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The Talk Show

10: The Next Big Thing, with MG Siegler

 

00:00:00   That seems nuts though. You're saying that there's hotels that have Wi-Fi access that

00:00:06   you can't do on a phone, like on an iPhone.

00:00:09   Right, because of the pop-up thing. Because there's a lot of them out there that want

00:00:13   you still to watch some kind of, you know, either ad or click on something that requires

00:00:18   a pop-up, and the iPhone doesn't like that too much. And then not to mention all the

00:00:24   ones that are not just tailored at all for a mobile experience.

00:00:28   And so, you know, it's either a combination of quick zooming so you can get it and hit

00:00:35   a button before it zooms back out because it's just completely not tailored.

00:00:39   I saw one where you had to go through – you had to click to a terms and agreements thing

00:00:46   in a web view.

00:00:48   And I don't know how they programmed it, but it was a tiny, tiny little button.

00:00:52   And I don't know how they did it, but every time you pinch-zoomed on the iPhone, it would

00:00:56   instantly go back out to the full size.

00:00:59   Yeah, yeah, I've seen the exact same thing.

00:01:02   It's an unzoomable web page.

00:01:03   And so it leaves you like the tiniest touch target in the history of touch.

00:01:08   It's like one pixel on the iPhone screen that you have to get your touch centered on.

00:01:13   It's crazy.

00:01:14   Yeah.

00:01:15   You really would need sandpaper to whittle down your fingers at that point.

00:01:18   So we're recording, today is Tuesday, July 24, but we're not releasing the show until

00:01:26   tomorrow and that will be after the Mountain Lion embargo.

00:01:29   So we will talk, we can talk Mountain Lion.

00:01:32   Yes we can.

00:01:34   Because everybody, we're all signed up on the NDA and everything like that.

00:01:37   But before we get to that, I was thinking we should talk about Marissa Mayer.

00:01:41   Is it Mayer or Mayer?

00:01:43   It's Mayer.

00:01:44   Even though it's spelled like Mayer.

00:01:47   So that's one of those things where I don't think I've ever talked about her on the

00:01:52   show.

00:01:53   And if I don't talk about somebody, I don't really know how to pronounce their name often.

00:01:56   So it ends up, I think this is a good move for Yahoo.

00:02:00   I don't see how they could possibly have gotten a better CEO.

00:02:03   Yeah, and it was totally out of left field.

00:02:07   It makes sense in hindsight, but no one was really thinking that.

00:02:10   I'm not sure exactly why, but no one was.

00:02:13   There was no rumor.

00:02:14   There was no whisper about it.

00:02:16   thinking that this was a possibility. I guess it's just because Yahoo has had such a string

00:02:21   of either boring hires or kind of obvious things. And there were reports that the Ross

00:02:28   Levinson guy, who was the interim CEO, was just going to get the job and they were kind

00:02:32   of going through the motions, interviewing a few of the people.

00:02:34   That's what I expected, too.

00:02:36   Did you read, I think Stephen Levy had a good post, I think it was yesterday, for Wired,

00:02:42   talking about Marissa Mayer's role at Google where, obviously she was there for a long

00:02:49   time and her role evolved over the time she was in charge of search and then most recently

00:02:53   she was in charge of the local stuff, but she also started and ran the program called

00:02:58   APM, which is Associate Product Manager, I think.

00:03:02   No, I didn't see this.

00:03:05   So basically she was running what is effectively inside Google a leadership training program.

00:03:12   And they had a few hundred people go through this under her through, you know, the decade

00:03:17   or so that she was running it.

00:03:19   And these people include like Brett Taylor, who is the guy who eventually would go on

00:03:22   to become CTO of Facebook.

00:03:26   They have the guy who's in charge of Chrome, not Sundar Pichai, another guy who's just

00:03:33   under him who's kind of spearheading that program.

00:03:36   And he's the one who actually took over the APM project.

00:03:39   But anyway, the long story short is that Steven Levy writes this pretty good post suggesting

00:03:44   that Marissa Meyer is even more better equipped to handle this Yahoo CEO job because she really

00:03:52   trained the cream of the crop at Google and now has these great relationships.

00:03:57   They've all stayed in touch.

00:03:58   They're supposedly all very close.

00:03:59   They would go on these long trips together and for one of them, Levy was embedded somewhere

00:04:04   in Africa, I think, or Eastern Europe. And they would do these once a year, and they

00:04:09   would all form these tight bonds, and they'd stay in touch after all these years. Most

00:04:12   of those people have obviously since left Google, but now, of course, Meyer still has

00:04:18   those relationships that she could potentially bring in. If she could even bring in, you

00:04:22   know, five or six of those people, that's potentially huge right there for Yahoo.

00:04:28   I've long had the sense that, not that she was on the outs at Google, but that, and other

00:04:34   people have said that she hit a glass ceiling. But she wasn't going – there was nowhere

00:04:38   above at Google that she was going to get to move up to.

00:04:41   Right.

00:04:42   And I kind of get the sense that she hasn't been as influential as she was in the past.

00:04:48   Yeah. It seems like the early days, she was whatever the 10th employee or something like

00:04:53   that. And everyone was probably doing a lot of work back then and through the time when

00:04:58   there were 100 employees. And she was one of the senior people and she was in charge

00:05:02   you know, there's the talk that she was in charge of the design aesthetic and all that kind of stuff and then as they slowly

00:05:07   Transition from to more than a search engine. I think her role just kept getting diminished and diminished and then finally

00:05:14   Whenever it was a couple years ago or something when they moved her off and who knows if they moved her off

00:05:19   She has to be moved off because she had just been working on it for so long

00:05:22   But moved off of search which is of course the bread and butter of Google still

00:05:25   You know it seemed from the outside that you know

00:05:29   They were just decided to go in a different direction and it was pretty telling that they didn't give her an SVP position

00:05:35   Even though you know of her seniority

00:05:38   You know, they had someone else running local this guy Jeff Huber

00:05:42   I believe was elevated to SVP of kind of local and commerce above her

00:05:46   So yeah, I think the writing was on the wall that she was eventually going to leave and it's surprising that they didn't

00:05:52   Elevate her to an SVP status, but who knows?

00:05:57   That's what the difference is.

00:05:58   Yeah, you never know what the inside politics are.

00:05:59   But from the outside, I always thought that she was of the Google that I liked best.

00:06:06   And I think that – and it's also – it's the sort of thing like with Apple where you

00:06:09   just – you take some of this stuff for granted that it's as simple as it is.

00:06:14   But I think like the fact that the Google homepage is just a search field and two buttons,

00:06:21   you can say, "Well, anybody could do that."

00:06:23   But I think that by … I can't even imagine how many times she had to say no to things

00:06:30   that other people at Google wanted to do on that homepage.

00:06:33   Oh, yeah.

00:06:34   I mean, I remember, you know, every … since 10 years, 5 years, everyone keeps saying,

00:06:40   "Just imagine if they had like a giant display ad behind, you know, behind Google on Google.com.

00:06:46   You know, how many tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars would that generate

00:06:50   in revenue every single year?"

00:06:52   They just didn't do it.

00:06:55   Most accounts, that was her job and her insight to not mess up that main experience.

00:07:02   And that's what makes me optimistic about her being a good CEO for Yahoo is that she

00:07:08   obviously has that ability to say no.

00:07:10   I mean, that's like the famous Steve Jobs quote, that he's prouder of the things they

00:07:13   said no to than the things they actually said yes to because that's what keeps the company

00:07:18   focused.

00:07:19   Yeah.

00:07:20   say along those lines, I've met her a number of times. I don't know her all that well,

00:07:25   but we've chatted from time to time. I've talked to her on stage a few times. I will

00:07:30   say that my impression of her is that she's extremely opinionated, which I think is great

00:07:35   because she has things that she likes and she has her own ideas of what she wants to

00:07:41   do, and she's going to get them done because that's just who she is. All the accounts from

00:07:46   people who've worked under her at Google will say the same thing. It's just she's

00:07:50   not wishy-washy. She doesn't really have any understanding of what she's trying to

00:07:54   do. She knows what she wants to do and she goes for it. That's awesome.

00:07:57   Right. Ideally, I think the best type of leaders have extremely strong opinions loosely held.

00:08:03   Right? Like in other words…

00:08:05   Yeah, so they're valuable.

00:08:06   Right? In other words, like with Tim Cook talking about Steve Jobs, that guy had the

00:08:10   strongest opinions of anybody in the world, but he might change them tomorrow. Any of

00:08:15   them.

00:08:16   Right.

00:08:17   And those people often, at the time they may get upset or whatever in an argument, it seems

00:08:22   like they always fall back on the idea that they love it if someone can stand up to them

00:08:27   and can actually make their case to change their mind about it.

00:08:30   That's the best thing in the world for those people.

00:08:34   I often think, and it's just one of those ways that everything comes full circle a lot

00:08:40   of times is that famously, almost infamously, Yahoo had the chance to acquire Google in

00:08:47   the early days.

00:08:48   And, you know, didn't quite offer enough money and never happened.

00:08:55   But I think it's always been pretty clear that Google held up Yahoo as a, "Look, they

00:09:01   made mistakes that we don't want to make."

00:09:03   Mad Fientist Yeah, yeah.

00:09:04   And that helped them, no doubt.

00:09:06   It's funny because I still think of Google as the upstart and Yahoo as the old guard.

00:09:13   By now, by today's date, they're actually relatively the same age.

00:09:18   Yahoo wasn't formed that much earlier than Google.

00:09:20   It's just that those first few years of Yahoo were the explosive years of the dot

00:09:27   com.

00:09:28   Yeah, you still hear though, I talk to startups every once in a while who either cut some

00:09:32   kind of deal with Yahoo or do something with them where they kind of run a test on their

00:09:35   their homepage, and it's still an insane amount of crushing traffic that anyone would be happy

00:09:40   to get.

00:09:41   And that's why it's great that someone can actually steer that in the right direction.

00:09:45   There's no question that they still have a lot of people going there.

00:09:47   I think, what is it now?

00:09:49   It's not the number one most trafficked website anymore.

00:09:52   It might be two, it might be three, I don't know what it is, but it's way up there still.

00:09:56   Right.

00:09:57   And I think that's an opportunity.

00:09:58   I think that'll be the first thing that you see a change about.

00:10:02   I think that there – and I don't think any previous CEO at Yahoo has really left

00:10:09   a personal – like, "Wow, there's a new CEO in charge of Yahoo.

00:10:15   Look at the Yahoo.com."

00:10:16   Yeah, that's definitely true.

00:10:18   I think that should be the first thing that she does is make some changes that Yahoo.com

00:10:24   is – there's a new sheriff in town and there's focus at this company now.

00:10:30   She should put up – did you see that picture circulating around?

00:10:32   it's the Obama Hope picture, but it's of Marissa's face.

00:10:36   No.

00:10:37   It's supposedly being plastered around Yahoo's campus right now. It's pretty awesome.

00:10:43   I talked to a friend who works at Flickr, and there's definitely some optimism.

00:10:47   I'm excited for that. I mean, I just randomly logged on to Flickr for the first time. It

00:10:53   was so bad that I had to reset my Yahoo password. I didn't even remember what it was. So that's

00:10:57   That's how bad Yahoo was in my head.

00:11:00   So I reset my password and I logged into my Flickr account and it was expired.

00:11:04   I think it had just expired like six months ago because I had signed up for a two-year

00:11:08   paid plan.

00:11:10   So I'm excited to see if they can really not only turn the Yahoo brand around, but all

00:11:15   these sub-brands.

00:11:16   I really would like to use Flickr for something cool again and I'd like to sign up for my

00:11:20   Pro account.

00:11:21   I mean, they have tens of thousands of pictures just saved.

00:11:25   It's really nice that they actually don't delete them, even if you let your Pro account

00:11:28   expire.

00:11:29   They only let you see 100 of them, but they keep them all just in case.

00:11:32   That's great.

00:11:33   Yeah, there's definitely some opportunities there.

00:11:36   I also think...

00:11:38   What do you think she's going to do with the Microsoft deal in terms of, obviously, Bing

00:11:43   powers their search now.

00:11:44   They handle some of the front-end stuff.

00:11:46   They do some different things than Bing does itself with search.

00:11:50   How do you think that she'll approach that?

00:11:52   Well, that's what I honestly don't know.

00:11:54   I'm not close enough to…

00:11:57   I could see it going one of two ways.

00:11:58   I could see it where that gets abandoned in Yahoo and Google sort of because of their

00:12:05   personal relationships becomes semi-allies.

00:12:10   Or if it's bad blood, maybe it goes the other way.

00:12:16   Right.

00:12:19   In the initial stories of her leaving, there was one, I think it was a New York Times report

00:12:23   that said, "Mayor called Larry Page by phone that day to resign on the spot."

00:12:32   There's no two weeks notice or anything.

00:12:34   She just called by phone.

