like, damn it.

00:33:01   Now I got to get out of here.

00:33:02   And is there another session going on and what did I miss and can I get in or is it

00:33:07   full?

00:33:07   Like get all of that out of here.

00:33:09   Like we don't need any of that.

00:33:10   And you don't want to be the only person getting up to leave, you know?

00:33:13   You know, I've done that.

00:33:16   I've absolutely done that.

00:33:17   It's like, oh, look, now the code has come out.

00:33:19   Goodbye.

00:33:19   It is.

00:33:20   It's one of those things.

00:33:21   I would just wait and see somebody else leave.

00:33:23   Okay.

00:33:24   Somebody else left out.

00:33:24   Now I can get up and leave.

00:33:25   No, no, I can, now I can get, now I'm not leaving in a huff.

00:33:28   I'm just part of the crowd that's leaving.

00:33:30   Well, the truth is, I mean, this is a weird thing about being a, a, a media

00:33:33   person covering a developer conference is we're there for the most part, you know,

00:33:39   if you're John Saracusa, you might have an app or two that you're thinking of,

00:33:42   but, uh, most of us are there for the big picture about like what's new in the

00:33:46   OS and how does it work?

00:33:47   And a lot of these sessions are fantastic, especially now that they're on video,

00:33:51   because you can glean like how it works.

00:33:54   And then they like say, we'll dive into the code now and, and, and.

00:33:57   Then it's less interesting to us.

00:34:00   It's great for developers and it's not for us, but there's

00:34:02   so much that can be gleaned.

00:34:03   I love watching developer sessions because you learn how it works and

00:34:09   can explain that to your audience without actually needing to know how

00:34:13   to build it because I don't, I don't need that part.

00:34:15   I just need to know how it works.

00:34:16   I remember that was one of my favorite sessions of all time was when they

00:34:19   introduced time machine and they did a session about time machine and they

00:34:23   got to the code eventually and I had to run away, but it was the only place

00:34:28   they explained the whole time ever in public at that conference.

00:34:33   How does this new feature actually work?

00:34:35   And it was so great.

00:34:36   Cause then people would say, how does this time machine thing works?

00:34:38   And I said, well, I couldn't build you an app, but I know how it works.

00:34:42   And that's, that's what I love about WWDC is, is the, the, the little

00:34:46   details that you get in those sessions.

00:34:48   I do think it's just interesting because they obviously did not need to do this.

00:34:53   I mean, and they could have done something much smaller with the media only.

00:34:57   They certainly didn't need to invite a thousand developers from around the

00:35:00   world to be there and do this big thing outside.

00:35:02   And like you said, I really don't think that when Johnny Ive and the

00:35:08   architects envisioned that space, whatever, I don't know if that I have,

00:35:12   generally have a poor sense of north, south, east, west, whatever side of the

00:35:15   ring that of the lawn they used for the, it seemed like more than a thousand.

00:35:20   Cause all thousand invitees were there, but then there were hundreds and

00:35:24   hundreds, maybe even an extra thousand people who were inside the ring with the

00:35:29   doors open viewing on additional screens.

00:35:32   I think those were largely Apple employees who were watching live, but.

00:35:36   Seemed like at least, you know, ballpark, there were 2000 people watching live.

00:35:40   That space, I don't think was ever envisioned for that yet.

00:35:43   It did not seem retrofitted for it at all while I was there.

00:35:49   It seemed like this is perfect.

00:35:50   This is perfect.

00:35:50   And I mean, so I could imagine that the answer is next year, it'll be another

00:35:54   thousand invitees, same space, same number of people.

00:35:58   Maybe they'd invite a few hundred more and, and widen.

00:36:02   It seemed like they could have widened it a little.

00:36:05   You know, there was some kind of.

00:36:06   Spitball math that they did with regard to COVID precautions, you know, in terms

00:36:13   of how many people they really wanted there and how many people they could handle.

00:36:17   But I really do think at the same time, I know I'm just reiterating a point.

00:36:20   You made a space that was never designed to be used that way.

00:36:24   Seemed perfect to be used that way.

00:36:26   It's yeah, I think the only, the only question I would have is do they want

00:36:31   ultimately to have everything be a video, a pre entirely pre-produced video, or

00:36:36   would they like to get back to the media event that has a live component for the

00:36:42   audience because we were watching, it was a watch along, right?

00:36:45   Like Tim and.

00:36:45   And Craig came out at the beginning to it live and said, Hey, we're

00:36:49   going to show you a video.

00:36:50   Now it was like going to comic con or something, right?

00:36:53   And then they were, now we're going to play the video or a film

00:36:55   festival or something like that.

00:36:56   Would they.

00:36:58   Do they like the idea of doing a live event so much that even if their media

00:37:02   event has a lot of pre-taped stuff in it, would they like to go back to having the

00:37:06   basics of it and the intros of the segments and the high level stuff beyond

00:37:10   the stage at the Steve jobs theater.

00:37:11   And then play those bits.

00:37:14   And if they do that right, like that's the theater is a better venue for that

00:37:18   probably than outdoors, although they could do it outdoors.

00:37:22   So that's the only question I've got is what do they want their media events to be

00:37:25   like ultimately, and do they want them to be entirely pre-taped or do they

00:37:28   want a little live element to it?

00:37:31   That that's the mystery because otherwise, yeah, they could totally just repeat what

00:37:33   they did this year and it would work.

00:37:35   Fine.

00:37:35   The big difference.

00:37:36   The keynote is obviously different.

00:37:38   And, and I've said this multiple times over the last two years of COVID that

00:37:42   effectively they've, they've created their own branded TV show, an episodic

00:37:48   continuing series of shows that don't, doesn't really have a name.

00:37:53   It's just Apple keynotes in the COVID era where there's no live audience.

00:37:57   But if you watch them or just go back and just watch the opening five minutes of a

00:38:01   bunch of them right from the first one, which I think was WWDC 2020, or maybe,

00:38:07   maybe the, I guess technically the first one would be the, the sort of really

00:38:13   almost emergency event in April of that year when they, when they unveiled the

00:38:18   magic keyboard for iPad and the trackpad support in iPadOS, which didn't have the

00:38:24   full flavor of the, these events and, and the, the branding of the show where,

00:38:31   where they zip around parts of Apple park, you know, and transition and, and

00:38:37   warp from, Oh, we're up upstairs in the Steve Jobs theater.

00:38:41   Now we're going underground to Johnny Suruji's secret lab, which we're

00:38:46   pretending is, you know, in some kind of, you know, a bomb bunker, but they're very

00:38:51   consistent with those transitions in the way that TV episode, TV shows always have

00:38:56   the same feel, you know, like an episode of the X-Files feels like an episode of

00:39:00   the X-Files, like you could just tune into an X-Files rerun.

00:39:04   And even if it's not showing Scully and Mulder, but you know, the characters of

00:39:09   the episode, you could like, Oh yeah, I'm watching the X-Files cause you just, you

00:39:12   know, just the music and the feel of it.

00:39:14   The WWDC, even if they want to stick with that for the most part, and I think they

00:39:19   will to some regard, WWDC is different because it's the only event left on

00:39:24   Apple's calendar now that Mac world expo is a decade dead, where there's a live

00:39:30   audience filled with actual people, right?

00:39:34   People who will, people who are like regular people who will cheer and be a

00:39:38   good studio audience for sure.

00:39:40   Whereas the media are bad at that.

00:39:43   And so they pack it with, they pack the theater with VIPs and Apple employees who

00:39:46   will cheer because the media aren't cheering so much, but the developers are

00:39:50   right now that expo is gone and you can't get a ticket to an Apple keynote.

00:39:54   The only way you get a ticket to an Apple keynote now is to be a developer

00:39:57   and win the lottery essentially.

00:39:59   And they're a good audience and it is good theater to do that.

00:40:03   I wonder, I don't know if you remember, you're a little younger than me, but

00:40:06   Saturday Night Live back in the early eighties, when Lorne Michaels left, Dick

00:40:11   Ebersole came in and he, this is TV trivia, but they did a lot of pre recorded

00:40:16   stuff on Saturday Night Live, which was very controversial at the time because

00:40:19   it was live, it was a live show.

00:40:21   And suddenly Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest and all these people are doing,

00:40:24   Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy are doing filmed segments that they do during the

00:40:28   week essentially, and then they run them during the show and it's not live.

00:40:32   And I've been thinking about that because that, that is kind of my question is what

00:40:36   does Apple want it to be?

00:40:37   A completely not live pre-taped thing that has a lot of advantages, including the

00:40:41   music and the transitions and all of that and the classic Steve Jobs, live on stage,

00:40:47   cheering people in the audience kind of thing.

00:40:49   And it's like, I don't know how addicted they are to that kind of stagecraft, but I

00:40:53   can see there being a hybrid where it's a live show, right?

00:40:57   With the big air quotes, it's a live show, but a lot of it, I don't know how much,

00:41:02   but a lot of it is still the pre-taped bits because they, they were always

00:41:05   expanding how much pre-taped stuff they had in the keynotes.

00:41:08   So they could do even more of that and still like claim that it's live because

00:41:12   Tim Cook was live and Greg Joszowiak was live and, and you know, a handful of people

00:41:17   were live throwing it into the videos and that, and that they could even pipe in the

00:41:21   cheering from the audience while the videos were playing.

00:41:24   And, and would that be better for stagecraft?

00:41:26   I'm sure they've had these conversations and I'm fascinated to see what they decide

00:41:30   in terms of, do we just completely lock it down?

00:41:32   Like we've, like we've been doing, or is there value in having some sort of a live

00:41:36   before a studio audience kind of component just for the stagecraft of it?

00:41:41   Yeah.

00:41:41   The last thing I want to say about that was that you mentioned the intro from Tim,

00:41:45   the live intro on stage in front of 2000 people that Tim Cook and then Craig, he

00:41:51   invited Craig Federighi up to say hello to.

00:41:54   I knew something was up because that happened at like 9 55.

00:41:59   I forget what time it was.

00:42:00   It wasn't at 10 AM Pacific.

00:42:01   It was like 9 55.

00:42:02   Yeah.

00:42:03   And one thing about the Tim Cook keynotes is they start exactly on time.

00:42:07   Like if it's a 10 o'clock keynote, you can almost set your watch by it.

00:42:12   But if you're wearing an Apple watch, of course you don't need to set your watch,

00:42:15   but if you're wearing a watch that needs to be set, you can pretty much set, set it

00:42:19   to the minute that when Tim Cook comes out and says, you know, hello or whatever his

00:42:24   go-to greeting is, or welcome, whatever.

00:42:26   Good morning.

00:42:27   Right.

00:42:27   That's what he says.

00:42:28   Good morning that it's 10 o'clock.

00:42:30   And so 9 55, everybody I was seated near, we were like, Oh, this must not be part of

00:42:36   the keynote, right?

00:42:37   Cause we just knew that there's no way he's coming out early.

00:42:39   He's not coming out late jobs.

00:42:40   I mean, it wasn't like jobs was super late, but he might be, you know, he could give

00:42:45   him at least five minutes, right?

00:42:46   I mean, sometimes the keynotes were five minutes late and it wasn't part of the

00:42:49   keynote.

00:42:50   So if you watched from home, you didn't see this.

00:42:53   And that did surprise me a little because I, they could have, they could have just

00:43:00   done the intro.

00:43:02   Here's the keynote.

00:43:03   Hope you enjoy it.

00:43:04   And then at the very end, Tim Cook could have come back on stage and said, thank you

00:43:08   for coming.

00:43:08   This is, you know, a unique day in Apple's history.

00:43:11   We're, you know, we've got a great afternoon with the state of the union and we have a

00:43:15   great week of sessions ahead for everybody around the world to watch go by, you know,

00:43:20   go wait for a Mac book air.

00:43:21   Goodbye.

00:43:23   And then it's gone.

00:43:25   That could have been part of the actual broadcast, but wasn't, I don't know why.

00:43:29   Cause the other thing that would have allowed them to show, which I think they like to

00:43:33   show is the audience, right?

00:43:36   And to show, look, we've got thousands of people here who are ecstatic and

00:43:41   enthusiastic and happy.

00:43:44   And you know, uniquely for this one in a beautiful California sunshine, it was a

00:43:49   beautiful day.

00:43:50   That's something to see.

00:43:51   I don't know if you noticed it.

00:43:52   There was a big drone flying overhead and lots of speculation.

00:43:57   Was this an unauthorized drone?

00:43:59   And a lot of people were like, if it were, you know, it would be shot down by now.

00:44:02   And it's like, you know, you say that I'm not quite sure if Apple has anti drone

00:44:07   technology on campus, maybe jammers, maybe they get to jam it or something.

00:44:11   Yeah, I don't know.

00:44:12   But then I thought, I thought that was going to be like a live shot of like, oh, of the,

00:44:16   of the, and maybe it's an experiment.

00:44:18   To see if they can do that, right.

00:44:21   Maybe they were trying it out to say, well, what if, is this viable?

00:44:24   Because I think there is a viable scenario where they do something like they did this

00:44:28   time except the, the, that wrapping segment, the the the envelope around the rest of the

00:44:34   presentation with Tim Cook saying hello and goodbye.

00:44:37   If that was live and the rest of the thing was pre-taped, but the live part was streamed

00:44:44   live and they showed Apple Park and they again, cause it's stagecraft, right?

00:44:48   It's all showmanship.

00:44:48   So it's like, how do we make a bigger impact?

00:44:51   And I don't know, Tim Cook coming out to a live studio audience, instead of just

00:44:54   wandering down a hallway at Apple Park, I think has a bigger impact, but I, you know,

00:44:59   I, that's their decision to make, but the drone shot, I absolutely thought, are we

00:45:04   going to open this live stream with a drone shot of Apple Park?

00:45:07   Yeah.

00:45:07   Or open it with Tim Cook and then say there's thousands of people here and then

00:45:12   the, the people at home, it would cut to that drone shot.

00:45:14   And again, you could do the Letterman bit, right?

00:45:17   Where he's like inside and you think that it's a pre-taped thing.

00:45:20   And then he walks out and there's a whole group of people there and it, and it turns

00:45:23   out it is live, right?

00:45:24   Like that would be great.

00:45:25   There's a lot of ways you could play with it, but as always with you and me, it

00:45:29   comes back to sports, but in televised sports, I think it's a worldwide

00:45:34   phenomenon, but I certainly in the U.S.

00:45:36   for your, in my lifetime, it has been a big deal that any major sporting event

00:45:41   has a blimp flying outside to provide the overhead shots, which makes sense for

00:45:47   outdoor sports, like the world series and the Superbowl and NFL playoff game or any

00:45:51   NFL game, you know?

00:45:52   And, and it is fascinating and it's something I never thought about growing up

00:45:57   because it was always the case.

00:45:58   There's always, it used to always be the Goodyear blimp and now there's a couple

00:46:02   other brands that have blimps, but you know, they spot, you know, they pay

00:46:05   something, Goodyear gets a promotional consideration, but then they fly a blimp

00:46:09   over the stadium and then they provide overhead shots and there's no other way

00:46:13   to get a perspective.

