33: Apple`s Actual Problems

0:00:00I mean, honestly, passing out a drag watching Mad Men is probably not a good habit to get into.

0:00:05It's a terrible hobby. What are your hobbies?

0:00:11Getting drunk and watching Mad Men.

0:00:13You know what, though? I don't know what made you think of that episode, but it's funny.

0:00:19It's probably true that we could just jump into any episode from any season,

0:00:24but that one in particular was...

0:00:26I think that's one of my favorites. It really sort of hits the nail on the head.

0:00:31You know what? It's because we were talking about this Apple stuff and people leaving.

0:00:40All right. Oh, maybe. Yeah, we'll tie it in. We'll tie it in when we get there.

0:00:44Yeah. I was supposed to do this at the beginning and I let this run. But I'll just pretend this is

0:00:49the beginning. I just wanted to say, I wanted to tell everybody out there that today's show is

0:00:54sponsored by audible.com, a leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment.

0:01:02Listen to audio books whenever and wherever you want. And I'll tell you more about them

0:01:06in a little bit. Are you sick of that? I'm so sick of this watch stuff.

0:01:10Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God, this watch stuff to me is it's there's like 10 different threads

0:01:17about Apple that I'm sort of following and almost all of them don't bore me, but they

0:01:22aggravate me. And the watch thing like is epitomizes it.

0:01:26I feel the same way. I don't think I would ever wear one.

0:01:29I just think it's got to be wrong. It's like

0:01:33I don't know. And people some people write to me like on twitter like once a

0:01:36day I get a thing that says like I take your silence

0:01:38on this watch thing as confirmation that they're that it's

0:01:42a big deal and imminent. You know like somehow I'm so cued in

0:01:45that I know all about it but I can't say anything about it. And no it's like the

0:01:49reason I'm mostly almost completely silent on it is I

0:01:51I just really don't care.

0:01:53- Yeah, I'm kind of the same way.

0:01:55Watches to me are basically jewelry.

0:01:58Like I like watches, I really like good watches.

0:02:01And I don't think I would have a use for,

0:02:04I mean we don't know what it does,

0:02:05but I don't need a gizmo strapped to my wrist

0:02:07when I've got the phone in my pocket.

0:02:09- Right, and somebody had a thing yesterday

0:02:11that was one of the things about it

0:02:12that I actually agree with,

0:02:13which is what if the so-called watch

0:02:16that Apple's supposedly working on

0:02:19is just the next iPod Nano, right?

0:02:21What if it's the iPod Nano comes with the thing,

0:02:25then you can strap it to your wrist?

0:02:26I don't know, I mean, that could be it.

0:02:28It's like that's the thing that gets me,

0:02:30not that I'm saying that Apple couldn't or shouldn't

0:02:33work on a thing that you,

0:02:38some kind of device that you strap to your wrist,

0:02:40but just that why are people making it out

0:02:42like it's a major deal, right?

0:02:43Like it might make perfect sense

0:02:45that Apple would make a thing that gets into this Fitbit,

0:02:50the Nike fuel band type monitor your steps fitness type stuff

0:02:55and maybe play music or something like that, too.

0:02:57I don't know.

0:02:58But why would anybody think it's a bigger deal than a new iPod?

0:03:02Presumably, if they make it, it's

0:03:04going to be something that sells for like $100, $200.

0:03:06It's not going to be $1,000.

0:03:07I don't think they're going to make $1,000 watches.

0:03:10I hope not.

0:03:11And it would probably, even if it's successful,

0:03:15sell in the range of like the new, in terms of quantity,

0:03:17the new iPod Nano. A nice little business, but this is not going to revolutionize the

0:03:24company.

0:03:25Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it. Maybe it's like the first iPod, a proper

0:03:31iPod with iOS on it. That's interesting.

0:03:35And so I've never heard of any idea. Number one, I still am utterly unconvinced that they're

0:03:39actually doing it. And number two, even if they do, I don't think of all the things that

0:03:44Apple's ever done and that they get, they release, and then immediately the tech

0:03:50press crowd goes, "That's it? That's all?" Right? I can't think of anything that is

0:03:55more obviously going to get that sort of response.

0:03:58Right. Well, I think everybody wants Apple to introduce some new revolutionary product,

0:04:03whether it's the TV or the watch or something. But I don't think anybody's really considering

0:04:08what it actually could be. And it's not going to have a cell radio on it. You're not going

0:04:12going to do the Dick Tracy stuff. At best it will be like an accessory for your phone.

0:04:18Which just isn't that exciting.

0:04:20Yeah, and I still can't get past the whole idea if it's really a watch. And that's what

0:04:26everybody seems to be talking about. And again, one of the things that gets me so frustrated

0:04:29is that people, it seems like nobody even has any reading comprehension anymore. Yesterday,

0:04:34we're recording this on Tuesday the 5th of March. I don't know when the hell it's going

0:04:38air. But on Monday, the 4th of March, Bloomberg published a story about the, a second story

0:04:45about the watch that actually had literally had no new information in it whatsoever, except

0:04:51that they sort of made it seem like it did, but they were really only citing the same

0:04:56source from a month ago that they published a thing a month ago that Apple might be working

0:05:02on some kind of watch type thing. And the story yesterday had no new information. All

0:05:07All it really had that was new was comments from analysts about what it could mean, that

0:05:12it could be a $6 billion business a year for Apple. But everybody jumped on it like they're

0:05:19reiterating, like they've got more sources confirming that Apple's making a watch, which

0:05:23if you read the article carefully, they did not. They said a month ago, as sources said

0:05:27a month ago.

0:05:28Yeah, it's just some weird feedback loop thing. How the hell do you estimate the size of an

0:05:34industry when you don't even know what the device is?

0:05:36It boggles my mind.

0:05:40I think the way that they did it was that they talked that watches are $60 billion a

0:05:46year spent worldwide on watches and that if Apple could take 10% of the market, they'd

0:05:51have $6 billion.

0:05:52Oh, that's bullshit.

0:05:53That's the…

0:05:54So, you know, it's all about the way you define the word.

0:05:58Market share is annoying just because market is so ambiguous.

0:06:02You can define market to be anything.

0:06:04I guarantee you $60 billion worth of watches sold. How many of them are like Rolexes or

0:06:08Amigas?

0:06:09Right. And yeah, and that's exactly it is that watches are actually almost a fascinating

0:06:16industry to look at as a whole because they literally go from one end of the economic

0:06:21scale to the other where you can, as far as I know, I'm pretty sure you could buy a working

0:06:29quartz wristwatch for I'll bet five dollars.

0:06:33Right? I bet it would cost more to ship it from Amazon than the watch itself

0:06:36costs. I'm going to go look this up right now and see what like if I can get a

0:06:39five dollar watch at Amazon. And and Rolex and Omega have healthy

0:06:43hundred year old, hundred maybe even more than a hundred

0:06:47year old businesses selling you know watches that start at

0:06:52four or five thousand dollars and go up from there because

0:06:55you know you can get them with diamonds and you know made out of platinum and

0:06:58stuff like that. You can easily spend $25,000-$30,000 on a watch.

0:07:03Right. Well, it's like super well-crafted, all hand-built, designed, and not to mention

0:07:10their fashion accessories.

0:07:12Here's a Casio men's analog watch. It's $999 at Amazon. It looks actually a pretty

0:07:19nice-looking watch, actually. But anyway, literally, $5 up to $50,000.

0:07:27That is not a market. You can't just say Apple's going to take 10% of that because it doesn't make any sense.

0:07:32Right. And I can't help but think that a huge chunk of that $60 billion is actually spent on those high-end watches.

0:07:39Right? Rolex and Omega must have a pretty good chunk of that.

0:07:43I'd imagine so, yeah. Also, is it watches or does it include clocks and all sorts of other timepieces?

0:07:48I honestly don't know. But it does seem like a stupid way to come up with a number and make it seem like news.

0:07:54Six billion.

0:07:55Well, you know, how many of those watches get sold to the military or other mass purchases,

0:07:59you know?

0:08:00It's just insane.

0:08:01Like, the market isn't... that is not a market.

0:08:04So there's no way that you can figure out six billion for the device.

0:08:07You don't even know what it does.

0:08:09Right.

0:08:10Like, you know, Apple is going to make...

0:08:11Apple is working on a new, very small piece of consumer electronics.

0:08:14Like, that's not news.

0:08:16What do you think Apple has done every single day for the last 30 years is work on new little

0:08:22computer type things by some definition of little.

0:08:25Well, you know, I do believe they've got something pretty far along because, you know,

0:08:30a lot of people seem to be hearing a lot of rumors. I just have no idea what it is.

0:08:35And it doesn't really interest me. Wearable computing in general doesn't interest me.

0:08:38Well, I guess what I want to emphasize is not that I'm bored by the idea of an Apple Watch,

0:08:43but I'm bored by just the sentence Apple is working on a watch. If there were some details about it,

0:08:48it right if there was something specific that we knew about it well that would

0:08:52get me interested but we don't nobody has any information at all except stupid

0:08:56patent filings which never well not never but they you know your success

0:09:04rated predicting right here from of what Apple is going to do from patent filings

0:09:07is just incredibly small exactly it's zero because it's they patent everything

0:09:12they do exactly what everybody else in the tech industry does is not patent

0:09:16everything they're going to do but patent everything they think of that's patentable.

0:09:20It's not whether we're going to do it, it's whether you can get a—if you can get a patent

0:09:23for it, you file it. Just in case. Cover your ass. It's just like your finger on the trigger

0:09:29of a machine gun and you just keep pulling it. Everything. Spray those patents all over

0:09:33the wall.

0:09:34Yeah, that's a visceral and probably accurate way to think about patents in general. Just

0:09:40bullets flying everywhere.

0:09:42unlike a typical episode of this show, which is meandering and pointless. No, that's not true.

0:09:51But I actually did. I got you. Guy English is a guy. Welcome to the talk show. I guess I should

0:09:56do that too if I'm going to do a sponsor. I tell people who the hell you are. Everybody,

0:10:00sometimes people say, "You should tell me who the hell is on the show."

0:10:02Because I guess a lot of people start listening without reading the text that says, "Special

0:10:10guest, Guy English, joins John Gruber to talk about whatever. They don't read that. They just

0:10:15hit play and then they don't know who's on the show. But I actually asked you to be on the show

0:10:20because I have a very specific theme that I want to talk about this hour. And actually this watch

0:10:25thing sort of touches on it, but it's this whole circle and the stuff I wrote last week about the

0:10:31stupid articles, this Apple is doomed scenario type stuff that... Let me try to encapsulate

0:10:39this and I think you'll agree but more or less that on the one hand we've got

0:10:44all these people saying that Apple is doomed or they're in trouble or they're

0:10:48they're heading for a fall they're tanking and it was all obvious it was

0:10:52you know it was inevitable because the way Apple works is is just it's not

0:10:59sustainable and it all depended on maybe some people you know some people argue

0:11:03it all depended on Steve Jobs or you know Apple's too closed and or another

0:11:09Another one too is that if you're only succeeding because of design, you're inevitably... people

0:11:15are going to copy those designs once they're successful and the copies will be cheaper

0:11:18and then you'll lose.

0:11:20That sort of argument.

0:11:22That's why Apple stock is going down and that's why...

0:11:24I don't know, they're going out of business or something.

0:11:27And that's nonsense and there's no real evidence for that.

0:11:30Apple's actually got a really strong business.

0:11:33And so it's easy to see that these arguments are nonsense if you really look at them critically.

