00:00:00 ◼ ► I guess we should just knock out the sad news right at the beginning, Jason, and do the obituaries.
00:00:13 ◼ ► We got John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe. He died about a week ago. The Times had a good
00:00:20 ◼ ► obituary. I was kind of taken aback. Adobe did not do the sort of "our founder died, let's devote our
00:00:29 ◼ ► homepage to an obituary." I mean, the canonical example would be what Apple did when Steve Jobs
00:00:35 ◼ ► died. Adobe just sort of had a statement, but they didn't really market on their website.
00:00:51 ◼ ► It still is the Adobe I love, but there's also the new Adobe that does stuff that I don't
00:01:07 ◼ ► like ad tech and analysis and stats and marketing tools and all of that, which I understand they
00:01:27 ◼ ► And are there going to be other weird businesses that they are going to go in that we will be
00:01:31 ◼ ► shocked by today? But Adobe's like that, right? Where they're like, they still do Photoshop.
00:01:37 ◼ ► They still do all of the creative apps. They're still building new apps. They still have teams
00:01:55 ◼ ► And, or, or maybe it's the main business. I actually don't know the size of it, but it's like,
00:02:02 ◼ ► he wrote illustrator and Warnock and Geschke, the two founders Geschke passed away a couple
00:02:06 ◼ ► of years ago, just. Pivotal knowledgeable computer people who also decided that they were going to
00:02:13 ◼ ► just take that tech and build their own business. And PostScript obviously is the, the, the biggest
00:02:19 ◼ ► intersection with, with Apple where Steve Jobs saw that and was like, Oh my God. And they made
00:02:25 ◼ ► the laser writer, essentially it's a collaboration between Apple and Adobe and the laser writer itself
00:02:30 ◼ ► changed the course of the publishing industry at the very least and probably the computer industry
00:02:44 ◼ ► we've been doing this long enough yet. We still have a long way ahead of us knock on wood,
00:02:50 ◼ ► hopefully, but I'm blown away. And I I'll just say it, we'll get to it later, but talking about
00:02:56 ◼ ► the iPad as a person, it can't be your main computer, the never ending topic. And it's like,
00:03:02 ◼ ► in some ways it feels like it's moving so slow and Steven trout and Smith pointed out, I added it to
00:03:10 ◼ ► the show notes, a 2013 article 10 years ago, I wrote an article that was pretty much covering
00:03:16 ◼ ► the exact same stuff that you and I were writing about this week, 10 years. And it's like, no,
00:03:42 ◼ ► by like 1988, the publishing industry had largely moved to the Macintosh and digital publishing,
00:04:10 ◼ ► I thought that was just totally normal. Right now it was a, there was a lot, I would say
00:04:14 ◼ ► there's a lot of pent up, pent up inspiration going on there, right? Where it was like,
00:04:26 ◼ ► like everybody had its precursor, but like the Mac leading to that point and then having
00:04:30 ◼ ► Warnock and Geschke at Adobe and saying, we can do postscript. And you put those together with the
00:04:36 ◼ ► hardware, the laser writer, and you put it together with page maker and then later QuarkXPress, you put
00:04:41 ◼ ► it together with Photoshop and illustrator. And it, that it just kept that ball just kept rolling
00:04:48 ◼ ► for a very long time. And by the time, yeah, five years had passed, the whole industry had already
00:04:54 ◼ ► been transformed and yeah, just like that. I wrote in my little brief sort of, I don't know,
00:05:03 ◼ ► call it a bit, whatever you want to call it when I, you know, just add a couple of thoughts when
00:05:07 ◼ ► somebody dies or something about the way that they did not settle. And to me, it's exactly,
00:05:19 ◼ ► friendly corporate relationship and certainly on and off over the years, they obviously got
00:05:24 ◼ ► along with Steve Jobs. The laser writer, as you just alluded to, was a total collaboration.