00:46:15   Like what does it look like when 70,000 people are in a stadium?

00:46:19   You can't photograph them from within the stadium and from the ground, you don't

00:46:23   get that perspective.

00:46:24   You need that overhead shot.

00:46:26   I thought that's what the drone was, but apparently not.

00:46:28   And they, they are actually using drones in sporting events now.

00:46:32   I've seen it a few times.

00:46:32   I think even Apple's Friday night baseball used a drone in a, in a couple, for a

00:46:36   couple of shots.

00:46:37   And, and we're going to see more of those too, because then you've got like the

00:46:42   Goodyear blimp is way up above and you can see the parking lot and the traffic

00:46:45   outside the stadium and all of that.

00:46:47   Those drone shots, you can be, you know, you can perfectly position it like a

00:46:50   video game, literally anywhere you want.

00:46:53   And so we'll, we'll see more of that.

00:46:54   Yeah.

00:46:54   I, I, I, if I had to guess what that drone was, it was Apple seeing what it would be

00:47:01   like for them to do that shot.

00:47:03   And, you know, and if it wasn't that, then I apologize and send my commiser,

00:47:08   commiserations to whoever owned that drone.

00:47:10   Cause they're probably not ever getting it back.

00:47:12   Anyway, it was good.

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00:49:15   Collide.com/the-talk-show.

00:49:17   I it's funny.

00:49:18   I always do this where I always think, Hey, I shouldn't wait a couple of weeks

00:49:23   after WWDC to have my first regular show after the live show.

00:49:27   And then here we are a couple of weeks later and it's my first show.

00:49:30   But on the other hand, it is clarifying.

00:49:33   It is like, and I w it's always the reason I'm so

00:49:38   stressed out about my live show.

00:49:39   Doing it like on Tuesday, the day after the keynote is everything they've

00:49:43   announced and plus things they didn't even announce in the keynote, but I've

00:49:46   learned about from the state of the union or, or just bumping into people and

00:49:50   Hey, did you hear about X?

00:49:51   Which, you know, makes sense that it wasn't in the keynote, but it's some

00:49:56   obscure thing that I really care about.

00:49:58   And I've, my head's filled with ideas.

00:50:00   My notebook's filled with stuff that's not necessarily in any kind of order.

00:50:03   And it's hard to organize it.

00:50:06   Time is such a wonderful sifter.

00:50:08   I feel like I have a much better perspective on what was a big deal.

00:50:11   What wasn't I'm curious for, for my, for my show with Mike Hurley upgrade,

00:50:16   we try, we try to do it right after as close to the event as possible.

00:50:20   And I think there's value in being there as the first kind of voices

00:50:24   and the quick hit right afterward.

00:50:25   But but doing it is really in a bubble of like, all we know is what was at the

00:50:31   keynote and when you know that like all the apple.com web pages have more

00:50:34   information and, and then for WWDC, the sessions have more information and,

00:50:38   and it's always a first cut at it, which is like big reactions.

00:50:42   And one of my favorite episodes we ever do is the week following,

00:50:45   because it's all the other stuff, right?

00:50:47   It's all the details and it's all the big picture of like what, you know,

00:50:50   now that we've had a week to think over it and it really does put in sharp

00:50:54   relief, the difference between walking out of a keynote and having

00:50:59   some time to think about it.

00:51:01   And, and they're both, they both have their advantages.

00:51:04   But, but yeah, it really does benefit from learning all the details

00:51:07   and getting time to kind of ponder.

00:51:09   I, I keep thinking about stage manager actually.

00:51:13   It is it, what strikes me about, so having used the betas a little bit,

00:51:18   I mean, stage manager is fascinating because it is the solution to one

00:51:21   problem that has been like asked, but not answered for years now,

00:51:27   which is iPad multitasking.

00:51:29   And it is also yet another solution to a constant problem that has

00:51:34   been asked and answered repeatedly, but not to anyone's satisfaction,

00:51:38   apparently, which is Mac OS window management.

00:51:41   And the fact that you dug up that, that the, the, the, you know, somebody's

00:51:45   leaked something that then they retracted that this was a project that they were

00:51:50   talking about 15 years ago inside Apple.

00:51:53   Shrinky Dink as a window manager.

00:51:56   And I'm fascinated that, you know, what got it over the hump, I believe, is that

00:52:01   it was an interesting solution to the iPad problem of grouping windows together.

00:52:07   And yet they also deployed it on the Mac.

00:52:09   And of course the way they announced it is they announced it for the Mac.

00:52:12   And I said to everyone around me at the event, I was like, well, that's

00:52:15   iPad multitasking right there.

00:52:17   And then that got a lot of nods.

00:52:18   Everybody was like, yep, that's it.

00:52:19   We knew what was coming, but what interests me is like how it will be

00:52:23   received and it's early yet in the betas and all of that, you know,

00:52:26   because my brief usage of these in beta, what it tells me is that stage manager

00:52:32   stands does not stand or fall based on the concept of stage manager, but it

00:52:39   stands or falls based on the underlying window infrastructure of the operating

00:52:47   system, because I used stage manager on the Mac and I was like, oh yeah, I can

00:52:52   see how this, I don't use spaces or anything like that.

00:52:55   I'm like, oh, well this way it's not out of sight out of mind.

00:52:57   You talked about that on the, on the talk show interview at the event, right.

00:53:01   Is I have a problem with spaces because if it's out of sight, it's out of mind.

00:53:05   And I want to keep my eye on it.

00:53:06   And, and stage manager lets you kind of keep your eye on it while also working

00:53:11   with, I think how a lot of people work, which is with groups of apps or groups

00:53:15   of windows and kind of switching between them.

00:53:17   And so on the Mac, I was like, you know, I don't know if I would use this.

00:53:21   All the time, but it, I can see the value of this and I know Apple has, has

00:53:26   strived for years, they must have a lot of feedback from users and from observing

00:53:31   users that people still struggle with window management on the Mac that, that

00:53:35   that non-expert users lose windows under other windows and, and they get frustrated

00:53:40   by it and they are constantly trying.

00:53:42   You got to give them credit that with all these things they've tried, they don't

00:53:45   think that they figured out window management yet.

00:53:47   They didn't say like, oh, with the Mac, we solved it.

00:53:49   It's it's over.

00:53:50   They're like, no, they, they still don't think that they've solved it.

00:53:53   On the iPad though, it's the same.

00:53:56   It's like literally the same thing.

00:53:58   And yet, at least in the early betas, it doesn't quite work.

00:54:04   And that was really instructive to me because I realized the problem is

00:54:07   they're putting it on an operating system that doesn't have 30 years

00:54:12   of window management thought.

00:54:15   And it has a year maybe, or two of window management thought of any kind or

00:54:21   anything resembling window management.

00:54:23   And that's, I'm fascinated by that.

00:54:25   And also I think that in the end, maybe if we're posing, if we're thinking

00:54:29   about center stage as the, as the thing to focus on in terms of the development

00:54:33   of the iPad, the iPad, maybe we're looking in the wrong place because I

00:54:37   don't think it's center stage itself.

00:54:38   I think it's like, how do you move windows?

00:54:40   How do you minimize windows?

00:54:41   How do you close windows?

00:54:43   And that's the part that there's no infrastructure in iPad OS

00:54:47   for any of that stuff.

00:54:48   And so this summer, cause it's not all there, even now in the betas, they're

00:54:53   going to have to invent that.

00:54:55   Whereas the max just got it.

00:54:56   And so center stage is like, Oh, this is kind of cool.

00:54:59   And on the iPad, it's like, Oh, well, yeah, but how do I, how do I minimize

00:55:03   a window and with, or close a window with a keyboard shortcut and the answer is,

00:55:07   I don't know, like they just don't know.

00:55:09   You just called it center stage three times.

00:55:12   I'm sorry.

00:55:13   I did it again.

00:55:13   I I've been doing it nonstop.

00:55:16   I can't believe I did.

00:55:17   I'm pretty sure I did not do it once in my live show and I was so happy.

00:55:21   I didn't, but I think, I do think it's a, I think it's a bad name.

00:55:24   And not in and of itself, but it is a bad name alongside center stage

00:55:30   because in both cases, what the stages is entirely different in center stage.

00:55:36   The thing with the camera, where you can move around in front of your iPad or

00:55:39   your studio display and the camera pans, because it's ultra wide, the stage is

00:55:45   your real world space where your sack of meat with teeth that is yourself is

00:55:54   operating your kitchen, your office, wherever the hell you are, it is the

00:55:59   actual real world where you are in front of a camera in stage manager.

00:56:03   The stage is the screen, which could not be more opposite.

00:56:08   It is, it is through the looking glass, but they're calling both of them the

00:56:13   stage and it is very confusing, right?

00:56:17   Like we all have, we all have real world desktops.

00:56:21   If you work in an office with a desk, but Apple has never called things the

00:56:26   desktop feature as to like where to put your mouse, they don't emphasize

00:56:31   that you put it on the desktop.

00:56:33   You know, it's the desktop in Apple's parlance is the, the background wallpaper

00:56:40   of your Mac behind all your windows.

00:56:42   That's the desktop.

00:56:43   And then there's clarity, this stage manager center stage thing.

00:56:46   I cannot, I keep doing it.

00:56:48   I'm so glad you made the mistake first, so I can call you out, but

00:56:51   I know that I'm going to do it.

00:56:53   It's it's impossible to keep straight.

00:56:54   And Apple likes their Apple likes cute names and cute names that are metaphors.

00:57:00   And so I see what they're doing here.

00:57:02   It was a mistake to, I think, maybe roll these out so close to each other.

00:57:04   I wonder if a more prosaic name for this feature would be better if it was called

00:57:08   something like window manager or window sets or something like that, where it's

00:57:13   just what it does because that's, that's what it is because it's like, and again,

00:57:20   I admire them for doing, they did expose and then they said, well, now we're going

00:57:24   to call it mission control and it includes these other things and like, they keep

00:57:27   trying to come up with ways to make this stuff work and, and, and I'm

00:57:31   appreciate that they keep trying, but yeah, the name isn't great.

00:57:35   And like the feature, like I said, I was surprised.

00:57:37   I was expecting to hate the feature on the Mac and I was like, yeah, actually

00:57:40   I can see how this might actually fit with how a lot of people use their Macs,

00:57:44   which is in these little window groups, but they want to have them accessible

00:57:48   and not like hidden in an invisible space.

00:57:50   That's all good.

00:57:51   It's just that on the iPad, like you literally can't do command W to close

00:57:56   a window, which is just, it's, it's just not there the infrastructure beneath it.

00:58:00   Isn't there.

00:58:00   Yeah.

00:58:01   Window manager, if they called me up right now and said, all right, smart ass, we

00:58:05   listened to you and Snill on your podcast.

00:58:07   What do you think we should call it?

00:58:09   And I can give them one answer.

00:58:10   I guess I would say window manager.

00:58:12   I think desktop manager would be a great name.

00:58:15   I'm stealing that from blogger and listener of the show, Jack Wellborn.

00:58:19   Who wrote a, I still haven't linked to it, but it's a good post arguing.

00:58:23   Just, just bitching about the name for the same reason I just did.

00:58:26   You know, that stage means stage shouldn't mean two entirely different things.

00:58:30   You're going to conflate them.

00:58:31   The problem with desktop, window sets, window sets, what I'm going to throw

00:58:34   in there, because it's literally, that's what it is is it's different sets of

00:58:37   windows that you switch among and that you, that's what it is.

00:58:40   Yeah.

00:58:40   You kind of group them together and then you switch between the sets.

00:58:43   Window groups, window groups, window sets, something windows, something.

00:58:46   I think desktop manager.

00:58:48   It works for me, but I can see why Apple would say, yeah, we can't use that because

00:58:55   that would work on the Mac, but doesn't work on the iPad because the iPad doesn't

00:59:00   have a desktop, right?

00:59:01   Like you can't put things on your, you know, it has a home screen instead of a

00:59:04   desktop.

00:59:05   And you know, that, that distinction is important.

00:59:08   You know, the desktop actually, everybody knows what it is on the Mac and it's a

00:59:12   place where you can put files.

00:59:14   Some people put lots and lots of files on their desktop and therefore it's, it's,

00:59:18   it's an important concept to people.

00:59:19   So I could see why they'd shy away from it, but stage to me is the wrong metaphor.

00:59:24   It doesn't seem like a stage, but anyway, I haven't used it on the Mac nearly as

00:59:29   much as I have on iPad because I haven't installed on the iPad air review unit

00:59:34   that I still haven't sent back from a couple of months ago.

00:59:36   Same.

00:59:37   Um, same, but I did play around with it briefly back when I was in California and

00:59:43   I could see it, you know, and, and I really appreciate it.

00:59:46   It was one of my favorite moments from my live show where Federighi, when we talked

00:59:50   about it, emphasized that when they introduce new things and stage manager is

00:59:55   just one of them, when they introduce new things like exposé and spaces, it's never

01:00:01   to say, if you're happy with the way you've been working on the Mac, we're not

01:00:05   taking that away from you.

01:00:07   And we're not saying that what you're doing is wrong, but we're enabling people

01:00:12   who didn't like it for a reason to have an alternative.

01:00:15   And I think that's great.

01:00:17   And I think it has worked out.

01:00:18   And I said on my show, you said you feel the same way.

01:00:21   Spaces never has never clicked for me and I never will because it's not how my

01:00:26   brain works and I can work with two.

01:00:29   I have in the past worked with two displays.

01:00:31   I can imagine working with three displays and thinking my email is on the left.

01:00:38   And like when I had did have two displays, that's what, that's where I put my email.

01:00:41   It was on the left display and I think spatially.

01:00:44   And when I want to check my email or copy from the email or drag from a message I

01:00:48   know I had opened from a minute ago, I turn my head to the left.

01:00:52   There it is.

01:00:53   And I drag it.

01:00:54   When I try to do that with spaces, I just never look at my email.

01:00:57   It's gone.

01:00:59   It's off in the space.

01:01:00   And the space can be over on the left.

01:01:03   I just don't go there.

01:01:05   And then I command tab to mail and I'm still in the second space and mail doesn't

01:01:10   come forward really.

01:01:12   It like activates the menu bar.

01:01:13   And it, it like, it, it's like static.

01:01:16   It's like getting an electric shock to my brain.

01:01:18   Like where is it?

01:01:19   Why isn't it here?

01:01:20   I don't know.

01:01:21   It has never worked.

01:01:22   It's like your stuff is on a second monitor that is unplugged.

01:01:24   Meanwhile, I know, I know that there are lots and lots of people who love spaces,

01:01:31   couldn't live without it.

01:01:32   It's good that they're not taking it away.

01:01:34   It's not a replacement.

01:01:35   It's, it's additive.

01:01:36   But I do think having used it on the iPad for a couple of weeks now in beta, I can

01:01:41   see using it.

01:01:42   I, but I do think, I think what shows, I don't think it's unsolvable, but I think

01:01:49   it makes it a very difficult proposition for Apple to get right.

