The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► How's your week? Anything going on?

00:00:03 ◼   ► On one level, yes. A whole lot. And on another level, absolutely nothing.

00:00:07 ◼   ► So, you know. Thank you.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Absolutely nothing. There's nothing on my mind.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Boy, it just seems like every day is the same as the last.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Holy hell.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Yeah, we were looking forward to my daughter coming home for Spring Break next week,

00:00:26 ◼   ► and instead my daughter is now home to do her online finals.

00:00:30 ◼   ► And then she'll be here for a month, at least.

00:00:32 ◼   ► So yeah, she's happy, she's so thrilled.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Nothing like having your freshman year switched off

00:00:39 ◼   ► and kicked back to your parents.

00:00:41 ◼   ► - I don't know, well, what do you,

00:00:43 ◼   ► all right, you're a college student.

00:00:45 ◼   ► All of this is bad.

00:00:46 ◼   ► And let me just say this as a preamble,

00:00:49 ◼   ► number one, we are recording on Monday, March 16th

00:00:55 ◼   ► at 6.30 p.m. Eastern dive, 3 Pacific,

00:00:59 ◼   ► and who the hell knows what the world will be like

00:01:02 ◼   ► by the time this podcast gets out the door, but--

00:01:04 ◼   ► - Who knows what it'll be like

00:01:05 ◼   ► by the time we finish recording?

00:01:06 ◼   ► - Recording, right, yes. - Who knows?

00:01:09 ◼   ► - Good point, very good point.

00:01:11 ◼   ► I honestly thought the first person who I heard say that

00:01:13 ◼   ► was there's a great restaurant guy here in Philly,

00:01:16 ◼   ► Mark Vetri, and he has a couple restaurants now,

00:01:21 ◼   ► but his, or no, not Vetri, it was,

00:01:24 ◼   ► Well, Vetri was quoted too,

00:01:26 ◼   ► but there's a couple of restaurant guys,

00:01:27 ◼   ► but one of them was, I think it might have been Vetri,

00:01:29 ◼   ► was quoted.

00:01:29 ◼   ► Everybody was saying everything's changing day by day,

00:01:31 ◼   ► and he goes, "No, it's changing hour by hour."

00:01:34 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:01:35 ◼   ► - And that is only for now, who knows, minute by minute.

00:01:38 ◼   ► Anyway, let me just say as a preamble

00:01:42 ◼   ► that this coronavirus thing,

00:01:44 ◼   ► and it could not be more serious.

00:01:47 ◼   ► It is hitting everybody.

00:01:49 ◼   ► I don't, I can't imagine,

00:01:51 ◼   ► I guess if you're a listener in South America,

00:01:55 ◼   ► somewhere in the, you know,

00:01:57 ◼   ► there's some places where it seems like it hasn't hit yet,

00:02:00 ◼   ► but you know, it's, as we all know from Tom Hanks

00:02:02 ◼   ► and Rita Wilson, it's already hit Australia.

00:02:06 ◼   ► Very hard to believe that there's anybody

00:02:07 ◼   ► who's gonna listen to this episode who's not affected,

00:02:11 ◼   ► hasn't had their life affected in some way,

00:02:13 ◼   ► and I think we all agree right at the beginning of it.

00:02:16 ◼   ► I don't mean to make light of it.

00:02:17 ◼   ► I think it's very serious.

00:02:18 ◼   ► I think my coverage of "Daring Fireball" is very serious,

00:02:20 ◼   ► But I also know that people want to listen to podcasts

00:02:22 ◼   ► and they want to get their mind off this.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And if we joke around in some ways,

00:02:26 ◼   ► it's in no way to be taken

00:02:28 ◼   ► as treating this whole thing lightly.

00:02:31 ◼   ► - No, we're all in the same boat.

00:02:32 ◼   ► I mean, more so than perhaps at any other point

00:02:36 ◼   ► in our lives, right?

00:02:37 ◼   ► Like the whole world is pretty much

00:02:39 ◼   ► in exactly the same situation here.

00:02:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, at some point back, I believe it was,

00:02:45 ◼   ► 'cause I was certainly back then.

00:02:47 ◼   ► I believe it was back when I was doing the show

00:02:48 ◼   ► Dan Benjamin, I had sarcastically—or it's not even sarcasm, but smart-assedly claimed that I never

00:02:57 ◼   ► washed my hands in the same way that I claimed that I'd had my driver's license revoked at some point.

00:03:03 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Well, you know, Dan's a germaphobe,

00:03:06 ◼   ► so you just say that and he would start itching, I think.

00:03:09 ◼   ► Dave

00:03:15 ◼   ► I mean, quoting my life.

00:03:18 ◼   ► I should actually see if I can dig that up.

00:03:20 ◼   ► Maybe we'll have a theme song for this episode.

00:03:22 ◼   ► Maybe everybody listening to me say this right now

00:03:25 ◼   ► will have already heard it.

00:03:26 ◼   ► Maybe if we find it, we'll stick it

00:03:27 ◼   ► at the beginning of the show.

00:03:28 ◼   ► But believe it or not, it was not true at the time.

00:03:33 ◼   ► And it is, as I feel my pristine hands right now,

00:03:38 ◼   ► it is definitely not true now.

00:03:42 ◼   ► We are washing hands.

00:03:44 ◼   ► We are taking this seriously.

00:03:45 ◼   ► we are bunkered in. - Yep.

00:03:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, so college student, freshman year,

00:03:53 ◼   ► wow, what a bummer.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Just off the top of my head though,

00:03:56 ◼   ► if you're a college student,

00:03:58 ◼   ► the two seminal years are of course freshman year

00:04:00 ◼   ► and senior year, the middle years kind of blur together,

00:04:04 ◼   ► which is worse to have interrupted?

00:04:05 ◼   ► I would think maybe senior year.

00:04:07 ◼   ► - I would think so, I would think so.

00:04:09 ◼   ► I mean, one of the differences is presumably

00:04:11 ◼   ► you're off campus your senior year,

00:04:13 ◼   ► like Jamie's in the dorm right now,

00:04:15 ◼   ► And like talk about really intensely close group of people,

00:04:20 ◼   ► like that's probably not what you want

00:04:22 ◼   ► is having all those hundreds of college students

00:04:26 ◼   ► in close proximity.

00:04:28 ◼   ► And, but senior year you're off campus.

00:04:30 ◼   ► I mean, maybe you even stay in your apartment or whatever,

00:04:33 ◼   ► but yeah, you're losing your end of your college life.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And by the time things get back to normal,

00:04:39 ◼   ► if you know, whatever that normal is,

00:04:42 ◼   ► you're out of there presumably,

00:04:44 ◼   ► you may not even get a graduation ceremony, right?

00:04:46 ◼   ► Like, ugh, it's terrible.

00:04:47 ◼   ► - I think almost certainly not, right?

00:04:49 ◼   ► I mean, it's-- - Yeah, I mean,

00:04:50 ◼   ► unless they do like a makeup,

00:04:52 ◼   ► and it's never gonna be the same, right?

00:04:53 ◼   ► Although it's funny,

00:04:55 ◼   ► because we always have to talk about sports

00:04:57 ◼   ► at least a little bit to offend people.

00:05:00 ◼   ► One thing I read is that the NCAA is actually thinking

00:05:02 ◼   ► of restoring some eligibility to some athletes,

00:05:05 ◼   ► which is an interesting idea

00:05:06 ◼   ► that maybe some of the spring athletes,

00:05:09 ◼   ► you know you get your four years,

00:05:10 ◼   ► and then you're done and you can't compete.

00:05:12 ◼   ► it's possible that some athletes who thought this was their last year are now going to

00:05:16 ◼   ► be granted another year and they can come back and compete next year again, which would

00:05:21 ◼   ► be—I think that is a thing that they absolutely should do because for some of these people,

00:05:26 ◼   ► this is—they've lost their chance and they're not going to get it back, but maybe

00:05:30 ◼   ► they'll get another year to do some of this stuff. Because I've been thinking about

00:05:36 ◼   ► that for for Jamie about like I mean I assume she's gonna keep taking her

00:05:42 ◼   ► courses in the spring even if they end up being all online you could just opt

00:05:46 ◼   ► out but then you're a quarter behind of everybody else and who knows the the

00:05:51 ◼   ► online courses might be easier all right I don't know we don't who knows but it's

00:05:56 ◼   ► just disruptive and yeah if you're seeing your senior year and you're

00:05:59 ◼   ► rolling through and you're this is your last hurrah and then there's no hurrah

00:06:01 ◼   ► Like, that's it. I feel bad for them.

00:06:05 ◼   ► - K through 12 schools are canceled,

00:06:07 ◼   ► I believe two weeks here in Pennsylvania,

00:06:13 ◼   ► not even Philadelphia, just statewide.

00:06:15 ◼   ► - My sons are also, our sons are the same age.

00:06:18 ◼   ► It's two weeks, but we look at it and we're like,

00:06:21 ◼   ► guys, I mean, it's gonna be a month at least,

00:06:23 ◼   ► and probably more than that,

00:06:24 ◼   ► and it might even be the rest of the school year.

00:06:26 ◼   ► But they're not gonna commit to that yet,

00:06:28 ◼   ► but it's, who knows?

00:06:30 ◼   ► - So my son Jonas came home Friday,

00:06:34 ◼   ► and I thought he had a really unique perspective on it.

00:06:36 ◼   ► I mean, it was obviously a major topic of conversation

00:06:40 ◼   ► with his, you know, the whole school.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And in fact, so he, they announced it on Thursday,

00:06:47 ◼   ► but they said, but we're still gonna have school Friday,

00:06:50 ◼   ► but it was a totally different schedule.

00:06:52 ◼   ► I don't know, I mean, I was,

00:06:54 ◼   ► what they did is they rejiggered the schedule

00:06:56 ◼   ► so that every kid would have every class on Friday,

00:06:59 ◼   ► whether it was usually only on Tuesdays or whatever,

00:07:02 ◼   ► so that every teacher could get some time with the kids

00:07:05 ◼   ► to say, here's our plan going forward

00:07:07 ◼   ► for what we're gonna do with remote education.

00:07:11 ◼   ► It seemed like a good idea.

00:07:12 ◼   ► We're announcing this a day early.

00:07:13 ◼   ► Everybody come in, we're gonna have one day

00:07:15 ◼   ► with like 30 minute classes with each teacher,

00:07:17 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah, but they obviously had a lot of time

00:07:19 ◼   ► to talk about it.

00:07:20 ◼   ► And Jonas came home and said, amongst him and his pals,

00:07:25 ◼   ► and his Latin teacher, who seems,

00:07:28 ◼   ► I've met with one of the parent-teacher things,

00:07:33 ◼   ► and did seem like a very clever fellow,

00:07:36 ◼   ► are of the opinion that they're not coming back.

00:07:41 ◼   ► And I thought it was a really interesting perspective

00:07:45 ◼   ► because it seemed, it wasn't like a woo-hoo,

00:07:49 ◼   ► we're done with school for the year.

00:07:51 ◼   ► I thought it was, just talking to them

00:07:53 ◼   ► about why they thought it, it was very much informed

00:07:56 ◼   ► by their lack of preconceptions,

00:08:00 ◼   ► that they're only 15, 16 years old,

00:08:03 ◼   ► whereas I'm 47 and the way the world works

00:08:06 ◼   ► is when something goes wrong at school,

00:08:08 ◼   ► they get the kids back in school as soon as possible.

00:08:11 ◼   ► There's a big snowfall and the roof collapses.

00:08:14 ◼   ► Well, they fix the roof and 10 days later,

00:08:16 ◼   ► the kids are back in school or there's a fire or something.

00:08:19 ◼   ► Nobody comes to school for a week

00:08:23 ◼   ► because we gotta fix this water damage from the fire,

00:08:27 ◼   ► then you come back to school.

00:08:28 ◼   ► Whereas without the preconception of this doesn't happen,

00:08:31 ◼   ► that schools close in mid-March

00:08:33 ◼   ► and the school year's just over,

00:08:36 ◼   ► when you look at what's likely ahead, it does seem likely.

00:08:41 ◼   ► Like the gist was they, you know,

00:08:43 ◼   ► and they were like at a whiteboard,

00:08:44 ◼   ► and they were like, you know,

00:08:45 ◼   ► the peak is obviously gonna come,

00:08:48 ◼   ► peak infections is obviously gonna come in mid-April

00:08:51 ◼   ► to end of April, and if that's the peak,

00:08:54 ◼   ► how, you know, isn't it, it's not gonna fall off a cliff,

00:08:57 ◼   ► it's gonna taper off, like how, you know,

00:09:00 ◼   ► and if wherever we are on the curve, however, you know,

00:09:04 ◼   ► however close to-- - Putting hundreds

00:09:05 ◼   ► of teenagers together-- - Right.

00:09:07 ◼   ► - And having 30 in a room and all of that,

00:09:09 ◼   ► it's just like that's the last thing you wanna be doing.

00:09:12 ◼   ► - Right, it just seems like really wishful thinking

00:09:15 ◼   ► to announce this as a two weeks thing.

00:09:17 ◼   ► I thought it was really telling last night

00:09:19 ◼   ► when the Vegas, it's very strange to me,

00:09:22 ◼   ► I predicted last night that the Caesars ones would follow.

00:09:25 ◼   ► So the Wynn and Encore in Las Vegas,

00:09:29 ◼   ► which are just two, but they're big and top tier,

00:09:34 ◼   ► announced that they were gonna shut down tomorrow, Tuesday.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And the MGM ones-- - And the Bellagio ones,

00:09:42 ◼   ► right? - Yep, all the Bellagio,

00:09:43 ◼   ► MGM group, the Bellagio ones, followed about an hour later.

00:09:47 ◼   ► And then all the other ones, every other property on the strip that you've ever heard of is in the Caesars Palace group.

00:09:54 ◼   ► And I just assumed that they would follow, and I was like rechecking this afternoon, and apparently not.

00:09:59 ◼   ► But yet they're laying off employees? It's very strange.

00:10:03 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know how long they think they can ride this out, but it seems like a bad idea to me.

00:10:09 ◼   ► Yeah, you just—throughout this, you know, and I keep coming back to like the stages of grief,

00:10:13 ◼   ► that there's kind of denial and bargaining

00:10:16 ◼   ► and then there's finally acceptance.

00:10:17 ◼   ► And I've seen that here,

00:10:19 ◼   ► that when you don't have a plan written down,

00:10:21 ◼   ► that is here is our global pandemic plan,

00:10:23 ◼   ► which nobody really has,

00:10:25 ◼   ► I mean, there are some, almost nobody has,

00:10:27 ◼   ► you end up in this sort of like,

00:10:29 ◼   ► well, maybe we can ride it out

00:10:31 ◼   ► and then you can see the steps.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Like, and then the next one is,

00:10:33 ◼   ► well, maybe we'll change a little bit.

00:10:35 ◼   ► And then you realize,

00:10:36 ◼   ► well, we're gonna have to change for a little while.

00:10:37 ◼   ► And then finally, you get to the point where you realize,

00:10:40 ◼   ► no, we need to shut everything down

00:10:41 ◼   ► and we just need to all sit here for a couple of months.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And, but it takes time because like,

00:10:47 ◼   ► I mean, how disruptive is it to say,

00:10:49 ◼   ► we're not gonna do the NCAA basketball tournament?

00:10:52 ◼   ► They were like, we'll play it in front of empty crowds.

00:10:54 ◼   ► And then finally, the next, literally the next day,

00:10:56 ◼   ► they're like, no, we're not gonna play it.

00:10:57 ◼   ► - Right, next day.

00:10:59 ◼   ► Well, and then I read,

00:11:00 ◼   ► I was reading the Las Vegas Review Journal this morning

00:11:02 ◼   ► and they had these amazing photos and they're like,

00:11:04 ◼   ► okay, yes, it's 8.30, nine o'clock in the morning

00:11:06 ◼   ► on a Monday and the strip is never busy

00:11:08 ◼   ► at nine in the morning on a Monday,

00:11:11 ◼   ► But it's not like this.

00:11:12 ◼   ► And it is like, you know, it's like scenes

00:11:16 ◼   ► that ILM would have to put together, you know,

00:11:19 ◼   ► to see no cars on the Vegas Strip.

00:11:22 ◼   ► It's just insane.

00:11:24 ◼   ► But then the reporter was like, you know,

00:11:26 ◼   ► but, you know, so Harris is one that's still

00:11:28 ◼   ► within the Caesars group, and they were like,

00:11:30 ◼   ► "Harris was mostly empty except for six players

00:11:33 ◼   ► "crowded around a craps table."

00:11:36 ◼   ► And I'm like, look, I like to play craps.

00:11:38 ◼   ► I like to gamble.

00:11:39 ◼   ► But in addition to the fact, number one,

00:11:41 ◼   ► All of the table games involve chips going back and forth.

