The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Do you have that too? Don't you have that? Am I making this up that you've got your second

00:00:04 ◼   ► toe sticks out further than your big toe?

00:00:06 ◼   ► No, I always called that a freak toe when I was little.

00:00:09 ◼   ► Yeah. Supposedly it means you're going to be financially well off when you get older.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I actually looked it up years ago and I think that's like genetically the more common one.

00:00:20 ◼   ► So having it not be that way is actually the freakish way, but it still looks weird to

00:00:24 ◼   ► me. Like you don't ever draw a foot that way.

00:00:26 ◼   ► No, you would never draw a foot that way.

00:00:28 ◼   ► But I remember that the tips of my second and third toes would be just blistered to

00:00:35 ◼   ► hell.

00:00:36 ◼   ► And so I would get up earlier or I would skip breakfast and go to the trainer.

00:00:41 ◼   ► It's sort of like being a pro athlete.

00:00:42 ◼   ► There's like a nice professional.

00:00:43 ◼   ► It was at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.

00:00:47 ◼   ► And you'd go to the trainer and there was a real college athletic trainer and he would

00:00:53 ◼   ► like take razor blades to your blisters and do them right.

00:00:58 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:00:59 ◼   ► Geoff - Is that the treatment?

00:01:02 ◼   ► I mean…

00:01:03 ◼   ► Dave - Well, I wouldn't recommend doing it yourself.

00:01:05 ◼   ► It seems like it was, you know, it was like a fine line between cutting off too much of

00:01:09 ◼   ► the skin and too little, but oh, it hurt like hell in the morning.

00:01:12 ◼   ► And it would just feel like I can't… oh, it was terrible.

00:01:15 ◼   ► It's like you couldn't even walk.

00:01:17 ◼   ► But then after a while, it just sort of, you know, you just get numb to the pain and then

00:01:21 ◼   ► you, you know, just play.

00:01:23 ◼   ► Never much for summer camp. We used to have a playground, like a local playground would

00:01:28 ◼   ► run, pay high school kids to supervise from like 9 to noon in the morning. And it'd be

00:01:36 ◼   ► like supervised kickball games and box hockey and arts and crafts.

00:01:41 ◼   ► Who's paying the insurance on that?

00:01:43 ◼   ► I don't, I think it was like a, you know, this would be like the very late 70s and early

00:01:49 ◼   ► eighties i think it was a holdout from us smaller simpler america's just gonna

00:01:54 ◼   ► say it's a simpler time right where where the municipal the city's the

00:01:58 ◼   ► little town where i grew up the municipal government paid for it somehow

00:02:02 ◼   ► it was in the school like they'd open up a little hallway in the school

00:02:05 ◼   ► which is next to the playground so the end there was a ping pong table in there

00:02:09 ◼   ► you could play ping pong when it rained um and that's where the bathroom must

00:02:13 ◼   ► have been because you need at least one right and there was a bathroom

00:02:15 ◼   ► uh and it you know a locker a little locker where they'd keep the kick balls

00:02:19 ◼   ► and the bases and stuff like that.

00:02:21 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:02:22 ◼   ► And then they'd open it up at night too.

00:02:24 ◼   ► It was like six to eight at night or something like that.

00:02:26 ◼   ► It's like they'd be closed from like noon to six and everybody would go to the community

00:02:29 ◼   ► pool or whatever, but from like nine to noon and six to eight they'd be open up.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Gotta keep you off the street somehow, I guess.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess.

00:02:38 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:02:39 ◼   ► I grew up in like a housing development, so we had, I don't know, a couple dozen kids

00:02:44 ◼   ► all around the same age.

00:02:45 ◼   ► So that was, we sort of had our own makeshift camp, I think.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't know anybody who went to camp camp though.

00:02:53 ◼   ► Like I said, if your parents love you, they keep you around, I think.

00:02:58 ◼   ► I think Jonas has mixed feelings about it.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Seems like a nice camp.

00:03:02 ◼   ► He loves to swim, they've got a pool, they play games and stuff.

00:03:06 ◼   ► But I feel like his view is that the inside of our house is sort of like a camp.

00:03:12 ◼   ► It's got way better video games.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Yeah, we've got video games and air conditioning.

00:03:16 ◼   ► You don't have to take a bus to get there. Right, a refrigerator full of cold beverages,

00:03:23 ◼   ► and that's about it. Alright, well we gotta get this show on the road, because there's

00:03:26 ◼   ► some exciting soccer matches coming up that I really, really want to see, so... Is this

00:03:31 ◼   ► true? No, of course it's not. Soccer's the worst! You're not following the world cup?

00:03:35 ◼   ► I am following it, and I am hating every minute of it, because I'm a masochist, I'm following

00:03:39 ◼   ► it. Did you ever play soccer? No, like, you know, gym soccer, and I was half-decent, but

00:03:45 ◼   ► But no, I never went out for any of the teams or anything.

00:03:48 ◼   ► No, I didn't either.

00:03:50 ◼   ► It just seemed interminable to me.

00:03:52 ◼   ► And I think playing it is way better than watching it.

00:03:56 ◼   ► I don't even know about that.

00:03:57 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:03:58 ◼   ► It just felt so clumsy to me.

00:04:01 ◼   ► It seems to me like basketball and soccer are peer sports.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Two teams, they're going for goals.

00:04:09 ◼   ► There's severe limits on how you can touch and advance the ball.

00:04:12 ◼   ► It seems like to me, always seemed to me like basketball was the one where, what is it that

00:04:16 ◼   ► separates us from the other animals?

00:04:18 ◼   ► It's our hands.

00:04:19 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:04:20 ◼   ► And we're purposely not using them in this one sport.

00:04:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:23 ◼   ► Well, I mean, the obvious corollary is really hockey, though.

00:04:26 ◼   ► But hockey manages to be way more exciting than soccer to me.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And again, you get to use your hands.

00:04:33 ◼   ► A little bit.

00:04:34 ◼   ► Or at least a stick that's, you know, in your hands.

00:04:36 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:04:37 ◼   ► I think Greece is playing today, but I hate every minute of this.

00:04:43 ◼   ► I'm glad it's only once every four years.

00:04:46 ◼   ► Do you root for the Greeks, just out of family heritage?

00:04:49 ◼   ► Eh, you know, for my dad maybe.

00:04:50 ◼   ► I honestly never cared.

00:04:55 ◼   ► I was born in America, I'm an American.

00:04:57 ◼   ► But I'm only...

00:04:58 ◼   ► Well, I guess I'm 50% Greek, so that's pretty Greek.

00:05:01 ◼   ► But I don't really...

00:05:03 ◼   ► Trust me, you're pretty Greek.

00:05:05 ◼   ► seen my forearms. You were going there. I went there first. Fuck you.

00:05:12 ◼   ► What's his name? Montero is rooting for the Portuguese.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Yeah, and he is--

00:05:16 ◼   ► I don't know if he's even serious or if he's just trying to--

00:05:19 ◼   ► It really seemed like trolling, and I hope it was, because it was either trolling or

00:05:24 ◼   ► he is like the worst sports fan I've ever seen, worse than you even.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Right, because how could you not be rooting for the Americans?

00:05:32 ◼   ► Well, I mean, like, if he wants to root for the Portuguese, that's alright, but like,

00:05:35 ◼   ► if you followed his Twitter stream during the Portugal-US match, it was just...

00:05:40 ◼   ► I mean, it was just...

00:05:42 ◼   ► You'd want to throw something through the wall.

00:05:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:45 ◼   ► Yeah, I kind of got the feeling that he was just trolling when he started complaining

00:05:50 ◼   ► about the refs, who I don't think were in the US's favor at all.

00:05:53 ◼   ► I don't think...

00:05:54 ◼   ► I think it was a well-refereed match.

00:05:55 ◼   ► Well, and he... and like, on Dempsey's goal, he was... he kept calling for an offside,

00:05:59 ◼   ► and then meanwhile, the announcers are not... like, it wasn't even close.

00:06:02 ◼   ► Well, it wasn't like it wasn't as if there was any question on offside. So, all right

00:06:06 ◼   ► the only questionable thing in the officiating there was the extra the one extra minute of

00:06:10 ◼   ► Extra it went from four to five minutes, right?

00:06:13 ◼   ► Right, that's when they scored in that and that's when they scored was in the fifth

00:06:17 ◼   ► Yeah, and supposedly they're saying that the I would I read after the match was that the whoever whoever the mysterious?

00:06:23 ◼   ► Referee is who gets to decide how many minutes of extra time there is added another

00:06:29 ◼   ► fifth minute so he added four and then he added one on on the last US substitution where the US the guy being

00:06:36 ◼   ► Substituted was like crawling off the field

00:06:39 ◼   ► Which is possibly justified although from what the announcer said is is a time-honored tradition. Oh well

00:06:47 ◼   ► It's horrible. I mean this is this is what happened against Ghana the past two World Cups

00:06:53 ◼   ► for the US

00:06:56 ◼   ► That you know, they got a lead and then they were just everybody was suddenly struck down by injury

00:07:00 ◼   ► Balls are being kicked out of the stadium. We don't have any more balls. Somebody get a pump

00:07:06 ◼   ► well, I mean what I don't I

00:07:09 ◼   ► Have so many complaints about soccer

00:07:12 ◼   ► But the one that really gets me is that we can use the stop button on a stopwatch

00:07:16 ◼   ► It is literally called a stopwatch

00:07:19 ◼   ► Because you can start the time and then you can stop it

00:07:23 ◼   ► Instead of just letting it run for 45 minutes and then saying yeah, there was about two minutes of extra time

00:07:29 ◼   ► We need to add yeah, it seems it seems like some kind of bizarre antiquated

00:07:34 ◼   ► You know think holdover from a hundred years ago, right, but then meanwhile they've got like like

00:07:40 ◼   ► Like the television crew at least has like the offsides camera that is like showing exactly where the player was

00:07:47 ◼   ► with like computer renderings and stuff

00:07:50 ◼   ► So, I mean it's not as if the game has is the same that it is played in

00:07:54 ◼   ► You know a desert or a back alley or something

00:07:57 ◼   ► Like the game though the World Cup games are professional level. We can use a stopwatch properly. Yeah, I don't I don't get that

00:08:05 ◼   ► I don't get why they don't run it simple just stop if the ref decides. Hey, this is a real injury

00:08:10 ◼   ► I'm blowing my whistle then there's a timekeeper who hits a red button exactly and then when he blows his whistle again

00:08:15 ◼   ► They hit the red button again, and then it's 90 minutes and it's 90 minutes, right?

00:08:19 ◼   ► And at 9-0-0-0 a buzzer goes off and the game is over.

00:08:26 ◼   ► Because there's also the weird thing at the end, you know, and it was almost, almost got

00:08:32 ◼   ► to that point in the US Portugal match where there is no automatic buzzer that goes off.

00:08:38 ◼   ► There's a ref who decides to blow the whistle and if the team is down by one goal and streaming

00:08:43 ◼   ► down the sideline and has a play, right.

00:08:47 ◼   ► That bothers me as an American.

00:08:49 ◼   ► just logically like as a nerd it's annoying like this yeah this nebulous nature of the clock and

00:08:54 ◼   ► yeah whereas i love i do love and and our mutual friend and and he's been slowly getting me more

00:09:02 ◼   ► into the game over the years guy english is big you know grew up in i don't know some kind of

00:09:09 ◼   ► soccer playing country uh has been preaching to me that it's a beautiful you know that it's the

00:09:14 ◼   ► beautiful game and that there's aspects and there's parts of it that i am getting more into

00:09:18 ◼   ► to. But I do love, I love the fact that it's a running clock. That it's, you know, they

00:09:24 ◼   ► start a half and for the next 45 minutes you're just watching these guys play.

00:09:28 ◼   ► Well, I mean, that's the great aspect of it, that there's no commercials like cutting into

00:09:33 ◼   ► the game.

00:09:34 ◼   ► Just a half-time full of commercials and then they've, you know, and it's funny, it's like

00:09:38 ◼   ► the nature of the, it's just like the web and anything else. If you want to sell ads,

00:09:44 ◼   ► nature of the opportunity, the advertisers will find a way.

00:09:48 ◼   ► Oh, I mean...

00:09:49 ◼   ► So they have those sponsorships along the sidelines.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Which are, like, way worse than the boards in hockey, or way more noticeable, and...

00:09:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's way better than commercial breaks.

00:09:57 ◼   ► Oh, no, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. Well, but I think, I don't know how much... I think

00:10:01 ◼   ► that's part of the issue with soccer in America, is that I think there's not nearly as much

00:10:04 ◼   ► money in it, even with all those ads, because it just doesn't ever total up to as much as

00:10:09 ◼   ► you would make from selling a few commercial ads, like video ads.

00:10:12 ◼   ► Yeah, but somehow the Premier League in Europe makes tons of money in that they can afford

00:10:16 ◼   ► to pay guys, you know, it's commensurate with US, you know, professional sports in terms

00:10:21 ◼   ► of the top player salaries and the value of the franchise.

00:10:24 ◼   ► Is it?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

00:10:26 ◼   ► Well, I mean, they all come up, like Beckham came here to make his money.

00:10:28 ◼   ► I'm sure he made some in England, but...

00:10:30 ◼   ► Yeah, but he's sort of like, you know, he's like an A-Rod type where it's, and I don't

00:10:36 ◼   ► mean that to be disparaging to him, but where his celebrity far extended beyond sports.

00:10:40 ◼   ► Yeah, okay.

00:10:41 ◼   ► you know that he had opportunities that were beyond just his soccer playing ability.

00:10:46 ◼   ► Well, I don't know, we didn't do any research.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Yeah, we should really talk more about soccer on your tech podcast with both of us that don't

00:10:54 ◼   ► really like soccer. The fans are gonna love that.

00:10:57 ◼   ► Well, but the thing that to me is interesting, though, in terms of like the advertising finding

00:11:00 ◼   ► a way is that in the Premier League, the teams are sponsored.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Right. And their jerseys are like, they have ads on their jerseys, don't they?

00:11:08 ◼   ► Right, I forget which team is which, but I know that I watched a match, I don't know

00:11:12 ◼   ► how I got tricked into watching a Premier League match a couple months ago, and one

00:11:15 ◼   ► had the Emirates airline.

00:11:18 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And airlines are big because they're international, and that they, you know, the international

00:11:22 ◼   ► appeal of it is, you know, makes it a perfect opportunity.

00:11:24 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:11:25 ◼   ► And they just have a big, instead of having the team name on the jersey, it's a big airline

00:11:29 ◼   ► logo on the jersey.

00:11:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:31 ◼   ► Which would, you know, to an American is crazy, like can you, I mean...

00:11:33 ◼   ► If the Red Sox or the Yankees had a big logo, somebody, some other company's logo would

00:11:37 ◼   ► be disgusting Yankees Yankees don't even put their player names on the jersey

00:11:42 ◼   ► that's right Derek Jeter's Jersey just says to even that's all the away Jersey

00:11:47 ◼   ► right right it just says to it's his number that's all it says I can't even

00:11:52 ◼   ► imagine if it had like a big Pepsi logo but that's the opportunity and the nature

00:11:59 ◼   ► of the game is such is that there aren't any breaks right right and so I do like

00:12:05 ◼   ► that i like that you can kind of just say okay i want to watch the u_s_ play

00:12:08 ◼   ► somebody and you've you know you only have to give up like you know

00:12:12 ◼   ► to its exactly two hours yeah exactly right

00:12:15 ◼   ► and uh...

00:12:16 ◼   ► and it just flows

00:12:18 ◼   ► like that

00:12:19 ◼   ► anyway let's make a prediction you think the u_s_ is going to make it into the

00:12:22 ◼   ► elimination of crowd while tell you what the only reason i'm watching it all is

00:12:25 ◼   ► because i have a uh... a pool going with some friends

00:12:29 ◼   ► whose prize is a landon donovan world cup jersey

00:12:33 ◼   ► Wait, is that for the loser or the winner?

00:12:36 ◼   ► That's for the winner.

00:12:37 ◼   ► They must have printed these jerseys up before he was not selected for the team.