00:05:29 ◼ ► Apple sold it and it was an Apple hardware product that connected to Apple's computers,
00:05:33 ◼ ► but entirely based on postscript technology that was Adobe's. Totally a joint collaboration. And
00:05:41 ◼ ► in those eighties years, if you were doing desktop publishing on a Macintosh, effectively part of your
00:05:58 ◼ ► extend all extensions ran. No, there was no kernel really, but so they effectively all ran in kernel
00:06:04 ◼ ► space and infamously any kind of conflict or bug in a third-party extension could just freeze up,
00:06:10 ◼ ► collapse your entire system or whatever. But if you were there at the time, nobody even called it
00:06:15 ◼ ► Adobe Type Manager. It was ATM. And the extension was always spelled tilde ATM because unlike now,
00:06:32 ◼ ► text encoding in classic Mac OS, tilde sorted to the bottom. And you always wanted ATM to load last.
00:06:59 ◼ ► You really did get somebody, some reader who thanked me for my post, but couldn't believe
00:07:06 ◼ ► I didn't mention the term WYSIWYG, which at the time was whether we were writing about it
00:07:12 ◼ ► professionally or before that, just talking about the Mac, you couldn't go two paragraphs without
00:07:18 ◼ ► talking WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get because it was transformative. The idea that you
00:07:23 ◼ ► actually could see on screen what you would get when you printed seems so obvious. But up until
00:07:32 ◼ ► that point, it was nothing like that. People don't understand the idea that it used to be,
00:07:37 ◼ ► you're writing your college term paper, let's say, because this is a true story about me,
00:07:42 ◼ ► in Microsoft Word. It's a little short. You wrote it in 12 point, but you need to pump it up a
00:07:47 ◼ ► little bit and you put it in 13 point. It'll print on a laser writer and look great. But on your
00:07:55 ◼ ► screen, it looked like crap because the bitmap font that was displaying on your pixel-y screen
00:08:02 ◼ ► only came in certain type faces. They were outlined or shadowed in the fonts menu as well.
00:08:13 ◼ ► it would print fine. ATM was that moment where Adobe was basically patching macOS to say,
00:08:25 ◼ ► Before that, there was as different as doing any sort of typography, even just rudimentary
00:08:35 ◼ ► word processing for a school paper where you were just happy to use Helvetica or Times New Roman.
00:08:41 ◼ ► You weren't fussy about typefaces. You're picking one of the 12 fonts that came with the computer,
00:08:52 ◼ ► So, where before it was, well, you had a typewriter or a "word processor" that was really just a
00:09:03 ◼ ► typewriter with a couple of lines of memory, and you got 12 point courier and you liked it.
00:09:17 ◼ ► in hot metal type, if you're setting with little tiny pieces of type, obviously, whatever size that
00:09:24 ◼ ► is, is the size you're going to get when it strikes the paper. Our bitmap fonts were like that.
00:09:30 ◼ ► It was like we'd have nine pixel, we'd call them points, but the points were pixels. Nine, ten,
00:09:37 ◼ ► twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two. If you didn't like one of those,
00:09:45 ◼ ► it's a tough one. You could set it to the others, but they looked terrible because they were just a
00:09:50 ◼ ► mathematical expansion of it. They weren't based on the shapes, which were in the vectors, which
00:09:59 ◼ ► was what PolkScript was all about, was creating a resolution independent vector, and no font hinted
00:10:06 ◼ ► every point size. It also means that you couldn't zoom effectively because that's cheating. If you
00:10:13 ◼ ► zoom in on a document that's got a 12 point font, it's not 12 point on your screen anymore.
00:10:25 ◼ ► newspaper and we had PageMaker. There's that moment where you zoom in and it redraws the
00:10:38 ◼ ► it just all turns into a gray square because it's like, "Nope, forget it. I'm not going to try."
00:10:43 ◼ ► Then Jobs, because Jobs was so savvy, when he went to Next, one of the first things they did was
00:10:50 ◼ ► they built their Next Step operating system on Display PostScript, which was just, "We're going
00:10:55 ◼ ► to use PostScript as our display layer." That ended up coming back to macOS in OS X with quartz.
00:11:06 ◼ ► PostScript ended up inspiring Next and then wrapping back around and being a key part of
00:11:11 ◼ ► the concept of how OS X... Trust me, I don't know if you ever used a Next Step computer, but
00:11:18 ◼ ► the processors at the time really struggled to try and render PostScript on the screen.
