The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► How is sunny California?

00:00:02 ◼   ► It's great. I mean, it was snowing in Montreal this week before I left,

00:00:06 ◼   ► which is just climate chaos. And then I got here and it was a heat wave, so it's great.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Ah, so anyway, you are out there. I don't know what else you're doing, but I know yesterday you were at the grand opening of the new,

00:00:18 ◼   ► or I guess it's not really the grand opening. I guess that's tomorrow.

00:00:21 ◼   ► but yeah that the sort of preview opening of the new flagship Apple store in

00:00:25 ◼   ► San Francisco right off right at the top of the hill at Union Square

00:00:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it was they did a sort of a preview event is opening officially on Saturday

00:00:34 ◼   ► It's when the general public can go and just we'll see how you like normal people react to the store

00:00:38 ◼   ► Especially when they're at capacity, but they had a small event yesterday with Angela errands, which was very nice. So tell me about it

00:00:44 ◼   ► Well, the thing that the thing that was remarkable to me up front is they brought us in and you know

00:00:48 ◼   ► They said Angela was going to speak.

00:00:50 ◼   ► There was all this internet stuff previously about why is Apple hiding Angel Aarons, Angel

00:00:54 ◼   ► Aarons, why isn't Apple showcasing her, why isn't she on the stage, is she even around

00:00:59 ◼   ► anymore?

00:01:00 ◼   ► You knew that that was bullshit because you see her on campus.

00:01:02 ◼   ► She's a presence at Apple.

00:01:03 ◼   ► She's everywhere.

00:01:04 ◼   ► She does phenomenal work.

00:01:07 ◼   ► But she came out and it was very similar to how I remember Johnny Ive coming out for the

00:01:11 ◼   ► Unibody MacBook event many years ago where she said flatly that it's not her favorite

00:01:15 ◼   ► thing to do.

00:01:16 ◼   ► and she asked for a bottle of water and she got talking.

00:01:19 ◼   ► And it's just like, she's so passionate

00:01:21 ◼   ► that she wanted to do this,

00:01:22 ◼   ► but clearly being on an Apple keynote stage

00:01:25 ◼   ► is not top of her personal list of things.

00:01:26 ◼   ► - Oh, interesting.

00:01:27 ◼   ► I wouldn't have, you know,

00:01:28 ◼   ► maybe that's the simple explanation

00:01:32 ◼   ► for why we haven't seen her on stage more often,

00:01:34 ◼   ► that she doesn't want to be.

00:01:35 ◼   ► - Just like Johnny, I mean,

00:01:36 ◼   ► not everyone wants to do that stuff.

00:01:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think people,

00:01:40 ◼   ► for all of the,

00:01:46 ◼   ► And some of it certainly warranted all of the debate

00:01:49 ◼   ► over the diversity of the people who

00:01:52 ◼   ► are on stage at Apple events.

00:01:53 ◼   ► It's easy to overlook the fact that a lot of people

00:01:56 ◼   ► really not just don't like it, but really have like--

00:01:59 ◼   ► it's just so stressful to go and speak in front of the audience

00:02:05 ◼   ► that it's undesirable.

00:02:08 ◼   ► They just don't want to do it.

00:02:09 ◼   ► Yeah, or they work.

00:02:10 ◼   ► I mean, like Craig Federighi, he was not great the first year

00:02:12 ◼   ► he did it.

00:02:13 ◼   ► But he got better and better every year at it.

00:02:15 ◼   ► And some of that is just they're going to have to give people that time, those opportunities,

00:02:18 ◼   ► and maybe smaller events like this is a good way to do it so they can sort of get comfortable

00:02:22 ◼   ► with it and then become very good at those jobs.

00:02:24 ◼   ► There's that, I think it's Malcolm Gladwell who's got this theory that it takes 10,000

00:02:29 ◼   ► hours to get good at something.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Which roll your eyes because it's Malcolm Gladwell and it's sort of anecdotal.

00:02:35 ◼   ► But with Craig Federicchi, it's like he needed like an hour and a half.

00:02:39 ◼   ► Yes.

00:02:40 ◼   ► He needed like, like he had like one his first time he came back was I think it was the back to the Mac

00:02:45 ◼   ► Event it was at Town Hall. I was not there. I actually watched that one remotely

00:02:51 ◼   ► and his he was doing the demos of these features on a Mac and his hands were literally shaking like he couldn't he

00:03:00 ◼   ► Really couldn't do the mousing required to do the demo. He was like clicking wrong because his hands were so shaky

00:03:08 ◼   ► It was almost hard to watch as you know it unless you know it. It's hard to watch somebody who's that nervous speaking

00:03:15 ◼   ► Then like the next time he came out. He was much better and then by the third time he did it a bed

00:03:20 ◼   ► He's like wow he might be the best public speaker in the company

00:03:23 ◼   ► Yeah, it was phenomenal and they had I'm blanking on her name right now

00:03:27 ◼   ► But the woman who the vice president of Apple pay was phenomenal first time out yeah

00:03:31 ◼   ► The person covering you is really good to me make jokes about small sports illustrated

00:03:36 ◼   ► Phenomenal and that kind of stuff. I'm really easy to see more of yeah

00:03:39 ◼   ► So tell me about the store itself

00:03:42 ◼   ► So what I loved about this is that in typical Apple fashion most companies would just they would give anything to have a business like

00:03:48 ◼   ► Apple store never mind a business like Apple. It just it's such a valuable property

00:03:51 ◼   ► It does so many so many billions of dollars in transactions

00:03:54 ◼   ► Really a beloved retail experience and messing with that is super scary because you do anything wrong you risk damaging that business

00:04:01 ◼   ► And that's big business for Apple, but they they don't just oh

00:04:04 ◼   ► "Oh, I think we'll make the Genius Bar three inches longer, we'll change the wood,

00:04:08 ◼   ► we'll do all these incremental things to improve them, we'll make the quality of

00:04:11 ◼   ► the screens better."

00:04:12 ◼   ► They rethought everything from the beginning, so it was Angela Aaron's team and Johnny

00:04:15 ◼   ► Ive's team and the companies that they worked with, and they brought everything back to

00:04:19 ◼   ► the essence.

00:04:20 ◼   ► And it wasn't, you know, do we keep the theaters or do we ax the theaters or do we

00:04:24 ◼   ► do something with the Genius Bars?

00:04:26 ◼   ► What is our core principle?

00:04:27 ◼   ► What governs what we're going to do with Apple Stores?

00:04:29 ◼   ► And she mentioned that Apple Store is the biggest product that Apple ships to customers,

00:04:34 ◼   ► They've had a long history, but Apple Online now does so much.

00:04:38 ◼   ► People can just go there and order, and they don't necessarily have to go to stores anymore

00:04:42 ◼   ► to do that.

00:04:43 ◼   ► Likewise, support.apple.com and Apple support on Twitter handle a lot of the low-level queries

00:04:47 ◼   ► now.

00:04:48 ◼   ► If you just have a software issue or you just need help or how-to information, they handle

00:04:52 ◼   ► all that.

00:04:53 ◼   ► It's not necessary for the Genius bars to do the same load they used to do.

00:04:57 ◼   ► They wanted to figure out what made the Apple store relevant to customers these days, what

00:05:00 ◼   ► would make them actually want to go there.

00:05:02 ◼   ► and they settled on this overarching theme of community,

00:05:05 ◼   ► that the Apple Store could be the central hub

00:05:07 ◼   ► of the Apple community, and it starts with those giant

00:05:10 ◼   ► 40-foot doors on both sides that, yeah,

00:05:12 ◼   ► make your Apple car drive-through jokes,

00:05:13 ◼   ► but they really wanna be able to open up the entire store

00:05:16 ◼   ► and make it part of that block,

00:05:18 ◼   ► almost like an open-air market.

00:05:20 ◼   ► - Interesting.

00:05:22 ◼   ► I can definitely say here in Philadelphia,

00:05:27 ◼   ► I tend to walk by the, it's just in a busy retail area,

00:05:32 ◼   ► So no surprise that I end up walking by the Apple store a lot.

00:05:36 ◼   ► And like most Apple stores, almost always pretty crowded.

00:05:40 ◼   ► And it's definitely not just people who are shopping for things.

00:05:43 ◼   ► I mean, there are definitely people who just go in to hang out, check their email, and

00:05:48 ◼   ► stuff like that.

00:05:49 ◼   ► Michael Scott Yeah, and they're taking that whole approach

00:05:53 ◼   ► and they're applying it to everything.

00:05:54 ◼   ► So there's a giant screen now, and if people remember, there used to be a movie theater

00:05:58 ◼   ► at the old Union Square store.

00:05:59 ◼   ► But now they have this giant 6K display, and it looked seamless to me.

00:06:03 ◼   ► It looked like it was actually one display, and I immediately just wanted to take it home,

00:06:06 ◼   ► but they don't sell it.

00:06:08 ◼   ► And that's right in the middle of what they call Forum now.

00:06:10 ◼   ► And Forum has these little box and ball seats that you can sit on, and they can make it

00:06:15 ◼   ► one big room where a developer or an expert can come and give a talk, but they can also

00:06:19 ◼   ► split it up into smaller areas.

00:06:20 ◼   ► So you can have several people doing smaller talks at the same time.

00:06:24 ◼   ► And the screen can be used for presentations, but also just shows information.

00:06:27 ◼   ► And all the iconography is exactly like iOS and it uses San Francisco as a typeface.

00:06:32 ◼   ► So it was built to be an Apple product.

00:06:35 ◼   ► What would an Apple, what would iOS look like running on a 6K display is exactly what you'd

00:06:39 ◼   ► expect with this.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I think those big displays are part of the, I mean, in every, you know, a lot

00:06:46 ◼   ► of these stores are, have to fit the existing space.

00:06:50 ◼   ► They can't just say, here's the dimensions that we want.

00:06:53 ◼   ► It's, you know, we're in a historic building here.

00:06:55 ◼   ► So here's what we have to work with.

00:06:58 ◼   ► But those big displays are definitely part of the new store design.

00:07:01 ◼   ► Yeah, and they took the Genius Bar and they said, "Genius Bar, it's got some negative

00:07:06 ◼   ► connotations like it's loud, it's noisy, people are elbowing, everyone's fighting for their

00:07:10 ◼   ► chance to get to the Genius Bartender, and it's not the experience they want to give

00:07:13 ◼   ► anymore, especially now that a lot of the software and basic help and how-to stuff has

00:07:17 ◼   ► moved online."

00:07:18 ◼   ► So now they have the Genius Grove, which is right up front in the store, not in the back

00:07:21 ◼   ► anymore.

00:07:22 ◼   ► It's part of that area where the forum is

00:07:24 ◼   ► with a lot of these open tables and open seating

00:07:27 ◼   ► and those trees that people might have seen

00:07:28 ◼   ► at the Belgium store previously.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And you can just go and sit there

00:07:31 ◼   ► and get help with your Mac or iPhone or iPad

00:07:33 ◼   ► for hardware issues or other things

00:07:35 ◼   ► that they can't solve online

00:07:36 ◼   ► and not feel sort of crowded around the little table anymore.

00:07:39 ◼   ► - That's interesting.

00:07:40 ◼   ► It's interesting that they would move that to the front.

00:07:42 ◼   ► - The whole thing was super interesting.

00:07:44 ◼   ► They have a boardroom there and I don't know,

00:07:46 ◼   ► they said like some of these features

00:07:47 ◼   ► will move to other stores

00:07:48 ◼   ► and some of them they've tried already

00:07:49 ◼   ► but there's something called boardroom

00:07:50 ◼   ► where Apple's approaching enterprise and big business

00:07:53 ◼   ► with Oracle partnerships and IBM partnerships.

00:07:56 ◼   ► But for smaller businesses, for entrepreneurs, for VCs,

00:07:59 ◼   ► for the Kickstarter stuff, they have boardroom now

00:08:02 ◼   ► where people can go in and not only get help with that,

00:08:04 ◼   ► but also network and make connections.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And they were saying that part of San Francisco

00:08:09 ◼   ► is so rich with that kind of culture

00:08:10 ◼   ► that they wanted a nexus, almost like an Apple-centric nexus

00:08:13 ◼   ► for them.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And that became the boardroom area.

00:08:17 ◼   ► And the retail stuff was super interesting, too,

00:08:19 ◼   ► because they have the avenue now.

00:08:20 ◼   ► So the Avenue, they used to have those accessories, but if anyone has seen pictures of the new

00:08:23 ◼   ► Infinite Loop store or the new store in New York, and I think the one in Belgium too,

00:08:28 ◼   ► they've got these panes.

00:08:30 ◼   ► Instead of just having cases, there's cases on shelves and you see the individual cases.

00:08:34 ◼   ► So it's an avenue and you have almost like little boutiques called windows where there's

00:08:37 ◼   ► different sets of accessories like cases and photography equipment and music.

00:08:41 ◼   ► And they have a new Apple job there called the Creative Pro.

00:08:45 ◼   ► And the Creative Pro's job is to help you.

00:08:47 ◼   ► You're supposed to touch everything, try everything, sample everything.

00:08:50 ◼   ► And if you need help, they'll show you the basics.

00:08:52 ◼   ► If you don't know anything, the basics of photography or music.

00:08:55 ◼   ► But they can also go up to and including lessons on Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro if you want

00:08:58 ◼   ► to take that next step up.

00:09:00 ◼   ► And they really want to make that sort of your introduction to Apple experience.

00:09:03 ◼   ► And it really is the whole back of the store is just one long run for that.

00:09:07 ◼   ► So, what do you think?

00:09:08 ◼   ► Do you think it's an improvement?

00:09:10 ◼   ► It's just an evolution?

00:09:13 ◼   ► It's super interesting.

00:09:14 ◼   ► The last thing I didn't mention is that they also have this garden, this neglected area

00:09:16 ◼   ► they've turned into a garden where it's 24/7 Wi-Fi with seating and it can fit up to 200

00:09:22 ◼   ► people.

00:09:23 ◼   ► It's interesting as an experiment and I like that Apple is not just doing that incremental

00:09:26 ◼   ► thing that they're willing to take risks with this, that Johnny and Angela are passionate

00:09:31 ◼   ► about this.

00:09:32 ◼   ► It will be interesting to see how people react to it.

00:09:34 ◼   ► Usually you go into an Apple store and you just see dozens of kids around a machine trying

00:09:37 ◼   ► to use Facebook or something like that.

00:09:40 ◼   ► This really does seem like a place where people like us, we're really good at handling Apple

00:09:45 ◼   ► technology.

00:09:46 ◼   ► there if we break our screen or something, we need a logic board to play something, something

00:09:49 ◼   ► really serious happens.

00:09:51 ◼   ► But for a lot of people, I feel totally alienated going into a lot of stores.

00:09:55 ◼   ► I go into a liquor store and I've got to text you or somebody for advice.

00:09:58 ◼   ► I just have no idea what I'm doing and I feel bad.

00:10:00 ◼   ► I feel anxious and a little bit embarrassed and dumb.

00:10:04 ◼   ► For a lot of people, that's what technology is like.

00:10:06 ◼   ► If they can go to an Apple store and get greeted and get help and get shown things and learn

00:10:11 ◼   ► things and I think it de-stresses all that and it shows that Apple really is playing

00:10:15 ◼   ► the long game still it's not like they don't bring you in there and hustle you

00:10:17 ◼   ► and force you to buy a case just to get a quick sale they want to make that

00:10:21 ◼   ► Apple brand super important to you so that even if you don't need something

00:10:24 ◼   ► now if you're just curious you'll think that Apple is just a great experience

00:10:27 ◼   ► and when you do want something that's exactly where you're gonna go yeah I do

00:10:30 ◼   ► think you know in though it's funny looking back because at this point like

00:10:35 ◼   ► the Apple stores being ubiquitous I mean they're they're pretty much everywhere

00:10:41 ◼   ► and being successful it's been long enough that we just take it for granted

00:10:46 ◼   ► that going back to when they first started it it was widely panned and you

00:10:52 ◼   ► know it's there's like a massive file of claim chowder in my bookmarks of people

00:10:56 ◼   ► who were predicting doom you know because every other computer company

00:11:00 ◼   ► that had ever tried their own branded stores before failed miserably I mean

00:11:04 ◼   ► Gateway isn't even a company anymore no yeah totally and it's just it just gets

00:11:10 ◼   ► to the heart of why Apple is not like other computer companies.

00:11:14 ◼   ► I mean, and part of it is just as simple as the fact

00:11:19 ◼   ► that they do hardware and software, which sounds like,

00:11:21 ◼   ► well, come on, that's not that big a deal.

00:11:23 ◼   ► But it's not necessarily because they do hardware and software.

00:11:29 ◼   ► What makes Apple different is why

00:11:30 ◼   ► they do hardware and software.

00:11:32 ◼   ► I would say that the fact that they do the hardware

00:11:34 ◼   ► and software is the result of--

00:11:37 ◼   ► it's the effect, and that the cause is just the way

00:11:40 ◼   ► that Apple approaches this stuff is different and their stores are emblematic of that.

