00:00:07 ◼ ► Is the global supply chain issues, are they affecting the flow of Heineken to the west coast?
00:00:19 ◼ ► The tanker truck can't sit by my house anymore because, you know, there is a shortage, so...
00:00:28 ◼ ► Can I tell you, shopping in... you know, we live right in the city, so we just walk everywhere.
00:00:34 ◼ ► In most of the whole pandemic, I would just walk places and take my mask. Not a lot of car shopping.
00:00:40 ◼ ► We used the car less than ever over the last two years. But I don't know why that is, because in
00:00:44 ◼ ► theory you'd think we might use it just as much, but we were out in the suburbs visiting family.
00:00:48 ◼ ► And my wife dialed up an order at Target. But you go to the suburbs. Have you ever done this,
00:00:55 ◼ ► where you can just have it curbside delivered? You pay for it like Apple Pay or something,
00:01:00 ◼ ► you know, on the phone. And you just tell them your license plate number. You pull into a special
00:01:06 ◼ ► parking spot. You open the trunk, and some high school kid comes out, loads up your trunk with the
00:01:20 ◼ ► It is awesome, but it also, like, we just did this a couple weeks ago. It also made me feel like we
00:01:27 ◼ ► were back in the midst of the pandemic, you know what I mean? Like when you're terrified to do
00:01:30 ◼ ► anything. It's like, hey, I would have opened my window. I'm not actually afraid. I'm vaccinated,
00:01:38 ◼ ► back in like early 2020 when we were like terrified and we're like washing our vegetables and leaving
00:01:46 ◼ ► all the packages like in a vestibule for a 24-hour germ-free period. This would have been great. Just
00:01:53 ◼ ► have a kid put all this crap in your trunk. And the thing is, everybody has those types
00:01:59 ◼ ► of services now, even McDonald's. I mean, you pull up and, you know, you can get food there,
00:02:04 ◼ ► and every business has that type of curbside pickup now. It's funny how businesses have
00:02:10 ◼ ► adapted so quickly. We're two years into this, but still, you know, you can just dial up an order,
00:02:20 ◼ ► Tom: All right, let me take a break here and let's get this show going. Let's thank our first
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00:04:09 ◼ ► off. Get it right for this holiday season. Jim, tell me a story about how you got started
00:04:16 ◼ ► writing about Apple and reporting on Apple back in the day. What was the first time that you
00:04:31 ◼ ► daily Mac news sites then. I do believe that the first actual daily site doing news type of stuff
00:04:44 ◼ ► was Mac Central, the one that we started back in '94. Mac in Touch was around then, I believe.
00:04:58 ◼ ► you know, well, we didn't want a boss. We both worked in a newspaper. We didn't want a boss.
00:05:15 ◼ ► Well, no, it was probably about 10 years ago, I guess, that he passed away. Yeah, and we started
00:05:23 ◼ ► it as a magazine first, you know, one of those ezines. And then we closed it down, and then
00:05:31 ◼ ► just a couple months later or a month later started to back up again. But this time did
00:06:03 ◼ ► Yeah. So I remember we would go home on our lunch break from our jobs. The mail would have
00:06:09 ◼ ► come by then, post whatever news we could, and then go back to work. And I remember one time,
00:06:56 ◼ ► and walked away from the computer. And at the time, we didn't have cell phones, right? So you
00:07:02 ◼ ► couldn't notify, you know what I mean? Like you were either at your computer, and if you're at
00:07:07 ◼ ► your computer and you're like, "Hey, Stan, the headline has a dick in it," you know, he'd be
00:07:15 ◼ ► like, he would be like, "Oh shit," and he'd fix it right away. But if he's not at his computer,
00:07:21 ◼ ► I remember in college, the one time we really messed up in the Drexel University paper,
00:07:26 ◼ ► it was the sports section. And the headline was real big. It was like, you know, 96-point type.
00:07:36 ◼ ► I'm very proud of my time at the Drexel Triangle back in the '90s, or right around that time,
00:07:46 ◼ ► really, '94, '95, right when you were doing Max Central. We ran a good paper. It was a good-looking
00:07:51 ◼ ► paper. It was well-designed. It was well-written. We made very few mistakes like that. But son of
00:07:55 ◼ ► a bitch, we went to press. And that's the thing, is even with the web, even if you have a dick in
00:08:03 ◼ ► the headline overnight, you could still fix it the next morning. There was nothing to do with
00:08:07 ◼ ► 5,000 printed copies of the Drexel Triangle that said, "Headline goes here." But the best part,
00:08:14 ◼ ► the best part was that we had a really good sense of humor. We took it seriously, you know,
00:08:18 ◼ ► in like the front page with the university news, you know, "The president of the university says
00:08:23 ◼ ► such and such." You know, we played it straight. But like our entertainment section, we were always
00:08:28 ◼ ► willing to have fun with stuff. And because we ran lots of funny headlines, there were a lot of
00:08:32 ◼ ► people who thought it was on purpose. And we were like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a joke. It was
00:08:38 ◼ ► a total joke. Yeah, we did that on purpose." Headline. That's how good we are. Headline goes here.
00:08:52 ◼ ► you know, like I'm talking this one went right across the whole top of the tabloid sports page.
00:08:58 ◼ ► Like it would have been great. Let's say like the men's tennis team had like a match. Well,
00:09:04 ◼ ► you know, that's like a one column story, right? That would have, oh, headline goes here in a tiny
00:09:13 ◼ ► I can't win them all. No, I remember though, I remember reading Mac Central voraciously. I've
00:09:19 ◼ ► told this before on the show, but at the time you'll remember, there were Mac User and Mac
00:09:26 ◼ ► World were the monthly magazines and they are both big. They, you know, Mac User was sort of
00:09:32 ◼ ► more casual. There was sort of a formality to Mac World. Mac World was sort of like the New
00:09:40 ◼ ► York Times and Mac User was like the New York Post, right? It was sort of the more fun.
00:09:46 ◼ ► And I liked them both. I bought them both and read them both cover to cover every month.
00:09:57 ◼ ► but like back then, like printed magazines, like Mac World had like a three month lead time and
00:10:02 ◼ ► Apple knew it. The other companies knew it. So like Apple would like, you know, go to Mac World
00:10:08 ◼ ► or Mac User months before new computers would come out and let them know because otherwise,
00:10:13 ◼ ► by the time they published the information about the new computers, it would be four months late.