00:12:42 ◼   ► So we found this on eBay, and that's going to be the prize for the winner.

00:12:47 ◼   ► So I have them losing.

00:12:49 ◼   ► I had Germany and Portugal advancing.

00:12:51 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:12:54 ◼   ► They played well against Portugal.

00:12:55 ◼   ► They could have won that game.

00:12:57 ◼   ► Should have won that game.

00:12:58 ◼   ► I've got Brazil winning the whole thing, though.

00:12:59 ◼   ► I go hometown.

00:13:00 ◼   ► I go one of the best soccer teams.

00:13:02 ◼   ► Yeah, and eventually the refs are gonna fix it for him.

00:13:05 ◼   ► There'll be some kind of match and it'll be a terrible handball or something like that.

00:13:09 ◼   ► Have you noticed the, I don't know how much of the commercials you've seen, because there

00:13:12 ◼   ► are some during the half, but there's a FIFA ad that is a soccer ball rolling on a field

00:13:18 ◼   ► and the field tilts.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Have you seen this?

00:13:21 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

00:13:23 ◼   ► The gist of it is that it's a FIFA ad and it says "Together we fight match manipulation."

00:13:28 ◼   ► And it's absurd that you need an ad to tell the fans like, "We're fighting against corruption

00:13:36 ◼   ► in soccer."

00:13:37 ◼   ► Right. Well, did you see that New York Times story a couple weeks ago?

00:13:40 ◼   ► About the previous South Africa, right?

00:13:42 ◼   ► Yeah. The one FIFA ref just took a cash deposit of $120,000 to the bank.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Just rolled into the bank with it, and then six hours later was reffing a match.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Right. Making suspicious calls.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Yeah, no attempt to hide it even.

00:14:01 ◼   ► The whole thing is crooked.

00:14:03 ◼   ► Yeah, and it stems from the fact that they picked the referees via international diplomacy

00:14:11 ◼   ► where it's, "Hey, we need a guy from this part of the world, this guy from this part

00:14:15 ◼   ► of the world, this part of the world," as opposed to ranking them by their...

00:14:18 ◼   ► These are the best refs.

00:14:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:22 ◼   ► Which is how US sports typically are done.

00:14:24 ◼   ► in the NFL for the playoff games there's like a systematic analysis of which referees were

00:14:30 ◼   ► the most accurate in a regular season and those refs get to ref playoff games. And I

00:14:37 ◼   ► think it's the same in baseball. I think that there's like a...

00:14:39 ◼   ► It's definitely the veteran teams at least. I don't know if it's... But if you're a veteran

00:14:43 ◼   ► team, it's because you've done well over the years.

00:14:45 ◼   ► Right. And one thing you could definitely say for Major League Baseball is for all the

00:14:49 ◼   ► problems that they've had over the decades, one thing is that there's never really been

00:14:54 ◼   ► any kind of even hint or whiff of implication of anything other yeah

00:14:59 ◼   ► there's umpires you can complain about but it's never in terms of bias or

00:15:04 ◼   ► fixing matches or no you just think they're inconsistent with their strike

00:15:08 ◼   ► zone or right it just allows the umpire but never a great umpire they had they

00:15:13 ◼   ► truly have an impeccable you know 100 you know century-long reputation for

00:15:19 ◼   ► Uncorruptibility, yeah. Yeah, being impartial. Yeah. And you take that for granted when you

00:15:25 ◼   ► hear what the feedback has to put an ad on that says we're trying to keep this fair.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Oh man, soccer. Let's move on. I said ahead of time that I wasn't going to get into it,

00:15:40 ◼   ► and I'm not into it, but I'm still watching it, and I don't want to talk about it.

00:15:44 ◼   ► Alright, well alright one last thing that I'll say thank thank God they got rid of those goddamn noise make oh the vous aylas. Yeah

00:15:50 ◼   ► I don't want to you can cut this but those were great for our company because

00:15:56 ◼   ► There was a plug-in called vuvu X and it was an audio plug-in that let you cut out the sound of vuvuzela

00:16:02 ◼   ► What and audio hijack Pro worked with this plug-in so people were using audio hijack Pro in this plug-in to to remove the the the?

00:16:09 ◼   ► Buzzing noise from the background. No, there's no reason to cut it

00:16:13 ◼   ► I don't mind well when you were watching the matches it was if you could get that's fantastic a vuvuzela

00:16:18 ◼   ► D a divu vuzela plug-in yeah vuvu X that's fantastic good

00:16:24 ◼   ► You know it was so annoying that it doesn't surprise me in the least that somebody took the time to get rid of it

00:16:30 ◼   ► Yeah, well, but I mean that was like an African thing so I guess you know they don't have that in Brazil

00:16:35 ◼   ► I don't know what they have there, but nothing quite so well. They've apparently banned it though. Did they really yeah that you?

00:16:40 ◼   ► you know that they're telling you as you come into the stadium that if you're caught with one you're gonna get kicked out

00:16:44 ◼   ► GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

00:17:14 ◼   ► I, you've changed it up a little bit. The set looks different. I was looking at the

00:17:20 ◼   ► talk show page now versus, I think I was on sometime last year. You got rid of the wood

00:17:26 ◼   ► paneling. You got rid of the skeuomorphism, if you will. You toned it down to a flat gray.

00:17:33 ◼   ► Thank you, Paul.

00:17:34 ◼   ► Very nice.

00:17:35 ◼   ► Did you see this where FAA, I just sent you this link, this is late breaking news before

00:17:39 ◼   ► we started recording that the FAA has put the Nix on Amazon's drone delivery plans.

00:17:45 ◼   ► Well, which didn't, I mean the drones didn't exist anyway, or you know, it's not as if

00:17:50 ◼   ► this was like they're in the air right now and they're calling them back because of this

00:17:53 ◼   ► ban.

00:17:54 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:55 ◼   ► You know, I read that article, it indicated that this was something the FAA had already

00:18:02 ◼   ► attempted to ban, right?

00:18:05 ◼   ► I guess so.

00:18:07 ◼   ► It occurred to me when Amazon announced this, was it months ago, was it last year, I don't

00:18:11 ◼   ► know when it was.

00:18:12 ◼   ► Early this year, early last year.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Yeah, it occurred to me that it just seems like, well, this, it's a cool idea and I could

00:18:19 ◼   ► see how in the future this could be a thing, but it's got to be, there's got to be some

00:18:26 ◼   ► regulatory structure here.

00:18:27 ◼   ► You can't just have anybody who wants to willy-nilly flying things through the air.

00:18:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:33 ◼   ► Especially propeller driven things.

00:18:35 ◼   ► Well, I mean, even when they announced it, they said this was—I mean, they announced

00:18:42 ◼   ► it and it made a big—you know, it got a big PR cry, and that was what they wanted.

00:18:48 ◼   ► But it wasn't as if they announced it, like, coming in six months.

00:18:50 ◼   ► They said, "This is coming in several years once we deal with the FAA."

00:18:57 ◼   ► So this story now doesn't really—I don't think it really changes anything for Amazon.

00:19:03 ◼   ► It just sort of clarifies that no, you cannot just start doing it.

00:19:06 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:19:07 ◼   ► It's not happening next week.

00:19:09 ◼   ► You're not getting drone deliveries within the next few months at least.

00:19:12 ◼   ► It just fits to me though with like, and to a lesser degree it's Amazon, but it's Google's

00:19:19 ◼   ► MO to me is to just announce crazy shit that's not even close to being real and get people

00:19:25 ◼   ► all excited about it.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And to me it just distracts from the best of what's really real.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And being announced today.

00:19:35 ◼   ► Well, for Amazon I think it's probably actually pretty effective because it says, "Oh, they're

00:19:40 ◼   ► really focused on delivery and even if they can't do this yet, I should still buy stuff

00:19:43 ◼   ► from them."

00:19:44 ◼   ► Because it was only, it was an ancillary thing.

00:19:46 ◼   ► It wasn't as if, I mean probably some people would have ordered stuff just to get a drone

00:19:50 ◼   ► to deliver it to them.

00:19:51 ◼   ► I probably would have.

00:19:52 ◼   ► But...

00:19:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I would do that.

00:19:54 ◼   ► But I mean it wasn't as if they said, you know, "This is the service."

00:19:56 ◼   ► They said, you know, we're working to make shipping on what you buy as fast as possible.

00:20:01 ◼   ► So it's not as if they were actually selling the drone delivery.

00:20:04 ◼   ► Whereas I think you're right, in terms of Google, there's a lot of stuff that they pre-announce

00:20:09 ◼   ► or announce when it's, you know, sort of half-baked and it's something that you might actually

00:20:13 ◼   ► want to buy directly, but either it's not available, like Google Glass has been.

00:20:19 ◼   ► This year they've had a couple, like anyone can buy it days, right?

00:20:23 ◼   ► But for the most part, it's still $1500.

00:20:25 ◼   ► is much more than they planned to charge for it, and for the most part it's just been available

00:20:30 ◼   ► to select developers. So it's something that's in the public consciousness but not actually

00:20:35 ◼   ► available to the public.

00:20:36 ◼   ► So, you know, and we're recording this the day, I think one day before the Google I/O

00:20:41 ◼   ► keynote. It could be, you know, by the day or two from now there's a big new Google Glass

00:20:46 ◼   ► announcement where either A) they've radically dropped the price, or B) they've got a new

00:20:50 ◼   ► generational hardware that's less obtrusive and significantly improved.

00:20:55 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:20:56 ◼   ► But I don't really expect that.

00:20:57 ◼   ► Well, but even if that's true, and it may well be, but it's been what?

00:21:03 ◼   ► A year at least, a year plus since it first has landed in people's hands.

00:21:06 ◼   ► Two years.

00:21:07 ◼   ► Yeah, two years, right?

00:21:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:09 ◼   ► And it doesn't really exist as a product.

00:21:11 ◼   ► It's not a product you can go into the store and buy.

00:21:14 ◼   ► And that's strange to me.

00:21:16 ◼   ► And I think your comparison is generally going to be to Apple, where you don't hear anything

00:21:19 ◼   ► about it until it's either in the stores or it's going to be in the stores very soon.

00:21:25 ◼   ► And in a form that is exactly as promised.

00:21:27 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:28 ◼   ► Like, you know, they did pre-announce the iPhone.

00:21:30 ◼   ► I was just going to say the iPhone is sort of the exception.

00:21:32 ◼   ► But even that, nothing that they pre-announced, I mean, was there anything that was missing

00:21:37 ◼   ► in the final product?

00:21:38 ◼   ► No, in fact, it was better because they switched from plastic to Gorilla Glass like a month

00:21:45 ◼   ► beforehand which to me is one of those like secret like little overlooked

00:21:49 ◼   ► historical things where it's like can you even imagine being Tim Cook and it's

00:21:53 ◼   ► like you're trying to get this super high-profile thing shipped and from

00:21:57 ◼   ► China and like Steve Jobs comes in and was like hey plastics no good I've got

00:22:03 ◼   ► these guys from Corning on the phone and I think we can switch to glass and it's

00:22:06 ◼   ► like May right it's like six weeks before you're supposed to ship the thing

00:22:11 ◼   ► and somehow he made it happen was it that I mean do you I don't know it was

00:22:14 ◼   ► I mean even if it was six months, it's ridiculous.

00:22:19 ◼   ► Well it was definitely after January.

00:22:21 ◼   ► I think that one of the books might have had that.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Maybe like the Jobs biography had this story.

00:22:27 ◼   ► Maybe it was like April or something like that.

00:22:28 ◼   ► But like you said, at any point between January and June, it's amazing.

00:22:32 ◼   ► It should be finalized.

00:22:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:35 ◼   ► It was like the most important part of the phone.

00:22:38 ◼   ► It was the thing that was most different and original and new.

00:22:41 ◼   ► they switched from hard plastic to Gorilla Glass. And the apps got better in some ways.

00:22:48 ◼   ► I forget, there were a couple of days. It was better than Promise, though. And then

00:22:52 ◼   ► two months after that, when they dropped the price, it even came down in price.

00:22:55 ◼   ► Right, right. So yeah, in that first generation, it wound up being better than they had originally

00:23:00 ◼   ► promised, which is something they never do anyway, as far as originally announcing something

00:23:05 ◼   ► before it's available.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Right. Like, whereas the opposite would have been if they'd promised it was gonna be Gorilla

00:23:11 ◼   ► Glass and promised it was gonna be $3.99 and then they shipped it and it was scratchable

00:23:16 ◼   ► plastic and $6.99.

00:23:18 ◼   ► Right. Right.

00:23:19 ◼   ► Well, and I'm also reminded of this, that showing these concepts and sort of conflating

00:23:27 ◼   ► between the concepts and reality with this thing I saw over the weekend and linked up

00:23:31 ◼   ► about...

00:23:32 ◼   ► Oh, the armband?

00:23:33 ◼   ► Google gesture. Right.

00:23:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:35 ◼   ► and Mashable linked it up as though it was real and then a couple of Android sites picked

00:23:40 ◼   ► it up after Mashable. And what it really was, was just a student exercise from, I forget,

00:23:47 ◼   ► some advertising school in Stockholm.

00:23:49 ◼   ► In Europe or something, right?

00:23:51 ◼   ► Yeah. I think it was Stockholm. Berg School of Communication. And it was a bunch of students

00:23:56 ◼   ► who made a video of a fake Google product called Google Gesture where you put this armband

00:24:01 ◼   ► on and it would translate sign language to verbal speech in real time.

00:24:08 ◼   ► Which is a little fantastic given that it doesn't, you know, Google has great text to

00:24:16 ◼   ► speech and speech to text but it still isn't quite as real time as what they were showing

00:24:22 ◼   ► for this armband for sign language.

00:24:28 ◼   ► All it was though, it had nothing to do with Google.

00:24:30 ◼   ► not engineering students, they're not working with, it's not like a computer science project,

00:24:34 ◼   ► they're advertising.

00:24:35 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:36 ◼   ► It was just an exercise to say like, make a fantastic product and then make an ad for

00:24:41 ◼   ► it.

00:24:42 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:43 ◼   ► But Mashable went with it as though it was real and so did other sites.

00:24:45 ◼   ► And I feel like, you know, shame on them for not looking at it a little harder.

00:24:50 ◼   ► The signs were all there that this was not real.

00:24:52 ◼   ► But it still to me is a little telling though that they got fooled because it's, you know,

00:24:58 ◼   ► Google tends to announce stuff that's not real yet.

00:25:01 ◼   ► Right, right. What was the last... the last sentence was "no shipping date for the

00:25:04 ◼   ► app has been announced yet."

00:25:06 ◼   ► In the... in the Mashable... yeah, in the Mashable piece, right.

00:25:09 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:10 ◼   ► Well, I don't know. That... I mean, that happens with... it doesn't happen in the same way

00:25:13 ◼   ► with Apple, but

00:25:15 ◼   ► there's all sorts of writing about Apple about

00:25:18 ◼   ► the iWatch that's coming, and

00:25:20 ◼   ► it's written as if this is a certainty and as if Apple has already announced it.

00:25:24 ◼   ► And it drives me crazy.

00:25:26 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely. Because well, and the thing I brought it up with Mark Gurman a couple

00:25:30 ◼   ► weeks ago when he was on the show, the thing that gets me is the way those articles are

00:25:34 ◼   ► always accompanied by visual mock up from some random, you know, designer on flicker

00:25:39 ◼   ► or dribble or wherever. Right. And and there's a tiny little credit to like a name. But it

00:25:47 ◼   ► doesn't really say it never says this is just a crazy mock up that is unrelated to the rumor

00:25:52 ◼   ► that I were publishing.

00:25:53 ◼   ► It just goes well with the story, but don't take it as fact or even as anything.

00:26:00 ◼   ► In fact, there was one a couple of weeks ago, it doesn't really matter which site it was,

00:26:05 ◼   ► but it was one of these sites like 9to5Mac.

00:26:07 ◼   ► And it wasn't a Mark Gurman story, it was somebody else.

00:26:08 ◼   ► But it might have been 9to5Mac, it might have been somebody else.