00:11:45 ◼   ► Absolutely. If you look at Apple, the consistent theme from the Apple 2 all the way to something

00:11:49 ◼   ► like an Apple Watch or an Apple TV is the mainstreaming of computing technology, democratization

00:11:55 ◼   ► of access to ubiquitous computing. The Apple Store is like that. It's a way to reach

00:12:00 ◼   ► people. It's a way to make people want to sort of get – make this – and you've

00:12:05 ◼   ► called this before like this affordable luxury where technology shouldn't be just kept

00:12:09 ◼   ► to a small few people and it shouldn't be something that's off-putting or inaccessible

00:12:13 ◼   ► or something that makes you feel bad about yourself.

00:12:14 ◼   ► It should be something that everybody can use to enhance their lives.

00:12:17 ◼   ► And Apple, people will debate, is it a hardware company, software company?

00:12:20 ◼   ► It's really a product company.

00:12:21 ◼   ► They make wonderful products because they want to give you a great experience and this

00:12:24 ◼   ► is absolutely an extension of that.

00:12:26 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I do think there's, and it's pretty clear

00:12:28 ◼   ► that the architectural evolution of the Apple Store has gotten a lot more humane, I would

00:12:35 ◼   ► say, where the original design was sort of like being inside a probably at the

00:12:41 ◼   ► time it was a power book, you know, there was sort of like an aluminum walls and

00:12:46 ◼   ► it was, you know, almost utilitarian. Yeah, it was a very, not quite like you're in a

00:12:53 ◼   ► sci-fi movie, but futuristic and definitely forward-thinking and a little

00:12:57 ◼   ► cold, a little clean, and you know, utilitarian is a good way to put it. And

00:13:03 ◼   ► And the stores got warmer when they started going more towards wood and getting away from the metal walls.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And I know most or all of the original Apple stores that had that first look,

00:13:15 ◼   ► all of them, I think, have at one point or another been shut down to be renovated,

00:13:19 ◼   ► to be updated to the more humane look.

00:13:22 ◼   ► But this new look, which is sort of like a 3.0, is downright organic.

00:13:27 ◼   ► I mean, there are actual plants, you know, on the walls and...

00:13:31 ◼   ► There's trees in the middle.

00:13:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:33 ◼   ► And if the stores are big enough, they even have trees.

00:13:35 ◼   ► And this one has a garden wall.

00:13:37 ◼   ► The only thing that was curious to me

00:13:38 ◼   ► is they don't have the glowing logo anymore

00:13:39 ◼   ► that we were so used to seeing on the stores.

00:13:41 ◼   ► They now actually have something that's

00:13:43 ◼   ► like the embedded stainless steel logo

00:13:44 ◼   ► that you'd see on a MacBook or an iPhone or an iPad.

00:13:47 ◼   ► And it's big and it's space gray and it's

00:13:49 ◼   ► right on the side of the building.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So it's not on the front of the building, it's on the side?

00:13:53 ◼   ► Well, I'm not sure what is actually the front,

00:13:55 ◼   ► because you have those two big doors.

00:13:56 ◼   ► You have the front and the back door,

00:13:57 ◼   ► and those take up the entire wall.

00:13:59 ◼   ► They're 40-foot doors.

00:14:00 ◼   ► So then in between those on the other side,

00:14:02 ◼   ► you have the giant Apple logo.

00:14:04 ◼   ► - Somebody who's selling big pieces of glass

00:14:08 ◼   ► is making a lot of money from Apple.

00:14:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, especially considering campus too.

00:14:12 ◼   ► - Exactly. - It's higher at this point.

00:14:14 ◼   ► - Oh man.

00:14:18 ◼   ► I guess my only worry with the Apple Store is that,

00:14:20 ◼   ► if I have to play devil's advocate,

00:14:24 ◼   ► I worry that maybe they're getting a little unfocused.

00:14:29 ◼   ► that maybe, you know, that shouldn't there be a focus to this?

00:14:33 ◼   ► And I would say that originally, the focus was very simple.

00:14:36 ◼   ► It was to let people come in and see and play and touch Apple products,

00:14:41 ◼   ► because it's the best way.

00:14:42 ◼   ► And I think this was a lot more important in the early parts of the last decade.

00:14:47 ◼   ► You know, let's say the, the, the, when people called them the iPod company,

00:14:50 ◼   ► because people didn't know Apple products because they were, you know,

00:14:56 ◼   ► relative to now, so many, you know, or an order of magnitude fewer customers, maybe two orders of

00:15:00 ◼   ► magnitude fewer customers. And the thing that makes Apple products desirable is are things that you

00:15:07 ◼   ► really have to see them and use it yourself to see how nice they are. Like you can say that something

00:15:13 ◼   ► is that, you know, this iPod is nicer than other music players, but you really have to use it and

00:15:18 ◼   ► see how it feels when you spin the, you know, the wheel, the click wheel, or in the modern time to

00:15:25 ◼   ► just load a web page and see how much better the trackpad is than the Windows

00:15:30 ◼   ► trackpad you might be used to, etc. And you go through, like, you can't just say,

00:15:34 ◼   ► "Hey, Macs have much nicer trackpads than the crappy Windows machine you're used

00:15:39 ◼   ► to." You can say it, but it's seeing is believing. And that was the purpose of

00:15:45 ◼   ► the stores. Let people see these things, make it easy to buy them, and once you

00:15:49 ◼   ► have them, make it easy to get help with them. And that was it. And now I feel like

00:15:53 ◼   ► by making it a community hub, I wonder if they're,

00:15:57 ◼   ► you know, just again, to play devil's advocate,

00:15:58 ◼   ► is it worrisome that they're maybe losing focus?

00:16:02 ◼   ► - So I think that's absolutely valid.

00:16:04 ◼   ► I'm wondering how much of the community focus

00:16:06 ◼   ► is actually the sugar candy coating on this,

00:16:08 ◼   ► because you sort of go through those three stages you meant.

00:16:11 ◼   ► You mentioned where Apple stores became a place

00:16:13 ◼   ► where you could go buy Apple products,

00:16:14 ◼   ► and that was perfect timing.

00:16:15 ◼   ► It was one of the many things that were the confluence

00:16:18 ◼   ► that led to iPhone becoming the astronomical business

00:16:20 ◼   ► that it was, and Apple made iPhone super available

00:16:23 ◼   ► both the Apple stores but then there was this whole move towards the halo effect where once

00:16:27 ◼   ► you got an iPhone that was sort of your gateway to Apple and then there was the back to my

00:16:30 ◼   ► Mac event and once you got an iPhone you'd go to the Apple store and maybe you'd get

00:16:33 ◼   ► a Mac or you'd get an iPad.

00:16:35 ◼   ► But now we're getting to a point where these products are so mature that they have to start

00:16:38 ◼   ► looking for extra markets and that there is Apple Watch and Apple TV and those sort of

00:16:42 ◼   ► become satellites around the iPhone.

00:16:44 ◼   ► But now there really is this move especially with that new avenue set up towards the things

00:16:48 ◼   ► that now that iPhone is built out as a platform, the things that you can build out from the

00:16:52 ◼   ► iPhone platform and that is photography and music and things like cases which are similar

00:16:57 ◼   ► to watch bands for phones.

00:17:00 ◼   ► While the iPhone business might be maturing, it lets Apple build all these other small

00:17:03 ◼   ► businesses that aren't as valuable as the iPhone but taken together might become very,

00:17:08 ◼   ► very valuable for Apple.

00:17:09 ◼   ► All right.

00:17:10 ◼   ► I can't move on from the store without mentioning the giant doors that easily could accommodate

00:17:17 ◼   ► a car.

00:17:19 ◼   ► look at that front showroom, can you imagine two cars on the floor? Is there room for that?

00:17:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it's funny because I went from the Apple store, I went down to Santana Row lately

00:17:33 ◼   ► where they have a Tesla store and the Tesla store looks very much like that front of that

00:17:36 ◼   ► Apple store. Once that's open, they have room for two Teslas and the bottom chassis

00:17:41 ◼   ► there, so three cars in essence for footprint. Absolutely, if you move those tables out of

00:17:46 ◼   ► of the way you can easily see especially if Apple goes for

00:17:49 ◼   ► something small and smart car II see a couple of those right in

00:17:51 ◼   ► the front.

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00:20:31 ◼   ► bucks. Anything else on the Apple Store?

00:20:35 ◼   ► No, I think it's going to be interesting to see how rapidly and how many of these new

00:20:40 ◼   ► five special features they roll out to other stores, how long that's going to take to happen.

00:20:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I bet fairly quickly, but it's certainly interesting, and it certainly does answer

00:20:50 ◼   ► the question of what's Angela Arnst been up to.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Yeah, she's been busy, and again, anyone who knows her on campus knows that she's been

00:20:57 ◼   ► super engaged and super busy since she took over.

00:21:00 ◼   ► Even the transition from … Prior to Angela Erin's, online and retail were separate

00:21:04 ◼   ► operations and she's been unifying those.

00:21:06 ◼   ► They did that giant online store makeover at the end of last year, which took them right

00:21:11 ◼   ► from … That stuff was terribly outdated technology and they went … Whether you like

00:21:15 ◼   ► it or hate it, you can't browse anymore.

00:21:18 ◼   ► But technologically speaking, the new Apple Store, they flipped a switch and it appeared

00:21:22 ◼   ► one day, which is a remarkable achievement.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know, it's got to be a stressful job, Angela Arndt, because, and I know famously

00:21:31 ◼   ► Apple doesn't really run by profit and loss centers, you know, there's no, you know, target

00:21:35 ◼   ► for profit from the iPods and a target for profit from the Macs.

00:21:39 ◼   ► And I mean, I'm sure they have internal goals, but they don't run like a division like that.

00:21:42 ◼   ► But retail by definition, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, you, you know, there's

00:21:47 ◼   ► these fixed costs, like the lease of the building, and all of the salaries for all of the employees.

00:21:53 ◼   ► then there's how much money you made by selling products and it's, you know, if there is,

00:21:59 ◼   ► you know, like a decline in that, it's going to, you know, be noticeable.

00:22:02 ◼   ► Yeah, and Apple, again, famously doesn't have presidents, but if you look at the size of

00:22:07 ◼   ► Apple Store business and you look at it similar to iTunes where they, you know, they need

00:22:10 ◼   ► marketing and they need all these divisions to make stuff for them. It's much more than

00:22:15 ◼   ► a branch like engineering or a branch like Silicon Technologies would need.

00:22:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, you know, it's an incredible operation, really is. I wonder how many stores they have

00:22:23 ◼   ► now I forget the number but they it was the anniversary I think the 15th or

00:22:27 ◼   ► something anniversary yesterday when they timed this yeah so from one store

00:22:33 ◼   ► to another the App Store yeah and in the news lately developers something they

00:22:40 ◼   ► flipped some sort of switch within the last two weeks or so and review times at

00:22:44 ◼   ► the App Store haven't just gotten better it's like it's like overnight it went

00:22:50 ◼   ► from a roughly one week review process.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Here's version 1.2 of my app.

00:22:55 ◼   ► I'm submitting it to the App Store.

00:22:57 ◼   ► For years, I mean the entire life of the App Store, going back to 2008, you could more

00:23:03 ◼   ► or less expect about a week before your app, if it goes through and everything is okay,

00:23:10 ◼   ► about a week before you get the email that says, "Okay, it's ready to go.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Just hit this button and it'll be live in the store."

00:23:18 ◼   ► Now it's one day and at times it's within a day.

00:23:22 ◼   ► There's a story, Cable Sasser posted a tweet

00:23:25 ◼   ► that one of the people at Panic published,

00:23:27 ◼   ► not a Panic app, but a private app, a personal app,

00:23:31 ◼   ► at 10.30 in the morning, submitted it,

00:23:33 ◼   ► got a notice at 3.30 in the afternoon

00:23:35 ◼   ► that there was a crasher,

00:23:36 ◼   ► and it was actually a legitimate crasher,

00:23:38 ◼   ► so it was like, hey, thanks for finding this.

00:23:40 ◼   ► At 5.30 or so, submitted a fixed version,

00:23:44 ◼   ► and by like nine o'clock at night, it was ready to go.

00:23:47 ◼   ► 830 at night it was ready to go. So within a day they submitted, a guy

00:23:52 ◼   ► submitted an app, they found a crash, resubmitted a fixed version and

00:23:55 ◼   ► published it to the store. So something's going on. Yeah, it's super interesting to

00:24:00 ◼   ► me because immediately everyone's like, "Well, Phil Schiller, Phil Schiller." But, you

00:24:04 ◼   ► know, Phil Schiller has been in charge of App Review since the beginning. That's

00:24:07 ◼   ► always been part of the of his organization the way that Evangelism is,

00:24:10 ◼   ► and WWDR is. That's always been a Phil Schiller thing. So I just wonder

00:24:14 ◼   ► Now that Phil Schiller has total control over the App Store,

00:24:19 ◼   ► there's no more, "What can we put on Eddie?

00:24:22 ◼   ► What can we put on Phil?

00:24:25 ◼   ► Is anybody really looking at this?"

00:24:26 ◼   ► We need this fixed, Phil.

00:24:27 ◼   ► You're going in there to fix it.

00:24:29 ◼   ► It has to be fixed, and that prompts a lot of action.

00:24:30 ◼   ► I guess.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Is that what you think is going on?

00:24:34 ◼   ► I mean--

00:24:35 ◼   ► I think there's a couple things.

00:24:37 ◼   ► One is, I'm not a developer,

00:24:38 ◼   ► but we've had apps, just for the company I work with,

00:24:40 ◼   ► has had apps in the App Store for a very long time.

00:24:39 ◼   ► And usually what I would see, because I'm on the email chain, is the app gets submitted

00:24:43 ◼   ► and then you don't hear anything for about a week.

00:24:45 ◼   ► And then at the weak point it says your app is now in review and then usually very quickly

00:24:48 ◼   ► after that it's either approved or rejected.

00:24:51 ◼   ► So the actual review process was always very, very quick.

00:24:53 ◼   ► It was just a part getting your app into that review process that seemed to take a long

00:24:57 ◼   ► time.

00:24:58 ◼   ► And then when the Google Play Store famously switched to reviews, that gap was much less.

00:25:03 ◼   ► They were doing something, maybe not to the extent that Apple was doing it, but they didn't

00:25:06 ◼   ► have that long gap before your app would go into review.

00:25:09 ◼   ► And that was really what seemed to be killer for people.

00:25:12 ◼   ► And now that gap is gone.

00:25:14 ◼   ► And my understanding is, I forget how long ago it was, maybe three or four weeks ago,

00:25:17 ◼   ► there was just a major reorg in that organization.

00:25:21 ◼   ► And they changed some things that I think needed to be changed.

00:25:25 ◼   ► I think everybody involved knew that they needed to be changed.

00:25:27 ◼   ► I'm talking mostly like, I don't want to name names here, but people probably know

00:25:30 ◼   ► who was involved in that organization because they did get attention years ago.

00:25:35 ◼   ► That got moved and those people are no longer there.

00:25:37 ◼   ► It seems like that that was the fix that needed to be made at least at least a high-level fix

00:25:41 ◼   ► It needed to be made to get this process on track. Yeah, I wonder if the I

00:25:46 ◼   ► Think it was in January where they announced or maybe it was December. Yeah, it looks like it was back in December

00:25:53 ◼   ► so is at the end of the year and Apple made an announcement where

00:25:56 ◼   ► It just did they promote somebody I think that somebody got promoted to be a senior vice president

00:26:03 ◼   ► what's-his-name the

00:26:06 ◼   ► Chip guy Oh

00:26:08 ◼   ► Johnny, sir. Ooh G. Yeah, Johnny, sir. Ooh G got promoted to senior vice president

00:26:13 ◼   ► and

00:26:15 ◼   ► They put the App Store they did which used to be under ed EQ they moved it to Phil Schiller's group and

00:26:22 ◼   ► I

00:26:24 ◼   ► Can't help but think it's not I don't even think it's like a Phil versus anything. I think it's sort of a

00:26:29 ◼   ► Fell through the cracks thing because like you said

00:26:34 ◼   ► App review was always part of developer relations and developer relations has been under Phil Schiller

00:26:41 ◼   ► Going back to the 90s. I mean as long as Schiller has been there

00:26:46 ◼   ► I think Schiller has been in charge of old, you know, but the not that he runs it, you know

00:26:51 ◼   ► He's obviously got a lot of responsibilities. But ultimately whoever's in charge of developer relations is a direct report to Phil Schiller

00:26:56 ◼   ► and I can't help but think that having the App Store as a

00:27:03 ◼   ► everything else related to the App Store, being under Eddie's group and Review under Phil's group,

00:27:09 ◼   ► it just creates a crack that I think the suboptimal, you know, week-long process,

00:27:16 ◼   ► which was obviously, I, you know, the App Store is a huge success for Apple. Let's just look at this

00:27:23 ◼   ► from Apple's perspective, and I'm not trying to make excuses for it, I'm just saying it's

00:27:27 ◼   ► objectively, there's no way you could argue that the App Store, especially on iOS,

00:27:32 ◼   ► is a tremendous success. I mean, it's, in my opinion, literally responsible for the

00:27:37 ◼   ► fact that "app" is now a word that everybody knows. It is a common, it's, you know, it's just

00:27:41 ◼   ► a word that everybody knows. That really wasn't the case before the iPhone. People didn't talk

00:27:47 ◼   ► about apps, at least outside, you know, our sphere. And here, it's a huge success, so I think a lot of

00:27:56 ◼   ► the complaints that have come in, it's like, "Come on, what do you complain about? This thing is

00:27:59 ◼   ► awesome. Whereas I think putting it all under fill eliminates

00:28:04 ◼   ► that crack. And it's a lot easier to say, look, there's no

00:28:07 ◼   ► buck does, we can't pass the buck here. We're the group in

00:28:10 ◼   ► charge of this. This isn't great. A week long review

00:28:13 ◼   ► process is, you know, Apple can do better than that. We can't,

00:28:16 ◼   ► you know, we Apple can't say we don't have the resources to do

00:28:18 ◼   ► better than this. We have billions of dollars. We couldn't

00:28:22 ◼   ► should do better.