0:11:39But I think the worst thing that any of us who really care about the company as users

0:11:45or just as people who appreciate the work that Apple has accomplished over the last

0:11:49few decades, the worst thing we could do is look at these nonsense arguments that Apple

0:11:55is in trouble and then console ourselves and think Apple doesn't face any actual, serious

0:12:02problems.

0:12:03And they do.

0:12:05And that's what I would like to talk about.

0:12:09What's actually facing Apple?

0:12:11- Is that my cue to sort of chime in there?

0:12:16I think there's two major big things.

0:12:19I wrote a piece previously about this,

0:12:21which is probably why you had me on.

0:12:23And I had content management,

0:12:26the fact that you have to juggle

0:12:27all your iTunes subscriptions.

0:12:29iTunes itself was an issue.

0:12:31And the third one was talent retention.

0:12:33I think basically the first two

0:12:35can sort of collapse into one thing,

0:12:37which is basically the technical debt that they sort of have to labor under.

0:12:42They've got like the, you know, IOS is the oldest mobile operating system now.

0:12:48And they've built a lot on top of it and the sort of infrastructure with iTunes and all that.

0:12:53And I think that they're going to start running up against, you know, sort of the limits of where they've sort of put their tent poles as they built out everything.

0:13:06Since I wrote that piece, iOS 6 came out, which makes you be able to stream TV from the cloud directly.

0:13:15And I've released iTunes 11, which is the same core, but a different UI on it, and it's quite a bit better, I think.

0:13:24Do you agree on that?

0:13:26I do, and I was wondering what you think about that, now that it's sort of settled in and it's not new anymore.

0:13:31not new anymore. I do think that iTunes 11 is an improvement interface-wise. I don't

0:13:36know, though, that it goes far enough in terms of reducing the work you have to do through

0:13:43it.

0:13:44>> Yeah, I don't think it does either. And the reason for that is it's effectively like

0:13:47a UI update, which you and Merlin talked about quite a lot, and that was a pretty good show.

0:13:54But the fact of the matter is it's still the same code behind it. If you have a dialog,

0:13:59you know if the preferences are up the whole app is blocked it's got a whole

0:14:03bunch of modal dialogues all over the place right because it's a really old

0:14:07code base you know tree dates no s-10 even I do think I think it's the last

0:14:13app from Apple that has a modal preferences dialogue and I'm pretty sure

0:14:18it's the only app I use that still has a modal preferences dialogue and for

0:14:22anybody who doesn't know what that means in other words I think you just said but

0:14:25But when you put the preferences open in iTunes, you can't use the other windows in the app

0:14:31until you close that window.

0:14:34And that's the way preferences windows on the Mac always used to be.

0:14:37Everything was a modal dialogue.

0:14:38And then slowly but surely, programmers updated their apps or all the old apps sort of faded

0:14:44away and were replaced with new apps.

0:14:46And the new way of doing it is to do it modelessly so that you can just leave the preferences

0:14:50window open and switch windows.

0:14:54I've still never heard a good explanation for why iTunes has modal dialog boxes for that.

0:14:59Other than that, they started with it and never got around to rewriting that code.

0:15:04Well, the thing is it's actually hard to do a modal dialog box these days.

0:15:07You kind of have to go out of your way to block the whole app.

0:15:10And the thing about those boxes, too, is that if you have AppleScript running,

0:15:14and you've got one of iTunes' modal dialog boxes up, the AppleScript won't run.

0:15:19So if iTunes has one of those dialogues saying "Check for your downloads" or something displayed,

0:15:27and you are running an app that wants to add something to the iTunes library via AppleScript,

0:15:32it won't run, it'll just fail. It's a chaotic mess.

0:15:38I think the reason they keep it is because if you basically change the preferences and all of that kind of stuff

0:15:45to be asynchronous with the rest of the UI, that is a lot of work and it probably will

0:15:48expose a lot of bugs in weird little places that they don't want to shake out for the

0:15:53sake of something that I think people like us notice, but I don't think that the general

0:15:59iTunes user really cares about that much.

0:16:01Right.

0:16:02But you can just think of some comments.

0:16:05It's easy to think of some scenarios where it would be a lot easier to keep it modal,

0:16:09where like let's say with your device preferences, right, you can delete your backup for like

0:16:14an iPhone that you no longer have in the preferences window. But if they did it

0:16:18without, if they did it modelessly, you could open the preferences window, go to

0:16:24a device, then switch to the other window, plug that device in and start a backup,

0:16:28then go back to the preferences window and delete your phone's backup. You know,

0:16:32it's, I don't know. You'd have to cover every single one of those edge cases.

0:16:38Right. I mean, keeping it modal does keep it pretty simple for them.

0:16:41But the bottom line, though, is that there's still like a thousand things you do in iTunes.

0:16:46And if you really wanted to understand everything iTunes did, it really would require a book-length amount of knowledge.

0:16:54Yeah, in fact, there's probably books out there covering exactly that.

0:16:58It's way too big. And so much of that should be bust out and put into the operating system.

0:17:03Or at least done some other way. Remember iSync?

0:17:07Sure.

0:17:08Brush Metal, your favorite?

0:17:10Yeah, I think that was like the first one. That was the first metal app.

0:17:13That one actually looked good, though. It did. It did look better.

0:17:17Because it had that white content section. Right.

0:17:21Like that, I think. A separate app for managing devices kind of makes more sense to me than sticking it all in iTunes.

0:17:28I know why they stick it in iTunes. It's for the cross-platform stuff. But still, it's a hodgepodge.

0:17:34So I think iTunes is eventually going to really start hurting Apple a lot more than it's

0:17:41apparent right now.

0:17:42Yeah, and they're still selling a lot of music.

0:17:45Sometimes people see the future, and sometimes when you know that it's the future, it's

0:17:49frustrating that it's not here yet.

0:17:51I get emails sometimes from readers who are more or less expressing a sentiment along

0:17:55the lines of, "Look, I've been using Spotify," or what's another one like Spotify?

0:18:00RDO?

0:18:02Yeah, RDO or and you know one of those streaming services and they're like, you know

0:18:08How can Apple not have something like this already? They're doomed, you know

0:18:11The the Apple way of managing my music is is so outdated blah blah blah

0:18:17But and the truth is it's it's a lot simpler to do it the other way where you don't have to worry about where the audio

0:18:22Is there's no file management

0:18:24You just have the ability to place these songs and wherever you are. You can just play them

0:18:31And yet, you know, the caching and etc is all taken care of behind the scenes.

0:18:36And it does seem a lot more Apple-like to do it that way, right?

0:18:39That's the way that, like, Apple, you know, the whole way that Apple, like, iOS approaches

0:18:44an app's data is, okay, you don't have to worry about it anymore, it's just in the app.

0:18:49And there's, you know, there's certain downsides to it, but on the whole, it's been a huge

0:18:52win.

0:18:53And I think it's, you know, it's why people, just regular, you know, Joe and Jane user

0:18:58love their iPads because they don't have to worry about where the heck their stuff is.

0:19:02It's just in the app. But yet Apple's the one who's not doing that with music.

0:19:06Well, they kind of are. I mean, the iCloud

0:19:10stuff kind of works pretty well. There's weird stuff.

0:19:14So I watch a lot of TV on my iPad,

0:19:18and you can stream. You can hit a button on the bottom

0:19:22of the list of episodes in a TV show that says "Get more episodes

0:19:26show the full season or something, and they'll have a little cloud icon next to the episode

0:19:31for you to download. And you can hit that and it'll start downloading and you can start playing it right away.

0:19:36But if there's not enough space on the device, it'll complain to you.

0:19:41And then you'll have to go and delete a previous episode. And it's just a lot of weird juggling.

0:19:46Yeah, overall they are definitely moving in that direction, but are they getting there fast enough, I guess is the question.

0:19:53question. I don't know if they are. I think that there is a danger for Apple that they

0:20:00can be out-simplified in terms of what you need to worry about in terms of this stuff.

0:20:06I feel like, at least in the U.S., Amazon is probably the most likely to beat them on

0:20:15that front.

0:20:16Yeah, I agree.

0:20:17Is Amazon – how good – you're up in Canada. How good is Amazon in Canada for –

0:20:21Pretty awful. I don't even bother looking that much. I mean, you can buy a lot of stuff and they'll send it to you, but in terms of digital content, not great.

0:20:30Apple and the rest of the world is way ahead on this stuff.

0:20:35What about Netflix? Do you have the same Netflix content?

0:20:39We don't. We don't. I wish I did. Netflix is sort of anemic, but not bad. For a while we were having Mad Men on it first, I think, before you guys had it.

0:20:49We do have House of Cards and all that. It's not like they didn't intentionally shoot themselves in the foot.

0:20:55Right, but that's because they own the rights to that. Because they own it, they can control it.

0:21:00I'm sure that they want you guys to have everything. It's what they've negotiated from the studios.

0:21:05Yeah, and that's another reason why I think Apple is kind of a little bit behind the eight ball in this kind of stuff.

0:21:10I'm sure Apple wants to make it easy so that everybody can get everything wherever they want.

0:21:16they want. But it's going to be a little bit harder. It seems like it would be harder for

0:21:21them to negotiate with the studios now that they're established.

0:21:26So the second thing that was on your piece, or like you've said, that really the first

0:21:31two you can just sort of brush under it is content management and rights. But the second

0:21:35one was talent retention. And I even pointed out a couple of weeks ago, I think on Twitter,

0:21:40that if anything you probably should have listed that one first.

0:21:43I almost disagreed with you by saying I kind of kept it for last.

0:21:47But maybe last is best.

0:21:50Well, I think that could have been a piece by itself, I think. Probably should have been.

0:21:54But I think it's the... And you're the first person to say it explicitly.

0:21:59And I continue to think so now, like a year later, that this truly is the single biggest problem that Apple faces.

0:22:09And almost nobody is talking about it.

0:22:12Well, I mean, so the impetus for my piece was a lot of people just sort of pick on people saying dumb stuff about Apple.

0:22:19But there's not a lot of sort of prying apart exactly what's going on behind the scenes or what's going south.

0:22:27Or at least the difficulties they're having. And I think the key difficulty is keeping people.

0:22:33The team that made the first iPhone, that was 2005, 2006, they started working on that.

0:22:43They've been at it for quite a while.

0:22:46And they've already done their major life's work on that.

0:22:52No matter how impressive iOS 7 is going to be, it's not going to be the first iPhone.

0:22:59phone. So I think people are going to start looking for other opportunities, other things

0:23:05to do, other interests that they have.

0:23:08But I do think the heart of it, though, is this sort of inverse of the conventional wisdom,

0:23:15which is that without this one guy, Steve Jobs, or say two guys, Steve Jobs and Scott

0:23:20Forstall, that innovation can't come from Apple because they had all the good ideas.

0:23:24I think the opposite. I think if there's going to be a problem coming up with big new things,

0:23:29I think it's more likely a draining of really bright engineering and design talent at the rank-and-file level.

0:23:36I agree, totally.

0:23:38Right.

0:23:39Well, maybe not your exact wording.

0:23:42I don't think the problem will be coming up with great new things.

0:23:44I think the problem will be executing them.

0:23:46Right. I guess that is a good way.

0:23:48That is absolutely a better way to put it.

0:23:50The ideas will be there, but will the execution?

0:23:53Yeah, I can see them having a really great, really ballsy idea and thinking,

0:23:56"Well, we're Apple. We're going to nail this out of the park."

0:23:58- Right, 'cause it's easy to say, to come up,

0:24:01it's really easy to come up with a design

0:24:03where the design involves something like,

0:24:05and this list scrolls like butter.

0:24:08- Right. - Right?

0:24:09You say that, that's part of the design,

0:24:11but you need someone to actually make it scroll like butter.

0:24:13- Yep. - Right?