00:11:45 ◼   ► I put out a chip, the dealer takes the chip,

00:11:48 ◼   ► you get paid and you're getting chips.

00:11:50 ◼   ► There's a lot of touching the chips there.

00:11:51 ◼   ► But Krabs is literally passing dice around

00:11:55 ◼   ► and everybody gets a turn to throw them.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Oh my God, I had to go to CVS today and pick something up,

00:12:02 ◼   ► even with Apple Pay.

00:12:03 ◼   ► And we can get to this later,

00:12:05 ◼   ► but Apple Pay is pretty cool in a

00:12:07 ◼   ► hey, watch what you touch situation.

00:12:10 ◼   ► It's always seemed kind of cool that there's no touching involved, but now it seems magic.

00:12:17 ◼   ► But because it was a prescription pickup, I had to sign for it, and guess what I had

00:12:22 ◼   ► to sign with?

00:12:23 ◼   ► That electric—

00:12:24 ◼   ► One of those plastic pens?

00:12:26 ◼   ► Attached to the thing.

00:12:29 ◼   ► And I felt like I almost turned into Larry David.

00:12:32 ◼   ► I was just like, "Ahh!"

00:12:35 ◼   ► I signed, and then I just kept my right hand up.

00:12:40 ◼   ► actually had to use my left hand to put my phone back in my right pocket, and I just kept my—and

00:12:44 ◼   ► of all the stores, of all the stores in Philadelphia, which is the one store that

00:12:51 ◼   ► doesn't have free hand sanitizer at the entrance? CVS! How is that possible that a pharmacy does not

00:12:58 ◼   ► have free hand sanitizer? But I knew that there's a little grocery—a great little family-owned

00:13:04 ◼   ► grocery store right around the corner, Debruno Brothers, which is doing a fantastic job in all

00:13:10 ◼   ► of this, absolutely fantastic job. I knew it. So I just, I'm like walking around with my right hand

00:13:15 ◼   ► up in the air, like going a block and a half to get, and I like went over there after using that

00:13:21 ◼   ► pen, hand sanitized before I hand sanitized. I did like a pre-hand sanitizer watch, because I feel

00:13:31 ◼   ► like that pen. I mean, I was like, "How are you making people use this pen?" This is…

00:13:35 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:13:36 ◼   ► I went to Whole Foods a couple of days ago, and I brought my own bag, put all the stuff in the bag,

00:13:43 ◼   ► dumped it out at the cashier, contactless, Apple Pay, walked out. I don't need the receipt, right?

00:13:49 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And I managed to do it. And I do wonder, in the long run, we're going to get some interesting new

00:13:57 ◼   ► cultural practices out of this that where people are going to be like, "Why don't we reduce the

00:14:02 ◼   ► amount of touching that happens?" Like, maybe that's a good idea. I think contactless payments

00:14:07 ◼   ► may be one of those places where everybody's like, "Why did we not just completely lean into this? I

00:14:11 ◼   ► don't want to touch anything." I think we're all going to get a little more conscious about all of

00:14:16 ◼   ► this stuff now, having lived through it. Yeah, and there have been a couple of places that I've seen,

00:14:22 ◼   ► smaller places here in Philly. Not like I'm out much, but I have seen places, and there's even

00:14:27 ◼   ► some places that have the sign in the window that were saying, "Credit cards, please," because they

00:14:33 ◼   ► don't want cash. But... - Yeah, I saw, I was buying dog food today. That was my one outing,

00:14:40 ◼   ► and the lady in front of me wanted to pay with cash, and it's like $7.07, and she's like, "Oh,

00:14:48 ◼   ► I think I have $0.07," and she's digging, and everybody around, you know, in our little three

00:14:54 ◼   ► yard bubbles is looking at each other like, "Are you kidding me?" And she's like, gets

00:14:58 ◼   ► it all out, and I'm looking at the cashier and I'm like, "Well, I hope you got just

00:15:01 ◼   ► a vat of hand sanitizer back there, buddy." Yeah. And then she's still busy putting her

00:15:07 ◼   ► money away in her purse, and I have already tapped my Apple Pay, picked up the 45 pounds

00:15:15 ◼   ► of dog food, and I'm walking around her to get out of there.

00:15:18 ◼   ► Right.

00:15:19 ◼   ► "Why, lady?"

00:15:20 ◼   ► You know what, and I think that for the most part,

00:15:22 ◼   ► you know, usually, and the distance on Apple Pay

00:15:25 ◼   ► is pretty generous, you know,

00:15:27 ◼   ► it's one of those technologies, and again,

00:15:30 ◼   ► I never really thought about it a lot until this last week,

00:15:35 ◼   ► but it's, the NFC distance, or I think it's NFC, right?

00:15:39 ◼   ► Most of these terminals is, the technology is NFC.

00:15:42 ◼   ► It is, it doesn't require you to get close enough

00:15:46 ◼   ► that you're worried about touching,

00:15:48 ◼   ► but it's not so generous that you have to worry about it happening accidentally when you're not

00:15:53 ◼   ► even that close, right? It seems like the distance is just right. Six inches, maybe three, four

00:16:00 ◼   ► inches at the closest, and ping, you're done. It's just absolutely—I mean, everybody's a germaphobe

00:16:09 ◼   ► at this point. Or everybody should be. I can't decide whether all the germaphobes are nodding

00:16:15 ◼   ► like "yeah I told you" or if they're too busy like in a corner somewhere. I can't do it, I don't know.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Meanwhile there's six guys playing craps at Harris on the strip.

00:16:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:27 ◼   ► I just can't believe it. Oh man. Oh my god. You gotta laugh to keep from crying sometimes.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Oh my god. Where do we start? What else is going on? What's going on in in your daily life?

00:16:44 ◼   ► you guys bunkered in? Uh, yeah, more so my wife works at a library full time and they closed it

00:16:53 ◼   ► over the weekend and today was a staff day where they're supposed to come in and sort of figure

00:16:58 ◼   ► out what they could do when they're not open to the public and by noon today, so again hours pass

00:17:05 ◼   ► and things change, by noon today we had been given all the Bay Area counties a shelter in place

00:17:10 ◼   ► order, which is usually used for things like toxic gas leaks. It basically said no non-essential

00:17:16 ◼   ► movement. So, you know, in other words, she's going to be home tomorrow. There's no way that

00:17:21 ◼   ► they're still going to be in the library unless the city government decides the library is an

00:17:26 ◼   ► essential emergency operation, which seems unlikely. And so then we'll all be, you know,

00:17:31 ◼   ► we'll all be in here, just locked in here. And for me, it's funny because this is where I work,

00:17:36 ◼   ► like you and I, so many of our peers already work from home, so it's not as disruptive to us,

00:17:41 ◼   ► but everybody else in my family has been disrupted directly by this. So, that's day to day,

00:17:47 ◼   ► I don't know, we're starting to figure it out now, that what does it mean that Jamie's home and

00:17:52 ◼   ► she's doing her finals and what's Julian doing in terms of his high school work and which teachers

00:18:00 ◼   ► know how to use email and which teachers don't know how to use email. There's a lot of that.

00:18:04 ◼   ► there's some tech savvy teachers and some really not savvy teachers. And yeah, I don't know. That's

00:18:10 ◼   ► where we are. So it's weird. And like you said, every hour, every day, it seems like there's

00:18:15 ◼   ► something new and different and changing about it. So I don't know. I mean, I assume are you all

00:18:21 ◼   ► just bunkered in too? - Yeah, bunkered in with our 500 pounds of charcoal. So we're all set.

00:18:29 ◼   ► You know, Jonas pointed out, I mean, we're, you know, we are as a threesome, rather naturally,

00:18:38 ◼   ► this isn't that different than what we like to do. Like, it's like, when we have no family,

00:18:43 ◼   ► other obligations, like for us, a nice weekend is often just entirely spent at home.

00:18:53 ◼   ► It's not that different for us.

00:18:56 ◼   ► And we're not on top of each other,

00:18:59 ◼   ► we've got plenty of space.

00:19:01 ◼   ► I do, I've worked from home most of my adult life

00:19:04 ◼   ► and nonstop since, I don't know,

00:19:08 ◼   ► God, at least 20 years for the most part,

00:19:12 ◼   ► with some very small exceptions.

00:19:14 ◼   ► But it's the hour by hour differences are just crazy.

00:19:22 ◼   ► Literally this morning, so Sunday night,

00:19:27 ◼   ► or Sunday, yesterday, Sunday, New York City announced

00:19:31 ◼   ► that they were gonna close all restaurants and bars

00:19:33 ◼   ► other than to allow for takeout and pickup,

00:19:37 ◼   ► and delivery, I guess takeout and pickup are the same thing.

00:19:42 ◼   ► But delivery and takeout.

00:19:45 ◼   ► And then Los Angeles followed shortly thereafter,

00:19:49 ◼   ► almost probably just accounting for the time difference

00:19:52 ◼   ► made that decision at the right time.

00:19:54 ◼   ► The governor of Ohio, which neighbors Pennsylvania

00:19:57 ◼   ► to the west, announced that the whole state

00:19:59 ◼   ► was gonna close all restaurants and bars

00:20:01 ◼   ► for the same policy other than takeout and delivery.

00:20:05 ◼   ► And then this morning, the mayor of Philadelphia,

00:20:07 ◼   ► Jim Kenney, said that he still wanted,

00:20:11 ◼   ► he said he encouraged, he was still encouraging people

00:20:13 ◼   ► to go to restaurants and to tip generously.

00:20:16 ◼   ► The staffs are hurting.

00:20:18 ◼   ► We can't really afford to close all these restaurants.

00:20:21 ◼   ► It's, you know, it's,

00:20:22 ◼   ► his top priority was obviously the economic impact

00:20:27 ◼   ► of closing restaurants, which again, I,

00:20:29 ◼   ► and I know people who work, you know,

00:20:31 ◼   ► I have, my friend Lee owns a bar here in Philadelphia,

00:20:35 ◼   ► Hopsing Laundromat.

00:20:37 ◼   ► I have friends in the restaurant industry.

00:20:41 ◼   ► I have a good friend, Matt, who works up in New York

00:20:44 ◼   ► in the industry and has been filling me in there.

00:20:47 ◼   ► I mean, it's just devastating.

00:20:48 ◼   ► Restaurants, it's really devastating.

00:20:50 ◼   ► it's, they're just not equipped for this financially

00:20:54 ◼   ► to pay staff.

00:20:56 ◼   ► I mean, literally, famously, I mean, in America,

00:21:00 ◼   ► at least, waiters, most of the people,

00:21:02 ◼   ► a lot of the people who work in restaurants

00:21:03 ◼   ► don't even have a salary that could still be paid.

00:21:05 ◼   ► They make all their money from tips.

00:21:08 ◼   ► Doesn't work if the place is half empty.

00:21:11 ◼   ► And there was this half measure where they were gonna say,

00:21:15 ◼   ► well, everybody, you can be open,

00:21:16 ◼   ► but you have to be half capacity.

00:21:18 ◼   ► And it's like, number one, that didn't seem like a great idea.

00:21:22 ◼   ► It's not an airborne illness, right?

00:21:23 ◼   ► So this is one of the things that I haven't understood

00:21:26 ◼   ► about some of these responses, where they're like,

00:21:27 ◼   ► well, if everybody's table is six feet apart,

00:21:31 ◼   ► then it's okay.

00:21:32 ◼   ► But it's not, you know, measles is airborne,

00:21:34 ◼   ► which when you think about it, it's terrifying, right?

00:21:36 ◼   ► That you could just walk by somebody, you know,

00:21:38 ◼   ► back before there was a measles vaccine,

00:21:39 ◼   ► somebody had measles and you just walk by them

00:21:41 ◼   ► on the sidewalk and you get measles.

00:21:43 ◼   ► - You get the measles.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Did you see the thread?

00:21:46 ◼   ► So you posted a link to one Don Schaffner thread,

00:21:50 ◼   ► and this is this guy who's an expert on food safety.

00:21:54 ◼   ► And you posted your post about hand washing,

00:21:57 ◼   ► which was really great,

00:21:58 ◼   ► and the idea that it does really warm water or cold water,

00:22:02 ◼   ► it's the soap that matters, which was really good.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And then he said hand sanitizer also is very effective

00:22:09 ◼   ► against this kind of virus,

00:22:10 ◼   ► so you should also use hand sanitizer, it's super powerful.

00:22:13 ◼   ► He had a new thread today because Lex Friedman, our buddy, said, "Basically, I'm worried

00:22:22 ◼   ► about takeout being contaminated."

00:22:24 ◼   ► Like, "How does this work?"

00:22:27 ◼   ► And Don basically said—and again, he's an expert, although not the only expert and

00:22:32 ◼   ► people have conflicting opinions—but he basically said, "It's unlikely because

00:22:36 ◼   ► this is a respiratory illness, which means that people are sneezing and coughing, and

00:22:42 ◼   ► then you breathe it in and that's how you get infected.

00:22:45 ◼   ► If somebody sneezed on your food while they were making it,

00:22:49 ◼   ► that would be gross and they should go home if they're sick.

00:22:53 ◼   ► But it's gonna be in your mouth and then you swallow it

00:22:56 ◼   ► and then it's got, your stomach has a low pH

00:23:00 ◼   ► so it's gonna inactivate the virus.

00:23:03 ◼   ► If it gets to your intestine, he says,

00:23:06 ◼   ► it's a respiratory virus,

00:23:08 ◼   ► it's not really designed to invade that way,

00:23:10 ◼   ► so it probably wouldn't work.

00:23:13 ◼   ► So basically what he says is,

00:23:14 ◼   ► I'm not really worried about getting the virus from food,

00:23:17 ◼   ► whether it's hot or cold, doesn't really matter.

00:23:19 ◼   ► Because as far as we know,

00:23:22 ◼   ► this is about people coughing or sneezing,

00:23:25 ◼   ► and then you either breathing that in

00:23:28 ◼   ► or the whole hand washing thing,

00:23:30 ◼   ► touching something that's got it on it

00:23:31 ◼   ► and then bringing that up and putting it on your eye

00:23:33 ◼   ► or in your mouth or something like that.

00:23:35 ◼   ► So it's not, yeah, so the vectors matter,

00:23:38 ◼   ► which is why everybody keeps saying, you know,

00:23:41 ◼   ► wash your hands, don't touch your face,

00:23:44 ◼   ► and keep your distance.

00:23:46 ◼   ► And that can do a lot to mitigate this.

00:23:49 ◼   ► And something like having the restaurants

00:23:52 ◼   ► convert to takeout, your big risk there is

00:23:55 ◼   ► the person who's handing you the food,

00:23:57 ◼   ► and you're their biggest risk too.

00:24:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:24:02 ◼   ► I had to run a few errands today.

00:24:05 ◼   ► I mean, it's at the point like today

00:24:07 ◼   ► where I was sort of crossing I's and dotting T's

00:24:12 ◼   ► on like what do we really have to do

00:24:16 ◼   ► if we wanna get it, if we get locked in here for two weeks?

00:24:21 ◼   ► And again, who knows?

00:24:22 ◼   ► This could get worse in two weeks.

00:24:24 ◼   ► We might, I might, three weeks from now,

00:24:26 ◼   ► I might think, I might laugh at the thought

00:24:28 ◼   ► that two weeks was a worst case scenario,

00:24:30 ◼   ► but I don't see any practical way that I could buy,

00:24:34 ◼   ► I can't get, I can't buy a month of food.

00:24:36 ◼   ► I mean, I guess in theory I could,

00:24:37 ◼   ► but I'm not prepared for that.

00:24:41 ◼   ► But one of the things was I needed to go to the bank,

00:24:43 ◼   ► I needed to move some money from the business to personal

00:24:47 ◼   ► so we could pay some bills,

00:24:48 ◼   ► and for the time going forward

00:24:51 ◼   ► till the end of the month, et cetera.

00:24:53 ◼   ► I was just effusively,

00:24:56 ◼   ► like I just thanked the guy at the bank.

00:24:59 ◼   ► I was like, I just wanna say, thanks, I'm glad you're here.

00:25:02 ◼   ► I appreciate you.

00:25:04 ◼   ► And I don't know, I felt a little Larry Davidist.

00:25:08 ◼   ► I was like, I just want you to know when I came in,

00:25:10 ◼   ► I really sanitized the hell out of my hands.

00:25:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:25:13 ◼   ► He's like, thanks.

00:25:14 ◼   ► Those guys, I don't know what's going on with their hands

00:25:18 ◼   ► because they're squirting a little Purell on their hands

00:25:21 ◼   ► between every single customer.

00:25:23 ◼   ► And it's like, man, that's the hard stuff.

00:25:25 ◼   ► Yeah, here it's, but it's been weird.

00:25:32 ◼   ► So our mayor said that, and that was this morning.

00:25:34 ◼   ► It was a news story this morning.