00:28:23 ◼   ► Absolutely. I mean, so around that time, there was a rework in

00:28:27 ◼   ► the marketing organization as well and Phil Schiller took full responsibility for the

00:28:30 ◼   ► app store but at the same time someone like Greg Joswiak who is also phenomenal took on

00:28:35 ◼   ► full product marketing responsibilities across the range of Apple products not just iOS devices

00:28:39 ◼   ► anymore and I think that allowed a lot of them to sort of focus down on these issues

00:28:43 ◼   ► and avoid anything slipping through the cracks but also as Apple scales Phil Schiller is

00:28:47 ◼   ► phenomenal, ADQ is phenomenal, Craig Federicki is phenomenal but the amount of product that

00:28:52 ◼   ► they have to ship now is exponentially bigger than what they had to ship several years ago

00:28:56 ◼   ► and they're still human beings and they can't look at everything all the time.

00:29:00 ◼   ► So having people who have that more focused responsibility I think is really great.

00:29:05 ◼   ► For a long time all I wanted from Apple was a front facing vice president of App Store.

00:29:10 ◼   ► And with Phil Schiller, it might even be better than that world because Phil is – it's

00:29:14 ◼   ► funny because you have certain personalities from the Apple groups.

00:29:17 ◼   ► It always seems like Eddie Q's group is slightly louder shirts and a little looser

00:29:22 ◼   ► going and Phil Schiller is very, very focused and really cares about the user experience.

00:29:27 ◼   ► They all have these distinct personalities.

00:29:32 ◼   ► But giving him the App Store and letting him run it, I think regardless of whether the organization has always

00:29:33 ◼   ► been his, it lets him focus down on that and say, "If I'm waking up today and I want to make App Store a phenomenal

00:29:38 ◼   ► product, and not just for developers but for users, because there's a bug in an app, I don't want that bug for a week.

00:29:43 ◼   ► I want that bug fixed immediately and me having to wait for a developer to get a review.

00:29:47 ◼   ► I feel bad for the developer, but I want my bug fixed.

00:29:50 ◼   ► And this fixes a really big-facing customer issue.

00:29:54 ◼   ► So what do you think they're doing differently?

00:29:57 ◼   ► I think part of it, I think, is just

00:29:58 ◼   ► they made personnel changes that they really

00:30:00 ◼   ► should have made years ago.

00:30:01 ◼   ► I mean, when you'd hear what was going on behind some

00:30:03 ◼   ► of this-- like, we see this stuff on the outside,

00:30:05 ◼   ► but people inside Apple feel the same kind of pain we do.

00:30:09 ◼   ► And they see decisions that don't

00:30:10 ◼   ► make any sense and reversals and things like that.

00:30:12 ◼   ► And it kept coming back to sort of the same group of people.

00:30:15 ◼   ► And reorging that seems to have taken care of that.

00:30:18 ◼   ► So I don't know if there is technical issues they change

00:30:21 ◼   ► too, but it just seems like this really coincided

00:30:23 ◼   ► with reorganizing App Review.

00:30:25 ◼   ► It has to be-- there has to be procedural differences, though.

00:30:28 ◼   ► There has to be something that they're doing procedurally

00:30:31 ◼   ► that is different than what they were doing before.

00:30:33 ◼   ► Because it's just-- even just throwing more reviewers at it,

00:30:39 ◼   ► if it was a backlog, I don't think

00:30:41 ◼   ► would result in same-day submissions.

00:30:44 ◼   ► I know I just was listening to ATP this morning,

00:30:48 ◼   ► and I know Marco had the exact same experience where

00:30:50 ◼   ► he had a same day approval of an Overcast update.

00:30:54 ◼   ► Which, same day, that's just not how the App Store looks.

00:30:59 ◼   ► So something is different procedurally.

00:31:01 ◼   ► I think that with this reorg, the reorg

00:31:04 ◼   ► put people in place who were willing to institute

00:31:07 ◼   ► the procedural changes that we're seeing.

00:31:09 ◼   ► And I think one of them, it has to be something

00:31:11 ◼   ► where they've enabled reviewers to sort of look at the history of a developer.

00:31:16 ◼   ► I'm just guessing. It's just a guess. But let's say, okay, here's an app. It's from Marco Arment,

00:31:22 ◼   ► and here's the history of submissions that he's made. It's, oh, look at how many, you know,

00:31:28 ◼   ► this is a very popular app, and here's how many updates he has submitted. He's never, like, abused

00:31:34 ◼   ► the system by like, like, I can't help but think that if

00:31:39 ◼   ► you've like started submitting builds daily, that if you just

00:31:43 ◼   ► like every single like, if you started submitting, like the

00:31:45 ◼   ► equivalent of nightly builds, yes, you're not going to get

00:31:48 ◼   ► same day approval. I think that they're going to, you know, I

00:31:50 ◼   ► would guess look at the history and put the brakes on that and

00:31:53 ◼   ► say no. But if your history is, wow, you've never been a

00:31:58 ◼   ► problem. You know, this is obviously a legitimate app.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Let's just make sure that there are no crashes.

00:32:04 ◼   ► Let's open it up and go through and see that everything works.

00:32:08 ◼   ► Okay, there you go. You're through.

00:32:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's exactly that.

00:32:12 ◼   ► I think it's putting together a smart system.

00:32:14 ◼   ► And what I liked about Cable's tweet, too,

00:32:16 ◼   ► is that it said they could cut the crash, the crash was fixed,

00:32:18 ◼   ► then the app went out.

00:32:20 ◼   ► So they're not just suddenly opening the gates and saying,

00:32:22 ◼   ► "Fine, just get rid of the backlog. Push all apps out."

00:32:24 ◼   ► They're running those instruments and they're running those tests

00:32:26 ◼   ► and they're finding those things.

00:32:27 ◼   ► And then if that flags it, maybe they're paying better attention to it,

00:32:29 ◼   ► saying, "We caught this bug. Oh, the guy's resubmitted it.

00:32:31 ◼   ► the guys resubmitted it, let's go,

00:32:33 ◼   ► nothing else was wrong with it.

00:32:34 ◼   ► And maybe just they got rid of people

00:32:35 ◼   ► whose opinions were not congruent

00:32:39 ◼   ► or weren't easy to work with

00:32:40 ◼   ► or were holding back other people.

00:32:42 ◼   ► 'Cause it really, if you think about it linearly,

00:32:44 ◼   ► it should not be app review or making choices

00:32:46 ◼   ► about what is and what isn't proper user experience.

00:32:48 ◼   ► This whole realm of other people at Apple,

00:32:50 ◼   ► much better positioned to do that

00:32:51 ◼   ► before an app ever hits review.

00:32:53 ◼   ► So getting all that out of the way

00:32:55 ◼   ► and putting in that system and then just applying it,

00:32:57 ◼   ► I think is the key to what we're seeing now.

00:32:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think so.

00:33:00 ◼   ► But it's very, very good news.

00:33:02 ◼   ► And it's one of those rare things

00:33:05 ◼   ► that there is no downside to this whatsoever.

00:33:08 ◼   ► So whatever they're doing at Apple, if you're listening

00:33:13 ◼   ► and you work in developer relations,

00:33:16 ◼   ► the entire world of third party developers says thank you.

00:33:21 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

00:33:22 ◼   ► And to go back to your point, the App Store

00:33:24 ◼   ► is a phenomenal business for Apple.

00:33:26 ◼   ► And developers do have pain points.

00:33:28 ◼   ► And it's really hard.

00:33:29 ◼   ► It's not hard, but it's hard emotionally to sort out.

00:33:31 ◼   ► Because a lot of our friends are developers.

00:33:33 ◼   ► And you'll go to WWDC and see the App Store labs.

00:33:36 ◼   ► And a developer will go in there and say, I made a great app.

00:33:38 ◼   ► Are you going to feature it?

00:33:39 ◼   ► And they'll say, what's your marketing plan?

00:33:40 ◼   ► And the developers say, I don't need one.

00:33:41 ◼   ► You're going to feature it, right?

00:33:43 ◼   ► And they're like, well, even if we do feature it,

00:33:45 ◼   ► that's one week out of 51.

00:33:47 ◼   ► What are you doing for the other 51 weeks?

00:33:49 ◼   ► And that's the kind of thing that App Store can't really

00:33:51 ◼   ► fix.

00:33:51 ◼   ► They'll never be able to-- no matter how good your app is,

00:33:53 ◼   ► they'll never be able to artificially make it a hit app,

00:33:56 ◼   ► especially in the climate we are now.

00:33:58 ◼   ► they can fix a lot of things.

00:34:00 ◼   ► Like search, search is a solved problem.

00:34:02 ◼   ► I type in tweetbot, I should get tweetbot.

00:34:04 ◼   ► There's no discussion about that anymore.

00:34:06 ◼   ► Google can handle that.

00:34:07 ◼   ► I think AltaVista handled that.

00:34:10 ◼   ► But it's still something that's not workable on the App Store.

00:34:13 ◼   ► And I understand the technical reasons, like I understand the infrastructure reasons, but

00:34:19 ◼   ► why doesn't there, wasn't there a metadata layer that just intermediates that stuff and

00:34:23 ◼   ► then goes to the old school database system, pulls the likely results and gives me that.

00:34:27 ◼   ► widening, sloppy search, nearest neighbor, all these things, these can help developers.

00:34:32 ◼   ► If I search for Twitter, I should get relevant results, not just linear like, "Oh, this

00:34:37 ◼   ► has Twitter in the name."

00:34:38 ◼   ► I want Tweetbot in that result.

00:34:40 ◼   ► And that's sort of a thing I think that affects customers and affects developers,

00:34:44 ◼   ► and it's something that Apple absolutely knows about that and they feel that pain.

00:34:47 ◼   ► But those are sort of things that I really hope that they figure out how to fix sooner

00:34:50 ◼   ► rather than later.

00:34:51 ◼   ► Dave, they, yeah, it's got to be.

00:34:53 ◼   ► I hope so.

00:34:54 ◼   ► This is a sign that makes me think that I would bet on them fixing App Store search in the near future

00:35:00 ◼   ► just because it seems like somebody's paying attention to these little long-standing issues.

00:35:07 ◼   ► And that's another one that's super long-standing. And I've made the exact same argument.

00:35:10 ◼   ► I don't care how hard a technical problem it is. Apple is... it cannot cry poor, right?

00:35:18 ◼   ► Yes.

00:35:19 ◼   ► They and and it is it, you know, however hard it is, it's obviously been solved. And so that, you know, the standard is, the bar is Google, right? And I should you should not be able to get better search results by typing in a Google box.

00:35:35 ◼   ► like your example, Tweetbot iOS.

00:35:38 ◼   ► You should not-- iOS app.

00:35:40 ◼   ► You should not be more likely to be

00:35:42 ◼   ► led to Tweetbot than if you type Tweetbot in the App Store.

00:35:46 ◼   ► It's got to be that good.

00:35:47 ◼   ► And it can't be as hard as web search,

00:35:50 ◼   ► because web search is searching everything.

00:35:51 ◼   ► You're only searching--

00:35:53 ◼   ► I don't care how many million apps you have.

00:35:55 ◼   ► You're only searching your own apps.

00:35:56 ◼   ► I just feel like Apple got burned

00:35:58 ◼   ► by whatever original algorithm they

00:36:01 ◼   ► they use for search, where they trusted the metadata

00:36:04 ◼   ► from developers and opened the door to being scammed.

00:36:09 ◼   ► That's, I mean, it's a huge part of the problem

00:36:10 ◼   ► with the search results is that you get search results

00:36:13 ◼   ► that are unrelated, and then if you actually like look

00:36:17 ◼   ► at the metadata, it's that they've put like

00:36:20 ◼   ► in their list of keywords that we wanna be searched by,

00:36:23 ◼   ► they put competing app names in,

00:36:24 ◼   ► which is supposed to be against the rules,

00:36:26 ◼   ► but it obviously doesn't get flagged.

00:36:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, to go back to your point a minute ago,

00:36:31 ◼   ► I believe it's the customer's job to protect me even from myself.

00:36:35 ◼   ► I'm very hesitant to ever blame a user for something.

00:36:38 ◼   ► If I'm doing something wrong, that's fine.

00:36:39 ◼   ► I'm doing it wrong.

00:36:40 ◼   ► But if I'm using a company like Apple, I want them to do everything possible to stop

00:36:44 ◼   ► me from making mistakes.

00:36:46 ◼   ► I don't even need keywords.

00:36:47 ◼   ► That's part of the problem that's bewildering to me.

00:36:50 ◼   ► I hate saying this because it's so easy to say how you can fix these things.

00:36:53 ◼   ► But I'm just talking about I type in tweetbot without and I miss the e because I'm human

00:36:58 ◼   ► and I make a spelling mistake.

00:36:59 ◼   ► That doesn't rely on keywords at all.

00:37:02 ◼   ► You have a database of things and you know how to do nearest neighbor and search widening

00:37:06 ◼   ► and basic things that search has been doing for a decade and you know what the most popular

00:37:10 ◼   ► result is that's close to that one.

00:37:13 ◼   ► And you provide me with that result because that's what I want and you kind of do that

00:37:17 ◼   ► extra work to give me what I want.

00:37:20 ◼   ► It sort of feels like iTunes, which is the overarching infrastructure, all of this was

00:37:24 ◼   ► built, the app store is built on the iTunes store which is originally designed to handle

00:37:29 ◼   ► All of this to me is almost like Apple's version of Windows XP, where you have just a legacy product that needs to serve hundreds of millions of people with an incredibly diverse range of use cases.

00:37:41 ◼   ► Like Jim Dalrymple wants ten versions of every Ozzy Osbourne song to play exactly the one he wants whenever he wants it.

00:37:48 ◼   ► Well I just want Siri to say, "Play me the smooth criminal cover by Glee," and it just does it and I have zero music in my library.

00:37:55 ◼   ► And then there's someone who just bought an iPod Nano at Best Buy and wants to sync it on their Windows PC using iTunes over a cable.

00:38:02 ◼   ► And you also on top of that you have billions of dollars of transactions moving through it.

00:38:07 ◼   ► And the person at Virgin Music who knows how to use the crazy back end of iTunes the way a Bloomberg terminal person knows how to use Bloomberg and they just have to upload their entire music catalog for that week.

00:38:18 ◼   ► And they wouldn't want anything to change because they know how to do it even if it is horrible.

00:38:22 ◼   ► balancing all of that, it's super easy on the internet

00:38:25 ◼   ► to say just fix iTunes and just fix this.

00:38:28 ◼   ► I would not want that job.

00:38:29 ◼   ► It just, it sounds like, again,

00:38:30 ◼   ► like another one of those impossible jobs to me,

00:38:32 ◼   ► but it is one of those jobs that Apple has to figure out

00:38:34 ◼   ► and fix because it's not getting any better.

00:38:36 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:38:37 ◼   ► You know, it's just the fact of human nature.

00:38:42 ◼   ► We're a terrible dishonest species collectively.

00:38:46 ◼   ► You can't trust metadata.

00:38:48 ◼   ► I mean, it sounds laughable,

00:38:51 ◼   ► But in the old days, in the '90s,

00:38:53 ◼   ► there was a time where search engines,

00:38:55 ◼   ► you'd put the meta tag in your HTML,

00:38:57 ◼   ► and it would be like meta,

00:38:59 ◼   ► and here you're supposed to list a handful of keywords

00:39:02 ◼   ► that are like, what is this page about?

00:39:04 ◼   ► And search engines would take those

00:39:06 ◼   ► and actually trust them.

00:39:08 ◼   ► And so as soon as people figured out

00:39:10 ◼   ► that the search engines actually trust them,

00:39:12 ◼   ► they would just start loading it up

00:39:13 ◼   ► with anything and everything to get SEO.

00:39:18 ◼   ► - It was keyword stuffing.

00:39:20 ◼   ► It's ridiculous.

00:39:21 ◼   ► And of course, anything that can be abused

00:39:23 ◼   ► is going to be abused.

00:39:24 ◼   ► And unfortunately, the App Store can be abused, and it is.