00:10:19 ◼ ► But the way to stay on top of the Apple universe was Mac Week, right? Yes, there was Mac Week,
00:10:27 ◼ ► there was Info World and there was PC Week. I think those were the three big ones and they were
00:10:39 ◼ ► But it was hard to get a subscription. They wouldn't take your money. This is the biggest
00:10:48 ◼ ► thing. Like if you would just be like, I would like to give you $100 a year so you would send me
00:10:53 ◼ ► your Mac Week every week. They would say, no, you had to like fill out a form and claim, you know,
00:11:00 ◼ ► like, well, what company do you work for? How many Macs do you buy? What's your job? How much,
00:11:05 ◼ ► what's your software budget per year? And I would continuously fill out these cards with a series of
00:11:11 ◼ ► fake names trying to get a subscription to Mac Week. And then I would hear from people, they're
00:11:19 ◼ ► like, oh yeah, I filled one out and now they just send one to my house every week. And it's like,
00:11:22 ◼ ► son of a bitch, they will not. I send these cards in all the time and they never, they didn't even
00:11:28 ◼ ► want money. They just wanted somehow to believe that you were a professional who was in the
00:11:34 ◼ ► advertising demographic, you know, to buy software and, you know, desks and chairs and whatever else
00:11:40 ◼ ► they advertised in Mac Week. I could not do it. So I used to have to read it at the Drexel
00:11:45 ◼ ► University library. It was the only thing I ever did in the library. I never took a book.
00:11:51 ◼ ► I would go in and read Mac Week. Yeah, it's amazing how tough it was. I could never get it.
00:12:00 ◼ ► But then, you know, when the web came out and you could suddenly go to Mac Central and Mac in Touch
00:12:06 ◼ ► and a few other sites and get like news on a daily basis instead of weekly basis, and you didn't even
00:12:12 ◼ ► have to go to the library at the university to get the one copy of Mac Week, it was game changing.
00:12:20 ◼ ► Even though it was, you know, four or five days after the fact, it's still breaking news at that
00:12:25 ◼ ► point. Well, and it was great too, because the other thing, it was so hard before, like, let's say
00:12:31 ◼ ► that you, there are apps that are still around, right? There's like Graphic Converter and BB Edit.
00:12:37 ◼ ► There's a couple of apps from that era that are still around. But let's say you were into Graphic
00:12:41 ◼ ► Converter, which is a great, it does exactly what you think it does. It's just a Swiss army knife
00:12:47 ◼ ► of being able to open any image format ever known to mankind and export it to another format. If a
00:12:53 ◼ ► new version came out, you had no idea that a new version came out because the apps didn't check for
00:12:59 ◼ ► versions because they couldn't assume an internet connection. A site like Mac Central to just say,
00:13:04 ◼ ► "Hey, you know, Graphic Converter 1.6 is out. Here's the new features." And it was like,
00:13:10 ◼ ► "This is amazing." And then you would go to the website and download it and, you know. And then
00:13:16 ◼ ► 90 minutes later, the download would finish. And you would do that on Netscape 2.02, which crashed
00:13:26 ◼ ► every 30 seconds. Yeah. But that's, it is funny though. And you guys played it so straight.
00:13:35 ◼ ► I never picked up, and I'm an astute reader, and I obviously got into the same racket not too many
00:13:42 ◼ ► years later. It never occurred to me that it was just two of you. I thought you guys had,
00:13:53 ◼ ► We actually did that on purpose. We thought about that and had like our family names with
00:14:01 ◼ ► their mother's maiden name listed on the one, the masthead. We had all kinds of things going
00:14:07 ◼ ► on just to make it seem bigger because at that point you really, that was the thing, you know,
00:14:18 ◼ ► you kind of needed that. So yeah, we gamed it a little bit and that's what it seemed. But in
00:14:26 ◼ ► doing that, you know, up until '96, '97, we still had our jobs, but then, you know, things kind of
00:14:36 ◼ ► took off and we quit our jobs at the newspaper and it was just all day long of posting stuff, going,
00:14:54 ◼ ► but it worked out, you know. I'm still here, it's on. I'm almost 30 years in now. It's a long time.
00:15:15 ◼ ► list and they print labels and they come out of an actual printer, they put them on envelopes,
00:15:21 ◼ ► they put stamps on the envelope, they stuff the press release into the envelope, and then it goes
00:15:25 ◼ ► out in the mail and four days later, Nova Scotia Post delivers it to Jim Dalrymple. And within like
00:15:33 ◼ ► two years, everything went to email and everything was immediate. Even just two years was the
00:15:40 ◼ ► difference between everything goes in the physical mail to nothing goes in the physical mail.
00:15:44 ◼ ► Right. Yeah, it was very, very quick. And I think it started to happen sooner than what they
00:15:52 ◼ ► thought. I mean, companies didn't always have websites. I remember eWorld and AOL, they would
00:16:00 ◼ ► sometimes have those, but once they started updating their website wherever it happened to be,
00:16:07 ◼ ► you know, it could be the day after or two days after, but that was still three days before the
00:16:15 ◼ ► press release would show up by mail, we would get it online and it was this race to get things up.
00:16:24 ◼ ► I'm glad that that doesn't happen so much anymore. It's not that race anymore to get things up,
00:16:42 ◼ ► Yeah, I do too. It's funny, it just took a while to settle in, right? To sort of find the equilibrium
00:16:51 ◼ ► of, okay, this is the pace. If you really want breaking news as it breaks, you know which sites
00:16:59 ◼ ► to go to. But for the most part, if you just want to check in once a day, you can check in,
00:17:04 ◼ ► you know, your site is a perfect example. You could just check in once a day, scroll down the
00:17:08 ◼ ► page until you see the post you remember seeing yesterday, and then know that you're caught up and
00:17:14 ◼ ► that nothing major happened, you know. Well, yeah, and Dave Mark does posting on The Loop, and he
00:17:23 ◼ ► does a great job of picking out these great posts that I think people find interesting. And then,
00:17:39 ◼ ► my thoughts on Apple and what happened, and, you know, I think there's a good mix there.
00:17:45 ◼ ► But I really do like that change. And when it came down to how things started changing,
00:17:52 ◼ ► you were one of the ones that really changed the way that people thought of websites. With
00:17:59 ◼ ► the headline and the blurb, like the thoughtful commentary that you had on the news really kind
00:18:09 ◼ ► of changed the way that news websites started to react to news. It wasn't about being first to get
00:18:17 ◼ ► something up. It was more about, let's think about this for a minute, especially with Big Apple News.
00:18:23 ◼ ► I think even with reviews still, your embargo time can come and go, and yours still isn't there.
00:18:39 ◼ ► Yeah. But, you know, people wait for your review because it is so thoughtful. And that's the way
00:18:47 ◼ ► that things should be. You know, you could see the change coming a couple of years after you started
00:18:54 ◼ ► during Fireball. I remember in 2009 when I started The Loop after I left Macworld, I called you
00:19:03 ◼ ► and said, "Hey, you know, I'm doing this thing. I'm going to do a daring Fireball type of thing.
00:19:16 ◼ ► "Please start so I can start linking to your articles." Right? Yeah, that was exactly it.