00:25:36 ◼   ► Our mayor said, keep going to bars and restaurants.

00:25:41 ◼   ► We'll have lower seating, but tip them generously.

00:25:45 ◼   ► We wanna keep them open, and I'm like,

00:25:47 ◼   ► this is not the right, your heart's in the right place

00:25:51 ◼   ► in terms of their businesses, but this is not leadership.

00:25:54 ◼   ► And my thought was, maybe he's waiting

00:25:57 ◼   ► for the governor of Pennsylvania to say,

00:25:59 ◼   ► the whole state restaurants have to be shut down,

00:26:02 ◼   ► then he as the mayor doesn't look like the bad guy who shut restaurants down. I don't know, but it's

00:26:06 ◼   ► like, you know, profiles and courage here. And then literally by like 1230, like just after noon,

00:26:13 ◼   ► news story comes out and in the Philadelphia Inquirer had the exact same photo of him,

00:26:18 ◼   ► literally just the same photo. And it's, you know, the Philadelphia is shutting down all non-essential

00:26:25 ◼   ► businesses, you know, it's pretty much grocery stores, drugstores, banks, and

00:26:30 ◼   ► doctors, you know, that's it. It's like a lot of politicians don't want to be the one to go first

00:26:35 ◼   ► because they don't want to be out of step, but once everybody's stepping in the same direction,

00:26:39 ◼   ► it makes it a lot easier for all of them. Yeah, and I thought so too, especially for Philly,

00:26:43 ◼   ► which I'm not going to say, it's not a suburb of New York, but we're in New York's orbit. And

00:26:51 ◼   ► having New York go first last night really would have given a lot of cover to me.

00:26:59 ◼   ► If I were the mayor of Philadelphia,

00:27:00 ◼   ► I would have done it last night after New York did it.

00:27:04 ◼   ► Even if I was on the fence once New York went,

00:27:06 ◼   ► I would have done it.

00:27:07 ◼   ► It really just seems that the worst case scenario

00:27:12 ◼   ► that we're trying to avoid just is that dire.

00:27:15 ◼   ► And every single person who knows

00:27:17 ◼   ► what the hell they're talking about, without exception,

00:27:20 ◼   ► is saying playing for time is absolutely essential.

00:27:24 ◼   ► Act on both ends.

00:27:25 ◼   ► In other words, acting as soon as we do,

00:27:28 ◼   ► as soon as we can collectively,

00:27:31 ◼   ► whether we know all the facts right or not,

00:27:34 ◼   ► versus, you know, and then trying to stretch this out,

00:27:37 ◼   ► the whole, what's it called, flatten the curve.

00:27:41 ◼   ► - Flatten the curve, yeah.

00:27:41 ◼   ► - Right, but you've gotta act,

00:27:43 ◼   ► you have to act as quickly as possible.

00:27:46 ◼   ► I saw a good video from some doctor in the UK,

00:27:49 ◼   ► with the UK in particular seems to be really,

00:27:52 ◼   ► as bad as the US national response has been,

00:27:55 ◼   ► boy, the UK really seems to have

00:27:57 ◼   ► had their collective heads up their asses on this.

00:27:59 ◼   ► But there was a World Health Organization doctor in the UK

00:28:06 ◼   ► who was saying that this is not the time to be worried

00:28:11 ◼   ► about whether you're right or wrong.

00:28:13 ◼   ► Everybody's afraid, everybody wants to be perfect

00:28:16 ◼   ► and make the right decision,

00:28:17 ◼   ► and nobody wants to make a mistake

00:28:18 ◼   ► by enacting draconian measures

00:28:22 ◼   ► and then to find out that they weren't necessary.

00:28:26 ◼   ► You have to, the single most important thing

00:28:30 ◼   ► is to act as strong as you can, as quickly as you can,

00:28:33 ◼   ► because if you wait until you're certain that you need to,

00:28:37 ◼   ► it's far too late.

00:28:38 ◼   ► We've seen that here in the US

00:28:41 ◼   ► with this situation with the testing kits.

00:28:43 ◼   ► My parents literally are still,

00:28:49 ◼   ► they should be right now on a cruise,

00:28:53 ◼   ► but they're not.

00:28:54 ◼   ► But it wasn't because of the coronavirus per se.

00:28:58 ◼   ► My mom actually came down with an unrelated bug.

00:29:01 ◼   ► She does not have coronavirus,

00:29:03 ◼   ► but became ill a few days before.

00:29:07 ◼   ► And they knew the coronavirus thing

00:29:10 ◼   ► was already floating about,

00:29:11 ◼   ► and they took it as an opportunity to,

00:29:13 ◼   ► hey, let's, you know what,

00:29:15 ◼   ► we didn't feel good about this anyway,

00:29:17 ◼   ► let's cancel, and canceled.

00:29:19 ◼   ► and I can only imagine that that's no fun at all right now.

00:29:24 ◼   ► I would imagine, I can't even imagine the claustrophobia

00:29:28 ◼   ► being on a cruise ship right now,

00:29:30 ◼   ► even if you're on a cruise ship that, you know,

00:29:32 ◼   ► as seemingly most of the ones that are still at sea,

00:29:34 ◼   ► I mean, I know all of the major cruise lines

00:29:36 ◼   ► have stopped new voyages,

00:29:38 ◼   ► but this was like a 10-day cruise

00:29:39 ◼   ► or something they were supposed to be on

00:29:40 ◼   ► 'cause they were retired and can go on very long cruises.

00:29:44 ◼   ► I would imagine the ones that are at sea,

00:29:46 ◼   ► even with no reported cases,

00:29:49 ◼   ► it must feel like you're on this giant floating prison.

00:29:52 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:29:55 ◼   ► - Or worse than a prison, I don't know.

00:29:57 ◼   ► I don't know, a petri dish,

00:29:59 ◼   ► giant floating petri dish with small beds.

00:30:02 ◼   ► - I mean, I've done some cruises.

00:30:04 ◼   ► It sort of feels like a floating prison already.

00:30:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I have too, and I feel the same way.

00:30:12 ◼   ► I feel a little cooped up.

00:30:13 ◼   ► One thing I can think of,

00:30:18 ◼   ► and then playing it back in my mind is,

00:30:21 ◼   ► and I was talking to my parents

00:30:22 ◼   ► before they made that decision,

00:30:24 ◼   ► and I didn't, at the time, I didn't tell them,

00:30:26 ◼   ► hey, definitely don't go, 'cause it's changed so,

00:30:29 ◼   ► it seems ridiculous in hindsight,

00:30:31 ◼   ► but nine days ago, it didn't seem out of the question to go.

00:30:36 ◼   ► But the thing that I thought about

00:30:39 ◼   ► from my times on a cruise ship is that it is

00:30:44 ◼   ► impossible to get and do anything without touching things.

00:30:49 ◼   ► You're always opening doors, there's doors everywhere,

00:30:54 ◼   ► to get inside, to get outside, to go here, to go there.

00:30:57 ◼   ► It just seems like a nightmare to me.

00:31:02 ◼   ► And everything is, hallways are so narrow.

00:31:06 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:31:09 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:31:11 ◼   ► My heart's out to everybody who's stuck on a cruise ship.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Otherwise, I don't know what to say.

00:31:19 ◼   ► It's bizarre.

00:31:20 ◼   ► But then there are parts of life that seem normal.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Like I said, the Debruno Brothers food market

00:31:31 ◼   ► here in downtown Philadelphia has been mostly normal.

00:31:36 ◼   ► I'm not going every day.

00:31:37 ◼   ► I'm trying to get as much as I can and bring it home

00:31:40 ◼   ► And, but you know, it's not crazy.

00:31:44 ◼   ► It, you know, and if you weren't really

00:31:47 ◼   ► closely paying attention, you wouldn't really notice,

00:31:49 ◼   ► you know, that every single employee,

00:31:51 ◼   ► not just the ones at the deli, are wearing plastic gloves.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Their shelves are well stocked with pasta

00:31:58 ◼   ► and all of the, you know, they even still have bread.

00:32:00 ◼   ► A lot of the bread's gone,

00:32:01 ◼   ► but they still have a wide assortment of bread,

00:32:05 ◼   ► wider than a lot of the photos I'm seeing from other places.

00:32:08 ◼   ► My wife went to Trader Joe's, though,

00:32:10 ◼   ► on Friday or Thursday morning,

00:32:13 ◼   ► while Jonas was still going to school.

00:32:14 ◼   ► She dropped him off, had the car,

00:32:16 ◼   ► went to the Trader Joe's here in Center City, Philadelphia.

00:32:19 ◼   ► And she felt like she might have made a mistake

00:32:22 ◼   ► when she pulled in.

00:32:23 ◼   ► For those of you who don't live in a major city,

00:32:27 ◼   ► it's, Trader Joe's is a weird supermarket.

00:32:30 ◼   ► It's a lot of fun.

00:32:32 ◼   ► People love it. - And the parking lots

00:32:33 ◼   ► are always bad. (laughs)

00:32:34 ◼   ► - And the parking lots are always bad.

00:32:36 ◼   ► on a normal Thursday at 8 a.m.

00:32:40 ◼   ► It is not a good parking lot.

00:32:42 ◼   ► But it's the sort of parking lot where

00:32:45 ◼   ► you don't just pull in off the street

00:32:46 ◼   ► and you're in the parking lot.

00:32:47 ◼   ► You're pulling off the street and you're more or less

00:32:49 ◼   ► in like a driveway to get to the parking lot.

00:32:53 ◼   ► And she pulled in and realized this is gonna be a mistake.

00:32:57 ◼   ► It was a half an hour to get from the street

00:33:00 ◼   ► to the parking lot, but she couldn't back up

00:33:02 ◼   ► because people had gotten behind her.

00:33:04 ◼   ► and it's one way to get in, another way to get out,

00:33:07 ◼   ► so you can't just make a U-turn or something.

00:33:10 ◼   ► So she more or less had to wait the half hour

00:33:12 ◼   ► to get to the parking lot.

00:33:13 ◼   ► Once she did that, why not go?

00:33:16 ◼   ► She gets to the front door.

00:33:17 ◼   ► There's a line to get in

00:33:19 ◼   ► because they were filled to the fire code capacity,

00:33:21 ◼   ► and there's an employee there saying

00:33:24 ◼   ► that the way they're managing the fire code

00:33:26 ◼   ► is every 20 who leave, they'll let 20 come in.

00:33:29 ◼   ► She said that, she didn't count,

00:33:33 ◼   ► but she figured she was probably like 25th,

00:33:35 ◼   ► but she wasn't in the next batch.

00:33:37 ◼   ► She was at least one batch behind.

00:33:40 ◼   ► And so she waited a while,

00:33:44 ◼   ► maybe like 10 minutes or something,

00:33:46 ◼   ► and then a woman came out, a customer,

00:33:48 ◼   ► and just empty-handed and said,

00:33:51 ◼   ► unless you have two hours announced

00:33:55 ◼   ► to everybody waiting in line,

00:33:56 ◼   ► unless you have at least two hours of time,

00:33:59 ◼   ► you should just leave,

00:34:00 ◼   ► because I was in there 45 minutes,

00:34:03 ◼   ► the line to get to the checkout snaked through every single up and down every aisle of Trader Joe's and

00:34:10 ◼   ► She said I was I was only about one-third of the way through and she said the only way to shop is to get a

00:34:16 ◼   ► Cart get in the line empty carted and as you snake

00:34:21 ◼   ► Through every aisle of the market

00:34:24 ◼   ► Do your shopping at while you're in line?

00:34:27 ◼   ► She said it's the only way to get she said because it there's no other way because the line is solid

00:34:32 ◼   ► you can't really, you know, shop in, you know, any other way.

00:34:34 ◼   ► Right, the story is the line at that point.

00:34:36 ◼   ► Right, the story is the line, and she said she was in there 45 minutes,

00:34:40 ◼   ► and she said I was only about a third of the way through, maybe a half at the best.

00:34:43 ◼   ► And my wife had to ghost, had to be somewhere at 10, so she knew she wouldn't make it,

00:34:48 ◼   ► so she just abandoned ship and came home. It's crazy. I mean, it's just—

00:34:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and what everything I've read says that the supply chain is fine.

00:34:56 ◼   ► People are rushing out because they're afraid,

00:35:01 ◼   ► and I think the truth is you want to have some semblance of control over your life,

00:35:06 ◼   ► and that's a thing that you can control is, you know, kind of nesting instinct, like,

00:35:10 ◼   ► people who are about to have a baby have, whereas I'm going to take care of this, and I'm going to

00:35:12 ◼   ► get it done, and I'm going to stock up and all of that. And, you know, this is a thing that we

00:35:17 ◼   ► can't control and that we—you can't even see it. And so, I understand the human nature behind it,

00:35:23 ◼   ► but also everything I've read says that the supply chain is doing okay and there aren't going to be

00:35:27 ◼   ► to be food shortages and you don't need to do what people have been doing where they're

00:35:32 ◼   ► buying all the toilet paper and all of that. At the same time, I do think it's true that

00:35:36 ◼   ► everybody would probably be wise to minimize the number of trips they take to the store.

00:35:42 ◼   ► We always talk about, my wife will often go to Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and Safeway

00:35:46 ◼   ► and Costco and get different things at different places. And what we're trying to do is make

00:35:53 ◼   ► our list be big and then go ideally at an off hour, although it sounds like there basically

00:35:59 ◼   ► aren't any, and do one kind of trip and then that's it for a while, just to reduce the

00:36:05 ◼   ► amount of exposure. But there's only so much you can do. But I get the human nature part

00:36:09 ◼   ► of it, of just wanting to control something in an uncontrollable situation, but it's also

00:36:15 ◼   ► kind of ridiculous to have that kind of experience at Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's is not made

00:36:19 ◼   ► for that.

00:36:20 ◼   ► No, it really isn't

00:36:22 ◼   ► And you know again my hats off to all of those people who are doing their jobs showing up I mean man

00:36:31 ◼   ► Absolutely anybody who's who's working at a grocery store?

00:36:33 ◼   ► or who is in the supply chain like

00:36:37 ◼   ► Parcel drivers and and letter carriers and everybody who's in the distribution thing anybody who does deliveries of any kind like

00:36:45 ◼   ► This is how the rest of us are gonna be able to

00:36:48 ◼   ► You know ride this out is that there are people out there who are moving everything around and getting it where it needs to go

00:36:54 ◼   ► We have a great UPS guy, you know, I know Marco has talked about this where he lives

00:36:58 ◼   ► Everybody has a different, you know, some people have a bad UPS service and a great FedEx guy

00:37:02 ◼   ► We have a pretty we have pretty good FedEx, but we have a great UPS guy Vince

00:37:07 ◼   ► I mean, we love the Vince is the best honest to God

00:37:09 ◼   ► I should write like a letter to the CEO of UPS about Vince

00:37:13 ◼   ► He's the group best UPS guy shows up today Amy was like Vince

00:37:17 ◼   ► "I'm so happy to see you, I'd hug you, but," you know.

00:37:20 ◼   ► And he's like, "You got it, Amy."

00:37:23 ◼   ► Virtual hugs all around.

00:37:25 ◼   ► But man, I can't even imagine the stress.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Honestly, I'd be so stressed if I were working

00:37:32 ◼   ► like a register, you know, and just, you know,

00:37:36 ◼   ► one after another after another, you know, think about it.

00:37:38 ◼   ► And like I said, there were fire capacity all day probably.

00:37:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's too many people in an enclosed space

00:37:44 ◼   ► on top of it, so yeah. - Right.

00:37:46 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:37:47 ◼   ► know what they're going to do. And now that the CDC is saying that they're recommending no more

00:37:51 ◼   ► than 50 people in a group, does that count? Does a supermarket count as 50 people? And

00:37:56 ◼   ► I don't know how they're going to do that because a Trader Joe's is a very different square footage

00:38:03 ◼   ► than a suburban Safeway or whatever your brand, Piggly Wiggly, wherever you live. The modern

00:38:11 ◼   ► supermarkets in suburban United States are enormous. You know, 50 people in a modern

00:38:19 ◼   ► Walmart is empty, right? It's a ghost town. I mean, I'm not saying – you know, we all have

00:38:24 ◼   ► to be smart and we have to listen to the advice of the experts, but I'm not quite sure what they

00:38:29 ◼   ► mean by 50 people at a time because I think it really makes a big difference whether it's 50

00:38:33 ◼   ► people in a Trader Joe's versus 50 people in a Walmart. For sure.

00:38:41 ◼   ► Anyway, let me take a break here. Thank our first sponsor. Great sponsor, Linode. Linode,

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00:39:40 ◼   ► I don't know, we won't get it out tonight,

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00:39:42 ◼   ► it's already in place, it ends April 30th,

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00:40:16 ◼   ► Just a reminder of a few of the other things they have.

