The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I don't even know where to start. What do you want to start with?

00:00:02 ◼   ► Johnny Ive.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Johnny Ive. I guess that's probably historically the biggest news of the week. So we just talk about our new black watches

00:00:10 ◼   ► So Monday Memorial Day US holiday I

00:00:20 ◼   ► Was just I

00:00:25 ◼   ► I so did not know what to make sense of this when it hit.

00:00:27 ◼   ► A story came out in the Telegraph in the United Kingdom,

00:00:32 ◼   ► written by Stephen Fry, who, though I don't,

00:00:37 ◼   ► I have some complaints about the article,

00:00:39 ◼   ► is a wonderful, you know,

00:00:41 ◼   ► one of the world's most beloved figures.

00:00:46 ◼   ► I mean, he's a comedian, actor, writer,

00:00:48 ◼   ► long-time Apple fan, wrote a profile,

00:00:52 ◼   ► and I guess you'd call it a profile?

00:00:54 ◼   ► I don't know, even the headline is weird.

00:00:56 ◼   ► The headline is when Stephen Fry met Johnny Ive,

00:00:59 ◼   ► the self-confessed tech geek,

00:01:01 ◼   ► talks to Apple's newly promoted chief design officer.

00:01:05 ◼   ► In an exclusive interview in which Ive's promotion

00:01:09 ◼   ► is revealed for the first time,

00:01:11 ◼   ► Stephen Fry meets Johnny Ive and his boss,

00:01:13 ◼   ► Apple chief executive Tim Cook,

00:01:15 ◼   ► to talk spaceships, design, and Steve Jobs.

00:01:17 ◼   ► And so, you know.

00:01:23 ◼   ► So part of the news, it's sort of a first person account of hanging out with Johnny

00:01:27 ◼   ► Ive and Tim Cook, which in and of itself is interesting, but to me, and the part that's

00:01:31 ◼   ► just odd to me is that this is how Apple chose to unveil the, what would you call it, the

00:01:40 ◼   ► executive change, which is that Johnny Ive has been promoted from senior vice president

00:01:44 ◼   ► of design to chief design officer and two of his lieutenants, Richard Haworth and Alan

00:01:53 ◼   ► and

00:02:15 ◼   ► time in the industrial design department there. They're a very close-knit team, very involved

00:02:21 ◼   ► team and Alan Dye came over with iOS 7 which is just a couple of years and it's I mean it's a

00:02:27 ◼   ► super fascinating topic to talk about because the dynamic of ID is that they all did work together

00:02:31 ◼   ► for so long and were so used to collaborating but with HI Johnny Ive was new to it and he needed

00:02:37 ◼   ► someone who was a strong collaborator in UI but he didn't go with any of the traditional like Greg

00:02:42 ◼   ► Christie team, he went with Alan Dye for marketing and then had to collaborate because he doesn't

00:02:49 ◼   ► draw pixels as far as I know. Yeah, Greg Christie is an interesting, you know, I don't, and that's

00:02:54 ◼   ► one of the reasons I wanted to have you on talk about this because I feel like you're a little

00:02:57 ◼   ► juiced in your, at least your mental Rolodex is a little bit more up to date than mine on some of

00:03:03 ◼   ► the names and stuff like that, but Greg Christie is a great example like where, I mean, I don't

00:03:08 ◼   ► I don't even remember what his title was, but I remember, certainly, they don't tell

00:03:13 ◼   ► you, one of the weird things about WWDC is that they don't tell you who's presenting

00:03:19 ◼   ► until you go to the session or until you start playing the session. And there is a credit

00:03:24 ◼   ► that tells you who it is who's talking to you, but in advance they don't tell you.

00:03:28 ◼   ► And sometimes who is giving the presentation is actually more of an indication as to what

00:03:33 ◼   ► the subject is going to be than the title of the session.

00:03:36 ◼   ► Absolutely. I think I last saw Greg Christie. I don't know if he did anything last year,

00:03:39 ◼   ► but I saw him do the big presentation on how they designed photos for iOS a couple years

00:03:43 ◼   ► ago. Yes, I remember that one. Right. And it just

00:03:45 ◼   ► because it just so happened that, you know, the user interface stuff was always more interesting

00:03:49 ◼   ► to me and always a little bit more, you know, up my, in my wheelhouse as one might say.

00:03:57 ◼   ► I almost said in my wheelbarrow. In my wheelhouse, as one would say. I wound up in Greg Christie-led

00:04:05 ◼   ► many times over the years. I think I seem to recall a long time ago there was even

00:04:09 ◼   ► like one that was more like a panel discussion, like stuff that they don't

00:04:14 ◼   ► really do at WWDC anymore. But yeah, Greg Christie was from back in the

00:04:18 ◼   ► day when there was like a general HI team that was sort of, I guess, really

00:04:24 ◼   ► just reported its jobs. It wasn't really part of any kind of

00:04:31 ◼   ► chain.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Yeah, as far as I know, I mean, HI was always sort of elevated at Apple beyond where they

00:04:36 ◼   ► would have been, like maybe another company that would have been slotted in under some

00:04:38 ◼   ► VP of some software product division somewhere.

00:04:43 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:44 ◼   ► But, you know, and as I've sort of written out, just dipping my toes in, part of this

00:04:50 ◼   ► is that one of the reasons Johnny Ive wanted to bring user interface design under his design

00:04:57 ◼   ► team's umbrella is that he wasn't exactly happy with all of the direction that interface

00:05:04 ◼   ► design had gone at Apple in recent years or in the years prior. I mean, because obviously

00:05:09 ◼   ► it was a change. I mean, whether you love the iOS 7 and Yosemite looks or whether you

00:05:14 ◼   ► don't like them or whether you're ambivalent about them, nobody can deny that there was

00:05:18 ◼   ► a shift in aesthetics.

00:05:20 ◼   ► Absolutely. And that, I mean, I think it feels like Scott Forestall gets blamed for a lot

00:05:24 ◼   ► of that but you know it was Steve Jobs airplane that had the famous stitch leather texture

00:05:29 ◼   ► that he wanted. He was a big proponent of that sort of affordance and Greg Christie

00:05:33 ◼   ► and I'm blanking on the gentleman's last name Baz who testified on all the Samsung

00:05:37 ◼   ► lawsuits and then subsequently left Apple. They were intimately involved in the early

00:05:41 ◼   ► years of the iPhone design that whole team and that whole focus and he really did feel

00:05:45 ◼   ► like he wanted something new when he came in.

00:05:48 ◼   ► Right. And Alan Dye came from, in Apple terms, MarCom. Does that widespread the industry?

00:05:57 ◼   ► I always thought that was sort of an Appleism.

00:05:59 ◼   ► No, I used to work in MarCom. So for me, it's always been normal in an enterprise. And I

00:06:04 ◼   ► think you and I both worked in print design for a while. And I always found that sort

00:06:10 ◼   ► of background. And I know Mark Edwards did that too. And I always found that sort of

00:06:13 ◼   ► background really educational when you started moving into digital design.

00:06:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:06:18 ◼   ► And anyway, Greg Christie left Apple.

00:06:21 ◼   ► Not immediately, but he left in their Panzareno story

00:06:27 ◼   ► from April 9th, 2014,

00:06:29 ◼   ► veteran designer Greg Christie departs.

00:06:31 ◼   ► And I don't know that it's as simple,

00:06:33 ◼   ► I don't know the story there,

00:06:34 ◼   ► but I don't, you know, whether it was, you know,

00:06:38 ◼   ► just, well, you picked him instead of me, then I'm out.

00:06:40 ◼   ► You know, I don't know.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Or if it was just, you know,

00:06:42 ◼   ► but Christie had been there for a long time,

00:06:43 ◼   ► and it's, you know, maybe, you know,

00:06:46 ◼   ► He could just put his finger in the wind until it was time to go. But yes, and there was definitely it was not exactly universally

00:06:52 ◼   ► Seen as the right decision within Apple. Well, I think that's absolutely true

00:06:57 ◼   ► I think you said that really well and there was a joke around the time that you know

00:06:59 ◼   ► We mentioned was gonna hate the direction. Yes

00:07:02 ◼   ► Yeah

00:07:02 ◼   ► but there's a lot of people who fell into that camp of liking rich textures and rich designs and

00:07:08 ◼   ► They they they had to be on board at my understanding is there was a really big meeting where this whole direction was

00:07:13 ◼   ► announced and not everybody was happy with it, but at the same time you have people like

00:07:17 ◼   ► Greg Christine you have people like army Lamora who?

00:07:20 ◼   ► Literally did forced marathons marathons of sprints for years and years and years and I think that comes to a point where you just you need

00:07:27 ◼   ► to stop

00:07:28 ◼   ► Especially if you're at that intense level of doing iOS and a yearly grind schedule. Yeah

00:07:37 ◼   ► Yeah, so I think bottom line is because a whole worth is you know industrial design has been under Johnny's group

00:07:44 ◼   ► I mean that was in fact that was Johnny's group. I think yes in the old days Johnny's group really was just industrial design

00:07:50 ◼   ► and

00:07:52 ◼   ► Holworth has been part of that and clearly, you know

00:07:55 ◼   ► Johnny trusts him and they've gotten along and that whole group has by all accounts that I've ever read has always been very tight-knit

00:08:02 ◼   ► And has gotten along

00:08:04 ◼   ► Extremely well that there's it's not just that they do good work, but that there's a true camaraderie

00:08:09 ◼   ► I think that's been part of the secret of keeping because a lot of creative people

00:08:13 ◼   ► They don't go very long term bill Watterson famously retired from Calvin and Hobbes and some people like George Lucas

00:08:19 ◼   ► They end up making prequels which is not the best of their work. And I think the relationship that ID group had

00:08:24 ◼   ► when Steve Jobs came back to Apple

00:08:26 ◼   ► They were off somewhere in the boonies and he brought them to IL to and set them up and made them so important

00:08:31 ◼   ► but that group seems to have sort of kept them all fed

00:08:33 ◼   ► and energized and alive for many, many years.

00:08:36 ◼   ► - Right.

00:08:37 ◼   ► It's the holiest of holies, the inner sanctum.

00:08:40 ◼   ► I mean, that is the center of Infinite Loop,

00:08:45 ◼   ► is their design lab.

00:08:47 ◼   ► I mean, maybe not, it's not the physical center, obviously,

00:08:49 ◼   ► but it's the place that the least,

00:08:52 ◼   ► fewest number of people have ever seen.

00:08:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, very few key cards grant access therein.

00:08:56 ◼   ► - Right.

00:08:59 ◼   ► But prior to this shakeup where Forstall was ousted

00:09:04 ◼   ► and UI design was placed under Johnny Ive in that group,

00:09:10 ◼   ► prior to that, there were HI,

00:09:13 ◼   ► there were people who, there was like an HI group,

00:09:15 ◼   ► but then there were also like,

00:09:16 ◼   ► it was spread about where somebody might go off on a team

00:09:20 ◼   ► and then they were, like I, for example,

00:09:22 ◼   ► like with, I think with the original iPhone

00:09:24 ◼   ► and you correct me if I'm wrong,

00:09:25 ◼   ► 'cause I could very much be wrong on this

00:09:28 ◼   ► as a basic story, but the basic gist was

00:09:31 ◼   ► when they committed to doing the iPhone,

00:09:33 ◼   ► Forstall was placed in charge of the software

00:09:38 ◼   ► and Forstall went around the company

00:09:40 ◼   ► cherry picking designers who he wanted

00:09:44 ◼   ► and would say, and this part is true,

00:09:47 ◼   ► I don't know if he did it to everybody,

00:09:49 ◼   ► but at least for some people it was,

00:09:50 ◼   ► I'm putting together a team to do something

00:09:53 ◼   ► and it's gonna be the greatest thing in your career

00:09:56 ◼   ► and I cannot tell you what it is,

00:09:57 ◼   ► but if you wanna join, you know,

00:09:59 ◼   ► you'll work harder than you ever have,

00:10:01 ◼   ► but it's gonna be great.

00:10:03 ◼   ► Are you in or out?

00:10:03 ◼   ► And if they said they're in, then they were on the team.

00:10:05 ◼   ► But then it wasn't like there was this one interface group

00:10:10 ◼   ► that part of what they did is put together an iPhone team.

00:10:13 ◼   ► The iPhone team had its own interface group,

00:10:15 ◼   ► cherry picked from around the company.

00:10:18 ◼   ► And that it was like that with other projects too,

00:10:20 ◼   ► maybe to a lesser degree because the iPhone was,

00:10:23 ◼   ► you know, a major, major endeavor.

00:10:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true.

00:10:27 ◼   ► I think Nitin Ganatra on debug was talking about how they had to all be disclosed by

00:10:32 ◼   ► Steve Jobs and when he wasn't around he would have to go into one room, look at the

00:10:36 ◼   ► designs and then walk out to the undisclosed designers and sort of describe to them what

00:10:39 ◼   ► they had to do.

00:10:42 ◼   ► Which is, it makes sense, I can see how it makes sense to Steve Jobs and it makes, you

00:10:47 ◼   ► know, and it obviously worked for Apple to some degree but obviously it was not a very,

00:10:53 ◼   ► There was an ad hoc nature to user interface design, to software design.

00:10:57 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

00:10:58 ◼   ► They had limited design resources, and they had to be shared and pooled.

00:11:02 ◼   ► It sounds like a really grueling project to get out.

00:11:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:11:05 ◼   ► On the one side, I think you could argue, maybe it's one of those things where it

00:11:09 ◼   ► doesn't have to be either/or.

00:11:10 ◼   ► They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

00:11:12 ◼   ► On the one side, you could say that what Jonny Ive orchestrated in 2011 with Forrestal going

00:11:17 ◼   ► out and all of UI design being placed under him and picking new people to run it and setting

00:11:25 ◼   ► a new style.

00:11:26 ◼   ► You could say that it was a power grab, that it was an expansion of just ego and an expansion

00:11:32 ◼   ► of his power.

00:11:33 ◼   ► But I think in a very reasonable sense, you could say it was a growing up.

00:11:40 ◼   ► It made the process of UI design much more orderly within Apple because it wasn't spread

00:11:46 ◼   ► about where each individual project might peel off its own team.

00:11:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.

00:11:52 ◼   ► And the thing that's interesting to me is Scott Forsloh was widely known as, I don't

00:11:55 ◼   ► know how widely known, but it was known that if Steve Jobs said, "I want leather for

00:11:59 ◼   ► this," if Scott Forsloh wasn't around, the designer would almost lose his mind because

00:12:03 ◼   ► it would just be no, no, no, no, no.

00:12:04 ◼   ► And he'd burn through 40, 50, 100 different designs.

00:12:07 ◼   ► But if Scott was there, he could say, "Steve will pick one of these three," and Steve

00:12:10 ◼   ► would pick one of those three.

00:12:11 ◼   ► And that saved everyone a tremendous amount of work.

00:12:14 ◼   ► But in an Apple where there's no Steve Jobs, the value of that for HI's or the combination,

00:12:19 ◼   ► the alchemy of that is very different.

00:12:22 ◼   ► And then you have at the same time someone like Johnny Ives sitting in the wings who

00:12:25 ◼   ► was on the record.

00:12:26 ◼   ► He'd said before he didn't like the skeuomorphic design.

00:12:29 ◼   ► One of the arguably the best designer in the world who's not allowed to take control or

00:12:32 ◼   ► to influence, to put his tastes on the software that runs on his hardware.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And then Tim Cook comes in and it always reminded me of what Steve Jobs did when he returned

00:12:41 ◼   ► to Apple when he said desktop, laptop, professional consumer. And he came in and he just said

00:12:46 ◼   ► design services, hardware, and software. And he made Apple very clean that way.

00:12:52 ◼   ► In a way that it didn't need to be under jobs. And again, I think that emphasizes that

00:12:57 ◼   ► part of what made Forrestal talented and essential and so important to the history of, you know,

00:13:03 ◼   ► Especially iOS, you know, you know the iPhone and iPad

00:13:06 ◼   ► Wasn't just that he was good manager and by all accounts

00:13:11 ◼   ► He was that he shipped OS is on time and there, you know, some people would argue they were more reliable

00:13:17 ◼   ► etc

00:13:20 ◼   ► But and an uncanny ability he seemed to have is that he seemed it

00:13:26 ◼   ► Wasn't just that he had good taste. It was that he knew Steve's taste and that his you know

00:13:32 ◼   ► And one of the profiles, something that was written, one of the pieces that was written

00:13:36 ◼   ► about Forstall was, it might have been an unnamed person who was complaining that like, you know,

00:13:42 ◼   ► they'd present stuff to Forstall and Forstall would say, "Steve wouldn't like that." And then

00:13:46 ◼   ► that was, all he had to do was say, "Steve wouldn't like it and that's enough to bounce you back to

00:13:49 ◼   ► the drawing board." And that it got tiresome over the time. But I think the fact that he

00:13:55 ◼   ► lasted so long as a direct report to Steve Jobs in that role shows that he was right. That he knew

00:14:02 ◼   ► knew what he would like and what he wouldn't like.

00:14:06 ◼   ► In a company where you have something like Steve Jobs, that's an essential skill to get

00:14:09 ◼   ► anything done.

00:14:11 ◼   ► And we've both heard the story is like, make that blue more beautiful.

00:14:14 ◼   ► That can burn hours and weeks from a designer.

00:14:17 ◼   ► If you can shortcut that process with someone like Scott Forest in the middle, that's immensely

00:14:20 ◼   ► valuable.

00:14:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:22 ◼   ► Because you couldn't just, it wasn't like you were going to get a chance at 10 a.m.