00:19:23 ◼ ► I do not like to toot my own horn. I really don't. You're making me uncomfortable. I've broken out
00:19:28 ◼ ► into a bit of a flop, so I care. But I will say one of my all-time favorite quotes about computers
00:19:38 ◼ ► in general is it... I actually don't have the actual quote, but Larry Wall, the creator of the
00:19:43 ◼ ► Perl programming language, and he might be just quoting something that was floating around the
00:19:48 ◼ ► Unix circles forever, but he said that, you know, "Good programmers are lazy." And the idea is that
00:19:56 ◼ ► they're lazy because they don't want to repeat themselves. So if there's something they do over
00:20:00 ◼ ► and over again, then they write a program that does the thing over and over again, and they just
00:20:04 ◼ ► keep writing programs so that they don't have to do more work. And that's sort of the mentality
00:20:09 ◼ ► behind the link items on Daring Fireball. And at the beginning, you know, and Kottke was doing
00:20:17 ◼ ► stuff like this, not technical or Apple specific, but Kottke had links and Andy Bayo had a little
00:20:24 ◼ ► sidebar on his blog where he'd have like little 10-word links. Jim Kudall, kudall.com, is...
00:20:31 ◼ ► The whole middle column is just really brief links. To me, that captures the entire magic
00:20:37 ◼ ► of the web, right? What is the difference between getting a printed copy of Mac Week every Friday
00:20:44 ◼ ► in the mail, and you can read it and be like up to the week on Apple News versus the web,
00:20:53 ◼ ► and the first thought was, well, printing is expensive, incredibly expensive, always has
00:21:01 ◼ ► been expensive, and so you cut down on this cost. The mail is incredibly expensive. You know,
00:21:06 ◼ ► I was talking about my student newspaper, you know, when I was at university. Printing was
00:21:11 ◼ ► incredibly expensive. That was like our whole budget. Like, everything we did was just to,
00:21:16 ◼ ► you know, actually print these copies of the paper and then distribute them around campus. But
00:21:21 ◼ ► we had a thing called the Green Machine. It was like a John Deere, like a little go-kart
00:21:28 ◼ ► tractor type thing, and we had a guy named Ryan. He was a great guy. He had nothing to do with the
00:21:34 ◼ ► actual editorial of the newspaper. He wasn't a writer. He didn't edit, but he was always
00:21:40 ◼ ► enthusiastic. But what he liked to do was get up early on Friday morning, pick up all these
00:21:45 ◼ ► printed papers, put them on the Green Machine, and then drive them around campus, and every building
00:21:50 ◼ ► where there were classes, then there was like a, you know, big pile of student newspapers that you
00:21:55 ◼ ► could pick up for free. But we didn't have to mail them, right? Like, mailing was incredibly
00:21:59 ◼ ► expensive. So the first thought any of us had in the '90s as to how to build a website, it was just
00:22:07 ◼ ► like, well, this is sort of like having a print publication, but we don't have to pay for printing
00:22:11 ◼ ► or the mail. And all you have to do is wait two minutes for your modem to download this tiny little
00:22:20 ◼ ► web page, you know, by today's standards, you know, that was measured in kilobytes, but it still took
00:22:25 ◼ ► forever to render. But, you know, it was certainly better than waiting for paper to come to your
00:22:32 ◼ ► house. It shifted then, though, right? It was like the first idea was we could just do what we did in
00:22:38 ◼ ► print but not pay for the print. And then it became, hey, wait a minute, we don't have to do,
00:22:43 ◼ ► like, a once a week issue. We could, like, just publish everything as it comes in. That, to me,
00:22:50 ◼ ► was the mind blown. And I know it dates me. I know that it, you know, because today, you know,
00:22:57 ◼ ► kids today, like our kids, they would never think about running a publication where you wait until
00:23:04 ◼ ► Friday morning and then you have seven days worth of material queued up, ready to go, and an issue
00:23:11 ◼ ► comes out, right? But that was the way it had to be with print. And the early web mimicked it because
00:23:25 ◼ ► >> Correct, yeah. I remember when at the newspaper when I told them I was quitting to do this
00:23:40 ◼ ► And I said, "No, I think it will. I really do. I think that this is where it's going. And,
00:23:47 ◼ ► you know, you guys, one day you guys are going to have to have a website." And they said, "Oh,
00:23:53 ◼ ► we'll never have a website. We don't need a website. That stuff, it's not going to work."
00:23:57 ◼ ► And it did. You know, luckily for us, a few years later, Macworld bought Mac Central, and
00:24:12 ◼ ► of exactly what I'm talking about, where Macworld was the gold standard in the Apple journalism
00:24:20 ◼ ► space, the Apple-specific space. It was the premier publication. But it was a printed publication with
00:24:29 ◼ ► tons and tons of print ads, you know. And back in those days, those issues were like half a
00:24:35 ◼ ► phone book, you know. They were huge, crazy thick, but they had these crazy long lead times. So it
00:24:43 ◼ ► was like the two extremes where Macworld the magazine had like a two or three month lead time
00:24:49 ◼ ► and was a printed thing that was super thick and had just the absolute utmost of production
00:24:56 ◼ ► quality. Printed on the best paper, the super high quality professional photography for all the
00:25:03 ◼ ► product shots. And then on the other end, there's Mac Central, which, you know, it wasn't like it
00:25:10 ◼ ► didn't look professional, but it looked quick. And there was no way to do high resolution graphics on
00:25:17 ◼ ► the web at the time. And the last thing you would want is something that would take longer to
00:25:22 ◼ ► download over these crazy slow modems. It looked professional. Like I told you, I couldn't believe
00:25:36 ◼ ► You know, it's funny how much we learned after that when we came into the Macworld. You know,
00:25:44 ◼ ► Jason Snell, I love Jason. He's so smart. And, you know, sitting down talking about magazines,
00:25:51 ◼ ► we were just dumbfounded, like how much went into that. And, you know, Rick LePage was around then
00:26:10 ◼ ► All right. All right. Let me take another break here. Thank our next sponsor. It's our good
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00:28:33 ◼ ► Pete: You know, you got to do that by the books, you know what I mean? That's a lot of laws around
00:28:37 ◼ ► it. It's the holidays, you know, there's not that much going on. I thought having you on,
00:28:49 ◼ ► But the other thing too, I think it's interesting this year with the current political climate
00:28:56 ◼ ► and with the, you know, Apple's in the midst of this. The EU is seemingly heading towards
00:29:05 ◼ ► passing some laws and regulations that are definitely going to affect Apple if they pass,
00:29:11 ◼ ► you know, like this thing about mandatory sideloading for mobile phones and just here and
00:29:16 ◼ ► there all over the place. Did you see the thing where Italy fined Google and Apple, I don't know,
00:29:21 ◼ ► it's just a couple million dollars, whatever. It's pocket change to Apple and Google. But the
00:29:26 ◼ ► publicity adds up that Italy found them to be, you know, breaking some kind of antitrust law,
00:29:35 ◼ ► whatever. It doesn't even matter. It's optics, you know? And it's funny having written about Apple as
00:29:42 ◼ ► long as I have and as we were just talking, you're, you know, you're a little bit ahead of me, a couple
00:29:48 ◼ ► more years ahead of me. But it would have been bananas in 1996 to say, "Hey, 25 years from now,
00:30:00 ◼ ► Well, 25 years ago, it was almost incredible to think that Apple would still be around.