00:11:23 ◼ ► I got the idea. The idea is, "Yeah, we should probably just use these fundamental resolution
00:11:29 ◼ ► independent outlines to draw everything on the screen." By the time we got into the OS X era,
00:11:36 ◼ ► Tom: Yeah, I was infinitely curious about the Next computers, but Drexel had, as far as I knew,
00:11:43 ◼ ► one. There was one that I knew of in the computer lab, and I got to, I don't know, kick the tires
00:11:49 ◼ ► on it. I mean, pretty much spent about as much time as I would have if there were retail stores
00:11:57 ◼ ► Ben: Yeah, mine was University Bookstore had one, and I spent a good hour on the stupid
00:12:04 ◼ ► display unit at the University Bookstore because it's the only way I was ever going to touch one.
00:12:08 ◼ ► Tom; Yeah, it was vaguely reminiscent of the early versions of macOS X in that the screen was slow to
00:12:14 ◼ ► refresh because you could see what it was doing, and you could see that it was elegant in doing it
00:12:21 ◼ ► correctly in some sort of abstract notion of, "Oh, this is the way to draw everything. Do it all
00:12:26 ◼ ► with PostScript right on the screen, and everything that could be an outline is an outline or a vector
00:12:32 ◼ ► graphic or something like that, and everything that could be scalable is scalable." But yes,
00:12:37 ◼ ► the computers, even though the Next was started at $10,000, way too slow really to handle it at
00:12:45 ◼ ► the time. I do know this. I didn't mention it. Again, the guy just died. I don't know. It's not
00:12:50 ◼ ► the time to to drudge up the unpleasant stuff, but I've talked to people, more than one person,
00:12:57 ◼ ► engineers at Apple who more or less have been there since the Next era, and Next's use of
00:13:07 ◼ ► display PostScript was technologically advanced and clearly the right thing to do, and like as you
00:13:13 ◼ ► said, absolutely is why the groundwork they laid literally just goes straight through to all of
00:13:22 ◼ ► these devices today, right up to the Vision Pro, which isn't even out yet. You can just trace the
00:13:28 ◼ ► operating system through in this way and the way that it handles graphics, certainly, but the
00:13:33 ◼ ► relationship between Next and Adobe was contentious. It's the way that Next kind of got pushed around.
00:13:40 ◼ ► It bothered Jobs. Steve Jobs does not remind anybody of the sort of executive who liked being
00:13:45 ◼ ► pushed around and bullied by bigger companies and being sort of overlooked by the press at large and
00:13:52 ◼ ► written about in the past tense, but the basic story, and this is all never written. This is all
00:13:58 ◼ ► stories told over beers at Macworld's and WWDC's long past, but Next didn't have the source code
00:14:06 ◼ ► to display PostScript. They had a licensing agreement, obviously, and they were allowed
00:14:11 ◼ ► to use it, but they only got to take like the binaries and put them in the operating system.
00:14:19 ◼ ► And so when Next engineers needed to do work that involved actual display PostScript code,
00:14:27 ◼ ► they had to go to Adobe and work in what effectively an air-gapped room without internet
00:14:35 ◼ ► access. And it breeds resentment, I guess, more or less. Like, okay, you guys can come in,
00:14:44 ◼ ► but it's like, you got to, I don't know if they went through a magnetometer, but effectively,
00:14:49 ◼ ► just anything that Adobe could do to make sure that they weren't sneaking out the source code
00:14:54 ◼ ► to PostScript, they would sit there, do all the work at somebody else's office, possibly,
00:14:59 ◼ ► depending on how intense it was. It wasn't just like, oh, we need to come in and spend five minutes
00:15:04 ◼ ► fixing a bug. It might be a major new feature. It might've been when they added color to Next,
00:15:09 ◼ ► something super significant and difficult, weeks at a time. But it's funny because these guys
00:15:15 ◼ ► resented that, but then what has Apple done in the decades past when they invite third-party
00:15:20 ◼ ► developers to come and work on unreleased operating systems and unreleased products like
00:15:26 ◼ ► the iPad and Vision Pro now? It's like, come to us, come into a room. You walk out with nothing.
00:15:46 ◼ ► in studying computer science at Drexel. One of my very, I guess, quite honestly, my favorite,
00:15:51 ◼ ► in hindsight, professor, same as David Manganask, and I had him for a couple of classes,
00:15:59 ◼ ► but he had written his PhD, I guess, dissertation on PostScript. I had him in around '93, '94.