01:01:53   And at this point, the clock's ticking, right?

01:01:56   Because you know, it's going to be shipping software come September or October

01:02:02   at the latest.

01:02:03   You know, there's not a lot of time to make significant changes, but I think what

01:02:08   really shows is where, where the platforms started, where the Mac started with just,

01:02:16   just overlapping windows.

01:02:18   And I mean, if you go back far enough, you only had one app at a time, but that's,

01:02:23   you know, that's so far in the past in the eighties that the ID, you know, your

01:02:28   windows stack on top of each other.

01:02:29   And if you have multiple applications visible at once, the windows for all those

01:02:36   applications that are open are all stacked on top of each other.

01:02:39   And that's the starting concept.

01:02:41   And yes, and it seems to me like Craig Federighi personally is annoyed by the

01:02:48   clutter and the, for lack of a better term, janitorial work of cleaning up that

01:02:52   mess.

01:02:53   But that is clearly shared by many other people.

01:02:56   And I think going back to Steve Jobs, who clearly was a major force behind the, the

01:03:03   purple button, I did, did Federighi bring that up in my show?

01:03:06   I think he might have.

01:03:07   Yeah, he did.

01:03:08   Yeah, single window mode or whatever it was.

01:03:10   It was only in like DP3, developer preview three of Mac OS X around 2000 or 2001.

01:03:18   John Siracusa was, of course remembers it because he was writing, you know, 25 page

01:03:24   reviews for Ars Technica of each of those.

01:03:27   Every single release.

01:03:28   Right, but one of those developer releases added what seems crazy, there was the red,

01:03:34   yellow, green buttons all along in Mac OS X that do what the red, yellow, green

01:03:38   buttons do today.

01:03:39   But then there was a purple button over in the other corner and that triggered single

01:03:44   window mode, which meant there's only one window at a time and that the other windows

01:03:48   weren't closed.

01:03:49   They just weren't shown.

01:03:50   And then you'd click the other app in the dock or, you know, there were ways to, if,

01:03:55   if you were in the same application that had multiple windows open, there'd be some

01:04:00   other way to get to one of those other windows.

01:04:02   But when you activated one of those other windows in single window mode, the current

01:04:07   window went away and then that window came up and you had one thing at a time to focus

01:04:11   on.

01:04:11   In concept, that sounds great.

01:04:13   It stage manager seems to address the similar need.

01:04:17   The problem with that single window mode back 22 years ago was in practice, it didn't

01:04:25   really work that well.

01:04:26   In a system that was kind of starting point was you could have dozens and dozens of

01:04:31   windows at a time for multiple applications.

01:04:34   And the iPad has the opposite problem where it started with literal single window mode,

01:04:40   right?

01:04:40   There was no split screen for years and years and years on iPad.

01:04:43   It was go back to the home screen, open up an app, and the app got the whole screen.

01:04:48   That screen was the window.

01:04:50   The window was the screen and that's it.

01:04:52   And there's much good things to speak about that.

01:04:56   And it's clearly a major reason why the iPad is so popular with so many people of

01:05:01   various technical inclination.

01:05:04   You know, for people who are savvy and technically savvy and can and do also use the Mac or

01:05:10   Windows or whatever else and have dozens and dozens of windows on screen at a time, it

01:05:15   just brings focus, right?

01:05:17   Focus is like a big part of a lot of people's desire for changing their workflow, right?

01:05:24   Like I feel scattered, hard to concentrate.

01:05:26   I would just like to write this article or this big, long, important email.

01:05:31   I just want to focus on it.

01:05:32   Just show me one thing at a time.

01:05:34   Lots of apps do it.

01:05:35   It's a great feature.

01:05:36   But the iPad starting from that as the concept behind the whole system to get to this, there's

01:05:42   like just something.

01:05:44   There's like an uncanny valley to it.

01:05:46   I don't know.

01:05:47   Maybe one way of putting it is why not just put red, yellow, green buttons on the iPad

01:05:53   windows when it's in this mode?

01:05:54   Yeah, well, I think they put the little lozenge at the top of iPad windows, but you have to

01:06:01   click it to reveal what the controls are, which I think is a mistake.

01:06:05   I think that when you're in this mode, they should be visible all the time.

01:06:09   And I know that that's like or when you move your pointer over it if you're using the

01:06:13   pointer, but I think that's where they're going to have to go is that they need keyboard

01:06:17   shortcuts and they need visual affordances for window management.

01:06:21   And that's the challenge, right?

01:06:23   Is that in any of these things, it's like, well, on the Mac, you can look at the window

01:06:26   menu or whatever, but on the iPad, there isn't one.

01:06:31   So that's why they have to grow these things and they can make their choices.

01:06:35   And I like the idea that this is like the pointer support on iPad OS.

01:06:39   It is a modern take on multi-window interface.

01:06:42   It's not, it's accepting that the Mac has a good thing in having a multi-window interface,

01:06:49   but that we're going to do a modern take on it.

01:06:51   Because I think the pointer support on iPad OS is fantastic, right?

01:06:55   It's like we didn't just ape the Mac.

01:06:58   We did an iPad version of a pointer that is like what we would do if we were building

01:07:04   the pointer today.

01:07:05   And I think the windowing is what they're trying to do is the same thing.

01:07:08   It's just they're missing a bunch of pieces of it.

01:07:12   And now, as you said, the clock is ticking and, you know, it's like, are we going to

01:07:16   have a debate about whether that little widget can unfurl or stays open by default so that

01:07:22   I have control over it?

01:07:23   Like, do we need title bars on iPad windows?

01:07:26   Cause we sort of don't have them, but we sort of do.

01:07:29   Like that's all the, again, I think that stage manager, it got it right that time, is not

01:07:35   the issue about it.

01:07:38   Like I think the stage manager concept is not bad.

01:07:40   It's the, it's like, how do you do windowing on iPad?

01:07:42   And that's where it's still kind of not all there.

01:07:45   And that's what their summer, I feel like is going to be.

01:07:48   It's funny, you mentioned single window mode and there's full screen mode, which the

01:07:51   Mac has had for a long time and people wanting to do focus modes in their apps.

01:07:55   One thing that struck me about stage manager to get back to the Mac for a second is when

01:08:00   I saw it at the keynote, the first thing I thought was this is an acceptance of the fact

01:08:05   that full screen mode on the Mac doesn't work very well.

01:08:08   And I know there are people who like full screen mode.

01:08:10   But like when they showed that you can click on the desktop and it brings the desktop up

01:08:13   because people keep stuff on the desktop, I thought, ah, see, this is it.

01:08:18   Because every time I try full screen mode with apps that I think should probably be

01:08:22   in full screen, like logic or final cut, I need to get a file somewhere.

01:08:27   It's like, ah, I can't get it.

01:08:29   So I'm like, I got to get out of full screen mode or I got to show the desktop or whatever.

01:08:32   And, and I looked at center stage and I thought, oh, this is, we're going to give you, sorry,

01:08:37   I called it center stage, stage manager.

01:08:39   This is us saying, well, if you want one big window, that's fine, but you can also click

01:08:46   and get your desktop like, yes, yes, that's what we want.

01:08:49   So it's like a less extreme full screen mode if you want it to be.

01:08:56   And I think that's, I think that's better.

01:08:57   I think that's a better approach, at least for some tasks, because yeah, I keep things

01:09:02   on my desktop or I want to open a finder window and drag a file in.

01:09:06   And when you're in full screen mode, the OS is basically saying, you know, nope, you will

01:09:12   only live in this one app.

01:09:14   And there are lots of jobs where you live in two apps or you just need two windows.

01:09:18   And, and so having the system manage those I'm, you know, I'm, I'm excited about that

01:09:22   part, but again, the Mac is much better at all of that than the iPad is.

01:09:26   And it's not stage manager's fault.

01:09:28   It's, it's the rest of the OS not being built around windows.

01:09:32   Yeah, yeah, totally.

01:09:34   And I do like it though, overall, it's, it is kind of fun when you get in the zone, like

01:09:39   for me in the morning, if I'm just catching up on email, Safari and messages, to have

01:09:45   all three of them visible, like windows, like I put Safari in the middle and mail sticking

01:09:51   out, like when Safari is active, a little bit on the left and messages a little bit

01:09:55   on the right.

01:09:56   I like it a lot.

01:09:57   It is a nice way to bang between those three apps.

01:10:01   And I like the spatial orientation.

01:10:04   It's very pleasing to me, but it also feels to me like, why, why is split screen still

01:10:11   around?

01:10:12   Like at one point I was like, what happens when I have all these, when I'm using stage

01:10:16   manager, what happens if I go back to control center and turn it off and it's like, it

01:10:20   puts you in split screen with, if you have three apps currently like in your set, like

01:10:26   the two most recently used ones become a split screen pair.

01:10:30   And it's like, why, why, why?

01:10:32   I'm not sure that was the right decision.

01:10:33   It, it, it just feels weird.

01:10:36   But of course, it would lead us into the next part, part of the stage manager discussion,

01:10:40   the, the stage manager gate part of, well, of course, split screen has to still be there

01:10:48   in the OS because the vast majority of iPads in use don't qualify for stage manager yet

01:10:54   because it's an M1 iPad only feature.

01:10:58   So I get it, but it's like, it just, I don't know.

01:11:01   There's a, I like stage manager a lot.

01:11:04   To me, it's the biggest conceptual change to iPad OS since they've switched from being

01:11:09   single window, all screen all the time that I really like.

01:11:12   Yet it also feels bolted on because it's coming on to me and unsteady conceptual foundation.

01:11:20   Yeah, that's, I think, I think that's the, that's the challenge with stage manager on

01:11:27   the iPad.

01:11:28   iPad is, is what do you really, okay.

01:11:31   Now that we've all admitted that there are windows on the iPad, what do they look like?

01:11:34   How do they interact?

01:11:35   How do, how do apps gather their own windows?

01:11:38   Do they know about them?

01:11:39   How can I, how can I manage windows on iPad?

01:11:43   And like a lot of those questions have been left as a, as a, as, as an exercise for the

01:11:49   user, right?

01:11:50   Like, I don't know, let's think about it.

01:11:52   And now it's like, well, now it's real.

01:11:53   And what is, what's the answer?

01:11:56   And it feels like there isn't one or it's half of an answer or it's sort of a, you know,

01:12:03   in progress, check back later in another beta kind of thing.

01:12:06   And that's the, that's what we're all kind of waiting for.

01:12:08   Like, cause in, in, in iPad, I was 15.

01:12:10   If you have multiple windows open, you can like touch the, cause there are windows, they're

01:12:15   just multitasking weird windows.

01:12:17   You touch the icon for the app in the dock and it will show you what windows exist, which

01:12:22   is like, okay, that's something, but it's still kind of weird.

01:12:27   And I still don't think it does a thing that makes sense in iPad OS 16.

01:12:32   So it's like, you know, that's, that's, that's what I want is, is I'm not, the early betas

01:12:38   don't suggest to me that Apple knows what the metaphor for iPad windows is.

01:12:43   It's more like, look, we built a window manager.

01:12:45   Now we got to figure out the window part.

01:12:47   I mentioned this on my live show, but a friend of the show, friend, your friend, everybody's

01:12:52   friend, the internet's friend, Matthew Panzarino observed right after the keynote that if they

01:12:56   had debuted stage manager iPad only three or four years ago, the people who feared for

01:13:03   the Mac's future would have lost their minds because they would have said, this is it.

01:13:07   They're there.

01:13:08   They've added this feature.

01:13:10   Game over, man.

01:13:10   They've added this feature to iPad because they're going to discontinue the Mac.

01:13:14   And this is their answer for Mac users who would in that hypothetical scenario, need

01:13:21   to switch to the iPad as their main computer, if they wanted to stay on an Apple platform.

01:13:26   And I think he's right that it would have only added fuel to that.

01:13:31   It turns out incorrect fear, but now when everybody is, everybody who's a Mac fan is,

01:13:39   is incredibly confident about Apple's commitment to the platform with the whole Apple Silicon

01:13:45   initiative and how amazingly well it's gone and just, you know, keyboards that work and

01:13:50   other, other things that have improved since four years ago.

01:13:53   I think what we're left with is the truth, which is that the iPad is the sort of forgotten

01:14:04   platform, not forgotten, but the one that gets the least attention, right?

01:14:07   The iPhone is the, you know, billion user product that has turned Apple from a smaller,

01:14:15   you know, peripheral player in the industry to the biggest, literally the biggest company

01:14:21   in the world.

01:14:21   The Mac, they've shown their commitment and it remains the, to use my now very old analogy,

01:14:28   the platform that's heavy so that the other platforms can remain light conceptually, the

01:14:33   one that the workhorse, the workstation.

01:14:36   The iPad is still third in their mind and attention, right?

01:14:40   Like if some Thanos type situation came and a bad guy could snap their finger and make

01:14:49   the Mac disappear and that they had to make the iPad be, do more of the things the Mac

01:14:56   did, it would be better than it is today.

01:14:59   And you can kind of see that, right?

01:15:00   It's still sort of, you could just see the gaps between these concepts.

01:15:06   It just, there's a lot of, there's so much work to be done with stage manager before

01:15:10   it ships.

01:15:10   Yeah, it is.

01:15:12   I mean, it's, it's, it puts, you think about Safari last year and you're like, wow.

01:15:16   Oh, there's, there's a lot, a lot more.

01:15:18   And honestly, not just before ships, but presumably after, right?

01:15:21   Like, I feel like they need to keep refining iPad windowing for a while now, but you're

01:15:25   right.

01:15:25   Yeah.

01:15:25   There would have been a lot of doom and gloom, I think.

01:15:27   They'd be like, oh, they're doing it.

01:15:28   They're copying everything on the Mac.

01:15:29   And I think that Apple maybe views the iPad as the place where they're building very

01:15:36   slowly.

01:15:36   They're building their vision for what the future of the Mac looks like to the future

01:15:42   of computing looks like, like long term.

01:15:44   But at least the last few years have made it clear that it's not short term.

01:15:49   They're like the Mac, the Mac is going to be, if the Mac ends up being essentially a

01:15:54   super set of iPad iOS in the long run and that you can more seamlessly move between

01:15:59   modes then so be it.

01:16:01   But like iPad iOS just isn't there yet.

01:16:03   We, you know, they need, there's more that work that needs to be done before they ever

01:16:07   could get to that point.

01:16:08   And I like that they're going there because I think that they're going to, they're

01:16:12   going to create something.

01:16:13   They have the potential to create something that is that like modern take on.

01:16:16   It's the 2024 take on 1984, let's say something like that.

01:16:22   Right.

01:16:23   I think that's cool, but thank goodness it's not a Thanos, like I'm going to snap.

01:16:27   And one of these things is going to disappear because it's not there yet.

01:16:31   Even as somebody who loves the iPad and working on the iPad and loves the progression

01:16:35   that's happening here.

01:16:36   It's, it's, it's just not there.

01:16:39   There's so much of it that, that the Mac brings that the iPad can't do yet.