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00:41:35 ◼   ► Yeah. Let me think. I think last time I was here, we were talking about your,

00:41:41 ◼   ► all of our various movable type problems involving moving to new servers and things like that.

00:41:46 ◼   ► And it's, Linode's great though. That's where mine is too. I've got an old server there on an

00:41:50 ◼   ► old version and a new server there that's going to run the new version and it's a whole, it's a

00:41:55 ◼   ► It's a whole thing.

00:41:56 ◼   ► (sighs)

00:41:58 ◼   ► - Boy, that feels like a long time ago.

00:41:59 ◼   ► Yesterday feels like a long time ago.

00:42:01 ◼   ► - I know that all of our jokes about how every week

00:42:03 ◼   ► was a month, it's like every hour is a month now.

00:42:06 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:42:07 ◼   ► I guess before we move on, I gotta get this out of the way

00:42:11 ◼   ► 'cause it's actually a couple of weeks old,

00:42:12 ◼   ► a couple episodes old.

00:42:13 ◼   ► I've got follow-up.

00:42:15 ◼   ► This feels ancient.

00:42:16 ◼   ► This feels like something from like the 1980s at this point.

00:42:21 ◼   ► I don't even remember what the hell episode

00:42:24 ◼   ► we were talking about this on.

00:42:27 ◼   ► But in the context of Sherlocking,

00:42:30 ◼   ► I don't know if you, I don't know.

00:42:32 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:42:33 ◼   ► - What was I talking about?

00:42:34 ◼   ► What was that? - Yeah, so the idea here

00:42:35 ◼   ► is that Sherlock, like that Watson was this app

00:42:40 ◼   ► and then Sherlock came out.

00:42:43 ◼   ► And the truth is there was a Sherlock before.

00:42:45 ◼   ► - Right, right.

00:42:46 ◼   ► - And then Watson, the idea was that Watson

00:42:48 ◼   ► was going to amplify Apple Sherlock.

00:42:50 ◼   ► But what happened is that in Sherlock 3,

00:42:53 ◼   ► I mean, I'm reading your notes here,

00:42:54 ◼   ► but that was that big moment where like,

00:42:55 ◼   ► 'cause the whole idea of "Sherlock 3"

00:42:57 ◼   ► was that there were these templates.

00:42:58 ◼   ► It was all these smart templates,

00:43:00 ◼   ► and that was what Watson was,

00:43:01 ◼   ► was smart templated search and things like that

00:43:03 ◼   ► to make it more than just sort of a basic find utility.

00:43:07 ◼   ► And so it boomeranged back around where it was like,

00:43:10 ◼   ► Sherlock begat Watson,

00:43:12 ◼   ► and Watson was like, "Sherlock only better."

00:43:14 ◼   ► I think that the Sherlocking happened

00:43:16 ◼   ► when Sherlock suddenly got all the features that Watson had.

00:43:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think that might've been

00:43:22 ◼   ► episode with molds, but I had forgotten that in the context of our community verbifying

00:43:29 ◼   ► "Sherlock" to mean when Apple comes in with a built-in feature or utility that obviates all,

00:43:38 ◼   ► or even just significantly part of a third-party utility, we call it "Sherlocking" because of this

00:43:43 ◼   ► thing with "Sherlock" and the third-party app Watson. The thing I had forgotten was

00:43:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly what you said.

00:43:49 ◼   ► Apple had a thing called Sherlock first,

00:43:51 ◼   ► but it was really just sort of like,

00:43:54 ◼   ► like what we now call Spotlight, sort of.

00:43:56 ◼   ► It was just like--

00:43:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it was basically like a find command

00:43:59 ◼   ► for the internet, I think,

00:44:01 ◼   ► but where it would do an internet search

00:44:04 ◼   ► or a search on your Mac,

00:44:06 ◼   ► but it didn't have all of the like template,

00:44:09 ◼   ► search templates where you could search

00:44:11 ◼   ► for a very specific thing and get a specific result back.

00:44:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, and have them-- - That was what Watson did.

00:44:15 ◼   ► have them come back in a very structured form like if you're searching for weather it came back in

00:44:21 ◼   ► like a widget in the window that looked like weather results and if you search for a movie

00:44:26 ◼   ► and the imdb page would come back right and it would have you could write them in in Watson and

00:44:31 ◼   ► then later in Sherlock you could actually write a search query where you basically said if they

00:44:34 ◼   ► input this here's the url and then here's how you parse the result and display it and it was a whole

00:44:39 ◼   ► thing that was very clever. And, you know, we could argue about whether it was also—my

00:44:45 ◼   ► memory at the time is that it was also fairly clear that that was the direction Apple's

00:44:48 ◼   ► product was going in. And just because Watson existed didn't mean that suddenly Apple couldn't

00:44:53 ◼   ► take their product in the direction that it needed to go in, but that was—that's the

00:44:57 ◼   ► origin of it.

00:44:58 ◼   ► Yeah. But it's funny that I didn't remember the Sherlock 1 and 2 part of it, even though

00:45:03 ◼   ► it would have been it it makes no sense for the first product to be named Watson.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Also what a burn that would be if they uh if Apple steals your product and also

00:45:13 ◼   ► names it something that just references your product. Right. Even worse. It did it did set

00:45:20 ◼   ► off a sort of when I was talking about it live on the show I definitely was like I don't think I'm

00:45:25 ◼   ► getting this right because that doesn't make sense that seems way too gratuitous. Yeah shape shot.

00:45:31 ◼   ► - Right.

00:45:32 ◼   ► Although I guess the closest they ever got to that

00:45:36 ◼   ► was with the confabulator thing with,

00:45:40 ◼   ► what was Apple's thing?

00:45:42 ◼   ► - Well, it was dashboard, right?

00:45:45 ◼   ► - Right, but the thing that was sort of,

00:45:46 ◼   ► the naming was similar.

00:45:47 ◼   ► So for those who don't remember,

00:45:50 ◼   ► back in around the same time,

00:45:52 ◼   ► pre-iPhone, so probably circa like 2004,

00:45:56 ◼   ► there was a third-party utility called confabulator

00:45:59 ◼   ► with a K.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Here, I'll put it in the show notes.

00:46:02 ◼   ► I'll write this down here.

00:46:03 ◼   ► - There's a nice Daring Fireball post about this.

00:46:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's definitely a nice DF post about it.

00:46:09 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:46:11 ◼   ► Actually, I'll probably have to link to it

00:46:13 ◼   ► 'cause probably anything related to the actual confabulator

00:46:15 ◼   ► is 404'd by now, other than a handful.

00:46:20 ◼   ► Macworld's still around, Tidbits is still around,

00:46:22 ◼   ► but jeez, just about anything else is probably 404'd.

00:46:25 ◼   ► But anyway, third-party utility, Arlo Rose,

00:46:28 ◼   ► And I forget who else was behind.

00:46:31 ◼   ► It was sort of a two-person thing.

00:46:33 ◼   ► It was kinda neat, really neat, really neat idea

00:46:36 ◼   ► where you would use XML to specify

00:46:38 ◼   ► what they called gadgets.

00:46:40 ◼   ► And then a gadget would be like a little window,

00:46:42 ◼   ► like a little, just a little, you know,

00:46:47 ◼   ► if you remember dashboard widgets in Apple,

00:46:50 ◼   ► confabulator gadgets were sort of the same thing.

00:46:53 ◼   ► I think that the gadget-- - With this old,

00:46:55 ◼   ► the old DF post actually says

00:46:57 ◼   ► a confabulator had widgets.

00:46:58 ◼   ► Apple's documentation called them gadgets, but then when they shipped them they called them widgets.

00:47:02 ◼   ► So they just completely took it over. They just completely took the name. Yeah. Well,

00:47:07 ◼   ► widgets is a better name anyway, which is no surprise that the first one used it rather than,

00:47:11 ◼   ► because they're not gadgets, they're widgets. There's definitely a difference. Anyway, both

00:47:16 ◼   ► of them were neat ideas. Dashboard was built on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I guess Confabulator's

00:47:22 ◼   ► scripting language was JavaScript, but the specification was a custom XML thing.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And now that I think about it, this is my, let's modernize this with the Sherlock and Watson and

00:47:35 ◼   ► the gadgets and the widgets and the confabulators and the dashboards. All of that was all desktop

00:47:43 ◼   ► stuff, because there was no iPhone yet. We were a couple of years away from the iPhone.

00:47:48 ◼   ► But it all sort of, in hindsight, presaged the current world where, on phones, and I think

00:48:00 ◼   ► to a great extent, too, definitely iPads on mobile, applications, native applications,

00:48:07 ◼   ► dominate usage in the mobile, using the web, in a web browser, is a minority of you. I just saw

00:48:16 ◼   ► some statistic, somebody pointed to a talk from a Google engineer who claimed, and this

00:48:23 ◼   ► was like in a talk, but that according to Google statistics, something like only 11

00:48:29 ◼   ► percent of time spent on mobile devices is on the web. I don't know. I mean, for me,

00:48:37 ◼   ► it's definitely higher because I sit there and read stuff on the web all the time. But

00:48:42 ◼   ► But I believe it, and I think it's,

00:48:45 ◼   ► I don't know how Google measures it,

00:48:47 ◼   ► 'cause a ton of my time on the web,

00:48:51 ◼   ► on my phone, is in Tweetbot.

00:48:55 ◼   ► So I'm on the web, but I don't know,

00:48:57 ◼   ► because I'm in Tweetbot, whether that registers with Google

00:49:01 ◼   ► is I'm on the web, or, you know.

00:49:03 ◼   ► And if I'm not on a Google website,

00:49:04 ◼   ► how's Google measuring it?

00:49:05 ◼   ► I guess that's a whole bunch of sites

00:49:07 ◼   ► have Google Analytics hooked up, I don't know.

00:49:10 ◼   ► But it all rings true, though,

00:49:12 ◼   ► if you just think about how you use,

00:49:13 ◼   ► I use apps way more than I use the web.

00:49:17 ◼   ► And that seemed to me the whole point of Sherlock

00:49:20 ◼   ► and Watson and Confabulator and Dashboard was,

00:49:25 ◼   ► hey, native stuff is cool and from an interface perspective

00:49:31 ◼   ► is better and more convenient than always having to go

00:49:34 ◼   ► to this browser app and opening, I guess we did,

00:49:37 ◼   ► I don't even know if we had tabs back then.

00:49:40 ◼   ► was just dozens and dozens of windows with one web page in them.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it also suggested the sweet solution that we got when the iPhone came

00:49:52 ◼   ► out, right, of being able to sort of save web pages and instead of having apps, there

00:49:57 ◼   ► were sort of like web apps and it was very much the same kind of like, well, a web page

00:50:00 ◼   ► with JavaScript is kind of like an app and that was in the water, obviously, because

00:50:04 ◼   ► here in 2004, the same, that was what Dashboard and Confabulator were, is use web technologies

00:50:10 ◼   ► to build stuff. And now we have the equivalent of that for things like, you know, my Slack app

00:50:17 ◼   ► that I use every day is built with web technologies, right? It's not a native app.

00:50:21 ◼   ► And it has benefits to the developer largely and a cost to the user largely, but it's the same kind

00:50:30 ◼   ► of push and pull. And like the beauty of the dashboard stuff back in the day was all you needed

00:50:37 ◼   ► to know was JavaScript. You didn't need to know everything that goes into building a native app,

00:50:42 ◼   ► and that was—they were trying to find a new place for people who wanted to build stuff on

00:50:49 ◼   ► the platform to go who had this background in web technology but didn't have it in building apps.

00:50:54 ◼   ► But the iPhone changed that really fast, the App Store.

00:50:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and yeah, I definitely think that there was that sentiment of, "Hey, we can do it. We

00:51:03 ◼   ► We can give so, the web is such a,

00:51:06 ◼   ► it's such a tremendous step forward

00:51:12 ◼   ► in terms of its openness, fundamental openness,

00:51:15 ◼   ► in that it's inherently cross-platform

00:51:18 ◼   ► and it was largely a boon to Apple

00:51:21 ◼   ► because prior to the growth of the web

00:51:24 ◼   ► and the explosion of the web in the '90s,

00:51:27 ◼   ► that was literally, the explosion of the web

00:51:30 ◼   ► coincided with Apple's resurgence after they acquired Next.

00:51:35 ◼   ► And they go hand in hand because part of the reason

00:51:37 ◼   ► Apple was suffering so much in the mid 90s

00:51:39 ◼   ► was that Windows had become so dominant

00:51:42 ◼   ► that everything that was all software that was being,

00:51:45 ◼   ► not all software, but you know,

00:51:47 ◼   ► like when Napster first came out, that was a huge thing.

00:51:50 ◼   ► Napster was a Windows app and the Mac apps at first

00:51:54 ◼   ► were like, remember it was like Maxtr,

00:51:57 ◼   ► I mean there were, it was like a sort of semi-open protocol,

00:52:00 ◼   ► but new stuff happened and it was Windows apps.

00:52:03 ◼   ► And inside, you know, like big corporations,

00:52:08 ◼   ► when they made in-house applications,

00:52:11 ◼   ► they were making Windows apps.

00:52:14 ◼   ► And so, you know, there was no way to sort of have a,

00:52:18 ◼   ► hey, this department can use Macs

00:52:20 ◼   ► and that department can use Windows.

00:52:21 ◼   ► It was like everybody had to use Windows

00:52:23 ◼   ► because some of the tools that the company had

00:52:25 ◼   ► were Windows only.

00:52:26 ◼   ► And when the web came about, and it was possible

00:52:31 ◼   ► to make web apps for everything,

00:52:32 ◼   ► all of a sudden you could use a Mac,

00:52:34 ◼   ► and you could use Windows,

00:52:35 ◼   ► and you could log on to your intranet.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Remember that word.

00:52:38 ◼   ► But it was, instead of Windows being dominant

00:52:44 ◼   ► because it was 95% of all computing devices,

00:52:46 ◼   ► the web was dominant because it was literally

00:52:48 ◼   ► 100% of computing devices.

00:52:50 ◼   ► It was unimaginable at one point to think

00:52:55 ◼   ► there would ever be this platform that would have greater market share than Windows, but it was,

00:53:00 ◼   ► because it was like a meta platform that could run anywhere. But at the other hand, the downside

00:53:09 ◼   ► to it was, man, the user experience, just clicking on buttons and filling in text forms and text

00:53:16 ◼   ► editing and just everything was just this huge crude step backwards because everything was sort

00:53:23 ◼   ► of a crude, lowest common denominator experience, right? It's, you know, the—and the web's come

00:53:31 ◼   ► a long way in some ways in terms of how polished you can make the experience, but the gist of it,

00:53:38 ◼   ► I think, you know, the sentiment behind things like Confabulator and Sherlock and Watson,

00:53:42 ◼   ► et cetera, was that, man, we could make this so much better. And, you know, like with Confabulator

00:53:47 ◼   ► in particular, most of their widgets were very small,

00:53:52 ◼   ► just little index card size, if not smaller.

00:53:58 ◼   ► Like when you open the calculator app, or Pcalc,

00:54:02 ◼   ► from our friend James Thompson, you get on a Mac,

00:54:04 ◼   ► you don't get, it doesn't take up your full screen

00:54:07 ◼   ► 'cause it's just a calculator.

00:54:09 ◼   ► It opens a little window that's the size of a calculator.

00:54:12 ◼   ► Which is very useful, and especially if you have

00:54:16 ◼   ► desktop monitor where you can really, you know, arrange your windows just so you can

00:54:21 ◼   ► have a little window off to the side for a thing that only needs a little window. Like,

00:54:27 ◼   ► why in the world if you just want to have the weather open, would you need to open a

00:54:31 ◼   ► new web browser window which is going to default to the size of, you know, full height of your

00:54:38 ◼   ► screen and, you know, the size of a piece of paper when all you need is the temperature,

00:54:42 ◼   ► You just need a little widget, right?

00:54:45 ◼   ► So I thought that was,

00:54:49 ◼   ► I thought one of the mistakes Apple made with Dashboard

00:54:51 ◼   ► was by putting them all on the one page.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Remember you used to have to go off to the left?

00:54:56 ◼   ► It was like, well, what's the point, right?

00:54:58 ◼   ► Like, if I just wanna have a little weather thing,

00:55:00 ◼   ► why can't I have the little weather thing

00:55:02 ◼   ► right there with all my other windows in my main space?

00:55:05 ◼   ► I'd love to know why Apple did it that way,

00:55:08 ◼   ► 'cause I thought it was a terrible mistake.

00:55:11 ◼   ► And I almost wonder whether they did it that way

00:55:13 ◼   ► as like a courtesy to Confabulator,

00:55:15 ◼   ► because doing it the other way

00:55:16 ◼   ► was the way Confabulator did it,

00:55:18 ◼   ► where the gadgets were interspersed

00:55:19 ◼   ► with your regular windows.