00:16:09 ◼ ► I don't know when he got his PhD, but he was pretty young for a professor. But he had written
00:16:14 ◼ ► his dissertation about PostScript and doing stuff. And so he knew, and he had these amazing little
00:16:20 ◼ ► programs. They were amazing. PostScript really is a programming language, but it doesn't look like
00:16:33 ◼ ► if you do write it as a human, you can kind of follow the gist of it. But he would have
00:16:46 ◼ ► You know what I mean? What was that thing we had as a kid with the pencil, the spirograph?
00:16:57 ◼ ► 3D, etched artwork, and it would be like 17 lines of code. And you would get this amazing
00:17:06 ◼ ► stuff out of it. PostScript was amazing like that, but it's so, as I wrote, the thing that makes
00:17:22 ◼ ► when they invented PostScript. They were like, this is nowhere near enough. Illustrator is the
00:17:26 ◼ ► perfect example because it really was just a front end to PostScript purely. And it wasn't like,
00:17:33 ◼ ► oh, well, the smart people will just write PostScript directly and we'll build PostScript
00:17:47 ◼ ► And if you really want to do something serious, you'll have to poke into the hood and find
00:17:51 ◼ ► the closest person who knows how to write actual PostScript and they'll go into your Illustrator
00:17:57 ◼ ► file and do the real hard work in actual PostScript. No, it was a complete encapsulation.
00:18:03 ◼ ► And maybe I'm drawn to that word encapsulation because of the EPS format, encapsulated PostScript.
00:18:17 ◼ ► but the encapsulated PostScript format was like the native format of Illustrator and Illustrator,
00:18:24 ◼ ► the app was conceptually a complete encapsulation of PostScript. It was just a word to the millions
00:18:33 ◼ ► of graphic designers who still use Illustrator. PostScript is just a word that they don't need
00:18:38 ◼ ► to really know anything about. It's all there as a visual tool for visual artists working in
00:18:45 ◼ ► visual medium. And I think most of the times in history, somebody invents something like PostScript
00:18:52 ◼ ► and they're so proud of it and they're so focused on it because their mind works like as a
00:18:59 ◼ ► programming language inventor, they're not the same people who have the mind to create a complete
00:19:10 ◼ ► what are we going to do with it? And the answer is, what do you mean? We'll just make it better.
00:19:13 ◼ ► It's like, no, no, no. You got to do something with it because artists need this. So we had
00:19:17 ◼ ► artists in college. We had this one incredible artist at my college newspaper, and this is like
00:19:21 ◼ ► 1991. So it's the very early days of this. And his medium was Illustrator. He just passed away
00:19:27 ◼ ► a couple of years ago. His name is Mel Marcello. This guy was a genius. He was still making like
00:19:31 ◼ ► posters that are hanging in like sports venues and stuff. He was so great with Illustrator.
00:19:37 ◼ ► And I remember I would see these things and you would, you would see whether you were in
00:19:54 ◼ ► wouldn't render a preview. And so you'd have to watch it draw live with all of the shading
00:19:58 ◼ ► and everything. And so it was almost like these videos of people making a sketch on an iPad,
00:20:04 ◼ ► where you're seeing not just the finished image, but like all the layers and all the different
00:20:09 ◼ ► shapes that are built up by the artist to get to the point where you get that final image. And it
00:20:15 ◼ ► was just amazing. And that was, so his medium was Illustrator, which means essentially his medium
00:20:19 ◼ ► was PostScript. And then the other thing about Adobe and Warnock and Geschke is right when I
00:20:25 ◼ ► started a Mac user, my boss was Pam Piffner, who ended up writing a book that is out of print,
00:20:30 ◼ ► but you can get it places. It's essentially the Adobe story. I mean, it was for their 20th
00:20:35 ◼ ► anniversary. It's called inside the publishing revolution. So she was deep down in this and she
00:20:38 ◼ ► was my first boss. And that was when they were trying to popularize PDF and release Acrobat.