01:16:46   And, and vice versa is also true, but like, they're just, they're just not, this is

01:16:50   a big hurdle for them.

01:16:51   This is a big step for them and it's hard and it's going to take some time.

01:16:54   I think.

01:16:54   Yeah.

01:16:55   I just think in hindsight, we were worried about the wrong platform, but I think it's

01:17:00   going to become clear now.

01:17:01   And it's the iPad that still, it has so much potential, like it's, it has more potential

01:17:06   ahead of it than it does already have behind it.

01:17:10   Right.

01:17:10   Whereas I'm not saying the Mac's best days are behind it, but the Mac is, is, you know,

01:17:15   40 years old, almost.

01:17:17   It is conceptually, you know, the, the very definition of an established platform.

01:17:23   Yeah, it's a solved problem, right?

01:17:25   It's a solved problem.

01:17:26   It does, the Mac makes sense and it does what it does.

01:17:28   And it doesn't mean that it can't be improved and the bugs can't be fixed.

01:17:31   That's not what I'm saying, but I am saying the Mac sort of has reached its, its final

01:17:35   form in many ways and that what it gets now, it's getting in lockstep with the other platforms,

01:17:39   but like the Mac does the job that the Mac was meant to do.

01:17:41   You couldn't change the Mac now if you wanted to that much because its appeal is that it

01:17:46   is the Mac.

01:17:48   And iPad is like, yeah, it's still like a lump of clay a little bit.

01:17:51   Like what does it want to be in the end?

01:17:53   And, and I don't know.

01:17:54   I also think though, it is safe to say that there was probably a moment there where Apple

01:17:58   and I know that they poo-pooed this on the talk show, but like, I think there was a moment

01:18:02   there where Apple was confused about what it wanted the Mac to be.

01:18:05   Maybe the Mac wasn't going to die.

01:18:07   For the 25th anniversary of the Mac, 30th anniversary of the Mac, I forget, I did an

01:18:11   interview with Phil Schiller and he said, the Mac goes on forever.

01:18:14   That was literally what he said.

01:18:15   The Mac goes on forever.

01:18:17   And I never doubt Apple's commitment to the Mac, but I do think that in that period, their

01:18:23   commitment to what the Mac would be was kind of wavering.

01:18:26   Like, would it just be a legacy platform or would it be something that merges with iPad?

01:18:31   And like, I think they didn't quite know what they wanted the Mac to be.

01:18:35   And I don't know exactly what happened, but I think they figured it out.

01:18:39   I think they decided this is what the Mac is going to be.

01:18:41   And we have seen the fruits of that.

01:18:43   So it's not quite that they abandoned the Mac, but I think they, there was like a real

01:18:47   midlife crisis almost where they're like, what do we want the Mac to be?

01:18:50   What, where is it ending up?

01:18:51   Where do we want to put our attention?

01:18:53   And you couldn't miss it in the last five years that that has changed dramatically.

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01:21:19   get 100 bucks in credit just for going to linode.com/the-talk-show.

01:21:25   As I waited to record this show post WWDC, I wondered how relevant the controversy over

01:21:31   the M1 requirement for stage manager would remain.

01:21:35   It seems like it is as relevant as ever.

01:21:38   I was talking with you in a thread on Twitter the other day, and the thought popped into

01:21:42   my head.

01:21:43   So anyway, for those who...

01:21:44   God bless you, and I hope you've enjoyed your June.

01:21:49   But if you are unaware, this feature that we've been talking about, stage manager for

01:21:54   iPad, is only available as announced at the keynote and currently as we record with developer

01:22:01   beta 2.

01:22:01   It's only available for iPads with an M1 chip, which I believe is just three iPads.

01:22:07   That's the iPad Pros 11 and 12.9 inches from last year, 2021, and the iPad Air fifth generation,

01:22:18   which came out, I think, in April of this year.

01:22:21   Maybe it was announced in March, but it's a couple of months old.

01:22:24   Those three are the only ones that have an M1, so they're the only ones with the feature.

01:22:28   And Federighi got asked by it, by a few, about it in a few interviews he did during WWDC

01:22:35   week, and the explanation came down to they basically...

01:22:39   I don't want to put words in his mouth, but their envisioning of the feature requires

01:22:45   everything that you can see in stage manager to remain active so that when you do switch,

01:22:50   you don't have to wait at all for anything that maybe got...

01:22:54   When you multitask on iOS, and by iOS, I mean iPhone and iPad traditionally, apps that are

01:23:02   in the background can get killed so that the system can reuse the RAM and whatever other

01:23:08   resources they were using.

01:23:09   And then when you go back to them, like with Command Tab or clicking their icon on the

01:23:13   home screen, they technically relaunched, but they were frozen, and so they just kind

01:23:19   of thaw back to right where they were, and it happens fast enough that you kind of don't

01:23:25   even notice, and you just...

01:23:26   It just works, supposedly.

01:23:30   And I think it truthfully has.

01:23:32   Basically, though, the explanation is it needs the M1 to do everything they want it to do,

01:23:37   and part of that is swap, virtual memory swap, which has never been available on iOS before.

01:23:43   That's one of the reasons iOS freezes applications in the background as opposed to just letting

01:23:48   everything just run.

01:23:49   Swap is basically...

01:23:51   It's pretty easy to explain in layperson's terms, where RAM...

01:23:56   Let's say you have eight gigs of RAM on the device you're running, and all eight is used

01:24:01   up, but something on the system needs more memory.

01:24:04   It'll just take something that isn't currently being used and write that portion of the RAM

01:24:09   to the storage, which used to be a spinning hard disk, and now everything is an SSD.

01:24:15   And then now you've freed up some RAM to use for something else, and then if you need that

01:24:20   thing that was written to disk, you write something else to the storage and unfreeze

01:24:26   the part from storage, put it back into RAM, and if it all happens fast enough, you don't

01:24:30   really notice or complain about it.

01:24:32   And the M1 famously has extremely fast IO, very fast SSD storage, and so something like

01:24:41   swap, which used to be dreadfully slow, but better than not having virtual memory, is

01:24:47   so fast that you don't even notice it happening.

01:24:50   But it's only on the M1 where the iPad can do it, which... you know... where to start?

01:24:57   One of the bits of controversy about this is that one of the devices that qualifies is

01:25:05   the 64 gigabyte of storage iPad Air, which just came out, which in a footnote Apple has

01:25:12   said won't be using swap because it only has 64 gigabytes of storage, and so presumably

01:25:18   Apple doesn't want to use any of it for swap, even like a tiny little 4 gigabyte area of

01:25:26   it or 5.

01:25:27   No swap.

01:25:29   But therefore the explanation that stage manager on iPad requires swap and therefore requires

01:25:35   the M1 sort of shoots a hole in it because that 64 gig iPad Air does get stage manager,

01:25:41   and that's led all sorts of people who have older iPads, including, and I have great

01:25:46   sympathy for them, people who bought an iPad Pro in 2020 with the A12Z, you know, who would

01:25:52   like to have stage manager and feel like this machine is faster than... seems fast enough

01:25:58   to do what I'm seeing.

01:26:00   And those 2020 iPad Pros have more... a more reasonable RAM amount too, which was the other

01:26:07   argument is, right, it's like you need enough RAM to keep multiple windows, all those windows

01:26:13   open at once.

01:26:14   No matter how fast your swap system is in the I/O system, you can never beat actual

01:26:19   RAM, right?

01:26:19   It's, you know, it's sort of why RAM even exists.

01:26:23   If that weren't true, everything could be swapped, you know.

01:26:26   RAM, you can't beat it.

01:26:29   This seems like this is not going away.

01:26:30   So do you think that this is...

01:26:33   because I also have sympathy for anyone who bought an iPad Pro that they feel like is

01:26:40   recent enough that they really kind of expected this feature to be there.

01:26:44   I have a personal thing.

01:26:45   I know I've said it in a bunch of places, like you should probably never, ever, ever buy

01:26:49   hardware speculating that there will later be software that will enable new features

01:26:54   on it.

01:26:54   And this is a little extreme because it took a long time and Apple made no promises.

01:26:59   But like, I also understand the people who felt like the iPad Pro had been... was so

01:27:04   powerful and you really couldn't max out those processors that they were hoping and

01:27:12   they were kind of taking a gamble that they would be able to do more in future updates.

01:27:17   And then here comes this big feature and they're shut out of it.

01:27:20   And I totally understand the frustration about it.

01:27:22   It is...

01:27:23   It's infuriating, right?

01:27:25   It's like, I just bought an iPad Pro and you want me to buy another one?

01:27:27   And this is a thousand dollar iPad.

01:27:29   What am I doing here?

01:27:30   I get all of that.

01:27:32   I wonder, and I'm curious what you think, if this is one of those cases, and these happen

01:27:37   from time to time, where Apple's disinclination to get into technical details, gory details

01:27:45   about why they do what they do has bitten them.

01:27:49   Because, like, they could have just said it requires the M1 and walked away.

01:27:55   But by opening the door with RAM and swap and as excuses, you allow people to look at

01:28:01   the tech specs and say, but what about this one?

01:28:04   And my feeling is that this is probably a very complex story.

01:28:10   I don't believe that this is Apple just conspires to make you buy a new iPad.

01:28:13   I don't think it's that.

01:28:15   I really don't.

01:28:16   I think they looked at the swap and the RAM.

01:28:21   They looked at the speed of the memory and the storage on the M1, which is appreciably

01:28:26   faster than on the A14, A12Z, and A12X, right?

01:28:32   Like, it's appreciably faster.

01:28:33   The M1 is a better chip.

01:28:35   Remember when the M1 iPads came out and we said, why aren't there features that take

01:28:40   advantage of the M1?

01:28:41   The answer is, well, here it is.

01:28:43   But the bad news is, if you don't have an M1, you don't get it.

01:28:46   And I wonder if, you know, what they were doing was trying to balance all these things

01:28:50   and saying like, well, we could do this on these models, but not with external display

01:28:54   support.

01:28:55   And we could do it on these models, but we would have to limit it to only three windows

01:28:59   at a time.

01:29:00   And they looked at it, and then somebody at Apple said, OK, let's just cut it here.

01:29:05   Saying it's only M1 is the cleanest explanation.

01:29:09   And so you end up in a situation where their explanations are sort of simplified, and they

01:29:14   don't tell the whole story, and they contradict their tech specs.

01:29:17   And they don't want to get into it.

01:29:20   But now that they've broken the glass a little bit, they kind of have to get into it, because

01:29:27   what they've said is contradicted by the tech specs.

01:29:30   When I think the truth is, this was a messy decision.

01:29:35   And that maybe they decided to omit certain systems because they didn't want to get into

01:29:39   the complexity of like, maybe it was about implementation, maybe it was about like, we

01:29:44   don't want to have a footnote that says no external display support on these systems,

01:29:48   and only through windows on these systems.

01:29:50   We just want to keep it clean and simple.

01:29:52   And my guess is that that is what they're guilty of, is wanting to keep it clean and

01:29:59   simple, or just conceiving of it as like, what could we do now that we've got the M1?

01:30:04   It's like, oh, we can finally do windowing.

01:30:06   So let's build it for the M1.

01:30:08   And either way, they end up in a situation where there are a bunch of people on the outside

01:30:13   looking in, which is why you asked me on Twitter, what if they had announced this with the M1

01:30:18   would people have been as angry?

01:30:21   And you think that people would not have been, that they would have reacted differently to

01:30:25   it.

01:30:25   And I thought to myself, I don't know, I think those people with the older iPads would

01:30:30   still be kind of mad, but I think it would be a different narrative if it was all about

01:30:34   like, this is how we can do this feature is the M1.

01:30:37   The M1 is the answer, even on that little iPad Air.

01:30:40   The reason it can do it at all is because it's got an M1.

01:30:45   Yeah, so my spitball idea is last year when they introduced the first M1 iPad Pros, which

01:30:52   was just two models, if they had announced Stage Manager for iPad at that same time and

01:30:59   said, now that we've got the M1 in our highest end Pro iPads, it enables us to do this.

01:31:06   And we thought about how can we take advantage of this amazing desktop quality silicon?

01:31:15   How about this?

01:31:15   Here's Stage Manager, and this wasn't possible before.

01:31:19   As great as all of our previous iPads are, this requires the power of the M1.

01:31:25   And I don't think it would have completely nipped the controversy in the bud, but I think

01:31:31   it would have tamped it down significantly.

01:31:35   If right when it first entered you as an iPad enthusiast's mind that this is a neat new

01:31:42   way of managing multiple windows and applications on iPad, if right from the very moment it

01:31:50   entered your mind you realized it was only for these brand new M1 iPads, I think it would

01:31:57   have tamped it down significantly.

01:31:59   I think you're right.

01:32:00   People keep mentioning that the A12Z was the chip in the developer kit for Apple Silicon

01:32:07   two years ago.

01:32:08   And so if the A12Z could power Macs two years ago for developers who were developing, porting

01:32:16   their Intel-based software to Apple Silicon for the Mac, isn't that proof that it can

01:32:21   do swap, that it can do multiple windows, blah, blah, blah?

01:32:25   So that's—I'm just tossing that out there as part of the controversy.

01:32:28   That's—

01:32:29   Yeah, I mean, my response would be, that's macOS, and this is iPadOS, and they're not

01:32:36   the same, right?

01:32:37   Well, I don't think—the proof is like—it's like saying, "Oh, that would be an easy feature

01:32:43   to fix."

01:32:43   Like, well, we don't know.

01:32:44   There may actually be some complexity in how they would choose.

01:32:46   And bottom line is I think they chose not to see or saw it and didn't like it.

01:32:53   And they're like, "No, we're just going to not go that far back."

01:32:56   But my pushback to you, my response to your tweet was, I think there's an undercurrent

01:33:01   in iPad, especially iPad power users, people who buy iPad Pros.

01:33:05   I think there has been a frustration that the hardware has been outpacing the software

01:33:09   for a while now.

01:33:10   And I think there was an expectation that if I bought the high-end iPad, eventually Apple

01:33:14   would get there with the software and that I would be able to take advantage of it.

01:33:18   And they finally did it, and I can't, because they blocked me off.

01:33:21   And I think we can talk about, like, should you feel that way?

01:33:26   Or was that a reasonable thing to believe?

01:33:28   But I think that's where it's coming from.

01:33:30   And I think that there is—I get it.

01:33:33   Like, I get the idea that the narrative has been all along, Apple needs to catch up with

01:33:38   its software, and here they are catching up, but you—it's too bad.

01:33:43   Even though your hardware was so great and Apple just needed to catch up, now that they've

01:33:47   caught up, your hardware is not good enough anymore.

01:33:49   I get that.

01:33:50   And I think that frustration would have existed no matter what the narrative, but I do think

01:33:53   you're right that if it had been introduced as an M1-enabled thing and that was the storytelling,

01:34:00   it would be less than it is now.

01:34:03   We can argue about how much less.

01:34:08   But—and again, it gets back to this—it's been there right since Steve Jobs introduced

01:34:14   the first iPad back in 2010.