00:39:29 ◼   ► You see it anytime you type a popular app name,

00:39:31 ◼   ► and all these unrelated apps show up.

00:39:33 ◼   ► And it's like, why the hell is that listed?

00:39:36 ◼   ► Which is what Google solved for by--

00:39:39 ◼   ► they originally had link authority,

00:39:40 ◼   ► and now I think that they're judging in social shares

00:39:43 ◼   ► and other things like that.

00:39:44 ◼   ► You try to determine the authority of the result

00:39:46 ◼   ► and give people the results that are more widely respected,

00:39:48 ◼   ► just the ones that have data that you're looking for.

00:39:51 ◼   ► - Right, like it's the actual actions of users

00:39:54 ◼   ► that Google trusts, including things like being able to see

00:39:59 ◼   ► like, okay, you searched for X, Y, and Z,

00:40:02 ◼   ► and we made this the second result, but you clicked it.

00:40:06 ◼   ► That's the one you clicked.

00:40:07 ◼   ► And then I searched for X, Y, and Z,

00:40:08 ◼   ► and it's the second result, but it's the one I clicked

00:40:11 ◼   ► because I realized it's the one I want.

00:40:13 ◼   ► And then they're like, well, that must be a good result

00:40:14 ◼   ► for X, Y, and Z.

00:40:15 ◼   ► Maybe we should make that the top result for X, Y, and Z

00:40:17 ◼   ► because all these people are clicking,

00:40:19 ◼   ► they do things like that, that can't be cheated.

00:40:21 ◼   ► I guess you could try to cheat it by having bots click 'em

00:40:25 ◼   ► or whatever, but Google fights against it.

00:40:27 ◼   ► Anyway, the App Store needs to be as good

00:40:30 ◼   ► as Google search, period.

00:40:32 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:40:33 ◼   ► - For just for apps, right?

00:40:34 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:40:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, and again, I don't know how often you search

00:40:39 ◼   ► for email, but I was trying to search for email this morning

00:40:41 ◼   ► just to find something I knew was there,

00:40:42 ◼   ► and it was inside the email app, it was just a nightmare.

00:40:46 ◼   ► But if you go to Spotlight, it works fine.

00:40:48 ◼   ► Whatever they're doing,

00:40:50 ◼   ► there just has to be a better way of doing it.

00:40:53 ◼   ► And I know they walked this back,

00:40:54 ◼   ► they were gonna have this process,

00:40:55 ◼   ► 'cause they're super concerned about privacy,

00:40:57 ◼   ► where they would surface apps online for you

00:40:59 ◼   ► if you were looking for them.

00:41:00 ◼   ► But they know who has what app installed,

00:41:02 ◼   ► so if the Twitter app is installed in everyone's iPhone,

00:41:05 ◼   ► yeah, give me that first.

00:41:06 ◼   ► But if Tweetbot is the second most installed Twitter app

00:41:09 ◼   ► in the iOS ecosystem, show me that second,

00:41:11 ◼   ► 'cause likely I'll be really happy with it.

00:41:15 ◼   ► Let me take another break here and thank our next sponsor.

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00:41:54 ◼   ► these of the glasses that you picked, the five that you picked.

00:41:58 ◼   ► You know, with just regular, you know, non prescription lenses, you go you try them on,

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00:44:12 ◼   ► What else is going on?

00:44:18 ◼   ► There's Google I/O.

00:44:19 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:44:20 ◼   ► - I watched the keynote and for the first time ever,

00:44:26 ◼   ► I really thought that Google did a good job.

00:44:30 ◼   ► It's the first time where I thought,

00:44:31 ◼   ► wow, that was a really good keynote.

00:44:33 ◼   ► - I had mixed feelings on it.

00:44:36 ◼   ► I thought some of the technologies were more impressive

00:44:39 ◼   ► in the way that they were presented?

00:44:40 ◼   ► - I could see that.

00:44:44 ◼   ► And I do think that their culture,

00:44:47 ◼   ► and again, this is the way most companies work.

00:44:49 ◼   ► Apple is the exception,

00:44:51 ◼   ► where Apple tends to have fewer people on stage.

00:44:53 ◼   ► Apple's pacing in a keynote

00:44:56 ◼   ► is always better than everybody else's.

00:44:58 ◼   ► And for someone like me,

00:45:00 ◼   ► whose default keynote to watch is an Apple keynote,

00:45:03 ◼   ► it makes everybody else's seem a little,

00:45:05 ◼   ► it's like, come on, tighten this up.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Even the time it takes to pass off to the next presenter is longer in a Google keynote

00:45:16 ◼   ► than in an Apple keynote.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Well, tangentially, like we do this thing, it's finally called Jason Snell, and sometimes

00:45:21 ◼   ► I help out where we transcribe the CEO, like Tim Cook, historically, his comments, and

00:45:27 ◼   ► I had to do that for—we have a site now, Tesla Central, for Elon Musk's last conference

00:45:31 ◼   ► call, and it was so difficult because Tim Cook is such a clean speaker, and Elon Musk,

00:45:37 ◼   ► second word was like and he would interrupt himself halfway through every sentence.

00:45:42 ◼   ► It was incredibly hard to transcribe them and it made me really appreciate just how

00:45:47 ◼   ► well Apple, not just what they say but how polished they all are as speakers.

00:45:52 ◼   ► Yeah, because ultimately in a transcription like that, you're not doing like a legal transcription

00:45:57 ◼   ► where you're documenting every single word out of their mouth.

00:46:00 ◼   ► You really want to get like a, "Here's what he meant to say transcription."

00:46:04 ◼   ► Not that you want to put words in his mouth, but if he adds an extra "like" or an "um"

00:46:08 ◼   ► or something like that, you don't want that in the transcription.

00:46:10 ◼   ► What you're doing is trying to make a transcription that's easier for your readers to learn what

00:46:15 ◼   ► he had to say.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Yes.

00:46:17 ◼   ► Like an idealized version of what he said.

00:46:18 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:46:19 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:46:20 ◼   ► That's the right way to do it.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And yeah, it's like with Tim Cook, it's a lot closer to the idealized version right

00:46:25 ◼   ► out of his mouth.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:27 ◼   ► And the same thing.

00:46:28 ◼   ► So I watched some of it.

00:46:29 ◼   ► It's always super interesting.

00:46:30 ◼   ► They have new chat apps, and I just don't need new chat apps.

00:46:32 ◼   ► I have so many of them already.

00:46:34 ◼   ► So it would have been nice if those were

00:46:36 ◼   ► sort of expansions of existing services.

00:46:38 ◼   ► I understand this, but they did this one duo,

00:46:40 ◼   ► which is just real time.

00:46:41 ◼   ► It's like FaceTime, but the minute the call comes in,

00:46:43 ◼   ► it's already streaming live video.

00:46:45 ◼   ► And to me, I just know I'm gonna get people

00:46:47 ◼   ► sending me junk, like their junk specifically,

00:46:49 ◼   ► right away, and there'd be no way to avoid it.

00:46:51 ◼   ► I just don't know. - I don't think that's gonna,

00:46:52 ◼   ► that's not gonna work on iOS, though.

00:46:54 ◼   ► - It won't, but I mean, just the idea of it,

00:46:56 ◼   ► like the idea of giving someone a direct,

00:46:58 ◼   ► like they can just pop up in your eyeballs,

00:47:00 ◼   ► to me is a recipe for disaster.

00:47:02 ◼   ► Because like you said before, humans cannot be trusted

00:47:04 ◼   ► in this technology.

00:47:04 ◼   ► Well, let's go through the stuff in order.

00:47:06 ◼   ► We'll start with Google Home.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Now, this leaked the night before,

00:47:11 ◼   ► but it's not a surprise.

00:47:13 ◼   ► And it was nice Sundar Pichai actually called out Amazon

00:47:17 ◼   ► and said Amazon's been doing good work in this area, which

00:47:22 ◼   ► is sort of a tacit acknowledgment

00:47:23 ◼   ► that this is a direct competitor.

00:47:26 ◼   ► It's not like a tangential competitor.

00:47:28 ◼   ► It is absolutely a dead-on direct competitor

00:47:31 ◼   ► to the Amazon Echo and that the cord, you know, that the family of devices that Amazon

00:47:37 ◼   ► has developed around it. It is a, so Google Home is a little, uh, Syracuse calls it a

00:47:43 ◼   ► weebl wobble. Remember the weebl wobbles? Yeah, it looks to me like an air freshener.

00:47:47 ◼   ► They weebl in the wobble, but they won't fall. They don't fall down. Uh, so it's a little

00:47:53 ◼   ► speaker, pretty small, surprisingly small. I thought when they first showed the product

00:47:57 ◼   ► I thought it was going to be more like echo sized, echo height, and it's a lot smaller than the echo.

00:48:03 ◼   ► So you plug it in, it is an always listening speaker, and

00:48:07 ◼   ► you say like, "Hey Google" to it, and you can start, you know, a

00:48:13 ◼   ► voice driven assistant conversation with it.

00:48:16 ◼   ► Yeah, it was interesting to meet a couple of vectors. First, Amazon.

00:48:21 ◼   ► Amazon's been given a huge amount of credit for the Amazon Echo and for Alexa.

00:48:25 ◼   ► But what always strikes me is that it is a US only product and I believe still a unilingual product and it's impressive what they do with it

00:48:32 ◼   ► But the solution set that they have to offer is so incredibly small compared to what Apple or Google are offering with

00:48:38 ◼   ► Multilingual support and for example with the Apple TV

00:48:41 ◼   ► Siri not only does multilingual support but they can do the multiple languages within the same query like I can I speak French too

00:48:48 ◼   ► So I can in French ask for an English movie title and that is an incredibly hard problem to solve that Apple is solving

00:48:54 ◼   ► As far as I know, Alexa is nowhere near.

00:48:56 ◼   ► So yeah, Alexa handles American English queries really, really well.

00:49:01 ◼   ► But I think it's impossible at this point to not realize just how far ahead Google really

00:49:05 ◼   ► is in that sort of technology.

00:49:07 ◼   ► And I'm hopeful that by introducing this, it'll no longer be an English-only American

00:49:12 ◼   ► product, but it'll be something that becomes competitive internationally.

00:49:15 ◼   ► Do you know, is Google home US only?

00:49:20 ◼   ► I think it might be starting that way.

00:49:23 ◼   ► The whole thing was kind of weird to me because Sundar Pichai, I think he was the one giving

00:49:27 ◼   ► the home pitch, at least in the beginning, he started off basically saying how wonderful

00:49:32 ◼   ► it was that Google understood context and he basically described the sequential inference

00:49:37 ◼   ► engine that Siri launched with.

00:49:39 ◼   ► You could do the kind of, that's what I meant by the presentations weren't as impressive

00:49:42 ◼   ► as the technology.

00:49:43 ◼   ► The things that he said Google Home could do were things that Siri has done for years

00:49:48 ◼   ► and things that Apple TV launched with months ago.

00:49:51 ◼   ► And I believe, I firmly believe this technology is beyond what Apple is doing with Siri right

00:49:55 ◼   ► now, but he didn't show me that.

00:49:57 ◼   ► He made it sound like Google was inventing the very basics of voice assistants.

00:50:04 ◼   ► I will say, and I spoke about this last week on my show, well I guess it was two weeks

00:50:09 ◼   ► ago, but the last episode with Ben Thompson, who, Ben Thompson is a bit, he's more of a

00:50:14 ◼   ► bull on the Echo.

00:50:16 ◼   ► And I know Marco Arment is too.

00:50:19 ◼   ► And I think the difference, I'm not, I just got one a few weeks ago because those guys

00:50:24 ◼   ► were saying how good it was.

00:50:25 ◼   ► And I really, really do think that this voice-driven assistant thing is in the coming decade going

00:50:31 ◼   ► to be, it's like the new touch.

00:50:32 ◼   ► Not that it's going to replace touch, but we're on the cusp of getting this to be really

00:50:37 ◼   ► useful and therefore it's definitely going to happen.

00:50:40 ◼   ► And so I really want to stay up to date with what everybody's doing.

00:50:44 ◼   ► And it's easier for me to do it because I'm in the US and I speak English.

00:50:47 ◼   ► So I can use Amazon's product.

00:50:50 ◼   ► I think that those two are much happier with the Echo than I am because they have a lot

00:50:56 ◼   ► of smart home stuff in their houses that hook up to the Echo.

00:51:01 ◼   ► And I don't.

00:51:02 ◼   ► I don't have any smart light bulbs or anything like that.

00:51:05 ◼   ► And so therefore what the Echo does for me is almost nothing.

00:51:10 ◼   ► I can get the weather.

00:51:11 ◼   ► Even with the weather, it's like a lot of times I just want to know the temperature,

00:51:15 ◼   ► because I can see outside whether it's raining or not. Like it's in our kitchen and we have,

00:51:20 ◼   ► you know, a window like humans do. So I could see if it's sunny or overcast or rainy. I just want

00:51:26 ◼   ► to know if I need a jacket. And if I ask Alexa for the temperature, she gives me the whole weather,

00:51:33 ◼   ► including the temperature, but the temperature doesn't come until like halfway through the

00:51:36 ◼   ► the weather report.

00:51:40 ◼   ► Siri is better at stuff like that.

00:51:42 ◼   ► You can ask Siri for the weather and you'll get a whole weather forecast, but if you just

00:51:47 ◼   ► ask for the temperature outside, she'll just tell you the temperature.

00:51:50 ◼   ► And I find that to be more useful.

00:51:52 ◼   ► There's several things here that, at least for me, are really interesting.

00:51:57 ◼   ► Amazon, again, that product is stuck in your house, and I have Siri on my wrist.

00:52:00 ◼   ► I have it in my pocket.

00:52:01 ◼   ► I have it on my lap with my iPad and maybe soon with the Mac.

00:52:06 ◼   ► Siri goes with me everywhere and that means that everything that I have connected to Siri

00:52:10 ◼   ► is with me everywhere and I do have a lot of the connected technology in my house.

00:52:13 ◼   ► I have a lot of the Hue light bulbs for example but also the LED panels that I use for video

00:52:18 ◼   ► podcasting are connected to an iHome plug because there's no Hue light bulb giant LED

00:52:23 ◼   ► panels but because I named them correctly if I say turn on my studio lights it knows

00:52:27 ◼   ► that the plug is called the light too so it just turns it on and suddenly every light

00:52:31 ◼   ► is on there and if I say make the lights purple it does all those things.

00:52:33 ◼   ► And wait, what are you using to drive that? Siri?

00:52:36 ◼   ► Yeah, Siri does all of that for me.

00:52:38 ◼   ► And how did you connect that to Siri?

00:52:40 ◼   ► So, Siri works through HomeKit, so anything that's HomeKit aware will just work with a series of commands with Siri.

00:52:46 ◼   ► And it has triggers, and it has rooms, and it has events, and it has all sorts of really, really fun, really powerful stuff that you can use with it already.

00:52:53 ◼   ► I don't, this is something I need to catch up on, but how do you configure stuff in HomeKit? Is there a HomeKit app? I don't even know.

00:53:02 ◼   ► So there's the internally there's a home. There's a home app that they haven't shipped and rumor is you know every year

00:53:07 ◼   ► They say they're gonna ship it and the rumor is I'll ship it this year

00:53:10 ◼   ► But you can configure it in any home kit aware app, but I bought a $10 app off the app store called home

00:53:14 ◼   ► That's really good

00:53:15 ◼   ► That just shows me every room in the house and every device

00:53:17 ◼   ► That's connected to it in every state of it and I can make quick changes in it very quickly

00:53:20 ◼   ► So you yeah

00:53:21 ◼   ► Cuz I honestly didn't wouldn't even know where to start like if a whole bunch of home kit stuff showed up at my house

00:53:26 ◼   ► And I plugged it in I don't even know where to start on that in that iOS

00:53:30 ◼   ► So you're saying you just you got to get an app and so you got an app called home and home is a third-party

00:53:35 ◼   ► App that you paid 10 bucks for and it uses Apple's homekit api's that they've been talking about for a while

00:53:40 ◼   ► To to allow you to set this stuff up

00:53:45 ◼   ► Yeah, you just use the camera you scan the barcode on the device that sets it up for you

00:53:48 ◼   ► You give it a name you assign it to a room. You can have multiple houses set up

00:53:51 ◼   ► You you can through iCloud you can control things remotely so that I'm not at home

00:53:56 ◼   ► I can still use Siri on my phone for example to control the the lights in the house

00:53:59 ◼   ► It works really really well and because it's not for me Amazon has big problems and that

00:54:04 ◼   ► is again their US focus but it's very unclear to me that Amazon could ever have a presence

00:54:08 ◼   ► in China because they have their own retailers and they have their own server and I want

00:54:12 ◼   ► a product that if I'm in Europe you know still works great for me and if I'm traveling on

00:54:15 ◼   ► business or if I'm in China like I speak very bad Mandarin but I speak a little bit of Mandarin

00:54:20 ◼   ► and Siri supports that, supports Hebrew.