00:20:44 ◼ ► And at the time it was like kind of a hard sell, but Acrobat, the whole premise of Acrobat and PDF
00:20:54 ◼ ► or fonts that were on the hardware. You didn't know I did a magazine when I was in college and
00:21:01 ◼ ► I laid it out in page maker and I had to do it as a PostScript file. And it was like, I couldn't use
00:21:06 ◼ ► anything but the fonts that were on every single PostScript fender printer, because otherwise
00:21:10 ◼ ► you just couldn't do it. And so they said, what we need to do is make something that will be
00:21:15 ◼ ► available everywhere, like a piece of paper for any document. And it'll look the same everywhere
00:21:20 ◼ ► without the overhead. And it took them a long time. It was super hard for them to sell it at
00:21:26 ◼ ► the very beginning. And I think about that now, because that was a long time ago, right? I started
00:21:30 ◼ ► at Mac user in 94. So we're coming up on too many years there, right? It's coming up on 30 years,
00:21:39 ◼ ► but like now we were trying to register my daughter's car in Oregon because she lives in
00:21:46 ◼ ► Oregon now and graduated from college. And every DMV form is a PDF, California, Oregon, doesn't
00:21:55 ◼ ► matter. Everything is a PDF. And that was one of those things where that was a vision thing on their
00:22:00 ◼ ► part. Like they knew PostScript wasn't the end result. It was a pathway to a bunch of things they
00:22:07 ◼ ► wanted to do. And it took a lot of time and a lot of effort for PDF to get where it is. But at this
00:22:13 ◼ ► point, everybody just, it's a PDF. What is a PDF? It's paper. It's it. And that's exactly what they
00:22:20 ◼ ► always meant for it to be is what it is now. But it took them decades of work to get it there.
00:22:26 ◼ ► Yeah. And there really was this straddle between the history, hundreds year old history of print,
00:22:33 ◼ ► which had hundreds of years of tradition and technological advances to get print to the
00:22:41 ◼ ► non computerized print design printing to the point where by the eighties it had reached the
00:22:49 ◼ ► apex in the same way that every technology is at its best, right when it's about to be replaced,
00:22:54 ◼ ► like the very best, smoothest propeller passenger jets came right before the jet era, you know,
00:23:02 ◼ ► made them irrelevant and print forms could be as beautiful as your ability to make them.
00:23:08 ◼ ► Yet was print and you had to put ink on paper and tallying results if you were printing some
00:23:14 ◼ ► kind of survey or whatever would be lots of manual labor, lots of manual labor just to actually print
00:23:20 ◼ ► and distribute them. And computerization makes all sorts of stuff easier. But everything that
00:23:25 ◼ ► came out of computers was ugly and or at the very least crude, if not ugly, right? Just blocky,
00:23:40 ◼ ► Apple obviously had an interest in it, but Adobe really more even, I think, obviously more so than
00:23:47 ◼ ► Apple in the professional tool space for desktop publishing really pushed for, hey, this we should
00:23:54 ◼ ► be able to use computers to make stuff that's even better looking than print because computers
00:24:05 ◼ ► oh, if it's computerized, it's easier and faster, but looks crude. It should be beautiful.
00:24:18 ◼ ► our college newspaper, like I said, in page maker, but we still shot all of our half tones in order,
00:24:24 ◼ ► you're going to take a continuous tone, a black and white photo in order to make a color or not
00:24:28 ◼ ► color in order to make it print. Well, it's like photocopying a regular thing in a Xerox machine,
00:24:34 ◼ ► right? It comes out. It's awful. So what you do is you use a stat camera and you basically make
00:24:39 ◼ ► a half tone of it, which is the whole thing becomes like pixels. It becomes dots, dots and
00:24:44 ◼ ► absence of dots. And, and then you can reproduce that directly. Okay, great. We got a scanner
00:24:50 ◼ ► my junior year, I think in college and I scanned a photo and it's like, oh my God. And you could
00:24:56 ◼ ► place the photo, you could move the photo around in page maker. And one of the things you could do
00:25:01 ◼ ► was click on the thing and say, put a screen on it. And then when it printed, it was, it was ready
00:25:09 ◼ ► to go for the camera without us having to hand a print to someone who had to take it into a dark
00:25:15 ◼ ► room, who had to use a stat camera to turn it into a half tone that would then get pasted down.