00:55:22 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:55:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, and there was a workaround

00:55:23 ◼   ► where you could pick up a dashboard widget

00:55:25 ◼   ► and then hit the hotkey to close dashboard,

00:55:27 ◼   ► and then it would stay out of the dashboard layer,

00:55:30 ◼   ► so they could run outside.

00:55:32 ◼   ► But I think maybe Apple just didn't wanna mix and match.

00:55:35 ◼   ► But you're right, the whole appeal

00:55:36 ◼   ► was that they were these little things,

00:55:38 ◼   ► and then they all lived on their own full-screen layer.

00:55:40 ◼   ► Well, who knew we were going to spend time on Confabulator?

00:55:44 ◼   ► That was the interface of the Confabulator

00:55:48 ◼   ► widgets was also, they were often very bizarre. It really

00:55:52 ◼   ► reminded me of the era of MP3 players with custom

00:55:56 ◼   ► skins, like, you know, Panix Player and Soundjam and all that

00:56:00 ◼   ► that had these super weird skins. And it was an era, that era was

00:56:04 ◼   ► the time where people like created like Photoshop files with

00:56:08 ◼   ► with weird interfaces and thought they would try them out.

00:56:12 ◼   ► And then I think in the end they were fun,

00:56:16 ◼   ► but not necessarily functional.

00:56:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, what was Panix was Audion.

00:56:21 ◼   ► So it was Audion and SoundJam and what was the big one?

00:56:26 ◼   ► A Winamp was the big one on Windows.

00:56:28 ◼   ► And it was always to me, that whole era,

00:56:32 ◼   ► well, I guess it predated during Fireball

00:56:36 ◼   ► 'cause that was all, iTunes came out in 2000 or 2001?

00:56:41 ◼   ► - 2000 iTunes came out, yeah.

00:56:43 ◼   ► - Right, and 'cause the iPod came out in 2001.

00:56:46 ◼   ► I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of dates,

00:56:50 ◼   ► but I famously remember that because the iPod announcement

00:56:53 ◼   ► was postponed and was low key because it was after,

00:56:58 ◼   ► in the aftermath of 9/11.

00:57:00 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:57:01 ◼   ► - Which I have to say has been on my mind a lot lately,

00:57:06 ◼   ► I keep thinking that what we're going through right now, the only comparison I can think of

00:57:10 ◼   ► in terms of just the general uncertainty that every single person is experiencing right now

00:57:16 ◼   ► is only comparable to 9/11. And I know it's different in a whole bunch of ways, but just

00:57:22 ◼   ► in terms of general uncertainty. Boy, I remember that. But anyway, that was all before Daring

00:57:26 ◼   ► Fireball. But the thing I remember, and boy, I wish I had been writing Daring Fireball so I could

00:57:31 ◼   ► point to it was how emblematic of the difference between Windows and Mac, the difference in the

00:57:37 ◼   ► quality of those weird custom UIs was between SoundJam and Audion on the Mac versus Winamp.

00:57:46 ◼   ► And I forget which one it was, if it was SoundJam or Audion that eventually supported Winamp's

00:57:52 ◼   ► format so that you— I think SoundJam let you use Winamp skins eventually.

00:57:59 ◼   ► Yeah, and that sort of made sense because even though Sound Jam is the one that Apple acquired

00:58:05 ◼   ► and turned into iTunes and still lives on today in two ways, I guess, as both the

00:58:15 ◼   ► music app on Catalina and the TV app on Catalina are both sort of forks of iTunes, which was

00:58:28 ◼   ► Apple's rebranded, single-skinned, of course, version of Sound Jam. But, you know, no surprise.

00:58:40 ◼   ► And both were technically excellent, and I guess it's time to put a link into Cable

00:58:44 ◼   ► Sasser's write-up of when Apple reached out to Panic to think about, you know, they

00:58:49 ◼   ► Apple had two choices of things to buy, and they were both very good options. And, you

00:58:55 ◼   ► Apple considered buying panic just to get Audion. But my recollection was that while

00:59:01 ◼   ► both were technically excellent, especially given the constraints of the classic Mac OS,

00:59:06 ◼   ► it was absolutely insane to have background MP3 players and invisible transparent windows,

00:59:13 ◼   ► stuff like that. There was no support in the OS for transparent windows, and somehow they

00:59:17 ◼   ► made it work.

00:59:19 ◼   ► Yeah, and they just did a blog post about finding all the faces of Audion, of all those custom things,

00:59:26 ◼   ► as a part of the—because Panic has a podcast now.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Right. I've been on it!

00:59:30 ◼   ► And yeah, and Krista Murgen is producing it, and they did an episode about Audion,

00:59:35 ◼   ► and then they did a thing about how they had to dig up all of their old skins

00:59:40 ◼   ► and find a way to make them display properly, which is really fascinating.

00:59:46 ◼   ► to that kind of spelunking through 20-year-old stuff.

00:59:50 ◼   ► - All right, we'll link to that.

00:59:52 ◼   ► It's noted.

00:59:53 ◼   ► But anyway, my hunch, my gut feeling,

00:59:57 ◼   ► and I think most people would agree,

00:59:59 ◼   ► was that the skins for Audion were slightly more

01:00:04 ◼   ► exquisitely designed than the ones for Sound Jam.

01:00:08 ◼   ► And no surprise coming from Panic,

01:00:11 ◼   ► whose forte is exquisitely pixel perfect.

01:00:15 ◼   ► Chef's kiss, that is the state of the art

01:00:19 ◼   ► in user interface design right now sort of work.

01:00:23 ◼   ► And then the Winamp stuff was like, I don't know,

01:00:27 ◼   ► it was pretty much like the Vegas strip.

01:00:29 ◼   ► Like the bad end of it.

01:00:33 ◼   ► Flashy for sure, not necessarily

01:00:36 ◼   ► what you would call beautiful.

01:00:38 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:00:41 ◼   ► What else? I got more follow-up. Look at you. Yeah, one more. We were talking about this

01:00:51 ◼   ► story, the Gurman report about Apple perhaps, and filed this under a non-sarcastic finally

01:01:02 ◼   ► allowing third-party default apps on iOS. By which we mean, let's say you use Spark

01:01:09 ◼   ► or you use the Gmail app as your main email client,

01:01:14 ◼   ► you could, though the idea would be you could say,

01:01:17 ◼   ► this is my main email client,

01:01:19 ◼   ► and so if you click a mail to link in any app,

01:01:22 ◼   ► it would open Gmail or Spark or whatever it is

01:01:27 ◼   ► that you've said, this is my main email client

01:01:29 ◼   ► as opposed to Apple Mail.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And you could say, Chrome is my default web browser,

01:01:35 ◼   ► and so you open a web link anywhere

01:01:37 ◼   ► that opens in your browser,

01:01:38 ◼   ► would open in Chrome and so forth. The angle on here that I need to follow up was with

01:01:47 ◼   ► regard to, I said something to the effect of Apple doesn't really have a financial angle

01:01:55 ◼   ► here, you know, that whatever there, there are many reasons and I defended it in some

01:02:00 ◼   ► ways, you know, that it's not as much of a no-brainer as some people would think, especially

01:02:05 ◼   ► people who like us who use third party apps and are really, you know, write about them

01:02:09 ◼   ► and enjoy hearing about them and know the developers of them and are enthusiastic about,

01:02:15 ◼   ► you know, new third party apps. It's easy to get caught up as an enthusiast and think

01:02:21 ◼   ► this is just totally frustrating BS that Apple doesn't allow you to set these things as your

01:02:26 ◼   ► default for these handlers. But it's, you know, it requires nuance to think about why

01:02:30 ◼   ► Apple might not have done it. It's not quite just in, it's definitely not in difference

01:02:36 ◼   ► and I don't think it's spite, but the one thing I said was something to the effect of

01:02:40 ◼   ► that they don't really have a financial interest in it. It's not like when you use Apple mail

01:02:45 ◼   ► instead of the Gmail app that Apple profits from that. The thing that I overlooked and

01:02:51 ◼   ► I knew about this, I've known about this for years ever since it started, is that the Safari

01:02:58 ◼   ► versus other browsers thing is

01:03:01 ◼   ► It there's a lot of money involved

01:03:05 ◼   ► Right

01:03:07 ◼   ► And the thing I got hung up on was that even with third-party browsers you have to use webkit

01:03:11 ◼   ► As the rendering engine and so in some extent even if you're using chrome or you're using firefox if you're using it on ios

01:03:19 ◼   ► You're using this fari rendering engine webkit under the hood

01:03:23 ◼   ► the difference is

01:03:25 ◼   ► and it is a lot of money is that Google pays Apple a ton of money to be the default search

01:03:35 ◼   ► engine in Safari. So when you go up to the location bar and you type coronavirus symptoms

01:03:44 ◼   ► and hit return and it goes to Google by default and returns search engines,

01:03:52 ◼   ► But the most recent information I found, did you update this?

01:03:57 ◼   ► I don't know if you--

01:03:58 ◼   ► - No, this is your link, the estimated $12 billion check

01:04:03 ◼   ► written from Google to Apple in 2019.

01:04:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, so, and you know, I would presume,

01:04:10 ◼   ► given the way things have gone,

01:04:11 ◼   ► that it's only gone up since then.

01:04:13 ◼   ► And nobody really knows,

01:04:14 ◼   ► I don't believe this has been confirmed.

01:04:16 ◼   ► What's the sourcing on this?

01:04:18 ◼   ► It will reportedly pay this according to Business Insider.

01:04:21 ◼   ► It comes via Goldman Sachs analyst, Rod Hall.

01:04:25 ◼   ► Rod Hall is actually a very good analyst.

01:04:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, he gets on the Apple analyst calls.

01:04:30 ◼   ► So obviously they don't think he's a rogue element

01:04:34 ◼   ► or anything.

01:04:35 ◼   ► But if you think about it,

01:04:36 ◼   ► it's like having Amazon affiliate fees or something.

01:04:38 ◼   ► Like there's a search engine affiliate relationship

01:04:41 ◼   ► and Apple gets paid by Google

01:04:44 ◼   ► for all of those search referrals.

01:04:46 ◼   ► And I'm sure if they were DuckDuckGo searches,

01:04:50 ◼   ► DuckDuckGo would pay something too, except they wouldn't and they'd go out of business

01:04:53 ◼   ► or whatever. I'm sure Microsoft would pay with Bing, right? They're sending business

01:04:57 ◼   ► Google's way and they get paid for it. There's an argument to be made that maybe Apple should

01:05:04 ◼   ► use something like DuckDuckGo or Apple should buy DuckDuckGo and have it as this neutral

01:05:08 ◼   ► search engine that isn't tracking people. But that would be not just a nice move for

01:05:14 ◼   ► consumers, they would be turning their back on billions of dollars a year if they did

01:05:18 ◼   ► that.

01:05:19 ◼   ► So if we take Rod Hall's number at it,

01:05:22 ◼   ► and again, you might imagine that this is negotiated

01:05:26 ◼   ► at the very highest levels of Apple and Google.

01:05:31 ◼   ► I would assume that E.Q. and Tim Cook are directly involved.

01:05:36 ◼   ► I don't even know, you know,

01:05:38 ◼   ► I don't know who the equivalents would be at Google,

01:05:43 ◼   ► but you know, 12 billion dollars is,

01:05:46 ◼   ► even by Apple standards, is a lot of money.

01:05:49 ◼   ► And it, you know, I don't forget it,

01:05:55 ◼   ► but I think I often, I don't know that I bring it up enough.

01:06:00 ◼   ► And it is, it does sort of,

01:06:02 ◼   ► it is, it's worth even more than an asterisk.

01:06:08 ◼   ► It is a, don't forget, like raise your hand,

01:06:11 ◼   ► don't forget about like when Tim Cook talks

01:06:13 ◼   ► about Apple having different priorities in terms of privacy

01:06:18 ◼   ► and he has even mentioned Google by name

01:06:21 ◼   ► as a company that has, from Apple's perspective,

01:06:26 ◼   ► places a lesser priority on privacy of customers,

01:06:33 ◼   ► that Apple isn't, when they're taking 12

01:06:40 ◼   ► or plus billion dollars a year to keep Google

01:06:43 ◼   ► the default search engine in Safari on all their platforms, they're getting a pretty

01:06:49 ◼   ► nice piece of that pie. And I don't think they're absolved in the least from all of

01:06:56 ◼   ► the privacy implications of that. I mean, if you're taking the money, then you're

01:07:00 ◼   ► on the hook for all of that.

01:07:02 ◼   ► Yeah, even if you're limiting your disclosure of what—and personalized information on

01:07:09 ◼   ► on all of those things, which they have rolled into Safari,

01:07:12 ◼   ► in the end, you're still sending them to a Google page.

01:07:15 ◼   ► Google knows your IP address, unless you're using a VPN.

01:07:18 ◼   ► They can build a profile.

01:07:20 ◼   ► They are gonna show you ads.

01:07:22 ◼   ► All of those things are still a part of that experience.

01:07:25 ◼   ► You could argue that Google is still also

01:07:26 ◼   ► the best search engine experience,

01:07:28 ◼   ► and that's part of the argument.

01:07:30 ◼   ► I've been using DuckDuckGo on my Mac for a while,

01:07:33 ◼   ► and you know what?

01:07:34 ◼   ► It's okay, but there are moments where I have to just go

01:07:37 ◼   ► to Google to find something,

01:07:38 ◼   ► because DuckDuckGo just can't quite do it.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Google is slicker, it's a good product,

01:07:43 ◼   ► but it's also, it's Google.

01:07:45 ◼   ► We all know what that means.

01:07:46 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:07:47 ◼   ► It's definitely a complicated decision,

01:07:52 ◼   ► but, you know, and part of the reason,

01:07:53 ◼   ► I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now,

01:07:55 ◼   ► enough as my default, for enough years,

01:07:58 ◼   ► and for most times,

01:08:00 ◼   ► I'm not doing it despite myself.

01:08:05 ◼   ► It's not like I'm living in a shack out in the woods,

01:08:10 ◼   ► cutting my own, butchering my own animals

01:08:14 ◼   ► that I've caught in a trap.

01:08:16 ◼   ► DuckDuckGo is a very good search engine.

01:08:18 ◼   ► And if Google didn't exist and DuckDuckGo

01:08:21 ◼   ► were the best search engine we had today,

01:08:24 ◼   ► we would still all be raving

01:08:26 ◼   ► when we really are honest about it.

01:08:27 ◼   ► What a marvel, one of the great marvels

01:08:29 ◼   ► of the modern world, this search engine is

01:08:33 ◼   ► we can type these things and get the results, but there are times, there are definitely more times

01:08:38 ◼   ► than the vice versa by far, that you might type X, Y, and Z and expect to get a certain result,

01:08:44 ◼   ► and DuckDuckGo doesn't have it, and then you do the same search in Google and there it is at the

01:08:48 ◼   ► top of the results. One of the things that makes that easy, though, is for most of the searches,

01:08:54 ◼   ► DuckDuckGo is just fine and you get exactly what you want, and if it's not and you suspect Google's

01:08:59 ◼   ► going to do better, you can just go right back up to your search terms and type g, just add the term

01:09:04 ◼   ► g exclamation mark as a DuckDuckGo shortcut for redirect me to Google and do the exact same search.

01:09:12 ◼   ► And they redirect you to Google in a way that I think sort of helps prevent tracking. They,

01:09:18 ◼   ► I don't know, I'm not sure how, I don't know how you could possibly keep Google from tracking you,

01:09:22 ◼   ► but it's not that bad. I don't know if anybody's ever thought about doing it. I would encourage

01:09:28 ◼   ► you to try. But end of follow-up, basically, you know, guess what? When you use Chrome

01:09:38 ◼   ► as your browser on iOS and you do a search in the search field, Google is paying Apple

01:09:45 ◼   ► for that. And so, you know, that's the obvious implication is if they allowed users to, you

01:09:53 ◼   ► You know, and this is a very cynical take,

01:09:56 ◼   ► but it's obviously on Apple's mind, it's real money,

01:09:59 ◼   ► but if they were to allow third-party browsers

01:10:01 ◼   ► to be set as the default,

01:10:04 ◼   ► presumably that might increase the number of users

01:10:08 ◼   ► who you spend more time in Chrome or Firefox,

01:10:13 ◼   ► or there's dozens of other really good web browsers

01:10:17 ◼   ► for iPhone and iPad.

01:10:18 ◼   ► The more people use them,

01:10:21 ◼   ► and being able to set them as the default,

01:10:24 ◼   ► you would think would only increase that.

01:10:27 ◼   ► It would decrease Apple's leverage over Google

01:10:30 ◼   ► for this annual negotiation on keeping it

01:10:34 ◼   ► as the default search engine.

01:10:36 ◼   ► - Right.

01:10:37 ◼   ► - Wouldn't you love, I always think about that.