00:54:22 ◼   ► It does all these things to me that makes it a much, it has the potential to be a much

00:54:26 ◼   ► greater solution and I think so does Google Now than anything Amazon is

00:54:29 ◼   ► fielding. Marco described Alexa as a sort of like a voice-driven

00:54:36 ◼   ► command line meaning that it's in the same way that at a command line at the

00:54:41 ◼   ► terminal you have to put the the arguments in the exact right order it is

00:54:47 ◼   ► rigid like that the command line is not plain English you know you don't just

00:54:52 ◼   ► type "show me a list of the files in this folder." You have to type "ls" and if you

00:54:56 ◼   ► type "ls /a" you get all of them and you know the arguments have to be

00:55:02 ◼   ► the exact right way. And then once you learn those arguments to Alexa in the

00:55:06 ◼   ► right order to put them, it is very very reliable and it's you know it's you know

00:55:12 ◼   ► nearing a hundred percent accuracy that the voice recognition will

00:55:17 ◼   ► recognize it, will quickly parse it, and will quickly get the result back from

00:55:20 ◼   ► the cloud. But that's exactly why I think, I'm not going to say a dead end, because they

00:55:26 ◼   ► can obviously scrap it and replace it with a new engine at some point. But I just feel

00:55:30 ◼   ► though that that rigidity, that's what Marco likes, that's what Ben Thompson likes about

00:55:34 ◼   ► it, that it's dependable because you can learn it. But I also feel like ultimately it's limiting

00:55:38 ◼   ► because there's going to be so many things we want to use these things for. And I don't

00:55:44 ◼   ► know, I know a lot of people out there, every time I mention that Siri has actually gotten

00:55:48 ◼   ► a lot better and it's noticeably improved to me in every way, both in terms of the speed,

00:55:54 ◼   ► like when I just want to, and I know attributing it all to Siri is not quite right, because

00:56:00 ◼   ► if I'm just in iMessage and I'm walking on the sidewalk, so I want to dictate a text

00:56:07 ◼   ► message, that's not really Siri, it's just the voice recognition, but it does go round

00:56:12 ◼   ► trip to the cloud and it is so much faster than it used to be.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And it's even local on the latest iPhones. If you can't connect, it'll still do a bunch of dictation locally.

00:56:19 ◼   ► Right, it'll do some of it locally.

00:56:21 ◼   ► It's gotten so much better. It's super useful to me.

00:56:24 ◼   ► But I actually do use Siri quite a bit.

00:56:27 ◼   ► And there's so many things that Siri can do, and that if I just take a guess whether...

00:56:32 ◼   ► You know, that seems like something Siri could do. I'm often right.

00:56:35 ◼   ► And one of them, for example, is that Siri now knows the point spreads for, like, NFL games, NBA games.

00:56:43 ◼   ► So, like, if you—I wanted to know what the point spread was for the second Golden State

00:56:48 ◼   ► Warriors-Oklahoma City game because I wanted to see if it went up because everybody was

00:56:53 ◼   ► expecting Golden State to win because they lost Game 1.

00:56:56 ◼   ► And Siri instantly knew the point spread.

00:56:58 ◼   ► And I thought, "I wonder if Alexa can do that."

00:57:00 ◼   ► No, no, no chance.

00:57:01 ◼   ► I use Siri all the time, too.

00:57:04 ◼   ► If I'm driving, I'll just use Siri.

00:57:05 ◼   ► And I have an idea for an article.

00:57:06 ◼   ► I'll just tell Siri to take a note, and it comes out well enough that I can quickly

00:57:09 ◼   ► put an article together.

00:57:11 ◼   ► But beyond that, what I really like about it is it does do that sequential inference.

00:57:15 ◼   ► So if I say turn on my studio lights, it turns on the lights just in the studio.

00:57:18 ◼   ► And if I say make them purple, it knows that I'm still talking about the lights, so it

00:57:21 ◼   ► makes the lights purple.

00:57:22 ◼   ► If I say make them white, it'll say I can't make them white, but I can turn them into

00:57:26 ◼   ► sunlight.

00:57:27 ◼   ► And to me that's kind of tedious because like just understand that I mean that anyway and

00:57:31 ◼   ► do it.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Don't give me the back chat.

00:57:33 ◼   ► But at least it's smart enough to not do what I was complaining about before, and that is

00:57:35 ◼   ► to widen its search and figure out what I want and do that, even if it's not exactly

00:57:39 ◼   ► what I asked for.

00:57:43 ◼   ► So one of the things that Google Home does that seems really interesting is it integrates

00:57:49 ◼   ► with Chromecast that you might have in your house.

00:57:53 ◼   ► And there is an interesting demo in the demo video they had where there's a little boy

00:57:59 ◼   ► asking something, some kind of question about space or something like that.

00:58:03 ◼   ► And then he just said, "Put it on the TV."

00:58:06 ◼   ► And it put whatever he was searching for on the TV.

00:58:09 ◼   ► Now some of that is a bit of a cheat because the TV, you know, at least my TV, you would

00:58:16 ◼   ► actually have to already have picked the Chromecast as the HDMI input and the TV would have to

00:58:21 ◼   ► already be on.

00:58:23 ◼   ► But still, that's a pretty cool trick.

00:58:25 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a lot of things in there that seem almost quasi-magical.

00:58:31 ◼   ► And one of the big things, especially with the Amazon Echo, is the API access.

00:58:34 ◼   ► And you've probably heard the same as I am, that there's rumors of Siri APIs for years.

00:58:37 ◼   ► But right now Apple has not shipped a Siri API.

00:58:41 ◼   ► So third party software and services beyond HomeKit can't access it.

00:58:45 ◼   ► And that does limit what it can do.

00:58:48 ◼   ► But I'm wondering when we eventually do get that new Apple remote app if we'll have sort

00:58:51 ◼   ► of the ability to control Siri on our Apple TV through our iPhone.

00:58:55 ◼   ► Because Apple is very good at sort of leveraging all their technologies with things like continuity

00:58:59 ◼   ► and handoff that will get sort of those abilities.

00:59:02 ◼   ► And maybe Google is using the same thing that the Siri remote does when it turns it on that

00:59:06 ◼   ► HDMI throughput tells the TV and everything else to go to the right place.

00:59:09 ◼   ► And if you have the exact right setup, it'll all work.

00:59:11 ◼   ► So I'll give them a little bit of credit to that. As far as I know, it's not shipping for months though,

00:59:14 ◼   ► so it's still a preview and you never know how much of a preview will actually be finished and ready enough to launch

00:59:19 ◼   ► when the product goes out the door.

00:59:21 ◼   ► Yeah, nothing. I don't think anything that they announced in the keynote yesterday is shipping yet.

00:59:24 ◼   ► Even the software like Android N is still in beta and the device is "later this fall" or something like that.

00:59:33 ◼   ► Even the the chat apps are so I think they said summer or something like that

00:59:38 ◼   ► I do question big picture. I

00:59:42 ◼   ► Mean, well, do you think so now of the three of Amazon?

00:59:47 ◼   ► Apple and Google now two of the three have announced this echo like standalone voice assistant device a no screen

00:59:55 ◼   ► Just speaker you talk to it and get audio out of it device. Do you think Apple would ship a product like that?

01:00:02 ◼   ► There have been rumors of them doing that for a while and it was all mixed into, like

01:00:05 ◼   ► the Apple TV was a really complicated project and they went many, many directions with it

01:00:10 ◼   ► that are different than what they ultimately shipped.

01:00:12 ◼   ► But there was this idea that it would be the central home hub and would serve as a nexus

01:00:16 ◼   ► for controlling everything within your house.

01:00:18 ◼   ► And they ultimately didn't go that way.

01:00:19 ◼   ► But there's a lot of choices that Apple would have to make to make that product.

01:00:23 ◼   ► So with the Apple TV they very clearly said that you have to hold down this button when

01:00:27 ◼   ► you talk to Siri.

01:00:28 ◼   ► And that's fine when you're just sitting there in front of your TV with a remote.

01:00:31 ◼   ► But if you want a ubiquitous device that's like Echo or that's like the Google Home device,

01:00:36 ◼   ► you have to eliminate that.

01:00:37 ◼   ► You have to just let people talk to it, which means you have to have a live mic in the living

01:00:40 ◼   ► room, almost like Microsoft did that with Kinect as well.

01:00:43 ◼   ► And Apple as a company has to be willing to say, "We're going to put a live mic in your

01:00:47 ◼   ► living room."

01:00:48 ◼   ► And this is very counter to what they've done with their products previously.

01:00:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:51 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:00:53 ◼   ► I don't think Apple would do this.

01:00:55 ◼   ► I think that these voice-driven assistants are absolutely, positively going to be—they're

01:01:01 ◼   ► useful but they're gonna be way you know in ten years from now we're gonna look

01:01:04 ◼   ► back and say how did we how did we get by without him I'm not sure that this

01:01:08 ◼   ► standalone speaker microphone device is the form factor to do it because it

01:01:14 ◼   ► doesn't seem to scale and I know people asked I don't I I know some people were

01:01:19 ◼   ► asking like well what do you what if you have multiple of these Google home

01:01:22 ◼   ► devices you know one on each floor did they work together and I think the

01:01:25 ◼   ► answer is not yet like I'm not quite sure that that's the answer to how you

01:01:29 ◼   ► you have this everywhere you want it is by setting up these speaker devices that, you

01:01:35 ◼   ► know, I almost feel like the speaker devices should be dumb terminals, not the central

01:01:39 ◼   ► hub.

01:01:40 ◼   ► It's useful to have the speaker and say, "Play the music.

01:01:43 ◼   ► I want to play the song right now," and then it comes out and it sounds good, and

01:01:46 ◼   ► it's there to help listen.

01:01:48 ◼   ► But I think it should just be like a dumb terminal.

01:01:50 ◼   ► It shouldn't really be the hub.

01:01:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:53 ◼   ► I went to a demo at Nuance, just in terms of the actual opposite of this.

01:01:57 ◼   ► Nuance has a press event and I went to look at it and they were showing their version

01:02:01 ◼   ► of this and it was a couple of years ago but they wanted to make sure that if you were

01:02:05 ◼   ► talking, your kid couldn't interrupt you.

01:02:07 ◼   ► So you would snap your fingers twice and you'd have a camera and three microphones beam form

01:02:11 ◼   ► on you and as you walked around it would stay locked to you so you could talk and nobody

01:02:15 ◼   ► else would get any cross talking on that.

01:02:17 ◼   ► And that to me was like the most overwrought of all these possible solutions.

01:02:21 ◼   ► But then the other day I was raising my arm to just stretch and I wanted to ask Siri something.

01:02:26 ◼   ► So I said, "Yo, Siri," and because I was moving my arm, my Apple Watch activated, because

01:02:30 ◼   ► I had an iPhone with me, the iPhone activated, my 9.7-inch iPad Pro activated, and because

01:02:35 ◼   ► the 12-inch was plugged in, that activated as well.

01:02:37 ◼   ► So I just said to turn on the lights, and then all these four or five voices were said

01:02:42 ◼   ► yes all at once.

01:02:43 ◼   ► Now, the lights just went on, so I don't know which one was ultimately responsible for it.

01:02:46 ◼   ► But it means there's just so much potential for a collision and sort of figuring out what

01:02:50 ◼   ► is the behavior, like how do you know which device is closest to me or which one I'm talking

01:02:54 ◼   ► because maybe my watch is closer but I didn't move it so Siri's not listening

01:02:58 ◼   ► and maybe my iPhone is across the room and my Mac is in my lap but I really am

01:03:02 ◼   ► talking to my iPhone and solving those are interesting problems. Yeah I would

01:03:06 ◼   ► say it's exactly the point I was gonna make is that okay I don't think that

01:03:10 ◼   ► this echo like speaker thing is the ultimate solution to this - what is

01:03:15 ◼   ► the device you buy to have this interaction with a voice assistant but

01:03:19 ◼   ► conversely I don't know that Apple's you know like let's just have "Hey" and then

01:03:24 ◼   ► the name of the... I don't want to have to beep it out. Hey, you know.

01:03:29 ◼   ► Yo Siri. Hey, you know. I don't think that's the answer either to have it on all of your

01:03:37 ◼   ► devices because I've had the situation too where you try it and multiple devices are

01:03:41 ◼   ► plugged in and they all answer or you know the iPhone doesn't have to be plugged in anymore.

01:03:46 ◼   ► So I don't know what the answer is. You know, it's but it's definitely coming and I thought

01:03:51 ◼   ► that some of the stuff that they showed in the Google Home is really impressive. But

01:03:58 ◼   ► then some of it too is also it's so hand-wavy. It's like, "Are you serious?" I could see

01:04:07 ◼   ► the mom in the video, she got a notice that her flight was delayed by half an hour. And

01:04:12 ◼   ► it's like, "You know what? Number one, your flight is never delayed by half an hour."

01:04:17 ◼   ► If it's half an hour delayed, you're just bored late. They don't give you a warning.

01:04:21 ◼   ► If your flight's delayed, it's like ours.

01:04:23 ◼   ► But I think they wanted to make it like a nice happy story.

01:04:26 ◼   ► So it's like, oh, your flight's delayed by half an hour.

01:04:28 ◼   ► And so she said, move my dinner reservation

01:04:30 ◼   ► from 7.30 to eight.

01:04:32 ◼   ► And it worked.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And I could see that working,

01:04:34 ◼   ► 'cause it's surely through OpenTable,

01:04:36 ◼   ► and I think OpenTable's AVPIs would allow that to work.

01:04:40 ◼   ► But there were other things that they did

01:04:44 ◼   ► that it just seemed like, come on, it's too easy.

01:04:47 ◼   ► - You know, I absolutely agree.

01:04:50 ◼   ► One of the things about this technology is it really is a parallel interface.

01:04:53 ◼   ► Like we will still have our tactile interfaces, but natural language and voice is so powerful

01:04:57 ◼   ► that we'll have these running in parallel and we won't really see it.

01:05:00 ◼   ► It's taken years to evolve.

01:05:02 ◼   ► Just a lot of the basic things we now take for granted on the old mouse interfaces and now on the gesture-based interfaces.

01:05:08 ◼   ► And it'll take some time to sort of...

01:05:09 ◼   ► Like one of the things I worry about is immediacy.

01:05:11 ◼   ► Like I forget if it was this demo or the other demo where it just said, you know, buy movie tickets.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And I'm petrified.

01:05:16 ◼   ► ever since the iMessage changes,

01:05:18 ◼   ► yesterday I shared my location with somebody by accident

01:05:20 ◼   ► because it was instant.

01:05:22 ◼   ► And it wasn't a person that it was a problem for,

01:05:24 ◼   ► but location is highly sensitive information

01:05:26 ◼   ► and me hitting that by accident

01:05:27 ◼   ► and not having sort of a confirmed deny request

01:05:30 ◼   ► in between that was hugely problematic for me.

01:05:32 ◼   ► And the same idea with here,

01:05:33 ◼   ► like just get movie tickets, just make a reservation.

01:05:35 ◼   ► And I can go back and say, oh no, don't make them.

01:05:37 ◼   ► But just, we don't seem to have all the steps that we have

01:05:40 ◼   ► on our traditional interfaces yet established for this.

01:05:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know Syracuse had called out the,

01:05:46 ◼   ► "Get Indian food." And it was like, "Okay, it'll be at your house." And it's like no

01:05:50 ◼   ► confirmation as to what you're ordering or what restaurant. It's just, "Okay, there'll

01:05:57 ◼   ► be Indian food in a bag on your porch by the time you get home." And it's like, "Come

01:06:01 ◼   ► on."

01:06:02 ◼   ► And it's one of those things that's really hard to do by voice. And it would have to.

01:06:07 ◼   ► It would necessarily require a lot of back and forth, right? It should more or less be

01:06:12 ◼   ► the same amount of back and forth that you would have if you actually called the restaurant

01:06:16 ◼   ► and talked to a person.

01:06:18 ◼   ► You could have a standing, like you could have gone to the trouble of pre-setting, like

01:06:20 ◼   ► this is my standard order, if I don't say anything else this is the order, but that's

01:06:23 ◼   ► a lot of faffing work that they don't show off in the beginning.

01:06:26 ◼   ► And otherwise exactly to your point, there are sometimes when it's faster to just tap

01:06:29 ◼   ► a quick button because your brain is reading all the information on a screen and can react

01:06:32 ◼   ► to it with fingers and taps faster than it could if you'd have a long involved conversation

01:06:37 ◼   ► with something.

01:06:40 ◼   ► I think I'm going to buy one of these, but I don't know that I'm going to leave it on.

01:06:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:06:45 ◼   ► I've still got the Echo downstairs, but I might as well mention it.

01:06:53 ◼   ► I just don't see how you can avoid the privacy implications of this.

01:06:57 ◼   ► Even above and beyond the "Do you trust Amazon with an always-on microphone in your kitchen?

01:07:03 ◼   ► Do you trust Google with this?"

01:07:05 ◼   ► The answer, obviously, for many, many people is yes.

01:07:09 ◼   ► And is Google learning anything more about you

01:07:11 ◼   ► than it already knows if you're a heavy Google services user?

01:07:16 ◼   ► But just think about it from a law enforcement angle.

01:07:18 ◼   ► This is like a dream from the FBI.