00:30:08 ◼ ► Right. That would have been, it would have been good enough to hear that they're still around.
00:30:12 ◼ ► You'd be like, "Whoa, thank God." And you'd be like, "Oh, no, no, they're not still around. They're
00:30:16 ◼ ► actually in big, big trouble for their overwhelming success." And they're facing the barrels of
00:30:22 ◼ ► regulators in the EU and in America and in Asia. And it's like, "What? You're kidding me. They're
00:30:29 ◼ ► still in business?" Yeah, true. So I'm curious. And to me, one of the things that makes it
00:30:38 ◼ ► salient is that Apple has a, if you want to put it in negative terms, I would use the word insular.
00:30:51 ◼ ► But I think it's good. I think it has served the company well that for the most part, they promote
00:31:03 ◼ ► A lot of people I know. And even people whose overall career isn't one continuous stint at
00:31:12 ◼ ► Apple, they leave and then they come back three, four, five years later at a higher level because
00:31:19 ◼ ► they left, went elsewhere, leveled up in their career, and then come back. And maybe instead
00:31:25 ◼ ► of being an engineer, now they're an engineering manager or something like that. I think overall,
00:31:31 ◼ ► it has served the company well because there is an Apple way of doing things. And it served
00:31:36 ◼ ► the company. And we can all complain about this, that, the other thing, our own pet peeves about
00:31:41 ◼ ► Apple products and where we have minor complaints. But for the most part, they've clearly stuck to it.
00:31:49 ◼ ► There's, if you went back to our 1996 cells, you editing Max Central, me reading Max Central at
00:31:59 ◼ ► Drexel University, and showed us modern Apple products, we would recognize them as Apple
00:32:04 ◼ ► products. We'd be like, "Oh, the future is going to be amazing. I love these retina screens. Look
00:32:10 ◼ ► at that. You can't see the pixels." There's an Apple flavor to them, right? That is very
00:32:24 ◼ ► is that the fact that so many people at Apple, including senior leadership at this point,
00:32:30 ◼ ► have been there for their whole careers, that they've internalized that mentality of being
00:32:37 ◼ ► the little guy who we're worried is still going to be in business in a year. And that attitude,
00:32:46 ◼ ► that perspective doesn't serve them well now that they're the most valuable company on the planet,
00:32:57 ◼ ► Tom: It's kind of tough because one of the things that we love about Apple is that they
00:33:24 ◼ ► Apple take stances that were not popular, whether it's, you know, in products, I mean, way back,
00:33:32 ◼ ► removing floppy disks, or political stances or semi-political stances with privacy. Like, no,
00:33:40 ◼ ► we are not going to take your information. We don't want your information. As a matter of fact,
00:33:51 ◼ ► You know, in a lot of ways, that could have held Apple back in features that they could
00:34:02 ◼ ► the right way. They won't open up back doors for governments. They won't unlock phones for
00:34:10 ◼ ► law enforcement agencies. They do things, I think, for the right reasons. And that comes back,
00:34:29 ◼ ► A perfect example of that is my last episode of the show, David_Smith was my guest, and we
00:34:36 ◼ ► were talking about widgets. And the most popular thing people use with his app, WidgetSmith, is to
00:34:44 ◼ ► create like a photo frame widget, where you pick one photo, you're like, this is it, this is me,
00:34:51 ◼ ► and my family, and we're at the Grand Canyon, and I just love this family photo. I would like to have
00:34:58 ◼ ► it on my second home screen always. And you can make like a photo widget frame like that.
00:35:04 ◼ ► But we were talking about the official Apple Photos widget, which the only option you have is to take
00:35:11 ◼ ► their AI-powered recommendations. But they're amazing, right? Everybody loves to talk about it.
00:35:16 ◼ ► They surface amazing photos, the machine learning, however they programmed it, and whatever model
00:35:24 ◼ ► they have, it's really almost astonishingly good how it surfaces these photos. But it's absolutely
00:35:32 ◼ ► the case that four or five years ago, everybody was talking about Apple being behind in that exact
00:35:39 ◼ ► area, right? Because maybe Google and Facebook and the places that had your photos in the cloud
00:35:47 ◼ ► on their servers were running similar, but just as amazing at surfacing these photos. But because
00:35:56 ◼ ► they could run it in the cloud, they didn't have to worry about not even the privacy type stuff,
00:36:03 ◼ ► but just the fact that, hey, it's our server in the cloud. It's not your battery-operated phone,
00:36:09 ◼ ► so we're not going to deplete the battery on your phone while trying to analyze which are the best
00:36:13 ◼ ► pictures of your kids from 10 years ago. Because nobody wants that, right? Everybody wants these
00:36:18 ◼ ► great pictures to be surfaced, but they don't want their phone to be dead because it figured
00:36:22 ◼ ► out which ones they are. And Apple's responses over the years, interviews with me, interviews
00:36:28 ◼ ► with other people, and they would say, "We're confident that our on-device strategy is going
00:36:34 ◼ ► to work out in the long run." And it has. And now that it has, people don't really talk about it
00:36:40 ◼ ► anymore. It's one of those things where it was like when it seemed like Apple was behind,
00:36:48 ◼ ► adamant that everything run on device was holding them back. And then once it was clear that it
00:36:54 ◼ ► wasn't holding them back, now nobody talks about it. Right. Apple has that a lot where people are
00:37:01 ◼ ► great about coming out and saying, "Oh, God, this will never work with Apple." And then it just goes
00:37:09 ◼ ► away because it does work. I mean, how many times has Apple been the first at doing something? You
00:37:18 ◼ ► know, if you look even at products, back to the iPod, you know, Apple wasn't the first one with
00:37:26 ◼ ► a music player. They weren't, you know, the first one with USB, but they made these things so
00:37:32 ◼ ► popular. Firewire. Firewire. I mean, just so many things. But it wasn't that amazing that the first
00:37:41 ◼ ► iPod was Firewire. Apple has popularized so many technologies that they, you know, they didn't
00:37:50 ◼ ► actually invent, but they did it in a way that made it available to the mass market. And they're
00:37:58 ◼ ► still doing that. If you look at the new stuff that they're working on, I mean, AR, I don't know
00:38:07 ◼ ► that they'll be big into VR, but augmented reality, I think, is going to be a huge thing for Apple in
00:38:13 ◼ ► the coming years. And who knows what they're going to be able to do with it? We see glimpses of it
00:38:20 ◼ ► every now and then, like in maps with walking directions. I actually used that once, and it was
00:38:26 ◼ ► fascinating. You know, that's one of the few things where it defines why I do what I do,
00:38:33 ◼ ► is I feel like my ability is much more suited to being a critic of things that have come out,
00:38:41 ◼ ► both good and bad. Say both, this is what's good about it, this is what's bad about it. And
00:38:47 ◼ ► I try never to pretend that that's in any way better than being the designers and engineers
00:38:57 ◼ ► who are actually in the arena making the new things. But one of the things that I've thought
00:39:03 ◼ ► was so obvious for years is that you should be able to just hold your phone up when you're like
00:39:10 ◼ ► walking around a city. Your phone has a camera, it has GPS. The phone, based on the camera and the
00:39:16 ◼ ► GPS, should obviously know where it is, where it's oriented, and should be able to give you
00:39:22 ◼ ► a heads-up display to tell you, "Here's how to walk to the restaurant you're looking for."