00:12:35   But of course, Larry Page has his voice issues or whatever, so maybe he wasn't around.

00:12:38   Who knows what the deal is with that.

00:12:41   But it seems like there's a little bit of bad blood between them, but who knows?

00:12:46   Maybe that's reading too much into it.

00:12:49   But I think you're absolutely right.

00:12:50   think it really that kind of is a pretty major factor in what she ends up doing. Maybe she

00:12:56   just looks at the numbers and realizes that the Microsoft deal is too good to kind of

00:13:00   dissolve. It's interesting that when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo a few years ago, remember

00:13:08   obviously Yahoo pushed back heavily and they were looking for anyone to help them, including

00:13:12   Google. And at one point they had kind of at least had a handshake agreement to do some

00:13:18   sort of similar advertising or search deal with Google that they ended up doing with

00:13:23   Microsoft, but they had to drop it because the government didn't officially look into

00:13:27   it, but all indications were that the government was going to look into it. But that was also

00:13:30   because Yahoo was by far the number two search engine at the time to Google, and Microsoft

00:13:36   was a non-player. Now Microsoft is number two, and I don't know, maybe the government

00:13:41   would be okay with Yahoo and Google tying up together, or maybe they still wouldn't.

00:13:46   Yeah, I don't know. I think it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.

00:13:49   And I think in hindsight, it'll become obvious how acrimonious it is that she left them.

00:13:55   You know, is it seen inside Google as a betrayal? Or is it, you know, good for her? And now

00:14:00   we're sort of like partners, sort of like and the comparison that I've seen other people

00:14:03   make is to Steven Elop, who was a Microsoft executive left for Nokia. And then as soon

00:14:09   as he got to Nokia forged this extremely tight bond.

00:14:14   Yes.

00:14:15   You know, that whereas it seems pretty obvious and the Nokia diehards, the people who don't

00:14:19   like that they don't have their own operating system anymore, see it as, you know, that

00:14:24   this was planned from the start, that he was like a mole in Nokia.

00:14:29   I think I alluded to that when it first happened.

00:14:33   That it was awesome that Microsoft got a plant in Nokia's area and I think that drew some

00:14:39   Iyer from Frank Shaw who's head of Microsoft Corporate Communications. They did not like

00:14:43   that too much. Well, I mean, however much it was planned and however much that, you

00:14:47   know, that this was agreed upon in advance. It certainly, in hindsight, has shown though

00:14:51   that Steven Elop's experience as a Microsoft executive certainly influenced his leadership

00:14:58   at Nokia in a very pro-Microsoft way. Yeah, that's definitely. Right, I mean, it doesn't

00:15:05   really matter whether you think that it's good or bad for Nokia, but that certainly

00:15:09   is the way it's played out.

00:15:11   I think we'll have to see if it's going to happen like that with Marissa Mayer.

00:15:15   Right.

00:15:16   There's something to be said for just doing what you know and what you've done for the

00:15:19   past decade or more, and that's like Marissa Mayer, Google runs very thick through her

00:15:26   blood, so maybe she does just turn to them for certain things that previous Yahoo CEOs

00:15:33   wouldn't have done.

00:15:34   thing that you brought up right after it happened which was interesting, you tweeted about,

00:15:39   does she use an iPhone or not? And I think a lot of people have kind of dug up that you

00:15:44   would see the little indications on Twitter and stuff that she was tweeting from an iPhone

00:15:48   and using Instagram in the early days and stuff like that. That's interesting because

00:15:53   it kind of also shows that she wasn't so ingrained in the Android culture that she's going to

00:15:58   bend over backwards to fork, make some kind of Yahoo phone or something that's only working

00:16:04   on Android. It seems like that won't happen, and that's great.

00:16:11   It wasn't just me trying to view everything from a "what's it mean for Apple" perspective.

00:16:16   Right. I think it shows that she has an open mind more than anything. That she wasn't just

00:16:21   another cog in the Google machine that just uses Android because you have to use Android

00:16:25   there. She was willing. And maybe it's great from her viewpoint of a competitive landscape.

00:16:30   Maybe she wanted to use iPhone. Maybe she liked it more. Maybe she wanted to use it

00:16:33   because she really felt like she needed to stay on top of what are the big emerging trends

00:16:38   out there.

00:16:39   Well, and the other thing that makes it interesting now that she's the CEO at Yahoo is that Yahoo,

00:16:45   it is quiet, but they have a bunch of partnerships with Apple as a content provider for the iPhone.

00:16:52   Yeah. And it's even more with iOS 6, right? Because they've already talked about the Siri

00:16:58   and sports integration. I think that's Yahoo Sports, right?

00:17:00   Yes, it is.

00:17:01   It's all the sports stuff in iOS 6 is powered by Yahoo Sports.

00:17:07   And Yahoo Sports is actually one of the powerhouse properties at Yahoo.

00:17:14   I mean for anybody who's not a huge sports fan, it's sort of quietly, everybody thinks

00:17:19   of things like Flickr and then search and Yahoo Mail and stuff like that.

00:17:24   But Yahoo Sports is easily top five sports site on the web.

00:17:29   Maybe –

00:17:30   I think it's two, it might be two. You know, you always hear these reports, like on ESPN,

00:17:35   you'll hear it on SportsCenter where they talk about a report from Yahoo Sports, and

00:17:39   that happens all the time. Part of it is because, a huge part of it is because they actually

00:17:44   invested quite heavily in original journalism on that side of things. And the plan, I think

00:17:50   way back when the plan was to kind of start that with Yahoo Sports, see if it would work,

00:17:54   and then go into other verticals, and they just never really did that to see if they

00:17:58   They could replace the AP or Reuters and become one of the main sources of wire news and whatnot.

00:18:04   But they did do a great job hiring at Yahoo Sports, and it remains a great place for breaking

00:18:10   sports news.

00:18:11   Yeah, and I think it's either number one or number two, probably after ESPN, I'm guessing.

00:18:18   Yeah, I would imagine ESPN's one.

00:18:21   Probably two, maybe CBS Sports, but I think it's probably Yahoo Sports.

00:18:24   And it's by far the biggest of the online-only properties.

00:18:29   So the ones that it competes with are mostly the TV ones, like ESPN and CBS Sports is big,

00:18:39   and probably Sports Illustrated.

00:18:40   Right, which CNN owns.

00:18:43   Yeah, that's part of it.

00:18:45   That's really interesting.

00:18:46   They're also huge, obviously, in finance rights.

00:18:51   That's what powers the iOS Stocks app, is still Yahoo financial information.

00:18:57   So that's another big vertical for them.

00:18:58   Yahoo News is still huge.

00:19:00   I think Google News may have overtaken it as a bigger property, but it's still a major

00:19:06   driving factor in what people use Yahoo for.

00:19:11   And I think that mobile is obviously a huge question going forward for Yahoo.

00:19:20   And Apple obviously has the whole shebang.

00:19:26   Google obviously has Android.

00:19:28   Microsoft has Windows Phone.

00:19:32   Yahoo doesn't really have its own, or not even, I shouldn't even say really, just doesn't

00:19:37   have any kind of mobile…

00:19:40   Right, they have no "in" of their own.

00:19:44   Right.

00:19:45   They're completely at the beck and call of these other players.

00:19:47   Right.

00:19:48   And I think it would be pointless for them to start.

00:19:51   I think that their play for mobile is, I think, to be a content provider.

00:19:56   Yes.

00:19:57   Right?

00:19:58   They absolutely should.

00:19:59   And that's working so far for iOS.

00:20:00   You would imagine that it won't work for the Google-flavored Android because they have

00:20:04   their own competing services across the board for all that stuff, for search, for sports.

00:20:10   Well not really for sports. Maybe they could do for sports, but for finance and for news.

00:20:14   But yeah, maybe sports and certainly maybe they could do something with Microsoft given

00:20:18   the Bing deal for Windows Phone. I think that's the way to do this.

00:20:23   Well and the other thing that struck me about Microsoft is now Microsoft is out of MSNBC.com.

00:20:31   They got out of the TV channel a while back, but they were still partners on the website

00:20:39   and now they're not.

00:20:40   So I do think there's some opportunities there where they can sort of try to play it

00:20:45   up across, not just Apple, but across the board try to get the Yahoo properties established

00:20:53   as the leading mobile providers.

00:20:56   Eric Meyer Yeah, that's smart.

00:20:58   I forget who it was.

00:20:59   Was it you?

00:21:00   who said like one simple goal for Yahoo, you know, like just talking about right

00:21:05   after the the hiring, talking what Yahoo should focus on, like just just try and

00:21:10   get one app on the main screen of like every iOS and Android device out there.

00:21:16   And I think that's good strategy I think. Yeah I think that's

00:21:20   absolutely, it's a clear goal, I think it's doable. Yeah,

00:21:27   Yeah, and so Apple also has the deals for Yahoo Mail.

00:21:32   Obviously, they've had that since the beginning.

00:21:34   And Yahoo Mail is sort of interesting,

00:21:36   because it's also-- I think Hotmail is bigger,

00:21:38   which is weird, but I think that's the biggest one.

00:21:41   And I think Yahoo Mail is still number two,

00:21:43   with Google quickly catching up to it.

00:21:45   But that's another property that's huge.

00:21:48   There's Yahoo Messenger.

00:21:49   It seems like IM is sort of falling by the wayside.

00:21:52   Maybe they can do some interesting video stuff

00:21:54   and compete with Skype more or something like that.

00:21:56   But these are things that tens of millions of people use every day, if not a hundred

00:22:01   million people.

00:22:02   It's kind of a crazy thing, their scale at that point.

00:22:05   Right.

00:22:06   And I think the other thing they've got to do is they've got to start thinking about

00:22:09   what's the next big thing.

00:22:11   Yes, absolutely.

00:22:13   And that will require bringing in some real outside thinkers, not just the people who

00:22:21   have obviously been at Yahoo for the past ten years.

00:22:24   You know, it sucks, but I hope that they do clear house quite a bit.

00:22:28   It seems like there's, you know, you don't want to call them dead weight, but it seems

00:22:31   like there's just a lot of people.

00:22:33   You talk to former and current Yahoo employees even, they just say, "People are just there

00:22:37   collecting a paycheck and they're not really inspired.

00:22:40   Maybe this hiring inspires 50% of them, but there's still going to be 50% who are just,

00:22:44   you know, just there kind of kicking around their B players when they need to be A players

00:22:49   kind of situation."

00:22:50   I totally agree.

00:22:53   I think they got to clean house, focus, focus, focus, get an app on, try to get one app on

00:23:00   everybody's home screen and then figure out what the next big thing that Yahoo can

00:23:05   start the market for.

00:23:06   Yeah.

00:23:07   Definitely.

00:23:08   I like our chances.

00:23:10   I really do.

00:23:12   I do too.

00:23:13   I think there's a reason why the consensus is that this is a good thing.

00:23:17   There's a few naysayers who say like, "Oh, well, she didn't get along with anyone at

00:23:20   at Google. But there's always going to be stories of, you know, and you can report any

00:23:25   story that you want. You can always find someone to say that. But I think that the general

00:23:29   consensus, you know, 90% of the people are saying that this is a good thing. I think

00:23:33   it actually is a good thing. And you never have seen this before, at least in recent

00:23:37   memory of Yahoo. Even when Jerry Yang came back.

00:23:39   Right.

00:23:40   It was, you know, it was like, eh, okay, so they're going to try and do like a Steve Jobs

00:23:44   rejuvenation type thing. But is this really going to work? And of course it didn't work

00:23:47   at all.

00:23:48   Right. Certainly success is definitely not assured, but I think it's definitely a possibility.

00:23:54   The opportunity is there. I also think, too, that anybody who says no a lot is obviously

00:24:01   going to make enemies. Maybe enemies is the wrong word, but they're going to have people

00:24:05   say, "I didn't like working under her because she said no to all this stuff."

00:24:08   Right. Yeah.

00:24:09   All right. Let me take a break, and let me thank our first sponsor. I love these guys.

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00:24:20   They started, the first time I noticed them, they have a product called the Glyph.

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00:24:29   And it's a brilliant little design because it's multi-use.

00:24:32   It's one little piece of plastic and rubber with a little tripod mount on one side.

00:24:37   So you snap it on the side of your iPhone and it fits on any standard tripod if you're

00:24:42   using it to shoot video.

00:24:44   great in conjunction with something like a GorillaPod, a little flexible tripod that

00:24:50   you can mount on just about anything. And you take the Glyph off, turn it sideways,

00:24:56   and it turns into a little prop up your iPhone like as an easel type thing. Use it all the

00:25:02   time for that. I watch baseball games on my iPhone. Use the Glyph to prop it up.