01:10:40 ◼   ► Whenever this comes up, I always think of all the things

01:10:43 ◼   ► I would love to be a fly on the wall for

01:10:46 ◼   ► would be those negotiations in particular

01:10:49 ◼   ► seem just like, man, that would be like,

01:10:54 ◼   ► wouldn't that be like a fantastic Apple TV show, right?

01:10:59 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:11:00 ◼   ► Like, they should have a crew and tape 'em now

01:11:04 ◼   ► and then just show it five years from now

01:11:07 ◼   ► so that it's, you know, keep it, I don't know.

01:11:10 ◼   ► It would be so great.

01:11:11 ◼   ► Because both sides have tremendous leverage, right?

01:11:14 ◼   ► Like, Apple's got the tremendous market share

01:11:18 ◼   ► of iPhone and iPad.

01:11:21 ◼   ► It's also, it's not just the sheer number of users,

01:11:24 ◼   ► it is the demographics of their average household income

01:11:29 ◼   ► compared to other mobile users.

01:11:31 ◼   ► It's their engagement that iOS users

01:11:34 ◼   ► often are shown to be more engaged with their devices

01:11:37 ◼   ► than Android users, and just the sheer number of,

01:11:41 ◼   ► just the sheer amount of collective attention

01:11:45 ◼   ► that people pay to their mobile devices

01:11:48 ◼   ► and how many times they do web searches,

01:11:51 ◼   ► that's Apple's side.

01:11:53 ◼   ► And then Google's side is, well, what are you gonna do?

01:11:55 ◼   ► You really gonna go to Bing?

01:11:57 ◼   ► Are you really gonna buy DuckDuckGo?

01:12:01 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know if they'd have to buy DuckDuckGo

01:12:04 ◼   ► to make it the default.

01:12:05 ◼   ► I don't know, though, that,

01:12:06 ◼   ► and just think about it from a user's perspective.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Like, if you what, update your phone to iOS 14,

01:12:14 ◼   ► and then you go to do a web search,

01:12:15 ◼   ► and it's sending you to DuckDuckGo,

01:12:17 ◼   ► which you've never heard of.

01:12:19 ◼   ► Again, I love DuckDuckGo.

01:12:21 ◼   ► I encourage you, people who listen to this show, to try it.

01:12:25 ◼   ► I don't think my mom would understand

01:12:27 ◼   ► what the hell is going on if her phone

01:12:30 ◼   ► was automatically updated to the next version of iOS

01:12:34 ◼   ► and searching the web center there.

01:12:36 ◼   ► I don't know that she's ever heard of it, right?

01:12:38 ◼   ► - Right.

01:12:39 ◼   ► - I don't think she's ever heard of Bing, to be honest.

01:12:42 ◼   ► So I feel like

01:12:45 ◼   ► Apple would probably make a lot more if Bing were stronger in branding and in terms of

01:12:55 ◼   ► public consciousness, right?

01:12:57 ◼   ► Sure.

01:12:58 ◼   ► Sure.

01:12:59 ◼   ► Because then maybe they would ping-pong year to year.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Like, okay, now Microsoft's going to offer us 20 billion.

01:13:08 ◼   ► But they're not interchangeable.

01:13:09 ◼   ► I feel like that is still the crown jewel of Google's arsenal, is the quality of the web search.

01:13:16 ◼   ► Although I do think that web search, do you think Google web search is getting worse?

01:13:21 ◼   ► Tim Cynova I don't use it as much as I used to because I've been using

01:13:25 ◼   ► DuckDuckGo a lot more on the desktop. But I don't know, I mean, I still go back to it and think that

01:13:33 ◼   ► that it's better than DuckDuckGo at finding pages, but I don't know. That's just purely

01:13:38 ◼   ► anecdotal.

01:13:39 ◼   ► Dave: It may be related to my stuff, but the one thing I find that's very difficult to

01:13:44 ◼   ► find period, DuckDuckGo or Google, is older stuff. And by older, I'm going to say roughly

01:13:51 ◼   ► anything more than five years ago. But like if, you know, I'm sure that this confabulator

01:13:58 ◼   ► "Daring Fireball" is still going to show my thing. But when I look for stuff like, you know,

01:14:04 ◼   ► I don't know, stories about—just recently, here's an example. Jean-Louis Gasset—and

01:14:12 ◼   ► forgive me if I butchered the—

01:14:17 ◼   ► I think you nailed it.

01:14:18 ◼   ► Well, as close as I can get to a French accent,

01:14:22 ◼   ► had a post that I linked to a couple days ago about just spitballing on the idea of what are the

01:14:31 ◼   ► issues related to Apple moving the Mac to ARM CPUs. I wanted to look up stuff related to the

01:14:40 ◼   ► PowerPC to Intel transition from 2005 and 2006. Boy, was a lot of that hard to find or just

01:14:49 ◼   ► unfindable. Like, it just seems like... and you know, it makes sense that most of what people

01:14:55 ◼   ► search for is recent stuff, and so the algorithms, you know, tend to gear towards recent stuff.

01:15:02 ◼   ► But it just seems to me anecdotally that search engines have gotten worse at finding stuff from

01:15:09 ◼   ► 10 years ago than they used to be. But maybe that's just me. I don't know. Let me take a break.

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01:17:59 ◼   ► Oh, coronavirus and Apple.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Let's get it over with.

01:18:04 ◼   ► I mean, there's a lot to talk about here

01:18:06 ◼   ► and there is an awful lot since the last time I did a show,

01:18:09 ◼   ► which was only like two weeks ago.

01:18:13 ◼   ► We went from me in Federico talking about,

01:18:16 ◼   ► I think I gave the odds then at 50/50

01:18:18 ◼   ► that we would have WWDC,

01:18:20 ◼   ► but maybe I'm giving myself too much credit

01:18:22 ◼   ► and I thought it was like a one in three chance

01:18:26 ◼   ► that WWDC was not going to happen.

01:18:29 ◼   ► And of course, as we now know,

01:18:32 ◼   ► WWDC is, as we know it, as an in-person, 5,000 attendee

01:18:37 ◼   ► congregation of the entire Apple community

01:18:42 ◼   ► is not going to happen. And as we record today on Monday, that is the most obvious statement

01:18:49 ◼   ► in the world. Two weeks ago, it seemed a little outlandish. And even when Apple made the announcement

01:18:57 ◼   ► last week, they were still slightly ahead of the curve, right? I don't think anybody

01:19:04 ◼   ► was surprised by that point, but it seemed like the writing was on the wall.

01:19:08 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, it was, I feel like we progressed very quickly from "it might not happen" to

01:19:16 ◼   ► "it probably won't happen" to "they've certainly decided it's not going to happen but they haven't announced it yet."

01:19:24 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Which, the nice thing about that is by the time they made their announcement, I feel like everybody had already, like, it was a forgone conclusion by the time they said it.

01:19:33 ◼   ► said it. Yeah, we had already passed the pass to the point of acceptance in the stages of grief.

01:19:40 ◼   ► I kind of feel I have no inside information on this whatsoever, but I kind of feel I one thing

01:19:49 ◼   ► I am certain of and this isn't from inside information. It's just knowing the way Apple

01:19:53 ◼   ► works is that they were on top of this for a long time and their public silence on it is

01:20:02 ◼   ► reflection of that's how Apple is about everything.

01:20:05 ◼   ► Apple isn't, doesn't,

01:20:08 ◼   ► Apple measures 100 times and cuts once.

01:20:12 ◼   ► They were monitoring this, their silence on it,

01:20:16 ◼   ► and the fact that they didn't announce anything officially

01:20:19 ◼   ► until last week wasn't 'cause they weren't paying attention

01:20:21 ◼   ► or were taking it lightly, it was that they,

01:20:23 ◼   ► they take their time.

01:20:25 ◼   ► I can't help but feel, and the weird thing about this

01:20:31 ◼   ► is that WWDC, I don't know if there are,

01:20:34 ◼   ► I'm not aware of any other conferences of similar size

01:20:38 ◼   ► that I would know about that are always,

01:20:43 ◼   ► every year annually, announced with so little time

01:20:47 ◼   ► between the announcement of the dates

01:20:52 ◼   ► and the selling of tickets, or now lotteries

01:20:58 ◼   ► get for attendees to sign up to to go and the actual conference most conferences are announced

01:21:06 ◼   ► at least a year in advance so that you know macworld is a great example you'd be leaving

01:21:13 ◼   ► macworld expo and the signs at the door would say you know next year january 4th to 10th yeah

01:21:23 ◼   ► Macworld next year, you know. And most conferences are like that. You know, WWDC has always been

01:21:29 ◼   ► unusual in terms of having, you know, getting announced, you know, mid-March to mid-April.

01:21:35 ◼   ► I think mid-April is about the latest they've ever done it, you know, even though it's—

01:21:40 ◼   ► I think they've gone to late April, but not much more than that.

01:21:42 ◼   ► But, you know, other than like one exception from like 2006, I believe, when it was in August,

01:21:50 ◼   ► It's pretty much been like clockwork.

01:21:57 ◼   ► I don't think I've been wrong in 10 years at guessing which week in June was going to

01:22:02 ◼   ► be WWDC week.

01:22:06 ◼   ► This year is a little bit, it's always June, it always starts on a Monday.

01:22:10 ◼   ► This year is a little harder to predict because June 1st is a Monday, but I think that by

01:22:17 ◼   ► by the usual schedule, the start would have been June 8th.

01:22:20 ◼   ► And if June was pushed back just a little bit,

01:22:25 ◼   ► one more day, definitely would have been

01:22:28 ◼   ► the Monday starting the second week of June.

01:22:33 ◼   ► But so all of these other conferences

01:22:37 ◼   ► that have been canceled, and every,

01:22:40 ◼   ► it's funny, 'cause not every conference has been canceled.

01:22:44 ◼   ► I saw that there was like a construction big 130,000

01:22:49 ◼   ► attendee conference in Las Vegas last week

01:22:53 ◼   ► that wasn't canceled, but they got nowhere near

01:22:57 ◼   ► 130,000 attendees.

01:22:59 ◼   ► They have, you know, they were, you know,

01:23:04 ◼   ► canceled is absolutely the right verb for what happened

01:23:07 ◼   ► because they were scheduled and then they were canceled.

01:23:10 ◼   ► Well, WWDC wasn't canceled

01:23:13 ◼   ► it was never announced, right? So what they did do was they made an announcement last week that

01:23:21 ◼   ► WWDC will have an all-new online format, but they didn't even give dates. Which, reading between

01:23:32 ◼   ► lines to me says they weren't quite ready to announce it. Whether it would have been announced

01:23:42 ◼   ► by now in the alternate universe where this coronavirus didn't even exist, I don't know.

01:23:47 ◼   ► But I feel like as they made their plans for how they do this online only, you know, or online

01:23:56 ◼   ► perhaps plus a small media event for the keynote, although I think even that is looking less and

01:24:01 ◼   ► less likely even now in mid-March, I feel like they were looking at the news and thinking,

01:24:10 ◼   ► "We can't wait anymore."

01:24:12 ◼   ► Like if you and I were talking right now on March 16th

01:24:17 ◼   ► and Apple still hadn't said anything,

01:24:18 ◼   ► it would seem absurd, right?

01:24:21 ◼   ► So I feel like their hand was pressed

01:24:23 ◼   ► to at least come out and say, "WWDC is going to be in June.

01:24:27 ◼   ► "It's going to be online only in an all-new format.

01:24:30 ◼   ► "We have lots of stuff we're excited to tell you

01:24:34 ◼   ► "and we'll tell you more soon."

01:24:35 ◼   ► But I feel like the fact that it doesn't even have a date

01:24:39 ◼   ► for the keynote, to me says that they kind of felt like the news, even with their silence,

01:24:45 ◼   ► the news was getting ahead of them on this coronavirus.

01:24:48 ◼   ► I think you're right, and I think they decided that it was, that they didn't need to make

01:24:54 ◼   ► an announcement with specifics just yet, but they needed to at least be clear that this

01:24:58 ◼   ► was the case, that it was, they had reached the point where they really needed to just

01:25:01 ◼   ► say, "Yeah, of course, we're not going to do this, but we are going to do something

01:25:04 ◼   ► online and we'll let you know." I was struck by the fact that not only did they not give

01:25:08 ◼   ► dates, but they say beginning in June, and it's sort of like starting in June, whatever it is,

01:25:12 ◼   ► and it's like, okay, well, so we've got a month, which is June. It could be the first week, but it

01:25:16 ◼   ► could be the last week. And then starting in June, I immediately thought, and when does it end? Like,

01:25:22 ◼   ► they could completely reconceive this thing where there's a big kickoff sometime in June,

01:25:28 ◼   ► and then there are new sessions that roll out across the whole summer, even. Not necessarily

01:25:33 ◼   ► all there on day one or even over the course of a week. I'd think that, you know, that would be the

01:25:38 ◼   ► closest analog and it might be what they prefer to do, but they're not really committing to that.

01:25:42 ◼   ► They could stretch this out and have WWDC be this thing that happens over the course of,

01:25:50 ◼   ► you know, eight weeks if they wanted to, or all summer.

01:25:52 ◼   ► - The one thing that really matters timing, not timing-wise, but as a mark your calendars,

01:26:01 ◼   ► this is an event, is the keynote. The public keynote, the thing where they make the

01:26:07 ◼   ► announcements they would have made on Monday morning, which is meant for everybody, from

01:26:13 ◼   ► developers to the mass market, not even technical media. And Apple's WWDCs get coverage on the front

01:26:23 ◼   ► page of newspapers. And again, I realize being on the front page of a printed newspaper is

01:26:28 ◼   ► nowhere even close to what it used to be. But even if you talk about newspapers like the

01:26:32 ◼   ► New York Times and the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle and, you know, whatever else.

01:26:38 ◼   ► - Above, you know, first screen of nytimes.com, it's the same idea, is that you want to get that

01:26:45 ◼   ► kickoff event is the one that everybody covers and has broad appeal and everything else is for

01:26:49 ◼   ► the developers, basically. - Right, but I can't help but feel that's part of the calculus of not

01:26:54 ◼   ► even announcing the date for that yet is of, you know, not, no, I mean, this whole coronavirus

01:27:01 ◼   ► thing is so up in the air. I mean, and maybe there's an optimistic scenario where we go through

01:27:08 ◼   ► a bad April and, but then we start getting on the downslope in May and maybe it's not,

01:27:17 ◼   ► it's obviously never going to happen that they're going to have 5,000 people in a giant

01:27:22 ◼   ► convention room for a keynote. But it may be, you know, maybe the idea is that a media event

01:27:29 ◼   ► at the Steve Jobs Theater with a couple of hundred? I don't know. I mean, at this point it sounds

01:27:35 ◼   ► outlandish. I do think that maybe they're holding out hope that things will have calmed down to the

01:27:41 ◼   ► point where they might be able to have a small crowd in the Steve Jobs Theater for that keynote

01:27:45 ◼   ► instead of it just being like a like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver were last week where

01:27:50 ◼   ► it's sort of they're shouting into a void and there's an empty theater. I do also think one

01:27:54 ◼   ► part of the hedge here has to be when do you you can't do WWDC unless you've got your new operating

01:28:01 ◼   ► systems ready to go you know the scope of them you know what's new you've got stuff ready to show to

01:28:06 ◼   ► developers you've got downloads ready to put up and that's the other part of this one of the stories

01:28:10 ◼   ► we've seen in the last few days because this is moving fast is developers internal to Apple but

01:28:17 ◼   ► but because of the security restrictions on Apple stuff,

01:28:21 ◼   ► either unable or it's very difficult to work at home

01:28:25 ◼   ► on top secret Apple stuff, which is kind of a no-brainer,

01:28:28 ◼   ► but at the same time, like, if you're trying to get

01:28:31 ◼   ► new versions of Mac OS and iOS and watch OS and TV OS

01:28:35 ◼   ► and iPad OS, all ready in a developer version

01:28:39 ◼   ► to drop the first week of June,

01:28:41 ◼   ► and suddenly you're trying to get them all

01:28:43 ◼   ► to work from home, or they can't all be in at the same time,

01:28:46 ◼   ► or whatever it is, it really calls into question

01:28:49 ◼   ► the ability to stay on schedule.

01:28:52 ◼   ► And that's the other part of this,

01:28:53 ◼   ► is like, what if they don't have a beta?

01:28:55 ◼   ► What if they don't feel like they might not be able

01:28:58 ◼   ► to announce until the end of June,

01:29:00 ◼   ► if they slip three or four weeks?

01:29:03 ◼   ► All of that is up in the air, right?

01:29:05 ◼   ► This may not go, it's not just the gathering issue,

01:29:08 ◼   ► it's also the, like, who's working on the software issue.

01:29:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, and there's actually, so there's two sides to that.