00:14:27 ◼   ► a Tuesday when he says you know no that's not good enough you don't get a

00:14:33 ◼   ► chance at 10 a.m. the next day to also present to him you've got to wait you

00:14:38 ◼   ► might be stuck waiting a week or longer before you get your next chance to get

00:14:42 ◼   ► your project in front of him yeah or if there's something that's worth fighting

00:14:45 ◼   ► for and there's been stories you know like like iTunes on Windows was a great

00:14:48 ◼   ► example but there's a lot of smaller examples Scott was somebody who could go

00:14:50 ◼   ► back to Steve and say look I really think we should take another look at

00:14:52 ◼   ► this and then projects that might have otherwise been derailed in a few minutes

00:14:56 ◼   ► Sometimes we gradually get back on track.

00:14:59 ◼   ► - Right, so rather than just merely

00:15:01 ◼   ► and being an arbiter of good taste,

00:15:03 ◼   ► being an arbiter of Steve Jobs' good taste was essential.

00:15:08 ◼   ► And I think, you know, in hindsight,

00:15:14 ◼   ► clearly not very valuable to Apple

00:15:16 ◼   ► after Steve Jobs wasn't there.

00:15:18 ◼   ► - No, 'cause Tim Cook doesn't,

00:15:19 ◼   ► Tim Cook's not, he's not Steve Jobs,

00:15:21 ◼   ► so he doesn't need that service,

00:15:22 ◼   ► and Johnny Ive is, he has peerless taste of his own,

00:15:25 ◼   ► so he doesn't need that service as well.

00:15:27 ◼   ► - Right, different days.

00:15:28 ◼   ► And it does make you wonder in hindsight what some of,

00:15:30 ◼   ► 'cause Ivan and Steve Jobs famously

00:15:34 ◼   ► were actually friends, more than just collaborators,

00:15:37 ◼   ► and ate lunch together all the time.

00:15:39 ◼   ► And it makes you wonder how much feedback Johnny had given

00:15:43 ◼   ► him over the years that was obviously rejected

00:15:46 ◼   ► in terms of trying to steer the user interface

00:15:50 ◼   ► in a direction more palatable to himself

00:15:52 ◼   ► without actually having any kind of actual role in it.

00:15:56 ◼   ► - I think something you said a couple of years ago

00:15:58 ◼   ► was really astute there because the age before retina,

00:16:00 ◼   ► and especially when mobile devices were really new,

00:16:03 ◼   ► swipe to unlock, nobody knew what that was.

00:16:05 ◼   ► So making a giant groove in there

00:16:06 ◼   ► and making a very elaborate button,

00:16:08 ◼   ► it gave you that affordance,

00:16:09 ◼   ► that visual clue of how you had to use that.

00:16:12 ◼   ► And, or Steve would say, you know, this is a database app.

00:16:15 ◼   ► No one cares about that, give it a texture.

00:16:17 ◼   ► And it sounds dumb, but if you're stumbling home,

00:16:19 ◼   ► tired or drunk, and you open up an app

00:16:21 ◼   ► and you're in contacts and there's nothing to tell you which contacts it is, maybe you're

00:16:25 ◼   ► trying to call a cab in Game Center and you just don't know. So there were a lot of usability

00:16:29 ◼   ► reasons and just philosophical reasons why I think that started off, but then as you

00:16:34 ◼   ► transition to retina, that sort of texture doesn't hold up anymore.

00:16:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's a combination. I emphasize that. Years ago, my thought was a lot more

00:16:42 ◼   ► about the retina, non-retina, and that you needed… The other thing was in addition

00:16:47 ◼   ► to just the affordances of knowing what to do and having that slide to unlock, which

00:16:51 ◼   ► is, you know, to me, like, just put that design itself, not even the whole iPhone, but just

00:16:57 ◼   ► put that slide to unlock itself, put that in a museum, because that is—it made people

00:17:07 ◼   ► wow. People wanted to buy the phone just from slide to unlock.

00:17:10 ◼   ► And it taught you how to use it.

00:17:12 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:15 ◼   ► My thought a couple of years ago was simply about the fact that even at 163 pixels per

00:17:20 ◼   ► inch, which was pretty high for the time in 2007, it still wasn't that high.

00:17:26 ◼   ► It was only high compared to the 120 to 130-ish pixels per inch we had on our Macs at the

00:17:32 ◼   ► time, that you needed to use those sort of Photoshop-style user interface designs just

00:17:40 ◼   ► to make it look good so that as soon as you looked at it you thought, "Ooh, that looks

00:17:43 ◼   ► cool," because something like iOS 7 just doesn't look that great on non-retina. There's nothing

00:17:51 ◼   ► about it that makes you go, "Wow."

00:17:54 ◼   ► I think that the affordance stuff was important too, because I think the basic idea with the

00:17:58 ◼   ► original iPhone was that – Steve Jobs used the analogy when he introduced it that, "Here's

00:18:09 ◼   ► these other phones of the time and look what they've got. They've got all these buttons.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Here's the thing about all these hardware buttons. It reduces the amount of space you

00:18:16 ◼   ► have. Now the screen's only this big. Then number two, a year from now if we come up

00:18:21 ◼   ► with this great idea for a new feature, we're stuck with the buttons we had already come

00:18:25 ◼   ► up with a year ago. We've solved this problem years and years ago. It's called bitmap screen.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Then you can make all the buttons you want whenever you want and only have the buttons

00:18:34 ◼   ► that you need right now on screen. So we'll do the whole thing will just be a screen and

00:18:40 ◼   ► we'll make the buttons in software. But I think that the basic idea was make the buttons

00:18:45 ◼   ► look like fake hardware and that in every single app it's like a dedicated device

00:18:52 ◼   ► simulating a dedicated hardware device for that feature.

00:18:55 ◼   ► Yeah and the Braun calculator is maybe a famous example of that. It's people the thought

00:19:01 ◼   ► was that people wouldn't know how to approach just a blank piece of glass and if you made

00:19:03 ◼   ► it look like something they were familiar with, at least they'd start tapping around

00:19:07 ◼   ► and then discover how it worked.

00:19:08 ◼   ► Right, or the call recorder.

00:19:11 ◼   ► Yes.

00:19:12 ◼   ► I know, that wasn't in the first OS, but certainly was in one of the early ones.

00:19:20 ◼   ► The compass is another one.

00:19:22 ◼   ► Reel to reel in the podcast app was probably the last big example of that.

00:19:26 ◼   ► Right, and even the ones that didn't have an, something like mail, which didn't really

00:19:31 ◼   ► have like a brown style gadget that you could compare it to.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Just the fact that there were these little 3D effects between the keyboard and the content

00:19:44 ◼   ► area, it just ever so gently suggested that this is what it would look like if you had

00:19:49 ◼   ► a hardware device that was just for email.

00:19:52 ◼   ► And the original, at least the first versions, they didn't composite anywhere nearly as well

00:19:55 ◼   ► as later versions, which is why we didn't get wallpaper until I think iOS 3 or I think

00:19:58 ◼   ► iOS 4 actually.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So they had a lot fewer things they could do visually.

00:20:03 ◼   ► - Right, well, the basic idea,

00:20:06 ◼   ► I always thought with the original home screen

00:20:09 ◼   ► was to make it look like at the home screen level,

00:20:13 ◼   ► by having just a black wallpaper,

00:20:15 ◼   ► the idea was you've got this device

00:20:17 ◼   ► that is sort of like a calculator

00:20:19 ◼   ► where each icon is a button, right?

00:20:21 ◼   ► It's like a dial pad where instead of having numbers,

00:20:26 ◼   ► right, like an old phone,

00:20:28 ◼   ► the phones that they were replacing, the basic interface was a 123, 456, 789, and a zero

00:20:39 ◼   ► dial pad.

00:20:40 ◼   ► The dial pad on the iPhone was these 11 apps.

00:20:44 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a really good insight.

00:20:46 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:20:47 ◼   ► It was also different than some competitive products when, not initially, but when, for

00:20:52 ◼   ► example, Android would later put widgets on the home screen.

00:20:54 ◼   ► It always felt like Apple never wanted the home screen to be a destination just a gateway, right?

00:20:59 ◼   ► It was just a dial pad where you dial up whichever app you needed the device to transform itself into. Yes, absolutely

00:21:05 ◼   ► So I kind of you know

00:21:10 ◼   ► We go back dialing all the way back to this news about Johnny I've and Greg Christie are not great

00:21:15 ◼   ► Christie, you know, well and I on die and Richard Holworth well and you know guys like Christie leaving

00:21:23 ◼   ► It turned UI design into something that works exactly like industrial design had always worked at Apple

00:21:32 ◼   ► Like and in theory they could have done the same thing by not putting it under Johnny I've but just by picking somebody else like Greg

00:21:38 ◼   ► Christie and setting up

00:21:40 ◼   ► UI design as a separate peer to

00:21:44 ◼   ► Industrial design right they could have named instead of putting it all under Johnny I they could have said Johnny you're still in charge of

00:21:52 ◼   ► Industrial design you design all the hardware and now we've named this guy

00:21:56 ◼   ► could have been great Chrissy could have been anybody else you are like the Johnny I've of

00:22:01 ◼   ► UI design and you'll set up your own lab and you guys will design all the user interfaces

00:22:07 ◼   ► Didn't have to be in one but it you know

00:22:10 ◼   ► But I do think that either way it was the right way to go moving forward without jobs at the helm

00:22:15 ◼   ► As CEO as somebody has to be in charge of the taste

00:22:20 ◼   ► Yes, some you know it had to be done

00:22:22 ◼   ► Yeah, no

00:22:24 ◼   ► I think that's very astute and I think the you could see clearly that it right away the big the first big project that came

00:22:30 ◼   ► Out was iOS 7 and when they did the advertising for the iPhone 5c

00:22:34 ◼   ► They had better together as their slogan

00:22:37 ◼   ► They wanted to show that the pallets matched over that the hardware and the software being together was an important thing for them

00:22:42 ◼   ► And that's probably the only reason obviously that had to have been driven by Johnny I but that that was the benefit of putting all that

00:22:49 ◼   ► stuff together.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:51 ◼   ► And I think the watch is the culmination of that because say what you want about the watch

00:22:55 ◼   ► and what you know whether you like the you know where you think the watch stands in terms

00:23:00 ◼   ► of you know is it better than the original iPhone is it better than the original iPad

00:23:04 ◼   ► whatever I don't think to me there's no doubt that the hardware and software integration

00:23:10 ◼   ► are tighter with the watch than any any other device and talking about UI design in particular

00:23:16 ◼   ► that the UI just doesn't make any sense

00:23:20 ◼   ► except in the context of this watch.

00:23:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it is something brand new,

00:23:25 ◼   ► and it's also a category where traditionally

00:23:26 ◼   ► Apple had 10 years of smartphones to look at,

00:23:28 ◼   ► or 10 years of tablets, of Windows tablet PC to look at.

00:23:32 ◼   ► Watches were still very new.

00:23:32 ◼   ► You had the Pebble, you had a couple Samsung watches,

00:23:35 ◼   ► but those came later, probably after Apple had to do

00:23:37 ◼   ► a lot of their original concepts for the watch.

00:23:39 ◼   ► So it's a project where Apple had to

00:23:41 ◼   ► not just identify problems and see like this,

00:23:44 ◼   ► We hate this because, and they already loved watches,

00:23:48 ◼   ► but they had to sort of figure out how to make the watch

00:23:49 ◼   ► a computer and not just a digital mechanism anymore.

00:23:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, famously, well, maybe not famously,

00:23:56 ◼   ► maybe people don't know this,

00:23:57 ◼   ► but in the development of the original iPhone,

00:24:02 ◼   ► the Forstall's software team didn't see the prototypes

00:24:06 ◼   ► of the hardware.

00:24:07 ◼   ► They were developing, they knew the size of the screen,

00:24:11 ◼   ► and they obviously knew it was gonna be a touchscreen,

00:24:13 ◼   ► but they didn't get to see what the prototypes look like.

00:24:16 ◼   ► Which is a little bit less important.

00:24:18 ◼   ► I feel like the software team just knowing,

00:24:20 ◼   ► okay, it's a touchscreen that is 320 by 480,

00:24:24 ◼   ► and it's gonna be a piece of glass, touch it.

00:24:26 ◼   ► Them working blind on the hardware

00:24:30 ◼   ► is a little bit less meaningful

00:24:32 ◼   ► than the fact that the hardware team

00:24:34 ◼   ► didn't get to see the software.

00:24:36 ◼   ► I know you know this.

00:24:38 ◼   ► Maybe it was even on eBay where a prototype got out.

00:24:41 ◼   ► There was this super janky looking stand-in OS.

00:24:46 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:24:48 ◼   ► - It was so ugly.

00:24:50 ◼   ► - 'Cause the iPhone was originally purple

00:24:53 ◼   ► and I think that was Skank was the stand-in one.

00:24:56 ◼   ► - We should try to find the link after this.

00:25:00 ◼   ► Skank was like the code name for the stand-in OS?

00:25:03 ◼   ► - I think, I don't know if it's just a stand-in OS

00:25:05 ◼   ► or it's the sort of the development,

00:25:07 ◼   ► stuff that runs all the technical information

00:25:09 ◼   ► that you need to grab from the electronics

00:25:10 ◼   ► to do a lot of things.

00:25:11 ◼   ► - Right, it was sort of like a diagnostic OS,

00:25:15 ◼   ► I guess you could say.

00:25:17 ◼   ► And purposefully did not look good at all.

00:25:20 ◼   ► It was made to look bad so that it wasn't like

00:25:24 ◼   ► they lied to them and said,

00:25:25 ◼   ► "Hey, this is the OS we're making."

00:25:26 ◼   ► They're like, "You guys don't get to see the OS.

00:25:28 ◼   ► "Make the hardware and here's this ugly diagnostic OS

00:25:31 ◼   ► "where you can test to make sure that the WiFi antenna

00:25:35 ◼   ► "is doing what the WiFi antenna is supposed to do,"

00:25:38 ◼   ► et cetera and so forth.

00:25:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think even some of the earlier prototypes

00:25:41 ◼   ► were just components, and I think this has been true

00:25:42 ◼   ► for years, even with iPads, they're just components

00:25:45 ◼   ► literally bolted down on boards.

00:25:47 ◼   ► - Yes, yeah, definitely.

00:25:50 ◼   ► Did you ever see like the early iPod prototype?

00:25:56 ◼   ► - No.

00:25:57 ◼   ► - It's, yeah, it's really big, and it, you know,

00:25:59 ◼   ► clearly was never supposed to fool anybody

00:26:01 ◼   ► into thinking it was the product, but it's, yeah,

00:26:04 ◼   ► it's just like a bunch of things on a board,

00:26:08 ◼   ► there's a dial that you know that was the click wheel but it just looked like a knob you know off

00:26:12 ◼   ► to the side that you would spin around well it's smart because if you have to wait for i mean you

00:26:16 ◼   ► can't you can't have one follow the other you have to be doing both at the same time so you have to

00:26:19 ◼   ► use them in some sort of development state right but i it's it seems very clear to me and i i would

00:26:27 ◼   ► be shocked to find out otherwise because it's with it you know was all one you know johnny i've design

00:26:31 ◼   ► lab but it's it seems very clear to me that the watch was developed with the software and the

00:26:36 ◼   ► the hardware at the same time.

00:26:40 ◼   ► And it seems even beyond that because there is some siloing like you have Kevin Lynch

00:26:43 ◼   ► in charge of the software not Craig Federighi but it also seems like the people who do messaging

00:26:48 ◼   ► for iOS are in touch with the people who are doing it for the watch and there's not sort

00:26:52 ◼   ► of that strict divide that there used to be and that results in all the stuff working

00:26:55 ◼   ► together maybe not perfectly but very well.

00:26:59 ◼   ► Right I do think I think Lynch reports to Federighi though but the idea was that you

00:27:04 ◼   ► know, rather than spread federally thinner than he is that, you know, they needed somebody

00:27:08 ◼   ► who is just going to be, you know, you know, what would they I don't know if he was I don't

00:27:14 ◼   ► know how there's the Apple term, the DRI directly responsible individual, but at least he you

00:27:20 ◼   ► know, somebody has to be the DRI for the OS itself, if not the design of the OS, and the

00:27:25 ◼   ► actual like, it's all coded up, you know, here's the build and the build is written,

00:27:30 ◼   ► know this is the 1.0 for Apple watch and that was Kevin Lynch yeah I think

00:27:35 ◼   ► someone also and this was definitely Scott for so many ways someone has to

00:27:38 ◼   ► have that single act of will to birth something new and it's arguable whether

00:27:41 ◼   ► the same person should mature that product but you you really have to have

00:27:44 ◼   ► that person whose only job it is to make that product launch right so with the

00:27:50 ◼   ► I've stored I I have to admit I'm guilty as charged where I my first read through

00:27:54 ◼   ► of the article was I took a deep breath and thought who does is this the first

00:27:59 ◼   ► step to him going out the door. And it was just like I wrote. And it was like, I read

00:28:06 ◼   ► too much into it, I think. But that whole thing that he was going to travel more, I

00:28:10 ◼   ► really did read at first, my first take, and as I, you know, when I linked to it on Daring

00:28:14 ◼   ► Fireball, I thought that meant he might move back to England. And a lot of that was based

00:28:20 ◼   ► on my recollection of that, of a 2011 story in the London Times that said that while negotiating

00:28:28 ◼   ► a new contract with Apple, I've wanted to be authorized to work from London or wherever

00:28:36 ◼   ► he would live in England, and that Tim Cook and whoever else at Apple was like, "No,

00:28:40 ◼   ► you've got to stay here," and that there was a source of conflict, which in hindsight

00:28:44 ◼   ► was the only one report of it. And then it's one of those things where it seems like there

00:28:48 ◼   ► were a whole bunch of stories about it, but every other story you can find about it is

00:28:53 ◼   ► the London Times is reporting that blah, blah, blah, Johnny, I've wanted to move to England,

00:28:58 ◼   ► there wasn't anybody else who said it. Their source for this was completely anonymous.