00:25:07   They've got another great little product called the Cosmonaut. It's a wide grip stylus,

00:25:14   sort of like a this sort of like a fat magic marker stylus for any touchscreen

00:25:21   first thing I think anybody thinks when they see it is well why is it so fat

00:25:25   why why isn't it a finer tip because the touch screens we have aren't meant for

00:25:30   fine tip styluses they're meant for something the size of a finger so the

00:25:36   cosmonaut has like a finger size stylus tip works great use it all the time my

00:25:42   My son loves it for using apps on the iPad like Color.

00:25:48   They also have, what else do they have?

00:25:49   They have an app.

00:25:50   It's Framographer.

00:25:52   It's a stop motion, time lapse, movie making app.

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00:26:09   Just two guys making products, selling them.

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00:26:23   Enter the talk show, all one word.

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00:26:31   Studio Neat, I want to thank these guys.

00:26:33   We wouldn't be doing the show without them.

00:26:38   Use a stylus with your iPad at all?

00:26:40   I never do.

00:26:41   This cosmonaut thing is sort of interesting.

00:26:44   I've seen it around before, but it looks kind of like a crayon.

00:26:49   One of those big fat crayons.

00:26:53   There was that story a couple days ago that, I forget who reported it, but that Microsoft

00:26:59   is looking into next generation styluses to use with their Surface devices or whatnot.

00:27:06   You're kind of reminded of the Steve Jobs quote that if you see a stylus, they blew

00:27:12   it.

00:27:13   But this one's good, huh?

00:27:14   This cosmonaut?

00:27:15   Yeah, well, it's good for – it's great for what the iPad is.

00:27:19   In fact, when they designed it, they had a blog post about it and they said, "Look,

00:27:24   if the tip has to be fat," and all the other styluses you see for the iPad, ones that it

00:27:29   will look like more like a regular pen's dimensions, still have like a pinky finger

00:27:34   size tip at the end because that's what the touch sensor is optimized for.

00:27:41   So no, it's not like writing with a fine tip pen and you can get tiny little handwriting.

00:27:46   It's like a marker.

00:27:47   But if that's what the tip has to be, why not give you a big thick marker in your hand?

00:27:52   It's almost like writing on a small white board instead of pen and paper.

00:27:57   **Matt Stauffer** Huh, that's interesting.

00:27:59   Okay.

00:28:00   Yeah.

00:28:01   Like given the practical aspects of what the iPad screen already supports as a touchscreen,

00:28:07   it's like an optimal marker for that.

00:28:09   **Matt Stauffer** Nice.

00:28:11   **Ezra Kleinman** And people often say to me, people often, you know, because I quote

00:28:15   the, "If you see a stylus, they blew it."

00:28:19   What Jobs meant about that though is a device that ships with a stylus and is intended...

00:28:24   **Matt Stauffer** Right, that requires it.

00:28:25   **Ezra Kleinman** Right, either requires it or is intended to be used a lot of the time.

00:28:30   Not that there's never a case for it.

00:28:32   I think an app like Paper or any of the drawing apps for the iPad absolutely work better with

00:28:38   a stylus than with a finger.

00:28:40   Eric Meyer Yeah.

00:28:42   And I think that's what the Galaxy Note has one, right?

00:28:45   The giant phablet.

00:28:46   And it's just so ridiculous the fact that it ships with one.

00:28:50   Steven

00:28:57   the – because I guess it is a big seller, especially in Korea, that they're going

00:29:02   to use the Note brand as a –

00:29:04   Well, it makes sense. I mean, it always – you know, someone once – I've only seen it

00:29:09   a couple times, but someone once had one on stage, and you know, you had them hold it

00:29:13   up to their face just to see how big it is. It's not that much different than the size

00:29:17   of the Galaxy 7, which is – or the Nexus 7, which is sort of funny. Yeah.

00:29:22   And speaking of which, about two weeks ago, you reviewed the Nexus 7 over at TechCrunch

00:29:28   and you liked it.

00:29:29   Yes, I did.

00:29:30   I did.

00:29:31   And I liked it a lot more than I expected to.

00:29:34   You know, I was gone.

00:29:37   I was abroad when Google I/O happened where they unveiled it.

00:29:40   And I was watching the Twitter chatter and I had heard a few things here and there about

00:29:45   what was coming.

00:29:47   And so it intrigued me because I wanted to see what the form factor was like.

00:29:50   I mostly wanted to see if Google would be able, Google and their partner Asus would

00:29:54   be able to create a decent even tablet for under $200 because we've all seen the Kindle

00:30:01   Fire, it sucks, you know, it's under $200 but Amazon's not making any money selling

00:30:07   it and it still sucks.

00:30:08   So I was very curious to see what, if it would be any good.

00:30:12   And so the initial reports coming out seemed to suggest that it was pretty good and so

00:30:16   Google was nice enough to send me one to take a look at.

00:30:19   you know, props to them, they know that I'm pretty negative towards Google in recent years

00:30:25   in general, but they know, I think, that if they actually make a good product, I'm going

00:30:29   to call it like I see it and say that it's a pretty good product, and I do believe that

00:30:32   this is a pretty good product. I think that, you know, a lot of people want to frame it,

00:30:39   of course, versus the iPad. It's different right now because one is, you know, a 9.7

00:30:46   One is a seven inch tablet and you you hear that in your mind and you think like oh, that's not the big difference

00:30:52   But diagonally speaking the screen size and everything. It's actually a pretty huge difference and that's I love the form factor of it and

00:30:59   You know as I said in my review

00:31:01   I think that this is the strongest case yet for why Apple should do something in this in this form factor and all indications

00:31:09   you know seem to be that they're going to do something maybe a little bit bigger of course, but

00:31:15   You know the main thing is the form factor the second thing is that?

00:31:18   Android

00:31:20   4.1 the Jellybean variety is is finally to the point where it feels smooth enough, and it's interesting

00:31:27   I also have it installed on a galaxy Nexus

00:31:30   Which is you know their last flagship device, and I definitely like it more on the Nexus 7

00:31:34   I don't know if you know I this device is obviously a little bit faster than that but for whatever reason

00:31:40   I just I think it's it's much more nicely attuned to to that 7-inch tablet than it is to the

00:31:45   4-inch or whatever size screen the the Galaxy Nexus has yeah, maybe because there's less scrolling involved

00:31:51   Yeah, could be because I still feel like I still feel like that's the one thing on Android that is very jarring is scrolling

00:31:59   Yeah

00:32:01   It's you know they made a big point about saying how buttery they even call it butter right there their new

00:32:06   Accelerated thing it's still it's not as smooth as as iOS for you know, whatever reason they can't get that to happen

00:32:14   But it's you know, it's something that I think the majority of consumers would would would not care about and/or notice

00:32:21   Except subconsciously which I do think is still important

00:32:24   I think you know when people think about quality there's subconscious things going on

00:32:27   You know when they use a device when they pick it up at an Apple store and just don't even realize like oh

00:32:31   This is so much smoother

00:32:32   It's just kind of a little thing.

00:32:34   But I think for the most part, the price and the size of this makes it compelling to a

00:32:39   lot of people.

00:32:40   And I think they're going to have strong sales.

00:32:42   The indications are that they're already failing to meet some demand for it.

00:32:46   Right.

00:32:47   It's a very good sign.

00:32:48   And I do think that they've explicitly pitched it as a consumption device.

00:32:54   To their credit, I actually think that that sort of focus is why the product is getting

00:32:58   I haven't I actually haven't seen a bad review of the Nexus of

00:33:02   Yeah, and I think that that having that sort of focus like here's what it's meant for it is meant for buying stuff from our

00:33:11   Google Play Store

00:33:13   Yeah, and to the point where they put all that stuff on the main screen like they have this widget and in jellybean

00:33:19   That's basically like you can rearrange things a bit, but they have you know a giant picture of a magazine

00:33:24   You know that that comes shipped with it. It's like an esquire or something and then they have a

00:33:28   a Transformers movie box artwork.

00:33:33   So you have that on there too.

00:33:35   And then you have a couple books that they ship with it.

00:33:37   They make it front and center very obvious that this is about media consumption in the

00:33:41   Google Play Store.

00:33:42   Right.

00:33:43   And I also think, and I know for three years now we've had these arguments about the iPad

00:33:48   and is it for consumption, is it good for creation, is it a general purpose computer.

00:33:54   And as a platform, it's for anything.

00:33:57   I mean, eventually these tablet OSes like Android and iOS could be used.

00:34:04   That's the future of computing in general for everything.

00:34:09   So the argument isn't, is the iPad mostly used for consumption?

00:34:13   Yes, probably it is.

00:34:14   But that, you know, Windows is mostly used for consumption.

00:34:16   Most people don't make websites.

00:34:18   Most people just read them, right?

00:34:19   I mean, that's the fact.

00:34:20   The entire internet is that way.

00:34:22   I mean, there's the rule where it's 10% creators and 90% consumers of the information.

00:34:28   Yeah.

00:34:29   But I do think that that's the argument in favor of—or a big part of the argument

00:34:34   of Apple jumping into this smaller tablet market is for people who are just, "Look,

00:34:41   I just want to watch some TV shows while I sit in bed with something that just comfortably

00:34:45   sits on my—while I'm propped up in bed."

00:34:48   Yeah.

00:34:49   It's a great form factor, I think.

00:34:51   Going back really quick to the media side of things and kind of these devices being

00:34:57   set up for the Google Play Store, you know, one of the biggest criticisms I had of the

00:35:01   Nexus 7 is that while Google is playing this up as a device for consumption of the Google

00:35:06   Play content, the Google Play content is still not nearly where it needs to be in relation

00:35:12   to both Apple and Amazon.

00:35:14   I mean, they still don't have Warner Music on there, so that, you know, they don't have

00:35:17   quarter of the music catalog out there in the world on this that you can get on

00:35:21   this device. What do you do if you have REM or something or some other

00:35:25   Warner artists that you really want and you can't get it? You could use of course

00:35:29   Spotify or RDO or one of those but you know Google's trying to get you to

00:35:33   use the Google Play Store and they just don't have the same amount of content.

00:35:37   Same goes with magazines, same goes with books, same goes with even even films.

00:35:41   They don't have everything. And so it's kind of... I still don't really

00:35:46   think that Google has the complete picture worked out of how this should

00:35:50   work. It's kind of confusing as to why they're forcing everyone into this

00:35:55   mentality that this is for the Google Play Store when the Google, you know, the

00:35:58   Play Store isn't quite ready for prime time yet. But I think that they saw the

00:36:02   the Amazon threat of the Kindle Fire, you know, taking control of Android itself

00:36:07   for the tablets and they just felt like they had to make this move right now.

00:36:10   Right, and I think it was a very, right, it's very much, it really is exactly what they

00:36:20   said it was.

00:36:21   There's no hidden purpose to it.

00:36:23   It's to have a device to support their online media, you know, the Play Store.

00:36:30   Yeah, yeah, and you know, while it's definitely, it's definitely a hit on the device that

00:36:37   don't have any 3G or wireless capabilities whatsoever, I also think that that's a great

00:36:42   move on their part just because of the fact they can show the carriers finally that they

00:36:47   have some leverage, that they can actually sell these things without needing the carriers

00:36:54   to do it. And so they can finally ship the new Android updates and not have to worry

00:36:58   about any carrier having any say over when these rollouts actually come.

00:37:03   I do think that brings us back to the commercial.

00:37:06   The commercial is this dad camping with his son and they're using the Nexus 7 to do

00:37:13   all sorts of cool things at night.

00:37:18   The big reveal at the end of the commercial is that they're actually just camping in

00:37:22   their backyard, which explains how they had internet access because it's Wi-Fi only.

00:37:28   Right.

00:37:29   I mean, the other explanation would be that the dad had a MiFi or something in his backyard.

00:37:33   but that's not going to make for a sexy commercial.

00:37:36   Yeah, it's sort of funny the way that they did it, just kind of nodding to the fact that

00:37:40   you probably don't want to use this thing actually in the middle of the woods, that

00:37:44   you will just want to use it close to your house or close to a place of work somewhere

00:37:48   with Wi-Fi.

00:37:49   I do wonder, I wonder if the lack of a 3G version, if they're about to be hit on two

00:37:56   sides on that front though, because what if the Kindle 2, Kindle Fire 2 has a...

00:38:02   Yeah, that's a great point. Because Amazon already has those relationships, right, with

00:38:08   the Kindle itself. They had, who did, at first I think they had T-Mobile and then they got

00:38:12   AT&T to provide for free. It was baked into the cost of the device, but you could get

00:38:17   updates of your books and download books for free without having to worry about a monthly

00:38:21   bill thing. I do wonder how they would negotiate that if it was a general consumption device,

00:38:26   meaning you could browse the web and download movies. It seems like it would be a little

00:38:33   pricey for them to try and negotiate something without a deal.

00:38:37   Yeah, and I don't think they could possibly do that for free. They got away with it on

00:38:42   the E and Kindles because…

00:38:44   That's so little data.