00:26:10 ◼   ► But it was a story about, or maybe it was a Gurman, I don't know, it doesn't matter.

00:26:17 ◼   ► But it was about this thing where that iOS 8 is rumored to be, like in the fall when

00:26:25 ◼   ► new iPads come out, that there's going to be split screen mode between multiple apps,

00:26:30 ◼   ► two apps.

00:26:31 ◼   ► So was this before the developer's conference or after?

00:26:34 ◼   ► After.

00:26:35 ◼   ► Okay, so before this had been a rumor, but then they didn't mention it at the conference,

00:26:39 ◼   ► so we're assuming it's not happening.

00:26:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:26:41 ◼   ► And somebody had poking around the iOS 8 beta had found some stuff that's in there that

00:26:49 ◼   ► suggests, yeah, there's these...

00:26:52 ◼   ► We can actually come back to this later in the show, but these different screen modes,

00:26:56 ◼   ► like two-thirds, one-third, one-half, one-half.

00:27:02 ◼   ► And so this article was describing what's actually in the iOS beta hidden, which isn't

00:27:11 ◼   ► we still don't really know like the actual interactive like what is the act how are you going to invoke it and drag it along and

00:27:17 ◼   ► Stuff like that and in meantime they had an illustration

00:27:19 ◼   ► showing something completely different from like somebody from months ago just

00:27:23 ◼   ► Speculating when the rumor first came out or right it didn't even match what was being described, right?

00:27:30 ◼   ► But yet was done in a very

00:27:33 ◼   ► highly detailed visual style that conveys a sense of authority and and of reality as if this is real and

00:27:40 ◼   ► Right, like it would be different. It would be stupid. They wouldn't do it

00:27:43 ◼   ► But like if somebody who's you know

00:27:45 ◼   ► Not really an artist like me took like a field notes notebook and just did like a simple sketch

00:27:52 ◼   ► On artistic just a pen on paper and said it's sort of like this right a couple of rectangles in an arrow

00:27:58 ◼   ► That would be one thing but it's these completely

00:28:01 ◼   ► Flushed down ideas. Yeah, like a hundred percent articulated in Photoshop idea, you know, and it drives me nuts

00:28:08 ◼   ► You know every and you could just you can find hundreds of these stories about like the iWatch right that are accompanied by these illustrations

00:28:15 ◼   ► Makes me crazy. Let me tell you about take a break talk about our first sponsor

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00:31:14 ◼   ► What else we were talking about?

00:31:17 ◼   ► Amazon yeah, so there was that last week. They announced the Amazon fire phone, right?

00:31:23 ◼   ► Did you see that I didn't see the event I saw I saw one of the summaries of it

00:31:29 ◼   ► Either did you actually watch the event?

00:31:32 ◼   ► No, I didn't I watched a little bit and it they did seem to do a nice job, but I

00:31:38 ◼   ► Forget I was busy at the time and then I've just read all the highlights

00:31:43 ◼   ► and it just didn't seem like there was two hours of stuff.

00:31:46 ◼   ► - Well, right, 'cause it was just the phone, right?

00:31:48 ◼   ► Did they cover anything else?

00:31:50 ◼   ► - Pretty much, I think they had some boilerplate up front

00:31:54 ◼   ► just talking about how successful Prime is.

00:31:59 ◼   ► - Right, and they're graphs with no labeled axes.

00:32:02 ◼   ► So it's twice as good as it was last year,

00:32:05 ◼   ► but who knows what it was last year.

00:32:07 ◼   ► - Right, well, I'm only half joking.

00:32:10 ◼   ► I took a screenshot of one of the graphs.

00:32:13 ◼   ► It showed like total number of Prime members over the years.

00:32:16 ◼   ► And it's a steeply sloping--

00:32:18 ◼   ► - Upwards.

00:32:19 ◼   ► - Upwards chart.

00:32:20 ◼   ► - But there's no label on the Y axis.

00:32:23 ◼   ► - Right, no label.

00:32:23 ◼   ► And I only half joking, I asked if Amazon

00:32:26 ◼   ► had ever published a graph with a labeled Y axis.

00:32:29 ◼   ► All they had, the X axis is labeled in years

00:32:32 ◼   ► and the Y axis is completely unlabeled.

00:32:35 ◼   ► I don't think that they have.

00:32:37 ◼   ► And I know that they've never once announced

00:32:40 ◼   ► sales figures for any hardware device that they make.

00:32:42 ◼   ► for the Kindles and the tablets and the TV one they've got now. They're all fire something now,

00:32:51 ◼   ► aren't they? All right. Yeah, I think so. Fire TV. Kindle means reader and fire means

00:33:01 ◼   ► everything else. Like fancier. Except the Kindle Fire is a reader as well. I mean,

00:33:08 ◼   ► the phone? No, no, the Kindle Fire tablet. Like, don't they call it the... Yeah, but it

00:33:14 ◼   ► combines Kindle and Fire. Right. Yeah. It's Kindle Fire. Right. Yeah. I see what you're

00:33:17 ◼   ► saying. I see what you're saying. Right. Right. It's Amazon Kindle Fire is a tablet that's

00:33:22 ◼   ► a reader and a fire. I guess fire means Android. I don't know. Yeah, I think you're right.

00:33:27 ◼   ► I think that... Fire means they're offshoot of Android. Yeah. It's both an e-reader and

00:33:31 ◼   ► a thing. Then the Fire phone is just their Android offshoot for the phone. And then Fire

00:33:37 ◼   ► TV is their Android offshoot for watching video and playing games or whatever on your

00:33:43 ◼   ► TV. I guess I don't know if they have games. I don't think they do.

00:33:46 ◼   ► No, they do. They do because that was one of the first ones that shipped with its...

00:33:49 ◼   ► You could buy it with a separate controller. And that was where people said like the Apple

00:33:54 ◼   ► TV should sell with a... You could buy a $20 controller and then play games on it. And

00:34:00 ◼   ► the Amazon Fire TV had... I think the default model didn't have a controller, but you could

00:34:05 ◼   ► buy an additional controller with it. I don't know if that ever took off. It's only been

00:34:09 ◼   ► a few months.

00:34:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't never hear anybody write about it.

00:34:11 ◼   ► So maybe it's not that popular. Maybe it is and they're just not writing about it.

00:34:16 ◼   ► You know, that's one of those things too that it's, you know, I know people who follow Apple

00:34:20 ◼   ► tend to be accused of, I don't know, favoritism or like in the sport, to go back to the sports

00:34:26 ◼   ► analogy that we're always complaining about the refs.

00:34:29 ◼   ► Right.

00:34:30 ◼   ► Right? We always perceive that the refs are out to get us. But I can't help but think

00:34:35 ◼   ► that if Apple had announced at the same time an Apple TV update with a game controller

00:34:42 ◼   ► and it had taken off to the extent that Amazon's has taken off, which is to say apparently

00:34:47 ◼   ► not much at all, that they'd be getting excoriated in the business press.

00:34:50 ◼   ► There'd be stories about how it had flopped.

00:34:52 ◼   ► And that Tim Cook would need to be fired and etcetera, etcetera, and go forth.

00:34:57 ◼   ► So it's better off not to try anything.

00:34:58 ◼   ► Well, I don't know somehow

00:35:00 ◼   ► Apple and Apple alone seems to not be given permission by the business press and some of the tech press to just try things

00:35:07 ◼   ► right

00:35:09 ◼   ► Right and and there's snide remarks about Apple TV as a quote-unquote hobby

00:35:13 ◼   ► Whereas it's clearly more, you know, and I think

00:35:17 ◼   ► By that it just means it's not as big a deal financially as the other things that Apple does like the phone and well

00:35:23 ◼   ► I mean that that originated I think it was Tim Cook who said that wasn't it or was it?

00:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah jobs, but yeah, it came from Apple or maybe start. Well, there's one it came while Jobs was still alive

00:35:33 ◼   ► Okay, I don't know if it was his words or Tim Cook's words while but Steve was still the scene, right?

00:35:38 ◼   ► And and yeah, and they said, you know, this is sort of a hobby for us

00:35:41 ◼   ► And then yeah, then it becomes the the way that the press writes about it, right?

00:35:46 ◼   ► I well, I actually remember when they did the first Apple TV the silver and it was the actual hard drive in it

00:35:51 ◼   ► yeah, and they even

00:35:53 ◼   ► It was sort of semi pre announced because they were gonna call it ITV. It was the same time as the iPhone

00:35:59 ◼   ► It was 2007 same same keynote

00:36:01 ◼   ► Was it really at the end of the of the the iPhone announcement? Yep. It was the same keynote

00:36:06 ◼   ► I'm like 99% certain on that. He was like, I don't even know what we're gonna call it

00:36:11 ◼   ► We'll just call it ITV for no no, no, they they know they decided it was the Apple TV

00:36:15 ◼   ► But he kept calling it the ITV because he said oh, that's why you shouldn't go with a code name that like

00:36:19 ◼   ► I do remember that it was it was that internally they had called it the ITV

00:36:23 ◼   ► and then he kept slipping when he was referring to it.

00:36:27 ◼   ► Well, and the reason that they... I've heard that the reason they couldn't use that was

00:36:32 ◼   ► because there's a big TV network in the UK called ITV. And it just wasn't worth it. Like,

00:36:39 ◼   ► I guess they could maybe use that name elsewhere around the world, but that the UK is too big.

00:36:44 ◼   ► A big enough market, yeah.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Yeah, a big enough market not to do it. But anyway, it was introduced as a hobby. It was

00:36:49 ◼   ► So we don't really know what we're doing with this, but we can, it's interesting enough

00:36:53 ◼   ► to ship and you can watch movies and TV shows on it and stuff.

00:36:57 ◼   ► But I can't help but think that if they had done a game controller already and had games

00:37:01 ◼   ► for Apple TV and it was, you know, had gone nowhere yet.

00:37:06 ◼   ► Which isn't, you know, right, you'd hear about it.

00:37:08 ◼   ► Seems like a different stand.

00:37:11 ◼   ► You wanted to talk Tim Cook, right?

00:37:13 ◼   ► Sure.

00:37:14 ◼   ► So let's segue right to these, I guess it was just one piece about Tim Cook and then

00:37:18 ◼   ► kind of response piece, right?

00:37:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:20 ◼   ► So, last Sunday, this was, I guess, nine days ago now, but last Sunday, there was on the

00:37:26 ◼   ► front page, not the front page of the New York Times, but front page of the Sunday business

00:37:30 ◼   ► section of the New York Times, was a profile of Tim Cook.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Which interestingly, he did not sit down for.

00:37:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:39 ◼   ► At one point in the profile, they'd spoke to Apple to verify some things, but they said,

00:37:44 ◼   ► Tim Cook who declined to be interviewed for this piece.

00:37:49 ◼   ► Yeah, but they open it with like an anecdote, a personal anecdote from his childhood, which

00:37:55 ◼   ► makes it seem as though he had talked to them for the article, but in fact they took the

00:38:00 ◼   ► anecdote from...

00:38:01 ◼   ► A speech or something that he gave, right?

00:38:03 ◼   ► That he gave at Auburn University within the last few years.

00:38:08 ◼   ► But then they just sort of...

00:38:10 ◼   ► To me it's a little disingenuous, the way that it's written.

00:38:13 ◼   ► Yeah, the way that it opens anyway, it relatively quickly admits, you know, we did not interview

00:38:19 ◼   ► him directly for this. So it's not as if...

00:38:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:22 ◼   ► They're certainly not framing the whole thing as if he had spoken to them. But you're right

00:38:26 ◼   ► that the intro does make it seem a little bit like he was speaking directly to them.

00:38:30 ◼   ► Yeah. The headline is "Tim Cook making Apple his own." I'll be sure to put it... I don't

00:38:35 ◼   ► always keep up with the show notes, but I'll make sure I link this in the show notes. It's

00:38:39 ◼   ► by Matt Richterl and Brian X. Chen.

00:38:43 ◼   ► Brian X. Chen of Japanese hate the iPhone back when he wrote for Wired.

00:38:51 ◼   ► But the other thing though that's interesting, so Tim Cook did not speak to them for this

00:38:54 ◼   ► profile, but they got a huge interview.

00:38:57 ◼   ► They did speak to Johnny Ive.

00:39:01 ◼   ► John: Was it in the same profile they had spoken to him?

00:39:04 ◼   ► Dave: Yes.

00:39:05 ◼   ► John; Okay.

00:39:06 ◼   ► I guess I didn't...

00:39:07 ◼   ► didn't see that that was the case. Yeah, so they did get Johnny Ive, which if

00:39:12 ◼   ► anything is... It's a bigger get, you think? Well, I think Tim Cook winds up

00:39:17 ◼   ► speaking... certainly doesn't speak a lot to the press, but he speaks more often

00:39:21 ◼   ► than Johnny Ive does. Well, so it was Johnny Ive speaking almost exclusively

00:39:25 ◼   ► about Tim Cook. So it wasn't him talking about his own work or his own, you know,

00:39:32 ◼   ► experiences at Apple. It was him sort of buttressing their claims about Tim Cook

00:39:36 ◼   ► or responding to some of their claims about Tim Cook.

00:39:41 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:42 ◼   ► You know, here's a quote from the article.

00:39:44 ◼   ► Johnny Ive, the head of design at Apple

00:39:46 ◼   ► in a name nearly as adored by its followers as Steve Jobs,

00:39:50 ◼   ► says Mr. Cook has not neglected

00:39:52 ◼   ► the company's central mission, innovation.

00:39:54 ◼   ► Here's the quote.

00:39:55 ◼   ► "Honestly, I don't think anything's changed.

00:39:58 ◼   ► People felt exactly the same way

00:40:00 ◼   ► when we were working on the iPhone.

00:40:02 ◼   ► It's hard for all of us to be patient.

00:40:04 ◼   ► It was hard for Steve, it is hard for Tim.

00:40:07 ◼   ► So I feel that's a pretty strong statement.

00:40:09 ◼   ► That's Johnny Ive putting his personal stamp of approval

00:40:13 ◼   ► on the--

00:40:15 ◼   ► - The Tim Cook era.

00:40:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, and saying, honestly,

00:40:18 ◼   ► I don't think anything's changed.

00:40:19 ◼   ► - Right.

00:40:20 ◼   ► - At least with regard to Apple and it's,

00:40:22 ◼   ► and you know, the I-word innovation.

00:40:24 ◼   ► - Right.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Well, it's interesting that, so yeah, he was,

00:40:28 ◼   ► if he was interviewed for part of this,

00:40:30 ◼   ► it was really to sort of vouch for Tim Cook.

00:40:33 ◼   ► Right, exactly. Which is if presumably put him forward to do that. Yeah, because if anything,

00:40:39 ◼   ► there's more credibility there than Tim Cook vouching for himself. Right? Absolutely. Yeah.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Right. Take take the sort of and I know it's a loaded word objectivity, but take the objective

00:40:48 ◼   ► per stance of, okay, forget whether it's Apple, and Tim Cook in particular, but a company's CEO,

00:40:58 ◼   ► and is he it replaces a very successful predecessor who founded the company.

00:41:04 ◼   ► The CEO claims that he himself is doing a good job replacing it. It's almost meaningless, right?

00:41:13 ◼   ► You know, we laugh, but it's like, well, you know, of course, you're gonna say it.

00:41:18 ◼   ► Right. You'd hope.

00:41:18 ◼   ► Right. It means a lot more when somebody who has his own...

00:41:22 ◼   ► Well, who was there before and who's there now, definitely.

00:41:27 ◼   ► Right, and has earned an enormous amount of credibility, and has an enormous amount of credibility to lose, vouches for him.

00:41:38 ◼   ► So you could see why Apple PR-wise would strategize such and assuming that everybody went along with it, that they would have Johnny speak instead of Tim.

00:41:49 ◼   ► Even instead of both.

00:41:51 ◼   ► The thing that I thought was interesting was there was a mention of, so right now there's

00:41:56 ◼   ► this idea sort of in the ether that Apple hasn't had any innovative product since Steve

00:42:02 ◼   ► Jobs died, right?