0:24:14I mean, I'm sure that the design spec for Android

0:24:16didn't say scrolling is gonna be real janky.

0:24:19(laughing)

0:24:20Right?

0:24:21That wasn't part of the spec,

0:24:24that's just how it ended up turning out.

0:24:27And the scroll guy went away and worked on it for ages and had all kinds of parameters

0:24:31behind that that you can tweak for the gravity and the deceleration and all kinds of stuff.

0:24:36And they really worked on it.

0:24:37I don't know if he's still there anymore.

0:24:38But it's people like that that you need.

0:24:42Part of what fuels this for us is that we know, me and you personally, know people who've

0:24:50left Apple.

0:24:51Yeah.

0:24:52Right?

0:24:53And so it's not really, we're not talking about it in the abstract.

0:24:55We know some really good people who've left over the last year or two.

0:24:59Just to be clear, we also know a lot of really good people that still had Apple.

0:25:02A lot of really good people who are still there.

0:25:05And I also know people.

0:25:07And when this just came up a bit ago, like somebody had pointed out on Twitter

0:25:12that, boy, a lot of people seem to be leaving Apple.

0:25:14It was maybe like a month ago that I just-- just by coincidence,

0:25:17you know, three or four people, somebody knew.

0:25:18I think it was Dan Fromer that tweeted the hate.

0:25:20Well, it was right after one of our pals.

0:25:22Yeah, had left.

0:25:24And not as a seeker, but I don't know.

0:25:29I never mention people's names who work at Apple.

0:25:31But yeah, somebody we know left,

0:25:33and then I guess he knew him too,

0:25:35and just said, "Hey, is it just me

0:25:36"or a lot of people leaving Apple?"

0:25:37And it's three, four people.

0:25:39But if you only know a certain number of people,

0:25:42your brain sees it as a pattern.

0:25:44And so a couple people did write to me after that,

0:25:47and after I chirped in on Twitter on it,

0:25:49a few friends from Apple said,

0:25:53you know that is true but keep in mind too that an awful lot come back

0:25:57including somebody we know who did who has come back and and one of the things

0:26:02Apple has is a standard policy where if you come back within two years you keep

0:26:07your seniority really it's as the yeah it's as though I guess you don't get

0:26:13credit for the two years you were gone or whatever but if you were there for 10

0:26:16years and you leave you'd go work somewhere else completely you know you

0:26:20don't work at Apple anymore. They don't do sabbaticals anymore at Apple.

0:26:28That's a really enlightened policy. I think that is one of the smartest HR moves I can think of.

0:26:33Right, because that was one of the things Steve Jobs changed in '97 when he came back,

0:26:38is the Apple used to have a sabbatical policy, and he got rid of it for the obvious reason,

0:26:43which was that in practice, when people took sabbaticals, you know what they did at the end

0:26:47other sabbatical, they quit. So if you're gonna quit, quit. So in other words, what

0:26:52they have is sort of an implicit sabbatical where you can quit and up to two years you

0:26:57can come back and it's as though you never left, which is, I think, enlightened. And

0:27:02apparently, and not even apparently, I actually know firsthand, it definitely is fairly common.

0:27:10And I'll bet too that maybe even that two-year window is negotiable. Because you know what

0:27:16I mean, when you're getting hired, everybody knows that, or at least you learn eventually

0:27:19that when you're getting hired, everything's negotiable.

0:27:22So if you were gone for three years, could you say, "Look, I'll do it, but I want my

0:27:27seniority back"?

0:27:28Right.

0:27:29And if you're good enough, I mean, I'm sure, why not?

0:27:31If they'll do it for two, why not three?

0:27:33Right.

0:27:34It looks like there's a guy that does a video.

0:27:37The iMovie guy.

0:27:38Oh, Randy Ublos?

0:27:39Ublos, yeah.

0:27:40Yeah, I'm sure that guy could go away for like five years, come back and just be--

0:27:45Yeah, exactly.

0:27:46gold. So that's pretty interesting. So maybe it's only like, you hear the plop of the pebble

0:27:54falling in the water when people quit, but you don't hear so much when they come back

0:27:58or the hires that they make.

0:28:01But I absolutely think it's—and again, I don't think the problem is—to reiterate

0:28:05so nobody misinterprets what we're saying—the problem isn't that Apple is bleeding talent.

0:28:12The problem is, though, that they could.

0:28:14And it would be devastating to the company.

0:28:16Exactly.

0:28:18And I don't think it's like these people will not

0:28:20go work on Android, or they won't go work on Windows Phone, necessarily.

0:28:24They will just go and do interesting stuff.

0:28:26Exactly.

0:28:27It'll be like The Nest or whatever.

0:28:29Exactly.

0:28:29No, I think that's a perfect example.

0:28:32And the one thing we do know, we know Bertrand left.

0:28:36I guess we should mention Bertrand as an executive who's left.

0:28:40He was a while ago.

0:28:41That's why I keep sort of forgetting about him.

0:28:44Right. But everybody knows that he's working on some secret thing, and nobody knows what the secret thing is, really.

0:28:50I mean, there's vague notions about something with the cloud, right? Because they have a website.

0:28:56But I think that's more likely, is that people will even go do their own startup type thing.

0:29:03Which I actually think will be pretty cool. I think there'll be like a lot of really cool ideas coming out of that sort of

0:29:09the flowerbed of

0:29:12apples

0:29:15X

0:29:18aces

0:29:19You know another good example of that is is the speaking of Bertrand because he's an investor

0:29:24But last week's the sponsor of last week's episode when I did with Jim Kudol ever picks

0:29:29And I'm not just because they sponsored the show and they sponsored my website, but I hadn't heard of them before

0:29:35It's one of those things where they're new and I'm pretty sure I would have heard of them anyway

0:29:39But it's really kind of an amazing technology

0:29:41I mean, it's you know, you'll you have to you know, if you haven't checked out ever pics

0:29:46you have to take my word for it, you know know that they are sponsors, but

0:29:49No, I checked it out after hearing you and you and Jim talk about it and it was pretty fancy

0:29:54Yeah, and it works. It does something that to me

0:29:59iOS and Mac OS X should do.

0:30:03It has this sort of, you don't have to worry about it,

0:30:05but you can get all of your pictures from anywhere at any time.

0:30:09And they're not all synced, you know, you don't sync,

0:30:12they're just there and you download them.

0:30:14And yeah, it's not perfect.

0:30:16It's like you're getting JPEGs instead of your...

0:30:20You know, you're robbed.

0:30:22So if you want to keep the raws, you've got to still manage that with

0:30:25Lightroom or Aputure or iPhoto on your computer.

0:30:28But that's not the problem. They're not trying to solve that problem.

0:30:31Yeah, they're not trying to solve the problem.

0:30:32They're not for professional use.

0:30:33Right. You want to look at all of your pictures from anywhere and find the ones, you know,

0:30:39you know, that time we went to Alaska in 2005, right? How do you find those pictures, you know?

0:30:47And they've solved that problem brilliantly, I think, in a way that nobody else has.

0:30:51And those guys are all ex-Apple guys. It's not just that Bertrand is a

0:30:57investor. If you look, you can go to Everpick's website and look at About Us and look at what

0:31:04the founders did. It's like some iOS guys. I think, effectively, some of your hypothetical

0:31:15guys who built the original iPhone, who at least worked on some part of it.

0:31:19Well, after this piece went up, I did get some feedback from people inside Apple pointing

0:31:23to LinkedIn profiles of various people it left.

0:31:25So I think it is, it's something that they're aware of.

0:31:29One thing that's, you just sort of jog my memory though.

0:31:33One of the last big Apple explosions

0:31:37was really good for the industry.

0:31:38We got like Palm.

0:31:39Was it Handspring?

0:31:43There was a bunch of companies that sort of came out of Apple.

0:31:46- Handspring came out of Palm.

0:31:47- Yeah, I'm thinking of it wrong.

0:31:50- It was weird, and then they got like reverse,

0:31:52It was sort of like a mini Apple where Handspring was sort of like Next a little.

0:31:59The analogy breaks down because they were actually building devices based on the Palm OS.

0:32:03They didn't build their own OS.

0:32:05But they ended up getting acquired by Palm and the Handspring team took over Palm.

0:32:11The same way that Apple's, everybody, describes the Next acquisition as a reverse acquisition.

0:32:18So I mean, there's been times where people have left Apple before,

0:32:22and a lot of cool little interesting ideas have sprung up that have been beneficial to the industry.

0:32:27Right.

0:32:28But it's interesting. So this Everpix and this theoretical thing that Bertrand is working on,

0:32:36both of them address what I think is our mutual pal John Sirkirz's major point about Apple,

0:32:41which I didn't actually put in his piece, is that they're really bad at doing server-side stuff.

0:32:47stuff and services, and that is increasingly going to be the future.

0:32:54I don't know what they're going to do in order to achieve sort of parity with Google on that.

0:33:00All right.

0:33:01Well, let's hold that thought, because that would be a great place to pick back up.

0:33:04But let me do this first sponsor read here and tell you about audible.com.

0:33:11So audible.com, here's the thing.

0:33:13is listening to the show you can get a free audio book from audible all you

0:33:18have to do is go to www.audiblepodcast.com/thetalkshow

0:33:27www.audiblepodcast.com/thetalkshow and sign up right there you'll start by

0:33:35getting a free audio audio book you get a 30-day free trial of the service so

0:33:40So you get to try it all out for free.

0:33:4230 days of their service, including a free audio book

0:33:45that you get to keep.

0:33:48They have over 100,000 titles, virtually every genre.

0:33:52If it is an audio book, they've got it.

0:33:55That's more or less the appeal of Audible.

0:33:58They've got it all.

0:34:00One of the things they want when they sponsor these shows,

0:34:03they want a book pick.

0:34:04They want me to tell you what to listen to.

0:34:06And I've got a great pick for you.

0:34:09It's a book I just finished, and it's really, really--I thought it was great.

0:34:13It's Devil May Care by Sebastian Fox.

0:34:19And the writing credit is actually by Sebastian Fox, writing as Ian Fleming, which is interesting.

0:34:27The gist of it is that the book takes place--it's a new book.

0:34:30It was written in 2008, but it's relatively recent.

0:34:33It's a James Bond novel, but that it takes place in 1967, effectively, like, roughly

0:34:40one year after the last novel, James Bond novel, that Ian Fleming wrote.

0:34:45And if anybody's, if you've read the Ian Fleming novels, you know that, you know, the guy had

0:34:51a real style.

0:34:52This guy, Sebastian Fox, like, it's a better Ian Fleming novel than Ian Fleming ever wrote.

0:34:59But it really reads like an Ian Fleming novel.

0:35:01It's almost uncanny.

0:35:04And I've read a few of the other James Bond novels

0:35:07that aren't written by Ian Fleming.

0:35:08And some of them are OK, and some of them aren't.

0:35:11But they don't sound like--

0:35:14the other ones, to me, always read like the movies, not

0:35:17the books, whereas the books are very

0:35:19different than the movies.

0:35:21This one, Devil May Care, it's uncanny

0:35:24how much it feels as though Ian Fleming wrote it.

0:35:28So like this writing credit, Sebastian Fox

0:35:30writing is Ian Fleming. It's perfect. It's really almost uncanny. I almost recommend

0:35:34the book just for the uncanniness of the authorial impersonation. But the story itself is good,

0:35:43too. If you like James Bond novels, you're going to love Devil May Care. So that's my

0:35:47pick as your audible novel. That's a cool idea. It's an amazing idea. And he also—and

0:35:55And as soon as I finished it, I Googled about it.

0:35:59And I guess the Fleming estate wanted him to do as many as he would, but he said one

0:36:04and done.