00:38:45   Right. And if you've ever tried using the web browser on one of those things, it's

00:38:51   It's like a parlor trick. It's not really feasible. It's like getting web pages by fax.

00:38:58   Right. But maybe they would have to, I imagine, do the same kind of deal that Apple did with

00:39:04   the iPad where you have a come as you want type plan where you can pay one month and

00:39:11   not pay the next. I imagine they have to do that unless they did some deal with one of

00:39:16   the carriers and they subsidized the price of the Kindle Fire down to free because you

00:39:20   signed up for $10 a month or something like that.

00:39:23   Maybe they could do that, but it still seems like the bar has been set with these tablet

00:39:28   devices that you're going to pay whatever you pay, whatever the retail price is, and

00:39:32   you're not going to worry about a monthly bill.

00:39:34   Right.

00:39:35   Which brings us to Apple's purported iPad mini and whether or not it will have 3G.

00:39:43   I think it will.

00:39:44   I think it'll have the exact same SKU configurations as the big iPad.

00:39:49   So you think it will have 4G as well then, or LTE?

00:39:52   No, I, well, I don't know about that.

00:39:59   I guess that comes down to battery and…

00:40:02   Yeah, that's the biggest factor I would imagine for what they're deciding.

00:40:07   But maybe, because a lot of what I've been seeing lately speculates that a bigger power

00:40:12   drain on the iPad 3 is the retina display, not the LTE, compared to the iPad 2.

00:40:18   the screen is actually consuming a bigger reason why the battery is thicker than the

00:40:24   LTE.

00:40:25   That's interesting.

00:40:26   Also, you have to consider the fact that we're six months removed, I guess, from the

00:40:32   new iPad.

00:40:33   So even now, they probably have slightly better chips in terms of power consumption management

00:40:38   for LTE, I would imagine.

00:40:40   Yeah.

00:40:41   Actually, now that I think about it, I think it's going to be.

00:40:42   I think it probably would be.

00:40:44   If it has 3G at all, it would have LTE.

00:40:46   Yeah.

00:40:47   Yeah, and if they do that, that's a killer feature right there.

00:40:50   Right.

00:40:51   I mean, a lot of people are going to love that.

00:40:53   What do you think?

00:40:54   My thought on price is $299.

00:40:57   I don't think they're going to go to $199.

00:40:59   What do you think they're going to do?

00:41:00   I think they'll do $199 Wi-Fi only.

00:41:02   Okay.

00:41:03   Okay.

00:41:04   That's interesting.

00:41:05   And a measly amount of storage, but they'll hit that price point.

00:41:09   And you'll have to pay—I forget what the—what's the premium for getting 3G on iPad?

00:41:17   I think it's, is it only $30? No, it's $130, right?

00:41:21   Right.

00:41:21   Yeah, it's $130. That's right.

00:41:23   So I would think, you know, $199 gets you a Wi-Fi only one, and $299 gets you one with 3G.

00:41:30   Like $100.

00:41:30   So how do you reconcile that then, you know, with the, there was just reports yesterday,

00:41:35   and you know, who knows, these are one-time reports out of like Japan or China or wherever,

00:41:39   where, you know, talking about a new iPod touch. It seems like a new iPod touch is coming because

00:41:43   they haven't refreshed it in over a year. It's been two years basically. And if that device,

00:41:49   which now sells for $1.99 at the base level, how do you reconcile the price discrepancy,

00:41:54   like those being the same price? I just, I don't think it's a problem. I think it's clear. I think

00:41:59   that with devices like laptops, it's a one-way correlation. Smaller is cheaper, bigger is more

00:42:09   expensive because the bigger displays are more expensive. But laptops only shrink to

00:42:16   a certain size, whereas stuff that fits in your pocket, you actually pay a premium for

00:42:21   miniaturization. And to me, it's exactly the same as the dilemma over the original,

00:42:29   going back to 2004, the iPod mini.

00:42:32   Right, which you wrote about the other day. There's not a huge price discrepancy, even

00:42:38   though it had less memory and it was just smaller, but people were paying almost the

00:42:42   same amount.

00:42:43   Right.

00:42:44   It had less storage.

00:42:45   It only had 4GB of storage, which was less than the original iPod from three years prior.

00:42:49   So people were like, "This is nuts.

00:42:51   No one's going to buy this."

00:42:52   And the truth is people see, "Wow, that's way smaller and cooler looking.

00:42:57   I want that one."

00:42:58   Yeah.

00:42:59   That's true.

00:43:00   So that's what I think.

00:43:01   Maybe there's an issue where they don't want both of them priced exactly $199 and they

00:43:05   they dropped the intro of the base model of the iPod Touch to 179, something like that.

00:43:13   But I don't think it's an issue because it's two entirely different sizes.

00:43:20   Yeah. So presumably a new iPod Touch would have a retina display because the old one

00:43:26   already does, and it would presumably also have a better camera. Just as a camera device,

00:43:32   If it is just as good of a camera as the iPhone 4S does, that's a killer camera device for

00:43:37   kids to buy for $199 and carry around with them, and on top of everything else it does.

00:43:43   So I agree with you, because the iPad mini will not be considered a camera device except

00:43:50   for those few jackasses at concerts that will hold it up as they always do with the regular

00:43:56   iPad, right?

00:43:57   Right.

00:43:58   I've thought of that too, with how many people I see using the iPad as a camera.

00:44:02   I can't even imagine how many people are going to use the iPad Mini as a camera.

00:44:05   Yeah.

00:44:06   They'll have head-mounted displays with this little device.

00:44:10   Probably two of them up there to be able to capture two different angles.

00:44:14   And it's the same thing going back to stuff like Game Boys and the PlayStation portables

00:44:20   and stuff like that.

00:44:22   People know that to shrink it to fit in a pants pocket costs a lot of money.

00:44:27   Why does a PSP, a Playstation Portable cost as much as the whole console?

00:44:32   Right. Right. I wonder, you know, so there's battery life as well.

00:44:38   So the Nexus 7 has great battery life. Part of the reason though is that it doesn't have the wireless chips in it.

00:44:44   So it's only relying on Wi-Fi to be able to do that. Nor does it have a retina display.

00:44:48   But we assume that the iPad Mini will not have a retina display.

00:44:51   display because you've made the great case for why it would, if they do it, it would

00:44:56   be cut from the same display as the iPhone 3.

00:45:01   And I don't know that for a fact.

00:45:02   That's just my own speculation.

00:45:04   So maybe it would actually be a different technology.

00:45:06   But I still think though the fact that they have experienced massive amounts of experience

00:45:10   for five years making exactly 163 pixel print screens, that it's got to work out in their

00:45:17   favor operations wise, even if it's not literally cut from the same sheets as the 3GS.

00:45:22   But I would be very surprised, I wouldn't be surprised at all if when we get them and

00:45:26   we look at it, that it looks like a quadruple size 3GS.

00:45:32   And that's another differentiating factor between, well we just talked about the differentiating

00:45:37   factors between the iPod Touch and this iPad Mini.

00:45:41   You also have to think obviously the iPad Mini versus the regular iPad.

00:45:44   I mean.

00:45:45   Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:46   So I don't think that, I would expect that even if it's true and Apple does release

00:45:53   this 7.85 inch iPad mini at an aggressive price point.

00:45:58   Maybe it starts at $249 instead of $199.

00:46:01   That way it's not more than half the price.

00:46:05   I think $249 is a very good bet.

00:46:08   If you've got an office pool on what the iPad mini starting price is going to be, $249

00:46:12   to me is maybe even better than $199.

00:46:15   Yeah, and it's still, I mean, they could easily get away with doing that in a world of a 199

00:46:20   Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire because there's so much more just value in the ecosystem.

00:46:25   They have all these apps that are made for the iPad.

00:46:28   They have all this content that's already out there.

00:46:30   They have millions of users that already have all their apps that they've downloaded.

00:46:36   And so you're going to have tens of millions of users right off the bat who buy this thing.

00:46:40   Even if they do it, I don't expect that sales of the big iPad, the regular one, the

00:46:45   only one we know now, I don't think that they'll drop at all.

00:46:48   I think that they'll continue to grow.

00:46:50   I think it's expanding into a different market, not eating into the same market.

00:46:55   And I wonder, the margin question would be fascinating to kind of get into.

00:47:02   They're getting down there because the iPad is already a lower margin device than the

00:47:05   iPhone, right?

00:47:06   But that's a lot to do with subsidies and that's a huge issue there.

00:47:10   But it's still a healthy margin that they're making.

00:47:14   If you get down to $249 and $199, how much of a margin is that going to be?

00:47:19   Can they really make these things for $100?

00:47:22   Can they make them for $130, all said and done?

00:47:27   I wouldn't be surprised, especially if they can already make an iPod Touch for $199.

00:47:34   I think that spec-wise, once the iFixit guys take one apart and once we run benchmark stuff

00:47:41   on it, it's not going to be the latest and greatest system on a chip.

00:47:48   It's not going to have the retina display.

00:47:49   I think it's going to have the equivalent system on a chip as like the iPhone 4 maybe.

00:47:55   Maybe the 4S, but the 4S is a year old now, so that's cheaper.

00:48:01   And I think that's that whole Tim Cook angle on Apple is that they reuse these certain

00:48:07   core technologies in a way that they just leverage the hell out of the economies of

00:48:13   scale.

00:48:14   I mean, I would love to know what it costs them to make a 3GS now.

00:48:21   What would be the break-even price on an iPhone 3GS?

00:48:23   Well, so it's subsidized down to zero, but they – so what do they actually sell it

00:48:28   for?

00:48:29   What can you get an unlocked one for?

00:48:30   Is it $2.99 now or is it $2.99?

00:48:32   Somebody just had a story last week that in India, they're selling it as a prepaid device

00:48:39   for $1.99.

00:48:40   The equivalent of once you convert the – it's about $200.

00:48:45   Okay.

00:48:46   Okay.

00:48:47   So that's interesting, yeah.

00:48:48   Because that's along the lines of an iPad touch now, I guess, right?

00:48:54   Right.

00:48:55   Yeah.

00:48:56   Yeah.

00:48:57   Okay.

00:48:58   Yeah.

00:48:59   It seems like this is this is going to happen now

00:49:01   There's been too many reports out there right when there's this much smoke around something

00:49:05   It's you know there's got to be something out there that it's coming

00:49:07   It's always possible of course that Apple would delay it at the last second because of some issue. Maybe there. Maybe there's a supply issue

00:49:14   Right you know who knows what can happen along those lines, but if they get this thing out in time for the holidays

00:49:19   This could be you know the the greatest selling holiday device that they've that they've ever launched

00:49:25   You know at a holiday time right and I think it could get it it could get silly real fast that

00:49:31   All the market share numbers consider the tablet to be its own category not the PC

00:49:38   Right right like and I realize that iPad is not a PC as we know it

00:49:42   But I think that it just shows that it's silly in today's day to to count PC sales as a market you

00:49:48   You know don't worry about whether it's a PC or not

00:49:52   just embiggen the category and say computing devices, mobile computing, you know.

00:49:56   Yeah, I totally agree. All that matters is how people are using computers on a daily

00:50:03   basis. The iPad/tablets are coming with a vengeance now. The Nexus 7 numbers are going

00:50:10   to be huge. The Kindle Fire was big for a bit and then it dropped off, but all indications

00:50:14   are that Amazon is getting ready to release another one.

00:50:17   The other two things to talk about is that, so we've got the Nexus 7 and you've got the

00:50:23   Kindle Fire now.

00:50:24   The reports yesterday are that Amazon's going to have another device coming out, a refreshed

00:50:30   Kindle Fire, but they'll also have a 10-inch version.

00:50:35   And so that's going straight on with the current iPad.

00:50:39   And the other line of thinking is that Google called the Nexus 7 the Nexus 7 because they're

00:50:44   going to have another size device to come out with down the road too.

00:50:48   Right, a Nexus 10 or something like that.

00:50:50   Right, a Nexus 10. So what do you think about them going directly after the iPad? I mean,

00:50:54   obviously, no one made any inroads in all this time, these two plus years going after

00:50:59   the iPad. Do you think that's like a good way to get a foothold in the door, like with

00:51:03   the Nexus 7 doing well, then the Nexus 10 does better as a result of the Nexus 7 doing

00:51:07   well?

00:51:08   Yeah, I think it could, especially if it continues to sell. I think it's the way to go. And I

00:51:13   I think the argument for multiple tablet sizes is exactly the same as the argument for multiple

00:51:18   laptop sizes, that different people are willing to make different trade-offs.

00:51:23   Why would somebody carry around a 15-inch, 4.5-pound MacBook Pro when I'm living the

00:51:30   luxurious life with my little stack of paper, weighs like MacBook Air?

00:51:35   Well, because some people are doing pro audio and video, or some people just like to have

00:51:40   a big screen everywhere they go.

00:51:42   I definitely think that anybody who has any kind of lasting success in the tablet market

00:51:47   is going to have some sort of range of sizes.