00:42:03 ◼   ► And the last one was the iPad, which was 2010.

00:42:06 ◼   ► He died in 2011, is that right?

00:42:09 ◼   ► 2011, I think.

00:42:11 ◼   ► And they've been sitting on their hands since then.

00:42:15 ◼   ► And the fairly obvious response is that innovative products don't come every six months or every

00:42:21 ◼   ► It's, you know, the Mac, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and then the iPad in 2010.

00:42:29 ◼   ► So even if you think it accelerated, I think that's fairly coincidental, and really we're

00:42:32 ◼   ► talking about a handful of truly game-changing products that you should expect there to be

00:42:38 ◼   ► multiple years, maybe even, you know, decades between them.

00:42:43 ◼   ► But the iPad mini is sort of the counter to that, that maybe that's one where it's at

00:42:48 ◼   ► least semi-innovative in terms of ramping up sales at least.

00:42:53 ◼   ► And what was interesting in that piece was that it said that this was a product that

00:42:57 ◼   ► Steve Jobs didn't think would find a market, and since then it outsells the full-size iPad.

00:43:04 ◼   ► I don't think it gave a number, but it vastly outsells it, right?

00:43:08 ◼   ► I don't know about vastly, but it did say that it outsold it.

00:43:11 ◼   ► And I thought that was interesting because it wasn't—Apple doesn't break that down,

00:43:16 ◼   ► Although you can kind of extrapolate some of it from average, they do say how many total

00:43:21 ◼   ► iPads they sell per quarter, and they do give an average selling price.

00:43:24 ◼   ► And given that the iPad Mini has always been significantly lower priced, that you could

00:43:29 ◼   ► see from the downward shift in average selling price that it's clearly been a successful

00:43:35 ◼   ► product.

00:43:36 ◼   ► But it was, you're right though, that they do give Tim Cook credit.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Not just credit, but credit as far as Steve Jobs didn't want to make this product, and

00:43:44 ◼   ► Therefore, they didn't under him.

00:43:47 ◼   ► And Tim Cook took over and then he said, "You know what?

00:43:49 ◼   ► We are going to make this."

00:43:53 ◼   ► It's never been promoted that way, but that's, to me, almost really the first major Tim Cook

00:43:59 ◼   ► product that apparently really just literally would not have happened under Steve Jobs.

00:44:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:06 ◼   ► And it's also a very interesting product to me operations wise because I still think it's

00:44:14 ◼   ► an enormous success.

00:44:16 ◼   ► Apple is a company of patterns and you can kind of pick up on the annual patterns of

00:44:21 ◼   ► their development and make, you know, without any kind of sources at all at Apple, it's

00:44:27 ◼   ► a pretty good guess that there's going to be at least one new iPhone later this year

00:44:31 ◼   ► and it's going to have a new system on a chip called the A8.

00:44:35 ◼   ► Right?

00:44:36 ◼   ► Right?

00:44:37 ◼   ► Well, at the very least, there's going to be a new iPhone.

00:44:38 ◼   ► As far as the chip, what do you think?

00:44:40 ◼   ► Like 90% chance on that?

00:44:42 ◼   ► I would say at least 90% chance that there's going to be an A8 because there's been an

00:44:48 ◼   ► A4, A5, A6, A7 for the last four years.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Has it been every single year that they've had a new one?

00:44:54 ◼   ► Ever since they introduced the one with the A4.

00:44:57 ◼   ► Okay.

00:44:58 ◼   ► Well, I'd say 99.99 that there's going to be a new iPhone and then maybe just slightly

00:45:02 ◼   ► less that it's going to have a new chip.

00:45:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:04 ◼   ► matter. But yeah, as you're saying patterns that they've followed for years at this point.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Right. And so to me, the thing that's most interesting about the iPad mini is the first

00:45:13 ◼   ► one that was introduced in 2012 was like a year behind the big iPad. It was a year behind,

00:45:21 ◼   ► it was still on the A5 when the big iPad had gone to the A6. It was not...

00:45:27 ◼   ► Right. It didn't have the retina display.

00:45:28 ◼   ► Right. And so I expected that in 2013 that it would still be one year behind

00:45:36 ◼   ► and it might go retina because the iPad had gone retina the year before but that

00:45:40 ◼   ► it would have the A6. Right. Which is how they you know how they could

00:45:45 ◼   ► in other ways you know how they kept the prices so much lower than the full-size

00:45:49 ◼   ► but it like skipped a year. It to me engineering wise it went all the way

00:45:53 ◼   ► from an A5 non-retina device to top-of-the-line A7 retina and not

00:46:00 ◼   ► thicker like the original retina iPads were. Right. Kept the felt thinness, the

00:46:07 ◼   ► long battery life and retina and went to the A7. I mean it's like there's like a

00:46:12 ◼   ► tiny little asterisk you have to insert there because it's like the clock speed

00:46:16 ◼   ► is like 5% slower than the iPad. Oh is it? I don't even think I was aware of that so.

00:46:21 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's it's really really like it's not even just an asterisk. It's like a tiny it's effectively

00:46:26 ◼   ► They effectively brought it up to the same level as the as the full-size iPad instead of keeping right

00:46:31 ◼   ► In a year when the full-size iPad had a tremendous year

00:46:35 ◼   ► Big jump in terms of the thickness and the width and you know battery life and stuff like right, which is amazing

00:46:41 ◼   ► And to me that's just all Tim Cook and then to hear that this you know that he you know

00:46:46 ◼   ► He'd been a proponent of the mini size all along. I

00:46:49 ◼   ► I mean, you know, it seems like the guy gets credit both for the operations and for the

00:46:56 ◼   ► for actual anticipating the market demand.

00:46:58 ◼   ► Right?

00:46:59 ◼   ► Well, the thing that I think before I say this, I need to stipulate that I do own some

00:47:03 ◼   ► Apple stock.

00:47:04 ◼   ► But the thing that I can't ever really get behind in these articles is talking about

00:47:08 ◼   ► growth.

00:47:11 ◼   ► And I'm not like, I'm not some sage investor, I don't really know what I'm doing.

00:47:16 ◼   ► But everything talks about how Apple's growth has slowed, and that's percentage growth,

00:47:23 ◼   ► right?

00:47:24 ◼   ► But why is that the metric?

00:47:27 ◼   ► Can someone explain to me why, you know, if you go from being, I don't know how big they

00:47:32 ◼   ► were 10 years ago, but they weren't that big, to either the biggest or second biggest or,

00:47:38 ◼   ► you know, top five biggest companies in the world, why is that not enough?

00:47:45 ◼   ► And why do you need to continue growing beyond that point?

00:47:49 ◼   ► Well, and I would even say the flip side that where they did have in the crazy go-go early

00:47:57 ◼   ► years 2008, 2009, 2010 of the iPhone, where they did have crazy like 40%, 30% year over

00:48:04 ◼   ► year growth.

00:48:05 ◼   ► Who thinks though that once you are the biggest company in the world that you can possibly

00:48:09 ◼   ► or 40% growth is feasible.

00:48:12 ◼   ► It's it almost is impossible and I know this is not really the law of big numbers

00:48:18 ◼   ► But it's what some people refer to you know use that phrase which it simply means once you're that big you can't

00:48:25 ◼   ► Grow at 30 or 40 percent. Yeah, you're right

00:48:28 ◼   ► That's the thing is that if you go from 1 billion in sales to 2 billion, it's a hundred percent growth

00:48:33 ◼   ► But to do 2 to 4 billion is obviously not as easy as 1 to 2

00:48:38 ◼   ► And as the numbers get bigger and bigger that becomes more difficult

00:48:41 ◼   ► And when you're literally the most profitable company in the world not just profitable tech company

00:48:46 ◼   ► But most profitable company seven or eight percent growth year-over-year in profits is huge

00:48:51 ◼   ► And and it's huge numbers of billions of dollars

00:48:54 ◼   ► that

00:48:56 ◼   ► Everyone's I shouldn't say everyone but Wall Street or investors or you know

00:49:00 ◼   ► Whoever it is seem so focused on the percentage growth and I just look at these numbers and I think like okay

00:49:07 ◼   ► they made $20 billion last quarter, that seems pretty good to me.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:16 ◼   ► The iPhone in particular, which is the biggest and most profitable by revenue and profit

00:49:20 ◼   ► line that Apple has, is in a fascinating market, which is phones, because for the most part,

00:49:27 ◼   ► there's an upper cap on how many phones are going to be in the world, which is one phone

00:49:31 ◼   ► for every adult or even close to adult-aged person.

00:49:35 ◼   ► I mean unless you've got your day phone and your night phone

00:49:37 ◼   ► Right, which is an exception and you know, there's obviously a lot of very elderly people who are not gonna buy it

00:49:45 ◼   ► No, I'm just kidding cell phone and they're dying off and there's you know children

00:49:49 ◼   ► I guess, you know really young children are typically not gonna get an iPhone, right?

00:49:53 ◼   ► Well, and it's not a it's not a good that people trade them in or upgrade but it's not a good that

00:49:59 ◼   ► Expires in any way at least not in terms of months. It's years

00:50:04 ◼   ► I don't know, what's the world population?

00:50:05 ◼   ► Seven billion people.

00:50:07 ◼   ► So let's say there's truly a hard cap

00:50:09 ◼   ► at around three billion phones in the world,

00:50:12 ◼   ► let's say three or four.

00:50:13 ◼   ► - Sure, why not?

00:50:14 ◼   ► - You know, and you could cut off large swaths

00:50:17 ◼   ► of those people for not having the financial,

00:50:21 ◼   ► they don't have enough money to buy an iPhone.

00:50:23 ◼   ► - Right.

00:50:24 ◼   ► - Right, it's just not gonna happen.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Or they live in a place where there still isn't

00:50:27 ◼   ► cell service, right?

00:50:29 ◼   ► Not that the iPhone has already peaked

00:50:33 ◼   ► and that it can't sell more.

00:50:34 ◼   ► But it's actually, if you look at the numbers

00:50:36 ◼   ► that have actually sold, it's remarkably close to,

00:50:39 ◼   ► they've sold about as many as they could have hoped to

00:50:41 ◼   ► at this point, and they've got to expand

00:50:43 ◼   ► and interesting in new ways and wait for the world

00:50:45 ◼   ► to catch up, you know.

00:50:46 ◼   ► It's truly, they've done almost as well with the iPhone

00:50:50 ◼   ► as they--

00:50:51 ◼   ► - As you possibly could.

00:50:53 ◼   ► - Right, like if you said in 2007,

00:50:55 ◼   ► when they came out with it, what's the best case scenario

00:50:59 ◼   ► for the next seven years?

00:51:00 ◼   ► - Right.

00:51:01 ◼   ► almost it's almost as though that they've they've hit that that they've

00:51:04 ◼   ► they've you know they've done as well with it as they possibly could have

00:51:08 ◼   ► expected to do and that years where they were having 30 or 40 percent growth that

00:51:15 ◼   ► was those were the years where they were expanding to new carriers around the

00:51:19 ◼   ► world I mean it's this is a thing that debuted on one carrier in one country in

00:51:24 ◼   ► 2007 and because of the nature of the way that they control the customer

00:51:29 ◼   ► Experience and that you know, it's so different than than what the carriers expect or want

00:51:34 ◼   ► You know, it was a relatively slow roll out around the world

00:51:39 ◼   ► And that's what made the growth possible is that there are these countries where it hadn't been sold

00:51:44 ◼   ► except like on the gray market

00:51:47 ◼   ► And then they debut and they could you know, it would allow for this tremendous growth. Whereas that type of growth

00:51:54 ◼   ► It's just not feasible to expect that right, right

00:51:57 ◼   ► Well, and and then in that same piece there was a quote from I forget who it was

00:52:01 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter some either investor or some analyst and I wrote this down because he said he thought Apple

00:52:07 ◼   ► No longer had the juice to create the world beating product it needs

00:52:11 ◼   ► And so let's let's I can even I can even say, you know, maybe he's right. Maybe they cannot create another iPhone

00:52:18 ◼   ► Maybe there's no market that exists or maybe they don't have the ability to create a market

00:52:23 ◼   ► But the word needs in that sentence is really what sort of sticks

00:52:27 ◼   ► Because this is again

00:52:29 ◼   ► I don't know what it is right now today

00:52:30 ◼   ► But it's one of the biggest companies in the world one of the most profitable companies in the world

00:52:34 ◼   ► And they've got how much money in the bank

00:52:36 ◼   ► What does needs mean in that sense?

00:52:40 ◼   ► Right it's not what Apple needs. It's what these investors who seek huge returns on this stock, right?

00:52:46 ◼   ► Right what they need right to justify continuing to support Apple

00:52:52 ◼   ► Here's a quote that they have in this time story from you know, this is the balance that was added to the story

00:52:57 ◼   ► This is from Lawrence I balter chief market strategist at Oracle Investment Research

00:53:03 ◼   ► Well the article this is this is the the the Times author's words

00:53:09 ◼   ► Investors have clamored for Apple wizardry a much-anticipated. I watch or ITV perhaps to these critics. Mr

00:53:17 ◼   ► Cook is uninspiring his social views window dressing when what they want is magic

00:53:22 ◼   ► magic, which is a little more telling than they could think, I think, because I think

00:53:27 ◼   ► that saying that they want magic, like they're presenting these guys as reasonable critics,

00:53:31 ◼   ► whereas I'd say using the word magic is a little bit, it's actually spot on, like what

00:53:38 ◼   ► they want.

00:53:39 ◼   ► It's not possible.

00:53:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:53:41 ◼   ► Or, yeah.

00:53:42 ◼   ► Here's the quote from this guy, Balter.

00:53:43 ◼   ► "Where is the grand design?

00:53:46 ◼   ► we hear from Cook is that there are some great products coming down the pike. Mr.

00:53:52 ◼   ► balter calls Apple a financial rock of Gibraltar. It is sitting on about 150

00:53:57 ◼   ► billion in cash, but he says he has serious questions about whether it

00:54:01 ◼   ► continued to be a hyper growth company. Is it a stock for growth investors he

00:54:07 ◼   ► asks or quote, widows, which and now to me, it's actually a little insulting,

00:54:13 ◼   ► Right.

00:54:14 ◼   ► Like, now it's like the alpha male investor on Wall Street who's, you know, like, what

00:54:24 ◼   ► exactly is wrong with widows?

00:54:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:54:27 ◼   ► And with a blue chip stock.

00:54:30 ◼   ► Which churns out earnings every year and pays a dividend and, you know, is a viable thing

00:54:37 ◼   ► to hold onto and earn you some money.

00:54:39 ◼   ► Right.

00:54:40 ◼   ► whose husbands have died are looking for stability, I guess.

00:54:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess.

00:54:47 ◼   ► And exactly, like you said, what's wrong with that either?

00:54:50 ◼   ► I mean, and you're right.

00:54:52 ◼   ► It presents it as a-- it should be this hypergrowth stock,

00:54:56 ◼   ► and instead it's this boring, you'll

00:54:58 ◼   ► just make a little bit of money off it every year stock.

00:55:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:02 ◼   ► Yeah, like I said, I can't read too much

00:55:06 ◼   ► of the stock analysis of Apple just

00:55:09 ◼   ► because it's just so insane.

00:55:12 ◼   ► - Right, and it's never been a fair way

00:55:17 ◼   ► to necessarily measure the CEO

00:55:19 ◼   ► because the stock is in some ways outside the CEO,

00:55:23 ◼   ► well, in large ways outside the CEO's control.

00:55:27 ◼   ► You know, judge them by their revenue

00:55:29 ◼   ► and their profit and their product lines,

00:55:31 ◼   ► but what happens to the stock price is often irrational,

00:55:34 ◼   ► and in Apple's case, usually irrational.

00:55:37 ◼   ► - Even if you do think the CEO

00:55:38 ◼   ► should be judged based on the stock. If you look at the numbers, it's way up since he

00:55:42 ◼   ► took over.