01:34:17   And it, you know, truly one of the great Steve Jobs keynotes of all time, in my opinion.

01:34:24   I really think it was great, but just didn't dance around it, but actually centered the

01:34:30   whole introduction around the, "Hey, you've got your phone, you've got your laptop.

01:34:36   Is there room in the middle for something new?"

01:34:39   And saying, "Yes, we think there is.

01:34:42   We think there is room in the middle, but it has to be better at some things than both

01:34:46   other—both devices.

01:34:47   For some things, it has to be both better than a phone and better than just using your

01:34:52   laptop."

01:34:53   And the iPad has lived in that space ever since.

01:34:56   And to this day—and I think we're seeing it with Stage Manager—but I think, to go

01:35:00   back to your point, that iPad users in the last few years, you know, at a point—let's

01:35:07   just draw the point where we saw it coming with benchmarks.

01:35:11   Like, just to say "geek bench," just because it's so common.

01:35:15   It was very clear before it happened that Apple Silicon was going to go past Intel in

01:35:21   single-core performance, and that the multi-core performance was limited only by the fact that

01:35:26   we were using chips meant for phones.

01:35:28   You know, that there was no reason Apple couldn't just add more cores if they wanted to create

01:35:35   Apple Silicon for, let's say, the Mac, when that was a hypothetical scenario.

01:35:40   And I think iPad users rightly have seen these devices hamstrung by the physical constraints

01:35:47   of iPhone screens, right?

01:35:49   Right?

01:35:49   Like—

01:35:49   I can give you a date.

01:35:52   It was October 30, 2018, where Apple kind of called out—because that's when they

01:35:58   announced that new iPad Pro and said it's faster than most PC laptops.

01:36:03   That was the moment they laid it down, right?

01:36:04   And they said, "We're going to be able to beat—our Apple Silicon stuff is faster

01:36:08   than PCs."

01:36:08   It was the moment where we knew that it was coming to the Mac definitively, because they're

01:36:12   already bragging about how it's faster than PC laptops.

01:36:15   But also, it was them saying, "The iPad is faster than laptops; it's more capable than

01:36:19   laptops."

01:36:20   And I think that's when the narrative really picked up that was like, "Okay, we agree

01:36:26   the hardware is amazing.

01:36:28   Why is the software so limited?"

01:36:30   And if you live that for a little while, and then they finally unlimit the software, and

01:36:34   you're like, "Well, wait a second.

01:36:36   But I bought this thing in October of 2018, and it doesn't do that?"

01:36:40   I would be mad, too.

01:36:42   I get it.

01:36:42   I mean, nobody likes to have their hardware that they spent money on not get a new feature,

01:36:49   right?

01:36:49   Like, it sucks.

01:36:50   It does, absolutely.

01:36:52   Cote: Yeah, and I just really feel like, in large part, the hardware clearly was there.

01:36:57   Apple even said so, like you said, that it's faster than most PC laptops.

01:37:00   And I know it was one of those statements from Apple that a lot of people who observe

01:37:04   the industry at large and not the Apple ecosystem hyper-focused, like me and you do, were like,

01:37:11   "Ah, more bullshit from Apple."

01:37:13   And then you start looking at actual tests and use cross-platform apps to export video

01:37:20   and do all these things.

01:37:21   And it's like, "Oh, wow, they're not kidding."

01:37:23   But yet, at such a basic conceptual level, the actual interface of iPadOS was largely

01:37:30   limited by the needs of the iPhone's iOS, which is single window for almost everything.

01:37:39   Because even the biggest iPhone you could buy is actually very tiny as a display.

01:37:44   And it's like, "Well, wait, my iPad Pro is 13 inches diagonally.

01:37:48   Why in the world am I limited by an interface that feels so meant for a five and a half

01:37:55   inch display?"

01:37:56   And okay, that's clearly exactly what stage manager for iPad is meant to address, right?

01:38:04   Like, okay, your display can hold a couple things.

01:38:07   And we can do neat 3D things and have these window groups on the left side.

01:38:12   We'll tilt them in 3D in perspective to make more room, right?

01:38:16   Because if we showed them in complete 2D, it would take up more space.

01:38:20   We'll just tilt them backwards.

01:38:21   It'll save space.

01:38:22   You can...

01:38:23   And they're spatially oriented so you can remember that your group with messages and

01:38:29   mail is up there at the top and your photos one is down at the bottom and not for you.

01:38:35   And yeah, I will say this, and I heard this.

01:38:37   I don't think Apple has mentioned it because Apple will...

01:38:41   The other thing that Apple, I think, is hamstrung, you mentioned that once they started going

01:38:45   into technical details like swap, it raises the exception like the one iPad Air with only

01:38:51   64 gigs of storage that doesn't get swapped but still gets stage manager.

01:38:55   They don't like to say anything negative about other products.

01:39:02   They'll talk up what's great about the M1 but don't want to publicly say what's not

01:39:08   so great about like any of the A-series chips.

01:39:11   But since this became a controversy, and I don't think this should be a surprise, but

01:39:16   the SSD storage on all of the A-series chips, including the A12Z and A12X that were only

01:39:23   used on iPad Pros, is not meant for the number of read-write cycles that swap inherently

01:39:33   mean.

01:39:34   When you have an OS that has virtual memory swap, you end up reading and writing to the

01:39:41   storage way more often than you do if you don't have swap.

01:39:45   It's just the nature of it.

01:39:47   Unless you as a user are using so few apps at a time that you don't actually go past

01:39:54   the physical RAM and use it.

01:39:56   But if you are using swap, it's incredibly intensive on the storage.

01:40:00   And because all of the A-series chips to date were meant for operating systems that didn't

01:40:08   have swap, they never spec the storage for swap capable long-term.

01:40:15   I mean, obviously, it would work.

01:40:17   If they just flipped a switch and let it work, it would work.

01:40:20   But it would wear out the SSDs.

01:40:23   And going back to those dev kits for Apple Silicon, for the Mac that ran the A12Z, that's

01:40:31   one of the reasons why they didn't sell those to developers.

01:40:34   They were like leased.

01:40:35   You'd sign up and put a deposit down and get them.

01:40:38   Then they collected them all.

01:40:40   They weren't meant for long-term use because they didn't have SSD that was meant for

01:40:44   the long-term wear and tear that a system like macOS has on the storage.

01:40:49   - Yeah, I mean, while, I mean, again, because I know people are really angry about this

01:40:55   and I hear from them.

01:40:55   I'm totally sympathetic.

01:40:58   I get why people are mad about this.

01:41:00   My frustration is that it feels sometimes like it's a version of the old, I know I

01:41:08   mentioned this earlier, the old, come on, this would be an easy feature addition to

01:41:13   this app that I use and you email the developer and say, it's gotta be easy, probably take

01:41:16   you a day.

01:41:17   And you don't know anything about the complexity of it.

01:41:20   You flattened it out to something that seems very simple.

01:41:22   And I think that, right, knowing what we know from the outside and maybe knowing what we

01:41:28   might know from talking to people on the inside, maybe a little, this is a complex issue.

01:41:35   And Apple PR doesn't want complexity.

01:41:39   And so their statements, like I said, have opened the door to a kind of a maze of questions

01:41:46   about like what exactly is going on here.

01:41:48   But I think what you say is exactly one of these issues, which is like, are we concerned

01:41:53   about the rewrite?

01:41:54   Are we concerned about the unclear messaging?

01:41:55   Are we gonna have to explain how this iPad works, but these iPads don't work?

01:42:01   And you can see why they might've just decided, like, first off, how many people are gonna

01:42:07   use this feature who have the 2020 iPad Pro?

01:42:11   Probably not that many.

01:42:12   And how many did we sell?

01:42:14   And like, is it worth, how much engineering effort when we need to figure out the windowing

01:42:18   system this summer?

01:42:20   How much engineering effort should we put into backward compatibility?

01:42:24   And you could see why they'd be like, no, let's just say it's the M1 makes this so much

01:42:27   easier.

01:42:27   Let's just focus on the M1.

01:42:29   But I do wonder now if because this has become an issue and because Apple sort of like stepped

01:42:35   in it a little bit by providing excuses that were not good enough, were not consistent

01:42:43   enough, if we might see something that is, you know, okay, the A12Z iPad Pro can run

01:42:51   it, but it can't drive an external display and maybe it can only display three windows.

01:42:56   And like, my question is, will they do that?

01:42:58   Maybe, maybe not.

01:42:59   I don't know.

01:43:00   And two, will it make anybody happy about it?

01:43:02   Because in the end, it's all just gradations of unhappiness where you're like, I can't

01:43:07   run it.

01:43:07   I can run it sort of, or I can run it fully.

01:43:09   And that's the truth of being a computer user is eventually you do have to buy a new

01:43:14   computer if you want the fancy new thing.

01:43:16   But I can see the argument that maybe I'm sympathetic to the argument that maybe Apple

01:43:20   should have been aware of how grumpy iPad Pro users were and tried to extend it back.

01:43:27   But I also totally understand why they said M1, it's clean, it's clear, the chip is much

01:43:31   better at this.

01:43:32   It's going to be a better experience for users.

01:43:34   And so I'm really curious along with all the fixes that they need to do in the betas,

01:43:40   if they will reconsider some sort of like limited support for older systems.

01:43:45   Yep.

01:43:45   And that was my spitball idea too, is what if you just said, okay, we'll enable it for

01:43:49   more iPads, but without any external display support and, and, or maybe like you said,

01:43:55   some kind of limit, like only up to three or four windows or apps at a time.

01:44:00   I would throw in display scaling because that's the other piece here that they've conflated

01:44:04   together that is another issue, which is, do you have the ability to do the display scaling

01:44:07   on the internal?

01:44:08   Because if you can't make the, the, the, the resolution, you know, you change the scaling

01:44:13   so that it's all, everything's a little bit fuzzy, but you can get more on the screen.

01:44:16   If, if you can't do that, then this feature is not very good.

01:44:20   Like it's not that great.

01:44:22   You need, without an external monitor, you really kind of need the more space feature.

01:44:27   And so I don't know the details of all the video circuitry that's in those, those iPad

01:44:32   pros from 2020, but that's the other piece of this.

01:44:35   So there's like, it's a complex system, right?

01:44:37   And like, this is why Apple didn't want to get into it, but then they, they kind of got

01:44:41   into it.

01:44:41   So now they're in it.

01:44:42   All right.

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01:46:54   You know, rather than item by item, which, you know, I'll link to the upgrade the week

01:47:01   after the WWDC where you and Mike went through all the details.

01:47:04   I think this is good to just spend a lot of time on stage manager because I do think it's

01:47:09   the I in hindsight, it's sort of like they spend a lot of time up front talking about

01:47:14   the new lock screen feature for the iPhone, which is cool.

01:47:17   And I do think is worth the time, but stage manager is the one that has like so much more

01:47:24   to come.

01:47:25   Whereas the lock screen thing, yeah, they have, you know, features and bugs to fix and

01:47:30   stuff like that, but it is what it is, right?

01:47:33   Stage manager is sort of a worthy topic of a long podcast discussion.

01:47:40   I think, I mean, it says a lot about the interface on two of Apple's platforms, right?

01:47:44   And interesting ways that they differ.

01:47:47   And I think those two things along with the, you know, M2 and the MacBook Air are the most

01:47:54   interesting things to come out of the developer conference.

01:47:57   And the M2 is kind of what we thought it was.

01:48:00   And the MacBook Air is sort of what we were told it would be by the people who are reporting

01:48:06   on leaks from sources.

01:48:09   But the stage manager and the lock screen, I mean, the lock screen is funny because the

01:48:13   lock screen is going to be way more interesting when it's on a phone that can keep its screen

01:48:17   on all the time, right?

01:48:18   Like an Apple watch.

01:48:20   And we all know that that's almost certainly coming in the fall, but in the meantime, you

01:48:25   know, they've got it in this other version, you know, widgets on the lock screen.

01:48:29   It's great.

01:48:29   It's smart.

01:48:29   It's one of those things where it's like, it's an important part of people's iPhone

01:48:32   experience and yet it's kind of not been given the attention that it deserves.

01:48:37   And so now it has.

01:48:38   I'm happy about that.

01:48:39   Yeah.

01:48:40   The widgets on the lock screen, there's been people I've seen asked over and over again,

01:48:45   why do they look like this?

01:48:46   Why do they not have like a sort of card background like widgets do on your home screen or other

01:48:53   places where we've had widgets now?

01:48:55   And it all makes complete sense and only makes sense when you imagine it in the context of

01:49:00   an always on display that just shows the date, time, and these widgets that don't have a

01:49:05   card background.

01:49:06   They're just text on the black screen.

01:49:07   It's literally the only place that Apple has done an always on display before is the

01:49:11   Apple watch.

01:49:12   And these are complications from the Apple watch essentially.

01:49:15   And that's why.

01:49:17   That's exactly why.

01:49:18   I did want to touch on the M2 because I thought, you know, it's actual hardware coming at

01:49:25   WWDC, which is always, you know, it's not unprecedented, but it doesn't happen every

01:49:29   year.

01:49:29   And I think it makes sense scheduling-wise.

01:49:31   The M, the new, this is so confusing, the Mac, MacBook Pro 13 inch with the M2 13 inch is

01:49:43   orderable.

01:49:44   I don't think it's in customer hands yet, but reviews drive this week, including yours.

01:49:49   Yeah, I think, I think maybe it's shipping as of our recording today on the, on the 24th

01:49:54   of June.

01:49:54   I think maybe it's shipping now.

01:49:56   Yeah.

01:49:56   Yeah.

01:49:56   Like the order started a week ago and now today customers are getting them.

01:50:01   Controversial.

01:50:02   So they introduced two, two machines and all new MacBook Air with a truly all new industrial

01:50:09   design and an M2 13 inch MacBook Pro with literally a completely unchanged industrial

01:50:19   design.

01:50:19   Could not be more different.

01:50:20   In fact, they were very clear in, in my briefings with them after the keynote.

01:50:25   I had, I had a brief, I don't know if you had the same briefing where it was, I know

01:50:28   this is one where we weren't together, but it was the two MacBook Pro or MacBooks next

01:50:34   to each other, one briefing.

01:50:35   And the, the part they were ready for before they opened up to questions was telling us

01:50:43   everything that was new and improved in the air.

01:50:45   Reduced weight, reduced volume, a brighter screen, 400 to 500 nits max, better sound

01:50:53   system, better microphones, other things that were new and something, something about, you

01:50:59   know, the, the 13 inch MacBook Pro.

01:51:02   And I just asked just to clarify, is there anything different in the M2 13 inch MacBook

01:51:07   Pro from the M1 model that looks exactly the same other than going from the M1 to M2?

01:51:15   And they were just very clear.

01:51:16   Nope.

01:51:17   That's the only thing that's different.

01:51:18   Same speakers, same display, same weight, same dimensions, same touch bar.

01:51:23   Absolutely nothing's changed except they tore out the M1, put in an M2 and that's it.

01:51:28   So it couldn't be easier to explain.

01:51:31   I mean, that's, it literally is a pure test of the difference between the M1 and M2.