00:51:52   And the Surface is going to be slightly bigger, right?

00:51:54   It's like a 10.6-inch screen, I think, at least the initial version that Microsoft will

00:51:59   be coming out with?

00:52:00   I don't think it was quite that much bigger, but it was definitely 10-point something.

00:52:04   Something?

00:52:05   I thought it was like 10.1.

00:52:07   Maybe it is.

00:52:08   Okay.

00:52:09   So it's slightly larger.

00:52:10   you know, not focusing at least at first on the smaller tablet space and going directly

00:52:15   after the iPad space.

00:52:17   Right. And I think it gets back to your point about people who are using tablets as laptop

00:52:22   replacements. I mean, that's clearly, I mean, explicitly what the Surface is aimed at.

00:52:27   Right, as we've seen with the keyboard itself, the keyboard cover, which, you know, I was

00:52:32   pretty, I ripped apart pretty quickly just because I think it's a silly thing to do it

00:52:38   it's built into the device itself. And I know it's an add-on. I don't know, are they giving

00:52:44   it, have they announced if they're going to give it with the Surface or if you have to

00:52:48   buy it as a separate add-on? Have they said anything about that?

00:52:50   No, I think it's, it must be a separate add-on because there's two different ones.

00:52:54   That's right, okay, you're right. So that's good, okay. Because like, I kind of ripped

00:52:57   it apart as like, it just kind of, you know, moves the mentality from like, oh, we're breaking

00:53:02   new ground in computing and we're moving on from this PC world, to instead, we're keeping

00:53:07   the same ideas of the PC world, we're just kind of making it look different. And there

00:53:12   was that great image of a laptop versus a surface where the laptop has the thick bottom

00:53:20   and the thin screen versus the surface with the thick screen and the thin bottom for the

00:53:24   keyboard. And so that's what I kind of had a problem with.

00:53:27   But I will say, since just a few days ago, I happened to be at an Apple store and I randomly

00:53:34   decided to pick up one of those Logitech keyboard case things for the iPad.

00:53:39   That thing is great.

00:53:40   It's amazing.

00:53:42   I can type just as well on that as I can on my computer and I fully plan to the next trip

00:53:48   I'm taking.

00:53:49   I'm taking a trip in a few weeks just for a few days.

00:53:51   Not bring a laptop at all.

00:53:52   Just going to bring the iPad, which I probably would have done anyway, but now I don't have

00:53:55   to worry about a thing.

00:53:56   I mean, I can send any email and type at full speed.

00:53:59   And I recognize too that some people are great at typing on the iPad already with the software

00:54:05   keyboard, but for whatever reason I was brought up in the world where you learn how to type

00:54:11   on a keyboard and I'm significantly faster at doing it that way.

00:54:13   And so people like me are going to feel a little bit more comfortable for the time being

00:54:19   at least using that keyboard.

00:54:20   And so I'm a big fan of this Logitech thing.

00:54:23   And so the Microsoft Surface cover is starting to make quite a bit more sense to me.

00:54:29   But I don't think though it's exclusive to them. I mean, I just think that the number of you know

00:54:34   And if it turns out to be a good idea, I mean Apple will just put a keyboard in the next smart cover. Yeah

00:54:40   Yeah

00:54:41   You know and have it be like Bluetooth or something like that

00:54:43   There is something clever about the way though that they're drawing power over their magnetic connection

00:54:48   Yeah, right because this logitech one that I have has is battery-powered

00:54:53   right and

00:54:56   You have to recharge it and it is Bluetooth and it works with the magnets though

00:55:01   It does oddly enough, you know

00:55:02   They say it works fine with a 4GS because the sorry with it with the new iPad because the new iPad is slightly thicker

00:55:09   Than the the previous iPad I've attached it to both

00:55:13   there's you can definitely tell that it's definitely more attuned for the the last generation iPad to rather than

00:55:19   Because it's the magnets slightly slip a little bit. It's kind of a weird thing, but

00:55:24   Yeah, so the the powering thing for the surface keyboard is definitely an interesting opponent

00:55:29   And they also have it's not just a keyboard they've they've touch elements to write where you can you have like all a trackpad like

00:55:36   Thing right yeah, so you can use your mouse cursor

00:55:39   That's ridiculous

00:55:43   Microsoft I don't know it's gonna be an interesting the rest of the year is gonna be fascinating

00:55:51   I also saw, before we got off the subject, I saw that the stories about the new Kindle

00:55:56   fires that are apparently imminent, that there's five or six SKUs.

00:56:02   Yeah, I saw, my sense of that is that they'll have two different sizes.

00:56:08   So I had actually, you know, like a year, it was a little over a year ago that I got

00:56:11   my hands, oddly enough, on a prototype of the Kindle fire before it was even named or

00:56:15   anything like that.

00:56:16   Right, I remember that.

00:56:17   I remember in—

00:56:18   It was my last great scoop while I was still at TechCrunch.

00:56:21   And so I talked to someone who was telling me basically the entire product pipeline and

00:56:28   everything, and they already had in the lab at that point a 10-inch version. There were issues

00:56:33   they were having with it and they were going to delay it, and I think that they also just wanted

00:56:37   to see how well the Kindle Fire itself as the 7-inch version would sell. And so the plan was

00:56:41   to release it in Q1 or Q2 of this year, which obviously came and went and they didn't do it.

00:56:46   I think that they saw the Kindle Fire had some issues. It wasn't getting great reviews and who knows they may have had component problems as well

00:56:53   But so the 10-inch has always been in the pipeline

00:56:56   I think with these multiple SKUs that they're talking about now

00:56:59   I think the plan is still to do a 7-inch and a 10-inch and they would just have different

00:57:04   Varieties of them like they would have one with more memory in it

00:57:07   That's my sense of what they're going to do with that right because the other thing I thought you know people were I saw a lot

00:57:12   Of speculation that it meant that they're gonna come out in a whole bunch of different sides, right?

00:57:15   But I don't I would expect two sizes maybe even only maybe still even only one size

00:57:20   Yeah, because you got to remember like the iPad 2 had 18 different SKUs

00:57:24   Because it had yeah all the different carriers and black and white three sizes

00:57:29   Wi-Fi only

00:57:33   Verizon compatible AT&T compatible and and the iPad 3 still has I think 12

00:57:39   Yeah, it's you don't have to get a different I

00:57:43   I don't know. But counting SKUs doesn't imply counting different sizes. It would be

00:57:48   easy to have six different SKUs and just have it be color and storage.

00:57:54   Yeah, right. I doubt Amazon, which is still very much trying to figure out this market,

00:58:01   comes out with a five-inch, a six-inch, a seven-inch. That seems a little bit of an

00:58:07   overkill.

00:58:08   Well, I was just going to take a second break here and thank our second sponsor.

00:58:13   And I am super, super excited about having this company.

00:58:16   Just because I like having different types of companies sponsor the show.

00:58:21   Second sponsor is Tonks Coffee.

00:58:24   T-O-N-X.

00:58:26   And they sent me some coffee when we first started talking about their sponsorship and

00:58:29   I love it.

00:58:30   It is absolutely great.

00:58:33   You pay them for a subscription and it's just no hassle.

00:58:38   You subscribe to Tonks and every two weeks you just get fresh coffee in the mail.

00:58:47   They find coffee from top producers all over the world, literally.

00:58:53   They sent me stuff, the sample pack they sent me, it had stuff from Kenya and another one

00:58:57   I think it was from Brazil and it was delicious.

00:59:01   And they've got a free trial right now.

00:59:06   So you can just sign up and get a sample and taste what all the fuss is about.

00:59:12   I love everything about them.

00:59:13   I like the name, Tonks.

00:59:14   I just like saying it, T-O-N-X.

00:59:16   I love their branding.

00:59:18   They have sort of a brand that reminds me of the credits from Dr. Strangelove, this

00:59:23   sort of big, tall, handwritten letter style.

00:59:26   I even like their copywriting.

00:59:28   It is unpretentious.

00:59:29   Yes, you're buying fancy, top quality coffee, having it sent to the world.

00:59:35   But the language they use to describe it, I just love the copywriting.

00:59:39   It's very, very down to earth, very, very straightforward.

00:59:45   And the coffee itself is just terrific.

00:59:48   Take it from my pal Marco Arment.

00:59:50   Marco Arment, who's far more fussy about coffee than I am.

00:59:54   Here's a quote from Marco Arment.

00:59:57   I have a great universal answer whenever anyone asks me how to make great coffee.

01:00:03   Get a burr grinder, get an arrow press, and subscribe to Tonks.

01:00:08   Couldn't recommend them more highly.

01:00:12   It's really, really great stuff.

01:00:13   Go to Tonks.org.

01:00:16   T-O-N-X dot org and find out more.

01:00:22   Tonks coffee.

01:00:23   Famously, I'm telling you right now, if you want to be a success on the internet, you

01:00:26   need three things.

01:00:27   You need a fussy way to make coffee.

01:00:31   Just buying your beans from Tonks alone qualifies as fussy.

01:00:34   You need a SodaStream so you can overcarbonate your own water.

01:00:38   And really, there is no step three.

01:00:42   You drink coffee, MG?

01:00:45   Mad Fientist I do.

01:00:47   I…

01:00:48   Steven: Almost called you Marco.

01:00:49   Mad Fientist That would have been cool.

01:00:52   Flattered.

01:00:54   I never make my own though, oddly enough.

01:00:57   I don't know why. I just never got into that. I feel like I just never have had a good coffee

01:01:02   maker, and that's why I don't do it. I should get into that because God knows how much money

01:01:07   I waste at coffee shops on a daily basis. I'm also a little weird though because I don't

01:01:13   really like hot coffee. I only like iced coffee. There's a little bit more of a process involved

01:01:20   in doing that. You can make it at night and put it in the fridge and stuff like that.

01:01:23   It does seem more, but it takes planning.

01:01:28   Actually on the Tonks website, they had a blog post about making iced coffee.

01:01:34   Oh, really?

01:01:35   I'll have to check that out.

01:01:36   That could be interesting to me.

01:01:37   But the big problem for me is that you can't just do it and then have coffee 10 minutes

01:01:41   later.

01:01:44   For me, it's way too – I need the instant gratification.

01:01:49   All of a sudden, I need coffee and I need it really, really quick.

01:01:53   Well, it's awesome that you're getting coffee sponsorships on the show.

01:01:58   You're moving up in the world here.

01:02:00   I could not be happier about that.

01:02:02   I love sponsorships from apps.

01:02:04   If you've got an app and you want to promote it, get in touch.

01:02:09   It's obviously going to be a huge source of sponsorship on a show that I'm hosting.

01:02:13   I love the idea of everything from coffee suppliers to the studio neat guys with the

01:02:23   little glyph and the stylus and stuff like that sponsoring the show too.

01:02:28   Yeah, that's great.

01:02:30   So Mountain Lion.

01:02:32   So Mountain Lion.

01:02:33   Yes.

01:02:34   It's coming out.

01:02:35   We can talk about this under embargo, which is sort of weird.

01:02:38   I don't think I've ever tried to do this.

01:02:40   I haven't either.

01:02:41   something before it's legal, but it will be legal tomorrow to talk about it.

01:02:46   Right. It would be against the embargo for us to release this recording now, and it will

01:02:53   be a-okay to record it in advance and release it when it's done.

01:02:56   Yes, as many people do. And, you know, and Mount Lion itself is sort of interesting because

01:03:04   while it shocked the world, it really did. Like, no one had any idea that it was coming,

01:03:07   And it was a big surprise.

01:03:08   It was the first legitimate surprise that no one had any inkling of that I can remember

01:03:12   in a long time when they did it earlier this year.

01:03:18   But now it's been out in developer preview for a while.

01:03:20   And because of all those...

01:03:22   There's many sites out there who get these great anonymous developer tipsters who are

01:03:30   willing to break their NDAs to leak this information.

01:03:34   It sounds suspiciously like some of these tipsters are actual writers for some of these

01:03:37   sites who are breaking their own NDAs, but we cannot be sure of this.

01:03:43   So regardless of how it happens, a lot of the info is already out there.

01:03:46   So it's always fascinating to write a review after most everyone knows, who really cares

01:03:52   about it knows what's coming.

01:03:56   And I think feature-wise, Apple has done the run-through twice now.

01:04:00   I mean, they did it in February, not publicly, but they unveiled the website and listed the

01:04:06   top features, and then they did the whole third of the WWDC keynote was devoted to Mountain

01:04:12   Lion.

01:04:14   And as always, I think that they do a very good job of highlighting the features that

01:04:19   are the most universally applicable.

01:04:23   So just in terms of a rundown of features, I don't really have that much to add.

01:04:27   Yeah, I mean, so I've been using it, I've been using the developer preview since that

01:04:33   initial developer preview and I've kind of, you know, I've had it, I had it at first on

01:04:37   just one machine and now I'm actually running it on my main iMac and I'm running it on the

01:04:45   Retina MacBook Pro that I have as well as a MacBook Air.