0:36:05Because Sebastian Fox is a real novelist.

0:36:07He's like, "I don't want to get caught up in..."

0:36:10Yeah, I mean, it's one thing it's a fun experiment to mimic another artist, but it gets stale

0:36:17pretty quick, I imagine.

0:36:19And apparently the reason they picked him is that he had a collection where he did parodies

0:36:25of a bunch of writers. And one of the writers he parodied was Ian Fleming, but he did a

0:36:31whole bunch of them. And apparently he's just got a natural aptitude for that, for writing

0:36:36in the style of others. And the Fleming estate so enjoyed his parody of Ian Fleming that

0:36:42they're like, "Hey, would you ever think about doing it seriously?"

0:36:45That's great. That actually just seems like a really good writing exercise.

0:36:49Yeah, it kind of is. Like, just copy your favorite writer.

0:36:53Just to keep you on your toes.

0:36:56Huh. Cool.

0:36:59Years ago, Dean Allen, the guy who wrote Textism.com, and hopefully someday we'll restart it,

0:37:05but one of my all-time favorite blogs.

0:37:08This is way back, I mean, like 2002, 2003 or something like that.

0:37:14He'd had Textism going for a year or two, and he did a contest where he invited the readers of the site

0:37:22to parody him and the style of textism, like send in a paragraph.

0:37:26And, uh, because he had a sort of very, very fussy

0:37:31style, and, uh, my god, the parodies were hilarious.

0:37:35But he was self-aware enough to know it was kind of silly? Yeah, totally. Oh,

0:37:38absolutely, yeah. He's a very, very, he was, you know, I've met him, he's a very, very

0:37:42down-to-earth guy. He was perfectly well aware of, you know, I

0:37:46mean, the fact that he was willing to do it just shows how

0:37:49almost meta-aware. He recognized he was fussy and it was kind of funny, just

0:37:52In and of itself, yeah. That's cool.

0:37:55We should get back to techs in a bit, but I think you might have linked to this.

0:38:00Somebody wrote to Ian Fleming suggesting a gun for James Bond.

0:38:05Yeah.

0:38:06And he was in letters of note, and he writes back.

0:38:08And he's still keeping it. He's not like, "Oh, thanks. I'll keep that in mind when I write my next book."

0:38:14He writes it from the perspective that he is Bond's biographer.

0:38:17Right.

0:38:18I suggest it to Mr. Bond the next time he sees him.

0:38:22He keeps it in the character of Erwin's writing style, which I found fascinating, and I really enjoyed it.

0:38:28Right.

0:38:29Yeah, he describes himself as James Bond's biographer.

0:38:32So, go and load the letters of note and dig up the uniflamic one. It's worth reading.

0:38:36Yeah, and he actually ended up naming the character who gives Bond the new handgun

0:38:41after the guy who wrote the letter, like Major Boothroyd.

0:38:44The guy who wrote the letter was named Boothroyd.

0:38:47had a good memory for names. Eventually it'll cost me. Really the only thing I can remember

0:38:56is stuff about James Bond. I don't even remember your name. It's Thomas. Thomas English. I

0:39:07did a talk in 2010 at Macworld and it was supposed to be the Gruber 10. I didn't make

0:39:14the name, but they gave me the name. But it was my top 10 issues facing Apple.

0:39:18And I haven't looked at it in a while until I was preparing for the

0:39:23show and I opened it up. And I think I did a pretty good job. And I think I

0:39:27ordered them interestingly where like the first half aren't... I think I was

0:39:34right to see them as issues, but I don't... I think that they proved not to be a

0:39:37problem for Apple. And in the second half I think is stuff that has... it's still up

0:39:42in the air. So here was my list, and this was the order it was. Number one was Steve

0:39:46Jobs. At the time, he was still alive. And I said, more or less, let's face it, it's

0:39:52an issue that maybe the guy's had health issues, so maybe he's not going to be around. Will

0:39:58they do okay without him? Obviously, that has since come to pass. I mean, he's dead.

0:40:04But I think I was right, too, that the company didn't depend on him. I mean, they depended

0:40:09He was dependent on them, but he wasn't essential.

0:40:11The company has done fine in the year and a half since he stepped down as CEO.

0:40:15Even as weird as the stock price is now, it's still way higher than when he was CEO.

0:40:20Right. Yeah, still is.

0:40:22But the other thing, too, is that if and when he did leave, it wasn't unlikely to collapse immediately.

0:40:31And the long-term effects, well, who knows?

0:40:33And we still don't know. That's still up in the air.

0:40:35Like it could well be that 10 years from now we'll look back and say, "Wow, Apple

0:40:39really faded after Steve Jobs died."

0:40:42We don't know that, though.

0:40:44Number two, my slide title was AT&T, but I guess what I really meant was carriers.

0:40:50That so much of Apple's success at the time was dependent on the iPhone, and they had

0:40:55to go through the carriers.

0:40:56I think they've done that very well.

0:40:57I mean, since…

0:40:58Was Apple really only on AT&T in 2010?

0:41:01I think so.

0:41:02Wow.

0:41:03when I gave the talk, I think.

0:41:07When did the Verizon iPhone come out?

0:41:08I think that was like 2011.

0:41:09- Seems so recent, you know what I mean?

0:41:10And it seems like they've been on, anyway, yeah.

0:41:12Sorry, continue, I couldn't.

0:41:14- They weren't on Verizon yet.

0:41:16But I think they've done well with that.

0:41:17And I think that they, you know, everybody is sort of,

0:41:20you know, the argument is, boy, the carriers hate Apple

0:41:23because Apple takes more money from the carriers

0:41:25than they do from other phones.

0:41:27So that's why the carriers try to push these other phones.

0:41:30But the iPhone is so successful that it's worked out, I think.

0:41:35I don't think Apple really has a problem with carriers.

0:41:37- I think they've also done well worldwide with carriers.

0:41:40A lot of you guys tend to just focus on the US market,

0:41:43but worldwide they've got pretty good reach

0:41:45and they're on a lot of different carriers

0:41:47all over the place.

0:41:48- Right, it was the same thing in New Zealand

0:41:50where there were a couple to choose from.

0:41:51I think it was Vodafone and I forget the other one,

0:41:54but there were a couple to choose from.

0:41:56- And that's gotta be a relatively small market, right?

0:41:58So the fact that they, it's good.

0:42:00The next one was I filed under computers, but what I meant was, I don't know, it was

0:42:07a bad slide title, but the gist of it though was that Apple had never successfully maintained

0:42:12two systems at a time.

0:42:15Once the Mac came out, the Apple II really faded fast.

0:42:20They've tried it with the Newton and the Newton never took off.

0:42:23They never had two computing platforms going at the same time and maintaining them.

0:42:29And I think since 2010, they've done a pretty good job of moving iOS and Mac OS X forward.

0:42:35I tend to agree.

0:42:36Putting them both under Fredericke clearly means that they sort of understand that having

0:42:43a bifurcated OS and computer development is not good for the company.

0:42:49So they're sort of reorganized to be everything under one ship.

0:42:52And they are moving iOS and OS X sort of closer together.

0:42:58share the same kernel and a lot of the same frameworks and increasingly a similar user

0:43:07experience in iCloud and in Launchpad and that kind of thing.

0:43:14I realize, I'll bet a lot of people out there listening are disagreeing. I get a lot of

0:43:19email from people who say that they're worried because Apple hasn't done anything radically

0:43:25new with iOS since it came out that it's, you know, that that's, it's just, they need

0:43:31something new. And a lot of people have really hung their hats on the fact that Forstall

0:43:36is out and Johnny Ive is taking over. And I think a lot of people really expect iOS

0:43:417 to be new, new, new. They shouldn't. And I think that they are going to be disappointed,

0:43:46disappointed, disappointed. I guarantee you they are. Well, I don't guarantee you because

0:43:50I don't actually know. Right. I come and get close to guaranteeing, I would bet that the

0:43:57reaction is going to be, "Really? This is it? I can't believe it. I thought it was going

0:44:00to be all radically new." Yeah, I mean, I'm only saying guarantee because earlier we said

0:44:03we knew people in Apple, but believe me, we don't know anything. Well, I don't know anything

0:44:06about this. But just the way product planning works and timelines, there's no way they're

0:44:13rebooting all of iOS 7 after 4-star left. Maybe iOS 8 will look really interesting,

0:44:20IOS 7 will be less of a leap than I think many people are hoping for or expect.

0:44:26And cosmetically, Apple, and they've said this expressly, like Schiller has said this,

0:44:34I don't know if Steve Jobs ever did because it seems like the sort of thing that's only come up more recently.

0:44:41But they've said it on the record multiple times that they don't do new for the sake of new.

0:44:48They only do new if it's better.

0:44:51And this was in response to the iPhone 4S in particular of,

0:44:56"Wow, why would you guys make a phone that looks exactly like the old one?"

0:45:00And their answer is, "If we can't do better, we're not going to do different just for the sake of different."

0:45:05Here's the thing though, I think that they do need to do better.

0:45:08I think something like Springboard is sort of running into a rut,

0:45:13but sticking folders into it, and it gets complicated really.

0:45:17It doesn't scale very well.

0:45:18We're looking at sort of like OS 8 finder kind of stuff.

0:45:23Do you know what I mean?

0:45:24Where there's just a bunch of stuff crammed in there.

0:45:26- I think it's really hard. - Which goes to the

0:45:29technical debt thing that I was talking about earlier.

0:45:31- I think the biggest problem with Springboard to me

0:45:34is that it's really hard to manage a lot of apps.

0:45:37Like if you have a bunch of apps and you want to,

0:45:40It just turns into a mess after your first or second screen.

0:45:44And yet they want you to have a lot of apps.

0:45:46Like they clearly want you to and encourage people to go to the app store

0:45:50and download lots of free and very low-cost apps.

0:45:53But there's no good way to order them.

0:45:57Yeah.

0:45:58I mean, it's very straightforward, which I give it full points for.

0:46:02But it's sort of just too much stuff going on there.

0:46:05And it's sort of really stuck into it.

0:46:06I think once you have them ordered,

0:46:08the basic concept of all there are are apps, and you tap them, and then the app gets the whole screen.

0:46:13I still think that's fundamentally brilliant and right. I think the problem is that Springboard makes it too

0:46:18difficult to organize them.

0:46:20Yeah, I think it doesn't scale very well. I mean, I end up using Spotlight quite a bit, because I've given up

0:46:25organizing my apps. I just keep them kind of go, and I try to find one, or I just type it into the

0:46:30Spotlight search field.

0:46:32I've got two screens that are ordered, and then the rest, it's practically the same.

0:46:37We've got like one and a half. But that's the user side of Springboard.

0:46:41Behind the scenes, Springboard is a huge piece of software.

0:46:44It is the window manager.

0:46:46And so that is another part of technical debt, where it's really hard to sort of pry it all apart

0:46:53and refactor it into something that is sort of more easily manipulated

0:46:59in order to better serve the future design directions.

0:47:04I and I think it might be something that if I was gonna say a flick

0:47:08But I do think it afflicts younger people than older people is the desire for new

0:47:12Because and I was talking about with moltz on this show a couple weeks ago about how we used to install these hacks on Mac OS 9

0:47:19To like change the the window style, right? I would never do that now I wouldn't

0:47:24That sounds so stupid to me now, but I was really into that when I was you know

0:47:291920 21 years old because I wanted something new I was bored with the way it looked and

0:47:33that's not something that Apple is really going to concern itself with.

0:47:38They're not going to concern themselves with changing Chrome just for the sake of changing the Chrome.