00:29:02 ◼   ► It certainly wasn't Johnny Ive. And asking around over, you know, in the last week, it

00:29:08 ◼   ► seems to me like that story was bullshit and was sort of a source of consternation at Apple

00:29:14 ◼   ► at the time because they knew it was bullshit. It was bullshit, but they didn't want to say

00:29:19 ◼   ► that it was bullshit just because they're Apple and they don't talk about such things.

00:29:23 ◼   ► Well, I had the same thought as you initially, just because it was a British paper, it was

00:29:27 ◼   ► Stephen Fry. I think that may have influenced me, but yeah, and not moving back necessarily,

00:29:32 ◼   ► but like if you were to spend the summers there, which is a couple months or three months,

00:29:35 ◼   ► that seemed perfectly logical to me given his new role.

00:29:38 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, that's another factor in it. The fact that it wasn't a UK paper,

00:29:43 ◼   ► the fact that it was, you know, wasn't announced in a press release.

00:29:48 ◼   ► Jared; It was the day the market closed.

00:29:50 ◼   ► I forgot about, and I've since linked to it, I linked to it yesterday on Daring Fireball,

00:29:57 ◼   ► but I forgot that in 2003 Avi Tamanian took a promotion, whether you want to put quotes

00:30:03 ◼   ► around it or not, to a title, "Chief Software Technology Officer," I think, CSTO. I forgot

00:30:17 ◼   ► about that, even though I just reread the story of it in the Becoming Steve Jobs, which—but

00:30:24 ◼   ► the thing that I had forgotten was that the title started with "Chief." I just—because somehow,

00:30:28 ◼   ► like, the four-letter CSTO—like, if they had promoted him to chief technology officer,

00:30:35 ◼   ► just CTO, I would have remembered that in a way that I didn't with chief software technology

00:30:41 ◼   ► officer. Somehow that sounded ceremonial to me right away, and then even the description

00:30:47 ◼   ► of it in the press release where Apple announced it sounded a little bit—it just really—it

00:30:52 ◼   ► almost seemed almost definite that it was sort of a stepping aside.

00:30:55 ◼   ► It was like inventing a title for him.

00:30:57 ◼   ► Yeah. So I kind of—I should have remembered it, but I think in the back of my mind, subconsciously,

00:31:04 ◼   ► I did and that it also fueled my, because it was, you know, that was 2003 and that was

00:31:11 ◼   ► when Bertrand Cerlet, Cerlet, Cerlet?

00:31:13 ◼   ► Jared Ranerelle Yep, Bertrand Cerlet.

00:31:15 ◼   ► Steven

00:31:15 ◼   ► Well, I say Sirlet, Sirlet, Sirlet, Sirlet, and you go yep.

00:31:19 ◼   ► I'm a Quebecer, so I'm doing it wrong.

00:31:21 ◼   ► Alright, Sirlet, Bertrand. I just know him as Bertrand. Everybody called him Bertrand.

00:31:24 ◼   ► So Bertrand got promoted to Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and reported directly to Steve Jobs.

00:31:31 ◼   ► Which I really do think is sort of a key to the difference between Tevainian going to CSTO and Johnny Ive going to Chief Design Officer.

00:31:41 ◼   ► that people who are getting promoted underneath him to take more

00:31:44 ◼   ► responsibility still report directly to I've not to Tim Cook or to somebody else

00:31:50 ◼   ► with the veiny and he was essentially non-essential at that point Steve Jobs

00:31:53 ◼   ► had a direct line of communication through a software stack and it made

00:31:56 ◼   ► Tivani and superfluous and that was not a position that Steve Jobs suffered

00:32:00 ◼   ► lightly right and it's actually kind of an interesting let me see if I can fish

00:32:05 ◼   ► this up here. I have this saved somewhere, I hope. No, maybe not. The gist of it is as told in the

00:32:15 ◼   ► Becoming Steve Jobs that it wasn't necessarily that at the time that he immediately, that

00:32:23 ◼   ► Tevainian really wanted to like, "Hey, ease my way out the door." He really just wanted to get

00:32:27 ◼   ► away from the day-to-day stuff and kind of work on blue sky stuff. But that it just did not work

00:32:34 ◼   ► with the way Steve Jobs worked at the company. So here's the passage from

00:32:40 ◼   ► becoming Steve Jobs. "It was unquestionably a promotion but it turned

00:32:44 ◼   ► out to be a job without much of a portfolio. Tevainian found himself with

00:32:48 ◼   ► little concrete responsibility. He felt out of the loop and realized that his

00:32:52 ◼   ► new role would not work." "Being a pseudo individual staff person working for

00:32:58 ◼   ► Steve doesn't work because he already has all the answers. He didn't like it

00:33:02 ◼   ► when I would be in a meeting where he was reviewing a product and I would have an opinion.

00:33:06 ◼   ► He just didn't like it. And he grew to not like that I could be a senior person like

00:33:10 ◼   ► that without having day-to-day responsibilities to deliver something," he says. Tim Cook,

00:33:16 ◼   ► now Apple CEO, says that he worried about Tevainian leaving and urged Steve in 2004

00:33:21 ◼   ► to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. "Steve

00:33:25 ◼   ► looked at me," Cook remembers, and goes, "I agree he's really smart. But he's decided

00:33:30 ◼   ► he doesn't want to work. I've never found in my whole life that you could convince someone

00:33:35 ◼   ► who doesn't want to work hard to work hard. Another time, this is my favorite part of it,

00:33:40 ◼   ► another time, shortly after Steve had learned that Tevainian had taken up golf, Steve karped

00:33:47 ◼   ► to cook that something was really amiss. Golf, he thundered incredulously. Who has time for golf?

00:33:52 ◼   ► Golf. He famously wouldn't even let people join boards of directors.

00:33:58 ◼   ► They should be too busy with Apple to do that

00:34:00 ◼   ► Well, I've also heard that they used to when they used to have their off-sites

00:34:04 ◼   ► He wouldn't let them have it anywhere where there was a golf course. Yeah

00:34:07 ◼   ► He was sort of anti golf which is

00:34:10 ◼   ► Which is super interesting because in the article as strangely staged as it was they made sure to mention that Johnny I've still had had

00:34:18 ◼   ► Things on his plate to do like the store redesigns like campus - and other products

00:34:24 ◼   ► yeah, which is a huge difference right and it's

00:34:27 ◼   ► You know, just an enormous, still, I still think even with this and with these

00:34:35 ◼   ► lieutenants taking over sort of direct day-to-day responsibility for UI design

00:34:39 ◼   ► and industrial design, he still is spread pretty thin. But I think he's spread a

00:34:42 ◼   ► little bit less than by administrative stuff. I think that's a key

00:34:46 ◼   ► thing we've seen recently too, is that Apple, if you look at what EdiQ is

00:34:50 ◼   ► responsible for, that's almost an entire, that is an entire company. It's

00:34:53 ◼   ► got its own marketing, it's got its own software development, it's got it, and

00:34:56 ◼   ► And they're bringing in people to sort of help him do that.

00:35:00 ◼   ► Marketing has always been stretched really thin, but they've got more people in there

00:35:03 ◼   ► lately and it just seems like it's a little more sane than it used to be.

00:35:07 ◼   ► And the responsibilities as they've grown, the company didn't scale to account for that.

00:35:11 ◼   ► And the amount of work that the people at the top of those organizations had to do was

00:35:15 ◼   ► just becoming ludicrous.

00:35:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:19 ◼   ► So I think, I have since concluded, you know, I mean who knows?

00:35:22 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:35:23 ◼   ► A couple years will let us know.

00:35:24 ◼   ► this actually is another one of those cases where, as weird as the story was where it

00:35:30 ◼   ► came out and it's, my guess is this weirdness was sort of, this is the way Johnny wanted

00:35:35 ◼   ► to do it and so okay, this is how they did it. That it really is what they say it is.

00:35:41 ◼   ► It's a promotion. It's a recognition maybe, it may be almost like a belated promotion

00:35:46 ◼   ► where it's recognizing the authority he already wielded within the company and that he's

00:35:51 ◼   ► not going anywhere.

00:35:52 ◼   ► Well, that was the interesting thing because there was, I think at least three discrete

00:35:55 ◼   ► reactions to the news when it first came out.

00:35:57 ◼   ► One was that this was Johnny Ive putting one foot out the door, you know, getting ready

00:36:00 ◼   ► to wind down.

00:36:02 ◼   ► The other was that this was Johnny Ive consolidating power because there was that old quote from

00:36:05 ◼   ► Steve Jobs where he said no one had more operational power at Apple besides himself than Johnny

00:36:10 ◼   ► Ive, even though they had a chief operating officer, which is, you know, just it shows

00:36:14 ◼   ► sort of his position in the company.

00:36:16 ◼   ► And then the sort of the third one was like the Wall Street take where they're still upset

00:36:20 ◼   ► that Apple doesn't disclose Johnny Ive because he was a senior vice president with direct

00:36:23 ◼   ► reports and certainly one of the top 10 paid people at Apple and his salary is not disclosed.

00:36:28 ◼   ► But now as a chief design officer with very few direct reports, you could argue that it

00:36:32 ◼   ► no longer needs to be.

00:36:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think so. I don't know. I mean, who knows about that? I know that I've—I

00:36:38 ◼   ► think I only tweeted about it, but maybe I blogged about it. But it has struck me as

00:36:43 ◼   ► weird over the years when they disclose executive payments, who's on the list and who's

00:36:48 ◼   ► Like, Arents had to be last year because her, like, I guess you just call it, loop it under

00:36:54 ◼   ► a signing bonus.

00:36:55 ◼   ► But she got an enormous amount up front.

00:36:57 ◼   ► Like, it's not her annual salary, but she was paid so much in her first year as a signing

00:37:02 ◼   ► bonus for taking the job that her compensation had to be disclosed.

00:37:07 ◼   ► It sounds complicated.

00:37:09 ◼   ► I read a Fortune article, I forget who wrote it, but they were saying that it's the top

00:37:11 ◼   ► 10 compensations on the team, but if they don't have policymaking positions, then they're

00:37:17 ◼   ► not included because they don't affect what Wall Street cares about with the company.

00:37:21 ◼   ► It just seems like a mess.

00:37:23 ◼   ► Yeah, it really does.

00:37:27 ◼   ► My conclusion is really—I'm not trying to be cute, but more or less, if you just

00:37:35 ◼   ► listen to Tim Cook's words in the internal memo, we're announcing the deal describing

00:37:39 ◼   ► what Johnny's responsible for, that he was responsible for hardware design and now he's

00:37:43 ◼   ► is responsible for UI design and packaging and he's supervising the design of the headquarters and

00:37:49 ◼   ► The retail in that New Yorker profile said he was doing the ads too. I mean it really is Steve Jobs level of breath

00:37:58 ◼   ► yeah, I don't quite think ads like marketing like TV spots and

00:38:03 ◼   ► Like magazine ads but like those videos that he does right like the videos for the keynote. Yeah

00:38:10 ◼   ► So even though he's not on stage in the keynote because he did I really do and I think it's as simple as that

00:38:16 ◼   ► He is just is not keen as to be a public speaker, even though the few times he has done it

00:38:21 ◼   ► He's done fine

00:38:22 ◼   ► I think it's like he just enjoys it so little and there's so much prep that's involved that he'd rather not

00:38:27 ◼   ► but instead his involvement in the presentation is

00:38:30 ◼   ► Literally supervising and if not editing, you know with his own hand the videos. Yeah

00:38:37 ◼   ► And this seems to suit everyone's best interest because it gets a little bit of the stuff

00:38:42 ◼   ► that Johnny Ive doesn't seem that happy to be doing which is the day-to-day managerial

00:38:45 ◼   ► stuff but it also recognizes, it almost like Apple's recognizing the job he was already

00:38:49 ◼   ► doing and that sort of assures his future in the company because you don't want him

00:38:53 ◼   ► to either get bored or to feel like he's finished or to want something different.

00:38:56 ◼   ► You want to keep him energized and engaged but at the same time it puts these two pillars

00:39:00 ◼   ► underneath him so if anything does happen or he decides to leave you have a stable functional

00:39:06 ◼   ► organization that can keep going underneath them. And that's really important Apple.

00:39:09 ◼   ► Yeah, that's exactly, I do think that it makes a more sustainable organization. Now,

00:39:15 ◼   ► would that mean that they would have to appoint a new chief design officer afterwards? I don't know.

00:39:20 ◼   ► I don't even have a new COO yet. Right, exactly. Although I think that's coming.

00:39:26 ◼   ► We can maybe just hold that thought and I'll do a sponsor break here and then we can talk about

00:39:33 ◼   ► that. But bottom line is I don't think Johnny Ive is going anywhere. I think this is sort of a,

00:39:39 ◼   ► you know, this is sort of a, like making it official that Johnny Ive and Tim Cook have

00:39:48 ◼   ► a relationship like Tim Cook and Steve Jobs did. Like where there are two leaders in this company

00:39:54 ◼   ► and it's a little different this time because the other way the guy with the, you know, the CEO.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Right, like it's a little different, but somebody has to be a CEO.

00:40:07 ◼   ► But exactly, I think in a way though that makes Ive different from Jobs is I don't think

00:40:12 ◼   ► Johnny Ive would ever want to be CEO.

00:40:14 ◼   ► I think part of this is that he's getting away from some of the stuff that a CEO would

00:40:19 ◼   ► have to do, some of this administrative stuff.

00:40:23 ◼   ► You know, Johnny Ive has no interest in negotiating with CBS television to get them on Apple TV,

00:40:30 ◼   ► right?

00:40:31 ◼   ► So it just comes down to the personalities and the individual talent that they have,

00:40:37 ◼   ► but that he is as important to Cook as Cook was important to Steve Jobs.

00:40:42 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like you need those two sides of the coin.

00:40:44 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter which side is on top at any given time, but you need those

00:40:46 ◼   ► two sides.

00:40:47 ◼   ► And the other thing that I thought was really good is the projects that Apple has coming

00:40:50 ◼   ► up like Campus 2 and like Project Titan, those are things that Jonny Ive seems really interested

00:40:54 ◼   ► in, which makes it seem further unlikely that it's anything other than a better positioning

00:40:58 ◼   ► of all the talent they have in place.

00:41:00 ◼   ► What's Project Titan?

00:41:01 ◼   ► the automotive stuff.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Oh, well we can talk about that.

00:41:06 ◼   ► Let me take a break though and thank our first sponsor and it is our good friends at Fracture.

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00:43:45 ◼   ► husband some pictures for Father's Day. My thanks to them. All right, so the car. That's

00:43:58 ◼   ► an interesting thing thinking about in the context of Johnny Ive being promoted to chief

00:44:04 ◼   ► design officer. Because it's, you think, well, that's just all industrial design. But there's,

00:44:13 ◼   ► You know, I think that if Apple is going to do a car, it is absolutely going to be completely,

00:44:23 ◼   ► you know, the computerification of car design.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Like there's no way that it's not going to involve both UI design and industrial design.

00:44:33 ◼   ► No, I would not be surprised if, you know, the same kinds of engineers who worked on

00:44:38 ◼   ► iPhones and other products are working on that now.

00:44:41 ◼   ► It's no guarantee that it's ever going to ship because I do think, and you know, that

00:44:45 ◼   ► thousand no's for every yes mantra, some of those no's come late.

00:44:50 ◼   ► Jared: We talked about this a couple weeks ago, that that TV just didn't ship for year

00:44:55 ◼   ► after year after year.

00:44:56 ◼   ► No one was interested in shipping it.

00:44:58 ◼   ► They didn't think it was a great product.

00:44:59 ◼   ► So it just sits in the lab.

00:45:00 ◼   ► Pete: Right.

00:45:01 ◼   ► But there was there.

00:45:03 ◼   ► There were TVs.

00:45:04 ◼   ► And I think, in hindsight, poor Gene Munster, but I do think that that's one of the reasons

00:45:10 ◼   ► Munster was so convinced and one of the things that analysts Wall Street analysts like him do is

00:45:16 ◼   ► develop sources in the supply chain and

00:45:20 ◼   ► ones who are most accurate like Ming

00:45:23 ◼   ► Ming key what's it mean?

00:45:27 ◼   ► Ming Chi Kuo

00:45:30 ◼   ► You know and and some of the stunningly accurate things that he's had in recent years

00:45:35 ◼   ► I think clearly come from the supply chain, you know that that he's talking to

00:45:40 ◼   ► to, like he, for example, nailed it on the screen sizes of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and

00:45:47 ◼   ► I think it was because he had sources at Sharp and whoever else was making the displays for

00:45:51 ◼   ► those things.

00:45:54 ◼   ► I think Munster figured out through supply chain that Apple was making TV prototypes,

00:46:01 ◼   ► and then just extr—you know, which is pretty, you know, that they weren't just things that

00:46:06 ◼   ► Apple had made in the Johnny Ive lab, which never comes – nothing ever leaks out of

00:46:11 ◼   ► there.

00:46:12 ◼   ► But they were in discussions with manufacturers and wheels were starting to turn over there

00:46:18 ◼   ► just to get things set up.

00:46:20 ◼   ► He just took that to mean, "Well, then that's a sure thing."

00:46:22 ◼   ► Because I think with most companies, once you get to that point, it's going to come

00:46:26 ◼   ► out and they're going to see how it does.

00:46:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:29 ◼   ► Apple is really different.

00:46:30 ◼   ► Apple prototypes almost everything.

00:46:32 ◼   ► If people like you or I can think about it or talk out loud about it on a website, Apple

00:46:37 ◼   ► has thought about it and investigated it, whether it's like touch screen max or arm

00:46:40 ◼   ► max or television.