01:29:15 ◼   ► So one, maybe inside Apple, because of this work from home

01:29:19 ◼   ► being a serious disruption to the way Apple works,

01:29:23 ◼   ► I mean, more than any company I'm aware of

01:29:25 ◼   ► in the tech sphere, and this is no surprise to anybody

01:29:29 ◼   ► who's listening to this show, Apple has a culture

01:29:31 ◼   ► of being onsite, face to face with the people

01:29:35 ◼   ► you work with, Apple--

01:29:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, come straight from Steve Jobs,

01:29:38 ◼   ► he was absolutely a believer that everybody had to be

01:29:42 ◼   ► in the same place at the same time.

01:29:43 ◼   ► - Right, and that doesn't mean they're all

01:29:44 ◼   ► the same building, they're way too big now.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Pretty much the entire city of Cupertino now

01:29:48 ◼   ► is office buildings owned by Apple.

01:29:51 ◼   ► I mean, really, I mean, for those of us--

01:29:56 ◼   ► - Drive down there sometime,

01:29:57 ◼   ► and there is an Apple logo on almost every corner.

01:30:01 ◼   ► - Including across the street,

01:30:03 ◼   ► which really just didn't used to be the case.

01:30:06 ◼   ► And buildings, you know, there were buildings

01:30:07 ◼   ► that was like, ah, that looks like, you know,

01:30:10 ◼   ► there was like this great expansion

01:30:11 ◼   ► in the late '80s and early '90s.

01:30:14 ◼   ► And, you know, in that era when Steve Jobs was in exile, and you can kind of tell because,

01:30:19 ◼   ► like, the architecture of the buildings is just very not to his liking.

01:30:24 ◼   ► I can spot a late 80s, early 90s Apple building a mile away. We had one in San Diego not too far

01:30:30 ◼   ► from where I went to college, and it had the little Apple logo on it in, you know, 1991 or whatever,

01:30:34 ◼   ► and all of them look like that, and there are a bunch of those in Cupertino for sure.

01:30:38 ◼   ► But then there's some weird ones now, too, like ones that are like, there's no way that's an

01:30:42 ◼   ► Apple building and then there's the drive by and there's a sign and there's an Apple logo.

01:30:46 ◼   ► They've leased all the space there is to lease in Cupertino and then built a giant campus.

01:30:51 ◼   ► And across the street from the giant campus, I don't know if people know this, one of the funny

01:30:55 ◼   ► things about it is Apple already had buildings on that street where the visitor center is.

01:30:59 ◼   ► Most of the buildings across the street that are south of the visitor center toward the freeway,

01:31:05 ◼   ► those are all Apple buildings that have been there a while. And then if you go under the freeway

01:31:10 ◼   ► there, there's the old mall that they want to redevelop, and part of the things they

01:31:14 ◼   ► want to redevelop that into is more office space than Apple wants. So they are—basically

01:31:22 ◼   ► the motto is, you know, if you're in California, you're in Cupertino, and if you aren't,

01:31:26 ◼   ► you know, your organization is all in one building, and if you need to talk to somebody

01:31:31 ◼   ► else's organization, you go to a different building. But everybody is together. That's

01:31:35 ◼   ► why James Thompson famously was given the ultimatum that he had to move from Ireland

01:31:39 ◼   ► to Cupertino if he wanted to keep working on the Mac OS X dock, because Steve didn't

01:31:43 ◼   ► want the developer of the dock to be in Ireland. He wanted him to be in California.

01:31:47 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's not to say everybody's in Cupertino either. I know Apple is a growing

01:31:52 ◼   ► footprint in Seattle. I don't know if they're still there. I remember the iWorks team used

01:31:58 ◼   ► to be in Pittsburgh.

01:31:59 ◼   ► Pittsburgh, yeah.

01:32:00 ◼   ► Right. But the iWorks team was in Pittsburgh, right? It wasn't like, "Oh, yeah, if you'd

01:32:08 ◼   ► like to come work on iWorks, you could work in the Pittsburgh office or you could work

01:32:11 ◼   ► in Seattle, you could come to Cupertino.

01:32:13 ◼   ► No, if you want to work on cloud, you go to Seattle. If you want to work on TV, you go

01:32:16 ◼   ► to LA. If you want to work on iWork, you go to Pittsburgh. And if you want to work on

01:32:19 ◼   ► Mac OS, you are going to be seated in Apple Park, basically.

01:32:23 ◼   ► It is a face-to-face collaborative culture.

01:32:26 ◼   ► So now what?

01:32:27 ◼   ► For better or for worse.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Now what do they do?

01:32:29 ◼   ► Right. Well, so there's two levels to it. The first level, and I have to admit, I think

01:32:34 ◼   ► I think you're talking about the Wall Street Journal story

01:32:36 ◼   ► from the other day about the problems.

01:32:38 ◼   ► I have it written down, so I'll remember to link it.

01:32:42 ◼   ► I've thought about just the cultural part of it,

01:32:46 ◼   ► that they're just not, they don't have tools

01:32:48 ◼   ► for remote collaboration within a very close-knit team.

01:32:52 ◼   ► They just don't have the culture of it.

01:32:58 ◼   ► And what the Journal story brought up, though,

01:33:03 ◼   ► is that there are just policies and rules about it.

01:33:07 ◼   ► For example, you can't bring hardware out of the building

01:33:11 ◼   ► without of these, famously,

01:33:13 ◼   ► we know these stories from the iPhone.

01:33:14 ◼   ► I mean, the iPhone was really super serious,

01:33:16 ◼   ► it was like in a vault, but,

01:33:17 ◼   ► hardware doesn't leave certain--

01:33:22 ◼   ► - For sure.

01:33:23 ◼   ► - Locked, closed, regulated doors.

01:33:27 ◼   ► But what if what you're working on requires,

01:33:30 ◼   ► You're a software engineer and you need to build and run,

01:33:34 ◼   ► but you need to build and run on the hardware.

01:33:36 ◼   ► But if you can't take the hardware out,

01:33:39 ◼   ► there's no way to do that.

01:33:41 ◼   ► And think about things like,

01:33:45 ◼   ► I'm gonna make up some numbers here,

01:33:49 ◼   ► but whether a certain animation for a transition

01:33:54 ◼   ► should be 300 milliseconds or 500 milliseconds,

01:33:58 ◼   ► and you build both and you look at them.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Well, how the hell do you do that

01:34:03 ◼   ► over remote video conferencing?

01:34:06 ◼   ► How does a team that is sweating the details

01:34:09 ◼   ► on how many milliseconds an animated transition should be

01:34:14 ◼   ► do it when they're used to doing it on the actual prototype?

01:34:18 ◼   ► Or even if it's not a prototype hardware,

01:34:20 ◼   ► even if it's just an animation for a new thing

01:34:22 ◼   ► that's going to run on the iPhone 11,

01:34:24 ◼   ► but you're there together as a team looking at,

01:34:27 ◼   ► So the hardware isn't secret, it's just an iPhone,

01:34:29 ◼   ► we're just testing on the iPhone 11, which is already out.

01:34:32 ◼   ► But the software is secret, and the animation,

01:34:35 ◼   ► in terms of what it looks and feels like,

01:34:37 ◼   ► is right there in your hand, in front of your eyes,

01:34:42 ◼   ► and now you're supposed to do it from home,

01:34:44 ◼   ► and the person demoing it to you

01:34:45 ◼   ► is doing it over a video conference.

01:34:47 ◼   ► Well, how in the, that's running at 60 hertz

01:34:50 ◼   ► or something like that, 60 frames per second or less.

01:34:53 ◼   ► It's impossible.

01:34:55 ◼   ► It's absolutely impossible to make that sort of judgment call

01:34:59 ◼   ► over a teleconferencing link,

01:35:01 ◼   ► no matter how good your bandwidth is to your home.

01:35:04 ◼   ► So I don't think it is speculative at all

01:35:10 ◼   ► to suggest that this is going to be disruptive

01:35:13 ◼   ► to the development of everything Apple has been planning

01:35:17 ◼   ► for the entire year, software-wise.

01:35:20 ◼   ► - And it's not to say that they couldn't do it,

01:35:23 ◼   ► But it is to say that they, I think, have not built up any—I don't know, but I'm

01:35:28 ◼   ► going to guess they've built up very little that allows them to do it in these cases where

01:35:33 ◼   ► you've got to be there, because why would they?

01:35:35 ◼   ► I mean, other than to do disaster contingency planning, which living in California you should

01:35:40 ◼   ► probably do anyway, and there were questions about, like, with the fires, if the air quality

01:35:45 ◼   ► wasn't going to be good enough.

01:35:46 ◼   ► Like, there are all of these other issues out there, so maybe they've got some plan

01:35:50 ◼   ► for it.

01:35:51 ◼   ► But clearly it's a hindrance, even if it isn't a full stop.

01:35:55 ◼   ► Even if you bring people in in shifts or spread them out, send some groups home and have other

01:36:01 ◼   ► people come and sit further apart or however you wanted to do it, it's going to be a serious

01:36:07 ◼   ► hindrance to your collaborative environment that you built up.

01:36:11 ◼   ► And that's why I feel like when we talk about WWDC, and this happens with everything

01:36:17 ◼   ► with the virus is you don't realize the assumptions you're making until you hit one of them and you go

01:36:23 ◼   ► oh you know and and wwc is a perfect one it's like oh what if they don't have like literally what if

01:36:30 ◼   ► they don't have developer builds what if they aren't far enough along in development to know

01:36:35 ◼   ► what they have confidence in mentioning in a keynote because they're not far enough along

01:36:40 ◼   ► to know whether they they think it's shippable or not right no i think that may be the case i think

01:36:46 ◼   ► it's definitely true. And then the other side of not wanting to announce a keynote date is the

01:36:51 ◼   ► actual, you know, preferring to have an audience of some sort, even if it's a Steve Jobs theater-sized

01:37:00 ◼   ► audience, which is like roughly a thousand people instead of a five or six thousand person cavernous,

01:37:06 ◼   ► you know, San Jose Convention Center audience. Apple likes an audience. They love, you know,

01:37:13 ◼   ► They love to have an audience for keynotes, but what if it starts to look like it's practical,

01:37:17 ◼   ► safe, totally safe, fine idea to do it, but probably not until the end of June?

01:37:24 ◼   ► Then I think Apple would absolutely want to hold it until the end of June to have a live event

01:37:32 ◼   ► and feel safe, good about it. So I wouldn't be surprised, honestly, the more I think about it,

01:37:39 ◼   ► I would not be surprised if the date for the keynote is literally not announced until,

01:37:46 ◼   ► like most Apple events, maybe a week or two before.

01:37:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, and if I was sitting in that meeting with Phil Schiller and his team

01:37:57 ◼   ► and Developer Relations and all of those people, I think the argument I would make is,

01:38:06 ◼   ► look how quickly this is moving. We don't know where we're going to be. Why announce a date when

01:38:12 ◼   ► we really aren't sure? Why do it? Why? And I get that there are people, because I talked to a

01:38:17 ◼   ► couple of them on Twitter, who are planning, first off, they're planning a vacation for June. I'm

01:38:21 ◼   ► like, you may not be taking that vacation. But secondly, if you're planning time off from work

01:38:25 ◼   ► so that you can stay home and consume all the videos, and I get people want to plan,

01:38:29 ◼   ► but your plans are in question, their plans are in question. Why pick a date if you

01:38:36 ◼   ► really don't have confidence that you can hit the date. And I don't see how any of us,

01:38:42 ◼   ► any of us in the entire world can have confidence in something like that right now, because

01:38:48 ◼   ► it's moving so fast. And if you are in charge of a big complicated system with a bunch of

01:38:52 ◼   ► employees, because like we haven't even started to talk about like, what if you do bring in

01:38:55 ◼   ► your employees, and your key OS engineers all get Coronavirus, right? And, and 20% of

01:39:02 ◼   ► key OS engineers are laid up in bed with a fever and breathing problems and may have to go to the

01:39:06 ◼   ► hospital. That's also what you don't want to have happen. So who can tell? Why commit to anything

01:39:14 ◼   ► right now? They committed to the important thing, which is, yes, we're going to do developer

01:39:17 ◼   ► resources and call it WWDC and there'll be videos and it'll start in June. Maybe they should have

01:39:24 ◼   ► even said summer. But yeah. - Well, I think the reason that they said June, I think the reason

01:39:30 ◼   ► they committed to June is and I'm glad you said that because a couple people a lot of people

01:39:36 ◼   ► who who listen to the show or read the site have pointed to that I think 2006 WWDC when they

01:39:44 ◼   ► postponed it till August and thought hey that might be you know why not just punt a couple months

01:39:50 ◼   ► that wouldn't work for Apple anymore no because the iPhone assuming the iPhone ships in in

01:39:57 ◼   ► September, you can't have your OS unveil be the month before the phone ships.

01:40:02 ◼   ► And even if, and I guess we can get to that, but even if the iPhone doesn't ship in September,

01:40:07 ◼   ► it's still... Apple's going to want to get back on this schedule once this clears up,

01:40:16 ◼   ► you know, even if it takes a year, you know. Back in those pre-iPhone days, Apple, I think, wanted,

01:40:25 ◼   ► I think Apple always wanted to be on this roughly annual schedule. It always seemed like they were

01:40:31 ◼   ► working for it, and they were just resource constrained, and they, you know, you get better

01:40:37 ◼   ► at what you do, right? And year after year, they've gotten better at it. But, you know,

01:40:44 ◼   ► there were gaps, but, you know, early years of Mac OS X was roughly annual, and then it kind of

01:40:49 ◼   ► got knocked off the annual, you know, sometimes 18 months and then when the

01:40:54 ◼   ► iPhone was being worked on they famously had an announcement that, "Hey, we've, you

01:40:59 ◼   ► know, we had a date for the next version of Mac OS X but we've pulled key

01:41:02 ◼   ► engineers off to work on this iPhone, you know, the first version of the iPhone so

01:41:07 ◼   ► we're gonna have to move this back six months." They're gonna want to stay on

01:41:12 ◼   ► annual schedule. And part of Apple's annual schedule is getting—the schedule is in June,

01:41:22 ◼   ► they tell us what's in the OSs. And part of the reason they do it at a developer conference is

01:41:29 ◼   ► they want developers to start working on these things, right? That they are announcing APIs and

01:41:35 ◼   ► features and they want developers to start updating their apps for them. So that come fall,

01:41:44 ◼   ► when these things come out, when these OSes come out, there's developer support for them.

01:41:49 ◼   ► You can't do that if you announce them in August. And then the other thing too is Apple's engineers

01:41:56 ◼   ► are all heads down, nose to the grindstone, July and August, finishing these things up. I mean,

01:42:03 ◼   ► Again, the start of this podcast seems like a long time ago by our current situation,

01:42:10 ◼   ► but I think we all remember that iOS 13 was in really rough shape last summer and, you know,

01:42:18 ◼   ► shipped in really weird fashion where 13.0 came out with the iPhones and was out for four days

01:42:27 ◼   ► before 13.1 shipped. That's, you know, and that's with a normal, quote-unquote, "normal" WWDC at the

01:42:39 ◼   ► beginning of June and a full summer of work. Punting the announcement and the betas till

01:42:44 ◼   ► August, it just wouldn't possibly fly. I mean, I guess it's theoretically possible if they're

01:42:52 ◼   ► already willing to say the iPhone isn't going to ship till—new iPhones aren't going to

01:42:57 ◼   ► ship till December or January or something like that. But I don't think they're willing

01:43:01 ◼   ► to say that yet. There was an announcement just last week that Foxconn announced that

01:43:08 ◼   ► they're actually ahead of schedule and getting back up to date, and they didn't mention

01:43:13 ◼   ► Apple specifically, but you hear Foxconn, I hear Apple, right?

01:43:17 ◼   ► I do wonder if they, you know, obviously they will try and things are going to be weird and things are going to slip and everything's going to be a little bit weird into the future for a while.

01:43:28 ◼   ► But, you know, it's hard to believe that the iPhone isn't going to be a priority. It does make me wonder maybe if there are going to be some things that get deprioritized, right?

01:43:36 ◼   ► Like there are features that have been rumored that maybe we won't see that they may take a lower priority, something like maybe even the Mac and say we're going to pull back on that.

01:43:46 ◼   ► course, what if this year is the year that they're going to do ARM on Mac and

01:43:50 ◼   ► that was going to be a big thing, then you can't really pull back on that.

01:43:53 ◼   ► Although you might be able to say, you know, this isn't really going to ship

01:43:56 ◼   ► until, you know, next year and so you've got and take your time or something. But

01:44:01 ◼   ► they may have to make some tough decisions because I think in the end the

01:44:03 ◼   ► one thing that is nothing is inviolate but the closest you get is getting that

01:44:10 ◼   ► iPhone out the door and getting an iOS update that goes with it and that they

01:44:13 ◼   ► They can't, they will prioritize that over everything else,

01:44:18 ◼   ► I think, if they have to.