00:39:27 ◼ ► And I get why we're not quite there yet, you know, but it's clear that that's where we're going,
00:39:38 ◼ ► Just see what you normally see through your eyeglasses, except there's like a green arrow
00:39:45 ◼ ► in front of you telling you which way to go. Keep going, keep going, go across this intersection,
00:39:50 ◼ ► all right, now make a left. I mean, the things that are coming are going to be as incredible
00:39:57 ◼ ► to people now as some of the products that they brought out early on. They are just going to keep
00:40:05 ◼ ► going, and that's one thing that I have respect for too, the whole industry. I mean, it moves so
00:40:15 ◼ ► fast. We talked about this with how our businesses moved quickly, but all of this is moving very
00:40:23 ◼ ► quickly, and that's where when Apple puts in things like privacy as one of the standards that
00:40:31 ◼ ► has to be met before these features go out, that's why that is so important. And, you know, when you
00:40:38 ◼ ► look, you know, mention the sometimes political fallout from some of this, I don't quite understand
00:40:46 ◼ ► or agree with the politicians that say, "Well, you know, we need access. I understand why they do,
00:40:55 ◼ ► but, you know, the fact that Apple is willing to protect users is very important to me."
00:41:03 ◼ ► Tom: So let me circle back and try to pick your brain on where you think Apple's senior leadership
00:41:15 ◼ ► is. Are they in the right place in terms of preparing for the next 10 years of innovations,
00:41:31 ◼ ► with the...if you just freeze-frame Apple's business today, it is incredibly profitable.
00:41:38 ◼ ► The iPhone is an incredibly profitable device, and the App Store model makes for an incredible
00:41:46 ◼ ► services add-on to the phone. And Tim Cook has said it. I think it goes all the way back to
00:41:54 ◼ ► Steve Jobs even, that, "Hey, if anybody's going to cannibalize one of our successful businesses,
00:42:00 ◼ ► it should be us." And famously, they really, truly did what they said with the iPod and the way that
00:42:19 ◼ ► and it was their fastest-growing segment. It was the thing that made them relevant to an entirely
00:42:26 ◼ ► new generation of younger people. It also exposed them to people like our generation, who never used
00:42:35 ◼ ► Macintosh computers, maybe still haven't used Macintosh computers, but suddenly had a reason
00:42:40 ◼ ► to buy an Apple product, because even if you used a Windows PC, the iPod was still the best
00:42:57 ◼ ► Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Do you think they're willing to do that again? And what happens if that next product
00:43:04 ◼ ► is not a $1,000 product? What if it's only a $500 product? You know, are they willing to cannibalize
00:43:13 ◼ ► Tom Bilyeu, Jr. Oh, yeah, I definitely think so. Because to me, it's about Apple moving ahead with
00:43:22 ◼ ► the product line. If they weren't willing to do that, you know, with the iPhone, you know,
00:43:28 ◼ ► that they weren't willing to put a music player on an iPhone and make that, you know, readily available,
00:43:40 ◼ ► And I think the same with the products now. They have to advance the product lines. And if one
00:43:48 ◼ ► cannibalizes the other, then that's going to happen. You know, and it all comes down to sales
00:44:00 ◼ ► That's what I think is that there was a sense circa 2005, 2006, where anybody who's just looking
00:44:10 ◼ ► at the, hey, what type of gadgets can I put in a pants pocket, you know, the iPods, cell phones,
00:44:18 ◼ ► there's, you know, and you, you could look at the cell phone and say, this is going to be the iPod,
00:44:24 ◼ ► it's going to one way or the other, whether, you know, Apple got involved, even if Apple had stayed
00:44:30 ◼ ► out of the market, and maybe cell phones evolve, and we're all using BlackBerry style devices with
00:44:38 ◼ ► a hardware keyboard to this day, I think that was a feasible future. And it's not disrespectful
00:44:48 ◼ ► to the people who made the iPod in 2001 2002 2003 in the early years, when making it easy,
00:45:10 ◼ ► mp3 music was going to be able to play mp3 music. Yeah. And it was, you know, time to move on. I
00:45:18 ◼ ► feel like, you know, where I clearly nothing like that is on the horizon for cell phones at this
00:45:25 ◼ ► moment. But it will be eventually and it will be Yeah. And the eyeglasses thing is the best guess
00:45:33 ◼ ► we have at the moment, you know, that you'll, you know, everybody will just wear spectacles of some
00:45:38 ◼ ► sort. And you'll have this permanently, you know, anytime you need it, user interface in your field
00:45:45 ◼ ► of vision, because you're wearing these glasses. That's the best guess. But I could see that I can
00:45:51 ◼ ► also see a future where that never happens. Yeah. And, you know, we've seen that future
00:46:02 ◼ ► in a way. When you look back at you remember netbooks, everybody had a netbook, which was
00:46:08 ◼ ► the worst computer of all time. And I remember, so it was probably around the 2010. Because I
00:46:21 ◼ ► remember writing about this on the loop where people were saying Apple has to have a netbook.
00:46:29 ◼ ► And it was mostly amazingly PC analysts that said Apple has to have a netbook in order to keep up.
00:46:37 ◼ ► And I said Apple will never have a netbook. And they didn't because it was just a piece of junk.
00:46:45 ◼ ► And, you know, those eventually went away. So I don't think that Apple was willing to follow
00:46:57 ◼ ► conventional wisdom or wisdom at the time just to put out a product and compete with something else
00:47:03 ◼ ► that's out there. They're going to improve that to the point where they can offer something.