00:46:42 ◼   ► All of that stuff, when they don't ship something, it's because they've made an informed decision

00:46:45 ◼   ► based on actual experience with prototype products that they don't want to ship it.

00:46:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:51 ◼   ► So, you know, there's no guarantee that a car is ever going to ship.

00:46:54 ◼   ► But I definitely – oh, God, this is going to be a terrible pun.

00:46:57 ◼   ► But I definitely think the wheels are turning.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Well, if you look at it now.

00:47:01 ◼   ► I was looking at cars the other day,

00:47:03 ◼   ► and even within the same brand,

00:47:04 ◼   ► the interfaces are completely different

00:47:06 ◼   ► from one model to the other.

00:47:08 ◼   ► And that just, to me, says there's no vision

00:47:10 ◼   ► for how this stuff should be done.

00:47:12 ◼   ► - Oh, I definitely think so.

00:47:13 ◼   ► I've seen that.

00:47:15 ◼   ► I've had my car since late 2006,

00:47:17 ◼   ► so it's been a while since I've shopped for a car,

00:47:19 ◼   ► but I remember the last time I did,

00:47:21 ◼   ► and driving two cars from the same brand,

00:47:23 ◼   ► and being just in the,

00:47:27 ◼   ► not that it was driving my decision as to what to buy,

00:47:29 ◼   ► but just absolutely rolling my eyes at the inconsistencies.

00:47:34 ◼   ► - I bought my last car right before the advent

00:47:37 ◼   ► of the infotainment system, the connected stuff

00:47:38 ◼   ► where you could just plug your iPhone

00:47:40 ◼   ► or Android phone into it.

00:47:41 ◼   ► So I went to my dealer and I said,

00:47:42 ◼   ► "Can I just upgrade to the next year's radio center?"

00:47:45 ◼   ► And they said, "No."

00:47:46 ◼   ► And I said, "Well, what do I have to do?"

00:47:47 ◼   ► They said, "Buy another car."

00:47:48 ◼   ► And that to me is probably one of those things

00:47:50 ◼   ► that Apple just thinks is ludicrous.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Like it should be as easy to update what runs on your car

00:47:54 ◼   ► as it is to what runs on your phone.

00:47:56 ◼   ► - Right, I mean, and not that you would be able to,

00:47:59 ◼   ► you know like that you should be able to get like a software update yes

00:48:03 ◼   ► right that that's what you should be able to get for your

00:48:06 ◼   ► car not that you should be able to take the actual computer out and they're at a

00:48:09 ◼   ► certain level apple is a hey you have to buy you just have to

00:48:12 ◼   ► buy a new phone yeah uh company but on another level you know

00:48:17 ◼   ► there are significant features that you get

00:48:19 ◼   ► you know two years after buying your phone by upgrading it

00:48:23 ◼   ► yeah i think that the same industry is just so far behind

00:48:27 ◼   ► And similarly, CarPlay, Scott Forslop was working on that years ago and it just took

00:48:32 ◼   ► forever to get to market.

00:48:34 ◼   ► And that shows, I think, the slowness of that sort of a process.

00:48:37 ◼   ► And if Apple's going to do that the way Tesla, for example, had to build up their car process,

00:48:43 ◼   ► we're talking years and years of experimentation, never mind a release schedule.

00:48:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:48 ◼   ► It's on a much longer time scale.

00:48:52 ◼   ► But I've heard, it's not my original analogy, I don't know who I'm stealing from, but that

00:48:56 ◼   ► carplay is to Apple's car what the rocker was to the iPhone. Even though the rocker

00:49:02 ◼   ► was like one year before the iPhone.

00:49:05 ◼   ► Carplay to me is really interesting because it's part of this huge transition that Apple's

00:49:09 ◼   ► undergoing where before we had all this pull interface where you'd have to go to some

00:49:13 ◼   ► other place to, well if we could just transition to apps for a second. An app was this discrete

00:49:18 ◼   ► bundle, this little binary you downloaded on your phone and you would tap it and all

00:49:21 ◼   ► functionality would be inside that. And the same way WebKit is now HTTP apps everywhere,

00:49:26 ◼   ► it's not all Bundling Safari anymore. With iOS 8, all the UI kit stuff is sort of an

00:49:31 ◼   ► extensibility means that all an app functionality is now everywhere. You can share to Pinterest

00:49:36 ◼   ► from a share extension, you can use one password from an action extension. So the idea of those

00:49:41 ◼   ► apps has sort of been torn apart. And not only that, not only can I just pull the notification

00:49:46 ◼   ► center down and use PCALC there without going to the app, I can now shoot that app to my

00:49:50 ◼   ► my Apple watch or shoot that app to my car.

00:49:52 ◼   ► It's like Marco's Overcast is running on cars now.

00:49:55 ◼   ► And I think that fundamentally changes

00:49:56 ◼   ► what it's gonna mean to be software.

00:49:58 ◼   ► And I think CarPlay was sort of one of the things

00:50:01 ◼   ► Apple was doing to experiment with what that's gonna be

00:50:03 ◼   ► going forward.

00:50:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:50:05 ◼   ► No, but I'm just trying to decide what to go to next.

00:50:11 ◼   ► We could go to, I'll give you a pick

00:50:13 ◼   ► and then we'll do the other one.

00:50:14 ◼   ► We could go to Google I/O, which is past tense,

00:50:19 ◼   ► sort of, I guess it's technically like wrapping up

00:50:21 ◼   ► its second day right now, or we could go to WWDC.

00:50:25 ◼   ► I say we do the past first, we'll do Google I/O.

00:50:27 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:50:28 ◼   ► - And we'll do WWDC expectations afterwards.

00:50:33 ◼   ► So Google I/O, keynote yesterday,

00:50:36 ◼   ► seemed to run about seven hours.

00:50:39 ◼   ► - All of this, they were good this year.

00:50:40 ◼   ► I mean, I think last year just went on forever this year,

00:50:43 ◼   ► it was just long.

00:50:44 ◼   ► - Announced a lot.

00:50:47 ◼   ► And some of it, you know, pretty interesting to me. I guess maybe it was a little more

00:50:53 ◼   ► focused than usual.

00:50:54 ◼   ► It was restrained. I mean, I remember some years where it would just almost seem like

00:50:57 ◼   ► every five minutes it'd be an entirely new initiative or API or something being dropped,

00:51:02 ◼   ► and you'd never hear about them again. And this year it seemed like they stuck to bigger,

00:51:05 ◼   ► more important things.

00:51:06 ◼   ► Yeah, and stuff that they truly expect to ship.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:09 ◼   ► I feel, you know, and not that Apple invented only talking about stuff that's really going

00:51:14 ◼   ► the ship but I think it's a little more appley direction. The whole thing was the

00:51:19 ◼   ► whole thing had a much more and people get really upset when we talk about this

00:51:23 ◼   ► stuff but it had a much more Apple sort of sensibility to it especially with the

00:51:27 ◼   ► new Android features and you could see this over time where originally to get

00:51:31 ◼   ► market share Google had to make everything open and marketed as open as

00:51:35 ◼   ► possible but now from Google Play services to store reviews to a lot of

00:51:39 ◼   ► the programs that they're doing they need to exert a certain amount of

00:51:43 ◼   ► control just to just to improve the experience and it looked like they're

00:51:46 ◼   ► doing that again with this keynote yeah I mean and and there's a lot of little

00:51:52 ◼   ► things but one of those things that I noticed is when they talked about where

00:51:57 ◼   ► it's a program that to me is very interesting but to me I to my knowledge

00:52:00 ◼   ► hasn't taken off yet but I think has a good chance to is Android one yes which

00:52:06 ◼   ► which is their version of Android that is meant for "developing countries," but it's

00:52:15 ◼   ► for people who cannot afford $500 or $600 phones. And so what if they can only afford

00:52:22 ◼   ► a $100 phone or a $125 phone? How good can you make that today in 2015? And the thing

00:52:32 ◼   ► that struck me about that is being Apple-like. Not that Apple is going after that market,

00:52:36 ◼   ► has any product that they don't. There is no iPhone that's targeted at that market.

00:52:39 ◼   ► But the way that it's Apple-like to me is that it's not a, "Here's a version of Android

00:52:44 ◼   ► that runs on lower powered devices." It's a whole thing like a device certification

00:52:49 ◼   ► program and the only way you get it is if you go along with them. And if you do, Google

00:52:55 ◼   ► has Apple-style control over the OS where you get the latest, you know, you're getting

00:52:59 ◼   ► Android lollipop and then you'll get the Android M update when it comes out because the only

00:53:07 ◼   ► way to participate in this as an OEM is to go along with what Google is saying.

00:53:14 ◼   ► There's a lot to unpack for me and one thing that maybe everyone knew this but me going

00:53:18 ◼   ► into this but Apple's been starting their keynotes by reaffirming their corporate mantras

00:53:24 ◼   ► and Tim Cook does that job.

00:53:25 ◼   ► He's like the moral compass of Apple and he talks about Apple's North Star being making

00:53:29 ◼   ► great products. And Google, they used to be, don't be evil, but more and more often now

00:53:33 ◼   ► they're saying Google's purpose is to organize the world's data and make it easily accessible

00:53:38 ◼   ► to everybody. And once I said that, I started watching the entire keynote through that lens.

00:53:43 ◼   ► And the thing like, the optimist in me is like, wow, Google's using all this money that

00:53:47 ◼   ► they make to bring technology, whether it's internet in balloons or low cost phones to

00:53:51 ◼   ► everybody. But then the cynic in me was saying that if they really want to collect all the

00:53:55 ◼   ► world data, they need to have everybody in the world giving them their data.

00:53:59 ◼   ► And then when you look at everything they announced, all these services, especially

00:54:02 ◼   ► the ones that are really cool, are sort of what you feed, the drugs you give somebody

00:54:07 ◼   ► so they'll go and feed the beast for you.

00:54:10 ◼   ► And there's a profound difference between Apple wanting to make great products so that

00:54:14 ◼   ► they can sell them at a high margin and make a good experience so you'll buy the next product,

00:54:19 ◼   ► where Google has to make these services that are so good that you'll be willing to give

00:54:22 ◼   ► them your data on an ongoing basis.

00:54:25 ◼   ► It's sort of a similar strategy.

00:54:28 ◼   ► You can argue how successful each one is, but they're both phenomenally successful,

00:54:32 ◼   ► but so different from each other.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:35 ◼   ► And it's, you know, the cynic in me always asks, and you know, with any company, but

00:54:40 ◼   ► you know, how are they going to make money on this?

00:54:42 ◼   ► How do they think they're going to make money on this?

00:54:44 ◼   ► And with a lot of their stuff, it's very dubious to me, like with the whole internet balloons

00:54:49 ◼   ► thing.

00:54:50 ◼   ► it to me, the honest way to make money on it would be to somehow take a share of what

00:54:57 ◼   ► they're charging the people, even if it's, you know, compared to like us carriers, even

00:55:01 ◼   ► if people there are only paying a few dollars a month for self service, you know, by taking

00:55:07 ◼   ► a share of that, then they're making money. The cynical way to do it would be if part

00:55:11 ◼   ► of the terms of service for getting internet service through the Google balloons is that

00:55:15 ◼   ► Google gets to see an index all of the traffic going through.

00:55:19 ◼   ► The thing that reminded me of a part of this is I remember a few years ago there was a

00:55:22 ◼   ► Google ad about a father setting up some kind of Google account, might have been a Gmail

00:55:26 ◼   ► account for his baby and starting to document the baby's life.

00:55:30 ◼   ► And there was pushback on that saying how can you try to encourage people to put their

00:55:33 ◼   ► children's data in there.

00:55:34 ◼   ► But now we live in a time where they just give Google accounts to schools and people

00:55:37 ◼   ► say thank you.

00:55:39 ◼   ► And they say they're not going to use that data and I take them at their word.

00:55:43 ◼   ► But I used to work in advanced analytics and the actual data is not always that important.

00:55:48 ◼   ► you get vast quantities of data, there's all sorts of patterns and behaviors and market

00:55:52 ◼   ► basket analysis and just trends and things that you can find in that data. That's immensely

00:55:59 ◼   ► valuable and Google showed that with things like the machine learning and the neural networks

00:56:03 ◼   ► on how their driverless cars can now start picking out other cars and pedestrians because

00:56:08 ◼   ► they're committing enough data and enough patterns and enough behaviors to understand

00:56:12 ◼   ► that and that that's going to be immensely valuable to them. So even if there's no direct

00:56:16 ◼   ► return on a business unit nature for things like the balloons.

00:56:21 ◼   ► All that stuff will feed their core business which is collecting and making use of all

00:56:25 ◼   ► that data.

00:56:27 ◼   ► Well the question though is where do you, you know, the thing about web search is that

00:56:33 ◼   ► there is a place, a very obvious place to show the ad which is right there at the top

00:56:39 ◼   ► of the results.

00:56:40 ◼   ► and it's you know

00:56:43 ◼   ► i think they say web search you know search advertising

00:56:47 ◼   ► is ninety percent of google's remains ninety percent of google's revenue

00:56:51 ◼   ► i think they really had it all comes down to that top spot in the results

00:56:57 ◼   ► and

00:56:59 ◼   ► in some sense okay simply giving internet to people around the world

00:57:03 ◼   ► through the balloons they don't need to make any money from the balloons because

00:57:06 ◼   ► those people are going to search on google and they're going to see those

00:57:09 ◼   ► ads and the results. I see that though as such diminishing returns and just for the

00:57:15 ◼   ► cynical reason that if you're in an impoverished country, those ad views just cannot be that

00:57:22 ◼   ► valuable and that you're chasing, instead of chasing pennies, you're chasing fractions

00:57:26 ◼   ► of a penny. Not that it means that Google's going anywhere, but it means that it's not.

00:57:32 ◼   ► I just don't see how that's a serious source of any kind of growth.

00:57:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's a lot to do with why you see them branching out and again like when I my old job was doing

00:57:39 ◼   ► This analytic stuff and it wasn't it wasn't really about search

00:57:42 ◼   ► But there were other ways of making huge amounts of money

00:57:44 ◼   ► So for example, if you go into a quickie Mart and you buy coke the quickie

00:57:49 ◼   ► The coke has no idea that you bought it

00:57:50 ◼   ► But the quickie Mart does and if you have a company that can go in and take that information

00:57:54 ◼   ► You can sell that back to coke and then you can sell it to Pepsi and if they bought Doritos with it

00:57:59 ◼   ► You can then sell that information to Doritos and those companies use it when they decide where they're gonna put their products on shelves

00:58:04 ◼   ► or what combinations or what sales or all this stuff is immensely valuable to companies

00:58:08 ◼   ► who want to get into these emerging markets and Apple and a lot of companies have talked

00:58:13 ◼   ► about the value of the BRIC countries but especially China is growing now, Russia is

00:58:16 ◼   ► growing now, Brazil is growing now and they're going to have huge economies and I think having

00:58:20 ◼   ► actionable intelligence on those economies will be valuable and if Google is the one

00:58:24 ◼   ► brokering all that then that makes Google as opposed to Facebook who's also doing these

00:58:28 ◼   ► emerging market internet initiatives.

00:58:30 ◼   ► It gives them a better position.

00:58:32 ◼   ► My understanding is that at Quickie Mart in particular Buzz Cola has an exclusive.

00:58:38 ◼   ► I think that's true.

00:58:39 ◼   ► They don't even need to do any analytics.

00:58:42 ◼   ► I don't mean to sound like I'm down on goal.

00:58:43 ◼   ► I just think that like everybody, some people think that you're not paying for this stuff

00:58:47 ◼   ► and whether you're paying with money or with time or with attention or with data, you're

00:58:52 ◼   ► always paying and you just have to be to understand the cost that your data is valuable, like

00:58:57 ◼   ► money is valuable and whether it's worth it for you to make that exchange.

00:59:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:59:01 ◼   ► of paying for stuff that leads me directly to one of the top products that

00:59:07 ◼   ► they announced that I owe this week that really caught my attention was Google

00:59:10 ◼   ► Photos. So Google Photos is pretty much Google's version of iCloud photo library

00:59:17 ◼   ► and I don't mean that I wrote that and I don't mean it in the sense that I think

00:59:21 ◼   ► they copied it I think it was inevitable for both companies to do this the basic

00:59:24 ◼   ► idea was so obvious that of course they were both going to do it and it just so

00:59:29 ◼   ► happened that you know Apple beat them to it. It feels like the right solution.

00:59:35 ◼   ► Yeah which is basically you sign up and you have all of your devices where you

00:59:41 ◼   ► deal with photos signed in and then all of your photos go to through one cloud

00:59:49 ◼   ► library and are therefore available on all your devices and to save space that

00:59:54 ◼   ► you don't have once you have that and if the truth is in the cloud meaning your

00:59:58 ◼   ► true library is the one that's in your cloud account, then your devices don't have to have

01:00:03 ◼   ► all of your photos. And if you have 32 gigabytes of photos and videos in your personal library,

01:00:11 ◼   ► you only need a fraction of them on your device at any time. And the rest can all be represented

01:00:15 ◼   ► by truly tiny thumbnails and then drawn down from the cloud on demand when you want to

01:00:22 ◼   ► open them.

01:00:23 ◼   ► You know, super smart.

01:00:26 ◼   ► And we used to call that you used to do that in storage a long time ago.

01:00:28 ◼   ► It was called nearline where you had all the frequently high value data, frequently accessed high value data right on the on the device, because you needed to access it all the time.

01:00:36 ◼   ► And it had to be fast.

01:00:37 ◼   ► But everything else was stored just a step away on much cheaper storage and in much bigger capacity.

01:00:43 ◼   ► And you would just get it when you needed it.

01:00:45 ◼   ► And it was very infrequent that you would actually need it.

01:00:48 ◼   ► And this is the same.