00:25:20 ◼ ► And it was a moment that I remember it was like, can we do this? Can we take a picture and put it,
00:25:28 ◼ ► print it out of the computer and print it? And it looked different in fact, because the dot patterns
00:25:34 ◼ ► were finer and more sophisticated, but, but it worked. And it was just an amazing moment. Like,
00:25:40 ◼ ► I cannot believe the computers let us do this stuff now because it was, I could feel us just
00:25:46 ◼ ► leaving the past behind when I did that. Yeah. I was like a year or two behind you on that.
00:25:52 ◼ ► My college newspaper time was all through the scanner and we were, we've talked about this on
00:25:58 ◼ ► my show before, QuarkXPress, not page maker. But I remember when we got at the newspaper,
00:26:06 ◼ ► our first 1200 DPI laser printers, and we figured out, oh my God, we could make the screens,
00:26:19 ◼ ► And then we sent them. And then that issue of the Drexel triangle, the photos all looked terrible
00:26:33 ◼ ► No, we didn't actually screen at 1200, but I forget what we did, but we made what we sent
00:26:39 ◼ ► photo ready to the printer looked way better than anything we'd been sending up until that point.
00:26:44 ◼ ► But then when the ink blobs go that small, it looked at then all these photos that we thought
00:26:50 ◼ ► were going to look better than ever all looked like a photocopy of a fax that had been crumpled
00:26:57 ◼ ► up into a ball and smoothed out or something. It was terrible. Anyway, hats off to John Warnock.
00:27:03 ◼ ► What a career. Absolutely. What a legacy. The other obituary, I think we can spend less time
00:27:08 ◼ ► on it, but our good friend, everybody, America's TV friend, Bob Barker, the host of The Price is
00:27:14 ◼ ► Right, died after a good long run at 99 years old. Almost, almost a hundred. He was a few months
00:27:26 ◼ ► got as close to a hundred as he could possibly get without going over. Amazing. And you made the
00:27:31 ◼ ► same, I actually, I was visiting my mom this week and I said, did you see Bob Barker died? I said,
00:27:36 ◼ ► he was every kid's sick day friend because that was, that show was on in the morning for an hour.
00:27:43 ◼ ► You're a kid, you're home sick. What are you going to do? You just watch TV. There's nothing more you
00:27:47 ◼ ► can do. You just got to lay there. And that was, game shows are half an hour long. That game was an
00:27:52 ◼ ► hour long. It was captivating. And then I look at Daring Fireball and you have written the same
00:27:59 ◼ ► thing, which is he is the, he is your friend when you're a kid and it's, and you're sick home from
00:28:04 ◼ ► school. It was definitely the same thing. Very strong memories of that snow day. A lot of snow
00:28:09 ◼ ► days, if it was a nice snow day, we'd go out and play of course. But I guess actually we might even
00:28:15 ◼ ► be like frozen and wet by the time that the Price is Right was on at 11 AM for us. So yeah, I think
00:28:21 ◼ ► so. I think that was the time. Yeah. We might've actually even on snow days where we went out,
00:28:26 ◼ ► been back in the house by the time it was Price is Right time. Ringing out your socks and having
00:28:31 ◼ ► some soup. But a lot of, a lot of snow days weren't really snow. It was more like ice or whatever. So
00:28:36 ◼ ► you wouldn't go out and boom Price is Right. Of course, rainy summer days where you couldn't go
00:28:40 ◼ ► out and play Price is Right. That was the one thing. And I had a sister, my sister's two years
00:28:44 ◼ ► younger than me. And we might've fought over every other hour of the day if we were both home,
00:28:50 ◼ ► because it was a rainy summer day or a snow day or something. But one thing where there's never
00:28:54 ◼ ► an argument about is 11. Well, of course Price is Right. Absolutely. And it is not to dig down too
00:29:03 ◼ ► far into this rabbit hole, but like it was a show conceived as being for housewives. The whole idea
00:29:08 ◼ ► of it was it's a daytime show. It's for the housewives. And the whole idea is, is you know
00:29:14 ◼ ► what housewives know about? Shopping because they are the shoppers in the family. So we're going to
00:29:18 ◼ ► do a whole game show based on you guessing what things cost. Okay. That's fine. And yet