0:47:43Right. I was talking with Grant Paul, Chip Owen, who's pretty big in the jailbreak scene

0:47:48for my show recently. And he was pointing out that

0:47:53a lot of people jailbreak just to do stuff different with their phone, just to make it

0:47:58and make it look like their own.

0:48:00And he was saying that even if Apple did allow you to pick themes,

0:48:05people would still be very jailbreak because they would want to pick a theme that Apple didn't support.

0:48:10Because it is all about the customization.

0:48:12And yeah, I think, I feel now that the word "afflict" is correct.

0:48:18It is an affliction to want to mess with this kind of stuff.

0:48:24But I can remember wanting to customize that kind of stuff.

0:48:28Well, the reason I say affliction is as someone who used to do it.

0:48:31And I'll bet that if I were 21 right now, I'd probably have my iPhone jailbroken.

0:48:37Sure.

0:48:37And I don't now.

0:48:38The only time my jailbroke was back with the original one when I wanted to run the Craig's app.

0:48:43Well, I mean, I had to because I'm in Canada.

0:48:46So you know what?

0:48:50I bought my first iPhone in San Francisco with Ben Simmons and Chris Parrish, and I didn't even

0:48:56know what I could do with it.

0:48:57And I bought it home, and I basically just looked at it for days.

0:49:00Because the jailbreak wasn't even out yet.

0:49:02And all you could do is basically call 911.

0:49:06So tempted just to call 911.

0:49:08Just to do something.

0:49:09Yeah, exactly.

0:49:10I just kept playing with a little slider for days until the first jailbreak sort of came out.

0:49:15But in hindsight, when I look back when I used to want to do that, I was never satisfied. Ever.

0:49:19Like, I'd be satisfied, like, getting a new, you know, theme for the extension thing, the

0:49:27Window Manager style, getting a new theme that made me happy would satisfy me for about

0:49:32five minutes.

0:49:33And then I'd think, well, now I want one that's better.

0:49:36It never ended.

0:49:37Well, I mean, you'd, because you know what?

0:49:39You're trying to get, you're trying to make the Millennium Falcon, right?

0:49:42Like, you want, with special modifications, and it just, you're never going to get there.

0:49:46Like, it's never satisfying.

0:49:47Right.

0:49:48So the people who want that sort of newness from iOS, they're not going to get it from

0:49:51Apple.

0:49:52But you kind of have it now with jailbreaking.

0:49:55I don't know.

0:49:56You can do it.

0:49:57Another thing that Grant, Paul, and I, and Vinay were agreeing on is that we kind of

0:50:02think Apple should have a legitimate way to jailbreak, I guess jail release at that point,

0:50:10probably through Xcode.

0:50:12You can connect it.

0:50:13You can say, "Yes, I want this totally unlocked," so you can SSH into the phone.

0:50:18I don't think they'll ever do it, but I think it's a good...

0:50:22I think it would be useful for the developer community.

0:50:25I think, yeah, I kind of agree with that.

0:50:27And something where it's somehow secure, I don't know,

0:50:31you have to sign in with your Apple ID.

0:50:33Yeah, exactly.

0:50:34And do, you know, use some cryptography there, you know, to...

0:50:38I don't know, a little bit, just something like an iOS,

0:50:41not the same thing, but the same idea as...

0:50:47What's it called on Mac OS X now, where the apps don't launch unless they're signed?

0:50:51Gatekeeper. Right.

0:50:55But the same basic idea, though, where some kind of user action...

0:50:59Yeah, exactly. Something that went through Xcode, I think that would be fine.

0:51:03It should not be on the phone. There should be no way on the phone to go and switch a button and put it into

0:51:07developer mode. But I think that would be...

0:51:11It would be useful for me as a developer to be able to mess around with this kind of stuff directly.

0:51:15Let me just play devil's advocate and toss this at you.

0:51:20Is there an advantage to the way jailbreaking works now, though, for Apple insofar as that

0:51:26really, really smart guys hunt down bugs that allow for it and then Apple gets to close

0:51:33those bugs because they've become public as opposed to those bugs remaining secret and

0:51:38the black hat guys using it to do exploits?

0:51:42Yeah, I mean, I don't think that Apple doesn't allow jailbreak simply to have smart guys checking out their code.

0:51:53But I think it's a happy byproduct, for sure. And from talking to Grant, most of the smart guys out of the community

0:52:01understands that when Apple closes one of these loopholes, it's because it is for security reasons.

0:52:06They don't take it personally. A lot of the articles that run are like, "Ah, Apple shut down jailbreaking."

0:52:11But it's not. When you can go to a website and it reboots your phone into a different OS, that's fine.

0:52:16That's not Apple shutting down jailbreaking. That is a serious problem that they're addressing.

0:52:22And Grant again points out that some of the exploits that you need to have the passcode and you have to be doing something very different.

0:52:30you have to have local access to the device itself.

0:52:33Apple can take like six months to actually close those loopholes.

0:52:37Like they clearly prioritize not to shut down Jailbreak,

0:52:40but to secure their phone for their customers,

0:52:43which is the right thing for them to be doing.

0:52:46Yeah, and you know, it's not just Apple that gets that sort of press coverage about that.

0:52:50Mistakenly, you know, reading way too much into the reasons behind it.

0:52:56I saw a story about Google that did the same thing.

0:52:58the same thing. The headline was "Google shuts down ad blocker" and there was this ad blocker

0:53:05app for Android that was taking advantage of lax permissions to block ads like in other apps.

0:53:12I mean, it was more or less ways that, you know, and all that Google did was sort of make it so

0:53:17that you had to get permission to do it, but it broke, completely broke this ad blocker app.

0:53:22It really was though, it was fixing a security type. Now security maybe is the wrong word,

0:53:27It was a bug.

0:53:29Yeah, it was a bug. They were fixing a bug that the app was taking advantage of.

0:53:32I mean, the fact that as a happy byproduct, more Google ads come through, I'm sure that they don't mind.

0:53:37But that really wasn't why they did it.

0:53:39Right. Yeah, I mean, people describe a lot of evil to companies.

0:53:43It's not always that cut and dry.

0:53:47That bug came across an engineer's desk and he fixed it.

0:53:51It wasn't Google trying to gin up their ad numbers, really.

0:53:56numbers really.

0:53:57Right.

0:53:58You know, I swear to God, by sheer coincidence, the next slide on my deck from that presentation

0:54:04was the App Store.

0:54:05And that at the time, 2010, there was still a lot more controversy about rejections and

0:54:10what was getting through.

0:54:11And I feel like they've, and I described it then as that they were a few degrees off course.

0:54:17That they didn't need a radical turnaround, they just needed a minor course correction.

0:54:22Because even if you're just a few degrees off course, if you keep going long enough,

0:54:26soon you're lost. And I feel like they did that. I don't feel that rejection of content

0:54:31in the App Store is a major problem.

0:54:33No, I don't think so either.

0:54:34Every once in a while there's an exception, but they tend to fix it, I think. They're

0:54:38not going to be perfect. You can't have 100,000 apps in the store and never make a mistake

0:54:44as to what gets in and what gets rejected. It's, can you get it fixed?

0:54:48Yeah, I think they're doing a great job with the App Store. Personally, I would have totally

0:54:52screwed it up and sank it already.

0:54:53Because when the App Store came out, I was really--

0:54:58I came from a console gaming background professionally.

0:55:01And I was really sure that they should have launched with like 10 apps that

0:55:07they'd worked very closely with developers on.

0:55:11And what they did is launch very broad and very wide.

0:55:13I thought the App Store should be way more confined.

0:55:16You should pay a heavy price to get in there, and Apple should work with you

0:55:19and really hone these sort of apps.

0:55:21And I think what they have done is really sort of thread the needle between being wide open and being more directed.

0:55:31Yeah, I honestly had the same… I don't know if I would have taken it quite as restricted as you,

0:55:37but I expected and was sort of disappointed that they didn't reject more apps just for being ugly.

0:55:41Yeah, exactly.

0:55:43I really thought that if an app was ugly, that they would just say, "No, we're not going to have that."

0:55:46I guess my thought was that they would only accept the apps that they now promote.

0:55:51Right? Like, there's a certain... They're not going to promote an ugly app.

0:55:54But I really thought that the apps that they promote, like in the featured page of the App Store app,

0:55:59I thought that would be it. That that would be all of the apps in the App Store.

0:56:04I'd go along with that. It's almost still... I would be wrong. I think it's the wrong thing to do.

0:56:10I think that what they did is the right thing.

0:56:13But I'm sure people in Apple were arguing like we were.

0:56:16Right.

0:56:17That it should be more restricted.

0:56:18Right. But it's a case where Apple, you know, and some people would roll their eyes,

0:56:23but that the App Store is far more open, closer to open than closed than I expected it to be,

0:56:28and that it could have been.

0:56:29Yeah, me too.

0:56:30And I think it has been a success.

0:56:34Yeah.

0:56:35The flip side of it, though, is the thing we've just been talking about,

0:56:37is whether it's a mistake and whether it's going to hurt the company,

0:56:41that there is no Gatekeeper-like mode of non-App Store, sanctioned non-App Store software on

0:56:49the phone.

0:56:50I don't think that's a mistake.

0:56:51I think that's exactly what I think they do.

0:56:55What would it serve?

0:56:56No, you just told me that they should have a mode in Xcode where you can't...

0:57:03You want them to do it but think that they shouldn't.

0:57:06Is that what you're saying?

0:57:08No.

0:57:09Okay, so maybe we're talking cost purposes here.

0:57:12What I think that they should do is have a mode in Xcode in order to unlock the device and allow basically what is now jailbreak access for developers.

0:57:21And for anybody who's paid the $99 to get the cert and runs Xcode and actually goes through the rigmarole.

0:57:27Gatekeeper allows you to sideload software that's not from the App Store.

0:57:31I don't think that they should be allowing that.

0:57:34I think the way that they conceptually should do Gatekeeper on the iPhone is what you're saying and make it like a developer mode thing.

0:57:42Okay, so we do agree.

0:57:43Yeah, I don't think it should be anything that a consumer would in any way be encouraged to sideload apps.

0:57:48Okay, yeah, so we do agree on that.

0:57:50Right.

0:57:51And now, is it short-sighted? I don't think it's that big a deal for them, frankly.

0:57:54Yeah, I don't either.

0:57:55- That's not, they're certainly not losing sales over it.

0:57:59Maybe they're losing experimental stuff

0:58:03that jailbreak guys do, but I don't think they,

0:58:07I don't know how many ideas they pick from that garden.

0:58:12You know what I mean?

0:58:13Like back in the classic days,

0:58:14they picked a multi-finder out of effectively

0:58:18what today would have to be jailbreak.

0:58:19- Right.

0:58:20- I don't see them doing that a lot with iOS these days.

0:58:22- No.

0:58:24Although they've hired some jailbreak guys.

0:58:27Yeah, because they're smart guys, and they've seen what they do, and it's good stuff.

0:58:31But they don't necessarily pick the ideas.

0:58:33Right, exactly.

0:58:35My next slide was security.

0:58:38And isn't it weird? I feel like, just like the last couple of months, there have been so many hacks.

0:58:43Yeah.

0:58:44That past screen one is nutty.

0:58:48Yeah. So they keep coming up with ways, for example, that you can circumvent the passcode

0:58:54screen on iOS. And it just seems, that one seems really weird to me in so far as that

0:58:59it, every, there have been so many bugs that get around the pass screen in iOS that you

0:59:04would just think that there'd be some kind of way to audit that code, to take a step

0:59:09back and say, "Look, this, you know, one time is bad luck, but two or three times, you know,

0:59:14audit that route. I mean, I, you know, I know that it seems like comps I want to

0:59:20want like, yeah, don't continue until this number is typed in. Like the whole

0:59:24system is never going to be bug free. It's just too complex and every, you know,

0:59:27it's just it's just a bylaw of the way software works. It's always going to bugs.