01:00:49 ◼   ► So all the photos you've taken recently, all the ones that are your favorites, all the

01:00:52 ◼   ► ones that you access all the time are just right there on your device.

01:00:55 ◼   ► So you tap them and they're there.

01:00:57 ◼   ► The ones that you maybe haven't looked at in three years, you know, and you probably

01:00:59 ◼   ► won't look at very often.

01:01:01 ◼   ► If you have to tap that and it takes a second to download, nobody really cares.

01:01:05 ◼   ► So they have two, but the big difference to me, the fundamental difference is that they're

01:01:10 ◼   ► saying unlimited storage for all of as many photos and videos as you want with the asterisk

01:01:19 ◼   ► on unlimited being that they recompress your photos in a hot you know in other words and

01:01:25 ◼   ► then they're not quite I don't maybe somewhere there's a technical but in other words they're

01:01:29 ◼   ► they're using Jake jpeg recompression to store good enough versions of your photos up to

01:01:35 ◼   ► 16 megabytes you can pay for something which they call original which gives

01:01:40 ◼   ► you the original the access to the original uncompressed photograph but I

01:01:43 ◼   ► think even then it's limited to 16 megabytes I could be wrong I wasn't sure

01:01:48 ◼   ► it sounded like if you're willing to pay for the storage you just got your photos

01:01:51 ◼   ► but they didn't say anything about raw either which I know Apple stressed yes

01:01:54 ◼   ► which you know kind of me is one of those like you know difference between

01:01:59 ◼   ► Apple customers and Google customers and I'm sure yes I'm absolutely sure that

01:02:04 ◼   ► there are some pro photographers who shoot everything in raw using some of

01:02:08 ◼   ► best cameras on earth who also are Android users no doubt about it but I

01:02:13 ◼   ► think the truth is that most professional photographers are probably

01:02:17 ◼   ► Apple customers and probably have iPhones and care about things like that

01:02:20 ◼   ► in a way that Android users don't or is it something that they will announce in

01:02:25 ◼   ► the course of the product roll out right and of course all of this stuff can go

01:02:28 ◼   ► on but the pricing difference is definitely different where you know it's

01:02:32 ◼   ► it's pretty easy and in fact depending you know on how long you've been

01:02:36 ◼   ► shooting digital photographs, it might be likely for most people that their complete

01:02:42 ◼   ► collection of digital photographs, not just from their phone, but everything they've

01:02:48 ◼   ► taken for the last 10 years or so, is already bigger than the free storage tier that Apple

01:02:53 ◼   ► offers. Whereas Google's is it's free for however many you want with that caveat that

01:02:57 ◼   ► they're going to recompress them, but to what they claim to be still a very high level.

01:03:02 ◼   ► I know David Mark on Loop Insight pointed this out, but again, this is fine if you're

01:03:07 ◼   ► happy paying with data because the terms of service are kind of nebulous as to what they

01:03:10 ◼   ► can do with it.

01:03:11 ◼   ► I don't think they're going to do anything wrong with it.

01:03:13 ◼   ► A lot of it is always just covering your ass if you have to move servers or do something

01:03:16 ◼   ► else and you don't want to be sued when you do the normal course of your business.

01:03:20 ◼   ► But with Apple, you know no one's going to show you an ad next to that photo.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Your photo is never going to be used as an ad.

01:03:25 ◼   ► At least Apple is currently being run.

01:03:27 ◼   ► They're not going to take, when you do facial scans, they're not going to say, "Oh, this

01:03:31 ◼   ► a photo of John Gruber, now I know what John Gruber looks like and propagate that across

01:03:34 ◼   ► their system. Where with Google you might not care about that, but again you should

01:03:37 ◼   ► – and I'm not saying that Apple couldn't reduce prices, it's just Google is subsidizing

01:03:41 ◼   ► it based on their business model where Apple's business model is not being used to subsidize

01:03:46 ◼   ► photo – cost of storage.

01:03:48 ◼   ► One of the reasons I don't use Gmail is I don't like the idea of ads next to my email

01:03:52 ◼   ► and I really don't like the idea of context-sensitive ads next to my email. And maybe that's just

01:03:57 ◼   ► because I'm a funny fuddy duddy who's been using email since the terminal days,

01:04:01 ◼   ► but it's like email to me is very personal and it just bothers me.

01:04:08 ◼   ► So Bradley Horowitz, who's in Google's vice president for photos streaming

01:04:16 ◼   ► and something else-- pretty interesting title, very specific--

01:04:20 ◼   ► but who's more or less in charge of Google Photos.

01:04:23 ◼   ► had an interesting interview with Steven Levy yesterday at Steven's back channel. And

01:04:30 ◼   ► his analogy, which I found pretty compelling, was that Google Photos is Gmail for your photos.

01:04:35 ◼   ► But then the flip side of that is what you just said. Well, wait, your Gmail has ads

01:04:40 ◼   ► next to your photos. If you have photos of your family at Disney World, are you going

01:04:47 ◼   ► to get ads for Universal Orlando next to those photos? I would find that extremely bothersome.

01:04:56 ◼   ► With Apple's photos, you can click to identify people's faces. Google looks like they're

01:04:59 ◼   ► doing that automatically and that's again to feed their machine learning system. I don't

01:05:03 ◼   ► know if that bothers me or not. There's a lot of things along this path that – I got

01:05:07 ◼   ► the Nexus 5 last year. I try to get the new Nexus phone every year and I turned it on

01:05:11 ◼   ► and I said, "Do you want to use Google now?" I said, "Yeah, hell yeah," because it

01:05:13 ◼   ► reminds me of Jarvis from the Iron Man movies. I want to use that. The first thing it said

01:05:17 ◼   ► is can we access your full web history? And I said no. And I said well then you can't

01:05:21 ◼   ► use Google Now. And that's technically not true. There's a lot they could do for me without

01:05:25 ◼   ► having to have access to my web history. And they might have changed that since then I

01:05:29 ◼   ► haven't looked again. But that to me the cost the price of that service was too high. And

01:05:35 ◼   ► again I consider paying with data the same thing as paying with money. So I don't get

01:05:39 ◼   ► that service now. And I understand why people would be reticent. And by all means if you

01:05:43 ◼   ► think it's a fantastic service, it looks terrific, if you're not bothered by this at all, great,

01:05:49 ◼   ► but I think it's worth at least considering the cost of what these services are.

01:05:53 ◼   ► So here's the storage pricing for iCloud, and this is as of May 29th, who knows, we

01:05:58 ◼   ► might get some new storage pricing in two weeks, I don't know. And delightfully so,

01:06:05 ◼   ► the dollar amounts are identical in US and Canadian dollars. So no matter which of me

01:06:12 ◼   ► and Renee you're thinking of here's what we pay 20 gigabytes you pay a dollar a

01:06:16 ◼   ► month 200 gigabytes four bucks a month 500 is 10 bucks a month and a terabyte

01:06:21 ◼   ► of storage is 20 bucks a month so to me that's a you know it's not bad 20

01:06:29 ◼   ► gigabytes is very possibly too small for an awful lot of people 200 gigabytes is

01:06:35 ◼   ► probably enough for just about everybody and it's four dollars a month which is

01:06:39 ◼   ► is not that bad but it's you know oh you know let's round up it's 50 bucks a year and so

01:06:45 ◼   ► Apple is saying 50 bucks a year and Google is saying nothing that's a difference I'm

01:06:51 ◼   ► not saying that's going to draw people to it but it's you know it's.

01:06:56 ◼   ► I pay for the half terabyte plan right now and it's absolutely different and also it's

01:07:02 ◼   ► if you're on that free five gigabyte plan it's not just photos all your backups are

01:07:05 ◼   ► in there as well and a lot of your other data takes up that space as well.

01:07:09 ◼   ► And if you look at what pure Amazon S3 stores because Apple is using Amazon and Azure I

01:07:14 ◼   ► believe to actually store this stuff.

01:07:17 ◼   ► You pay for the storage that you use so it's not an unheard of model.

01:07:21 ◼   ► But I think you know Apple selling these devices they make a lot of money off these devices.

01:07:25 ◼   ► It would probably be a compelling value add to customers if you said you bought a 64 gigabyte

01:07:29 ◼   ► device you're starting off at 64 gigabytes.

01:07:31 ◼   ► If you want more, you can pay for it.

01:07:33 ◼   ► But at least you have enough to back up

01:07:35 ◼   ► pretty much the content of that device.

01:07:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I wonder, you know, presumably Apple

01:07:42 ◼   ► isn't paying like with a standard S3 plan.

01:07:45 ◼   ► - No, I hope not.

01:07:47 ◼   ► - Wouldn't that be hilarious if Eddy Cue

01:07:49 ◼   ► just had set up like a, just like signed into S3

01:07:52 ◼   ► and he just pays like a regular bill every month.

01:07:56 ◼   ► - There's a pile of paper bills in the Ferrari's

01:07:59 ◼   ► seat next to him.

01:08:00 ◼   ► for every single iCloud bite of data.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Presumably Apple has a very special deal with Amazon

01:08:09 ◼   ► for their use of S3.

01:08:11 ◼   ► So who knows what they're paying and how close,

01:08:16 ◼   ► but it would be curious to know how close Apple,

01:08:21 ◼   ► as a company that is saying this is not our core competency

01:08:24 ◼   ► so we're gonna go out for storage

01:08:25 ◼   ► and some of these services to Amazon

01:08:29 ◼   ► with S3 and Microsoft with Azure.

01:08:32 ◼   ► And even given our clout and the size of the offer

01:08:37 ◼   ► we can make and our, you know,

01:08:38 ◼   ► Apple's famous negotiating acumen.

01:08:42 ◼   ► Even so, so let's just presume that they've gotten

01:08:46 ◼   ► very good favorable rates from both Amazon and Microsoft.

01:08:49 ◼   ► It would be interesting to know how that compares

01:08:53 ◼   ► to Google's ability to do it completely internally

01:08:57 ◼   ► in terms of cost.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And at what point is it valuable enough for Apple

01:09:01 ◼   ► where like maps, they start to want to make that

01:09:03 ◼   ► of their own core competency?

01:09:04 ◼   ► - Right, like how much does it,

01:09:06 ◼   ► is there a significant difference

01:09:09 ◼   ► in the cost per typical user who says,

01:09:12 ◼   ► okay, yes, go ahead and store my entire photo library

01:09:15 ◼   ► on your service.

01:09:16 ◼   ► What does that average out to for a typical user

01:09:19 ◼   ► for Apple using S3 and who knows what else,

01:09:24 ◼   ► and Google doing it completely internally?

01:09:27 ◼   ► I think that would be interesting.

01:09:28 ◼   ► That would be extraordinarily difficult to figure this out because I think it's obviously

01:09:33 ◼   ► secret information for both companies.

01:09:35 ◼   ► I think it would benefit Apple in the long run.

01:09:37 ◼   ► iCloud Photo Library I think is a tremendous product.

01:09:39 ◼   ► I think it solves a problem in a really good way.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Cameras we know are incredibly important, especially in iPhone upgrade cycles.

01:09:45 ◼   ► New cameras drive significant upgrades.

01:09:47 ◼   ► But if you always have friction, if people feel either they don't use it or they feel

01:09:51 ◼   ► it's too expensive, they're often going to hit that wall where they can't take a photo,

01:09:55 ◼   ► they want to take it, they have to delete something else.

01:09:57 ◼   ► reduces the experience and it's just one more piece of friction that they could probably

01:10:02 ◼   ► use their resources to overcome.

01:10:04 ◼   ► Yeah. Let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor and it's our good friends at

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01:14:52 ◼   ► What else from I/O?

01:14:53 ◼   ► Anything else?

01:14:54 ◼   ► Yeah, the Google Now improvements and the, I mean the Android stuff was interesting but

01:14:58 ◼   ► a lot of them I thought was very similar, some of them at least was very similar to

01:15:01 ◼   ► to what Apple have been doing with iOS for a while, like with permissions and with battery

01:15:04 ◼   ► usage. But the Google Now and the OnTap stuff, which sadly doesn't mean beer is going to

01:15:08 ◼   ► pour from your lightning port, I thought that at first. But the, I guess they don't have

01:15:12 ◼   ► lightning ports, they're USB port. But the stuff about that is what makes me so interested

01:15:16 ◼   ► in Google is that they're trying to make these better contextual engines where they can present

01:15:20 ◼   ► you already like they know that if you have a flight coming because they read it off your

01:15:23 ◼   ► email they can present you with the boarding pass for that flight. But now they want to

01:15:27 ◼   ► start doing it when you're in locations and in areas that they haven't explored so far.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And this is an area that Apple hasn't wanted to go into with Siri and Apple gets a lot

01:15:35 ◼   ► of data from Siri and for a while they just did not want to mingle or act on your data

01:15:42 ◼   ► on their servers.

01:15:43 ◼   ► It was one of their privacy lines.

01:15:45 ◼   ► But now with the proactive stuff that Mark Gurman was reporting on last week, it sounds

01:15:49 ◼   ► like maybe that's changing at Apple and it makes me wonder what a service like Google

01:15:54 ◼   ► now or like on tap would be through Apple's strong privacy and security stance or filtering.

01:15:59 ◼   ► Yeah, can we do that? We'll just take a time out here and say young Mark Gurman over at

01:16:04 ◼   ► 9to5Mac has been on a run like no one else. Hats off to young Mark Gurman, but he seems

01:16:11 ◼   ► to have uncovered about 90 to 95% of what has publicly been revealed about WWDC and

01:16:20 ◼   ► coming out. I do think that's an interesting direction for Apple and I feel like with Apple

01:16:28 ◼   ► and Google in particular that they each, depending on the nature of their companies, get ahead

01:16:36 ◼   ► of each other in certain ways and then the other catches up. And sometimes we can say,

01:16:43 ◼   ► "Well, the one is copying the other." But on the other hand, it's not even about copying.

01:16:48 ◼   ► It's really just like, it's inevitable that they're both going to go in that direction.

01:16:52 ◼   ► And it can go from little things like the copy and paste pop-up.

01:16:57 ◼   ► You know, how to select text and how to copy and paste it, which, you know, iOS didn't

01:17:03 ◼   ► have in the first few revs, famously.

01:17:07 ◼   ► You couldn't copy and paste, but then when they got it, they nailed it.

01:17:10 ◼   ► And it's like, oh yeah, this is the way to copy and paste on a touchscreen.

01:17:14 ◼   ► And Android experimented with a whole bunch of things, and all of them, quite frankly,

01:17:19 ◼   ► in my opinion, just really, really stunk.

01:17:21 ◼   ► It was one of the areas where Android was just, it's just one of those things that drove

01:17:25 ◼   ► me nuts about it every time I tried it.

01:17:27 ◼   ► And then coming up in Android M, they've got what's effectively the iOS style of copy and

01:17:31 ◼   ► paste.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Other things, though, you know, same thing.

01:17:34 ◼   ► Android had it first, where you'd swipe down from the top of the screen and you'd see a

01:17:37 ◼   ► list of your notifications.

01:17:39 ◼   ► And they had that for like two years before iOS had a notification center.

01:17:44 ◼   ► And guess what?

01:17:45 ◼   ► You swipe down from the top of your screen and there's a list of your notifications.

01:17:48 ◼   ► So it's not like it's a one-way street.

01:17:50 ◼   ► I think that this sort of contextually aware, the phone knows some stuff about where you

01:17:58 ◼   ► are, what you do, where you are on a daily basis, and can do smart things about it.

01:18:05 ◼   ► I think it's like it does every time I hear them say neural network or machine learning

01:18:11 ◼   ► I do think of the Terminator because you know it's one of those things where you are where

01:18:15 ◼   ► those movies sent to us as warnings and I'm saying that it sounds paranoid but you never

01:18:20 ◼   ► know how far this stuff is going to get and how much I want them to know about me which

01:18:23 ◼   ► goes back to the same privacy discussion about Google Now previously so I would love to have

01:18:29 ◼   ► Jarvis in my house but when I start thinking about it it's just as scary as it is attractive

01:18:33 ◼   ► So I'm conflicted about this technology.

01:18:37 ◼   ► But I think it does have absolute value.

01:18:39 ◼   ► And if you don't like it, I would hope that a company like

01:18:42 ◼   ► Apple and eventually Google would let you just use the

01:18:44 ◼   ► functionality that Siri provides today where it has

01:18:47 ◼   ► minimal knowledge of you.

01:18:48 ◼   ► And the knowledge that it does have is on-device knowledge.

01:18:50 ◼   ► And it's not doing any big data gathering or operations.

01:18:53 ◼   ► But for people who do want that, who think that

01:18:55 ◼   ► providing that data to get that service is a tremendous

01:18:57 ◼   ► deal for them, that I think Apple providing it makes all

01:19:01 ◼   ► of iOS more valuable to them?

01:19:03 ◼   ► I find some of the stuff in Germin's report on it to be a little confusing because one

01:19:14 ◼   ► of the things he says is that to begin with, Proactive will become a new layer within the

01:19:18 ◼   ► iOS operating system, replacing the pull-down spotlight menu currently found on the iOS

01:19:23 ◼   ► home screen.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Again, I don't know what his sources are.

01:19:26 ◼   ► I don't know anything about this.

01:19:28 ◼   ► I'm completely in the dark.

01:19:30 ◼   ► heard anything about it. But that doesn't make any sense to me because that screen is

01:19:33 ◼   ► not part of the OS. The two layers of the OS that go from top or bottom is control center

01:19:40 ◼   ► from the bottom and notification center from the top. And the reason I call them layers

01:19:45 ◼   ► of the OS is you can get them from anywhere. Whereas to me, what he's talking about is

01:19:49 ◼   ► just part of the, to use the internal lingo, it's part of springboard. It's only when you're

01:19:54 ◼   ► on the home screen. And it doesn't make any sense to me that this feature wouldn't be

01:20:03 ◼   ► available everywhere. To me, it would only make sense in the hold down the home button

01:20:07 ◼   ► layer where Siri takes over the whole screen. But I don't know.