01:04:50   And so it's, you know, I found it to be by far stable enough at this point, obviously

01:04:54   the Golden Master is out and it will be out tomorrow in its full form.

01:05:00   And it's great.

01:05:01   I mean, on my IS Apple specifically, you know, are there any performance things you're talking

01:05:06   about?

01:05:07   Because, you know, normally when a new OS comes out, that's what people talk about,

01:05:09   you know, is there a performance gain or anything?

01:05:11   Even with Snow Leopard from Leopard, they talked about how it's been kind of tailored

01:05:16   and whittled down to just its essentials and they made it much smaller.

01:05:20   But there really is nothing like that, I guess, that they at least want to say with Mountain

01:05:23   Lion.

01:05:24   at least on my three-year-old iMac, which is nearing the end of its life in that it's

01:05:30   nearing the end of how much I'm willing to put up with compared to how slow it is compared

01:05:33   to my other computers.

01:05:35   It does seem to make it faster.

01:05:36   I don't know what the reason for that is, but it definitely starts up faster.

01:05:39   I noticed, because I've been using it nonstop since the initial developer preview in February

01:05:45   on my 11-inch MacBook Air.

01:05:49   And I have noticed, especially the last few builds, especially since WWDC, I have noticed

01:05:55   that waking from sleep is a lot faster.

01:05:58   Yes.

01:05:59   Yeah, I've noticed that as well.

01:06:01   And I asked them, I did ask Apple about that because I didn't see them mention that anywhere,

01:06:06   but I wanted to make sure that I hadn't placebo affected myself and convinced myself that

01:06:12   it was waking from sleep faster.

01:06:14   And then the truth is, no, we didn't touch that.

01:06:16   But they said no, they actually put a huge amount of effort.

01:06:19   It was actually a really big engineering thing to improve wake from sleep times.

01:06:25   Everything related to sleep.

01:06:26   Well, and they're doing one of the new big features is that Power Nap thing, which I

01:06:31   haven't actually tried yet.

01:06:32   So it's a weird thing too because it only works, it doesn't work for example on my

01:06:37   old iMac.

01:06:38   It only works on I believe the newer MacBook Airs and the Retina MacBook Pro.

01:06:45   Right.

01:06:46   my MacBook Air, because my MacBook Air is two years old.

01:06:49   Yeah, I don't think it does either.

01:06:50   I think it's only the newest versions.

01:06:52   Yeah, starting...

01:06:53   Well, I don't think it's just the newest versions that just came out at WWDC.

01:07:00   I think it works.

01:07:01   Right, but the one before that.

01:07:02   Yeah, the one where the 11-inch Air got the light-up keyboard.

01:07:06   Yeah, that's right.

01:07:08   Yep, I have the note.

01:07:09   I asked about that.

01:07:10   It's mid-2011 MacBook Air, the new Retina MacBook Pros, and none of the iMacs.

01:07:15   Right.

01:07:16   Yeah.

01:07:17   Yep.

01:07:18   Right.

01:07:19   But that's why I was unsure whether I was seeing things by thinking that Maya doesn't

01:07:21   qualify for Power Nap, MacBook Air seems to be waking from sleep even snappier.

01:07:27   Like even getting ever, ever closer to the ideal of the iOS instant wake from sleep.

01:07:33   Yep.

01:07:34   Yep.

01:07:35   That's interesting.

01:07:37   One of the features that I've actually used quite a bit and has been extremely helpful

01:07:41   has been the airplane mirroring of the Mac itself to an Apple TV. This came up the other

01:07:46   day we were trying to watch Wimbledon and my girlfriend and I actually don't have cable

01:07:52   and so we were unable to watch it in a traditional sense but it was streaming on ESPN 3 I believe

01:07:59   and previously and it wasn't on the watch ESPN app on the iPad or iPhone so you couldn't

01:08:06   do it that way but I could watch it on a browser and just stream my entire computer right right

01:08:11   right to the Apple TV and that was awesome.

01:08:14   - Yeah.

01:08:15   Well, the other thing I've been thinking of

01:08:19   big picture wise is that I think it's been a total success

01:08:24   for Apple to get away from these monolithic

01:08:30   extravaganza OS updates and sort of focus on ones

01:08:35   that are maybe not as exciting but year over year

01:08:40   adding features and I feel like by by by shooting for smaller less

01:08:46   extravaganzic updates it's it's just it just seems like it's a win for everybody

01:08:53   I think it's easier on their engineering I think it's easier to hit the ship

01:08:58   dates and I think it's a lot less for users who are updating to each new

01:09:05   version as they come along, there's a lot fewer chances for them to feel like, "Whoa,

01:09:13   this is too much all at once."

01:09:14   Yeah, right. There's basically no learning curve from Lion to Mountain Lion. There's

01:09:20   new notification center, which is awesome. It's probably my favorite feature of it.

01:09:23   But even that feels natural, especially if you've used iOS devices before. They've

01:09:29   done a good job, I think, making it a very easy transition.

01:09:34   And it's great the fact that you can update from Snow Leopard

01:09:39   to Mountain Lion as well.

01:09:40   So if you happen to skip Lion for whatever reason,

01:09:42   now you can pay $19 instead of--

01:09:45   was it before-- was it $29 for Lion when it came out?

01:09:48   So now you can pay even less and get upgraded

01:09:50   to the newer version.

01:09:51   I do think what you were talking about,

01:09:52   kind of the focus on the smaller updates and everything,

01:09:56   I totally agree with that.

01:09:57   But I think there's a potential for some small backlash just because of the fact that Windows

01:10:03   8 is coming out this fall.

01:10:05   And they'll say, "You know you'll see stories that Windows 8 is a major upgrade, whereas

01:10:11   Apple has only been kind of tinkering with small little things here and there."

01:10:17   Microsoft has been really focusing on going after their core audience and improving things

01:10:23   for them.

01:10:24   Oh no, there's, you know, I could probably write Jesus Diaz's piece for Gizmodo right

01:10:30   now. No, but it is, to me, it is a super sharp contrast with Microsoft and Apple in multiple

01:10:41   ways where on the one front, Windows 8 is a radical interface change. I mean, it's

01:10:49   easily, I mean, really no hyperbole involved. The biggest interface change from one version

01:10:54   to the next in Windows history.

01:11:00   And Mountain Lion is absolutely the opposite of that.

01:11:04   I think most users, if you sat them down in front of Lion or Mountain Lion, would have

01:11:08   to poke around a bit before they'd figure out which is which.

01:11:12   At a glance, the easiest way is probably just look for Notification Center up in the upper

01:11:16   right-hand corner.

01:11:17   Notification Center and the slightly white tray for the that the apps it on now

01:11:23   Oh, yeah for the dog the glass dock is is slightly more

01:11:27   So you know it is a refinement. I mean there's definitely I think it's a good question

01:11:33   What do you get for your $19 or your 20 bucks? Yeah?

01:11:36   I think there's definitely a lot there, but it certainly is a lot less than than Windows 8

01:11:42   And on the other side, it's also in sharp contrast to Microsoft, where Microsoft has

01:11:47   gone with this – well, you're an MG, so I'll go with it.

01:11:51   I'll go with the Lord of the Rings analogy, this one OS to rule us all.

01:11:57   One OS that is meant for everything from phones to desktop computers.

01:12:03   And Apple is very clearly and adamantly sticking to this.

01:12:07   We've got shared technologies like iCloud and the names of these apps and there's

01:12:16   certainly some similarities that hold back to the Mac thing.

01:12:20   But it is two different OSs, one geared for touch devices and one geared for keyboard

01:12:28   and pointer devices.

01:12:29   Yes, I also but I feel like I totally agree with that again, but I think you know with things like notes and

01:12:37   Reminders now, you know, those are straight-up ports to a new

01:12:43   Screen size basically and in a new way of interaction with a mouse

01:12:48   But it does feel like you know, if they do two more iterations

01:12:52   Let's say of OS 10 or you know, if they say Kate stay at OS 10 do they do us 11?

01:12:57   who knows, but if they do two more iterations of OS X, I feel like we're going to get a

01:13:02   lot of overlap between the two of them, and it just becomes that the Mac is now the version

01:13:12   of all your apps that you're used to that are just being used on a bigger device that

01:13:17   doesn't sell as well as an iOS device.

01:13:20   Yeah, pretty much.

01:13:21   Yeah.

01:13:22   And that's an interesting thing.

01:13:24   I think, you know, at first, I think a lot of people were skeptical as bringing some

01:13:30   of these iOS ideas and applications to the Mac environment.

01:13:34   But now it's starting to make a lot of sense to people.

01:13:37   I think, and that kind of leads into what I think will be the most, by far, controversial

01:13:41   feature of Mountain Lion, which is the gatekeeper stuff.

01:13:45   Because I've already run into a couple issues where I've tried to download an application

01:13:51   over the web and I just had the default setting on when I installed Mountain Lion and so I

01:13:56   couldn't do it.

01:13:57   I had to go into my settings and switch it so that because no one, right now Apple isn't

01:14:02   certifying developers just yet for Gatekeeper and so none of them are under that thing.

01:14:08   Presumably most of the big ones will.

01:14:09   I know they told me that Adobe is already on board for that so that's a huge one for

01:14:14   them.

01:14:15   for everyone else, you will be blocked from downloading internet applications without

01:14:23   removing that thing at first, without removing the default setting. You can still do it.

01:14:27   You don't want to freak anyone out here. Of course, you can still do it. You can download

01:14:30   whatever you want. But by default, you will have to change that setting.

01:14:34   Yeah, I guess that probably will be the most controversial change because it sounds perfect

01:14:40   on paper. But in practice, yes, it is sort of... it feels like you're being told to just

01:14:49   stick to the app store.

01:14:51   Yeah. And how will parents do it? Will they even know where to go? They guide you pretty

01:14:56   well on how to do it, but it's not as seamless as you might think. I can imagine for someone

01:15:02   who's not really clear on how to make their way through the settings of OS X.

01:15:08   And I wonder too, with, in the first couple of months, I think that there's going to be

01:15:14   a lot more reasons for people to revert that, to change that setting to the more liberal,

01:15:19   "Okay, allow apps to run from anywhere even if they're not signed."

01:15:23   Right, right.

01:15:24   Because there's going to be so many apps that haven't been updated yet.

01:15:27   Yes.

01:15:28   But then once people make that change, they're never, that's the sort of thing you've sort

01:15:32   of set it and forget it, and you're not going to go back, and you're not going to get the

01:15:35   advantages of Gatekeeper.

01:15:37   Yeah.

01:15:38   I think it's going to take a year or two and people getting, "Wait until you get

01:15:43   your next Mac," and then you leave that setting on.

01:15:46   I feel like a year from now, it'll be a lot easier to live with Gatekeeper blocking

01:15:53   anything that's at least not signed than it is now.

01:15:56   I had to turn it off.

01:15:57   There was no way to – I couldn't last that long using only the built-in apps.

01:16:05   Right I think in that way it's it's sort of similar to the pop-up blockers built into browsers

01:16:10   You know when they first came out

01:16:11   It's like you had to keep turning it off because there were so many sites that needed a pop-up for whatever reason to log in

01:16:16   Or something like that, but over time it ended up being a very good thing because it just basically killed the pop-up market

01:16:22   That's actually a perfect. I think that's a really good analogy. I think it's a lot like that. Yeah, yeah

01:16:27   So that's so that's a great feature, but it will be controversial to begin with another thing is

01:16:34   So you just talked to Apple right you didn't did they send you a build a specific build of of

01:16:41   Mountain Lion, that's did they send you the one that's through the the Mac App Store

01:16:46   No, okay, so

01:16:48   There's there's this weird thing going on where they have Facebook integration right like this is coming

01:16:54   And they've already announced that it's coming right, but it's not coming till the fall right and it's not even

01:16:59   It's not really clear

01:17:00   why that is because so they gave me a demo you know a retina MacBook Pro with

01:17:06   the new version of mountain lion on it but I noticed they also gave me a code

01:17:10   to download a version for another computer so I could test it on all my

01:17:13   machines on the one that I downloaded it does not have the Facebook integration

01:17:18   but on the one they gave me it does and they told me specifically that it would

01:17:22   be a little bit different because it has the Facebook integration I don't know

01:17:25   what the holdup is like because it's ready to go it I don't think it is ready

01:17:29   to go. I think it's, I think that I, I, my, I don't know this for a fact, but my impression

01:17:33   is that it's beta, it's still beta quality and it's, it's, there's bugs in it that are,

01:17:39   it's not set yet. You can get it, the other way you can get it is if you have an ADC account,

01:17:44   it's a separate download from the GM. So if you go to the, the Mac developer page and

01:17:51   you log in with your ADC credentials, there's a download, download the GM build of Mountain

01:17:56   Mountain Lion. A few links down, there's "Download the Facebook development package."