01:51:36   Yeah.

01:51:39   I, I don't know about your briefing on my briefing.

01:51:41   It was very much like, can I touch the MacBook Air?

01:51:45   Yeah.

01:51:45   And then, and then the MacBook Pro sitting there is like, whatever.

01:51:49   Cause it's, it's literally no different.

01:51:50   I think that's the funny thing about it.

01:51:52   Certainly there's no world where Apple wanted their first M2 processor based Mac to be that

01:51:57   laptop.

01:51:59   It's not interesting at all, but it, it, it exists for reasons and it's still got a touch

01:52:04   bar and it doesn't have MagSafe.

01:52:05   And I think it's not a computer almost anybody should buy, but the M2 is, you know, it's

01:52:10   what we thought it was plus a little bit more, I would say, you know, it's got that, it's

01:52:13   got a nice per core speed boost and, and the next generation GPU, next generation core,

01:52:19   next generation, like secure enclave and neural engine and all of that.

01:52:24   And the part that surprised me was the 4k video encode stuff where they like, they took

01:52:28   the, the high-end video encoding blocks that they put in the M1 Pro and Max, and they just

01:52:33   put them in the M2, which is sort of like, what is going to be in the M2 Pro and Max,

01:52:38   I wonder.

01:52:39   But, and then also I'm reminded cause I wrote my review this week of that uninteresting

01:52:43   laptop and I'm reminded that like most people don't need much more power.

01:52:50   I like the, most people are coming from Intel.

01:52:52   First off, most people are going to buy one, an M2 laptop are coming from Intel and they're

01:52:57   going to still get that huge boost.

01:52:59   And the power in there is so much so like it already was killing it at 1080 HD video

01:53:04   encodes and stuff.

01:53:06   It's now it's 4k that it can kill it at too, which is like, is that even a consumer

01:53:10   application yet?

01:53:10   I guess maybe a little, but kind of not.

01:53:12   And like, this is where Apple is.

01:53:14   Like it is, it's.

01:53:16   I am constantly fascinated by the fact that when Apple does these Apple Silicon announcements

01:53:21   that they're like, they're so, they're so confident in their ability to do this.

01:53:25   And, and you see those moves be confident in things like taking things right out of

01:53:30   the Pro chips on the previous generation and rolling them in, because that strongly suggests

01:53:35   that they're not too worried about what they've got up their sleeve for the next generation

01:53:39   of Pro chips as well.

01:53:40   And it's just like, I, it's been a while since I've seen Apple quite this confident

01:53:46   in this kind of a story, this chip story.

01:53:49   I mean, on the, on the iPhone, it's been like that for a little while, but on the Mac,

01:53:52   now it's just a completely different tune than back when they were rolling out Intel

01:53:56   updates, right?

01:53:57   Cause this is our first update in Apple Silicon era.

01:53:59   And like, it's just like, it was all along on the iPhone where they're like, yep, here

01:54:05   it is.

01:54:06   It's Yup.

01:54:07   Everything is faster.

01:54:08   Everything is better.

01:54:09   And like, it's, it's just, what a change from like the last round of Intel speed bump

01:54:15   announcements.

01:54:15   Yeah.

01:54:17   What they really didn't have much to speak of, you know, and, and, and if there were,

01:54:21   if there were, you know, CPU performance gains, they were so meager.

01:54:25   It wasn't, you know, it was almost embarrassing to say 5% faster, you know, two years after

01:54:31   the previous model came out.

01:54:33   And I think in some cases, the Intel lineup got so confusing where, where there were superior

01:54:39   machines that had worse single core performance, you know, like, you know, I think you could

01:54:44   say that in large, in a lot of ways for a lot of tests with the iMac Pro, which was

01:54:50   sort of a weird one-off computer for that, that sort of patched over a gap in the lineup

01:54:56   for a couple of years while they knew internally, they knew they were going to Apple Silicon.

01:55:01   They weren't going to say that so publicly, but it was sort of like, well, we need something

01:55:06   for developers and pro users who, who, you know, machine like this.

01:55:11   But the Xeon chips were like slower in single core, but, but, but if you had multi-core

01:55:17   needs, it was a great machine overall and had great multi-core performance.

01:55:21   But it's a weird thing to talk about product marketing wise.

01:55:24   They said something to the effect of like 18% faster CPU, but obviously that varies

01:55:30   case by case in the real world.

01:55:32   Now that these machines are out, people are saying it's yeah, about 20%.

01:55:35   That's a good increase for 18 months.

01:55:38   You know, the, the first M1 Max came out in November of 2020.

01:55:43   Is that right?

01:55:44   Yeah.

01:55:45   Yeah.

01:55:46   So it is keep, keep in mind too, that, you know, so many, and I, I do this too, right?

01:55:51   Like you do a core single core test of Geekbench or something like that.

01:55:54   But the truth is when you're talking about overall device performance, you're talking

01:55:59   about a combination of factors, right?

01:56:00   It's single core.

01:56:01   If you've got stuff that's single threaded, it's multi-core.

01:56:03   If you've got stuff that's multi-threaded, but it's also the memory and the storage

01:56:09   because you may be doing swap or you're reading things in or writing things out.

01:56:12   And, and, and obviously the speed of the memory is going to be a limiting factor at some point.

01:56:16   All of those things factor in.

01:56:18   And that's the thing about the M2 is it's not just that the cores are a little bit faster

01:56:21   and the GPU cores are a little bit faster, but it is true that the memory bandwidth is

01:56:25   faster because they're using the same memory as on the M again, the M1 Pro and M1 Max and

01:56:30   M1 Ultra they're using that memory, which also enables them to go up to 24 gigs of,

01:56:36   of memory as a max up from 16.

01:56:38   And their SSD is faster, I believe as well.

01:56:42   So you end up with all of those things kind of contribute to it being faster.

01:56:46   It's not just about the cores.

01:56:47   Yeah, I realized that the 13 inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar is it is controversial

01:56:57   in a way in so far as people are like, why does this machine even exist?

01:57:01   This is it's offensive to people.

01:57:03   Why are they selling this $1,300 starting point machine when it's, it even has a, because

01:57:10   they changed nothing from the one 18 months ago, it even has a worse camera than the new

01:57:16   iMacbook Air 720p instead of 1080p.

01:57:20   The explanation, I think I don't, I, nobody would explain this to me in such terms, but

01:57:26   there can be a no other explanation.

01:57:29   Here's the explanation.

01:57:30   It sells.

01:57:31   And I think they, the closest they came to an explanation wasn't in briefings.

01:57:36   It was actually in the keynote where Ternus, I think described it as their second best

01:57:41   selling Mac, you know, that their best selling Mac is the MacBook Air.

01:57:45   Most beloved best-selling for all the obvious reasons.

01:57:48   Their second best selling Mac is the two port 13 inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar.

01:57:54   And therefore, they're, they, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

01:57:58   And who knows, maybe in a world where COVID didn't happen and supply chain was not in

01:58:04   a screwed up state that it is, and they have to prioritize and obviously the iPhone is

01:58:09   going to get the top priority of any platform, but we were in a world now where like, and

01:58:14   you know, here's my, my dedication to the podcast craft.

01:58:17   My studio display with nano texture, which I ordered months ago, arrived 50 minutes before

01:58:24   you and I started recording this episode.

01:58:27   So it's still sitting unopened upstairs with my fingers itching to put it on my desk.

01:58:32   But that's unusual.

01:58:33   That is not a, that's a, that's a thing that should not take 10 weeks to arrive.

01:58:39   Right.

01:58:40   And people, the MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and Macs are backordered at the moment.

01:58:47   And it takes, you know, those aren't even new products.

01:58:49   They should not be backordered at this time.

01:58:50   They announced the MacBook Air at WWDC on June 7th and said it's coming later next

01:58:58   month, which means sometime in July.

01:59:01   And I'm thinking it might be like July 30th or 31st or something like that, you know,

01:59:05   but they didn't want to, they didn't want to not announce it at WWDC.

01:59:10   They didn't want to hold a separate event just for the MacBook Air in early July.

01:59:14   So they kind of had to pre-announce it, but that's unusual.

01:59:17   That's not how Apple usually does things.

01:59:19   And they're usually aren't so uncertain about when they'll start taking orders for

01:59:24   a product.

01:59:25   Even if they, the date of an event is not quite caught up to where it is in production,

01:59:32   mass production.

01:59:33   They still say we'll start taking orders two Fridays from now or something like that.

01:59:38   Nope, not with the MacBook Air.

01:59:40   So things are weird.

01:59:41   Maybe if that weren't the case, they would have done a little bit more with this 13-inch

01:59:46   MacBook Pro, maybe put a new camera in, done something else with the display, made the

01:59:50   speakers better, who knows, but maybe not, right?

01:59:53   I don't know.

01:59:53   I don't know.

01:59:54   Maybe not.

01:59:54   I think, yeah, I think it comes down to margins and also there's inflation that you can

01:59:58   factor in here too, but yeah, because I think once you start to change it, it unravels and

02:00:02   you got to really like actually change it.

02:00:03   And I think the benefit they have is that it's literally unchanged.

02:00:06   It's literally the same enclosure.

02:00:08   It's literally the same screen, the same camera, all of it.

02:00:11   They got a box full of touch bars.

02:00:13   They got to get those moving.

02:00:14   They got a bunch of extra touch bars, got to stick them in there.

02:00:16   And I mean, the truth, like why does this product exist?

02:00:19   Well, first off, yeah, absolutely.

02:00:20   I don't, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

02:00:22   There's very, very limited reasons why you would buy it over something like the M2 Air.

02:00:26   And they're there.

02:00:27   There's some, it's got better battery and it's got the touch bar if you like that and

02:00:30   all that, but there's so many reasons not to, not to use it and then the, that the Air

02:00:33   is better.

02:00:35   The reason it's the number two, you're right, don't mess with success.

02:00:38   If it's the number two, we got to keep it going.

02:00:40   The reason it's the number two, I believe firmly is because some people will only buy

02:00:44   a MacBook Pro.

02:00:45   And when I say some people, I think that it doesn't do it justice because I think

02:00:49   it's people.

02:00:50   Yes.

02:00:51   But I think it's also organizations have standardized on MacBook Pro.

02:00:55   And I was just talking to somebody today, one of my Six Colors members who says that,

02:01:00   you know, he, he asked for an M1 MacBook Air and his IT guy was like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

02:01:04   yeah.

02:01:04   I got you something better.

02:01:06   And it was the M1 13 inch MacBook Pro.

02:01:08   And he's like, that's not what I wanted.

02:01:09   He was disappointed by it.

02:01:11   Right.

02:01:11   But, but IT people and companies and they're like, well, no, Matt, we standardized on

02:01:14   MacBook Pro.

02:01:15   It's the pro level.

02:01:16   It's got the pro stuff.

02:01:17   It's, it's much better for us because we're a professional organization here than this

02:01:20   consumer laptop, the Air.

02:01:22   And also, so you, you, so you got to do it.

02:01:25   Like if you're Apple, you can't say, well, no, no, or, and what you really can say is,

02:01:30   well, yes.

02:01:31   And it starts at two grand now, cause that's what the 14 inch starts at.

02:01:35   That's not going to cut it.

02:01:36   And so you end up looking at it and you're like, okay, well, we can redesign the 13.

02:01:39   Although you could argue the 14 is the redesigned 13, but let's say they make a redesigned

02:01:44   13 and they try to make it with MagSafe and all that kind of stuff.

02:01:49   It's like, well, what is that going to cost them?

02:01:51   And what are their margins?

02:01:53   Like, okay, but now you've elevated to a $1,600 product or a $1,700 product.

02:01:58   It's like the reason it sells well is that it it's in the lower price range.

02:02:03   Plus it's the good, better, best thing where it's like, you know, look, it starts at $1,200

02:02:09   or whatever, but in reality, it starts at 2000 because that other laptop is not one that

02:02:13   is does anything like the other ones do.

02:02:15   So in the end, I think that's it is that there are people who must buy a MacBook Pro and

02:02:21   Apple needs a product that hits that price point because they can't say $2,000, please.

02:02:28   In the door for the very cheapest MacBook Pro, they can't do it because they sell so

02:02:32   many of them.

02:02:34   So that's why it exists.

02:02:35   And it's, is it a, I was going to say cynical.

02:02:39   I don't think that's it, but it's like, is it an uninspiring business decision to

02:02:43   keep that computer the way it is?

02:02:45   And I think the answer is yeah, it absolutely is an uninspiring business decision, but here

02:02:49   we are.

02:02:50   It's about margins and the buyers wanting a MacBook Pro label on it.

02:02:56   And so here it is, but anybody who knows anything and looks at that in the M2 Air, like, I don't

02:03:03   think it's an even hard decision.

02:03:04   There's almost nobody for whom the 13-inch MacBook Pro M2 is a better computer purchase

02:03:11   than the M2 MacBook Air when it comes out next month.

02:03:13   I just, it is, they exist, but they are a teeny tiny group of people who probably know

02:03:20   who they are and everybody else like shouldn't buy this computer.

02:03:22   It only exists to hold down the bottom of a price list.

02:03:52   become computer programmers or engineers or who, you know, go and work in IT and just

02:04:19   research on washing machines and compare specs and look at checklists and look at these things

02:04:25   and make an informed, rational decision based on tangible things that you can prove in the

02:04:32   real world.

02:04:33   And by those standards, this machine shouldn't even exist.

02:04:35   It really shouldn't.

02:04:38   But that's not how so many people buy things.

02:04:40   People buy things that make them feel good and that just feel like the right decision.

02:04:45   And there's a lot of people, and I think you're very true that the 13-inch MacBook Pro is

02:04:50   exceedingly popular in corporate IT department purchasing.

02:04:54   Yeah.

02:04:55   I've heard that from somebody else in the aftermath of this machine coming out and people

02:05:00   in our sphere saying, "I don't understand who this is for."

02:05:04   It isn't logically for almost anyone.

02:05:09   There's like that tiny, tiny sliver of people who are doing things that require sustained

02:05:15   performance at the peak, long, long video exports or something like that or very long

02:05:22   Xcode compiles, something where the fan really will kick in.

02:05:26   But famously, not just me and you, but lots and lots of people reviewing these M1 MacBooks

02:05:32   over the last 18 months have had trouble getting the fans to come on while reviewing them just

02:05:38   to see what it's like.

02:05:39   It's actually hard to do.

02:05:41   When you're trying to do it artificially by running benchmarks and stuff, so the odds

02:05:47   that somebody who's a fairly typical user in the real world is ever going to engage the

02:05:52   fan on a 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro are very slim, that it'll ever come on, period.

02:05:58   But I think there's a lot of people who look at them side by side and say, "This MacBook

02:06:03   Air is meant for consumers.

02:06:04   I'm a very serious computer user.

02:06:07   I really open up a lot of tabs.

02:06:08   I open up a lot of apps at the same time."

02:06:12   I need a thing that's a little thicker and has Pro in the name.