0:59:30But a small enough component you'd think you could get really close to being bug

0:59:35free, and you would think that the passcode is a relatively, the lock screen

0:59:40is a relatively small component. Well, I think what happens is it interacts with

0:59:44The contact picker comes up, and the contact picker is, I don't know if it's a different process, but it's definitely a different group that develops it.

0:59:58It's a different app. It's coming from the contents app.

1:00:02Yeah, I guess so.

1:00:03Well, it's coming from the frameworks, actually.

1:00:05So, you know, and then you can cancel and get it into some weird kind of state, because that code isn't necessarily developed with the idea that it will be running inside the context of the passcode lock.

1:00:18It's developed with the concept that it's going to be running inside the context of an app.

1:00:22And I think maybe, I guess what I'm underestimating is how complex it is, because it's not truly

1:00:29a lock screen.

1:00:30If the lock screen really meant that you can do nothing except type in a number or a passcode

1:00:36if you have the other one, passcode set, type in your passcode or passphrase and then you

1:00:42can use the phone, they probably could make it bug-free, but the problem is you can, there's

1:00:47exceptions that are poked through it, right?

1:00:49the music player controls the fact that you can get to Siri, right? The fact that you

1:00:57have to be allowed to make emergency phone calls. A lot of them involve that path through

1:01:02the emergency phone call. And that once you have any sort of exceptions like that, that

1:01:09some bugs are inevitable, I guess.

1:01:11Yeah. It is still weird.

1:01:13But I wonder, too, though, it must be the case that iTunes—and you hear about people

1:01:18who've had their passwords taken in iTunes.

1:01:22There's also that security, not just device security,

1:01:24but what happens if there's a major breach in your Apple IDs.

1:01:31I don't think that they're particularly--

1:01:37I mean, didn't that happen to Matt Honan?

1:01:40Yeah.

1:01:40Was it Matt Honan?

1:01:41Yeah.

1:01:41Yeah.

1:01:42Yeah, part of what happened to his Twitter account getting

1:01:46hacked was that his mobile.me account got attacked.

1:01:53And that was the email address he was depending on.

1:01:55And it was taken not by a technical flaw,

1:01:58but social engineering.

1:01:59Somebody who called Apple and gave them

1:02:03Matt Honan's-- I don't know-- his mother's maiden name.

1:02:05Or I don't know, some stupid thing

1:02:06that wasn't that hard to find.

1:02:08And then all of a sudden, they had his account.

1:02:10Yeah.

1:02:11I'd be curious to know how much of a real world

1:02:14impact that is, though? How many people it actually affects?

1:02:18I don't know, but it does seem like it's growing, especially the attacks on services, right?

1:02:23Twitter, you know, I mean, they say a couple hundred thousand accounts were compromised,

1:02:26but everybody I know had their password reset, so I don't know.

1:02:29Yeah.

1:02:31So I think it's a risk. I think this is one of those things where I don't think Apple has a

1:02:35particularly worse security threat than any other major company like Google or Facebook or Amazon,

1:02:41But that it's a threat to all of these companies, right?

1:02:44In terms of if you want to just do risk assessment that, you know, it's got to be a...

1:02:50Well, here's the thing. I think those more web-based companies have a better handle on security than Apple, I think.

1:02:59I don't know if I mean that.

1:03:04I think there's a larger surface area for exploits in terms of what Apple shapes in code than there are in web services.

1:03:12Yeah, maybe.

1:03:13I mean, the scariest jailbreak to me was the one—I think it was just the one, but like you said, it was the one where you just went to the website.

1:03:21And just by going to the website, it took advantage of a bug in Safari that let it root your phone.

1:03:30I mean, that one to me was terrifying.

1:03:34I mean, and again, talking about Apple shutting down jailbreaking, there's a reason that they only allow Nitro to run inside Safari rather than third-party apps using WebKit or the web view.

1:03:51I know you know this, but the horrible exports that could be done if that thing's broken.

1:03:59It's not a matter of them trying to shut down performance in other apps. It's them really trying to keep it secure.

1:04:05Right. It is absolutely a security thing. It's almost more surprising that they even use it in mobile Safari.

1:04:11Yeah, I mean, we talked about this offline at the time.

1:04:17I think the only reason that they did it is because Android had a huge performance leap when they started doing it.

1:04:27So I think they bit the bullet and went with it.

1:04:31I do think that that's the reason. I think that if Android didn't use a just-in-time

1:04:37compiler for their JavaScript engine, that Apple wouldn't have it in Safari either.

1:04:44In fact, I know that they had it for a while and didn't deploy it until...

1:04:49And if there were a way that they could make... Nitro's the one that everybody gets, right?

1:04:55Or is Nitro the one that has the just-in-time compiler? It doesn't matter, I guess.

1:05:00I think Nitro's a joke.

1:05:01Well, the slower one that all the other WebKit using apps get on iOS, if they could make

1:05:07it just as fast, but without the executable bits in memory, they would do it.

1:05:13People who think that Apple's being spiteful to slow down other people's browsers on iOS

1:05:17are nuts.

1:05:18They don't want anything on iOS to be slow.

1:05:20You know what?

1:05:21Let's actually explain what happens.

1:05:22So the JavaScript comes down, and it gets compiled into code, like honest-to-god code

1:05:28that's going to run on the CPU.

1:05:30And then that's put into memory, and that memory is marked as being executable, which means that the CPU will be able to interpret that code and run it.

1:05:37That leads to horrible potential exploits.

1:05:42Because then if you can put your own code into those same memory spots, it can do whatever it wants.

1:05:50Because it's marked as being executable.

1:05:54Yeah, including stealing your passwords because it's running under Safari, so it has access to the passwords.

1:05:59It has access to everything that Safari has access to.

1:06:02Yeah, or it has—which is a risk that they decide that they're okay with because they control Safari.

1:06:08But if it was running inside a WebView inside any other app, it would have access to everything that that app had access to,

1:06:14including potentially anything you're writing, anything you're working on.

1:06:18And anything you've given the app permission to.

1:06:21to be an app that you've given permission to access your location, then the exploit

1:06:26has access to your location.

1:06:28Yeah.

1:06:29It's a horror show for Apple if that kind of stuff gets out in terms of PR.

1:06:32And even worse, it's really, really bad for the user because there's private information.

1:06:37Whereas the way things really are is that iOS has a rule that in third-party apps, memory

1:06:43can't be marked as executable.

1:06:45Right.

1:06:46So there are bugs in other apps and stuff like that, but one thing that an exploit can't

1:06:50do is inject code into memory and have that code executed.

1:06:55Which is actually what a lot of these jailbreak apps and additions do,

1:07:04is that they work sort of like old school classic extensions where they inject themselves into

1:07:09running processes and sort of mess with them in order to add features.

1:07:12So that's sort of the benevolent way of sort of using this kind of stuff.

1:07:16The malevolent way is kind of a horror show. You have no idea what's going to happen.

1:07:21Anyway, so I think they're reasonably pretty good on security. I think they've got a wider target area than some of the other companies.

1:07:31Next on my list was MobileMe, which clearly is the weak spot of the company.

1:07:38Still remains the weak spot of the company. If anything, I probably should have made this the biggest issue after Steve Jobs, in hindsight.

1:07:45And my next slide is really the same thing. It shouldn't really have been a separate one. I added it under backups.

1:07:51And that any data loss is a tragedy. And clearly the way this should work is it should all just go to the cloud.

1:07:59Yeah. I mean, I think if you were right now, these two should collapse into one thing.

1:08:03But at the time, we didn't have iCloud backup. They've done pretty well with this.

1:08:09Like the way your phone comes back up to the cloud is pretty good.

1:08:14What do you think about iCloud files? Because I think I've got a bone to pick with you on this, I think.

1:08:21I think it's a good idea overall, but that they've got to have an official system-wide way of moving documents between apps.

1:08:32Okay. So I think you're sort of an advocate of the way Dropbox works. Would you like to see that?

1:08:42I don't think so. I don't think Apple should do Dropbox. I don't because I feel like Dropbox exposes...

1:08:47It is a file system. I don't think that they should expose a file system. I think they should expose a file picker.

1:08:52You know, I feel... You know, sort of... I'm not saying the interface would be the same, but basically the way that iOS has always allowed you to have this shared collection of photos that any app can access.

1:09:03you should be able to get files from another app the same way, and that the system would provide it.

1:09:08It's a hard problem to solve and to come up with an interface that is simple, but it's ridiculous, though, that if you've got a PDF in one app, that you can't get it into another app on iOS.

1:09:25I'm disappointed to hear you say that because that's exactly the point I wanted to make.

1:09:29Tell me that I'm wrong.

1:09:30I thought you...

1:09:31No, no, you're exactly right. I thought you were like an advocate of the Dropbox kind of way.

1:09:36I totally agree with you. I think what we should have is some kind of sheet that pops up that you can give it...

1:09:43You can tell it what types of data you can absorb.

1:09:50give it PDFs or images or text files,

1:09:54and a system designed picker will come up,

1:09:58just like the photos want, and it'll be media specific,

1:10:01so if it's images, it'll be images,

1:10:02or you can tap on it and get sort of quick look style

1:10:06previews of what you're gonna open.

1:10:08I don't think file systems should make a comeback.

1:10:12- And if you want it, Dropbox exists, use Dropbox, right?

1:10:17I don't feel that they should try to solve the problem

1:10:19the problem that Dropbox has solved. I feel like they should, but they should, the only thing they should copy from Dropbox is the reliability.

1:10:25Oh, sure. Yeah.

1:10:28But the arbitrarily nested folders thing? No, forget it. It's a mess.

1:10:33I agree. Yeah. And this is one of the, like, one of Syracuse's bugbears is

1:10:38file systems and their reliability.

1:10:43I think that that doesn't really matter that much.

1:10:47increasingly I'm seeing disk space, especially now that we've got SSDs and cloud stuff,

1:10:54as a third-level cache, right?

1:10:57Or a third-level swap, really.

1:10:59You've got your RAM, you've got your swap, and then you've got everything that's on the disk,

1:11:02and then you've got the cloud.

1:11:05So increasingly I think that the specifics of the way the file system works won't be that relevant.

1:11:12I agree.

1:11:13And, you know, I know that Apple is thinking about this.

1:11:17I don't know if they're thinking about doing it for iOS, but they're clearly thinking about

1:11:20the general problem, because Mac OS X, now that it has sandboxing, has this, you know,

1:11:27ways to get data from one sandboxed app to another, which is that the open and save dialog

1:11:35box isn't from the app.

1:11:38It's part of the system.

1:11:39and you show this and the system has the right

1:11:42to poke through the sandbox from one to another.

1:11:46And because, what do they call it, intense?

1:11:48It's not like Google intense,

1:11:49but it's the fact that you the user have chosen the file

1:11:54that they know that it's safe to say

1:11:56that this other app can access this file

1:11:59from the sandboxed app because--

1:12:01- So long as it's an explicit action by the user,

1:12:03it's good. - Right.

1:12:04And that's what I think could conceptually,

1:12:08I'm not saying that the interface is easy to design, but conceptually, though, that's exactly what iOS needs.

1:12:13And that you, the app, can't just open the file from the other app silently.

1:12:18You need the system picker and the user's explicit action, and now you've got it.

1:12:23Yeah.

1:12:28And that, again, goes back to the technical debt thing and Springboard, the complexity of the code base that is Springboard.