00:55:43 ◼   ► Right, way up. And in fact, that's the point I'm getting at, is that it's actually getting

00:55:49 ◼   ► to me this Times article. If you really read between the lines and look at it, the stuff

00:55:55 ◼   ► in Tim Cook's favor is, a lot of it is concrete, things like the iPad Mini being a hit. Largely

00:56:03 ◼   ► brushed over in this article, but the stuff at WWDC, where you see Apple as an organization

00:56:08 ◼   ► really working to pulling together in a cohesive way, across the whole company.

00:56:15 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:16 ◼   ► Right. And in a way that shows that these products they've already got, the iPhone and

00:56:21 ◼   ► the iPad, and even the Mac, which is, you know, the longest standing, still have deep

00:56:26 ◼   ► areas to be improved. That they're nowhere close to being finished, you know, and that

00:56:32 ◼   ► a shallowness to say, give me something new, give me a watch or a TV, that the iPhone and iPad are

00:56:38 ◼   ► old news. Whereas there's still so, so much to do to improve those products, even in the short term,

00:56:46 ◼   ► even just this year and next year, let alone for the next decade, right. And it's such a shallow

00:56:51 ◼   ► way to look at them as to say that, that they need, you know, like you emphasize the word need

00:56:57 ◼   ► that they need something new when there's so much work that can be done and improvements that can be

00:57:03 ◼   ► made to these existing products. But then conversely, the negative stuff, the balance,

00:57:10 ◼   ► well, I don't know, maybe the guy is an empty shirt, is getting so much, the sauce is so much

00:57:15 ◼   ► weaker. They're still, in this article, using the stock dive in 2013 against Cook that investors

00:57:24 ◼   ► doubted the guy and the stock went from over 700 down under 500 and this is the

00:57:33 ◼   ► old pre split numbers but it's they're still using that like hey there's proof

00:57:38 ◼   ► that the guy you know is maybe on shaky ground whereas really what that stock dip

00:57:44 ◼   ► proved was that a lot of investors believed not that Tim Cook was an empty

00:57:48 ◼   ► shirt but that a lot of it investors thought he was an empty shirt right it's

00:57:51 ◼   ► It's not proof that he was, it's proof that somebody believed he was.

00:57:54 ◼   ► Right.

00:57:55 ◼   ► But the article came out in June of 2014 when the stock is back up at near historic peaks

00:58:04 ◼   ► and way higher.

00:58:05 ◼   ► I mean, it might even be--

00:58:07 ◼   ► I think it was around 350 when he took over.

00:58:09 ◼   ► I'm pulling that number out of the air, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

00:58:12 ◼   ► If it's not double, it is very close to double the peak of where it was when Steve Jobs,

00:58:20 ◼   ► you know, resigned.

00:58:21 ◼   ► So yeah, it went up and then it went down a little bit

00:58:23 ◼   ► from there, but was still way over where it had been.

00:58:25 ◼   ► And now it's back up.

00:58:27 ◼   ► - Right, so that the only way you can use it

00:58:29 ◼   ► as a cudgel against him is to ignore what's happened

00:58:32 ◼   ► after, you know, you've got to still be stuck

00:58:36 ◼   ► at like late 2013 when it was depressed.

00:58:40 ◼   ► It's actually the stock now is not a good example

00:58:44 ◼   ► of problems with Tim Cook.

00:58:46 ◼   ► And then the last, well, there's two things I wanted

00:58:50 ◼   ► talk about in the article. But the last thing in the article I thought was weird too.

00:58:56 ◼   ► Where they--

00:58:57 ◼   ► John: Is it the Beatles comparison?

00:58:58 ◼   ► Okay, go ahead. Sorry.

00:58:59 ◼   ► Steve: No. Oh, yeah, maybe. Yeah. Was it? Is that who gave it? It's like they found

00:59:03 ◼   ► some guys at WWDC who claim to be iPhone developers.

00:59:07 ◼   ► John; Right.

00:59:08 ◼   ► Steve; And one of them--

00:59:11 ◼   ► John; The quote that I have is that--and I wrote this down too--is that, "Jobs is to

00:59:14 ◼   ► John Lennon what Tim Cook is to Ringo."

00:59:17 ◼   ► Steve; Yeah.

00:59:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:19 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:59:20 ◼   ► - I mean, nothing against Ringo, but I mean, that's,

00:59:25 ◼   ► I don't know, I couldn't cotton on to the idea

00:59:28 ◼   ► that Jobs is Lennon and Tim Cook is not Paul McCartney,

00:59:33 ◼   ► he's frickin' Ringo.

00:59:35 ◼   ► - Right.

00:59:36 ◼   ► I think comparisons to the Beatles, in this case,

00:59:39 ◼   ► are pretty-- - It doesn't work.

00:59:40 ◼   ► - It doesn't work. - Right.

00:59:41 ◼   ► - But it's, yeah, they let that, you know,

00:59:43 ◼   ► but they found somebody who obviously

00:59:45 ◼   ► doesn't think much of Tim Cook,

00:59:46 ◼   ► And then at the very end of the article,

00:59:50 ◼   ► they found one thing particularly jarring in the keynote.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Apple did not hew to its tradition of pairing hardware and software.

00:59:57 ◼   ► Specifically, Apple introduced a program called Health,

00:59:59 ◼   ► which helps consumers and doctors monitor health status,

01:00:02 ◼   ► like heart rate or glucose levels,

01:00:04 ◼   ► but did not also introduce a piece of hardware to measure those results.

01:00:07 ◼   ► That is something the new smartwatch is rumored to do.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Quote from this guy, Mr. Ziluf.

01:00:14 ◼   ► "They just released software," said Mr. Ziloff, sounding surprised.

01:00:18 ◼   ► It's something Steve wouldn't have done.

01:00:21 ◼   ► It's an impossible comparison, but it's one that Mr. Cook is being held to, at least until

01:00:25 ◼   ► he makes enough magic of his own.

01:00:27 ◼   ► And then the article ends.

01:00:29 ◼   ► So they just let this guy say this.

01:00:31 ◼   ► They quote this guy who was at WWDC saying, in the last paragraph, "It's something Steve

01:00:36 ◼   ► wouldn't have done."

01:00:37 ◼   ► Whereas you can list...you probably ran out of fingers listing WWDCs where they didn't

01:00:42 ◼   ► introduce new hardware.

01:00:43 ◼   ► Right, right. Well, and and recently, it's all been new iOS stuff that then in the fall,

01:00:49 ◼   ► you realize, oh, right, the phone does have, you know, two cameras or a GPS, or I'm trying

01:00:55 ◼   ► to think of a more recent example. But, you know, iPhone does have things that go with

01:00:59 ◼   ► this software,

01:01:00 ◼   ► right, including 2011. Steve Jobs last WWDC was no hardware, right? It was actually the

01:01:07 ◼   ► WWDC where they moved the iPhones from right to the fall and there was no

01:01:15 ◼   ► hardware it was the I you know it was like the introduction of iCloud as a

01:01:18 ◼   ► strategy which was software and so they don't they just let the quote stand like

01:01:23 ◼   ► that to me and that's how the article ends they say that something Steve

01:01:26 ◼   ► wouldn't have done whereas the Times could have easily fact-checked right and

01:01:29 ◼   ► said actually it is something that not only would he have done he did do and

01:01:35 ◼   ► That, to me, is maddening, and to me is the sort of thing you would think you would expect

01:01:40 ◼   ► better from the New York Times.

01:01:42 ◼   ► But it's because I feel like it didn't even occur to them because their perspective is

01:01:47 ◼   ► they want this false balance where you've got to have somebody saying something like

01:01:55 ◼   ► this.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Otherwise, it seems like Tim Cook is too balanced and too skewed in favor of saying Tim Cook

01:02:02 ◼   ► is...

01:02:03 ◼   ► He's actually doing a good job.

01:02:04 ◼   ► actual facts say. And it's just maddening to me that that's who they speak to from WWDC,

01:02:10 ◼   ► whereas I thought it was, I know you missed it this year, you weren't out there, but it

01:02:14 ◼   ► was a crazily popular WWDC from developers' perspective.

01:02:18 ◼   ► Right, right. Yeah, and you could see that after the fact in terms of developer response.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And you didn't even have to be there for that. You know the announcements, you know, that

01:02:25 ◼   ► it's a lot of stuff that developers have been asking for.

01:02:28 ◼   ► Right.

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01:04:25 ◼   ► I thought there was one more thing in this time story that got under my skin, which was

01:04:30 ◼   ► when they were talking about Tim Cook and Apple's charitable giving and the whole thing

01:04:37 ◼   ► with telling the investors at the annual meeting that if they want, you know, with regard to

01:04:42 ◼   ► their environmental stance.

01:04:43 ◼   ► If all you care about is the return on investment, then get out of the stock, right?

01:04:47 ◼   ► and that they're gonna do the right thing. and this was from some investors

01:04:53 ◼   ► with admittedly right-wing views on climate change and and similar you know

01:05:02 ◼   ► that sort of environmental type things. and I thought that the article sort of

01:05:09 ◼   ► painted Tim Cook tried to paint him a little bit as sort of a wuss you know

01:05:16 ◼   ► Like, he's sort of a namzy-pamzy, wasting money on things that a CEO...

01:05:23 ◼   ► I thought that they presented that side of the argument a lot more than the flip side,

01:05:29 ◼   ► that they didn't really seem to have any quotes from anybody who backs his leadership on those

01:05:35 ◼   ► concerns.

01:05:36 ◼   ► They had quotes from the people who were against it and nothing from the people for it.

01:05:41 ◼   ► And I thought that was a little...

01:05:42 ◼   ► Well, I mean, Tim Cook declined to be interviewed, so that's...

01:05:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess. But I thought that was a little weird. And then there was this weird thing

01:05:50 ◼   ► where they were comparing Apple's charitable giving to Microsoft.

01:05:53 ◼   ► Yeah, did you work out the math on that? Because...

01:05:56 ◼   ► Well, I'd leave that to you. You're...

01:05:59 ◼   ► Well, I just...

01:06:00 ◼   ► You're the guy.

01:06:01 ◼   ► You know, I did a mental calculation on it, and it was something like, you know, under

01:06:05 ◼   ► Cook, Apple has increased their charitable giving and their matching of employees' charitable

01:06:09 ◼   ► giving and I don't remember the numbers it doesn't really matter you can look it

01:06:13 ◼   ► up in the article but basically it said something like in the past two years 50

01:06:17 ◼   ► million has been donated but in the past two decades Microsoft has donated like

01:06:22 ◼   ► over a billion yeah that's exactly it that it's over two decades Microsoft is

01:06:28 ◼   ► employees donations inclusive of the corporate match have donated a billion

01:06:34 ◼   ► dollars since 1983 so two decades right and so if you if you do that or three

01:06:39 ◼   ► decades right 93 to the yeah that's three deck if you do the math like it

01:06:44 ◼   ► worked out that yeah Apple might not have you know might not be doing quite

01:06:49 ◼   ► as much on average as Microsoft did over 20 years but in the past two years the

01:06:53 ◼   ► numbers are way up and it doesn't really make sense to compare 20 years worth of

01:06:59 ◼   ► donations to two years when they've just started this program out. So the whole

01:07:06 ◼   ► thing, the math on it seemed, it was just, it was, it was an apples and oranges

01:07:10 ◼   ► comparison, to use a phrase that doesn't work that well for Apple, but it didn't

01:07:15 ◼   ► really make sense to me as I was reading it. Well, if you divide a billion over 30

01:07:20 ◼   ► years from Microsoft is 33 billion, or a million a year, or 33 million a year, and

01:07:26 ◼   ► and they're saying Apple has donated 50 million in two years. Well, so it's in the ballpark.

01:07:33 ◼   ► Now, there's inflation adjustment, et cetera, where $1983 are worth less. So maybe Microsoft

01:07:38 ◼   ► has been giving more. But still, they're in the ballpark when you look at it that way.

01:07:42 ◼   ► And it's new. They've recently gotten into the ballpark, so it doesn't seem to make sense

01:07:47 ◼   ► to me to compare it over the past 20 or 30 years.

01:07:50 ◼   ► Right. And the other thing, too, that they just toss out there as though it's equivalent

01:07:54 ◼   ► is that Microsoft says that on average it donates two million dollars a day in

01:07:59 ◼   ► software to nonprofits which is great it's better than not doing better than

01:08:05 ◼   ► not doing it but let's face it you know that's that's that's valuing office at

01:08:09 ◼   ► like $900 or something which nobody writes right it would be great if rogue

01:08:15 ◼   ► amoeba donated software to nonprofits but it's not the same thing as rogue amoeba

01:08:20 ◼   ► but donating money to nonprofits. And 2 million sounds like a lot. It would be a lot for

01:08:27 ◼   ► Rogamib or Qbrands to donate $2 million in software. Yeah, 2 million a day. That'd be a

01:08:35 ◼   ► lot of copies of Esper. But for Microsoft, it's not, especially given the fact that the prices

01:08:44 ◼   ► they charge for their software are just arbitrary. It's not real good. It's not the same thing as,

01:08:48 ◼   ► for example donating two million dollars a day in hardware to non-profits which has a fixed cost.

01:08:54 ◼   ► So it's a weird, I thought it was a weird and slanted comparison.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Yeah, all right what else you got? Well we were talking growth, I think you wanted to touch on the

01:09:04 ◼   ► physical growth of the iPhone. Oh there you go, Mr. Segway, that's why. Yeah.

01:09:10 ◼   ► So we've got, that's the other big story that came out this week and this is nothing new.

01:09:15 ◼   ► This is, you know, it's just verifying months-long rumors, but that Bloomberg yesterday, this

01:09:21 ◼   ► was Peter Burrows.

01:09:22 ◼   ► Well, hold on.

01:09:23 ◼   ► Don't use the word verifying because...

01:09:24 ◼   ► Oh, not verifying.

01:09:25 ◼   ► That's a wrong word.

01:09:26 ◼   ► Well, no, I don't mean to criticize you.

01:09:28 ◼   ► I'm talking more about all the sites that publish this stuff all the time.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Now we've got a slightly more reputable site with maybe better sourcing, right?

01:09:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:37 ◼   ► Echoing the rumors.

01:09:38 ◼   ► There you go.

01:09:39 ◼   ► This is Tim Kolpin and Peter Burrows reporting for Bloomberg.

01:09:44 ◼   ► Apple's big iPhones, plural, said to start production next month.

01:09:51 ◼   ► Apple suppliers in China will begin mass production of its largest iPhones ever next month, according

01:09:55 ◼   ► to people familiar with the plans as the smartphone maker faces increased competition.

01:10:02 ◼   ► Blah blah blah, asked not to be identified because the plans are private.

01:10:06 ◼   ► One model will have a 4.7 inch display compared to the 4 inch screen of the current 5S that

01:10:12 ◼   ► be available to ship to retailers around September," said two of the people. "A 5.5-inch version

01:10:19 ◼   ► is also being prepared for manufacturing and may be available at the same time," the people

01:10:23 ◼   ► said. So they're saying, and this has been rumored by various people for a while, that

01:10:29 ◼   ► there's two new bigger iPhones this year, a 4.7-inch diagonal display and a 5.5-inch.

01:10:38 ◼   ► is a lot of... I feel like we could easily fill the rest of the show just talking about

01:10:42 ◼   ► this. I don't even understand the aspect that this 5.5 inch version may be available at

01:10:49 ◼   ► the same time.

01:10:50 ◼   ► As if they might release this in like January or something.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Right. I don't get it.

01:10:54 ◼   ► I mean, as we just talked about 10 minutes ago about the patterns that Apple follows,

01:10:58 ◼   ► they don't release a new iPhone in the middle of the year with a different size.

01:11:03 ◼   ► Right. I don't get it. I've never been less...