00:47:12 ◼ ► It could be. But by the time Apple perfects what they're doing and is ready to release it,
00:47:24 ◼ ► Yeah. And that's what I mean that you have to be honest with yourself, right? You have to honestly
00:47:32 ◼ ► look at the state of the next thing. And instead of thinking, well, I really wish that this were
00:47:47 ◼ ► And I know that everybody likes to tell the story that the 10-second version is that it was a big
00:47:55 ◼ ► flop. It wasn't a hit. It obviously was not a hit product. But it wasn't really a flop. It actually
00:48:01 ◼ ► existed in a weird sort of netherworld where it was good enough to keep going and within a handful
00:48:12 ◼ ► of years got much, much better. Like the Newton 2000, like the last models that they made were
00:48:19 ◼ ► really, really credible and were much, much better than like the Palm pilots of the day,
00:48:24 ◼ ► even though the Palm was the one that everybody thinks was sort of the successful PDA of the era.
00:48:29 ◼ ► But there was sort of a wishful thinking aspect to Apple launching the Newton when they launched it.
00:48:42 ◼ ► That it was like, we know that this sort of basic... And they were right, that the basic idea
00:48:55 ◼ ► They were on the scent of what we now consider to be the smartphone. They were on the trail.
00:49:03 ◼ ► It just was clearly so far away that it really needed to bake in the oven some more. But I feel
00:49:11 ◼ ► like not to put John Sculley on the psychiatric couch, but maybe the itch to prove himself
00:49:20 ◼ ► post Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs has left and he's next and he's doing some interesting stuff there.
00:49:40 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think he said it right, that the Newton, that whole technology, when you look at
00:49:49 ◼ ► what it did for people, it was pretty incredible. And there was as much of a group around how great
00:49:58 ◼ ► the Newton was as any other product. It was small, yeah, but it was pretty incredible. I remember
00:50:21 ◼ ► I couldn't afford the 2000, but I got like a discounted version of one that was discontinued.
00:50:27 ◼ ► But it was clearly like, this is the future, but whereas the Macintosh to me was always,
00:50:52 ◼ ► Even then it was like, already right now, this is the best way to do word processing. This is the
00:50:59 ◼ ► best machine to use Excel on. This is the way to do spreadsheets. This is just a fabulous metaphor
00:51:08 ◼ ► for personal computing. It was already great, whereas the Newton was always about the future.
00:51:14 ◼ ► And I feel like that's the mistake that companies always are tempted to make is to come out too
00:51:21 ◼ ► early. And that's sort of where I feel like Facebook has gone with this whole VR meta thing,
00:51:30 ◼ ► where they're so anxious to change the negative stories about the social stuff on Facebook to get
00:51:46 ◼ ► Oculus headsets, all this stuff. But they're so focused on what it's going to be as opposed to
00:51:54 ◼ ► what it is now. And if you lose sight of what it is now, to me, you never get there. You never get
00:51:59 ◼ ► to where you want to go. Well, yeah. And I think that's kind of a crazy ass company. I try and stay
00:52:12 ◼ ► away from them as much as possible. So it's hard when I don't trust them. So I don't trust what
00:52:26 ◼ ► they're trying to do, what they will do. I don't trust anything about it, which is a huge difference
00:52:39 ◼ ► what's happening now. But they always seem to be able to plan for the future in a way that,
00:52:51 ◼ ► what was the old saying, a delight in, I don't know, surprise and delight. They were always
00:53:02 ◼ ► able to surprise and delight. And I just don't see that. I see Facebook as being like the CES.
00:53:09 ◼ ► You know, CES would have products that never, ever came to fruition because companies were just
00:53:15 ◼ ► throwing stuff out there to see what would happen. But I see Apple as being, they're trying to be
00:53:24 ◼ ► responsible, but they're also trying to have some of the surprise and delight that will put products
00:53:31 ◼ ► out there. And you asked earlier if the executive team is where it should be. And I think it is
00:53:41 ◼ ► because Apple is looking at least five years out for products. So is Apple still pushing things
00:53:52 ◼ ► forward? Well, I think the Mac is certainly pushing the envelope of computing way beyond
00:54:01 ◼ ► where the PC industry is. So that was a huge change. Making their own chips for the Mac
00:54:07 ◼ ► was a massive change because it had software implications, it has developer implications,
00:54:32 ◼ ► they clearly didn't have to do it. Because if they don't pursue Apple Silicon for the Mac and move
00:54:42 ◼ ► the Mac to their own Silicon platform, then what would they have done? Well, they would have just
00:54:47 ◼ ► stuck with Intel and x86. And what performance would they have? They would have the same
00:54:53 ◼ ► performance as the rest of the industry because that is the industry. So they could totally
00:55:01 ◼ ► differentiate the Mac purely by the operating system alone, which is what effectively they
00:55:09 ◼ ► did ever since they went to Intel in 2006. The whole story was, "Okay, we give up. We're not
00:55:17 ◼ ► going to do this PowerPC thing anymore. We'll just go Intel and we'll use PC graphic cards and
00:55:23 ◼ ► we'll just design better enclosures and compete on the platform." They didn't have to do it.
00:55:48 ◼ ► MacBooks are out. I know people who were holding out and it was the longest year of their life,
00:55:56 ◼ ► number one. It was a terrible year. It was a pandemic year. We're all locked in. So it was
00:56:02 ◼ ► a long year for that. But everybody has friends who were like, a year ago did not buy the initial
00:56:09 ◼ ► M1 MacBook Pro because they're like, "I'm going to wait for the real Pro Pro MacBook Pro. And I'll
00:56:16 ◼ ► wait." And I don't think anybody was surprised that it took a year, but it was a long year
00:56:22 ◼ ► because everybody's looking at these benchmarks from these $999 MacBook Airs that are blowing away
00:56:29 ◼ ► $4,000 PC rigs. Everybody knows it that now that people are adopting the Apple Silicon Macs,
00:56:44 ◼ ► it continues to blow people's minds. Even though it's year-old news, they're like, "I know
00:56:49 ◼ ► everybody's been bragging about this for a year, but I didn't have it until now. And holy crap,
00:56:54 ◼ ► now my shit runs really fast." Yeah, absolutely. I was one of the ones that went out and got one.
00:57:01 ◼ ► I got a MacBook Air M1. Yeah, incredible. It's absolutely... But it's like you said, though.
00:57:19 ◼ ► It shows their commitment to it and that they're not sitting on their heels as the iPhone company.