1:12:33the code base at Springboard, in that implementing something like Google Intents or what's a Microsoft one called,

1:12:40Contracts, where an interface from some other app is presented inside the currently running app,

1:12:49is currently sort of tricky to do on iOS.

1:12:52And I think that that kind of flexibility is going to be required if we're to sort of get this cross application,

1:13:01not communication, but interoperability, which I think iOS, I think that that's a sore spot for iOS.

1:13:08And I think if we're going to move forward with it, that's going to have to be fixed.

1:13:11To get more people only to be using iOS devices, as opposed to sometimes using iOS devices,

1:13:17but needing a Mac or even a Windows machine for X, Y, and Z.

1:13:22Right.

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1:15:34- How do you like your Apple TV?

1:15:36- What?

1:15:38- How do you like your Apple TV?

1:15:39- I love my Apple TV.

1:15:39- Yeah.

1:15:41- Do you like your Apple TV?

1:15:42That was one of my next slides.

1:15:43- I love it.

1:15:44I've got a list, I've got a list here somewhere.

1:15:47I love it. I use it all the time. I think it's kind of fundamentally screwed up in that you can't search across services.

1:15:56There's so many people talking about this future TV panel thing that I don't know what to believe.

1:16:07I think that's misdirection. I really do think that the secret of Apple TV is that what their secret plan for Apple TV is, what they've already shown us.

1:16:16They've already shown us. It is that little $100 box.

1:16:19I really think that the people waiting

1:16:21for this amazing iPhone-like moment

1:16:25of here's the real Apple TV

1:16:27and it's a $2,500 TV set or something like that,

1:16:30I think that they shouldn't hold their breath.

1:16:33- Yeah, so I've written about this before,

1:16:35but I think the only way that they would do it

1:16:37is if the panel that they ship

1:16:40is effectively just like an AirPlay receiver

1:16:44and the box is, you know, it comes with the box,

1:16:47but you can buy the box every year to update it.

1:16:51And I can only see them doing a panel if they,

1:16:53I don't know, buy up all the production capacity

1:16:56for a factory and they just end up stuck

1:16:58with a bunch of huge panels for some reason.

1:17:01It's a weird product.

1:17:02I don't see them necessarily shipping it.

1:17:04- I've said before, and I'll say again,

1:17:05that in some sense it makes sense in terms

1:17:07of why sell a $100 device that you hook up

1:17:09to a $2,000 TV set and why not sell the $2,000 TV set?

1:17:13But in the time since I've been making that argument, A, TV set prices have dropped, and

1:17:20they're no longer a lot. Most people don't spend $2,000 on a 50-inch TV anymore. It's

1:17:25a lot less. And B, people just don't replace TV sets that frequently, right? I mean, there

1:17:30are idiots like me who Apple releases something new, and if I don't even need a new phone,

1:17:35I still go out and buy the new phone. But normal people…

1:17:39But I wouldn't do that with a TV.

1:17:40Right, normal people don't do that.

1:17:41And that's…

1:17:42Yeah.

1:17:43Yeah, and even I wouldn't replace my TV just because Apple came out with a TV, unless,

1:17:47I guess, if it had some amazing thing.

1:17:50I don't know what it would be, but I don't know.

1:17:53I just don't see what that would be.

1:17:54Well, that's why I say, like, if they did do it, it would just be like a sort of a dumb

1:17:59AirPlay receiver that…

1:18:01Because at least then, when they do update the box, you don't have to replace the actual

1:18:07expensive panel.

1:18:08But it certainly wouldn't. I mean, that would be a hobby.

1:18:11I can totally see. And you know, I know you would last time you were on the show, I think we talked

1:18:15about how that some new box we had a better remote control than IR would be great, you know, Bluetooth

1:18:204 or whatever the hell the low energy Bluetooth is. That's, but that's still that's the same idea

1:18:28that we have now, right? A new, it's a new $100 box with a better remote and therefore with the

1:18:32with a better remote, a better interface.

1:18:34So did you see that piece from MG

1:18:37recently about Apple

1:18:40basically eating the game console's lunch?

1:18:44I mostly agree with him. I keep meaning to write this up.

1:18:48But he totally sidestepped the interface.

1:18:52It's like, yeah, the compute power is connected to your TV,

1:18:56but there's no way to make a game out of it because the remote control stinks

1:19:00in its IR. So I think, yeah, like a box with some kind of Bluetooth would be good.

1:19:05And I think he's right in that it could do really well, because it's cheap.

1:19:09And I think this is probably the last generation of dedicated game consoles we're going to see.

1:19:13I think so, too. And that's partly why I was so pessimistic

1:19:18about the PlayStation 4 launch, or "launch."

1:19:22And I know, you know, I called it a shit show. They didn't show the box, didn't give a price,

1:19:26didn't give a thing. And a lot of the response from people who follow games are like, "You

1:19:30don't know shit about games. Who cares what the box looks like? It's just a box. It can

1:19:36look like anything. It doesn't matter."

1:19:37And I see the point of that, that it's a thing you just stick in your media cabinet, and

1:19:42it doesn't really matter what it looks like. But that's not my point. My point isn't that

1:19:46I really want to see the box. My point was that they blew all of this press on a thing

1:19:51that they clearly haven't finished designing yet, right? That they've wasted all of this

1:19:56energy and attention, and they're clearly not done yet.

1:20:00That's my point. And I think that they've got to get their shit together,

1:20:04because if they don't see Apple TV and Apple TV-like devices

1:20:08as a bigger threat to their PlayStation business than

1:20:12Xbox, then they're nuts. And I think Microsoft gets it.

1:20:16I think Microsoft totally sees that Xbox needs to get

1:20:20more like Apple TV. I tend to agree.

1:20:24So the thing that you're missing about the PS4, because you don't really follow this stuff, is that they are actually addressing a lot of the reasons why iOS devices are more popular, or not more popular, but why they have such mindshare in the gaming world now.

1:20:38You know, you'd boot up your PS3, you'd have to wait for, like, ages to get a software update. The games, you'd have to wait for, like, gigabytes to download to patch.

1:20:49And a lot of the PS4 announcement was about them smoothing out that sort of trouble.

1:20:55I just don't think they needed to announce it now, though.

1:20:57I think they should have borrowed a page from Apple and waited until the thing was closer to being done.

1:21:03And yes, I know that to get the games out, the developers have to be in on the technical details of it and to have games.

1:21:12And that's not the way they worked out.

1:21:13But that's, yeah, you do that in the back channels, right?

1:21:15Yeah, exactly.

1:21:16And sure, John Carmack is going to know all the details of it because you want to have some awesome game from him on the system.

1:21:23But you don't do a press event for that.

1:21:27No, no. I mean, Ubi has dev kits just down the street here. You don't need an event for that.

1:21:33I don't know why they were trying to show off. Maybe they were scared of Microsoft. I don't know.

1:21:38I don't follow that sort of side of the industry as much as I used to.

1:21:41But you know how Google always tries to announce...

1:21:44Remember they did the 3D maps before Apple announced their maps?

1:21:47It totally feels like that kind of lame, reactionary kind of thing.

1:21:51Right, that they somehow wanted to make an announcement first, whether they were ready to or not.

1:21:56Yeah, it's just boneheaded.

1:21:59So yeah, I think Apple TV is interesting.

1:22:03I think what they need to do is release or beef up their Bluetooth stack

1:22:09so that people can build controllers to work with games.

1:22:13Like, let's say Nintendo, the Wii U is not selling great.

1:22:17I don't think Nintendo should get it out of hardware. What I'd love to...

1:22:21What could be an interesting path going forward is to make their own controllers that work

1:22:25with software that you can download onto an Apple TV or whatever

1:22:29Google happens to have at the time.

1:22:33I could see something like that. I don't know. But maybe. I don't know.

1:22:37Because consoles have lasted six, seven years now.

1:22:41Can you imagine where the Apple TV is going to be in seven years?

1:22:45Yeah.

1:22:46Like they iterate relentlessly every year on this kind of stuff.

1:22:50And it's just going to get more and more powerful.

1:22:53And the way that the game console business works is totally going to get sideswept by,

1:22:58if not Apple TV, something like it.

1:23:00I totally agree.

1:23:03And I feel like it's difficult to have a six, seven year

1:23:08project-- almost impossible to have that sort of schedule now.

1:23:12Yeah.

1:23:13You can't do it.

1:23:15It is a good question.

1:23:16What will Apple TV be like in six or seven years?

1:23:19It could be tiny, silent, and have incredible graphics.

1:23:24Yeah.

1:23:25Because by that time, a 1080p screen

1:23:28is going to be tiny in terms of pixel count.

1:23:31I mean, that's nothing.

1:23:32I mean, we're already close to it on our phones, and some phones actually have it, other brands.

1:23:38Yeah, I don't know.

1:23:42I think that you could easily saturate the pipeline to a 1080p TV set six, seven years

1:23:49from Apple TV.

1:23:50>>

1:23:50I mean, you saw what Cable and Panic put up, right?

1:23:55Yeah.

1:23:56What's it called? The adapter, the HDMI adapter.

1:23:59Lightning to HDMI.

1:24:01Has a little ARM chip in it.

1:24:03It's a computer.

1:24:05Running iOS.

1:24:06Right.

1:24:07They said, what did they say?

1:24:102 MB, or 2 gigabits of RAM.

1:24:16made you at first it made it sound like it had two gigabytes of RAM which I thought was insane

1:24:20I thought it had to be wrong and it is wrong it's two gigabits not bytes which is 256 megabytes but

1:24:25still 256 megabytes of RAM isn't that what the original iPhone had or did the iPhone have 512

1:24:32I think it could have been 256 I think that it has that the adapter has as much RAM as the original

1:24:39- Yeah.

1:24:40(laughs)

1:24:41This is an adapter too.

1:24:43And they don't even,

1:24:44they don't pretend it's anything smart.

1:24:46- Right.

1:24:47- But it's running little iOS on it.

1:24:50So yeah, this, it's,

1:24:51you know, Apple TV's going places, I think.

1:24:54I mean, you could easily cram Apple TV

1:24:57- Let me see something.

1:24:59- Within a few years into the,

1:25:00that kind of form factor that you just stick

1:25:02into the back of your TV and you're done, you know?

1:25:04- Right.

1:25:04I mean, maybe the--

1:25:06- Actually, maybe that's it.

1:25:07Maybe it's just an HDMI thing,

1:25:08like it's like little dongles.

1:25:09dongle you just stick it right in there.

1:25:10Yeah, would it need power though?

1:25:12It would need power, right?

1:25:13Can you get power from HDMI like USB?

1:25:17This is an interesting question.

1:25:18I don't know.

1:25:24This is awesome listening.

1:25:28Getting power from an HDMI cable.

1:25:32There's a page here on Stack Overflow that says the original iPhone...

1:25:35The page...

1:25:36Go ahead, sorry.

1:25:37The original iPhone had 128 megabytes of RAM, and it didn't go to 256 until the 3GS, and then the 4 had 512.

1:25:44The 4S had 512, and now the 5 has a gigabyte? Is that right?

1:25:48Yeah, that seems to jive with my recollection, yeah.

1:25:51So the Lightning to HDMI adapter has twice the RAM on the original iPhone.

1:25:57You know what, though? It kind of makes sense, because they'd need it for a framebuffer, right?

1:26:01That's insane, though.

1:26:02That is insane. It's totally crazy, yeah.

1:26:04Right.

1:26:05So you know what? So I found this out. HDMI cable supports 5 volts of power.

1:26:10Huh.

1:26:11So it's quite possible that you could plug in an Apple TV HDMI dongle.