01:11:07 ◼   ► excited not excited well I'm not exactly because I'm I'm personally a little yeah

01:11:17 ◼   ► I don't want to be like I mean I'll just I don't know right out there I'm holding

01:11:20 ◼   ► my iPhone right now it's it's a four inch screen and it's almost too big to

01:11:26 ◼   ► me I could see how maybe I could I could get used to a 4.7 I've seen 4.7 devices

01:11:34 ◼   ► But that to me seems just the width seems to me annoying 5.5. I've seen those phones. I know that I don't want one

01:11:40 ◼   ► I know that I don't

01:11:42 ◼   ► It just seems weird to me

01:11:44 ◼   ► No, I've never even my personal tastes aside even let's say I really want even if I wanted a huge iPhone

01:11:50 ◼   ► I just don't understand how Apple's going to

01:11:53 ◼   ► Present it in a keynote

01:11:57 ◼   ► Where they said, you know, I could see how they would say look everybody wants a big phone. Here's a bigger. Okay

01:12:03 ◼   ► I don't understand how they say here's two bigger iPhones

01:12:07 ◼   ► bigger and even more humongous and the size that you've grown used to

01:12:13 ◼   ► Over the last seven years and that has made the iPhone that by far, you know

01:12:18 ◼   ► 70% of all the profits in the entire handset industry is now right that was it

01:12:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that was your big thing is that you're reading this as them saying there will be a 4.7 and a 5.5 and that's it

01:12:29 ◼   ► And that's all I've ever seen rumored. I've never seen from any of these other rumors rumors of a new four inch normal

01:12:37 ◼   ► current size iPhone

01:12:39 ◼   ► Right. Well, but I I guess the question is how would that how would that leak?

01:12:43 ◼   ► Versus if the size changes it's much more obvious, right?

01:12:48 ◼   ► Well

01:12:51 ◼   ► Part of it too and and over the last few years the track records been pretty good on the component leaks out of Asia

01:12:59 ◼   ► And what they're showing this year is something that's more along the lines of the iPads with rounded sides

01:13:06 ◼   ► Okay, have you seen any I haven't I I really don't look at this stuff

01:13:10 ◼   ► Just because I wait till it comes out

01:13:11 ◼   ► But I understand what you're saying a lot of what's come out and and from sources that have been pretty accurate in years past

01:13:17 ◼   ► You know and that got the new

01:13:19 ◼   ► iPhone 5 shape and and same same type of people who stood, you know had like leaks of the gold iPhone

01:13:27 ◼   ► last year are showing I

01:13:30 ◼   ► 4.7 inch and 5.5 inch phones with more or less just think of a smaller iPad or iPad mini with the rounder

01:13:39 ◼   ► sides and those style brands

01:13:41 ◼   ► And nothing like that has leaked with a 4 inch

01:13:45 ◼   ► So let's see if you presume now obviously this is an enormous if this is the biggest if I could make on the show if

01:13:53 ◼   ► We take it for granted that

01:13:57 ◼   ► all new iPhone hardware will inevitably leak from the agent's supply chain.

01:14:03 ◼   ► Again, that is an enormous if, but if we take that as an assumption, then the only way that

01:14:09 ◼   ► the 4-inch screen stays at the top of the, you know, gets the A8 and new camera and,

01:14:16 ◼   ► you know, stays at the top of the heap technology-wise, spec-wise, is if it's going to still be in

01:14:21 ◼   ► the 5S form factor.

01:14:25 ◼   ► Which seems different if there's two new models that have a new iPad style look.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Like it's possible, I guess, but it just seems weird.

01:14:35 ◼   ► Like to me, for example, the way that I just mentioned before that in 2013, last fall,

01:14:42 ◼   ► Apple introduced two new iPads, the new mini with retina and the new iPad Air, and they

01:14:48 ◼   ► had the same spec, same camera, same A7 system on a chip, roughly that it's just, hey, which

01:14:55 ◼   ► size do you want right and they also looked like siblings right they look

01:15:00 ◼   ► like the same device shrunk up and down well but if you even right so I mean the

01:15:05 ◼   ► the question is are they gonna keep a four-inch screen as a sibling a brother

01:15:11 ◼   ► to the exist or the the new sizes but if you were gonna do that if you're gonna

01:15:17 ◼   ► change the case that's gonna present all sorts of manufacturing challenges right

01:15:20 ◼   ► I would guess. I mean it might make sense to put the new hardware in there, you know, whatever the

01:15:28 ◼   ► new chip is, new camera, whatever, but keep the current case because you've already tooled up all

01:15:34 ◼   ► your factories for that current four inch sized case. Yeah, but they've never kept the same four

01:15:39 ◼   ► factor form factor for more than two years. The 3G, 3GS was two years, the 4, 4S was two years,

01:15:45 ◼   ► and that's true five five s now does you know again the fact that that's the

01:15:50 ◼   ► pattern that they've had ever since the you know 3G you know in the original

01:15:56 ◼   ► 2007 iPhone was the only one that only lasted a year does that mean that it

01:16:02 ◼   ► always be so maybe not you know maybe this form factor the five five s form

01:16:07 ◼   ► factor is like their Porsche 911 you know we don't need to change it you know

01:16:12 ◼   ► This is this is the way the four-inch iPhone looks all the time. Yeah, and there's and it doesn't look dated

01:16:18 ◼   ► It looks still looks great. I mean ultimately what we'll see in

01:16:22 ◼   ► What three months I?

01:16:25 ◼   ► would guess September because that's it's been September for

01:16:28 ◼   ► ever since they moved it to the fall right and then October is for iPads and

01:16:33 ◼   ► Perhaps the watch or whatever else they're gonna do, but I would guess the phone gets its own event in September, right?

01:16:40 ◼   ► Well, I said to you I said the interesting thing to me was not the physical size growing because I'm as I said

01:16:46 ◼   ► I'm pretty happy with the current physical size. I'm

01:16:48 ◼   ► interested to see a

01:16:50 ◼   ► storage space increase

01:16:52 ◼   ► in the device

01:16:54 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely. And nobody has any kind of rumors about that

01:16:58 ◼   ► Well again, I guess is that something that would even leak because you know, they already make 128 gig iPad

01:17:03 ◼   ► So the the storage already exists in that size

01:17:07 ◼   ► How different would be with the physical, you know, the case wouldn't need to be any different just to put a little more

01:17:11 ◼   ► storage space in there probably

01:17:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think the hundred and twenty eight gigabyte chips would be bigger

01:17:18 ◼   ► I and and along the same lines, I would really really I think it's almost overdue at this point like to see more RAM

01:17:25 ◼   ► Okay, because they've they've been all at the iPhones been at one gigabyte of RAM sense for a while now

01:17:31 ◼   ► I forget which was it maybe die from five. I think the five

01:17:36 ◼   ► You know and in that tick-tock strategy of every two years, they take bigger leaps forward

01:17:42 ◼   ► I would really like to see them go to two gigabytes. Well now do you do you think you notice a

01:17:48 ◼   ► lack of RAM

01:17:51 ◼   ► Less so than used to but I still get those, you know, it's it's most noticeable in Safari

01:17:57 ◼   ► Okay, when tabs that I know I have open end up having a load

01:18:02 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know, it's just the nature of the phone where I use it on cellular more than any other device

01:18:09 ◼   ► And therefore if I'm out on cellular sometimes, you know, it's the most inconsistent networking wise and reloading a tie

01:18:15 ◼   ► Often takes you know longer than then you'd like right? Well because I mean with storage space

01:18:21 ◼   ► It's very obvious if I want to put all of my music on there. I can't do it

01:18:24 ◼   ► Whereas with RAM it's more of a nebulous, you know, as you said some days a Safari tab needs to reload and

01:18:31 ◼   ► But yeah, that is that is I guess one of the one of the obvious ways you can tell

01:18:34 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know, I don't play ton of games on my phone

01:18:38 ◼   ► But I know a lot of people do Jonas certainly does and they're you know games typically

01:18:43 ◼   ► You know can use as much RAM as you can throw at them, right?

01:18:46 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely, you know

01:18:48 ◼   ► So it's not so much that I personally on a day-to-day basis really really need more RAM in my iPhone

01:18:53 ◼   ► But I think that the iPhone as a platform could use it. Yeah, right

01:18:57 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

01:18:58 ◼   ► And the iPad too, especially if it's true that they're going to add some sort of multitasking

01:19:04 ◼   ► type interface where you can run two apps at the same time.

01:19:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:08 ◼   ► Sure.

01:19:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I totally agree.

01:19:10 ◼   ► I just can't see how they would spin an introduction where they say we've added two new sizes above

01:19:16 ◼   ► it, but yet the four-inch one looks exactly the same as it used to.

01:19:21 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:22 ◼   ► Honestly, if you look at, we're, especially you, I think,

01:19:27 ◼   ► are very fixated on the devices

01:19:30 ◼   ► and pay much more attention to them than most people.

01:19:32 ◼   ► But I mean, if you look at a bunch of iPhones side by side,

01:19:37 ◼   ► the user experience is not really very different

01:19:40 ◼   ► between them from a consumer standpoint,

01:19:45 ◼   ► you know what I mean?

01:19:46 ◼   ► In that there's always been a home button at the bottom,

01:19:48 ◼   ► there's a power button at the top.

01:19:49 ◼   ► I guess the headphone jack moved,

01:19:51 ◼   ► But would it really be that big a deal

01:19:54 ◼   ► if the 4-inch had one case and the 4.7 and 5.5,

01:19:58 ◼   ► if they exist, had a different case?

01:20:00 ◼   ► - It's not, but it just seems weird.

01:20:03 ◼   ► It just feels a little off to me

01:20:05 ◼   ► that if they were all going to be on the-

01:20:07 ◼   ► - The same level.

01:20:09 ◼   ► - The same level spec-wise.

01:20:10 ◼   ► It just would seem odd

01:20:11 ◼   ► if one of them looked different than the others.

01:20:14 ◼   ► Just seems a little off.

01:20:16 ◼   ► And then that makes me think that if it's the case,

01:20:18 ◼   ► that they're going to-

01:20:20 ◼   ► - Your concern is that they're gonna bail

01:20:21 ◼   ► on the four inch size, right?

01:20:23 ◼   ► - Exactly, that's my concern is that the new,

01:20:26 ◼   ► you know, AA top of the tier, top tier iPhones

01:20:29 ◼   ► are only gonna be four seven and or five five.

01:20:33 ◼   ► And that the four inch size will no longer

01:20:35 ◼   ► even be made with metal, it'll drop,

01:20:37 ◼   ► I don't know what they're gonna call it, the five CS,

01:20:39 ◼   ► but that the, a phone with the five S specs

01:20:43 ◼   ► will be in the plastic case that we saw last year

01:20:45 ◼   ► at that $200 or $100 price level down.

01:20:50 ◼   ► - Well, selfishly, I hope that's not the case,

01:20:53 ◼   ► but I don't have any insight as to whether or not

01:20:55 ◼   ► that'll be the case.

01:20:56 ◼   ► - No, but nobody who's publishing these rumors does either,

01:20:59 ◼   ► which just convinces me that all of the leaks

01:21:02 ◼   ► are from the supply chain and none of them

01:21:04 ◼   ► are from Cupertino.

01:21:07 ◼   ► Whereas the only people who know it.

01:21:08 ◼   ► Nobody even says how they're gonna price these things.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Is the 5.5 inch going to be--

01:21:14 ◼   ► Much more expensive.

01:21:15 ◼   ► More expensive?

01:21:16 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Right?

01:21:18 ◼   ► With the iPads, you pay for the bigger size.

01:21:19 ◼   ► You pay for the size and you pay for the storage, right?

01:21:22 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:23 ◼   ► Does it make sense that you would have-- I just don't see how you do this.

01:21:25 ◼   ► Maybe one of them is-- another possibility is that the 4.7 inch is the new flagship model,

01:21:37 ◼   ► most expensive, and the 5.5 inch is the new 5C lower priced model.

01:21:43 ◼   ► But then that seems weird to me that you, that somebody, let's say somebody who's older

01:21:50 ◼   ► and has, you know, really wants the bigger phone because they really have trouble reading

01:21:55 ◼   ► the smaller screen.

01:21:56 ◼   ► They just want everything bigger because they want bigger text, which is a totally reasonable,

01:22:00 ◼   ► perfectly, maybe the best example of why they should have multiple size iPhones available.

01:22:07 ◼   ► But why would you be, why would you have to sacrifice on the specs to get the bigger screen

01:22:13 ◼   ► because you really want the bigger screen. It doesn't make any sense to me. Like to me

01:22:16 ◼   ► it makes the most sense to do it like the iPads and have same specs across the line

01:22:21 ◼   ► and different price points. But I don't even know if the price differential on the iPads

01:22:27 ◼   ► makes sense. Why is the iPad mini so much cheaper? I don't know. I guess the screens

01:22:32 ◼   ► are I guess at a certain point you really just cost more to have a bigger screen.

01:22:36 ◼   ► Yeah, screen and battery.

01:22:38 ◼   ► Even if the pixels are the same.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Yeah, because it needs a bigger screen physically and it needs a bigger battery physically.

01:22:45 ◼   ► So what are you hoping for?

01:22:47 ◼   ► I've had Marco on talking about this.

01:22:49 ◼   ► I'm so confused about this.

01:22:51 ◼   ► I really don't see how this is going to play out.

01:22:54 ◼   ► Like I said, I try not to think about this until they've actually announced it and then

01:22:57 ◼   ► I say, "Okay, that's the one I'm going to get."

01:23:00 ◼   ► Like I said, I don't want a bigger phone.

01:23:03 ◼   ► I certainly don't want a 5.5-inch phone.

01:23:05 ◼   ► As you said, you've tried a phone like that.

01:23:07 ◼   ► I've used a phone like that.

01:23:08 ◼   ► It's way too big for my taste.

01:23:10 ◼   ► It's really big.

01:23:11 ◼   ► I can see why some people do.

01:23:12 ◼   ► I can.

01:23:13 ◼   ► I can totally see why Apple would make it.

01:23:15 ◼   ► But I certainly don't.

01:23:16 ◼   ► I don't think I want it.

01:23:17 ◼   ► And you don't want to be forced into getting it, almost, because you want the top-of-the-line

01:23:22 ◼   ► phone as far as specs go.

01:23:24 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:23:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:26 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't...

01:23:27 ◼   ► I'm hopeful that a relatively reasonable size, physical size phone, will exist with the high-level

01:23:34 ◼   ► specs.

01:23:35 ◼   ► But you know, like I said, we'll see in three months.

01:23:38 ◼   ► The ACE, the A8, which I mentioned a few times, is maybe not even the best example of it because

01:23:43 ◼   ► the iPads have the A7 too this year. The two things that the iPhone 5s has that no other

01:23:51 ◼   ► iOS device has is it has a better camera.

01:23:53 ◼   ► Touch ID.

01:23:55 ◼   ► And it has touch ID. And anything else they might introduce along those lines is going

01:23:59 ◼   ► to be in the iPhone first because the iPhone has the profit margins to support the top

01:24:05 ◼   ► line. The camera, you know, for me personally, the camera is the most important thing. I would probably

01:24:10 ◼   ► buy whichever iPhone has the best camera. Even if it's the 5.5 inch?

01:24:15 ◼   ► Well, if it was only the 5.5 inch, man, that would, I don't know what I would do.

01:24:20 ◼   ► Because I mean the camera has gotten pretty good. Like I went from the, I forget, I went from like

01:24:24 ◼   ► the iPhone 1 to the 3G or 3GS maybe, and the difference was enormous. But at this point,

01:24:31 ◼   ► you can certainly see a difference but it's pretty good already you you know what you still see the

01:24:36 ◼   ► difference indoors okay outdoors i don't know that i can pepsi challenge it but indoors you can

01:24:41 ◼   ► definitely still see the difference especially you know indoors and at night you know where low

01:24:45 ◼   ► the low light situations you can definitely i i think i could easily tell the difference between

01:24:51 ◼   ► a five and a 5s well but it's not even just telling the difference it's is the is the lower one

01:24:57 ◼   ► pretty good and pretty acceptable.

01:24:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:00 ◼   ► Well, and I still, because I'm, you know, as I get a semi-amateur camera enthusiast,

01:25:06 ◼   ► and I have cameras, you know, real cameras that have fancy lenses and high ISO.

01:25:13 ◼   ► So I know what it's like to have a camera that can do really well in low light.

01:25:18 ◼   ► So I can see how much potential phone cameras still have to go in low light.