00:57:25 ◼ ► Yeah. All right, let me take a break here. Thank our third and final sponsor of the show,
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00:58:41 ◼ ► Last but not least, let's talk about the future. And it's funny because Apple is a very secretive
00:58:49 ◼ ► company, right? And this has always been true. They keep their powder dry until they're ready
00:58:57 ◼ ► to fire it, right? But we do kind of know when they're working on things, right? Like before
00:59:05 ◼ ► the iPhone came out, nobody knew what it was going to look like. It blew us away. Everybody was sort
00:59:09 ◼ ► of, a lot of people were thinking it was going to be an iPod phone, which would have made sense.
00:59:14 ◼ ► I would have bought it. I would have bought an iPod phone. Sure. But you can't start making a
00:59:22 ◼ ► cell phone and go to the major carriers and not have the news leak out in some degree, right?
00:59:28 ◼ ► Like there was a general sense that, hey, nobody knows what it is, but Apple's working on a phone.
00:59:34 ◼ ► And it was the same thing with the iPad where it was like, I don't know what they're doing. Is it
00:59:39 ◼ ► like a cut down Mac? Is it a scaled up iPhone? But they're doing a tablet, right? And everybody knew
00:59:46 ◼ ► they were doing a tablet. At this moment, everybody quote unquote knows Apple's doing two things.
00:59:53 ◼ ► They're working on AR and VR, which may or may not be two different products, right? AR meaning like
00:59:59 ◼ ► glasses you just normally see through that project a heads up display. VR meaning complete occlusion
01:00:07 ◼ ► of your visual field and some kind of high resolution thing. And of course, the other thing
01:00:13 ◼ ► is the car. AR and VR seem like Apple is arguably the best suited company to make the first,
01:00:26 ◼ ► oh, this is the way that product's supposed to be, right? And then we're all going to be like,
01:00:37 ◼ ► I'm not trying to sell them short. I'm just saying I don't get it. I don't get what business Apple
01:00:44 ◼ ► has in that market. And I'm curious what you think. So if I look at the car, I try and think about
01:00:56 ◼ ► where Apple could be best. And I keep coming back to the software and the hardware to make that
01:01:15 ◼ ► And I'm not sure if, does Apple really want to get into the car manufacturing business?
01:01:29 ◼ ► who keep tossing that out. And I know that a lot of the, I mean, we're talking five, six years
01:01:35 ◼ ► of rumors, right? But there's been a lot of speculation over the various resets that project
01:01:43 ◼ ► Titan has had over the years, that Apple might just be making effectively an operating system
01:01:49 ◼ ► for a car. In theory, it sounds like something somebody should make. It absolutely sounds like
01:01:57 ◼ ► something Microsoft should be in advanced stages on, right? Maybe Google too. It does not sound at
01:02:06 ◼ ► all like the type of thing Apple ever has done, ever should do, right? They're not a company that
01:02:14 ◼ ► licenses operating systems. And the brief time that they did in that 25-year-ago period when
01:02:24 ◼ ► you were writing Mac Central, right? I mean, that was chief Mac clone era. It was a disaster for the
01:02:33 ◼ ► company financially. They were licensing copies of the operating system for $25 or something like
01:02:38 ◼ ► that, as opposed to selling $4,000 computers with a 30% profit margin. I don't get the car thing.
01:02:49 ◼ ► And the other thing that scares me, like if I were Tim Cook, is I don't see where the whole
01:02:56 ◼ ► car market is going. It feels to me, and maybe it's like I said before, that I live in a city,
01:03:08 ◼ ► I walk most days, very seldom drive my car. I don't have to drive my car. But the other thing,
01:03:16 ◼ ► like my wife and I have been talking about it lately, and she dug up, you know, Philadelphia is
01:03:20 ◼ ► a very old city, one of the oldest here in North America. But there were some pictures from right
01:03:26 ◼ ► around the corner from us from like 100 years ago before cars took over. And it's like, there are
01:03:32 ◼ ► streets here that you think like, "Ah, that's kind of a narrow street." You kind of have to,
01:03:37 ◼ ► you know, maybe you want to slow down driving down the street. But it's because we have parking on
01:03:41 ◼ ► both sides of the street. And if you just got rid of the parked cars, which like this picture
01:03:45 ◼ ► from like 100 years ago shows you what this exact street looked like before cars were parked,
01:03:51 ◼ ► it was like, "Hey, this is actually a very wide street." We're kind of moving to that sort of,
01:03:58 ◼ ► not that nobody's going to own a car, but a lot fewer people will own a car and will just use
01:04:05 ◼ ► ride sharing. And it's way more efficient because instead of having all of these cars that are parked
01:04:13 ◼ ► for 23 hours a day, we could have these cars that are, you know, mostly in use all the time and
01:04:19 ◼ ► taking people places. That doesn't sound like a business Apple would want to get into. There's
01:04:26 ◼ ► obviously money to be made for some people in that market, but like selling the type of cars that a
01:04:33 ◼ ► ride sharing service would use for robot driven... Let's just say, you know, let's say they pull it
01:04:39 ◼ ► off with the self-driving, you know, you don't have to have a human being at the wheel. You could
01:04:45 ◼ ► just get into a robot car and say, you know, "Take me to Target or take me to Trader Joe's."
01:04:53 ◼ ► That doesn't seem like a business for Apple, right? Stylish AR/VR glasses that people would
01:05:19 ◼ ► That would be just, I mean, we talked about optics earlier. This isn't optics. This will be
01:05:26 ◼ ► real stuff, especially, and forgive me if I say something wrong here, but in a litigious society
01:05:34 ◼ ► like America, people will be looking to sue the shit out of Apple at every turn. And if there's
01:05:41 ◼ ► robot cars out there, you can bet that people are going to want to sue them for whatever they can
01:05:47 ◼ ► get. So I'm not sure that they can do that. So in turning it around on you, if we know that Apple is
01:05:56 ◼ ► they are actually, Project Titan is a thing, and they've had several high-ranking people at Apple
01:06:27 ◼ ► He's a little saucer-shaped vacuum, but he's a robot. And we have him in our powder room
01:06:38 ◼ ► off the kitchen, and every day at like five in the morning, I forget what time my wife has him
01:06:44 ◼ ► set. I call him him, you know, and then he wakes up. He wakes up, and then he's got like a mental
01:06:51 ◼ ► map. You can like use the Roomba app to see the Roomba's map of your house, what they think it is.
01:06:58 ◼ ► It's a fabulous idea, and the Roomba absolutely sucks. I mean, he is really, he's so dumb.
01:07:11 ◼ ► He's the worst robot you could ever imagine, but he's so bad that I have tremendous sympathy for
01:07:17 ◼ ► him, where like I'll come down in the morning to make coffee, and I look, and there he is. He
01:07:23 ◼ ► got lost under the dining room table, right? No, it happens. It absolutely happens. And there he is,
01:07:29 ◼ ► and I feel bad for him because he was like, there he was like vacuuming up crumbs all around our
01:07:35 ◼ ► house, but then he got under our dining room table and just ran his battery out trying to get out
01:07:43 ◼ ► from under the table, and he couldn't do it. And then I pick him up, you know, and he's like a
01:07:47 ◼ ► little, like having a little sick puppy, and then I take him into the powder room, put him on his
01:07:59 ◼ ► It's clear though, but I have heard, you know, Tim Cook is sort of coy when he talks about the future.