01:20:10 ◼   ► I think one of the things that I don't know if this is what he's describing or not, but

01:20:15 ◼   ► previously Apple was doing a lot of really cool things and part of those were surfaced

01:20:18 ◼   ► in Siri. Like Siri could do a lot of interesting search. You could say like compare Apple or

01:20:22 ◼   ► Google stock or get me these sports results.

01:20:25 ◼   ► And you could do a lot of interesting searches in Spotlight, especially recently they made

01:20:29 ◼   ► major changes to both Siri and Spotlight recently.

01:20:32 ◼   ► And Spotlight could get you a bunch of interesting information including Wikipedia and maps and

01:20:35 ◼   ► ports of interest.

01:20:36 ◼   ► But even App Store search, they were all different like some did nearest neighbor and some didn't

01:20:41 ◼   ► and some didn't care if you misspelled words and some didn't.

01:20:45 ◼   ► And so in spite of having all these great technologies, they weren't merged together.

01:20:48 ◼   ► They weren't better than the sum of the parts.

01:20:50 ◼   ► I think part of what this is is taking the engine that's being built into spotlight and

01:20:54 ◼   ► the engine that's in Siri and sort of making something that is better than each of those

01:20:57 ◼   ► individually and Siri is sort of an ancillary interface layer.

01:21:02 ◼   ► It doesn't replace the multi-touch interface but it's there whenever you need it.

01:21:08 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:21:11 ◼   ► What do you think about – this bothers me but maybe I'm just not aware of the lingo

01:21:15 ◼   ► But it bothers that this whole trend towards calling it machine learning

01:21:19 ◼   ► bothers me because to me it's just AI we already have a term for it and my

01:21:23 ◼   ► my hunch is that

01:21:26 ◼   ► Computer science the world had talked about AI for so long and for so many decades and you know famously, you know, we

01:21:36 ◼   ► Kubrick thought that by 2001 we'd have a computer you could just you know how that you could just talk to you. So

01:21:42 ◼   ► famously

01:21:44 ◼   ► computer scientists as a whole were vastly over-optimistic in terms of when we would get to

01:21:51 ◼   ► like talk to a computer and hold a conversation with them, AI. And that it burned out the term.

01:21:59 ◼   ► And so we come up with this new thing called machine learning that is, it doesn't,

01:22:06 ◼   ► you know, it's two different words, but it's just, you know, a different branch of AI.

01:22:09 ◼   ► I remember in Dune, which was one of my favorite books and movies growing up, where they had

01:22:14 ◼   ► that Butlerian Jihad and they made a new commandment saying, "Thou shalt make no machine that thinks

01:22:18 ◼   ► like a man."

01:22:19 ◼   ► So it's been all part of our culture growing up and I by no means have any specific knowledge

01:22:24 ◼   ► of AI, but it does seem like there's this recognition that's coming out that we're getting

01:22:30 ◼   ► smart objects but they're not smart the way AI is.

01:22:33 ◼   ► Touch ID makes the home button smart, the way Siri makes the microphone smart, the way

01:22:39 ◼   ► makes the camera smart but it's not smart in a Terminator or Matrix way. It's

01:22:43 ◼   ► just it's useful and I wonder if if this is sort of like what Jeff Hawkins was

01:22:48 ◼   ► doing at Numenta where there was a realization that we can't make them

01:22:51 ◼   ► think like us so we've got to go sort of part of the way there and this is

01:22:54 ◼   ► using machine learning as distinct from AI because it's not artificially

01:22:58 ◼   ► intelligent in the way we always imagined it. It's just a machine learning

01:23:01 ◼   ► to recognize context and other specific areas. Hmm yeah one of the examples that

01:23:06 ◼   ► Google gave and it does seem and this is one of those areas where it seems like

01:23:09 ◼   ► Google is not just ahead of Apple but ahead of everybody but definitely ahead of Apple is in the

01:23:15 ◼   ► aforementioned Google Photos project. They're doing more. So Apple's been doing face recognition

01:23:22 ◼   ► for years and you know but they're doing a lot more. They're doing like recognizing when a

01:23:28 ◼   ► picture was of a snowfall and saying I mean who now does this work I don't know but that they're

01:23:33 ◼   ► saying that you know you can say I remember that snowfall back in 2010 and you could search for

01:23:38 ◼   ► for snow in 2010 and come up with the photos you took

01:23:41 ◼   ► of the snow piled on your car or whatever,

01:23:45 ◼   ► which is really pretty cool, but it also seems believable.

01:23:50 ◼   ► It seems like, wow, I bet that's really complex

01:23:52 ◼   ► and really interesting how they got there,

01:23:53 ◼   ► but I kind of believe it.

01:23:55 ◼   ► If they can do face recognition, why can't they do,

01:23:58 ◼   ► this is a snowy scene.

01:24:00 ◼   ► - It's sort of like when they told us

01:24:02 ◼   ► that Siri would get better when the more people use it.

01:24:03 ◼   ► It's all of these technologies require ungodly amounts

01:24:07 ◼   ► of data. It's part of why I think Google really wants to get

01:24:10 ◼   ► us to give it more data because it who knows how much it needs

01:24:13 ◼   ► to consume of snow before it starts to understand and

01:24:15 ◼   ► recognize snow, that movie Ex Machina that just came out, they

01:24:20 ◼   ► have a guy there who sort of it's sort of like the Google

01:24:22 ◼   ► company in that universe. And in order to make his AI, he hacked

01:24:26 ◼   ► every phone in the world to read every facial feature feature in

01:24:29 ◼   ► the world. So he'd have enough data to reproduce them. And that

01:24:31 ◼   ► was the volume that he needed. And it always seemed to me like

01:24:34 ◼   ► when you start doing facial recognition or snow or when you

01:24:36 ◼   ► have driverless cars, the amount of raw data you need to get to what the car needs or the

01:24:42 ◼   ► photo needs to make the machine understand it is just immense.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Yeah I can totally see that.

01:24:52 ◼   ► Anything else on IO?

01:24:53 ◼   ► I think that was all the really, I mean there was the cardboard stuff where they have VR.

01:24:58 ◼   ► And VR is fascinating to me.

01:24:59 ◼   ► It's like when Facebook bought Oculus because it's always been interesting to me that on

01:25:04 ◼   ► On a computer I can have Facebook or Google open in one little window but then switch

01:25:07 ◼   ► quickly or on a phone it's in one little app but I can switch quickly.

01:25:11 ◼   ► But once it's VR and on your face I mean I don't know how to quit out of Oculus when

01:25:14 ◼   ► it's strapped to my head or quit out of cardboard when it's strapped to my face.

01:25:18 ◼   ► It seems like that's sort of the complete all-encompassing presence that they've always

01:25:22 ◼   ► wanted.

01:25:23 ◼   ► Yeah, have you ever used cardboard?

01:25:26 ◼   ► I haven't.

01:25:27 ◼   ► I've used Oculus a couple times and I've used Google Glass but I haven't used cardboard.

01:25:32 ◼   ► I am worried that I'm not going to be able to use it.

01:25:36 ◼   ► I'm worried that my eye situation, that maybe at the time where I can see 3D is over.

01:25:41 ◼   ► But we'll see.

01:25:42 ◼   ► But it definitely seems interesting.

01:25:44 ◼   ► And I had to say, like, I was watching the keynote, or at least I watched some of the

01:25:47 ◼   ► Google I/O keynote, and I was watching on the TV and my son had gotten home from school,

01:25:53 ◼   ► and he was like, "Man, this stuff, these guys are boring."

01:25:56 ◼   ► And then when that part kicked in, he was like, "Wait, this is pretty cool."

01:26:01 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:26:02 ◼   ► you know, when they first came out with it last year, I thought it was kind of janky.

01:26:06 ◼   ► But just because the only one they had was this seriously simple, stupid cardboard thing.

01:26:12 ◼   ► But I don't know, it seems pretty interesting to be able to do it. I don't know. But

01:26:18 ◼   ► you raise a good point, because this is one of the first interfaces where I mean, there's always

01:26:21 ◼   ► going to be accessibility issues. But this is one of these first interfaces where there's a

01:26:25 ◼   ► tremendous amount of the population who can't watch 3d movies, because they're just not

01:26:28 ◼   ► comfortable with their eyes converging and focusing on different planes and they get vertigo where they get seasick and

01:26:33 ◼   ► They're trying to fix these but there will always be a large amount of

01:26:36 ◼   ► People who will not be able to use this as an interface and that to me

01:26:40 ◼   ► Investing in it that heavily is interesting despite that even before I had this retina issue and had vision problems

01:26:46 ◼   ► Even before that even when I saw 20/20 out of both eyes at distance

01:26:50 ◼   ► I've never enjoyed a 3d movie

01:26:53 ◼   ► Other than like a short one at like Disney like where you go in and you're in and out in five minutes and it's like wow

01:27:00 ◼   ► That was pretty cool

01:27:01 ◼   ► And I'll tell you what it is for me is I go and see a 3d movie and I could I can see the 3d

01:27:07 ◼   ► and it's like I don't have any problems with the

01:27:09 ◼   ► What do you call it? Like where some people have trouble seeing the 3d? Yeah

01:27:14 ◼   ► But I would come out of the movie and and I will realize I don't remember the second half of it

01:27:21 ◼   ► Like I'll be like I honest to God don't remember what the hell happened there. Like I remember I saw

01:27:26 ◼   ► Perfect example is up

01:27:30 ◼   ► I saw Pixar's up in 3d for the first time and I came out thinking hey that was pretty good

01:27:36 ◼   ► And then I realized I really

01:27:38 ◼   ► The whole thing once once the kid was in the house. I really didn't remember it

01:27:42 ◼   ► I was like there was some kind of old, you know, I remembered vaguely

01:27:44 ◼   ► There was the old guy who had the dogs

01:27:46 ◼   ► But it was like I really could not summarize the plot

01:27:49 ◼   ► Like I I have to spend so much time concentrating on the 3d that I I cannot just sit back and watch the movie

01:27:55 ◼   ► and then when I watched up the second time in 2d, I

01:27:58 ◼   ► Was so much more impressed with the movie. I was like wow, this is so clever

01:28:03 ◼   ► This is a typical Pixar movie where every single scene is good

01:28:06 ◼   ► Every line is worth, you know, every line of dialogue is worth it

01:28:10 ◼   ► It's like and I just didn't have that impression watching it in 3d

01:28:13 ◼   ► I had the same problem with I got accidentally I bought 3d tickets to Avengers Age of Ultron and the the fight scenes were just

01:28:20 ◼   ► Undigestible to me. There was so much visual information. I had very little idea what was happening

01:28:24 ◼   ► Yeah, and I went back and saw it in 2d and I was fine. Yeah, I haven't seen it

01:28:28 ◼   ► Yeah, my son has and tells me that it's that I'm an idiot for not having seen it already. That's all Tron. It's AI

01:28:33 ◼   ► Let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor and these guys

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01:32:12 ◼   ► Anything else at IO I

01:32:18 ◼   ► Think that was the main stuff. Yeah, so

01:32:20 ◼   ► WWDC what do you think is coming up? I

01:32:25 ◼   ► I think Apple's going to stick with iOS 9 and OS 10.11. I think we'll see the new Apple TV.

01:32:32 ◼   ► We'll get some more word on HomeKit. Apple TV might come with a game store or an app store.

01:32:37 ◼   ► I think those will probably be the least of the big stuff.

01:32:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I am surprised to hear this. But so at the code conference this week,

01:32:50 ◼   ► Jeff Williams was, you know, and this is a conference that Steve, this is the Walt Mossberg

01:32:54 ◼   ► Karas Swisher hosted conference that for years was like the All Things D conference while

01:33:00 ◼   ► they were at the Wall Street Journal and now it's the code conference now that they're

01:33:04 ◼   ► on their own at Recode/Comcast.

01:33:08 ◼   ► Zing!

01:33:10 ◼   ► And for years, I don't know if there's, maybe there's a year where nobody from Apple showed

01:33:19 ◼   ► I don't know but for years somebody from Apple has shown up jobs was there many times and some of his most famous sort of

01:33:26 ◼   ► Off-the-cuff interviews in the last, you know, 10-15 years came with that conference

01:33:29 ◼   ► Obviously, he's pretty hard get he was a pretty hard get Tim Cook has spoken there a few years ago. That's the conference where Tim Cook

01:33:37 ◼   ► Said that the wrist is interesting. This was that was two years ago

01:33:41 ◼   ► and

01:33:44 ◼   ► This year speaking from Apple was Jeff Williams

01:33:49 ◼   ► So I thought that was, as an Apple nerd,

01:33:51 ◼   ► that was something that caught my eye.

01:33:52 ◼   ► 'Cause to me, being an Apple exec

01:33:55 ◼   ► who is authorized within Apple to go there and speak,

01:34:00 ◼   ► not necessarily opened by the standards of open,

01:34:02 ◼   ► but instead wasn't just a bunch of no comments.

01:34:05 ◼   ► And in fact, he said some interesting things.

01:34:08 ◼   ► But it's also sort of another sign

01:34:10 ◼   ► of Jeff Williams' leveling up within the executive hierarchy.

01:34:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, we saw him do the research kit presentation

01:34:17 ◼   ► the last event and I thought he did an excellent job for his first time yeah

01:34:21 ◼   ► and you know and in addition to the fact that he did a great job on stage it was

01:34:28 ◼   ► to me an important an interesting thing that he announced and something that was

01:34:34 ◼   ► dropped like a you know a true surprise something that had not been leaked in

01:34:39 ◼   ► any way I think the stuff that like if you look at the stuff that's in

01:34:42 ◼   ► Federighi's work that traditionally doesn't leak that we don't start

01:34:45 ◼   ► hearing about stuff until it starts leaving the core group of engineers.

01:34:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree. So, you know, first sign of Jeff Williams's leveling up was a

01:34:55 ◼   ► significant on-stage presence at one of their public events and then another

01:34:59 ◼   ► sign here is his appearance at the code conference and so my conjecture is that

01:35:07 ◼   ► I don't know if it's imminent but I would think sooner rather than later

01:35:11 ◼   ► later Jeff Williams is going to get a promotion to chief operating officer as

01:35:16 ◼   ► he was sort of it would Tim Cook was chief operating officer Jeff Williams

01:35:18 ◼   ► was right underneath them and then he became senior vice president of

01:35:22 ◼   ► operations which is not exactly the same thing as chief operating officer it's

01:35:25 ◼   ► not a c-level position so that makes that makes a lot of sense especially if

01:35:28 ◼   ► operations continues on one hand I can see it because Tim Cook is an operations

01:35:33 ◼   ► guy so you might think you don't need a CEO when the CEO is in fact that good at

01:35:37 ◼   ► operations but I think it just makes sense as as Jeff Williams continues to

01:35:41 ◼   ► do these impressive projects that that title gets to him yeah I think so and

01:35:46 ◼   ► well and quite frankly I honestly think I think it's a lot harder to guess than

01:35:51 ◼   ► it was with Steve Jobs and Tim Cook but my guess is that the current succession

01:35:56 ◼   ► plan if something happened to Tim Cook would be for Jeff Williams to be named

01:36:01 ◼   ► CEO yeah I thought the same thing and that it's it's and again it's funny how

01:36:07 ◼   ► things change where when when Steve Jobs you know was sick and it was I mean a

01:36:14 ◼   ► responsible company would have a succession plan even with a perfectly

01:36:17 ◼   ► healthy CEO like they have to I it well it's a responsibility of the board if

01:36:23 ◼   ► they don't then the board I think can be you know is liable to shareholder suits

01:36:28 ◼   ► etc I Tim Cook seems to me like the type of guy who you know always has insurance

01:36:35 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:36:37 ◼   ► Right, like you don't have to remind him

01:36:39 ◼   ► that you have to, you know, you should, you know,

01:36:41 ◼   ► make sure you get renter's insurance on that,

01:36:44 ◼   ► you know, rental property.

01:36:45 ◼   ► It's like he's already got it.

01:36:46 ◼   ► - It's a line item.

01:36:47 ◼   ► - But my guess is that the current succession plan,

01:36:50 ◼   ► if it needed to come in, would be for Jeff Williams.

01:36:52 ◼   ► And the funny difference would be that when Steve Jobs,

01:36:55 ◼   ► they needed a succession plan,

01:36:56 ◼   ► their idea was the last thing we're gonna try to do

01:36:59 ◼   ► is replace Steve Jobs with another Steve Jobs,

01:37:02 ◼   ► because there is no other Steve Jobs.

01:37:04 ◼   ► Whereas my guess with Tim Cook is

01:37:07 ◼   ► we would replace him with the closest thing we have

01:37:10 ◼   ► to another Tim Cook, which is Jeff Williams.

01:37:13 ◼   ► A guy with the exact same background.

01:37:15 ◼   ► They just seem like two peas in a pod, really.

01:37:21 ◼   ► And I'm sure if you got to know them personally,

01:37:24 ◼   ► I'm sure that they're individuals.

01:37:25 ◼   ► But at least from the outside,

01:37:26 ◼   ► they are extremely similar individuals.

01:37:29 ◼   ► Operations background, even they're both from the US South,

01:37:33 ◼   ► They seem to have similar demeanors even, you know, and similar reputations within the

01:37:39 ◼   ► company for getting shit done.

01:37:42 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:37:43 ◼   ► And Steve Jobs was unique, but he did have some of the skills that are really important

01:37:47 ◼   ► for a CEO, including the ability to make those deals and the ability to rally shareholders.

01:37:52 ◼   ► But a lot of the other things – it's not typical.