01:44:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I think it's really,

01:44:21 ◼   ► I think that that June timeframe for WWDC,

01:44:26 ◼   ► whether WWDC is the traditional in-person conference

01:44:30 ◼   ► as we know it, or whether it's purely virtual,

01:44:32 ◼   ► including the keynote, where even every member of the press

01:44:36 ◼   ► is watching the keynote from home, over the web,

01:44:40 ◼   ► and nothing is done in person,

01:44:43 ◼   ► June is sort of set in stone.

01:44:46 ◼   ► And I think they could definitely push it

01:44:48 ◼   ► to the end of June.

01:44:50 ◼   ► And again, you've made this point a couple times,

01:44:52 ◼   ► I think, already in the last couple minutes,

01:44:54 ◼   ► is that if need be, they'll cut features, right?

01:44:58 ◼   ► But I think they would cut--

01:45:00 ◼   ► - Cut features, or they might even do a little prelude

01:45:03 ◼   ► and say, here are some features that are gonna be in here.

01:45:05 ◼   ► They're not all gonna be in there.

01:45:07 ◼   ► 'Cause we already know that they kicked things out

01:45:08 ◼   ► the last couple years.

01:45:09 ◼   ► Just say it up front, these are the features

01:45:11 ◼   ► we're working on, they're not all gonna be

01:45:13 ◼   ► in the developer beta, they're not all gonna ship

01:45:15 ◼   ► in the fall, but they will ship in the next 12 months

01:45:18 ◼   ► and just move on.

01:45:19 ◼   ► And everybody's gonna understand, right?

01:45:21 ◼   ► Because we will all have just been through this

01:45:23 ◼   ► for the past several months and know that nothing

01:45:26 ◼   ► is quite like what it used to be.

01:45:29 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:45:30 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break before we wrap up.

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01:47:19 ◼   ► I know you would care about this, the editor and you.

01:47:23 ◼   ► I don't know what to call this damn thing.

01:47:25 ◼   ► COVID-19 or coronavirus.

01:47:28 ◼   ► I saw you added the SARS-CoV-2.

01:47:30 ◼   ► - SARS-CoV-2, yeah.

01:47:33 ◼   ► Yeah, it's okay.

01:47:34 ◼   ► So I give you the overview from my perspective, which is coronavirus is a generic term for

01:47:38 ◼   ► for a whole family of viruses that include things

01:47:41 ◼   ► that cause like the common cold.

01:47:43 ◼   ► And it's based on like sort of how they actually look.

01:47:46 ◼   ► They have these little spikes

01:47:47 ◼   ► that when you look at it in a microscope,

01:47:49 ◼   ► microscope looks kind of like a crown.

01:47:51 ◼   ► So this is a coronavirus.

01:47:53 ◼   ► The thing is coronavirus is a really great,

01:47:56 ◼   ► understandable, commonly used term.

01:48:00 ◼   ► And so I get that, you know,

01:48:02 ◼   ► right now when we say the coronavirus,

01:48:04 ◼   ► everybody gets which coronavirus we're talking about.

01:48:07 ◼   ► can be pedantic about it, but like, I think we get it in terms of common usage that sometimes—I

01:48:13 ◼   ► wrote a macro piece a few weeks ago about WWDC and I just called it coronavirus because

01:48:17 ◼   ► I didn't want to get into it. And I think that's okay. And it comes—all these names

01:48:23 ◼   ► also come from, I think, a fairly good place, which is, in the olden days, we probably would

01:48:29 ◼   ► call this the Wuhan virus, because that's where it first emerged. And the feeling there

01:48:33 ◼   ► is that that leads to a lot of kind of demonization of China and Chinese people all over the world,

01:48:40 ◼   ► which is happening anyway, by the way. So, like, to take it away from that and say, like,

01:48:44 ◼   ► we're not going to make this about a city, we're not going to place blame, we're not

01:48:47 ◼   ► going to do anything like that, we're just going to call it a generic name, and they

01:48:50 ◼   ► came up with, so there are two names, right? The virus itself is SARS-CoV-2, which is basically

01:48:59 ◼   ► acute respiratory like the old SARS coronavirus number two because this is the like it's all like

01:49:05 ◼   ► a bad sequel SARS-2. COVID-19 is the coronavirus symptoms, the disease that's caused by the virus

01:49:13 ◼   ► found in 2019. So technically you could have a coronavirus which was SARS-CoV-2 which was

01:49:22 ◼   ► causing you to have COVID-19 symptoms, right? That's the chain of precision if you want to

01:49:28 ◼   ► to be precise about it. Right, and the name COVID-19 comes from CO is from corona, VI from virus,

01:49:38 ◼   ► the D is from disease, and the 19 is because 2019 is when it was first discovered in like in

01:49:44 ◼   ► December. And thank, I do thank the WHO for just going with all caps and not lowering the O and the

01:49:53 ◼   ► eye right yeah or the even you know they like they just like industry would have

01:49:58 ◼   ► lots of inner caps in it right but I have seen other I've seen some

01:50:02 ◼   ► publications that lowercase it like as though it was the name David you know

01:50:06 ◼   ► like capital C but then lowercase ovid 19 well you know a lot of that a lot of

01:50:11 ◼   ► those may be British and British English they don't capitalize acronyms even if

01:50:15 ◼   ► they're acronyms they just put the initial cap and then they move on so

01:50:20 ◼   ► So you'll see them talk about NASA and it's capital N, lowercase ASA, and you're like,

01:50:24 ◼   ► "That's very weird," but there's a style thing at play there.

01:50:29 ◼   ► I've shifted it during Fireball from coronavirus simply to COVID-19, and I know when I made

01:50:38 ◼   ► the shift, I knew that COVID-19 was the disease, not the virus, and that the virus had its

01:50:45 ◼   ► own name. But I don't, it's too complicated and number and also the SARS-CoV-2 is really

01:50:56 ◼   ► a, I don't know.

01:50:58 ◼   ► That's a mouthful.

01:50:59 ◼   ► And what's the keyboard equivalent of a mouthful?

01:51:02 ◼   ► Yeah, right. It's a fingerful. I don't know.

01:51:04 ◼   ► I don't know. It's a twister with your fingers.

01:51:07 ◼   ► This comes up a lot, and in the business that we're in, especially talking about technical

01:51:11 ◼   ► things, there's a lot of pedantry to go around, and sometimes people are more concerned

01:51:15 ◼   ► with people being right than being clear. And I think you want to be right, but you

01:51:20 ◼   ► want to be clear, and if you're right but unclear, you've failed. And so, one, that's

01:51:25 ◼   ► why I knew the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 and coronavirus when I wrote

01:51:30 ◼   ► that first coronavirus piece for Macworld, and I still went with coronavirus because

01:51:35 ◼   ► I felt like, first off, it's not a piece about viruses that I'm going to explain

01:51:39 ◼   ► how it works. And second, everybody knows what I mean when I say coronavirus, so I'm

01:51:43 ◼   ► going to choose to be clear and not pedantic about it. And I think it's a decision. Also,

01:51:50 ◼   ► a lot of the contexts you're writing about are about stopping the spread of COVID-19,

01:51:55 ◼   ► and that's accurate, because we're trying to stop the spread of the disease that's

01:51:59 ◼   ► caused by the virus, not just the virus. It all goes together.

01:52:03 ◼   ► - Right, I totally get it that if you are working

01:52:07 ◼   ► at the CDC or you're a scientist and you're working on this,

01:52:11 ◼   ► the difference between the virus and the disease

01:52:14 ◼   ► the virus gives you is incredibly important.

01:52:18 ◼   ► Fundamentally, it's totally different people

01:52:20 ◼   ► working on totally different things, right?

01:52:22 ◼   ► There's different people studying the virus

01:52:24 ◼   ► than the type of people who are working on

01:52:26 ◼   ► how to manage the actual disease.

01:52:28 ◼   ► Totally get it, I get it.

01:52:31 ◼   ► But from my perspective and the level

01:52:34 ◼   ► that I'm writing about it, I just need a name.

01:52:36 ◼   ► And my shift was mainly,

01:52:39 ◼   ► I think I was thrown off a little bit

01:52:40 ◼   ► because I tend to defer to the New York Times.

01:52:44 ◼   ► I'm an avid reader of the Times,

01:52:45 ◼   ► and I know that they're pedantic about such things.

01:52:49 ◼   ► And they're still, even to this day,

01:52:52 ◼   ► not that they never mention COVID-19,

01:52:55 ◼   ► but they're pretty much all in on coronavirus.

01:52:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:52:58 ◼   ► My shift last week toward COVID-19 was that I knew all along what you said, that coronavirus

01:53:05 ◼   ► is a generic term and that the SARS from a couple years ago was a coronavirus, and that

01:53:10 ◼   ► there will be more—there will be future coronaviruses.

01:53:14 ◼   ► Sure.

01:53:15 ◼   ► You know, hopefully not for a long time, but it's inevitable.

01:53:19 ◼   ► You know, it's going to happen again.

01:53:23 ◼   ► My shift last week was that I was always a little uncomfortable just using coronavirus

01:53:28 ◼   ► because I knew it was a generic term, but I also felt comfortable with it because that's what the

01:53:32 ◼   ► time seemed to be doing and it's what I knew everybody who was reading "Daring Fireball"

01:53:35 ◼   ► would know exactly what I was talking about. My discomfort with using the generic term

01:53:41 ◼   ► reached a point last week where I was like, if I start using COVID-19 instead, everybody is—I'm

01:53:49 ◼   ► not going to lose one single reader. Although somebody told me—I swear to God, this is a true

01:53:55 ◼   ► story. I forget who told me this. Somebody told me that they had like a relative who had been

01:54:03 ◼   ► planning this for well over a year, and that he and his wife, their dream was to go on a month-long

01:54:11 ◼   ► vacation into complete isolation. No phones, just like in their outdoors type people camping,

01:54:21 ◼   ► and just tune out of the world. And the guy is a big basketball fan, and he's like,

01:54:27 ◼   ► "Coby Bryant's dead." And it's like, "Oh, no, is that why everybody's..."

01:54:33 ◼   ► You know, they know that's not why everybody's upset anymore. Sit down.

01:54:38 ◼   ► I mean, can you even imagine? It's crazy. But anyway, I felt like last week, we easily

01:54:47 ◼   ► crossed the threshold where COVID-19 was at least as well known as coronavirus, and I've shifted to

01:54:53 ◼   ► using it. And though I'm reluctant to, I'm going with the all caps because I don't feel like

01:54:58 ◼   ► lower casing it is appropriate. Yeah. Well, there... I agree with your choices, but I think

01:55:05 ◼   ► this also is a little window into when people, a lot of times people send in corrections and

01:55:10 ◼   ► things and they think that decisions are made carelessly. And a lot of times you don't, you

01:55:15 ◼   ► we don't talk about the carrier, but we think about it.

01:55:18 ◼   ► We are concerned about how we're being interpreted,

01:55:23 ◼   ► and sometimes it does come down to,

01:55:25 ◼   ► am I going to confuse people?

01:55:27 ◼   ► Because if I'm right, but then I have to explain

01:55:31 ◼   ► all the reasons why I'm right,

01:55:33 ◼   ► sometimes the decision is, I'm not gonna be that right.

01:55:36 ◼   ► I'm gonna vague it up a little bit

01:55:38 ◼   ► so that everybody still understands it,

01:55:39 ◼   ► and I don't have to stop and explain myself.

01:55:41 ◼   ► Because it starts to get a little showy sometimes

01:55:43 ◼   ► where you're showing off.

01:55:45 ◼   ► I'm gonna use this very particular term that nobody knows

01:55:48 ◼   ► and then explain it.

01:55:49 ◼   ► And it's like, it's better to use the term everybody knows.

01:55:51 ◼   ► Just do that if your goal is not to show off

01:55:54 ◼   ► but to communicate.

01:55:55 ◼   ► - All right, so back to the Apple, at least ramifications

01:55:59 ◼   ► at a high level of this.

01:56:00 ◼   ► We've covered, internally, Apple is really culturally

01:56:05 ◼   ► and policy-wise not really set up for remote work

01:56:08 ◼   ► on a lot of new stuff.

01:56:10 ◼   ► But, you know, gotta do what you gotta do.

01:56:14 ◼   ► I mean, I don't even think there's a debate at this point.

01:56:17 ◼   ► You gotta work from home and they'll make the best of it.

01:56:20 ◼   ► WWDC covered.

01:56:24 ◼   ► I guess I went out of chronological order.

01:56:27 ◼   ► The other thing were reports earlier this month

01:56:32 ◼   ► that Apple had been planning a late March press event

01:56:36 ◼   ► of some sort to announce new products.

01:56:39 ◼   ► And we all know stuff that's been rumored.

01:56:42 ◼   ► there have been longstanding rumors of

01:56:44 ◼   ► some sort of successor to the iPhone SE,

01:56:49 ◼   ► which I really don't think is gonna be called

01:56:51 ◼   ► the iPhone SE 2, but more or less,

01:56:54 ◼   ► what we know as the iPhone 8, hardware-wise,

01:56:57 ◼   ► aesthetic-wise, updated with the internals

01:57:00 ◼   ► from probably an iPhone 11 in terms of the A series chip.

01:57:09 ◼   ► Maybe new iPad Pros, which are like 18 months old,

01:57:14 ◼   ► or who knows what else.

01:57:16 ◼   ► There could be new MacBooks.

01:57:17 ◼   ► There could be, you know, there's a bunch of products

01:57:19 ◼   ► they have that wouldn't be worthy of a major flagship event,

01:57:24 ◼   ► but would certainly have been in normal times worthy

01:57:29 ◼   ► of some sort of event.

01:57:30 ◼   ► And as I pointed out on this show, I think with Federico,

01:57:34 ◼   ► but you know, Apple's a company of patterns,

01:57:37 ◼   ► and they have, obviously we know they have the annual pattern

01:57:42 ◼   ► of WWDC in June and new iPhones in September,

01:57:46 ◼   ► but they have a biannual pattern in recent years

01:57:50 ◼   ► of having an event in late March,

01:57:52 ◼   ► where in the last few years, in the even-numbered years,

01:57:56 ◼   ► they've had events in late March,

01:57:58 ◼   ► and in the odd ones, they haven't.

01:57:59 ◼   ► And I don't think that's a coincidence.

01:58:01 ◼   ► I think that's part of the cycle for some of these products

01:58:03 ◼   ► which don't have an annual schedule.

01:58:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, the iPad feels like it's an 18-month cycle, right?

01:58:08 ◼   ► So that would be in the spring every other year

01:58:11 ◼   ► and in the fall every other year.

01:58:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, and there were reports, I don't know,

01:58:15 ◼   ► a week and a half ago or something like that,

01:58:17 ◼   ► a couple of, it leaked to a couple of outlets

01:58:21 ◼   ► that Apple had been planning it, was gonna cancel it

01:58:26 ◼   ► because even then the writing was on the wall.

01:58:27 ◼   ► Even when things were still, even then,

01:58:31 ◼   ► in the long ago times of 10 days ago,

01:58:34 ◼   ► seemed pretty clear it was not practical,

01:58:37 ◼   ► or even just advisable, even if things hadn't gotten worse

01:58:40 ◼   ► in the last 10 days, even then it just seemed

01:58:42 ◼   ► totally ineladvisable to gather people

01:58:45 ◼   ► in a room together.

01:58:48 ◼   ► And just imagine the PR risks of, oh my God,

01:58:53 ◼   ► Apple had these people come out to an event

01:58:56 ◼   ► and three of them got the coronavirus

01:58:59 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:59:00 ◼   ► Nobody's gonna take a risk like that, it's crazy.

01:59:03 ◼   ► But then what does Apple do if they have these products

01:59:05 ◼   ► ready to go but they can't hold an event?

01:59:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:59:09 ◼   ► And the thing Mike Hurley and I were talking about this

01:59:12 ◼   ► earlier today, supply chains.

01:59:16 ◼   ► A supply chain is not exactly a conveyor belt,

01:59:19 ◼   ► but it's kind of a conveyor belt, right?

01:59:21 ◼   ► Like at some point before the product gets announced,

01:59:25 ◼   ► especially if it's going to ship like that Friday,

01:59:28 ◼   ► they stop making the old product

01:59:31 ◼   ► and they start making the new product.

01:59:33 ◼   ► And you can't just not,

01:59:38 ◼   ► like unless you're willing to have your old product

01:59:40 ◼   ► go out of stores and go out of being able to,

01:59:43 ◼   ► I mean, the stores are closed, but buy it online,

01:59:46 ◼   ► at some point you gotta flip the switch.

01:59:47 ◼   ► And so this is the debate also about like,

01:59:49 ◼   ► would you announce a new Apple product now

01:59:52 ◼   ► when all this else is going on?

01:59:53 ◼   ► And the answer is I wouldn't launch a brand new platform