1:26:16Right. And then have—you wouldn't see it, but you don't need line of sight because it's going to use Bluetooth instead of IR.

1:26:21Exactly.

1:26:22Right.

1:26:24Oh, man. I think that could be it. That'd be great. The only thing is would be—

1:26:28And if it's not it, we just designed an awesome product for them.

1:26:30Right.

1:26:31You're welcome, guys.

1:26:32(laughing)

1:26:34The last item on my list from that talk I gave in 2010

1:26:38was about box credits, by which I meant

1:26:40that I thought it might be problematic

1:26:42and that Apple should go back to letting

1:26:45the people who make their products

1:26:46somehow get credit for them.

1:26:48- Right.

1:26:49- And that maybe that'll be,

1:26:50but I do think it ties in with retention too, right?

1:26:53That if you want to make a name for yourself in your career,

1:26:56it's really, really hard to do that at Apple

1:26:58because there's only a handful of executive level

1:27:02employees who they allow to do so.

1:27:04Yeah, with the occasional, Mike, I forgot his name again, Randy Uberos, kind of weird

1:27:10starlet sort of spots, you know?

1:27:12Right.

1:27:13And I'm so curious about what the thinking is behind, like, why does Randy Uberos get

1:27:19to get credit by name and come up and do that, you know, and what's his name does, Jeff

1:27:24Robbins, the iTunes guy.

1:27:27There's a handful of guys who get to do that, but very few.

1:27:30Well, both of those got bought in through purchase, didn't they?

1:27:34Yeah, but I don't think that's the only explanation.

1:27:36Well, I think they also sort of...

1:27:38They're pillars in what Steve loved, right?

1:27:42He loved iMovie.

1:27:44He loved iMovie to the expense of chasing down music when he should have, right?

1:27:51Right.

1:27:51And then he bought iTunes, and that did really well.

1:27:54So it's kind of the two pillars of media that sort of get that little...

1:27:58Right. But it is a… To me, it just plays into your argument though that talent retention

1:28:04is a problem. And one of the areas that they're clearly weak about, I think, is allowing employees

1:28:10to take credit. And I'm not saying that they should broadcast it. I'd realize that

1:28:14marketing-wise, it's much stronger to put Apple behind it.

1:28:18Designed by Apple in California.

1:28:20But to me, it's like Pixar is the example where it's… Pixar is way, way more heavily

1:28:25promoted than any, you know, the directors are, but they certainly give credit to the

1:28:29directors, you know, and it's not like, you know, and the argument with Apple, the original

1:28:35argument behind getting rid of about box credits was that it was being used by poachers, recruiters

1:28:42to poach talent, but that's, and today that's absurd, right, with LinkedIn and I mean, Apple

1:28:48employees are allowed to have LinkedIn profiles or at least they do have them and whether

1:28:52I mean, the idea that that's what recruiters need, that recruiters can't poach from Apple because the apps don't have about box credits. It defies belief. It's goofy.

1:29:03I mean, not to mention the legal deals, not to cross recruit people.

1:29:08Right. If a recruiter looks at an Apple product, just pick an app, and says, "I want to see if I can hire some people who wrote this for Apple." They're going to find out who it was. It's not that hard.

1:29:20Yeah, no, it's not hard. Yeah, I'd like to see about box credits. I don't know if that's such a big deal. I don't know if people care really anymore.

1:29:27Yeah, I don't know.

1:29:29Like, it used to be a big thing. Like, I would love to see my name in the credits.

1:29:33Right.

1:29:34I don't know if people care that much anymore. Maybe they do. I don't know.

1:29:38I don't know. I would like to know. I don't know. I like credits. I sit through the credits in the movies, you know.

1:29:44- Yeah, me too, very much so.

1:29:46But what I like about this is that you're right,

1:29:50this is another form of retention, right?

1:29:52Like you wanna give people credit for their work

1:29:54and sort of thank them for spending their talent

1:29:58on making things for Apple.

1:29:59- Right.

1:30:00- So yeah, and I think that's increasingly

1:30:04gonna be a problem, but we'll see, yeah.

1:30:07- Anything else to add?

1:30:09Do you think that the,

1:30:11I think that that covers the actual problems that Apple faces.

1:30:15Yeah, this is a good list. I actually forgot that you've given this talk, but it's pretty good.

1:30:19I don't see

1:30:23competitive pressure being that much of an issue for Apple.

1:30:27Do you? I mean, so there's all this market share stuff, but like we were talking at the top

1:30:31about the watch, it totally depends on how you define a market, right?

1:30:35I don't think so. I don't think that's the problem, really. I don't think

1:30:39they have a problem with that. Do you think the share price matters? I don't

1:30:47really think so. I guess if it fell significantly further, it might, because at some point,

1:30:55the shareholders could disrupt the actual way that the company is being run, that they'd

1:30:59have to respond. But part of the advantage of having the amount of cash that they have

1:31:04is that the share price can't fall that much further.

1:31:07Right?

1:31:08Like Apple is--

1:31:09Well, that's in theory, right?

1:31:10Like you can't actually have a company that's valued less than its cash pile.

1:31:13Right.

1:31:14I guess that is true.

1:31:15But it gets to the point, though, where it's starting to really get--

1:31:17It's obviously stupid.

1:31:19Right.

1:31:20There's all sorts of ways that the stock price can be irrational, but at a certain level,

1:31:26it can't get that low on a PE level, right, as long as the earnings stay up.

1:31:31I think that it's already as low as it is because there's clearly some people who

1:31:34trade the stock who actually think that their earnings are going to fall.

1:31:38Whereas I think that the problem, if insofar as it's a problem, is that they're just slow,

1:31:44the growth is significantly slowing down because they've sat, you know, they've reached a point

1:31:48where not where the phone market is saturated, but where it's closer to saturated, where it's

1:31:54more in equilibrium, that they're really just up against the pace at which people around the world

1:32:00are able to, and are willing to, switch from dumb phones to smart phones.

1:32:06Whereas they had a couple of years of growth where it was, you know, they weren't near that limit.

1:32:12Well, yeah, it was explosive, right? It was a whole new thing.

1:32:15And it just, what used, like, I didn't used to care about smart phones.

1:32:19I don't know about you. I had like a Motorola, like a Razr.

1:32:22I remember, I can't remember who wrote it, but somebody wrote a story in like 2006 about,

1:32:28it might have been, what's his name, the coding horror guy.

1:32:33Oh, Jeff Atwood.

1:32:34Yeah, it might have been, and if not, it was somebody who I've filed in my head as being

1:32:38like Jeff Atwood, but who had a Windows Mobile smartphone, you know, the old Windows Mobile,

1:32:45and was saying about how amazing it is.

1:32:46And yes, the phone, you know, and it was like fully aware that the phone is kind of janky

1:32:49in a lot of ways, in all the ways that like the iPhone came and just blew them away.

1:32:54But he was just talking about how awesome it is to be able to just Google things whenever

1:32:57you want.

1:32:58And that was pretty much his whole argument came down to whoever wrote it, their argument

1:33:02came down to it's kind of amazing to be able to Google and get Google to answer a question

1:33:07anytime anywhere.

1:33:09And that you could do that on this phone and that he can't believe how many, you know,

1:33:13for all the flaws of these devices, he can't believe that anybody, you know, who could

1:33:17have one doesn't.

1:33:18And it did kind of make me think, hmm, maybe.

1:33:22Then I looked at them and I was like, ugh.

1:33:26I don't think that the stock price matters that much, because I just don't see how the

1:33:31P/E value can go much lower than it is now. I think that the company will largely still

1:33:36continue to be undervalued overall.

1:33:38Here's one thing. I think that the stock price may have some impact on retention.

1:33:45I just read my mind. There's another possible problem where if the share price stagnates,

1:33:54giving out stock options doesn't really mean anything, right?

1:33:59Right.

1:34:00I think Microsoft ran into that for a while, too.

1:34:03Although, yeah, they definitely did.

1:34:06Because that was, you know, and I remember reading about it.

1:34:09I think I might have even been in the novel micro-surfs,

1:34:12where there came a point where the stock was going up, up, up,

1:34:16and all employees had a lot of options.

1:34:19But there came a point where when the stock stopped going up, up, up,

1:34:23that there were like two classes of employees in the company.

1:34:26They were the ones who were millionaires and the ones who just had nice jobs,

1:34:30you know, with a good salary.

1:34:31But you didn't even, you know, and it was just, you know, at a certain point,

1:34:34the people who'd been there for so long were all, you know,

1:34:38millionaires many times over in terms of their net worth

1:34:40because of these options they had.

1:34:41And the new hires had no hope of getting that.

1:34:44Right. And then words, you know, everybody, you know,

1:34:46everybody seemed to realize that.

1:34:48And so it became a less attractive place to go work.

1:34:51Because it used to be, for a while it was, if you could get a job at an engineer at Microsoft,

1:34:55if you did it and you did a good job, within three or four years you'd be a millionaire.

1:35:00I don't know if a lot of people go to Apple for that kind of financial reward.

1:35:03No, I don't think so either.

1:35:04I think they go to, for lack of a better word or phrase, change the world.

1:35:12That you can work on products at Apple that you can have an effect on people that you can't have anywhere else.

1:35:19Which interestingly is what Zuckerberg is pitching people now.

1:35:23I think he's probably right.

1:35:25Maybe.

1:35:26Yeah. Well, it's possible.

1:35:28In a different way, you know?

1:35:29Right.

1:35:31It's possible because Facebook, you could probably argue,

1:35:33has more users than any other thing.

1:35:38I'd guess so, I don't know.

1:35:39Google search probably has more, I guess,

1:35:41but that's just Google search.

1:35:43I don't think any other Google product has the reach that search does.

1:35:47No, I don't think anybody is as engaged with any other service more than Facebook.

1:35:51Right.

1:35:52Like the most of the people.

1:35:53And that's a total black hole to me.

1:35:54I know nothing about it, and I know you're the same way.

1:35:57It's one of those, like, yeah, kind of feeling like a...

1:36:01May get blindsided from that.

1:36:02Right.

1:36:03Yeah.

1:36:04Because eventually at some point, me and you were the only two people on the planet who

1:36:07aren't using Facebook.

1:36:09Yeah, exactly.

1:36:10Right.

1:36:11Could happen.

1:36:12It's probably going to happen sooner rather than later.

1:36:13I actually have an account.

1:36:14I just never check it.

1:36:15No, I don't even have an account.

1:36:16Yeah. So there you go, boys and girls. Somebody sign up as Jon Gruber.

1:36:21I think there are, in fact, a couple of—I don't know if there are even parody accounts,

1:36:25but—and somebody set up a Daring Fireball account, like an unofficial—for all I know, it's incredibly active,

1:36:31and there's a thriving group of people commenting on everything I write on the site, and I have never seen it.

1:36:37I don't know. Somebody wrote—somebody did it, and they wrote to me afterwards, and were like,

1:36:43like, "I hope you're okay with it." I don't think I ever—I think I gave no answer. I didn't say,

1:36:48"I'm okay with it." I didn't say, "I'm not okay with it." I just ignored it.

1:36:52Well, are they taking your stuff or just—

1:36:53No, no, no. Actually, I don't know. I have no idea. Maybe they are. Maybe they're republished.

1:36:59I have no idea what it is. I've never seen it. All I know is that there's an unofficial

1:37:04Daring Fireball account. I don't know. I have no idea what it is. I was going to say, "No,

1:37:12I think they're just discussing my stuff, but maybe they're republishing it.

1:37:16So that brings us to something I've been wanting to talk about. I'm selling

1:37:20Daring Fireball t-shirts. Is that a problem?

1:37:24Well, as long as you stick to Canada, I guess it's fine.