01:25:22 ◼   ► To get to that point.

01:25:24 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Honestly, it would truly break my heart if the 5.5-inch display is the only way to go

01:25:31 ◼   ► top of the line.

01:25:32 ◼   ► I just can't see how they would make such an enormous leap because I'll tell you what,

01:25:36 ◼   ► going from 4 inches to 5.5 inches...

01:25:39 ◼   ► It's huge.

01:25:40 ◼   ► ...is just huge.

01:25:42 ◼   ► It sounds like you're just talking about an inch and a half, but it's not.

01:25:45 ◼   ► It's just a so much bigger device.

01:25:49 ◼   ► I think it's even bigger than like a Field Notes notebook.

01:25:52 ◼   ► They're really, really big.

01:25:53 ◼   ► And again, I can see why someone would want that.

01:25:56 ◼   ► I totally understand the idea of, hey, I just want something right in the middle of a phone

01:26:00 ◼   ► and a tablet because I'm going to use it all day long for these things.

01:26:03 ◼   ► That's not how I use it.

01:26:05 ◼   ► That's not what I want.

01:26:06 ◼   ► Right.

01:26:07 ◼   ► I just want something that's as small as possible and not noticeable in my pocket until I want

01:26:11 ◼   ► it.

01:26:12 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:26:13 ◼   ► I really don't see how this is going to play out.

01:26:15 ◼   ► Let me take a third break here.

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01:28:43 ◼   ► So bigger storage more RAM. I agree with you on that

01:28:47 ◼   ► I didn't I don't know if we concluded on that

01:28:50 ◼   ► But I do think they should go more and I think the way that people are shooting video

01:28:53 ◼   ► I think that it's it's essential. I know I've had family members come to me with iPhones that are full up

01:28:59 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, and it's because they shoot so many videos and photos. I mean, it's

01:29:06 ◼   ► I don't know. I think it's due. What else do we have on the agenda?

01:29:13 ◼   ► What? Go ahead.

01:29:14 ◼   ► Oh, so bigger iPhones. This is something I wanted to talk about last week when Guy was

01:29:17 ◼   ► on. Just a small thing, but I don't know if you saw it. Did you see the State of the Union

01:29:22 ◼   ► address?

01:29:23 ◼   ► I haven't yet. As I said, I had to miss Dub-Dub for a family matter, and so I haven't caught

01:29:27 ◼   ► up on all the videos yet.

01:29:29 ◼   ► So the State of the Union is great. I recommend it for anybody who's only watched the keynote.

01:29:33 ◼   ► I know that we're a couple weeks out from WWDC, but if you want to watch one more, I

01:29:37 ◼   ► recommend that platforms stay--

01:29:38 ◼   ► John: It is always worthwhile, especially as a developer, but in general, there's often

01:29:42 ◼   ► stuff in there that you didn't hear about in the keynote, but that could have been in

01:29:45 ◼   ► the keynote.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Dave: Right.

01:29:47 ◼   ► And if you're nerdy enough to--even if you're not a developer, but if you're nerdy enough

01:29:50 ◼   ► to listen to this podcast, you're absolutely in the target audience for the State of the

01:29:55 ◼   ► Union.

01:29:56 ◼   ► Because it's not super-codey.

01:29:57 ◼   ► It's not a lot of example code.

01:30:01 ◼   ► It's at the level of the show, I think.

01:30:03 ◼   ► But they give you details that they just cannot fit into the keynote or that they just don't

01:30:07 ◼   ► want to put in the morning keynote.

01:30:10 ◼   ► And the big one, it's such a tell and it's so awkward, you know, like you said, where

01:30:14 ◼   ► they've switched to this thing where they'll ship stuff at WWDC and software and then the

01:30:18 ◼   ► hardware that comes out later in the year, it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's why they did

01:30:21 ◼   ► that."

01:30:22 ◼   ► Well, the stuff about multiple screen sizes is so, it's so obvious, but they can't say...

01:30:30 ◼   ► Well, they won't say anyway.

01:30:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Well, right.

01:30:34 ◼   ► They're not going to say, "Hey, we might be shipping iPhones with new pixel dimensions

01:30:38 ◼   ► or new physical sizes."

01:30:39 ◼   ► Or we might, when we unveil the iPad later, new iPads later this year, have a show a new

01:30:48 ◼   ► feature where you can run two apps side by side.

01:30:51 ◼   ► They just say like, "Hey, you know, in theory, you might want to support these new..."

01:30:56 ◼   ► They call it adaptive apps, and it's sort of like responsive...what responsive layout

01:31:02 ◼   ► is to web design.

01:31:03 ◼   ► Right, where it works, and whatever the screen size is, it'll still work and look as if it

01:31:07 ◼   ► was made natively for that size.

01:31:10 ◼   ► Right.

01:31:11 ◼   ► And that they're switching from a model where there are two sizes you need to worry about,

01:31:17 ◼   ► iPhone size and iPad size, and horizontal and vertical layout, and then a little asterisk

01:31:25 ◼   ► for iPhone because there's still older ones that have a 3.5 inch instead of a 4 inch,

01:31:30 ◼   ► but they really just added pixels to the top. They didn't really create a new…everything

01:31:34 ◼   ► stayed exactly the same size. They just…

01:31:36 ◼   ► Interviewer Just got taller.

01:31:37 ◼   ► John Greenewald Just got taller. They're switching to a system

01:31:42 ◼   ► where there's these one-third width, half width, full width, two-thirds width, and,

01:31:48 ◼   ► you know, like the iPhone is considered a one-third width. And so it just seems pretty…like

01:31:54 ◼   ► Without saying, "Hey, we might do this," they're telling you that your apps...

01:32:00 ◼   ► Everybody should watch the State of the Union, and they talk about this.

01:32:03 ◼   ► It's interesting both in terms of thinking about how it might work as a user and developer,

01:32:08 ◼   ► and how it might...

01:32:09 ◼   ► But it's also interesting, as anybody who's ever spoken publicly or is careful with their

01:32:14 ◼   ► words, to look at the contortions that they're jumping through.

01:32:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:19 ◼   ► And they do it pretty well.

01:32:21 ◼   ► It's so hard. It'll make you laugh. It's really kind of funny and I almost feel bad for him.

01:32:26 ◼   ► And then there's a whole session. I haven't actually watched it yet, but it's building

01:32:30 ◼   ► adaptive apps with UI kit session 216. And the thing that's interesting too, and I still

01:32:37 ◼   ► feel like this hasn't really gotten through to everybody yet. There's no NDA this year.

01:32:43 ◼   ► Everybody can just go to developer.apple.com or just Google WWDC 2014 videos. It's easier,

01:32:49 ◼   ► it /videos/wwdc/2014. And they have all the videos from WWDC, and you don't even need

01:32:56 ◼   ► an ADC account. You don't have to log in. You just click the video you want and start

01:33:01 ◼   ► watching it. So everybody, you don't even have to sign up for a developer account. You

01:33:04 ◼   ► can just go watch session 216 and see them talk about it.

01:33:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I had a note that I wanted to mention that it's interesting that the NDA has been

01:33:13 ◼   ► lifted on all of this. And they just before the conference talked about how there can

01:33:20 ◼   ► be access to betas of the OS. But as a developer, it's tremendously annoying to have even more

01:33:29 ◼   ► people running a beta OS before it's out.

01:33:32 ◼   ► interesting. That's I you know, I that occurred to me and it's

01:33:37 ◼   ► yeah, I thought about that. But as my personal interest as a

01:33:45 ◼   ► developer at Q branch, we're still iOS only and iOS is not

01:33:48 ◼   ► having a public beta. Whereas at rogue amoeba, the max, you guys

01:33:53 ◼   ► are almost all Mac. And or is it all not have something for them.

01:33:59 ◼   ► But it's but for the most part, though, the company, it's a Mac

01:34:01 ◼   ► company with it with some toes dipped in the iOS pool and you guys are gonna have people running

01:34:08 ◼   ► the public beta of Yosemite. Right and people always did this who I don't want to say shouldn't

01:34:15 ◼   ► have but you know didn't necessarily need to and it was always a little bit of a struggle because

01:34:22 ◼   ► you know we'd have to say we're not there yet we're working on it but if you need your stuff

01:34:26 ◼   ► to work on a daily basis, don't run a beta OS. I mean, that's just good advice in general, right?

01:34:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it's definitely good advice. Anybody out there who's thinking about participating in the

01:34:38 ◼   ► Yosemite public beta, you know, was right. I mean, if you not, we're not saying don't do it. I'm

01:34:43 ◼   ► saying no, you've got to take responsibility. That's exactly it. And and you've got to take

01:34:48 ◼   ► responsibility for what and the more people that are doing it, the more emails we're going to get

01:34:52 ◼   ► that say, you know, this isn't working, whatever. And we want to support these people as soon as we

01:34:56 ◼   ► can, but we also have limited resources. And so I don't know if this will help Apple or

01:35:02 ◼   ► not because I think they had pretty good testing both internally and from developers in previous

01:35:07 ◼   ► years. So I'm not really sure what they're striving for with this sort of change to opening

01:35:13 ◼   ► it up a little bit more.

01:35:15 ◼   ► In theory, if there's something stupid simple that's like really just like a line of code

01:35:21 ◼   ► and you know what it is that this thing we could do this and

01:35:25 ◼   ► maybe we'll ship a point one update. And it'll make things

01:35:29 ◼   ► run better on Yosemite public beta. Sure, you might do that you

01:35:34 ◼   ► could do that it just in a way that you even if there was no

01:35:37 ◼   ► public beta might roll out. But updates of your apps over

01:35:42 ◼   ► summer, if you can work one in that does make things better

01:35:44 ◼   ► under Yosemite, you'll do it you might have done it anyway,

01:35:46 ◼   ► because it'll help you because you'll be running it. But you

01:35:50 ◼   ► can't run your company you can't support a beta operating system and

01:35:56 ◼   ► that's exactly it and and so like I said I don't know what Apple's hoping to

01:35:59 ◼   ► accomplish with this and I hope they do get something out of it but it's

01:36:02 ◼   ► definitely frustrating for us as as developers because ideally you're gonna

01:36:07 ◼   ► want to you're gonna want to support Yosemite either when it officially ships

01:36:11 ◼   ► out of beta or soon thereafter all of your possible right all right day one if

01:36:16 ◼   ► possible if not as soon afterwards as possible but that's because once it's

01:36:20 ◼   ► out of beta it's a stable target that's the thing yeah that's the thing to you

01:36:24 ◼   ► make a great point there that right now it's completely all over the map and

01:36:28 ◼   ► things can change drastically between releases and trying to track every

01:36:33 ◼   ► single one of those changes across weekly or monthly releases before it's

01:36:37 ◼   ► in the public's hands is not a good way to run a company right it's you can't

01:36:42 ◼   ► target a moving target well you could you can try to it's way more worse you

01:36:46 ◼   ► you'll end up wasting time you know and it could be something like a cosmetic

01:36:50 ◼   ► bug like you know this doesn't look good because it's doesn't render well on the

01:36:56 ◼   ► transparent such-and-such and it ends up by the time it ships it's no longer even

01:37:01 ◼   ► transparent because they've tried and you spent time we're fixing it for two

01:37:04 ◼   ► weeks worth of right yeah so anyway and it happened you cannot do it and and

01:37:10 ◼   ► And again, I've been there, even way back when I was at Barebones, we went through it

01:37:14 ◼   ► with BB Edit on the public beta of Mac OS X.

01:37:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:18 ◼   ► Well, but I mean, are you talking pre-10.0, the actual public betas then?

01:37:23 ◼   ► Because those were actually almost releases.

01:37:27 ◼   ► That's probably a bad example because I think we only had the native carbon version of BB

01:37:34 ◼   ► Edit was internally beta tested.

01:37:36 ◼   ► We didn't have a public beta of that.

01:37:38 ◼   ► there I remember though being at bare-bones though maybe not the 10.0

01:37:42 ◼   ► but like 10.1 and 10.2 and all you know even before that even the betas of

01:37:46 ◼   ► Mac OS 9 you know that the various updates to it that we'd get bug reports

01:37:52 ◼   ► from people who were running it and it's like thanks for filing the bug we do

01:37:56 ◼   ► appreciate that report the bug but don't you don't expect us to have this fixed

01:38:00 ◼   ► on the schedule that we would for a similar bug on a shipping version of

01:38:05 ◼   ► Yeah, that's exactly it

01:38:07 ◼   ► Right anyway. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm interested to see how that aspect of it plays out and how popular the public be

01:38:13 ◼   ► Well, I should you know, I mentioned this but I should say it hasn't been a huge issue

01:38:17 ◼   ► It's not as if we've seen an influx of people running this who shouldn't be or you know

01:38:21 ◼   ► Ah, but they haven't started the public beta yet for Yosemite. There's none right now at all. I

01:38:25 ◼   ► Don't know. Am I wrong? Well, then I guess we'll see if I'm like I said, I'm sort of out of it

01:38:31 ◼   ► as far as DubDub goes.

01:38:33 ◼   ► - You'll know in the next episode of the talk show

01:38:35 ◼   ► if I start by apologizing.

01:38:36 ◼   ► I'm nearly certain that the public beta hasn't started.

01:38:39 ◼   ► - You may well be right.

01:38:40 ◼   ► I mean, I'm running it on one of my machines,

01:38:41 ◼   ► but that doesn't mean, you know,

01:38:43 ◼   ► I got it from the developers area.

01:38:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, my hope is that they're waiting

01:38:47 ◼   ► for a significantly better.

01:38:49 ◼   ► I think that the two betas are actually pretty good

01:38:51 ◼   ► for June. - Right.

01:38:52 ◼   ► - You know, both iOS 8 and Yosemite.

01:38:54 ◼   ► I've got machines, I've got devices running both here.

01:38:59 ◼   ► And they're both pretty good for June betas.

01:39:01 ◼   ► - Especially compared to past years.

01:39:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, past years, the June ones

01:39:05 ◼   ► have usually been unusable.

01:39:07 ◼   ► You know, it's like, I'll come back to it in mid July

01:39:09 ◼   ► when they've got it.

01:39:10 ◼   ► To me, they seem like they're ahead

01:39:11 ◼   ► of where they've been in the past years,

01:39:12 ◼   ► but I wouldn't recommend them to anybody

01:39:14 ◼   ► to depend on in either case.

01:39:16 ◼   ► - No, and a big thing is that a lot of the time,

01:39:20 ◼   ► the features that they've talked about aren't in there yet.

01:39:22 ◼   ► - Yes, that's absolutely true.

01:39:25 ◼   ► - So you wanna run these and see like,

01:39:26 ◼   ► oh, they talked about this new stuff, I wanna see it.

01:39:28 ◼   ► and then if you install it, you're not actually gonna see it for another month because it's

01:39:31 ◼   ► not there yet.

01:39:32 ◼   ► So...

01:39:33 ◼   ► So, I don't know.

01:39:34 ◼   ► I'm optimistic that they're...

01:39:36 ◼   ► I'm curious about it though because it does seem to be of a piece with this whole opening

01:39:41 ◼   ► up of Apple.

01:39:42 ◼   ► You know, that they're a little bit, you know, not in a radical departure but in a slight

01:39:47 ◼   ► shift of course.

01:39:48 ◼   ► You know, Angela Ahrendts had a LinkedIn blog post yesterday on what it's like to be starting

01:39:54 ◼   ► a new job at a new company.

01:39:56 ◼   ► It wasn't particularly revealing.

01:39:58 ◼   ► It was, you know, right.

01:40:01 ◼   ► And it was, you know, there were no secrets.

01:40:03 ◼   ► There's nothing gossipy or shocking or notable.

01:40:05 ◼   ► It was, you know, well-written and interesting.

01:40:08 ◼   ► It's an interesting perspective.

01:40:10 ◼   ► But the thing that's most interesting is that a senior vice president at Apple posted a

01:40:16 ◼   ► here's what I'm up to blog post on LinkedIn, right, which has never happened before.

01:40:21 ◼   ► as LinkedIn but on any kind of social network or blog or anything like that.