01:18:02   Ah, okay. You're right then. Okay. That makes sense. Because I was wondering if it was like

01:18:06   maybe they signed a deal with Facebook where they couldn't technically include it until

01:18:11   they included Facebook within iOS officially as a package deal or something. And so since

01:18:15   that won't be out until the fall with iOS 6, maybe they couldn't do this integration

01:18:20   with Mountain Lion. But that makes more sense. Especially while it works on the front end

01:18:24   for users because it's in the notification center, for example, where you could send

01:18:28   a Facebook status message right from there just like you can with the tweet button now.

01:18:33   It makes more sense that developers might be having some bugs or issues that they have

01:18:38   to kind of work through.

01:18:39   Right.

01:18:40   I think the other very interesting and it's obviously something everybody's going to notice.

01:18:47   It's not a detail.

01:18:48   It's the iCloud document storage.

01:18:51   Yes.

01:18:52   I think that it's, I'm really happy with the way that Apple's done this.

01:18:59   And clearly the way that Mountain Lion wants you to use these apps is to store your stuff

01:19:05   in iCloud.

01:19:07   Like that is what Apple wants you to do.

01:19:09   Apple thinks that's the future of storage and syncing and stuff like that.

01:19:17   And it's a huge difference from the way the Mac has always worked.

01:19:20   The way the Mac was created was with this idea that the file system is your foundation.

01:19:26   That's where you start.

01:19:27   You start by looking at your desktop and on your desktop are volumes and you go into these

01:19:32   volumes and you know where things are.

01:19:35   You know where the document is.

01:19:36   It's in this folder here.

01:19:38   You start with the finder.

01:19:39   **Ezra Klein:** Yep.

01:19:40   **Beserat Debebe:** And then you open the document.

01:19:42   And the new way, the iCloud way, is just like iOS, where the documents are conceptually

01:19:50   in the app.

01:19:51   So when you want to open a text edit document, you don't go to the Finder, you go to text

01:19:56   edit and it's in text edit.

01:20:00   To the point where I brought this up with them, if you have a PDF that was created in

01:20:05   a certain app, say like Adobe Acrobat or something like that, it will show up in there, but you

01:20:11   You would have to—it wouldn't show up by default in something like Preview.

01:20:15   You would have to—there's a way to do it where you can dig for it and find it in

01:20:19   the file system, but by default it's not there.

01:20:21   It lives in whatever app it was created in.

01:20:26   But what I like about the way Apple's done this is they've made it easy, and it's

01:20:29   clear that that's the way they want you to do it, and I think it's the way that

01:20:32   most people who are sitting down in front of Mountain Lion for the first time, they're

01:20:36   going to—I think they're going to use it, and I think they're going to really

01:20:38   like it.

01:20:39   want to use it. If you want to keep storing your stuff the same way you always have, you

01:20:44   want to use Dropbox instead of iCloud, or you just want to keep your documents for privacy

01:20:51   reasons, you don't want them going anywhere to the cloud, you only want them on your own

01:20:54   hard drive. It's just one tab over in the open dialogue box, and it is the traditional

01:20:59   "here's, you know, store it wherever you want" interface. And if you want to do it,

01:21:04   you know, get to them through the finder, you can do it.

01:21:06   Yeah, that that will be a little controversial though as well

01:21:10   I it just because

01:21:11   because it is one more click to be able to do it that way and they're trying to change it and I think that's

01:21:16   the way they have to do it and I think the the benefits of it far outweigh what what the backlash will be because now

01:21:22   Presuming you have at least one iOS device like this the seamlessness at which it will work is awesome

01:21:29   I mean, you know

01:21:30   everyone's seen the demo now where you can edit something on your Mac and it will change in almost real time on a

01:21:36   an iOS device if you're doing that.

01:21:38   And in terms of, you know, getting like a PDF from one app to another, you can still

01:21:43   use drag and drop.

01:21:44   Yes, right.

01:21:45   I mean, and so there's, you know, you think like, well, can't I just drag it from here

01:21:50   to the – and you know what?

01:21:51   It works.

01:21:52   So –

01:21:53   Yep.

01:21:54   Yep.

01:21:55   I think that they've managed this transition very well because there's – the way they

01:21:59   want you to use it, they're not pushing you.

01:22:02   They're enticing you to go there on your own.

01:22:05   Yeah.

01:22:06   And I think that the fear people had was that Apple was going to push people to do that.

01:22:11   And it's, you know, you can argue that with some of the policies, with all of this stuff

01:22:17   put together with Gatekeeper and with the sandboxing restrictions in the App Store and

01:22:21   the fact that only App Store apps get iCloud access, that, you know, that they're enticing

01:22:27   you heavily enough that maybe it counts as pushing or that they've tilted the floor

01:22:31   in that direction.

01:22:32   But they're not forcing you to do that.

01:22:33   And I really, really, truly believe that they're not going to do that.

01:22:36   That there's not, you know, the next major version of Mac OS X is not going to be App

01:22:42   Store only.

01:22:43   Right.

01:22:44   I think Gatekeeper is their, you know, that's their solution long term to bringing the advantages

01:22:50   of the App Store to all apps.

01:22:52   Right.

01:22:53   I think that they're doing it the exact right way, which is that they're playing

01:22:57   up the advantages of the App Store separately from apps themselves.

01:23:00   that if you want to do the App Store, like yes, you'll have to take a hit if you have a paid app,

01:23:06   but you're also getting access to Game Center, you're getting access to the iCloud integration.

01:23:12   So they're playing up like the advantages of doing it, but not making you do it necessarily.

01:23:17   Right.

01:23:17   So that's, you know, you lead with a carrot, not with the stick in that regard, which is smart.

01:23:23   The two other things I had, like I think there's one quick one, which kind of brings us back

01:23:32   to what we were talking about at the very beginning with Marissa Meyer, is it's fascinating

01:23:37   that built-in sharing in Mountain Lion includes both Vimeo and Flickr, but it doesn't include

01:23:46   YouTube, even though YouTube is like one of the standard apps on iOS and Apple has obviously

01:23:52   had to deal with Google in that for the past, and that's by far the biggest video sharing

01:23:56   site.

01:23:57   They have Vimeo, but no YouTube.

01:23:59   You know what?

01:24:00   I noticed that.

01:24:01   I remember noting that at the keynote.

01:24:02   I know my notes from the WWDC keynote had that.

01:24:07   And I forgot to – I hadn't really thought about that since, but I remember thinking

01:24:11   like at the keynote, "Is that it, or is that like they're still in negotiation?"

01:24:15   It's not in there for sure.

01:24:17   Yeah.

01:24:18   And Vimeo is.

01:24:20   So that's pretty fascinating.

01:24:21   And Flickr is still there. Flickr has been integrated into things like iPhoto for a while.

01:24:27   And Apple TV.

01:24:29   And Apple TV, right. Yeah. And so it's still there. So they're still giving Yahoo and Flickr

01:24:34   that love, which is nice. Hopefully it gets rejuvenated a bit.

01:24:38   The other really big thing I kind of wanted to talk about was Safari itself. So I know,

01:24:44   or I presume, that you're a big Safari user.

01:24:47   I am.

01:24:49   And I am not. I use Chrome. Pretty much exclusively, except I've made exceptions for when the Retina

01:24:57   MacBook Pro came out because Chrome was just looked god-awful because it wasn't updated

01:25:03   with the Retina graphics yet.

01:25:04   Right. Even the font rendering wasn't--

01:25:07   Yeah, it was awful. It was all wrong. It was wrong too in Twitter for--it's still wrong

01:25:10   in Twitter for Mac, and I don't know if they'll ever fix that. It was wrong in Sparrow. It

01:25:13   was wrong in a few other things. They fixed it in Sparrow. But so they have since fixed

01:25:17   it sort of in the Canary build which is the early build of Chrome but it's still not stable

01:25:23   enough so I still use Safari when I'm using the the retina MacBook Pro but and I've been

01:25:28   using it with the with the mountain lion release I still I still have a big problem with Safari

01:25:34   I know that they say you know they gave me the the stats that according to SunSpider

01:25:38   JavaScript test Safari is the fastest browser now compared to I think it was Chrome 19 or

01:25:43   whatever the last version was.

01:25:45   I still find it to be slower, and just the smallest

01:25:48   little things that I do, including one

01:25:51   is, of course, using Gmail, which makes some sense

01:25:53   that Google is able to optimize Gmail for Chrome

01:25:56   better than they could for Safari.

01:25:58   Who knows if that's on purpose, or if it's just because they

01:26:01   have access to that team directly.

01:26:03   But I still have a problem with using Safari as my main browser.

01:26:06   And the only thing that I've noticed

01:26:08   that's pretty buggy in Mountain Lion is Safari itself.

01:26:11   I'm having rendering issues.

01:26:12   Are you noticing anything with that?

01:26:13   No, I'm not.

01:26:14   Huh.

01:26:15   I don't know why that is.

01:26:16   Just certain sites seem to – I'll get the thing where I scroll down and then all

01:26:20   of a sudden part of the page, like a square of it is white.

01:26:24   One of those situations.

01:26:26   I don't know what that is.

01:26:27   I could probably switch to Chrome pretty easily.

01:26:31   Although I don't really like Chrome on iOS as much.

01:26:35   I think they did a very nice job and I can see how some people would really like it.

01:26:38   I mean, one of the—when there was all that talk—and I know you had it early, that they

01:26:43   were working on Chrome for iOS.

01:26:48   Which would have to comply with the App Store rules, use the systems version of WebKit.

01:26:53   I remember thinking, "Well, what's the point then?

01:26:55   If it's really just a rectangle with WebKit, why even bother?"

01:26:58   And I think that—

01:26:59   Well, they're syncing.

01:27:01   Syncing is one of the things that people love the most, which I care about a little bit.

01:27:05   I'm used to the OmniBar, which they oddly added to Safari in OS X.

01:27:11   So they have that now, where you can either search or type a URL in, but they don't have

01:27:15   it even on iOS 6 on Safari.

01:27:18   Yeah, that's interesting.

01:27:21   And I'm not quite sure what the logic is there, because there's more room for a second bar

01:27:26   on the Mac.

01:27:27   Yeah, my only thought is that it's easier to touch a second input than it is to drag

01:27:33   a mouse up somewhere and try to do it.

01:27:35   But I'm not sure otherwise.

01:27:39   Just hold that thought for a second and we'll get back to that.

01:27:42   Another little, given the nudge to Google, change in iOS 6 is that that search field

01:27:49   in iOS 6 no longer says Google.

01:27:52   Google says search.

01:27:53   Search the web or something like that.

01:27:55   Yep, yep, that's right.

01:27:57   That's another thing that someone else brought up to me, that maybe they do it in iOS because

01:28:04   They want people to go to the sites directly rather than using Google, which has become

01:28:09   almost the default for a lot of people to find any site, you know?

01:28:13   But then it still doesn't make sense why they would do it in OS X to go the other way.

01:28:17   I don't know.

01:28:18   I will say this.

01:28:19   When it comes to Chrome versus Safari, especially on the Mac, I could switch to Chrome very

01:28:23   easily.

01:28:24   And the times that I've used it, I like it.

01:28:25   I can't even remember off the top of my head why the last time I tried it as my daily

01:28:30   browser I switched back.

01:28:33   But it's very close to me.

01:28:34   And I do think, and I think the best thing about it is to me it does feel faster.

01:28:38   I, at a technical level, there's a big fundamental difference between Chrome and Safari, which

01:28:46   is that Chrome breaks off each tab into its own process.

01:28:52   So if you have 20 tabs, there's 20 Chrome rendering processes.

01:28:57   Safari has two processes one for the interface and a separate process that

01:29:03   just does the rendering now that's a big security win either both both ways give

01:29:09   you the security win where the rendering process which might be exploited by bugs

01:29:13   in JavaScript or something like that is completely sandboxed and doesn't have

01:29:18   access to the file system doesn't have access to all sorts of stuff huge

01:29:22   security win. But I do think that at least to date the Chrome model of using many rendering

01:29:31   processes, especially I think the reason that Safari gets slowed down for me is that I'm

01:29:36   such a hyperactive reader that I end up with 20, 30 tabs open at a time. And that to me

01:29:43   is when it really, I see the difference. I don't really see a difference in speed if

01:29:46   I have one tab open in each app. It's when I have a bunch open. I can't help but think

01:29:52   that at a technical level, it's gummed up by only having one monolithic rendering process.

01:29:59   So, why do you think they do that? Why not just copy what Chrome did?

01:30:04   I honestly have no idea. I mean, I just – and I hesitate to speculate because I'm – whatever

01:30:11   technical guesses I could make are, you know, laughably ill-informed compared to, you know,

01:30:17   the guys who are actually on the WebKit team at Apple.