00:29:23 ◼ ► people of our generation, kids who did not know what anything cost were enthralled by the Price
00:29:32 ◼ ► is Right. And I think it's because it had this Bob Barker, very friendly, and it had this bizarre
00:29:38 ◼ ► sensibility in it. It was a bunch of mini games. We would say now for something like Mario party,
00:29:43 ◼ ► right? It was mini games and they were all, they had weird. Designs sometimes elegant, mostly not,
00:29:50 ◼ ► but weird designs of the mini games. We had the little like yodeling guy, the one on the mountain,
00:29:56 ◼ ► you had the big, big levers that you would pull and a number would come up. You had the big Plinko
00:30:01 ◼ ► thing where the they're all going down. Like there was some maniac who was in the art department of
00:30:06 ◼ ► that who would invent these just bizarre little mini games and they were so striking. And I think
00:30:13 ◼ ► that's why kids liked it is if you got bored with it, you're onto the next one. And then it also
00:30:18 ◼ ► means, you know what they all are and they had a rotating, whatever they had like 10 or 15 that
00:30:21 ◼ ► would rotate and then you'd see it and you'd be like, Oh, I know this one. It was magical. It
00:30:25 ◼ ► really was. I think that was part of what made it like, it's still on. It's still as a popular show
00:30:31 ◼ ► and in that era, people who are younger than us or whose memories aren't as good as us,
00:30:36 ◼ ► the whole morning was filled with game shows until it, until it became soap opera time.
00:30:41 ◼ ► And then the soap operas came on, I guess after the price is right. It was like the price is
00:30:45 ◼ ► right ended it and you might have news at noon and then it was also after that. But that mini
00:30:51 ◼ ► game format is what kept it fresh because every other game was 30 minutes of the exact same game
00:30:58 ◼ ► every day. And some of them are great. I loved the, one of my all time favorites too was Dick
00:31:04 ◼ ► Clark's, whatever. Pyramid. Yeah, but it changed over the year. $25,000, $64,000 pyramid, $100,000
00:31:12 ◼ ► pyramid, but the pyramid was a good game. But it was still, it was two rounds and the rounds were
00:31:18 ◼ ► exactly the same every day. The price is right had these mini games. I wonder how many they had.
00:31:24 ◼ ► I want to say because of what, what would they do in rotation at any given time, right? How many
00:31:29 ◼ ► would have been there? I don't, I don't know, but it was six a day, right? Because there would be
00:31:33 ◼ ► like the first three for the first spinoff and then the second three for the second spinoff.
00:31:38 ◼ ► So sounds about right. So if there were six mini games a day, they must've had 20 or 30 of them,
00:31:42 ◼ ► really. Cause I think if you went all week, you'd see some maybe more than once, but it was great
00:31:48 ◼ ► cause they, and then the other thing they had that was fantastic is most of the time, the normal
00:31:53 ◼ ► prizes people were playing for would be like a dining room set or a brand new washer dryer,
00:31:58 ◼ ► a big jet ski jet skis or something like that. But, but at least once a day, somebody's game
00:32:05 ◼ ► would be for a new car and everybody would go bananas. The whole crowd would go bananas. Yep.
00:32:20 ◼ ► Somebody every day, but they, it wasn't like always the second spot or the seventh spot,
00:32:30 ◼ ► the show only started three minutes ago. And already this lady's planned for a brand new Honda.
00:32:35 ◼ ► Holy cow. It's every day. Yeah. You can't just, you can't explain it even logically. I mean,
00:32:42 ◼ ► we could, like I said, I think I, I can understand logically what it was, but as a kid, it was just
00:32:47 ◼ ► like, give it to me. I'm I'm I'm homesick. Give me an hour of this show. I want it. I hope the
00:32:52 ◼ ► yodeling guys are on. I hope the big thing where you pull the handle and it tells you how many you
00:32:57 ◼ ► got right is on because those are my, my favorites. Like there was, yeah, it was magical. And Bob
00:33:02 ◼ ► Barker was the guy at the center of it. Game show host is a tough job. And it's funny that some game
00:33:07 ◼ ► show hosts live on in our memories. You mentioned to Clark. I was thinking about like Alex Trebek.