01:37:55 ◼   ► Like you said earlier, Johnny Ive probably has no aspirations to be CEO because that's

01:37:59 ◼   ► not the kind of job you'd enjoy doing.

01:38:01 ◼   ► And I think that's true of a lot of them, whether it's marketing or services or something

01:38:05 ◼   ► else.

01:38:06 ◼   ► Like Craig Federighi, a CEO, makes no sense.

01:38:08 ◼   ► Even though he's phenomenal, Jeff Williams just seems like the best fit for that job.

01:38:13 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:14 ◼   ► Like what it really means to be a pure CEO, it really, to me, comes out of operations.

01:38:19 ◼   ► And combined with a deep understanding of what it is that makes Apple, Apple, right?

01:38:25 ◼   ► you know, that I don't think, you know, I again, I really do not think that in the near future,

01:38:33 ◼   ► that they would ever consider looking outside the company for replacement, you know, CEO, it would,

01:38:39 ◼   ► it would have to take a significant and I think, years long drought of, you know, of, you know,

01:38:47 ◼   ► declines in revenue and problems with products, you know, for them to even think about that it

01:38:51 ◼   ► It would have to be a situation where something was clearly going wrong.

01:38:55 ◼   ► Whereas as long as things are going right or in my opinion even just like okay, they're

01:39:01 ◼   ► only going to look inside.

01:39:03 ◼   ► I agree completely.

01:39:04 ◼   ► I don't think there's, it's such a unique culture and getting someone at that level

01:39:07 ◼   ► acclimatized to that culture.

01:39:09 ◼   ► We've heard about having some of the problems with the vast amount of engineers but getting

01:39:12 ◼   ► an executive in there at that level.

01:39:15 ◼   ► I can understand bringing in Angela Ahrens but we saw what happened when he brought in

01:39:19 ◼   ► John Browett before that.

01:39:20 ◼   ► It's just not an easy thing to do.

01:39:22 ◼   ► You know, years from now, who knows?

01:39:24 ◼   ► You know, Angela Arnn's could be on that list too, but it wouldn't be like a near term, if something happened near term.

01:39:31 ◼   ► And I don't think that's going to happen. I think Tim Cook is, you know, he's made Apple his life.

01:39:36 ◼   ► I think it would be like an emergency situation. But they have to have a plan for it.

01:39:40 ◼   ► So another way to look at it to me is, you know, there are places, you hear about places where they only like to hire software engineers from Stanford, MIT,

01:39:48 ◼   ► and you know Caltech and Carnegie Mellon like if you're not in the top five comp

01:39:53 ◼   ► side programs they don't want it they don't want to look at you I think Apple

01:39:57 ◼   ► for like a chief executive is only looking at graduates of Apple University

01:40:03 ◼   ► yeah like if you haven't gone through app years long program through Apple

01:40:08 ◼   ► University and learned the Apple way from the last 15 to 20 years they're not

01:40:14 ◼   ► looking at you and the only the only way to go through Apple University is to

01:40:18 ◼   ► to be a long time executive at Apple.

01:40:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, absolutely.

01:40:22 ◼   ► I think Angela again, running Apple retail and stores

01:40:25 ◼   ► is one of the closest jobs to being president

01:40:27 ◼   ► of a division of Apple.

01:40:28 ◼   ► Maybe only iTunes is similar

01:40:29 ◼   ► because of the scope of that operation.

01:40:31 ◼   ► So those are two people who could,

01:40:33 ◼   ► and Angela Aarons did run her own business for a long time.

01:40:35 ◼   ► But like you said, that the length of time in the company

01:40:37 ◼   ► is what makes it Apple.

01:40:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, it is sort of her own division.

01:40:41 ◼   ► And in a sense, for example, she gets her own marketing.

01:40:46 ◼   ► Again, maybe the posters gum through Schiller's group or whatever, but just the general sense

01:40:51 ◼   ► that when you walk into the Apple store, the experience of walking in, and literally, I

01:40:56 ◼   ► mean this totally literally, how it smells.

01:40:59 ◼   ► Every sense that is engaged when you're in that store is a reflection of Apple's brand.

01:41:06 ◼   ► That's an enormous brand responsibility.

01:41:08 ◼   ► Again, that makes her more like the president of a separate division.

01:41:14 ◼   ► Yeah, no, absolutely. I think Q is similar because again they have marketing and they

01:41:18 ◼   ► have events and they have developers and they have designers and all those people working

01:41:21 ◼   ► and iTunes could easily be its own company as well. But he just seems ideally suited

01:41:26 ◼   ► for what he does which is making those sort of entertainment deals.

01:41:28 ◼   ► Yeah, Q would be on my short list of guesses though too, definitely.

01:41:32 ◼   ► Which is interesting because I've been thinking about this a lot because there are all the

01:41:35 ◼   ► rumors of the new Apple TV coming out and the Apple TV unlike the iPhone and the iPad

01:41:39 ◼   ► is under the iTunes organization.

01:41:42 ◼   ► And it's been so long since it was updated.

01:41:44 ◼   ► It was last updated 2012, the spring.

01:41:47 ◼   ► What that means for a product when Apple looks at it as not just being a device, but being

01:41:51 ◼   ► a device that has to be bundled with services, in this case, media properties or content

01:41:56 ◼   ► deals.

01:41:57 ◼   ► Because otherwise they could have just been updating this every year the way they've been

01:41:59 ◼   ► updating iPhones.

01:42:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:01 ◼   ► So that's the thing I'm most excited about for WWDC this year.

01:42:05 ◼   ► At least, unless they have, you know,

01:42:06 ◼   ► other than the vague idea that they have a complete surprise

01:42:09 ◼   ► to pull the, you know, to pull the curtain on.

01:42:13 ◼   ► But, you know, so we, blah, blah, blah, new Apple TV.

01:42:17 ◼   ► And maybe there's an SDK, et cetera, et cetera.

01:42:21 ◼   ► We don't know anything about it.

01:42:22 ◼   ► Like, they've kept that, that's been,

01:42:24 ◼   ► like, the details of it have been,

01:42:26 ◼   ► at least from everything I've seen,

01:42:28 ◼   ► is pretty under wraps.

01:42:30 ◼   ► But I really do think it's coming this year.

01:42:33 ◼   ► I would put money on it.

01:42:34 ◼   ► I think we can guess a little bit.

01:42:36 ◼   ► Like it's running a single core A5 processor right now and they've almost certainly got

01:42:39 ◼   ► to do.

01:42:40 ◼   ► They're going to go, it's an iOS device.

01:42:41 ◼   ► It runs a version of iOS 8 right now that has just a different versioning number.

01:42:45 ◼   ► You mean right now meaning if you go into a store and buy a $69 Apple TV right now.

01:42:50 ◼   ► Right.

01:42:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:52 ◼   ► Single core A5 processor running iOS 8.3 I think has been updated 8.3.

01:42:55 ◼   ► But you know if they put an A788 class processor in there, if they let it run something like

01:43:00 ◼   ► metal, if they start incorporating technologies into it like Siri, then I think if you do

01:43:04 ◼   ► You just look at it as an iOS device and you bring it up to parity with last year's or

01:43:08 ◼   ► this year's iPhone or iPad, then that becomes a very, maybe a more expensive device than

01:43:13 ◼   ► we've seen before, but that becomes a really interesting device.

01:43:15 ◼   ► And just in terms, it's crazy, and they do these comparisons as they've gone to retina

01:43:19 ◼   ► screens where they show what a 1080p TV pixel for pixel looks like on a retina 5K iMac or

01:43:29 ◼   ► something like that.

01:43:30 ◼   ► you see it my god the 1080p TV is like just a tiny little rectangle in the corner I mean

01:43:38 ◼   ► you could do like side-by-side 1080p on a retina 5k my Mac right I pretty sure yeah

01:43:43 ◼   ► before you do for them is still have room for your pallets so the ridiculous thing is

01:43:49 ◼   ► that a new Apple TV to run a 1080p TV is pushing way fewer pixels than an iPhone 6 or 6 plus

01:43:59 ◼   ► I guess it's just not even breaking a sweat in terms of that, in terms of what they could

01:44:04 ◼   ► get away with at a cost-efficient level.

01:44:08 ◼   ► So I'm really excited to see that, to see what they do, to see what the input methods

01:44:11 ◼   ► are and to see what kind of SDK they're giving to us.

01:44:18 ◼   ► Well, that's a super interesting thing.

01:44:20 ◼   ► And I think the platform technologies group under Johnny Suruji, the other Johnny at Apple,

01:44:25 ◼   ► I think never gets the credit they deserve.

01:44:27 ◼   ► If you look at something like the Apple, the iPad Air 2, that machine is ludicrously overpowered

01:44:32 ◼   ► for what you can do on it.

01:44:33 ◼   ► That's got an A8X processor.

01:44:36 ◼   ► A lot of companies, companies that make money off selling chips, it's not in their best

01:44:39 ◼   ► interest to move too fast because they want to get as much money as they can for every

01:44:42 ◼   ► generation of chip.

01:44:43 ◼   ► Apple could care less.

01:44:44 ◼   ► So they just let these guys run as fast as they can.

01:44:47 ◼   ► They don't say, "Oh, the A7 is good enough.

01:44:48 ◼   ► We'll use that for two or three years."

01:44:50 ◼   ► No, you can fit an extra core, do it.

01:44:52 ◼   ► You can fit an extra more GPUs, do it.

01:44:55 ◼   ► And there I think for a while iOS the software was perhaps ahead of the hardware but I think

01:45:00 ◼   ► we've entered an age now where I don't even know what you do with the power in an iPad

01:45:04 ◼   ► too.

01:45:05 ◼   ► I don't think anything maybe a high-end game taxes a little bit but I don't think anything

01:45:08 ◼   ► on iOS taxes it and if you start putting that sort of power in an Apple TV I don't outside

01:45:14 ◼   ► of an SDK you don't need that to run HBO now.

01:45:16 ◼   ► So I think what they start doing both with the iPad going forward and with Apple TV is

01:45:21 ◼   ► So start answering the questions of,

01:45:23 ◼   ► now that you have all this silicon, what do you run on it?

01:45:26 ◼   ► - Can I tell you what my dream feature

01:45:28 ◼   ► for Apple TV would be?

01:45:29 ◼   ► And I'm ripping it right off from my pal John Siracusa.

01:45:32 ◼   ► I don't know if you do listen

01:45:33 ◼   ► to the Accidental Tech podcast?

01:45:36 ◼   ► - Absolutely.

01:45:37 ◼   ► - It's got John Siracusa. - Only for Casey.

01:45:39 ◼   ► - Who?

01:45:40 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:45:42 ◼   ► Oh yeah, all right, I got you, I got you, the other guy.

01:45:44 ◼   ► - The moderator.

01:45:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, the other guy.

01:45:46 ◼   ► So Siracusa had a rant a few episodes ago,

01:45:48 ◼   ► and I know it's a recurring thing for him,

01:45:50 ◼   ► But his thing is you're watching a stream

01:45:53 ◼   ► or a video or whatever, and you go to fast forward

01:45:57 ◼   ► or you pause for too long, and then when you come back,

01:46:01 ◼   ► it's back at the beginning, right?

01:46:03 ◼   ► Like you're watching a Netflix stream and you just wanna,

01:46:05 ◼   ► like I understand that if it's streaming

01:46:07 ◼   ► rather than completely downloading,

01:46:09 ◼   ► it's like you just go listen to the episode of ATP

01:46:12 ◼   ► where Syracuse ran it, but I just,

01:46:13 ◼   ► I'm completely in agreement with him.

01:46:15 ◼   ► If I wanna fast forward a stream,

01:46:19 ◼   ► Just show me thumbnails as it goes by.

01:46:22 ◼   ► But make sure that the time on-- even just

01:46:25 ◼   ► if you just move the timeline and the scrubber

01:46:27 ◼   ► and the timeline, and don't even show me anything visually.

01:46:29 ◼   ► Just let me see the timeline and pick.

01:46:32 ◼   ► And if I say, I know I just want to go back two minutes,

01:46:35 ◼   ► and I just go back, just show the timeline animating

01:46:38 ◼   ► for two minutes.

01:46:38 ◼   ► And then when I stop two minutes later and hit play,

01:46:42 ◼   ► if you need a second or two to catch up on the stream, fine.

01:46:45 ◼   ► But make sure that that's where you start.

01:46:47 ◼   ► And the fact that so many streaming things

01:46:50 ◼   ► on everything I've ever tried don't work that way

01:46:54 ◼   ► drives me nuts.

01:46:55 ◼   ► And it's even worse because, like Syracuse,

01:46:59 ◼   ► we've been a TiVo house since forever.

01:47:01 ◼   ► I think I got a TiVo in year 2000

01:47:05 ◼   ► when my wife and I, when I was working

01:47:08 ◼   ► at Pear Bone Software, we went over Rich Siegel's house

01:47:11 ◼   ► and he had a TiVo.

01:47:12 ◼   ► And we immediately went out the next day and bought a TiVo.

01:47:16 ◼   ► We were like, this is the craziest thing ever.

01:47:17 ◼   ► But the thing with TiVo is when you fast forward,

01:47:19 ◼   ► it always just fast forwards.

01:47:21 ◼   ► And when you rewind, it always rewinds.

01:47:23 ◼   ► And it always just starts where you want to start.

01:47:25 ◼   ► And you never have this problem.

01:47:26 ◼   ► And I know that's because TiVo has downloaded everything

01:47:29 ◼   ► into a hard drive in the box.

01:47:30 ◼   ► But the simple fact is that with TiVo,

01:47:32 ◼   ► you can fast forward, rewind, skim, scan,

01:47:37 ◼   ► whatever you want to call it, backwards, forwards, jump

01:47:39 ◼   ► forwards 15 minutes at any time, and it just works.

01:47:42 ◼   ► And I swear to God, if Apple TV could just do that for stuff,

01:47:47 ◼   ► that enough would sell me on it.

01:47:50 ◼   ► - It's sort of like the original iPhone

01:47:51 ◼   ► when you scroll Safari, they didn't try to render

01:47:53 ◼   ► the interface and slow you down,

01:47:54 ◼   ► just let you get where you were going

01:47:56 ◼   ► and then filled it in behind you.

01:47:57 ◼   ► - Yes, that's what I want.

01:47:58 ◼   ► That's exactly what I want with stream scanning.

01:48:01 ◼   ► - And not to be a dick about it,

01:48:04 ◼   ► but also I know that whatever content deal

01:48:06 ◼   ► has been delaying or at least influencing

01:48:08 ◼   ► the Apple TV releases, I'm not gonna get that

01:48:09 ◼   ► in Canada anyway, so just ship me the hardware.

01:48:12 ◼   ► - I never thought about that, it's sad.

01:48:14 ◼   ► God, that sucks.

01:48:17 ◼   ► - Well, you'll still get the, I still think,

01:48:19 ◼   ► I think Apple could do a better job

01:48:20 ◼   ► even with their own content, the iTunes content

01:48:22 ◼   ► that you do get in Canada.

01:48:24 ◼   ► And I'd really like to see them focus on that experience

01:48:28 ◼   ► and put the sort of, comparing it to scrolling

01:48:32 ◼   ► on the iPhone is exactly right.

01:48:33 ◼   ► Like, obviously, right from the get-go,

01:48:35 ◼   ► when the software was way more ambitious

01:48:38 ◼   ► than the hardware could support,

01:48:40 ◼   ► they still focused on making sure

01:48:41 ◼   ► the experience was responsive.

01:48:44 ◼   ► And that even if you had to wait to catch up,

01:48:46 ◼   ► At least you, it wasn't like if you scrolled too far down on the webpage, all of a sudden

01:48:50 ◼   ► it snapped you to the top, which would make you mad, but which happens with streaming

01:48:55 ◼   ► stuff all the time.

01:48:58 ◼   ► There's super smart engineers working on Apple TV and maybe there were some frustrations,

01:49:02 ◼   ► maybe there were some false starts, but they've had a long time now and it feels like there's

01:49:06 ◼   ► a big technology gap that's going to help with performance and things are smarter now,

01:49:11 ◼   ► so hopefully a lot of that will get rectified.

01:49:13 ◼   ► Yeah, my, you know, and again, not to put too much on them, because who knows, maybe

01:49:16 ◼   ► it'll be an underwhelming announcement, and I'm not going to hold it against them.

01:49:20 ◼   ► But I will just say, knowing that there are some really smart people who've been working

01:49:23 ◼   ► on it for a while, and that some of the holdup, if not all of it, a lot of it has been content

01:49:28 ◼   ► negotiation and figuring out what we're going to do in terms of service-wise, and it was

01:49:32 ◼   ► external, that it's possible that the internal team is really kind of, might be, you know,

01:49:38 ◼   ► able to do like it's like a 2.0 version of whatever it is that they were going to if

01:49:43 ◼   ► they might have shipped two years ago that they would have shipped then you know that

01:49:46 ◼   ► they're already at like a next generation version of it.

01:49:50 ◼   ► And there's so much in iOS 8 that they're not for example last year we almost had no

01:49:53 ◼   ► iTunes announcements I can I don't think I can remember very many at all and the ones

01:49:57 ◼   ► we did get like iTunes radio they never propagated because the beats merger effectively changed

01:50:02 ◼   ► that whole strategy but we don't have continuity for iTunes or for any form of media yet we

01:50:06 ◼   ► just get up with the playlist playing on our Mac, just transfer it to our iPhone and keep

01:50:10 ◼   ► walking or if we're watching something on the Apple TV and we want to go to bed, we

01:50:13 ◼   ► can't just pick up our iPad.

01:50:15 ◼   ► You can go manually and chase after the functionality the way you used to have to do with productivity

01:50:19 ◼   ► stuff on iOS, but it's not yet of that age and I think this is a huge opportunity.