02:06:16   And, oh, one of the technical differences is that this one has a fan or in Apple parlance

02:06:21   an active cooling system, and this one doesn't.

02:06:23   Well, I need that because sometimes I've got so many tabs open and I use Chrome instead

02:06:27   of Safari, and I know that that's more intense.

02:06:30   So, yeah, I need the one with the fan, you know?

02:06:32   And, you know, I know that there's people—there's so many more people who hate the touch bar

02:06:39   than who are publicly in love with the touch bar.

02:06:44   But one of the reasons it stuck around for so long is that in the real world, there's

02:06:50   a lot of people who do like it, or at least like it when they're looking at it in the

02:06:53   store, side by side.

02:06:55   Like, here's a machine with a bunch of finicky, stupid buttons at the top of the keyboard,

02:06:59   and here's one with this cool color thing where you can slide the volume up and down

02:07:04   with your finger, and it looks cool, feels cool.

02:07:06   Some people like it, right?

02:07:08   It sells MacBooks, and I know, you know, the people who hate it can't believe there are

02:07:12   people who like it, but there are.

02:07:13   This machine—I bet this machine remains the second best-selling Mac in the lineup,

02:07:19   and I think they did the right thing by not changing anything.

02:07:23   I mean, I would rather there be a—nobody's making you buy it, right?

02:07:27   Your IT manager may make you use it, but nobody's making you buy it.

02:07:32   I think that anybody who—it exists to fill a price point.

02:07:35   It doesn't mean it's taking away from something else.

02:07:38   Like, the MacBook Air is still there, and in fact, you could argue they're the same

02:07:40   computer with, you know, these slight differences.

02:07:43   If you price the new MacBook Air at the same specs as the MacBook Pro, they cost the same.

02:07:49   They're the same computer, like, except that the MacBook Air has like an extra port because

02:07:53   you don't have to charge on a port.

02:07:54   You can charge on MagSafe, and it's got the better webcam, and it's got the taller

02:07:59   screen, and it's got a better look, and it comes in different shades.

02:08:02   And it's thinner and lighter.

02:08:05   And it's thinner and lighter and nicer in every conceivable way.

02:08:08   But that's the thing.

02:08:09   So this product exists for corporate buyers to buy and say they're using a MacBook Pro,

02:08:16   even though it's kind of not.

02:08:18   And for everyone else, there's the MacBook Air, right?

02:08:22   And you're right about the thermals, too.

02:08:24   It's like, yeah, that fan is nice, but we've yet to see—it takes so much to get the

02:08:29   fan to spin up at all on the M1.

02:08:30   And I imagine the M2, you know, we're going to have that similar situation where it's,

02:08:35   you know, try to get the MacBook Air to throttle.

02:08:37   Just try.

02:08:38   It's really, really hard to do.

02:08:40   And no, once you're at that point, you've got bigger problems.

02:08:44   Like I said, you know who you are.

02:08:46   And if you have to have a 13-inch laptop, and you can't buy the 14-inch, and you know

02:08:52   this is going to happen, well, then this is the computer for you.

02:08:54   But we are so far on the edge of the edge case at that point that, yeah, everybody else

02:08:59   knows what the deal is.

02:09:01   It's like the millions of US vehicle buyers who buy a pickup truck because they want a

02:09:07   pickup truck who never once in their entire ownership of the pickup truck put anything

02:09:12   in the bed of the pickup truck that wouldn't fit in a much smaller vehicle with sufficiently

02:09:19   large trunk/storage space, you know, as you get into those hybrid sort of half-car, half-SUV

02:09:26   type vehicles that are super bumpy.

02:09:27   Yeah, crossovers around any van or whatever it is.

02:09:29   Yeah, exactly.

02:09:30   Right.

02:09:31   But they know they want a pickup truck, and that's why pickup trucks are such unbelievably

02:09:35   high sellers.

02:09:37   You know, I mean, it's like practically all that Ford sells it these days, you know, is

02:09:42   pickup trucks.

02:09:42   Yeah, and if you're a business, you don't want to say no, right?

02:09:45   Because your job is to take their money.

02:09:47   Right.

02:09:47   So if you're Apple and everybody's like, "Well, we want to buy a MacBook Pro, but we're not

02:09:51   going to buy your $2,000 one for this corporate drone that we have over here.

02:09:55   We want the cheap one."

02:09:56   And you're like, "Well..." I mean, when Apple has tried to manipulate their audience, their

02:10:01   customer base into doing things they don't want to do, even Apple can't, you can't do

02:10:06   it.

02:10:07   You can't do it.

02:10:08   So they tried to kill the MacBook Air, remember?

02:10:10   They kept the $999 non-retina air around for a long time to hit a price point, by the way,

02:10:15   just to hit a sub-thousand laptop price point.

02:10:18   But then they came out with the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar and the one with the

02:10:25   escape key, and then they had the 12-inch MacBook.

02:10:29   And they're like, "Hey, this one's kind of like the Air, and this one's kind of like the

02:10:33   Air, but they're more expensive."

02:10:35   And everybody was like, "Nah, we're just going to buy the MacBook Air, even though it's not

02:10:40   retina, even though it's old.

02:10:41   We're still going to buy it because that's what we want to buy.

02:10:43   We want to buy a $999 laptop, not your $1,200 laptop."

02:10:49   I think they really learned their lesson there, that there's only so much...

02:10:53   You can kind of push consumers where you want them to go a little bit, but there are times

02:10:59   when you can't, and they want what they want.

02:11:02   And when I look at this 13-inch MacBook Pro, that's what I think, is like, "Look, the market

02:11:08   has spoken.

02:11:09   They want a thing called Pro that costs what this costs."

02:11:13   And Apple is not yet capable of making something nicer at this price point with the margins

02:11:21   they want.

02:11:21   And so this is what we get.

02:11:23   >> And you really are getting a great computer.

02:11:25   >> It is.

02:11:26   Well, that's...

02:11:27   So in my review, that's what I said, is this thing is three things.

02:11:30   It's the first M2, and that's interesting.

02:11:33   It's a relic of the past, and that's weird.

02:11:38   And it's also a perfectly fine computer.

02:11:40   Out of context, if the M2 Air did not exist, you'd be like, "Yeah, it's fine."

02:11:47   But you look at all the other laptops Apple has done, and you're like, "Why is this still

02:11:50   what it is?"

02:11:51   And I think we've beaten it to death now, but that's why it is.

02:11:55   But it's perfectly...

02:11:55   It's not bad.

02:11:56   It's just, you know, Apple's moved on everywhere else to something new and shinier and better,

02:12:02   and this computer is perfectly serviceable.

02:12:05   Maybe that's why the IT people want to buy it.

02:12:07   They're like, "Perfectly serviceable.

02:12:09   That's what we're going for."

02:12:10   It's like, "Okay, fair enough."

02:12:11   >> It's also not as fun-colored as the M2 Air, but the M2 Airs are nowhere near as fun-colored

02:12:18   as a lot of us were hoping they would be.

02:12:20   >> Yeah, I was hoping we'd finally get a bright-colored thing.

02:12:24   I didn't expect we were going to get six bright colors like the iMac, although I was hoping.

02:12:29   And I'm disappointed that it's space gray and silver and midnight and starlight.

02:12:35   The midnight is nice.

02:12:36   It's black, but it's actually very, very, very dark blue.

02:12:40   In most light, it's black.

02:12:41   I like that.

02:12:43   I kind of remember the old black MacBook.

02:12:45   It's kind of fun, but I don't know.

02:12:47   I still am waiting for Apple to embrace.

02:12:49   It's so great that they embraced it on the iMac, and I'm a little surprised.

02:12:52   And again, maybe there's some supply chain issues here where they were reluctant to have

02:12:57   that many SKUs, but they have four colors of MacBook Air.

02:13:00   They're just not that exciting.

02:13:01   And I would have liked at least one.

02:13:03   Again, nobody's going to make you buy it.

02:13:05   Just like with the iMac, the M1 iMac, there's a silver one.

02:13:08   Nobody's going to make you buy a wacky-colored computer.

02:13:11   But wouldn't it be nice if there was a bright blue MacBook Air or a bright green MacBook

02:13:19   Air?

02:13:19   And maybe there will be someday, but not today.

02:13:22   I do think there's something to the fact that the iMacs, the controversial thing with the

02:13:29   M1 iMacs is the white bezel around the screen, or one of the things some people are like,

02:13:34   "Eh, I don't know about that."

02:13:35   And I think having reviewed one and used it for two weeks, it doesn't bother me in use.

02:13:44   The way it bothered me when I first saw it is like, "Ooh, I don't think I'm going to

02:13:48   like that."

02:13:48   And then once I was in front of it, I stopped noticing.

02:13:50   And I think people, I don't know if they were actual rumors from people who ostensibly

02:13:55   heard this from their sources, or if it was all speculation.

02:13:59   But common sense, it wasn't a bad guess that the iMac M1 colors might have been a hint

02:14:06   as to the first truly designed around Apple Silicon MacBook Air colors.

02:14:12   Turns out, not at all.

02:14:13   But I think, though, that the iMacs went with the white bezel and the keyboards that look

02:14:20   the way they do because those colors went together.

02:14:24   And therefore, there were rumors or speculation that color MacBook Airs would have a white

02:14:31   bezel around the screen and maybe white keyboards instead of black keycaps.

02:14:35   And I think that might be true in the abstract if Apple had gone that way.

02:14:41   But the X factor is the notch, where the notch, which is on the new M2 MacBook Air and not

02:14:50   on the completely unchanged, except for the chip 13-inch MacBook Pro, a black notch, however

02:14:58   distracting you find the notch on the MacBook Pros, it's a lot less distracting with a black

02:15:05   bezel around the screen than it would be to have a white bezel around the screen and then

02:15:09   have a black notch in the middle of the menu bar.

02:15:12   And so I think we're gonna go with a notch.

02:15:14   I feel if there's a logic that Apple won't explain, I think it starts with the notch

02:15:20   and goes backward from there, where we want to use this notch from the MacBook Pros, but

02:15:25   if we have the notch, then we need a black bezel.

02:15:27   If we have a black bezel, these colors don't really work.

02:15:30   - Yeah, except, so the problem I have with that is that if you look at the MacBook Air,

02:15:34   it comes in silver and midnight.

02:15:36   - Right.

02:15:37   - And like that's a, not white, but a very, very light color and a very, very dark color.

02:15:44   So I don't know.

02:15:46   I think that if it can pull off silver, maybe it could pull off a bright color as well,

02:15:53   especially since the interior would be dark, but the exterior would be bright.

02:15:58   I think when I was doing that 20 Max for 2020 series a couple of years ago, I was struck

02:16:03   by the fact that Apple only did the colorful laptops for the iBook very briefly, and then

02:16:08   they went to the monochrome.

02:16:10   They were black and white and then ultimately silver.

02:16:12   And I do think that there's a question, which is your iMac is at your house or in your office

02:16:18   or in your hotel lobby or wherever it is, you are choosing it as a piece of furniture almost.

02:16:23   Your laptop comes with you and represents you.

02:16:25   And I think maybe the argument against a colored laptop is people have to carry their laptops

02:16:30   with them to job interviews and they're at Starbucks and you're in public with your computer.

02:16:37   And maybe people are a little less reluctant to stand out with a computer in a public place

02:16:42   because it says something about them.

02:16:44   I mean, not everybody, but I keep coming back to that because that was a decision Apple

02:16:48   made way back when and they've never gone back on, which is, yeah, the laptop is not

02:16:52   really a place for that much personalization.

02:16:55   I guess put a sticker on it if you want to, but Apple's not gonna do anything like that.

02:16:59   And I wonder if that is one of the arguments is people don't actually want to stand out

02:17:04   with their laptop like they might with their iMac, but I'd love to see it.

02:17:07   I would have taken a bright blue MacBook Air.

02:17:10   And I think I'm gonna buy the midnight one because it does stand out in that way, even

02:17:16   though it does look black and you have to look real close to see the blue reflection

02:17:19   on it.

02:17:19   And we'll see how bad it is with fingerprints.

02:17:21   But I had a black MacBook back in the day and it was terrible with fingerprints.

02:17:34   No surprise to me that it was the one that they featured most prominently, like in the

02:17:38   hands-on area, the kiosk they had right at the entrance where they had, I don't know,

02:17:43   a dozen, maybe more open and very, you know, slowly going from open to closed all in a

02:17:49   row made for a nice little photo.

02:17:51   But the midnight was the one they showed off.

02:17:54   And again, I don't think it's a crazy theory to think that if the supply chain were different,

02:17:59   maybe they'd have more colors, you know, just all the ones we already see, which are

02:18:04   all kind of boring, but probably, you know, will sell just great.

02:18:08   And maybe one or two or three more iMac style colors too.

02:18:13   But it's like, you know, things are a little nuts right now.

02:18:15   Let's keep it down.

02:18:17   Anything else that stands out, we can't go through item by item, but if you have one

02:18:21   more thing you wanted to talk about from WWDC, what would it be?

02:18:24   Oh, from WWDC.

02:18:26   I don't know.

02:18:27   I mean, I feel like we've hit the highest high points of it.

02:18:31   My other big piece of Apple news from the last little while that I wanted to at least

02:18:36   mention is that Apple's continued expansion into live sports continues because they announced

02:18:43   that they signed a 10-year deal with Major League Soccer to broadcast every single one

02:18:51   Major League Soccer games without blackouts.

02:18:54   And this on the heels of Friday Night Baseball.

02:18:56   I know people love it when we talk about sports here.

02:18:58   We're not talking about keyboards.

02:18:59   We got to talk about sports.

02:19:01   But there's also the rumor that they are going to get NFL Sunday tickets starting next

02:19:05   year.

02:19:05   And I think it's, I know we talked about baseball the last time I was on about the

02:19:10   Friday Night Baseball thing.

02:19:11   I just want to say again, I think one reason that Apple is doing this is to expand the

02:19:17   universe of devices that can play Apple TV stuff.

02:19:22   That putting sports on Apple's platforms, even if it's free like Friday Night Baseball,

02:19:28   if you want to watch it and you don't have a TV or a streamer box that supports Apple

02:19:34   TV, it's a motivator to get that.

02:19:36   And once you've got it, Apple's gotten in to try and get you Apple TV+ or buy movies

02:19:43   or whatever you want to do using Apple's platforms.

02:19:46   Apple's gotten in there.

02:19:47   And so I look at this deal, which is fascinating because it's like a little sports league.

02:19:51   It's not a big league.

02:19:52   And so they could buy the whole thing and they can say no blackouts and they can experiment

02:19:57   with it.

02:19:58   But I think Apple's trying to figure out like what's the best place for them to be

02:20:03   in live sports and how can they, is it a little fractional thing like Major League Baseball?

02:20:10   Is it the whole shebang like MLS or is it something like Sunday Ticket where it's a

02:20:15   premium on the side thing?

02:20:17   And then how does that all work as everything goes to streaming?

02:20:22   Because a lot of the sports stuff is the last line of defense for traditional cable.