01:07:21 ◼   ► We're bugging ourselves.

01:07:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:23 ◼   ► Because imagine if you're under investigation,

01:07:26 ◼   ► and FBI goes to Google with a warrant and says,

01:07:30 ◼   ► we're investigating this individual, Rene Ritchie.

01:07:35 ◼   ► does he have a Google Home?

01:07:37 ◼   ► And if Google is legally compelled to say yes,

01:07:40 ◼   ► then they can issue a warrant that says,

01:07:42 ◼   ► well, we would like to have that microphone

01:07:44 ◼   ► recording everything that, you know,

01:07:48 ◼   ► please send us a 24-hour MP3 file

01:07:50 ◼   ► of everything that gets said every day in this house.

01:07:53 ◼   ► Like that is something that they could

01:07:55 ◼   ► compel Google to do.

01:07:58 ◼   ► - It's funny, one of my favorite,

01:07:59 ◼   ► you know, it's not a phenomenal movie,

01:08:01 ◼   ► but there's a movie called Equilibrium,

01:08:03 ◼   ► and they have Christian Bale in it,

01:08:04 ◼   ► and he's a grammaton cleric,

01:08:05 ◼   ► and they wanna kill him at the end,

01:08:07 ◼   ► and they say, "What's the easiest way

01:08:08 ◼   ► "to get your weapon away from you?"

01:08:10 ◼   ► He says, "What?"

01:08:10 ◼   ► And he says, "To ask you for it."

01:08:12 ◼   ► And it's true with passwords.

01:08:13 ◼   ► Any law enforcement will tell you

01:08:14 ◼   ► that often the easiest way to get something

01:08:16 ◼   ► is just to ask it,

01:08:16 ◼   ► 'cause we're happy to do a lot of things to ourselves,

01:08:18 ◼   ► just out of convenience, with no sense of security.

01:08:21 ◼   ► And that was one of the more troubling aspects

01:08:23 ◼   ► of the Google I/O to me,

01:08:24 ◼   ► is that a lot of the things that they're doing

01:08:26 ◼   ► requires me to remove encryption in order to have it done.

01:08:29 ◼   ► Like, they showed off their,

01:08:30 ◼   ► and I know we'll get to it later,

01:08:31 ◼   ► but they showed off their chat app,

01:08:32 ◼   ► and they have an incognito mode,

01:08:33 ◼   ► and only when you go into incognito mode

01:08:35 ◼   ► does it have end-to-end encryption.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And that's because they wanna do a lot

01:08:38 ◼   ► of machine learning bots inside that.

01:08:40 ◼   ► But that to me is dumb.

01:08:42 ◼   ► If I'm talking to you, John,

01:08:44 ◼   ► and then I wanna ask a bot something,

01:08:45 ◼   ► I still want that parsed.

01:08:47 ◼   ► I want my communication with you to be end-to-end encrypted.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Then if I address the bot, turn off the encryption,

01:08:51 ◼   ► if I go back to talking to you, turn it back on again.

01:08:54 ◼   ► And for the very reasons you mentioned.

01:08:57 ◼   ► I have a personal belief that our phones

01:08:59 ◼   ► are like hard drives for our brains,

01:09:01 ◼   ► that they should be covered with a privilege that is beyond what spouses or priests or

01:09:04 ◼   ► doctors or anybody enjoys in the law.

01:09:06 ◼   ► They should just be almost inviolate and that their data should not be accessible to law

01:09:10 ◼   ► enforcement.

01:09:11 ◼   ► But we don't live in that world.

01:09:13 ◼   ► And the world we're living in now, we are giving away and leaking so much data that

01:09:17 ◼   ► all of these products are a huge concern.

01:09:19 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah.

01:09:22 ◼   ► I think that it's not going to keep people from using it.

01:09:25 ◼   ► And there's also been questions, you know, now that our phones can listen to us, is has

01:09:30 ◼   ► law enforcement ever tried to compel Apple or somebody else to turn your iPhone into

01:09:37 ◼   ► a bug?

01:09:38 ◼   ► I don't think that that's ever happened, and I'm not, you know, but it's obviously a concern

01:09:43 ◼   ► now that we have these devices that are literally always listening to us.

01:09:46 ◼   ► I mean, and –

01:09:47 ◼   ► Did you see the Edward Snowden documentary?

01:09:48 ◼   ► No, I haven't seen it.

01:09:51 ◼   ► It's great.

01:09:52 ◼   ► There's a scene in the very beginning and they're filming him, and it's actual film

01:09:54 ◼   ► of him doing the first interviews that led to the articles, I believe, in The Guardian.

01:09:58 ◼   ► And right away, there's an IP phone on the table and he unplugs it, takes it apart, and

01:10:03 ◼   ► they're saying, "Why are you doing that?"

01:10:04 ◼   ► And he said, "It has a speaker."

01:10:05 ◼   ► And they said, "It's not on."

01:10:06 ◼   ► He goes, "What do you mean it's not on?"

01:10:08 ◼   ► I used to sit on the opposite end of these things and he would put his blanket over his

01:10:11 ◼   ► head to type in his password because there were cameras outside of the windows.

01:10:14 ◼   ► And he's like, "You don't understand the degree to which we are doing surveillance

01:10:17 ◼   ► on you."

01:10:18 ◼   ► That's creepy.

01:10:19 ◼   ► What's the name of the documentary?

01:10:21 ◼   ► It's Chilling.

01:10:23 ◼   ► for Citizen 5 or something like that. No, I haven't seen it. I don't know. I don't I can't really say why because it's something

01:10:29 ◼   ► I'm interested in and I love a good documentary, but it's it's terrific

01:10:32 ◼   ► And I know that there's the feature film is coming out soon with yes Edward Norton, right? Isn't Edward Norton playing? Sort of a dead ringer.

01:10:40 ◼   ► Yeah, and all these things go through your mind and you know, Apple's taking great pains

01:10:45 ◼   ► to to take care of security and they're building systems that they

01:10:49 ◼   ► themselves cannot get into and that's the thing is that you might trust Google

01:10:53 ◼   ► with your data but once someone else has your data I'll take responsibility for

01:10:57 ◼   ► losing my own data but once somebody else has it even if they don't do

01:11:01 ◼   ► anything bad with it they're the employees at that company or that

01:11:04 ◼   ► company gets exploited or some place that they're using to store data gets

01:11:08 ◼   ► broken into there's it creates this this ability for that information to get even

01:11:12 ◼   ► further out it's just one step removed it's one step less safe and those are

01:11:16 ◼   ► really we don't think about it because convenience is such a good selling point

01:11:19 ◼   ► But if this is super valuable things, it's the most valuable thing that we have is our information

01:11:24 ◼   ► And and I really worry about a lot of these products and what do what they'll turn us into

01:11:28 ◼   ► Yeah, so the next thing they did announce when you mentioned it, it's their new chat app. It's you know effectively it's like they're

01:11:35 ◼   ► What Google has had a lot of chat apps over the years? So they're starting over with a new one. It's called alo a

01:11:41 ◼   ► all

01:11:44 ◼   ► It's like French for hello, I get obviously

01:11:48 ◼   ► Hello

01:11:49 ◼   ► Not a bad name. I like it, but they've wiped the slate clean. This is not Google Hangouts. This is a new thing

01:11:57 ◼   ► It's a chat app

01:11:57 ◼   ► So it's sort of a cross between iMessage and like WhatsApp or something like that and it's not spaces which they introduced

01:12:03 ◼   ► I think three days before this one, which also has chat features

01:12:05 ◼   ► Yeah, that's curious that they that they release spaces before this and then didn't talk about spaces in the keynote at all

01:12:13 ◼   ► I haven't really looked closely at spaces yet

01:12:16 ◼   ► But I've heard from a couple of people that I should because it looks like a really, you

01:12:19 ◼   ► know, seems like a really useful thing.

01:12:20 ◼   ► David A.

01:12:38 ◼   ► Google Wave anymore, thankfully. But you know there was Google Buzz and then there's Google

01:12:42 ◼   ► Spaces. And people have expectations once you use that, if they send you a WhatsApp

01:12:47 ◼   ► message or a Snapchat, that you're going to get back to them. And there's just more and

01:12:50 ◼   ► more proliferation of all these services and it doesn't look like it's slowing down. Just

01:12:54 ◼   ► the demands on our attention are ridiculous. And people are not doing anything coherent.

01:12:59 ◼   ► And I understand it's easier for them to launch a separate service, but it's going back to

01:13:03 ◼   ► what we were talking about with Apple. It's not their job to do things that are easy for

01:13:06 ◼   ► It's their job to do things that are better for me.

01:13:08 ◼   ► And my world, maybe burying it all on Slack

01:13:10 ◼   ► would be the best thing.

01:13:11 ◼   ► But Google could make a product that is coherent

01:13:13 ◼   ► and that produces these features

01:13:15 ◼   ► and gets rid of ones that they don't find as valuable anymore.

01:13:17 ◼   ► That would be better for me as a customer.

01:13:19 ◼   ► - The thing about Allo is the privacy thing that you said.

01:13:25 ◼   ► So there's two modes in Allo.

01:13:26 ◼   ► And the default mode includes,

01:13:28 ◼   ► like what's new is that it includes

01:13:32 ◼   ► a Google bot interaction.

01:13:34 ◼   ► And so you can like @Google in the middle of your chat

01:13:38 ◼   ► and get answers to questions that you could ask Google.

01:13:43 ◼   ► I can imagine that being useful.

01:13:45 ◼   ► But it seems weird that it's the default.

01:13:48 ◼   ► And then they call the other mode incognito mode, which

01:13:52 ◼   ► to me is very problematic.

01:13:54 ◼   ► I really, really don't like using that.

01:13:57 ◼   ► And I know that the term comes from Chrome,

01:14:00 ◼   ► where that's what they called the private mode for your tabs.

01:14:06 ◼   ► And I guess if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt,

01:14:12 ◼   ► that's why they chose the word incognito.

01:14:15 ◼   ► But to me, calling it incognito puts a slightly negative connotation on it.

01:14:23 ◼   ► That's something that you use for something

01:14:25 ◼   ► that you want to keep secret, or something

01:14:28 ◼   ► where you want to be anonymous or you want to hide.

01:14:30 ◼   ► And it's, it's sort of carries like a negative,

01:14:33 ◼   ► like negative connotation to me. Whereas the word private,

01:14:36 ◼   ► which is what I think they should call it.

01:14:38 ◼   ► And I think it should be the default is, well, of course you want privacy.

01:14:42 ◼   ► You know, who doesn't want privacy? And you know, as, as Christopher,

01:14:46 ◼   ► I'm going to botch his last name. So soy hands. How do you pronounce his name?

01:14:50 ◼   ► Do you know? I'm not sure. Uh, do you know who he is? No, he's, uh, uh,

01:14:55 ◼   ► privacy advocate and he's a super good follow. I'll put his Twitter in the show

01:15:01 ◼   ► notes. Thank you. But as he described it yesterday, the default mode of Allo,

01:15:09 ◼   ► which is encrypted, but it's not end-to-end encrypted. So the privacy mode

01:15:14 ◼   ► and the way iMessage works and I think the way WhatsApp works is end-to-end

01:15:17 ◼   ► encrypted. So if I send a message on iMessage to you, it is encrypted leaving

01:15:23 ◼   ► my phone and it isn't decrypted until it gets to your phone.

01:15:30 ◼   ► And in between, like when it's in Apple's hands, it is in an encrypted state that they

01:15:34 ◼   ► can't read.

01:15:35 ◼   ► That's end-to-end encryption.

01:15:37 ◼   ► Apple is really only there to facilitate the, you know, connecting your Apple ID to your

01:15:43 ◼   ► phone.

01:15:44 ◼   ► It's just a route and it's end-to-end encrypted.

01:15:47 ◼   ► The term is exactly what it sounds like.

01:15:49 ◼   ► And it makes it impervious to person-to-person-in-the-middle attacks, which is the important thing.

01:15:54 ◼   ► Yes, right.

01:15:55 ◼   ► So if somebody hacks my—or if I'm in Starbucks and I'm using the Wi-Fi and somebody else

01:16:02 ◼   ► is reading all the stuff that goes through the Wi-Fi router, all they see is the encrypted

01:16:07 ◼   ► version of the message.

01:16:10 ◼   ► The default mode for Allo that includes the Googlebot, by definition, in order to have

01:16:15 ◼   ► this interaction with the Google bot. It is over HTTPS, but it's encrypted from you to Google Server,

01:16:23 ◼   ► then Google sees what you type, and then Google encrypts it to send it on to you. That's like

01:16:29 ◼   ► exactly how the FBI wants all of these services to work. That's exactly what the FBI has been pushing

01:16:35 ◼   ► for in this entire argument. And maybe, you know, not just the FBI here in the US, but law enforcement,

01:16:40 ◼   ► you know, like-minded law enforcement in Europe and elsewhere. And I'm certainly that the Chinese,

01:16:46 ◼   ► I'm certain that the Chinese government would like to see the messaging services work like that too.

01:16:51 ◼   ► Because if it's only secure over the air from me to Google, and then it's unencrypted on Google

01:16:58 ◼   ► site, then if Google has served a warrant to say, let us see these messages, we're really,

01:17:04 ◼   ► really, you know, we're conducting an investigation between John Gruber and Rene Ritchie.

01:17:08 ◼   ► they're running some kind of scam.

01:17:12 ◼   ► We need to see their messages.

01:17:14 ◼   ► There they are, right?

01:17:16 ◼   ► - I understand why Google's doing it.

01:17:19 ◼   ► Because they're all about machine learning,

01:17:21 ◼   ► and the more data you feed that, the better it is.

01:17:23 ◼   ► And they're getting access to what we're typing,

01:17:25 ◼   ► how we're typing it, when we're typing it.

01:17:27 ◼   ► All those discussions, it really feeds,

01:17:29 ◼   ► at enormous scale, it feeds their machine learning

01:17:31 ◼   ► and their artificial intelligence projects.

01:17:34 ◼   ► And they're giving me a free service in exchange.

01:17:36 ◼   ► and convenience is always at war with security.

01:17:38 ◼   ► But to your point, that what Google wants here

01:17:41 ◼   ► happens to be what everybody else wants.

01:17:43 ◼   ► And you could make a case that Google will protect it,

01:17:45 ◼   ► but Google is bound by laws,

01:17:47 ◼   ► and we don't know what those laws are gonna be yet.

01:17:49 ◼   ► But also, Google is subject to abuse.

01:17:50 ◼   ► And we saw with the NSA,

01:17:51 ◼   ► when they started having access to this,

01:17:53 ◼   ► they didn't just use it for legitimate

01:17:55 ◼   ► and noble government purposes,

01:17:56 ◼   ► but they used it to keep track of ex-girlfriends

01:17:58 ◼   ► and to spy on people and to do things.

01:17:59 ◼   ► And you can say that won't happen,

01:18:01 ◼   ► but the best way for that not to happen

01:18:03 ◼   ► is what Apple's doing,

01:18:04 ◼   ► where they themselves do not have access to it.

01:18:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And I know for a fact that iMessage was architected

01:18:13 ◼   ► with that in mind.

01:18:14 ◼   ► It was, you know, the high level,

01:18:17 ◼   ► one of the top bullet items was,

01:18:19 ◼   ► we need to design this system from the ground up

01:18:22 ◼   ► so that we cannot see these messages

01:18:25 ◼   ► even if compelled to do so by a warrant.

01:18:27 ◼   ► - And FaceTime too, which is why it's allowed

01:18:29 ◼   ► to be used in the medical industry

01:18:30 ◼   ► because it's end-to-end encrypted

01:18:31 ◼   ► and there's no chance for someone to intercept that

01:18:34 ◼   ► and have private data leak.

01:18:35 ◼   ► I mean, they've been doing this

01:18:36 ◼   ► with all their services systematically.

01:18:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I really,

01:18:39 ◼   ► there's no other way for Google to do this with the bot,

01:18:45 ◼   ► I don't think, unless, you know,

01:18:47 ◼   ► I guess there is, there are other ways

01:18:49 ◼   ► where it would have to be, like you said,

01:18:50 ◼   ► like where everything I typed to you is still

01:18:52 ◼   ► in the end-to-end encrypted,

01:18:53 ◼   ► but only the @Google ones are not.

01:18:56 ◼   ► And I really feel like that they should,

01:18:58 ◼   ► and it doesn't seem like they're doing it,

01:18:59 ◼   ► I think that they should use, do something visual,

01:19:02 ◼   ► like the way that iMessage does green bubbles for SMS

01:19:06 ◼   ► and blue bubbles for iMessages.

01:19:09 ◼   ► They should do something to make clear

01:19:11 ◼   ► what is end-to-end encrypted and what is not.

01:19:14 ◼   ► And I really kind of feel like they dropped the ball

01:19:17 ◼   ► by doing this the way that they're doing it.

01:19:19 ◼   ► I mean, it's sort of deliberate,

01:19:21 ◼   ► but I really do feel like it's a problem.

01:19:24 ◼   ► I mean, it's a service that I wouldn't wanna rely on.