01:50:23 ◼   ► I don't know how many people can mention about whether they're going to do it now or not,

01:50:26 ◼   ► but there's a lot of stuff that they can just do to catch up and bring all this stuff forward

01:50:29 ◼   ► that I think would be really interesting.

01:50:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I wonder how some of the continuity stuff could work and with like a little bit

01:50:36 ◼   ► of proximity awareness, you know, like how much easier could they make, you know, airplay

01:50:44 ◼   ► by like I already know you're in the living room and you're watching a video and, you

01:50:50 ◼   ► know, maybe the Apple TV could get ready to receive, you know, the video so that the handoff

01:50:57 ◼   ► happens much quicker in advance.

01:50:58 ◼   ► I don't know if you've played with handoff on the Apple watch very much.

01:51:02 ◼   ► No, I actually haven't done handoff on the watch that much.

01:51:06 ◼   ► It's interesting because there's some collision right now because I have a Mac and I have

01:51:10 ◼   ► an iPhone and I have my Apple watch and you can handoff messages or mail or any of that

01:51:14 ◼   ► kind of stuff, but my Mac is broadcasting too, so I'll pick up my iPhone and I'll see

01:51:20 ◼   ► the Safari icon from my Mac, but then I'll change Windows, then all of a sudden I'll

01:51:23 ◼   ► see the messages icon from my watch.

01:51:26 ◼   ► And that sort of thing I think they're going to have to figure out too because now we're

01:51:28 ◼   ► We're not going to just have an iPhone or an iPad, but we have the Mac and the watch

01:51:31 ◼   ► and maybe the Apple TV.

01:51:33 ◼   ► And who gets that slot on the lock screen or in the dock?

01:51:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:51:37 ◼   ► All right, let me take one last break here and thank our final sponsor, and then we'll

01:51:43 ◼   ► come back and wrap up the show with our final thoughts.

01:51:46 ◼   ► But our last sponsor, and I am positively delighted to have them back, it's our good

01:51:51 ◼   ► friends at Harry's.

01:51:54 ◼   ► You guys know Harry's.

01:51:55 ◼   ► makes premium men's shaving products. Everything from the handles to the razors to the creams,

01:52:02 ◼   ► anything you need. Really great stuff, really great focus on quality design, a sort of timeless

01:52:13 ◼   ► design that isn't gimmicky, it doesn't look like a droid ad from Verizon, it just looks like a nice

01:52:18 ◼   ► classy handle for a razor. A nice beautiful box of razor blades. And here's the thing,

01:52:28 ◼   ► by cutting out the middleman, they make them, they package them, and then they sell them

01:52:33 ◼   ► direct to you. So you're not going through some kind of distributor, and then the distributor

01:52:38 ◼   ► puts them in drugstores, and then the drugstore sells them to you, and it's marked up all

01:52:42 ◼   ► along the way. And when you're in the drugstore, because people shoplift this stuff, they've

01:52:48 ◼   ► got them behind a glass thing and you've got to hail down a clerk and then they

01:52:51 ◼   ► have to unlock the thing and then you pick it out and then they won't even let

01:52:54 ◼   ► you take them they like walk you to the counter what a pain in the ass you go to

01:52:59 ◼   ► Harry's you sign up you pick the one you want you pick the starting kit you want

01:53:02 ◼   ► and a couple of days later boom the thing arrives in the mail and they by

01:53:08 ◼   ► cutting out the middleman their prices are just terrific so just for example

01:53:15 ◼   ► here's the thing the blades cost like two dollars or less per pack depending

01:53:20 ◼   ► on what you do so for 15 bucks you get you get a pack of eight you can't get a

01:53:26 ◼   ► 15 pack of like Gillette high-end blades I mean an 8 pack for 15 bucks you know

01:53:32 ◼   ► they're like $32 or something like that and that's even on Amazon if you go if

01:53:37 ◼   ► you buy 16 at a time it's only 25 bucks you're only paying a dollar fifty per

01:53:42 ◼   ► blade cartridge and these are the type of cartridges you know there's four

01:53:45 ◼   ► blades on the thing and you know a strip at the top to keep it comfortable comes

01:53:50 ◼   ► in beautiful packaging makes you feel really good about it really really cool

01:53:56 ◼   ► stuff they also have things where you can sign up once you're a happy

01:54:01 ◼   ► customer you can tell them how often you shave how often you go through stuff you

01:54:05 ◼   ► can sign up get more or less like a subscription and blades just show up on

01:54:09 ◼   ► a regular basis so you don't even have to remember to reorder but to get

01:54:14 ◼   ► started before you know you're not going to subscribe before you know how good

01:54:17 ◼   ► this stuff is all you do is you go there you take a look around and you can get

01:54:20 ◼   ► these sets they've got one called the Truman set gives you some shaving cream

01:54:24 ◼   ► or gel a handle three blades everything you need to get started 15 bucks that's

01:54:31 ◼   ► it they've got the Winston set same type of stuff same three things except the

01:54:36 ◼   ► blade is made out of steel instead of plastic really cool stuff and then

01:54:41 ◼   ► And here's something else, timing-wise, exactly,

01:54:43 ◼   ► it's a great idea.

01:54:45 ◼   ► It's called the Father's Day Shave Set.

01:54:48 ◼   ► Comes in a beautiful box.

01:54:50 ◼   ► You get to pick between foaming gel or shave cream.

01:54:54 ◼   ► It gives you everything you need

01:54:57 ◼   ► to get started with Harry's.

01:54:58 ◼   ► And just the box alone looks like it's worth it.

01:55:03 ◼   ► The whole thing is only 40 bucks.

01:55:04 ◼   ► Really, really great stuff.

01:55:08 ◼   ► Again, a no-brainer.

01:55:10 ◼   ► I know it seems like a, you know, like a,

01:55:11 ◼   ► it's like getting your dad a tie.

01:55:13 ◼   ► It's right out of the central cliche, you know,

01:55:14 ◼   ► get your dad a shaving kit.

01:55:15 ◼   ► But this is so nice and it's so nicely designed.

01:55:18 ◼   ► I say go retro and do it.

01:55:20 ◼   ► It is a great idea.

01:55:21 ◼   ► How can you go wrong with it?

01:55:22 ◼   ► Really, really cool stuff.

01:55:25 ◼   ► I encourage you to go and check it out.

01:55:26 ◼   ► You just see that just the box alone

01:55:28 ◼   ► looks like it's worth 40 bucks.

01:55:29 ◼   ► Don't know how these guys do it.

01:55:31 ◼   ► Where do you go to find out more?

01:55:35 ◼   ► Go to harrys.com.

01:55:37 ◼   ► h a r r y s dot com and use the code talk show know the just talk show and on your first

01:55:45 ◼   ► order you will save 10 uh so my thanks to harry's go there check them out get your uh

01:55:54 ◼   ► dad your husband your father um anybody you want a father's day shaving kit really really

01:55:59 ◼   ► great stuff my thanks to them you know what i was wrong it's not 10 you save five bucks

01:56:05 ◼   ► But anyway, that's what you save.

01:56:07 ◼   ► Five bucks at checkout on your first purchase.

01:56:10 ◼   ► But it'll be about 10% depending on what you buy.

01:56:14 ◼   ► - It's money in your pocket.

01:56:15 ◼   ► - Money in your pocket and a fantastic shaving kit.

01:56:18 ◼   ► One last thing on my list of things to talk about.

01:56:22 ◼   ► I don't know if you have anything.

01:56:23 ◼   ► And maybe it's related to handoff and et cetera.

01:56:27 ◼   ► But one of the most curious pieces of news

01:56:29 ◼   ► that have come out to me,

01:56:30 ◼   ► you know what I'm gonna say, right?

01:56:31 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:56:32 ◼   ► - All right, you say it.

01:56:33 ◼   ► - Discovery D.

01:56:34 ◼   ► Discovery D. Explain Discovery D to people who may not be familiar with it.

01:56:41 ◼   ► So Apple did a lot of under-the-hood stuff with Yosemite. I think they rewrote Launch

01:56:45 ◼   ► D. They rewrote Discovery D. And my original understanding is that this was a key component

01:56:50 ◼   ► for things like continuity and for a world where you do have things like the Apple Watch,

01:56:54 ◼   ► and you need to be able to move, identify devices and move information, not just information,

01:56:59 ◼   ► but actually activity back and forth between them. But it was remarkably error-prone. I

01:57:03 ◼   ► I think Rich Segal was my favorite when he posted a screenshot showing Apple TV bracket

01:57:07 ◼   ► one all the way to 99 or something on his screen.

01:57:10 ◼   ► All right.

01:57:11 ◼   ► So for example, if in the last year you've had an experience where anything on your home

01:57:19 ◼   ► network has suddenly gotten a new name where it was the old name parenthesis and an integer.

01:57:26 ◼   ► Like perfect example that your Apple TV no longer shows up as Apple TV.

01:57:30 ◼   ► now called Apple TV one or you know Jones iPhone is now Jones iPhone 2 that's

01:57:37 ◼   ► discovery D that's an issue with discovery D or if your other computers

01:57:42 ◼   ► on your network no longer show up in the finder like they're just it's not there

01:57:45 ◼   ► anymore they're only intermittently there I it does seem like they fixed my

01:57:49 ◼   ► problem at some point but we had a problem here I think I talked about it

01:57:53 ◼   ► in the show a few months ago with our HP laser jet printer which has

01:57:58 ◼   ► Bonjour support and at first when we first got it a couple years ago it was

01:58:04 ◼   ► great because we no longer needed it just go and set up a printer and it was

01:58:09 ◼   ► listed and then it would figure out what it was it was almost I swear and I know

01:58:14 ◼   ► this is retro but in the old days of classic Mac OS with the chooser and we

01:58:18 ◼   ► didn't even have network but you plugged a printer in your computer and you went

01:58:21 ◼   ► to the chooser and there it was there was the printer and you selected it and

01:58:25 ◼   ► And then when you went to whatever app you were using to print, it would print to that

01:58:29 ◼   ► printer.

01:58:30 ◼   ► And there was no other, no drivers to install, no telling the computer what printer it is.

01:58:36 ◼   ► It all identified itself.

01:58:38 ◼   ► That's how it worked with our LaserJet until Yosemite.

01:58:42 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden, you printed yesterday and then you went to print today and it wouldn't

01:58:48 ◼   ► print and then you'd go to see where's the printer and it wouldn't even be listed.

01:58:54 ◼   ► One of those fixes was to basically disconnect everything, especially Apple TVs, and then

01:58:58 ◼   ► reconnect it.

01:58:59 ◼   ► It sounded – I don't have the technical acumen to say whether this is true or not,

01:59:02 ◼   ► but it sounded like almost some form of cash poisoning where something would keep a bad

01:59:05 ◼   ► list and it would just replicate errors over and over again.

01:59:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:59:10 ◼   ► It would maybe like hang on to old ideas of where something should be.

01:59:17 ◼   ► But the weird thing about it is it replaced something called mDNS Responder.

01:59:23 ◼   ► weird thing is is people you know again when I was younger I would have been

01:59:26 ◼   ► right there with them but they're you know people far braver than me jury-rigged

01:59:31 ◼   ► Yosemite to turn off discovery D and replace it with mDNS responder from like

01:59:39 ◼   ► I guess what we had before Mavericks yeah like the last stable version of

01:59:46 ◼   ► Mavericks which to me that type of stuff I can see why it works I'm not shocked

01:59:50 ◼   ► that it works. But to me, that sort of doing surgery on the OS is not for me anymore, right?

01:59:56 ◼   ► That's a young man's game. But by every account I've read, if there's like sets of instructions

02:00:02 ◼   ► out there, I wouldn't recommend following them if you're, you know, but there are, and by all

02:00:09 ◼   ► accounts at work, that you could disable Discovery D, go back to Maverick's version of MDNS Responder,

02:00:15 ◼   ► and everything just worked. And the weird thing is before that, before somebody had figured out,

02:00:18 ◼   ► out, here's a proven set of instructions to do it. The assumption was, well, they replaced

02:00:24 ◼   ► and why did they replace MDNS responder, which didn't have any of these problems, with

02:00:28 ◼   ► Discovery D, which has all of these problems. And the consensus was, well, some of these

02:00:33 ◼   ► continuity features must depend on it. And if you do this, I'll bet some of the continuity

02:00:38 ◼   ► features aren't going to work anymore, and apparently not. And so the weird thing is

02:00:44 ◼   ► that in what's still a beta, the latest beta of 10.10.4, that is exactly what Apple has

02:00:52 ◼   ► done is that discovery D is no longer there and they've gone back to MDNS responder.

02:00:59 ◼   ► It feels like an MDNS responder has been around since Jaguar, but it feels like they needed

02:01:04 ◼   ► this rewrite or they felt they needed this rewrite. Oftentimes people at Apple will complain

02:01:08 ◼   ► that they're not allowed to refactor old code or they just don't have the time to refactor

02:01:12 ◼   ► But it sounds like this went forward and they were given opportunities to fix it and there

02:01:16 ◼   ► were fixes that were in almost every point release and it just got to a point where a

02:01:19 ◼   ► decision was made that it's not being fixed right enough or fast enough and we're cutting

02:01:24 ◼   ► baits.

02:01:25 ◼   ► And I don't know if this is just for now and they're testing it because what's weird is

02:01:30 ◼   ► this is a beta so unless it's in the shipping version it's not going to hit everybody.

02:01:35 ◼   ► So if the shipping version comes out with Discovery D back in it then I don't know what

02:01:38 ◼   ► this means that comes back with MS DNS responder in it then at least we know

02:01:42 ◼   ► that that's been officially changed everywhere now MD nest or discovery D

02:01:46 ◼   ► is also on iOS 8 right I believe so yeah I believe so too and I had a friend who

02:01:51 ◼   ► said that he was with - this is a friend who does not work at Apple but I was out

02:01:56 ◼   ► with a few Apple folks and joked I'll bet they replaced discovery D on iOS -

02:02:01 ◼   ► and and they they just went silent and the one the one Apple guy had to like

02:02:05 ◼   ► stifle a laugh. I don't know. Read that as you may, but I mean, you know, and they wouldn't

02:02:11 ◼   ► know further words for explained exchange on the subject, but there might be something

02:02:16 ◼   ► there.

02:02:17 ◼   ► I think if you started asking, you'll just get a clear saying too soon.

02:02:20 ◼   ► My guess is there's somebody within Apple who's the DRI, again, directly responsible

02:02:25 ◼   ► individual for Discovery D, who is having trouble sleeping at night and when he wakes

02:02:32 ◼   ► up in the morning is covered in sweat.

02:02:34 ◼   ► Yes.

02:02:35 ◼   ► because this sort of thing does not happen like they Apple stubbornly fixes

02:02:42 ◼   ► these things rather than go back to right like a rollback like this just is

02:02:50 ◼   ► you know and it's not the hugest deal in the world but it's just out of character

02:02:54 ◼   ► for Apple and and another thing I have heard is just loosely that in term in

02:03:03 ◼   ► in the aftermath of this coming out and just like asking around like, "What the hell,

02:03:07 ◼   ► man? This is just crazy," is that Discovery D became like the whipping boy for anything

02:03:17 ◼   ► and everything wrong with Yosemite, even if it had nothing to do with networking. Like,

02:03:23 ◼   ► just loose terms from the top. It's this whole basic idea, you know, and to go back even

02:03:29 ◼   ► into Marco's functional high ground thing.

02:03:33 ◼   ► This whole basic idea that Apple software

02:03:35 ◼   ► has become a little less reliable with Yosemite,

02:03:40 ◼   ► really rank, really rankled people within Apple,

02:03:45 ◼   ► all the way up to the top.

02:03:47 ◼   ► And that, you know, I've talked about this,

02:03:51 ◼   ► but that, you know, there were people who,

02:03:53 ◼   ► not who went in denial about it, but who said,

02:03:55 ◼   ► "Wait, our open bug count is lower than it's been in years.

02:03:58 ◼   ► We've been fixing bugs at this incredible rate.

02:04:01 ◼   ► It doesn't make sense that people think

02:04:03 ◼   ► we've been getting less reliable,

02:04:04 ◼   ► and we're getting fewer crash reports than ever.

02:04:07 ◼   ► Things are crashing less.

02:04:08 ◼   ► All these ways they have internally

02:04:11 ◼   ► of analytically measuring reliability

02:04:14 ◼   ► were saying Yosemite was one of their best releases ever,

02:04:17 ◼   ► and the conventional wisdom out in user land

02:04:20 ◼   ► was that it was one of the worst,

02:04:22 ◼   ► and the whole thing came down to its discovery deets fault.

02:04:27 ◼   ► They were using the wrong metrics to qualify their success,

02:04:30 ◼   ► but DiscoveryD became the poster child.

02:04:31 ◼   ► - Right.

02:04:32 ◼   ► - And you could just see in a pre-Steve Jobs world,

02:04:34 ◼   ► he'd be sitting there with Apple TV 99

02:04:36 ◼   ► and wanna throw the controller at somebody's head.

02:04:38 ◼   ► - You know what?

02:04:39 ◼   ► It actually, doesn't it seem like a Steve Jobs decision?

02:04:42 ◼   ► That at some point there was like, it obviously wasn't,

02:04:45 ◼   ► but at some point, somebody got started

02:04:48 ◼   ► about all these bugs with DiscoveryD

02:04:50 ◼   ► and there's this frustration and pride

02:04:53 ◼   ► that Yosemite's supposed to get,

02:04:54 ◼   ► and he's just like, fuck it,

02:04:56 ◼   ► We're going back to MDNS Responder.

02:04:58 ◼   ► And everybody in the room is like, well, we don't do that.

02:05:00 ◼   ► And then he leaves, and it's like,

02:05:02 ◼   ► he just said we're going back to MDNS Responder,