02:20:26   So it's all, it's just like that deal and the fact that in Boston, the New England Sports

02:20:32   Network is going to offer their network that does Bruins and Red Sox games over the top

02:20:38   as a streaming service to anybody.

02:20:40   It's starting to feel those two deals happening in the same week, I believe.

02:20:44   I had that moment where I thought, oh, I think it's happening.

02:20:47   It's going to take a while, but it feels like the move to streaming for sports is really

02:20:54   kicking in now.

02:20:55   Yeah, I think so too.

02:21:04   I think that there's a, it's one step at a time and if it's in the right direction, then

02:21:10   the next step follows, the next step follows and don't look for it to come all at once.

02:21:14   And I know that when Apple first started getting into original content and they had the carpool

02:21:19   karaoke, which I think I called CarPlay Karaoke and the Planet of the Apps show, which really

02:21:26   went nowhere and people were like, oh God, this is making me sick.

02:21:30   What's Apple thinking?

02:21:31   These shows stink or are lame.

02:21:33   How are they going to launch a whole paid streaming network with this stuff?

02:21:39   Well, you got to start somewhere and it makes a lot more sense to start with a relatively

02:21:43   simple show like Carpool Karaoke than to start with Severance or For All Mankind or any of

02:21:52   the, or the morning show, any of the shows that are the actual breakthrough hits of Apple

02:22:00   TV+.

02:22:01   You know, and I'm slagging on soccer here a little bit by saying that MLS is the carpool

02:22:08   karaoke of sports, but it is the, you know, it's the fifth major sports league of team

02:22:15   sports in the US, right?

02:22:17   It's, you know, the NFL and then the NBA and MLB and then the NHL and MLS is below that.

02:22:26   But it is, you know, there's a lot of fans and they do skew younger, which goes with

02:22:31   streaming, right?

02:22:32   The average MLS fan is younger than the average, certainly the average baseball fan, as you

02:22:38   and I know from watching baseball commercials.

02:22:41   And the structure of this deal is interesting because it's structured so every game is going

02:22:45   to be on this thing that they're using, as far as I can tell, they're going to use Apple

02:22:49   TV channels, so it's a separate service that you have to pay for on top of Apple or you

02:22:53   don't actually have to have Apple TV+.

02:22:55   You just have to pay for this service, but it'll be just like you can do Paramount+ through

02:22:59   Apple TV today if you want to.

02:23:01   It's going to be like that.

02:23:02   It's going to be a thing exclusive to Apple, but it'll kind of have its own little service

02:23:07   charge that you have to do.

02:23:09   But they are going to put some games on Apple TV+ and they're going to put some games on

02:23:12   for free, like Major League Baseball, like the Friday Night Baseball is right now.

02:23:16   And I can't read that as anything other than trying to find some ways to get people to

02:23:23   be able to watch some soccer without the buy-in of spending a lot of money.

02:23:30   Because the problem with it is you're never going to grow your fan base if the only way

02:23:33   in is through an expensive, essentially, pay-per-view.

02:23:36   That was the problem.

02:23:37   It killed boxing.

02:23:38   It killed-- this is a totally esoteric one, but cricket is a good example where if you're

02:23:43   a sport-- and soccer, European soccer before about 10 years ago, it is-- if it's a tiny

02:23:49   group of people who want it and they're fervent fans, you charge them a fortune.

02:23:53   And that's great because you make a lot of money, but you will never, ever, ever make

02:23:58   a new fan in the place where it's got that charge.

02:24:01   So I think Apple is trying to walk the line.

02:24:04   It actually makes me wonder if Friday Night Baseball might have a free element to it all

02:24:09   along.

02:24:09   MLB TV always has a free game.

02:24:11   One game every day is free.

02:24:14   Like, they're trying to make it so that you can sample MLS on Apple TV, either as a complete

02:24:20   freebie or as an Apple TV+ subscriber, and then hope that they can convert you eventually

02:24:25   to such an excited fan that you'll pay for the whole package.

02:24:28   And I think that that's an interesting way of trying to find a way.

02:24:32   Like, 4uilla1 just made a deal with ESPN for their rights, and apparently they turned down

02:24:38   offers from a bunch of streamers because they really did want to be on linear TV.

02:24:41   They wanted to be on, in this case, ESPN.

02:24:44   And I can see why, right?

02:24:46   Like, I could see why you might say, "Well, they got a lot of money, but if I'm only ever

02:24:51   on Amazon for pay, nobody's ever going to discover our sport."

02:24:56   So Apple is trying with MLS to do this kind of like in-between thing where it's like a

02:25:01   little bit for free, a little bit for TV+, and then the big package.

02:25:04   And we'll see how it goes, but you're right.

02:25:06   It is Apple experimenting.

02:25:07   They can afford-- they couldn't do-- like, how much would it have cost for them to sign

02:25:11   up the NFL for something like this?

02:25:12   And it's like, that would be many, many, many, many, many billions of dollars.

02:25:16   And, you know, and those rights aren't for sale.

02:25:19   So this is a good experiment for them.

02:25:22   - It did-- hasn't the NFL done a thing like, so with the Thursday night football, which

02:25:26   is one game a week, they've sold some of those games to Amazon, where nationwide you can

02:25:32   only watch them on streaming.

02:25:34   But I think they have-- they carved out an exception.

02:25:37   I don't know if that's going to continue, but I think heretofore,

02:25:40   if it's your local team, you can still tune into a local linear TV station to get the

02:25:45   game.

02:25:45   So if it's like Green Bay versus the Philadelphia Eagles, across the nation, if you want to

02:25:52   watch it, you have to go to Amazon Prime, which means you're streaming it.

02:25:55   But if you live in Wisconsin or southeastern Philadelphia or New Jersey, you could tune

02:26:01   into some station on actual TV to see the game.

02:26:04   I don't think that's going to continue, but it was sort of the NFL saying--

02:26:07   - No, I think that-- I think that is continuing.

02:26:10   I think that the NFL's deal is that it'll always be on over the air in the local markets

02:26:16   of the two teams.

02:26:16   - Right.

02:26:16   At least for now.

02:26:17   - Everywhere else-- starting-- and it used to be like a rebroadcast of the NFL Network,

02:26:21   but starting this fall, it's an exclusive to Amazon.

02:26:24   So yeah, if it is-- if it's the Chiefs versus the Vikings, it'll be on the air in Minnesota

02:26:30   and in Kansas City, but not anywhere else.

02:26:32   It'll only be on Amazon.

02:26:34   And they went out and they got Al Michaels, and I mean, like, they spent money on announcers

02:26:39   and they did the whole thing.

02:26:40   And so that's the NFL experimenting with what if we did a pure streaming thing, but even

02:26:45   then, they're keeping the local option open.

02:26:48   The MLS version of that is that the MLS will probably still sell some of these games to

02:26:54   ESPN or Fox Sports 1 or both, but they won't be exclusive.

02:26:59   They'll also be on the Apple streaming deal.

02:27:01   That's just-- it will be-- you can't black it out.

02:27:04   Apple's got the upper hand there, which is also kind of interesting.

02:27:07   So everybody's trying to figure it out, and I'm-- I think it's going to be fascinating.

02:27:12   I think it's going to be one of the most interesting things in terms of technology change in the

02:27:17   next five years is, like, the money-- because it's all about money in the end, right?

02:27:21   And the money was all about keeping people on cable, and now the money is shifting to,

02:27:25   oh, no, people are leaving cable, but we want their money.

02:27:29   How do we get their money too?

02:27:30   And they will find a way because they want their money.

02:27:32   - Yep, and I think the other factor for Apple-- and I thought this was very clear, but you

02:27:38   had to sort of read the subtext of their promotion of Friday Night Baseball when it was new at

02:27:45   the beginning of the season.

02:27:46   And I remember going into an Apple store to see something.

02:27:49   I think I was trying to look at the-- try to see the studio display with nanotexture

02:27:53   or the adjustable base or something.

02:27:55   But all of the machines, you know, they have them configured so that the Macs that aren't

02:27:59   being used show a promo that's coordinated, and they show the same thing, and it was all

02:28:04   for Friday Night Baseball.

02:28:05   And I thought the message was very clear.

02:28:07   It was, hey, you, somebody who likes baseball but has never watched Apple TV at all.

02:28:13   You just haven't gotten in yet.

02:28:15   Here's another-- you know, you haven't gotten in because of movies, and you haven't gotten

02:28:18   in because of shows like Severance and The Morning Show.

02:28:22   Maybe you're a sports fan.

02:28:24   Try it for baseball.

02:28:25   Watch a baseball.

02:28:25   It's free.

02:28:26   Just watch.

02:28:26   Friday Night.

02:28:27   Just go to Apple TV on any of the devices.

02:28:30   If you own anything in this store, if you own one of them, you can just go to that device

02:28:36   for free and watch a baseball game.

02:28:38   That was more or less the gist.

02:28:40   And I think that that-- I think that's so easily overlooked in our crowd where we watch

02:28:46   streaming more than we watch anything else is that there's still lots of people who,

02:28:50   you know, they've either never watched streaming or it's just Netflix to them, right?

02:28:55   It's-- there's TV, and then sometimes they watch stuff on Netflix.

02:28:59   And the idea that you could do what most of us do, which is, you know, zip around between

02:29:06   streaming services, sign up for a streaming service to get just one show, and then unsubscribe

02:29:11   when it's over and wait for something else from them and sort of flip-flop and manage

02:29:15   around.

02:29:16   It's nothing like the cable world, right?

02:29:18   It's a very different world.

02:29:19   Just try it.

02:29:20   Just try it.

02:29:20   And if baseball or soccer is what gets you to just try it, next thing you know, you are

02:29:26   watching Severance or something like that.

02:29:28   - Yep.

02:29:28   Yep.

02:29:29   As soon as it's part of your possible world, then Apple can try to close the deal, right?

02:29:35   - Right.

02:29:35   - If they can-- if they can-- and they're thinking big picture here, right?

02:29:39   They're the-- what Julia Alexander, who I do a podcast with about streaming, she calls

02:29:43   them the ecosystem plays, Amazon and Apple.

02:29:46   Like, they don't follow business rules, right?

02:29:48   Like, they're in it for the big picture.

02:29:50   The big, big, big, long-term picture.

02:29:53   They're happy to spend money in order to get people in their ecosystem.

02:29:57   And it's hard not to see some of these sports moves by Apple as exactly that, which is like,

02:30:01   look, we just want people to have devices at home that are attached to a TV that are capable

02:30:06   of showing our stuff.

02:30:07   And then we'll close the deal by making a show they have to see.

02:30:10   And they'll be like, oh, I do already have Apple, don't I?

02:30:13   Because I watched that baseball game.

02:30:14   I watched that Mets game that was on Friday night, and I had to watch it on Apple.

02:30:18   So I got the $25 stick at Walmart, the Roku, and it's got the Apple thing on it, and I

02:30:24   watched it.

02:30:25   But now there's this view--

02:30:26   Steven: Or I figured out how to actually get to the Apple thing that's actually been on

02:30:30   my Samsung TV all along.

02:30:32   Already on my TV.

02:30:33   Exactly.

02:30:33   But I already did it.

02:30:35   Yeah, and then somebody, then the next Ted Lasso, you know, whatever is the next kind

02:30:41   of buzz thing from Apple happens, and you're like, oh, I do have that, don't I?

02:30:45   And you've expanded the universe.

02:30:46   And, you know, Apple can afford to do that kind of big picture thing of like, we get

02:30:52   them in a little bit, and then they got an iPhone, and they've already got this.

02:30:54   And then we're like, oh, there's a bundle.

02:30:56   You could do some fitness.

02:30:57   You could get an Apple Watch.

02:30:58   And it's like, it's all part of that, just like, how many different kind of wedges can

02:31:02   we stick in there to like get our foot in the door?

02:31:06   And this is one of them.

02:31:08   And sure, I think there's money to be made in the long run, but there's also, like, directly

02:31:13   from this.

02:31:13   But I think it's also about that ecosystem and about just getting people.

02:31:17   Apple, in many ways, it's streaming is kind of like how they were before the iPod, right?

02:31:22   Where it's sort of like, people know about it, but like, it's kind of esoteric.

02:31:25   And it's like, yeah, they're Mac users and whatever.

02:31:27   And the iPod kind of turned people's heads and made people notice.

02:31:30   And it's like, well, we think of Apple as being so big and dominant in so many ways.

02:31:35   But in streaming, they are an afterthought.

02:31:38   Like, they are still an afterthought, even with all their success and the best picture

02:31:42   win and all the Ted Lasso Emmys and all of that.

02:31:45   They're still sort of like, you're right, Netflix and Rest of World, whatever that is.

02:31:50   And so any opportunity Apple can have to like wave at somebody and say, no, no, no, you

02:31:55   can watch our stuff too, at this point is a win for them.

02:31:58   Yep, I agree completely.

02:32:02   And it is very exciting looking forward.

02:32:04   That to me, as somebody who's not really a soccer fan, certainly not an MLS fan, I'm

02:32:08   very excited about the announcement because of what it augurs going forward.

02:32:12   Yeah, yeah.

02:32:13   I mean, that's NFL Sunday ticket deal.

02:32:15   If they make that, that is going to be something to see.

02:32:17   I hope that that is the rumors are that they actually have made it and they're just not

02:32:21   announcing it, which kind of makes sense because it's not going to happen until fall of 23.

02:32:25   But like, for our non-American listeners, you got to understand, I know that nobody

02:32:31   else cares about the NFL, but the NFL is the most successful entertainment product in the

02:32:35   United States.

02:32:36   It's an NFL game during the season is the number one TV show every week.

02:32:41   It's a big deal.

02:32:43   And so, and they have an agreement with all the networks and Amazon at this point.

02:32:48   So if Apple joins that as one of the NFL partners, it's a, it's a big deal.

02:32:53   And that would be something that would drive a lot of people toward Apple services for

02:32:58   the first time just to get that product.

02:33:00   Yep, absolutely.

02:33:01   Jason, always a pleasure to have you on the show.

02:33:04   And again, I'll just end the show the same way I began it, which is it's so good to

02:33:08   hear your voice, but even better that I heard it for real, not electronically amplified,

02:33:13   just direct, hands shaking hands, giving hugs.

02:33:17   I know, right.

02:33:18   It was good.

02:33:19   In a, in an interesting building we were in, but yes, it was, it was fantastic to, to see

02:33:24   you.

02:33:24   And I'm, I'm hoping that we'll, I'm hoping I'll see you again this fall.

02:33:28   Yeah.

02:33:29   Fingers crossed.

02:33:31   All right.

02:33:31   And of course everybody can read your fine work at six colors spelled, however you would

02:33:36   prefer to spell colors.

02:33:38   Yeah.

02:33:39   So you can put a U in or not.

02:33:40   It doesn't matter.

02:33:40   Six colors.com and of course, J Snell on Twitter.

02:33:44   And I think you do a couple podcasts, but they can find them all.

02:33:47   I've lost count, but, but the incomparable.com or relay.fm are the places to go for all

02:33:54   of my many podcasts.

02:33:55   Anyway, good to hear from you.