01:19:28 ◼   ► - And to your point, I mean, using the term incognito,

01:19:30 ◼   ► It's baffling to me because they're using your phone number as a unique identifier and that means that you're by definition

01:19:35 ◼   ► You're not a cognit. Yeah, I'm messaging you and incognito mode. We still know who each other are. There's no identity questions, right?

01:19:42 ◼   ► It's it's not incognito. It's really a problematic use of the word

01:19:45 ◼   ► I really do think so because it's not the same as chrome chrome when you go into incognito mode

01:19:49 ◼   ► You really are anonymous or at least you know, if it works the way it's designed

01:19:53 ◼   ► I don't you know, I mean obviously there could be a bug

01:19:54 ◼   ► Well, even there like it stops your history and it stops the cookies

01:19:58 ◼   ► but unless you're using some form of ad tracker and all those things, blockers,

01:20:02 ◼   ► it's not stopping the web from monitoring your progress in general. You

01:20:04 ◼   ► have to go incognito and block everything else. Yeah, and it doesn't, you

01:20:08 ◼   ► know, it doesn't route you through some kind of anonymizing service, either your

01:20:11 ◼   ► IP address, it's still just your IP address, you know, but it is cut off from

01:20:14 ◼   ► your regular cookie stash and etc. Then next, the sibling. Oh, by the

01:20:21 ◼   ► way, we should say that Apple actually, I think, does call this privacy mode and

01:20:24 ◼   ► It's the ones who started it. Yes, you know in Safari you mean? Yes. Yeah, I yeah, it's new private window. Yep

01:20:31 ◼   ► But again, it's the their use of incognito and aloe is really not that it's not that similar to to chrome and like you said

01:20:40 ◼   ► you're still you know still your phone number and

01:20:42 ◼   ► it's

01:20:44 ◼   ► you know, I say thumbs down thumbs down on the architectural design of aloe or at least the

01:20:51 ◼   ► The defaults should be flipped in my opinion. The default should be what they call private mode and then you should be able to turn on

01:20:57 ◼   ► You know

01:20:59 ◼   ► Give me some help from Google bot mode and then there should be a very very clear visual indication that you're no longer

01:21:04 ◼   ► private yeah, and the whole the whole like again like twice I think the technology was impressive but the presentations I think that the

01:21:11 ◼   ► Did not do them any services

01:21:13 ◼   ► It's unclear to me like you and I are chatting on iMessage and I'm researching a scotch thing

01:21:18 ◼   ► It reminds me almost of those really, really early adventure games where you're standing

01:21:21 ◼   ► on the edge of a forest and it's a river to one side and you type and pick up the sword

01:21:24 ◼   ► and it does that.

01:21:25 ◼   ► It's just not always an optimal form.

01:21:28 ◼   ► We replace that.

01:21:29 ◼   ► Those aren't how games run anymore.

01:21:30 ◼   ► We replace that with easier, more direct forms of manipulation and it's not clear to me exactly

01:21:35 ◼   ► what you said or Syracuse said about the curry.

01:21:37 ◼   ► It's not clear to me how efficient this form of communication will be.

01:21:40 ◼   ► There will be specific cases where it's very useful but do I want my entire chat experience

01:21:45 ◼   ► It's subsumed with these little use cases that I might not ever make put to use.

01:21:50 ◼   ► So the sibling app to Allo is called Duo and it is, you know, I think it's very fair to

01:21:56 ◼   ► say it's their answer to FaceTime.

01:21:58 ◼   ► It is live video chat.

01:22:02 ◼   ► I don't know, there might be an audio mode.

01:22:04 ◼   ► I mean, it doesn't demo as well, but you know, it's live video.

01:22:09 ◼   ► It is a companion to Allo, so I'm guessing it still uses your phone number as an identifier.

01:22:14 ◼   ► It is going to be cross-platform, iOS and Android.

01:22:18 ◼   ► And like you said earlier, you hinted at it, they have a feature they call "knock-knock

01:22:22 ◼   ► preview," which means that if I call you, it'll start the video on me, and the notification

01:22:30 ◼   ► that you get, when it rings or whatever, says when I'm knock-knocking you, it'll already

01:22:38 ◼   ► show you where I am, who I am, and what I'm doing.

01:22:41 ◼   ► You'll already have the video to look at.

01:22:43 ◼   ► I don't know who thought this was a great idea.

01:22:45 ◼   ► I understand they use someone's kids as a demo, but I don't know who decided that

01:22:49 ◼   ► anybody has the right to put live video on my home screen without my consent or my lock

01:22:52 ◼   ► screen without my consent because we know people.

01:22:55 ◼   ► It's not going to end up well for us.

01:22:57 ◼   ► Dave: Well, yeah.

01:22:59 ◼   ► All right, like if I know you're having a meeting.

01:23:03 ◼   ► Aditya: No, my phone rings and all of a sudden it's every inch of guy English on my home

01:23:08 ◼   ► screen.

01:23:09 ◼   ► I mean it's just not going to work well.

01:23:10 ◼   ► It's an interesting demo and like you said, it may not be a good feature.

01:23:15 ◼   ► And on iOS, it's 99.999% certain there's no way that's going to work because that's

01:23:23 ◼   ► something that's only going to be on Android.

01:23:24 ◼   ► Yeah, well you have to have the app open and sitting there waiting for the person to call,

01:23:28 ◼   ► which kind of defeats the purpose.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:31 ◼   ► If you're already in the app, they could do it, but otherwise it's just going to be

01:23:33 ◼   ► a standard notification.

01:23:35 ◼   ► Again…

01:23:36 ◼   ► And again, another separate application.

01:23:39 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I kind of-- it's the same reason that FaceTime's

01:23:43 ◼   ► a separate application.

01:23:45 ◼   ► It is, but Apple doesn't have FaceTime plus an app-like

01:23:48 ◼   ► hangout that already does very similar things to this.

01:23:50 ◼   ► I mean, it's just layer upon layer of Google communication

01:23:53 ◼   ► apps at this point.

01:23:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's interesting to me that they're doing it.

01:23:57 ◼   ► And I wonder, unlike with Amazon and the Echo,

01:24:01 ◼   ► where they called it out, they didn't mention Apple and FaceTime,

01:24:04 ◼   ► but especially with the Duo.

01:24:06 ◼   ► And I think it's fair to say that Allo is as much a competitor to WhatsApp and Line

01:24:12 ◼   ► and all the other, you know, there's so many messaging apps that are out there.

01:24:16 ◼   ► You can't just say it's a direct answer to iMessage.

01:24:19 ◼   ► And iMessage is a little different.

01:24:20 ◼   ► iMessage doesn't have stickers and it's really more about replacing SMS text messaging.

01:24:25 ◼   ► But with Duo, it's impossible not to talk about this and not mention FaceTime.

01:24:32 ◼   ► And it looks like FaceTime.

01:24:33 ◼   ► I mean, the screen just looks like FaceTime.

01:24:35 ◼   ► Yeah, and I just think that they're answering for Android users a need that, you know,

01:24:40 ◼   ► that's like a cool thing that iPhone users have been using for years and, you know,

01:24:46 ◼   ► there hasn't been a good answer for Android users and now there will be.

01:24:50 ◼   ► And it's interesting because FaceTime, I mean, well, the story is well known.

01:24:55 ◼   ► Steve Jobs announced it was going to be an open standard and much to the surprise of the engineers

01:24:59 ◼   ► sitting in the audience at the time. And then Apple got sued by Vertimex and basically they

01:25:04 ◼   ► They had to re-architect the entire system based on rocket docket Texas patent law.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I believe they've gone to court three times and I'm not sure what the status is now, but

01:25:13 ◼   ► it really hamstrung the roadmap for FaceTime.

01:25:15 ◼   ► It gets years later and we have FaceTime audio now, but we don't have FaceTime conference

01:25:19 ◼   ► calls and there's all sorts of really obvious features that Apple just being sued into oblivion

01:25:23 ◼   ► by this company has not been able to roll out.

01:25:27 ◼   ► The technology behind Duo is super interesting to me and they're using WebRTC.

01:25:31 ◼   ► I think that's what they're doing.

01:25:32 ◼   ► The way that they're implementing it, really, really interesting, but it'll need to evolve

01:25:37 ◼   ► too.

01:25:38 ◼   ► Skype has got all these features and Hangouts has conference calls.

01:25:41 ◼   ► I'm not sure what the exact difference is, why they don't get sued the way that Apple

01:25:44 ◼   ► has, but it really does open up that cross-platform dynamic that you want from services like these.

01:25:52 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah, definitely.

01:25:54 ◼   ► So it'd be interesting to see what kind of uptake it gets.

01:25:59 ◼   ► I kind of salute them.

01:26:00 ◼   ► I feel like these are focused apps and the point is very clear and it's sort of the opposite

01:26:06 ◼   ► of, what was that thing that Google built a couple years ago and it eventually disappeared

01:26:12 ◼   ► but it was like...

01:26:13 ◼   ► Dave Asprey

01:26:14 ◼   ► Wave.

01:26:15 ◼   ► Dave Asprey

01:26:16 ◼   ► Yeah, that's it, Google Wave.

01:26:17 ◼   ► Right, it's the opposite of Wave.

01:26:18 ◼   ► It's the antithesis where Wave was so nebulous and so grandiose in its ambitions that they

01:26:25 ◼   ► lost the point of, "Hey, I'm looking at this thing and I just don't get it."

01:26:29 ◼   ► I mean...

01:26:30 ◼   ► It was super ambitious, but it really was not a good product.

01:26:35 ◼   ► I mean, it was a fascinating research endeavor, but it was just nowhere near as cohesive as

01:26:41 ◼   ► a product needs to be.

01:26:42 ◼   ► Whereas these new apps are so super focused, okay, it's messaging.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And it's video, it's like FaceTime.

01:26:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:54 ◼   ► They're almost like unitaskers.

01:26:55 ◼   ► And Apple again famously never put FaceTime on Android.

01:26:59 ◼   ► People still want iMessage on Android.

01:27:01 ◼   ► And Apple historically has not been great at services

01:27:03 ◼   ► and not been great at cross-platform apps.

01:27:05 ◼   ► So wanting those two things together is a curious choice

01:27:08 ◼   ► when you hear people complain about it.

01:27:10 ◼   ► Google has been really good about putting apps on iOS

01:27:12 ◼   ► and there's profound business reasons for why they do that.

01:27:15 ◼   ► But their apps have not been great on iOS.

01:27:19 ◼   ► From the design where they insist on making them

01:27:20 ◼   ► very Android-like, you know, with Roboto

01:27:23 ◼   ► and with a lot of those and the hamburger buttons,

01:27:25 ◼   ► to the performance of like Hangouts.

01:27:26 ◼   ► Hangouts has gotten better,

01:27:27 ◼   ► but Hangouts was a dumpster fire for far too long.

01:27:32 ◼   ► So having these stripped down apps

01:27:34 ◼   ► could mean that they're actually decent apps on iOS

01:27:37 ◼   ► and then you solve that cross-platform problem.

01:27:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, we'll have to see.

01:27:41 ◼   ► But again, later this summer, not available now.

01:27:43 ◼   ► - No.

01:27:44 ◼   ► - What else do we have here?

01:27:46 ◼   ► We got Android N, they announced.

01:27:48 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:27:50 ◼   ► And they're gonna let the internet name it.

01:27:51 ◼   ► I think that was the general.

01:27:52 ◼   ► Yeah, that seems weird.

01:27:55 ◼   ► I don't know what the--

01:27:57 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:27:59 ◼   ► It seems pretty stupid to me.

01:28:00 ◼   ► I'm guessing that they already have a name

01:28:02 ◼   ► and that they're just saying that they're letting

01:28:04 ◼   ► the internet name it.

01:28:06 ◼   ► Nutella or Nanaimo or--

01:28:08 ◼   ► You can't use Nutella, though.

01:28:09 ◼   ► It's a trademark.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Well, they use KitKat.

01:28:12 ◼   ► They came to a licensing agreement to use KitKat.

01:28:13 ◼   ► Well, maybe that's what they'll do.

01:28:15 ◼   ► Maybe they'll pay the Nutella people.

01:28:20 ◼   ► Or just go and do Git.

01:28:22 ◼   ► screw it, we're gonna just nuke it.

01:28:25 ◼   ► - I'm trying to think what, from the Android end,

01:28:27 ◼   ► I have my notes here.

01:28:28 ◼   ► The one thing that was interesting to me,

01:28:30 ◼   ► the most interesting thing that they showed were these,

01:28:34 ◼   ► I forget what they call it,

01:28:34 ◼   ► but it's like instant app something.

01:28:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it's basically streaming apps.

01:28:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that if you architect your Android app

01:28:44 ◼   ► the way that, you know, this is a new thing,

01:28:48 ◼   ► but if you architect, you can divide your app

01:28:51 ◼   ► into slices and you know more or less componentize your app. It can load just

01:28:57 ◼   ► the component that it needs to do something and will more or less load it

01:29:02 ◼   ► like a web page. So it'll just load right over the air and just all of a sudden

01:29:07 ◼   ► you're in the app but it hasn't downloaded the entire app. It's just you

01:29:13 ◼   ► know the piece that it needs to do a thing. So maybe like if your OpenTable, I

01:29:17 ◼   ► I forget what demos they use, but if you're OpenTable, it could just show you the screen

01:29:22 ◼   ► that you use to make a reservation and you pick a time and then you're in with the reservation.

01:29:29 ◼   ► Then if you want the rest of the app, you can say, "Give me the rest of the app," and

01:29:32 ◼   ► then it'll download the whole thing.

01:29:36 ◼   ► It's really interesting to me because a lot of us have been there where we're out, we're

01:29:39 ◼   ► traveling, maybe we're roaming, we have a poor connection, we want to do something but

01:29:43 ◼   ► we just don't happen to have the app installed.

01:29:44 ◼   ► you go to the app store and you have one bar

01:29:47 ◼   ► and you're trying to download it.

01:29:48 ◼   ► You're just watching the thing, try to turn.

01:29:50 ◼   ► You just wish you'd had that app installed.

01:29:51 ◼   ► You'd remember to do it at the hotel on Wi-Fi.

01:29:54 ◼   ► So it is an absolute problem.

01:29:55 ◼   ► But to me, the bigger picture here is that

01:29:57 ◼   ► we've been seeing for a while,

01:29:58 ◼   ► and you've been talking about this for a long time,

01:30:00 ◼   ► how there used to be websites

01:30:01 ◼   ► and then just things started happening over HTTP

01:30:03 ◼   ► and they became web services

01:30:04 ◼   ► and you had APIs and endpoints

01:30:06 ◼   ► and maybe they would show up on the web

01:30:08 ◼   ► but maybe they show up on apps

01:30:09 ◼   ► or maybe they would service in some other type of client.

01:30:11 ◼   ► And it really changed the fundamental meaning

01:30:14 ◼   ► of what it meant to be a web service.

01:30:16 ◼   ► And now that's been happening with apps.

01:30:18 ◼   ► And we saw it with extensibility on iOS,

01:30:20 ◼   ► where previously you had to take a photo,

01:30:23 ◼   ► go out to a photo app, make an edit,

01:30:24 ◼   ► go to another photo app, make an edit,

01:30:26 ◼   ► go back to, maybe go to Pinterest or to Tumblr and share it.

01:30:29 ◼   ► And it was super inconvenient,

01:30:31 ◼   ► but you went to all these different destination apps,

01:30:34 ◼   ► where now, thanks to extensibility,

01:30:35 ◼   ► you just pull out the features of an app.

01:30:37 ◼   ► You don't ever, I use PCALC in shade now.

01:30:40 ◼   ► I never go to the PCALC app.

01:30:41 ◼   ► I use shared social networks using the share sheet.

01:30:44 ◼   ► I never actually launched social network apps.

01:30:46 ◼   ► And that has profound meaning to the brands of those apps

01:30:48 ◼   ► because they no longer control those experiences.

01:30:51 ◼   ► You know, maybe it'll show up on my watch

01:30:52 ◼   ► or Overcast might be on my CarPlay dashboard

01:30:55 ◼   ► and the logic and the interface layers

01:30:57 ◼   ► are totally decoupled and the binary has been separated out

01:31:00 ◼   ► into all these features.

01:31:01 ◼   ► And now these features are being streamed,

01:31:04 ◼   ► you know, at least in Google's world,

01:31:05 ◼   ► it's being streamed back almost like web services.

01:31:08 ◼   ► And it makes you really question what an app will be.

01:31:10 ◼   ► never mind five years from now, but two or three years from now, and what that means

01:31:14 ◼   ► for developers and for services.

01:31:16 ◼   ► It's fascinating to me. It's a really neat trick. I'm not quite sure if it's a good idea

01:31:20 ◼   ► or not. Is it something Apple would do? I don't know because Apple is pretty—because

01:31:24 ◼   ► it doesn't even ask you if you want the app. It just—all of a sudden, you're in it,

01:31:28 ◼   ► in the same way that when you tap a URL, it just takes you to the webpage. You tap a URL.