01:08:08 ◼ ► You know, he's not, obviously he's a super smart guy, and he's not going to be tricked into spilling
01:08:14 ◼ ► the beans on anything that he doesn't want to reveal. But I remember a couple of years before
01:08:19 ◼ ► the Apple Watch, somebody was asking like, "Hey," you know, and again, like we said, like, we kind
01:08:24 ◼ ► of know what Apple's working on, like we kind of knew they were working on a watch thing before we
01:08:30 ◼ ► knew what it was going to be. And what I remember Tim Cook saying was, "The wrist is an interesting
01:08:35 ◼ ► location to us." And whoever was interviewing him was like, "Whoa, whoa, you actually said something
01:08:42 ◼ ► interesting there." And then they were like, "Tell us more." And he's like, "No, no, that's it. The
01:08:47 ◼ ► wrist is interesting. That's all I have to say." But it said a lot, and it turns out it was very
01:08:53 ◼ ► interesting to them. I've heard Tim Cook talk about this, and he does talk about cars, and
01:09:00 ◼ ► people ask about it. All he'll say, though, is that autonomy is interesting, something to that effect.
01:09:06 ◼ ► And what makes me think about where Apple might be going with Project Titan is not just,
01:09:14 ◼ ► you know, robot vacuums, but clearly, five years from now, maybe too soon. But like, by the time
01:09:23 ◼ ► you and I are ready to hang it up and retire, will we have robots who can go to the fridge and get us
01:09:28 ◼ ► a Heineken? You know, like, maybe, right? You'll be able to say to some sort of dingus in your house,
01:09:37 ◼ ► "Hey, dingus, go get me a beer." And the dingus, you know, a little robot can go out to your
01:09:44 ◼ ► kitchen and maybe get you a beer or something like that, or get you a paper towel or whatever you
01:09:48 ◼ ► need. That seems feasible, and that is autonomy? And is it that different programming-wise as
01:09:57 ◼ ► opposed to making a car, except that the risks are so much lower, right? So if you had a smart
01:10:06 ◼ ► Apple robot who could vacuum up crumbs and go get you a beverage from the fridge, what's the worst
01:10:14 ◼ ► thing that could happen? Maybe it, like, falls down the stairs or something, right? As opposed
01:10:19 ◼ ► to a car, where the worst thing that happens is you get in a terrible car crash and a human being
01:10:24 ◼ ► gets hurt. So you're saying that these are, it's autonomous devices as opposed to a vehicle?
01:10:42 ◼ ► obviously somebody's going to make these things, right? I mean, there's no question. I mean,
01:10:46 ◼ ► again, go back to laziness. It's a virtue. We are a lazy species. We are going to make robots that
01:10:55 ◼ ► do as much work as we can possibly trick them into doing, right? I mean, we're going to do it.
01:11:08 ◼ ► Yeah, no. And I don't think that we know where Apple is going to take all this technology. But
01:11:16 ◼ ► the way that you put it is very interesting because we've always said this about patents,
01:11:22 ◼ ► too. Don't think that because Apple filed for a patent that this is going to be a new feature or
01:11:27 ◼ ► a new product. It could be something that they just have out there. It could be something that
01:11:32 ◼ ► they're going to integrate into another product, software or hardware. So it makes perfect sense,
01:11:48 ◼ ► Apple stores would be as big as an Ikea, right? And you'd have this cavernous Raiders of the Lost
01:12:02 ◼ ► But I really do. I don't know. There's something I can't shake about the fact that Apple at its best
01:12:14 ◼ ► makes personal computers. And I know that we've had this term PC for 30 years, 40 years. But it
01:12:24 ◼ ► still is true, though. They're personal computers. And the more personal, the better Apple is at it.
01:12:31 ◼ ► That's why the watch is such a sneak hit, right? Where it just sort of everybody was like, "Hey,
01:12:39 ◼ ► this thing's a flop. Nobody wants it." And now it's like, you can't even get your hands on them
01:12:43 ◼ ► for Christmas. Everybody wants an Apple Watch because it's super personal. It's on your wrist.
01:12:50 ◼ ► It is a statement of personal style. I think cars are getting less personal, whereas the 20th century
01:12:58 ◼ ► model, like when you and I grew up, your car said something about you. And you'd pick a style of car
01:13:06 ◼ ► or color of car that was a personal statement. I think we're moving away from that, where your car
01:13:17 ◼ ► Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the car, back in our days when we were
01:13:26 ◼ ► starting to drive, it really did say something about you. But yeah, now it's more, I mean,
01:13:38 ◼ ► hybrid or a big gas guzzling thing. But yeah, it's more of a tool, a utility thing now.
01:13:49 ◼ ► I don't drive a whole lot anymore. I mean, I live in a suburb in California, but I don't drive as
01:14:01 ◼ ► much as what I used to. So the devices that I have, you mentioned the watch. I'd even put Apple TV in
01:14:09 ◼ ► there as being a personal thing, the way that you use that. But the watch is so personal. It's on my
01:14:15 ◼ ► wrist all day long, and I love it. I use it for sleep tracking now. So I'm actually charging it
01:14:22 ◼ ► right now while I'm doing this with you so that it'll be ready for tonight and track my sleep.
01:14:28 ◼ ► I track my sleep every night with it. It's got the safety features for heart, and it doesn't get more
01:14:34 ◼ ► personal than that. It's actually warning you or helping you with your heart rate and tracking all
01:14:42 ◼ ► of that stuff. I love my watch. And to me, that's where they're going is just go by the number of
01:14:52 ◼ ► human senses. So we've got AirPods in our ears. We've got the watch on our wrist that's monitoring
01:14:59 ◼ ► our pulse and et cetera. The eyes are next. It just feels to me, in terms of what we'll be
01:15:07 ◼ ► talking about when you're on my show five years from now, way more likely to me that we're talking
01:15:12 ◼ ► about some kind of product that goes in front of our eyes or multiple products if AR and VR remain
01:15:17 ◼ ► separate than the car thing. That's just what I think. I just can't shake that feeling.
01:15:27 ◼ ► - Jim, I'm gonna wrap up. I really appreciate it that you took time out of your holiday weekend
01:15:44 ◼ ► Don't you feel like it's like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he's
01:15:51 ◼ ► got his finger on the Holy Grail and he could just roll it a little bit and his dad, Sean Connery,
01:15:58 ◼ ► is like, "Let it go." But I feel like we're that close to getting back to actually going to press