01:40:26 ◼   ► Well, besides when Steve Jobs was blogging on Apple.com with like thoughts on music and

01:40:31 ◼   ► whatever.

01:40:32 ◼   ► Yeah, but even then it wasn't personal. It was like two times in the entire history of

01:40:36 ◼   ► Apple Steve Jobs wrote, "Here's something you've bastardly made me actually address."

01:40:45 ◼   ► Thoughts on music and then thoughts on Flash.

01:40:47 ◼   ► That's right. That was the other one, Flash. Yeah. How'd that work out? If we have Flash

01:40:51 ◼   ► on the iPhone yet?

01:40:54 ◼   ► You know, there's people that, somebody emailed me about that the other day. Some reader wanted

01:40:58 ◼   ► me to do like a claim chat on RoundUp on Mobile Flash because the people who were adamant

01:41:03 ◼   ► that it was--

01:41:04 ◼   ► It could never be a success without it.

01:41:06 ◼   ► Right. Seemed to have conveniently lost their interest in the cause.

01:41:13 ◼   ► Right.

01:41:14 ◼   ► No, I don't believe so. I'm more curious, are there any devices you can go out and buy

01:41:18 ◼   ► today that have--

01:41:19 ◼   ► have flash right through the android do current android devices have it or

01:41:23 ◼   ► right i don't think so i think you'd have to buy like a super low-end android

01:41:27 ◼   ► phone that's running an ancient version of android you know

01:41:30 ◼   ► to get it like a two-point something version i don't think android supported

01:41:33 ◼   ► it in the entire 4.0 versions and that 4.0

01:41:37 ◼   ► is a couple years old yeah yeah everybody's given up on it all right i

01:41:41 ◼   ► don't even know blackberry still supports it

01:41:43 ◼   ► they just had some new phones didn't they yeah

01:41:48 ◼   ► It's funny. It's funny how hard it is for a company to actually like the the the the candle to actually go out, right?

01:41:54 ◼   ► right, well, it's like do you remember the

01:41:56 ◼   ► the load sis like

01:41:59 ◼   ► lawsuits against Unix and Linux

01:42:01 ◼   ► This is this they were suing

01:42:04 ◼   ► Linux and maybe Unix I forget what the deal was that they owned some piece of Unix and therefore were suing Linux

01:42:11 ◼   ► I think was the deal and

01:42:12 ◼   ► These lawsuits went on for like a decade and they kept losing them

01:42:16 ◼   ► but they kept filing them and it was always a concern

01:42:20 ◼   ► that this was gonna impact something like Android

01:42:24 ◼   ► where it's actually, even if it's not true Linux,

01:42:27 ◼   ► it's built around it and if one of these lawsuits

01:42:30 ◼   ► was successful, suddenly somebody might be taking

01:42:32 ◼   ► a huge chunk of money out of some big company.

01:42:35 ◼   ► And yeah, anyway, the point was that it took over a decade

01:42:39 ◼   ► I think before they, as you said, the candle finally went out

01:42:41 ◼   ► and they finally gave up and said, all right, we're done.

01:42:44 ◼   ► And it's a similar thing with BlackBerry

01:42:46 ◼   ► where the company is just limping along and I mean they must have had some money in the

01:42:50 ◼   ► bank too the way Apple does not to that extent but.

01:42:54 ◼   ► Yeah I guess so I don't know it's just it's I don't know I expected something spectacular

01:42:59 ◼   ► to have happened by now either like we're out we're turning out the lights and we're

01:43:04 ◼   ► we've sold our I you know the way I expected to go is we've sold ourselves to I don't know

01:43:10 ◼   ► LG or HTC or I don't know some somebody like that we've sold ourselves to and now we're

01:43:15 ◼   ► Blackberry's just a name that's owned by this other company.

01:43:18 ◼   ► - Right, like Napster got sold a couple times that way.

01:43:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it hasn't happened yet.

01:43:23 ◼   ► And yet, like you said, they're still coming out

01:43:25 ◼   ► with new phones and it's like, I feel sorry for them.

01:43:28 ◼   ► I don't know, anybody who's still left.

01:43:30 ◼   ► - Right.

01:43:31 ◼   ► - They don't look terrible, but they don't look

01:43:33 ◼   ► at least a bit competitive with everything else

01:43:35 ◼   ► that's going on. - Right.

01:43:37 ◼   ► - Or Palm, you know, right?

01:43:39 ◼   ► Like Palm just disappeared, you know?

01:43:41 ◼   ► It's like I've ever thought something would've happened

01:43:43 ◼   ► by now.

01:43:44 ◼   ► You know, that BlackBerry is going to either disappear or get sold.

01:43:47 ◼   ► Well, Palm got bought by HP, right?

01:43:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's where they went.

01:43:51 ◼   ► I know HP wound up with them at some point because the tablet-sized ones were HP devices.

01:43:57 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:58 ◼   ► What were they called?

01:43:59 ◼   ► The touchpad?

01:44:00 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's right.

01:44:01 ◼   ► But yeah, BlackBerry is limping along still.

01:44:04 ◼   ► And that was the thing.

01:44:06 ◼   ► I was surprised to see this announcement.

01:44:07 ◼   ► I think it was this week or last week.

01:44:09 ◼   ► And I haven't even looked at the phones, but I've never been interested.

01:44:12 ◼   ► it's interesting that they're still able to put something in.

01:44:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I don't, you know, you never,

01:44:18 ◼   ► just walking around the city, you never see

01:44:20 ◼   ► BlackBerry posters in the carrier stores anymore

01:44:22 ◼   ► or anything, it's, you know,

01:44:24 ◼   ► it's almost like they're not there.

01:44:25 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure you can go in and buy one, but,

01:44:28 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:44:29 ◼   ► I would guess that most of the ones that are still being

01:44:31 ◼   ► sold are like the old style ones, not the new--

01:44:33 ◼   ► - With the keyboard versus the touchscreen, you mean?

01:44:36 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Right.

01:44:37 ◼   ► The ones that, you know, people who are just

01:44:38 ◼   ► BlackBerry diehards who've just skipped out

01:44:40 ◼   ► on the whole iOS Android type computing thing

01:44:43 ◼   ► and still just, they just want a replacement

01:44:45 ◼   ► for the BlackBerry that they have.

01:44:46 ◼   ► - Right.

01:44:48 ◼   ► - Right, which isn't unreasonable.

01:44:49 ◼   ► It's not a good business going forward, but it's--

01:44:51 ◼   ► - No, but if you have something that works

01:44:52 ◼   ► and then it eventually breaks 'cause it's been five years,

01:44:55 ◼   ► you may well want the exact same thing.

01:44:57 ◼   ► - Right, I totally understand that mindset.

01:44:59 ◼   ► I mean, I personally, obviously don't, you know,

01:45:03 ◼   ► when it comes to phones, I don't feel that way,

01:45:04 ◼   ► but there's other things in my life that if it breaks,

01:45:07 ◼   ► I just wanna buy the exact same thing.

01:45:08 ◼   ► exact same thing.

01:45:09 ◼   ► Oh, your goddamn keyboard, John.

01:45:10 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:45:11 ◼   ► My keyboard.

01:45:12 ◼   ► I have the same – I bought like four or five pairs of the same sneakers.

01:45:16 ◼   ► Okay.

01:45:17 ◼   ► You know, I don't care what the new sneakers are.

01:45:19 ◼   ► Just give me a new pair of Samba Millennium.

01:45:21 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:45:22 ◼   ► Or whatever they're called.

01:45:23 ◼   ► All right.

01:45:24 ◼   ► I think that's it for my list this week.

01:45:27 ◼   ► Good show.

01:45:28 ◼   ► All right.

01:45:29 ◼   ► Well, I got one more for you.

01:45:30 ◼   ► You got a topic?

01:45:31 ◼   ► You got something to throw in?

01:45:32 ◼   ► I do have one more.

01:45:33 ◼   ► You got a little bonus?

01:45:34 ◼   ► And this is important to me.

01:45:35 ◼   ► Did you see – it was last week.

01:45:37 ◼   ► you see the announcement of these new emoji emoji no oh no I didn't I saw that

01:45:43 ◼   ► there were but I didn't see what was okay well so so there's two things

01:45:46 ◼   ► actually iOS 8 makes it promotes emoji to like a top-level keyboard now so

01:45:51 ◼   ► instead of by default it used to be you had to turn on the emoji keyboard oh

01:45:55 ◼   ► right yeah and now iOS 8 has it there by default for everybody which is actually

01:46:00 ◼   ► a little bit interesting because it indicates Apple feels this is part of

01:46:03 ◼   ► of the culture now, the same way punctuation is almost.

01:46:08 ◼   ► So I thought that was kind of interesting, but--

01:46:10 ◼   ► - Right, there's a smiley button on the keyboard.

01:46:11 ◼   ► - That's exactly it.

01:46:12 ◼   ► Instead of hitting the globe and pulling up other keyboards,

01:46:14 ◼   ► you just hit the smiley button basically.

01:46:17 ◼   ► But yeah, so last week, the standard got released

01:46:20 ◼   ► for like 240, 250 new emoji.

01:46:24 ◼   ► And the way that it works is that each platform,

01:46:27 ◼   ► Apple, Android, Twitter, has to then create illustrations

01:46:31 ◼   ► for this and make it part of their OS

01:46:34 ◼   ► or part of their platform.

01:46:35 ◼   ► And I wrote about this today,

01:46:37 ◼   ► but the one that I'm very excited about

01:46:40 ◼   ► and I'm a little worried about

01:46:41 ◼   ► is there is now going to be a middle finger emoji.

01:46:43 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:46:44 ◼   ► - Is there really?

01:46:45 ◼   ► - There is a, I forget the exact name,

01:46:47 ◼   ► but it's hand with middle finger raised.

01:46:50 ◼   ► You know, they have longer names.

01:46:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:46:54 ◼   ► - I'm looking at your website now.

01:46:57 ◼   ► - There you go, yeah.

01:46:58 ◼   ► So it's, what's it called?

01:47:01 ◼   ► reversed hand with middle finger extended.

01:47:03 ◼   ► And it's a hand flipping the bird.

01:47:06 ◼   ► Now my concern though, and this is a question for you,

01:47:10 ◼   ► is Apple going to include this?

01:47:12 ◼   ► - Oh, now that's a fascinating question.

01:47:16 ◼   ► This is why you put Paul Kvassus on your show.

01:47:20 ◼   ► That's a damn good question, Paul.

01:47:22 ◼   ► - Because Apple, they've got the pile of poo in there,

01:47:26 ◼   ► but at the same time, their app store is fairly restrictive.

01:47:30 ◼   ► There's no pornography in there.

01:47:32 ◼   ► There's no risque content.

01:47:35 ◼   ► - Is pile of poo, is the emoji description pile of poo?

01:47:40 ◼   ► - That is the actual name of it, yeah.

01:47:42 ◼   ► If you look in the Unicode table, it's called pile of poo.

01:47:45 ◼   ► - And so there's no reason that you would have to turn it

01:47:49 ◼   ► into a googly-eyed smiley face.

01:47:51 ◼   ► - No, it's not happy face.

01:47:52 ◼   ► It's not happy pile of poo.

01:47:53 ◼   ► It's not smiley pile of poo.

01:47:55 ◼   ► It's literally just pile of poo.

01:47:57 ◼   ► - It could be an ugly rank.

01:48:00 ◼   ► smelly with flies buzzing around it.

01:48:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, like little stink rays coming out of a pile of poo.

01:48:06 ◼   ► And instead it's a very, very happy, you know,

01:48:09 ◼   ► your doctor is gonna be very happy

01:48:13 ◼   ► with your school special.

01:48:14 ◼   ► - If it looks like this guy, yeah.

01:48:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, you're eating well, you're taking care of yourself.

01:48:19 ◼   ► - But so the thing is that, you know,

01:48:21 ◼   ► they're restrictive in some regards and then not in others,

01:48:24 ◼   ► but this is a standard.

01:48:26 ◼   ► And what's interesting is that they were talking

01:48:29 ◼   ► couple months ago about introducing diversity into the emoji and they wanted to have basically

01:48:35 ◼   ► there's a whole lot of white people in the emoji which is interesting because it comes

01:48:39 ◼   ► from Japan so it's a little strange but Apple said you know we want to have other other

01:48:45 ◼   ► races represented in there and they said they might just do it themselves and they can take

01:48:50 ◼   ► instead of like smiling elderly person they can make that a smiling elderly person of

01:48:55 ◼   ► a different race. So I don't know, you know, they have the authority on their own platforms

01:49:02 ◼   ► to make this not quite a middle finger, I think. And I'm worried that I'm going to have

01:49:07 ◼   ► to switch to Android if this happens.

01:49:11 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:49:12 ◼   ► Reversed hand with middle finger extended. Well...

01:49:16 ◼   ► I mean, can you draw that in a way that follows that guideline without it being a middle finger?

01:49:20 ◼   ► Yeah, well look at that. You're obviously not an emoji lawyer as I am. I actually have

01:49:26 ◼   ► a JD in emoji law. So reversed hand, you do need to show the back of the hand. The middle

01:49:33 ◼   ► finger extended does need to be extended, but there's no reason you couldn't have another

01:49:37 ◼   ► finger extended.

01:49:38 ◼   ► That's exactly it. You toss up another finger and it's not incorrect. And then suddenly

01:49:42 ◼   ► I'm not flipping somebody the bird, I'm giving them a peace sign.

01:49:45 ◼   ► Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Or a Spock sign.

01:49:50 ◼   ► that is one of the new ones that's it I saw that one in there the what I call

01:49:55 ◼   ► that the Vulcan symbol yeah that's already that's already a little long and

01:49:57 ◼   ► prosper I feel like you could officially comply with the description by putting

01:50:03 ◼   ► another finger up there I'm worried I'm worried John that's a good question what

01:50:09 ◼   ► will they got to do the right thing here they got to give me the middle finger

01:50:13 ◼   ► yeah you know would be it would it would it would fit with it wouldn't comply

01:50:21 ◼   ► with the description at all but it would fit with previous frustrations with

01:50:26 ◼   ► similar curse words in in prose if they just replaced it with a picture of a duck

01:50:36 ◼   ► right right right you would go to insert this emoji and you get it's gonna duck

01:50:42 ◼   ► like. Nice. That's my guess. My guess is they're just going to put a picture of a duck. Son

01:50:49 ◼   ► of a bitch. We'll see. I'm hopeful. This is great. Now I'm on pins and needles to see

01:50:56 ◼   ► how this turns out. And it could be months. We don't know. Because the way the standard

01:50:59 ◼   ► works, you know, it gets announced and then they implement it over time. So I don't know

01:51:03 ◼   ► if it'll be part of iOS 8 or iOS 9, but I'm eager to see it and I hope we get what we

01:51:08 ◼   ► deserve yeah do you know if there was there any controversy over this you know

01:51:13 ◼   ► I didn't not that I saw it it's a standards body that you know the the

01:51:21 ◼   ► the companies that comply to the standards still have a lot of leeway

01:51:25 ◼   ► rather so if you look you know things look different on different platforms so

01:51:29 ◼   ► yeah I'm gonna go with no I think they're not gonna do it I mean they did

01:51:33 ◼   ► pile of poo though I wonder would there be a way that they would add a parental

01:51:37 ◼   ► control that you can't... On your emoji keyboard? Right. Well, but the thing is that if you

01:51:42 ◼   ► don't know what it means, then it's just a middle finger sticking up, right? I mean,

01:51:45 ◼   ► it's not... Do they have other fingers? Can you get every single finger of the hand? I

01:51:50 ◼   ► mean, there's already pointing fingers. Like pointing with the pointer finger and up and

01:51:54 ◼   ► down and... I don't know if there's one for every finger. I don't think there is. But

01:52:00 ◼   ► I mean, like, you could just tell your kid this means one. Like, I mean, that's probably

01:52:05 ◼   ► bad lesson to teach your kid I guess. Yeah make sure you emphasize that lesson

01:52:10 ◼   ► before the first day of kindergarten. This means what? Duck you Paul. Duck you John.