01:31:35 ◼   ► sort of like the way that, you know, like with like Twitter, the Twitter app can

01:31:40 ◼   ► say, "Hey, I own the twitter.com domain name, so now let the user choose whether

01:31:45 ◼   ► tapping a tweet URL takes you to the web page or opens the Twitter app right to

01:31:51 ◼   ► the tweet." So that's what this is doing on Android, except it's letting you run

01:31:56 ◼   ► apps you haven't even installed yet. I don't think Apple would allow that, even

01:32:00 ◼   ► not the technology behind it aside, I just don't think Apple would do it

01:32:03 ◼   ► because they don't want to. They're so conservative about

01:32:07 ◼   ► letting native software run on the device.

01:32:09 ◼   ► Yeah, like the Google approach almost seemed like feature

01:32:13 ◼   ► caching, like you're going out grabbing a bit of a web page,

01:32:16 ◼   ► treating it a bit like an app so it performs better or maybe has

01:32:18 ◼   ► advantages or access that a web page wouldn't get. And that's

01:32:23 ◼   ► true. Apple, one of the every year there's a technology that

01:32:26 ◼   ► fascinates me in WWDC. And two years ago, it was extensibility.

01:32:29 ◼   ► And last year, it was all the on the app thinning stuff, the app

01:32:32 ◼   ► slicing on demand resources because we're starting to see that.

01:32:36 ◼   ► You don't have to download everything, every iPad version of the interface just to get

01:32:40 ◼   ► the iPhone app and you don't have to download the 32-bit if you're running a 64-bit device

01:32:45 ◼   ► and you don't have to download 10 levels if all you need is one.

01:32:48 ◼   ► And you start to think about that like on an Apple TV where if your kid is playing and

01:32:52 ◼   ► you don't ever want them to see a dialogue that says you're out of space please go

01:32:55 ◼   ► delete something because that's just a terrible experience.

01:32:57 ◼   ► So it's handling all that stuff dynamically in the background and even multitasking now

01:33:02 ◼   ► is just-in-time multitasking. It's not the old concept of multitasking anymore.

01:33:05 ◼   ► And this is becoming almost like a real-time world where you don't have to

01:33:08 ◼   ► preload a bunch of apps and you can have a bunch of features. And I agree with you,

01:33:12 ◼   ► I don't think Apple would do it in this way, but I think extensibility and the

01:33:15 ◼   ► way they've the creative ways they've been using it and it's

01:33:18 ◼   ► underpinning a lot of technologies in iOS 9. Like the the game recording, for

01:33:23 ◼   ► example, is run through an extension so the game has no idea what you're

01:33:25 ◼   ► recording and no access to your movie. But that could easily be split out into

01:33:28 ◼   ► a separate screen recording functionality.

01:33:31 ◼   ► I think that's sort of that future that we're going to where we're not going to be bound

01:33:35 ◼   ► by these binary blobs on our screens anymore.

01:33:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:38 ◼   ► Here's—I found it in my notes.

01:33:39 ◼   ► It's called Android Instant Apps.

01:33:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:42 ◼   ► And one of the things that's interesting about me is just the big picture that it is

01:33:45 ◼   ► a full embrace of the native app as an important thing by Google, who's known as a web company.

01:33:52 ◼   ► Yes.

01:33:53 ◼   ► It's just to me, it's a tacit acknowledgement that native apps are better than web apps.

01:33:59 ◼   ► Because this is a way that native apps are getting a lot more webby, to put it one way.

01:34:05 ◼   ► Where you don't, the same way that you don't have to download, you don't install a web page.

01:34:10 ◼   ► You just go to the URL and it loads. This is the same thing. You don't have to worry about installing an app.

01:34:14 ◼   ► You just tap a URL and a part of the app just instantly loads.

01:34:18 ◼   ► loads. And it's an instant, you know, to me it's just tacit acknowledgement that

01:34:22 ◼   ► native apps are superior on, especially on mobile devices. And I think, I don't

01:34:30 ◼   ► know if they announced it, but I think there was that whole thing about Android

01:34:32 ◼   ► apps on Chrome as well. And what does that mean? Because Chrome to me was like

01:34:36 ◼   ► the most Google of operating systems. It was a cloud-first web-centric operating

01:34:39 ◼   ► system, but you start running Android apps and what does that mean about the

01:34:42 ◼   ► future of those cloud-centric web apps? Yeah, well I think it's, maybe it's wrong

01:34:47 ◼   ► to describe that as the most googly. It's the most webby. It's the, you know, and there's a lot of

01:34:52 ◼   ► people, and for a lot of years it seemed like Google as a company was sort of dominated by

01:34:58 ◼   ► people who have that, "Hey, the web is the future, you know, everything's going to run in a browser

01:35:02 ◼   ► tab eventually" mindset. And I think that what we're seeing is that Google is, that that's no

01:35:08 ◼   ► longer true of Google. Yeah, here it is. So Chromebooks will be able to run Android apps

01:35:13 ◼   ► when the feature arrives later this year.

01:35:15 ◼   ► And that to me is really, really interesting.

01:35:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I wonder though how well that's gonna work

01:35:21 ◼   ► with the, 'cause to, it's been a while

01:35:25 ◼   ► since I've tried an Android tablet,

01:35:26 ◼   ► but it just seems to me like so many Android apps

01:35:29 ◼   ► are meant to be run, only meant to be run on phones.

01:35:33 ◼   ► I mean, I guess what they could do is just open,

01:35:36 ◼   ► like show a phone size slice of the Chromebook,

01:35:41 ◼   ► just make like a little cell phone dimension window?

01:35:45 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:35:46 ◼   ► 'Cause they don't really have windows, they just have tabs.

01:35:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, there's been companies

01:35:51 ◼   ► that have been trying to do stuff like this for a while.

01:35:52 ◼   ► Like there was a rumor that WebOS was gonna run

01:35:54 ◼   ► on HP computers when they first bought the company,

01:35:56 ◼   ► and that didn't really go anywhere.

01:35:57 ◼   ► But this is, I think again to your point,

01:36:00 ◼   ► it's like there's still things that native apps do

01:36:03 ◼   ► that web-based technologies don't do.

01:36:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, all right, before we wrap up,

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01:38:28 ◼   ► for the long term, go to Wealthfront.com/the-talk-show. My thanks to them.

01:38:34 ◼   ► Anything else that you noticed at Google I/O?

01:38:37 ◼   ► Well, I had this sort of general feeling when I was watching this, and I don't know if I'll have the same feeling at WWDC,

01:38:44 ◼   ► that we're sort of getting to this point where we're getting most of the functionality we need out of these devices,

01:38:50 ◼   ► and the announcements that are being made are, you know, they're not startling technologies anymore.

01:38:54 ◼   ► It's like the first time you saw the App Store, the first time you saw Siri, or the first time you saw some of the multi-touch technologies.

01:39:01 ◼   ► They were just so different than what we've seen before.

01:39:04 ◼   ► And now we're seeing things that are either filling in the gaps that other vendors make

01:39:08 ◼   ► that maybe they don't have already, or they're things that just build on.

01:39:12 ◼   ► And maybe bots and machine learning are the big things now, but they're sort of factored

01:39:16 ◼   ► into apps that we know and use already.

01:39:19 ◼   ► And it reminded me of the talk you had, I think it was last week, about iPhone 7 and

01:39:24 ◼   ► the internet is just falling over itself saying, "Oh, it's going to be boring.

01:39:27 ◼   ► It's going to look the same."

01:39:28 ◼   ► I went and looked and the last three Galaxy phones all look the same, because we're getting

01:39:31 ◼   ► to a point where we know how a phone should look, and if Apple wanted to, they can make

01:39:35 ◼   ► a triangle.

01:39:36 ◼   ► It wouldn't be boring, but it would be stupid to use.

01:39:39 ◼   ► So I just wonder how much of this is really going to be exciting as the very early days

01:39:43 ◼   ► or the frontier days of mobile technology, and how much we're going to complain about

01:39:47 ◼   ► boredom when really we're getting just exactly what we need now.

01:39:50 ◼   ► I think there's a huge chunk of the technology press, and not just the people who write about

01:39:57 ◼   ► but some of the enthusiasts who follow this stuff, who have a just a childlike attention

01:40:04 ◼   ► span and a need for novelty that is, has bears no relation to the general public and it's

01:40:14 ◼   ► and they miss the forest for the trees really because it's there's so much that is interesting

01:40:19 ◼   ► on these devices if you dig into them and get into the details and so many people just

01:40:25 ◼   ► want to, here, just show me what it looks like and let me see if it looks new or not.

01:40:29 ◼   ► And if it doesn't, then it's boring. And it's just absurd. And other products aren't like

01:40:33 ◼   ► that. This is a sign that it's, and of course there was in the early years that, of course

01:40:38 ◼   ► the iPhone changed more dramatically in the first five years, you know, when it would

01:40:42 ◼   ► go from like the 3GS to the iPhone 4. I mean, it was a huge, really dramatic, just look

01:40:49 ◼   ► at the device physical change. It went from non-retina to retina, it went to a flat back

01:40:55 ◼   ► with the antenna on the outside of the sides.

01:40:58 ◼   ► Well, we're not going to see changes like that anymore,

01:41:01 ◼   ► because it's becoming closer to--

01:41:03 ◼   ► they've gotten it down, and they know what form factor it wants to be.

01:41:06 ◼   ► And just look at the car industry.

01:41:10 ◼   ► The new Porsche 911 comes out, and nobody who follows cars says,

01:41:14 ◼   ► oh my god, it looks just like last year's 911.

01:41:17 ◼   ► It's ridiculous.

01:41:19 ◼   ► And when somebody like Blackberry did the Blackberry Passport, which

01:41:22 ◼   ► was a big square phone, and a bunch of people said, oh,

01:41:24 ◼   ► Blackberry is willing to take risks. It looks different and then nobody bought it and nobody used it because we

01:41:29 ◼   ► We say we want these things, but we don't it's like why McDonald's is so popular and the thing that's you know Apple

01:41:36 ◼   ► Of course

01:41:36 ◼   ► They're working on phones that have a higher screen to the casing ratio and they'll ship them eventually

01:41:41 ◼   ► but you read some of the articles and they're just like delete the

01:41:44 ◼   ► bezels and double-size the battery and that's not what Apple has to do to be a successful iPhone 7 and then you open up I

01:41:50 ◼   ► I fix it and you show them all the technology in this phone

01:41:54 ◼   ► and you're like, what do you want them to do again?

01:41:56 ◼   ► Yeah, just cut off the vessels on the top and bottom.

01:41:58 ◼   ► Okay, but what about these parts of the phone?

01:42:01 ◼   ► Where are they gonna go?

01:42:02 ◼   ► Are you chopping off all the battery that's in there

01:42:05 ◼   ► and all the sensors that are in there?

01:42:07 ◼   ► Are you gonna compact them down,

01:42:08 ◼   ► just push them and hope that they somehow fit in anyway?

01:42:11 ◼   ► These aren't rational, well thought out arguments

01:42:13 ◼   ► that are being made.

01:42:14 ◼   ► They're sort of very emotional and very superficial.

01:42:17 ◼   ► And I'm wondering how much we're gonna have to put up

01:42:19 ◼   ► that frankly, because I'm not looking forward to September.

01:42:26 ◼   ► I don't know either, and it is, if the iPhone, I don't want to get lost in the woods on iPhone

01:42:31 ◼   ► 7 speculation, but if it's true as widely leaked so far by the things that have leaked

01:42:37 ◼   ► out of the supply chain, that the iPhone, the next iPhone, you know, we keep calling

01:42:42 ◼   ► it the 7, I don't know that they're going to call it the iPhone 7, especially if it

01:42:45 ◼   ► does look so similar to the iPhone 6 and 6s. But if it does largely look like the 6 and 6s,

01:42:50 ◼   ► it will be new because this will be the first time they've stuck with a general form factor for

01:42:57 ◼   ► three products, you know, three years in a row. So that is new territory. But I really do think

01:43:04 ◼   ► over every single year, every one of the S years so far, I've seen people, and

01:43:14 ◼   ► people not trying to be jerks, not trying to be clickbait, just readers or just people

01:43:21 ◼   ► on Twitter who say, "Man, I don't think that they're going to sell a lot of these because

01:43:24 ◼   ► it looks just like last year's."

01:43:26 ◼   ► But normal people don't buy a new iPhone every year.

01:43:29 ◼   ► I just can't repeat that enough.

01:43:31 ◼   ► And I almost think that every two years is starting to become a stretch, that people

01:43:36 ◼   ► just don't buy new $700 phones every two years.

01:43:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I went back and looked because I remember

01:43:44 ◼   ► this board now in narrative and it was the iPhone 5.

01:43:47 ◼   ► And the iPhone 5 rebuilt the iPhone from the atom up.

01:43:50 ◼   ► It went to the bigger screen, it had the chamfered bay.

01:43:53 ◼   ► Apple didn't have to, they spent an awful lot of money

01:43:55 ◼   ► basically rebuilding that entire phone

01:43:56 ◼   ► and people said, "Oh, it's still a round rect."

01:43:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, new aspect ratio.

01:44:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, boring, a round rect.

01:44:02 ◼   ► I don't care about LTE, I don't care about the camera,

01:44:04 ◼   ► I don't care about the screen being 16 by nine,

01:44:06 ◼   ► I don't care about the chamfered edges.

01:44:07 ◼   ► Still a round rect, fail.

01:44:09 ◼   ► I've heard this from so many people at Apple.

01:44:10 ◼   ► It's absolutely institutionalized

01:44:13 ◼   ► in the company's thinking is that they just do,

01:44:17 ◼   ► they don't do new just for the sake of new.

01:44:20 ◼   ► The only reason they change something

01:44:22 ◼   ► is if they're convinced that it's better.

01:44:24 ◼   ► And that's why things like the MacBook

01:44:29 ◼   ► slash PowerBook form factor has been so incredibly stable

01:44:32 ◼   ► since the titanium PowerBook,

01:44:35 ◼   ► which was like what, like 2001 or something?

01:44:37 ◼   ► I mean, it's very close to like the Porsche 911 of Apple, is the "What does a pro laptop

01:44:48 ◼   ► look like?"

01:44:49 ◼   ► I mean, if you took the Titanium original, which is the first one that went in this direction,

01:44:54 ◼   ► and compared it to today's MacBook Pro, you're going to be blown away by how thin and light

01:44:59 ◼   ► the MacBook Pro is, and how much better the unibody casing is than the Titanium one in

01:45:07 ◼   ► in particular where the seams really kind of you know with wear and tear started to fall apart

01:45:11 ◼   ► it's better in so many ways but year over year there was never like a radical wow they've totally

01:45:19 ◼   ► changed the way the the macbook or power book looks and can you imagine reporters going oh

01:45:23 ◼   ► another clamshell boring right exactly it's people are you know they're just it's very childish the

01:45:29 ◼   ► desire for radical new form factors because it's just not unless you can do better um yeah and

01:45:36 ◼   ► And there's so many features that are better that are actually worthy of our time and attention.

01:45:40 ◼   ► It reminds me a bit of the smart battery case debacle from last December where people reviewed

01:45:46 ◼   ► it and they didn't ask any questions.

01:45:48 ◼   ► They just did things like, oh, this is a capacity as listed.

01:45:51 ◼   ► Like we found out the capacity of this battery and based on the price that other people charge

01:45:55 ◼   ► for their batteries, this is expensive.

01:45:58 ◼   ► Or oh, we think it looks ugly because it has a hump.

01:46:01 ◼   ► All these, and nobody asked, like I asked immediately because the design was really

01:46:04 ◼   ► different is why did you do this?

01:46:06 ◼   ► And they were happy to answer and I'm assuming they'd answer anybody on those questions.

01:46:10 ◼   ► And it turns out it does things like not making your phone think it's plugged into the wall

01:46:15 ◼   ► so it doesn't turn on all the networking features that it does when it believes it has unlimited

01:46:19 ◼   ► power.

01:46:20 ◼   ► And it carefully goes around the antennas so that they don't get blocked because when

01:46:24 ◼   ► the antennas are blocked everything fires up and has to use a lot more power to make

01:46:27 ◼   ► a connection which defeats the purpose of having a battery case.

01:46:30 ◼   ► And they put the word "smart" in the name but so much of the coverage was so incredibly

01:46:34 ◼   ► superficial that it really embarrassed me as someone who works in the industry.

01:46:39 ◼   ► And I just worry that we're getting more and more in that direction.

01:46:42 ◼   ► I've seen people with those out and about, too. I've seen a fair, you know, because

01:46:46 ◼   ► it's a fairly distinctive design and you can, if somebody's walking and using their

01:46:50 ◼   ► phone on the sidewalk, it's, you know, the back of the phone is actually what you see.

01:46:54 ◼   ► And so I've definitely seen enough of them.

01:46:56 ◼   ► There's a ton of them on campus. I mean, they really like them. And these are not

01:46:59 ◼   ► people who will suffer poor technology lightly.

01:47:01 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:47:02 ◼   ► - I'm still, I'm so surprised that they're only available

01:47:04 ◼   ► in black and white.

01:47:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:47:06 ◼   ► - Like I kind of wondered at the origin, you know,