01:30:20   Right. Yeah. They have done some nice things to make it more compelling to use Safari with

01:30:26   Mountain Lion, in particular the iCloud iTabs integration stuff. So if you use Safari on

01:30:34   iOS, which most everyone does except for the few who use Chrome, you can get transfer back

01:30:40   and forth quickly between your tabs that you have open. And that's a really nice integration.

01:30:44   There's also the reader thing, which I don't know how many people use or don't use. It still seems

01:30:50   kind of half-baked in my mind, but it's nice that they have it for offline now if you want to do

01:30:54   that. So you can take a bunch of articles if you're going to be going to an airport or whatever,

01:31:00   but you can always do that with Instapaper or one of the other services already. And so they do a

01:31:06   a nice job of kind of unifying that experience but it's still not quite

01:31:12   enough I think to get me using Safari on a regular basis just solely because

01:31:17   of the speed thing and I'm for whatever reason it's a silly aesthetic thing but

01:31:21   I'm like addicted to having pinned tabs where I have like four tabs that I pin

01:31:25   which are you know like Gmail, Twitter and a few others that rotate tech memes

01:31:32   one of them and because I just always have those open and kind of shoved over

01:31:35   to the side so they're not in my face or something because there's weird spacing issues with

01:31:41   Safari tabs. I'm sure you've noticed this where it's like certain versions of it, and

01:31:46   I've been playing with different nightly builds and stuff, certain ones like when you open

01:31:50   a new tab it'll open it like the entire half of however big your window is and that will

01:31:54   be the new tab. Other versions do it as like a fifth of it and they make like these small

01:32:00   little differences and I'm not sure what they're going for there. I just like the aesthetic

01:32:03   better.

01:32:04   I don't like the way that with tabs in Safari now, if you have two tabs in a window, they

01:32:08   each get half the window.

01:32:09   Yeah, right.

01:32:10   Exactly.

01:32:11   Because, aesthetically, it just—and I realize that the idea there is that if the page title

01:32:16   has a long string, then you see more of it.

01:32:17   You can see the whole thing, yeah.

01:32:19   But, yeah, aesthetically, to me, it doesn't look good.

01:32:22   Yeah.

01:32:23   I do actually like—I like and don't like the non-showing of favicons, which—because

01:32:27   a lot of sites just have shitty ones, and they're kind of ugly, and Chrome shows those,

01:32:31   and Safari doesn't, so it keeps it more pristine and more focused on what the content is. But,

01:32:36   you know, in some hands, like, Google does an actually kind of cool thing with their

01:32:40   favicon for Gmail, which is that they give you a little unread count on it when, you

01:32:45   know, so if there's two unread emails in there, it'll show up in the favicon as little two

01:32:50   on the side of it.

01:32:51   >> Yeah. Maybe I should give Chrome another shot. I don't know. It might be time. I think

01:32:56   one of the reasons I switched the last time is I had a bookmarklet that didn't work for

01:33:01   me in Chrome. And I eventually figured out that it was a bug in the bookmarklet. It wasn't

01:33:08   that Chrome didn't support it. So anyway, I probably should.

01:33:13   That is a big problem with Chrome for iOS, though, by the way. The bookmarklets do not

01:33:17   work at all.

01:33:18   Right. That's actually the deal-breaker for me. I mean, just from a practical standpoint

01:33:23   is why I don't use it. But I understand, though, that most people don't use bookmarklets.

01:33:29   They have no idea what they are.

01:33:31   And I do see how the way that Chrome's interface for iOS, especially on the iPhone's design,

01:33:37   actually puts more emphasis on the content.

01:33:40   Yes.

01:33:41   Because it doesn't have both a top and bottom bar.

01:33:45   It just has a top bar.

01:33:46   Yeah, which was a little jarring at first, but it's actually pretty nice.

01:33:51   The thing I love the most, though, and god, I wish Safari for iOS would copy this, is

01:33:56   just to be able to swipe without zooming out, you know, like rather than hitting the tab

01:34:00   button, you can just swipe on the left or right and get to the next tab.

01:34:03   Yeah, that's genius. That really is very nice.

01:34:06   Yeah, so that's my favorite thing. And they did kind of similar, they did a new gesture

01:34:13   in Safari for Mountain Lion, which is that you can pinch to zoom out and it gives you

01:34:19   this new tab view type thing that you could switch between the open tabs in Safari, which

01:34:25   Which is pretty slick. I'm not sure how good that is for people who have tons of tabs

01:34:30   open because you'll just be flicking through them forever. But it's a pretty nice little

01:34:33   element.

01:34:34   Yeah, but the funny thing is there, and I like it. I think it's a great feature. But

01:34:38   there the tabs are tab size.

01:34:41   Yes. Yes.

01:34:42   Like, in the interface where it really doesn't matter, the tabs are tab size.

01:34:47   They bring them down to a small little size. Yeah, that's funny.

01:34:49   But when you zoom in there, each one gets an equal share of the tab bar.

01:34:56   They only look good.

01:34:57   I guess bottom line is that Safari's tabs only look good when you have at least four

01:35:00   or five tabs in a window.

01:35:02   Mad Fientist Yep.

01:35:03   Totally agree.

01:35:04   Yep.

01:35:05   Adam

01:35:16   table. But I think that they're not really in it for the money. I mean, I'm sure, multiply

01:35:22   the 50 million copies, they'll eventually sell by 20 bucks. I mean, they're going to

01:35:28   keep the $100 million or $200 million, whatever it comes to. But I mean, that's not that much

01:35:34   money for Apple.

01:35:35   Yeah. When they give these pitches about what Mountain Lion's all about, they lead with

01:35:42   the numbers, you know, 66 million people or whatever using OS X. That number has tripled,

01:35:47   I think they said, in five years. And then they start to go in directly to like how they're

01:35:53   focused on distributing it digitally. And they even told me this time they're not going

01:35:58   to do the USB key thing that they did the last time because, you know, some people just

01:36:02   couldn't comprehend how to do it through the Mac App Store.

01:36:05   Right.

01:36:06   So, but that's a smart way to do it.

01:36:10   And it led to, they said, I think 40% of the install base updated to Lion in nine months,

01:36:15   which doesn't sound like a lot compared to iOS, but it's huge compared to any other

01:36:22   traditional desktop operating system.

01:36:23   You know, they give you the Windows 7 number that it took 26 months to hit that same milestone.

01:36:27   Right.

01:36:28   And I think that, you know, it was, I think that the old numbers were largely the fact

01:36:34   that prior to Lion, most people just didn't update their operating system until they got

01:36:40   a new computer.

01:36:41   Right.

01:36:42   I mean, they're just, the mass market really just buys a computer and will install, hopefully,

01:36:47   you know, whatever software updates come over the air, security updates and stuff like that.

01:36:50   But they don't, when it comes time to do the big update to the new major release that

01:36:55   you have to pay for, they don't do it.

01:36:56   And now they are.

01:36:58   Yeah, just getting 40% to do it in the nine month span because that's how long.

01:37:03   Because I really think that's a large part about what the, you know, Windows 7 taking

01:37:06   26 months is, I mean, when you're talking about 26 months to hit 40%, you're more at

01:37:11   that, you know, two year period where people get new computers every two or three years.

01:37:16   Yes, that's totally true.

01:37:17   That's probably what drives the majority of that number.

01:37:20   Right.

01:37:21   And I really think, you know, so like you said, Apple says there's now 66 million installed

01:37:26   base for Mac, which isn't users, it's Macs, right?

01:37:29   And so like a family Mac might have multiple users.

01:37:32   It's kind of hard to estimate users.

01:37:33   But if every single one of them spent the 20 bucks to update to Mountain Lion, it's

01:37:41   just not that much money from Apple's perspective.

01:37:44   Clearly this thing is priced low to encourage people to update.

01:37:48   And it's fascinating how that's influenced Microsoft because now Windows 8 is how much,

01:37:55   I think it's, is it $29? It's something obscenely low compared to what it used to be, which

01:38:01   is well over $100. And so it feels, of course, like they've been pressured to do that by

01:38:09   what Apple is doing, and they've kind of set the bar for what an OS upgrade should be.

01:38:14   Yeah, and they've also simplified it, where they don't have anywhere near as many versions

01:38:18   of Windows to choose from.

01:38:20   Right.

01:38:21   They just decided to go with that ridiculous RT name still for no apparent reason.

01:38:26   But what's most interesting about Microsoft dropping the price significantly of Windows,

01:38:31   which is great for consumers, of course, and that's going to lead to a lot more people

01:38:35   upgrading to it, I think.

01:38:37   But that's the core way they make money.

01:38:40   It's not the core way because OEMs still pay the licensing fee to Microsoft, but it's still

01:38:46   like a big part of the way Microsoft makes money, and they're taking whatever it is,

01:38:51   a fourth cut.

01:38:52   Right.

01:38:53   A fourth of that now.

01:38:54   In theory, Apple could give it away free.

01:38:57   I mean, I don't know about the accounting ... There still might be some kind of-

01:39:01   Right.

01:39:02   There would be accounting practices that you couldn't do that legally, but-

01:39:06   Or they could sell it for a ridiculously low price.

01:39:09   In theory, they could sell it for $1.99 or something.

01:39:13   It wouldn't matter to Apple financially.

01:39:15   They wouldn't really be taking it on the chin.

01:39:18   The whole reason for that is that the only people who can buy it are people who've already

01:39:22   paid $1,000 or more for an Apple computer, whereas Microsoft needs that money.

01:39:28   That's a core part of their business.

01:39:31   So yeah, I don't know if the OEM relationship is any different, if they're charging the

01:39:37   OEMs less per license because they're charging consumers less? I assume not, because that

01:39:42   would be a significant hit on their business if they did that same cut for the OEM vendors

01:39:49   that they work with. I mean, you're talking Windows revenues cutting by a fourth or whatever.

01:39:54   Well, and I think that the difference is that they're pretty much pitching it as it's upgrade

01:40:00   pricing only. Yeah, that's true.

01:40:04   That is a question. I don't actually think – I remember somebody asked it, and I don't

01:40:07   think we have the answer yet is let's say you buy a bare bones PC that doesn't even

01:40:11   ship with a version of Windows on it, just a blank motherboard and hard drive. Will you

01:40:16   be able to take the $29 retail Windows 8 thing and install Windows on it or do you have to

01:40:22   start with some version of Windows?

01:40:23   You know, that's always been a tricky question. I remember back in the '90s thinking about

01:40:28   that. I want to say that at least one version, maybe it was Windows ME or something like

01:40:33   allowed you to install the operating system even though it was the upgrade version.

01:40:39   And it wasn't like touted or anything, but there was a way to do it.

01:40:41   Or there might have been a small little hack that you could, you know,

01:40:44   get some file on your computer that made it think that you had, you know, Windows XP or something.

01:40:49   And then you could, or Windows 98 I mean, and then you could install Windows ME on top of that.

01:40:54   There was something like that.

01:40:55   But as far as I know, you can't do that or you shouldn't be able to do

01:40:59   that because that'd be stupid then, you know, from Microsoft's perspective.

01:41:03   They want you to, of course, buy the full version, which you're right, is the version

01:41:06   that they would sell to the OEMs.

01:41:08   The OEMs aren't doing upgrades for users.

01:41:11   Anyway, though, bottom line, I just don't think Mountain Lion is all that earthshaking.

01:41:18   It is absolutely not earthshaking in the way that Windows 8 is.

01:41:23   I think it's a good thing for Mac users.

01:41:26   Yeah.

01:41:27   That just makes reviewing it interesting.

01:41:30   I mean, you know, I assume we're both writing our reviews today. Yeah, I don't know exactly how to frame it

01:41:36   I think you know, you're framing it as correct

01:41:38   And I don't like to do you know, I don't know how you you come up

01:41:43   Do do your traditional review stuff?

01:41:46   I know that you do it typically different than like say, you know

01:41:50   The verge or engage it does it like especially with hardware

01:41:53   But and I try to do that too just because I don't I don't like to go into details about all the little

01:41:59   all the specs and everything because it just matters less and less over time it seems like.

01:42:03   But with an OS upgrade like this, it's a tricky thing to approach from a review perspective

01:42:08   because it's so similar to what Lion is, you know, besides these core features.

01:42:14   Yeah, that's the problem I'm having with my review. I like it. I think everybody, certainly

01:42:19   everybody who like listens to this show or reads during Fireball, I think it's going

01:42:23   to be a very popular update and I think it's worth 20 bucks. But every, it's hard to

01:42:29   to write the review though in a way that doesn't come across as saying I don't

01:42:32   know if that you know there's not that much new right right so you almost have

01:42:37   to do it as taking a step back and looking at the broader perspective right

01:42:40   what you're talking right yeah yeah but anyway speaking of which we should

01:42:43   probably get to work on that stuff mg siegler thank you very much for being

01:42:46   here I really appreciate it of course thanks for having me again let me just

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