00:33:13 ◼ ► Like there is something that Pat Sajak is retiring, right? Like there was something that the audience
00:33:17 ◼ ► is really connected those hosts in a way. And Bob Barker, certainly. That was my first thought was
00:33:22 ◼ ► just like so many hours spent in front of the TV. Usually when I was homesick from school and
00:33:32 ◼ ► It's it's a bizarre human trait to be able to spend literally thousands of hours, hundreds of hours
00:33:39 ◼ ► a year over dozens of years for Barker doing the exact same thing. And people don't get tired of
00:33:48 ◼ ► you. It's like all they get is they just, they just grow in affinity for your presence. I mean,
00:33:53 ◼ ► and you and I could have wasted many, many hours on this show talking about our love of David
00:33:56 ◼ ► Letterman and late night talk shows. I have the same thing, but it's a different kind of charisma.
00:34:01 ◼ ► And Pat Sajak sort of proved it by trying his hand at hosting a late night show, which lasted like,
00:34:07 ◼ ► I don't know, four months or something like that. Just didn't have it as a late night host,
00:34:11 ◼ ► but obviously has it in spades as the host of to me rather insipid game show. But yeah,
00:34:18 ◼ ► it's not my favorite. Merv Griffin actually, who was, had his greatest success on camera as a talk
00:34:24 ◼ ► show host, but he invented game shows and then went out and hired. And that's how he made his
00:34:29 ◼ ► money was he invented game shows and made huge amounts of money from them. Jeopardy and wheel of
00:34:34 ◼ ► fortune being his babies, bringing back jeopardy, which had a much lesser known run before the Alex
00:34:42 ◼ ► Trebek era. And I guess inventing wheel of fortune whole cloth. No. And, and jeopardy was his
00:34:48 ◼ ► invention to begin with the original two. He and his, he and his wife, yeah, the art Fleming
00:34:52 ◼ ► version too. He and his wife invented it. That jeopardy song. Everybody knows was written by
00:34:55 ◼ ► Merv Griffin. It's just bananas. And then wheel of fortune. They actually brought back jeopardy
00:35:00 ◼ ► to pair it with wheel of fortune and yeah, something about that. And I don't know if our
00:35:04 ◼ ► kids have anything, are YouTubers comparable. I mean, like there weren't very many channels.
00:35:09 ◼ ► There wasn't much to do. And it became this thing that you really formed a connection with. And so
00:35:13 ◼ ► it's 99. He had a good run. Good job. Didn't go over. Nope. Didn't go over. All right. Let me
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00:38:25 ◼ ► and I used to think about it with speed, is in the early years of iPhone, it was super noticeable,
00:38:32 ◼ ► but it's always noticeable with most computers. But I've always thought that it's way easier to
00:38:37 ◼ ► tell how fast a new one is after you've gotten completely used to it and then go back to the
00:38:44 ◼ ► pre- just one generation back and feel how much slower it is. And I always keep my old iPhones
00:38:51 ◼ ► around for testing with, you know, oh, I've got the old last year's OS on my last year's phone
00:38:57 ◼ ► so that I can, oh, is this new? Is this feature new? What did this look like? Oh, here it is.
00:39:02 ◼ ► And then I'll be like, wow, this scroll's slow. This is crazy. I had that experience this week.
00:39:07 ◼ ► I'm going to be doing a video with my AirPods. I've been using AirPods Pro 2 ever since they
00:39:13 ◼ ► came out. And remember when I got them and I wrote, I reviewed them very glowingly. It's one
00:39:17 ◼ ► of my favorite Apple products. I think it's as much as people love AirPods, I honestly think
00:39:23 ◼ ► they're vastly underrated as augmented reality devices that everybody, especially with the Pro
00:39:32 ◼ ► versions that do the, and the Macs that do the advanced noise cancellation stuff, which is going
00:39:37 ◼ ► to be a little bit more accurate. I don't have the beta software online, but anyway, I love my
00:39:42 ◼ ► AirPods Pro 2. I'm glad I upgraded even though my AirPods Pro 1 were fine and not lost or not
00:39:50 ◼ ► battery deficient. But I thought this definitely sounds better, especially the noise reduction.
00:39:55 ◼ ► And I wear them as a pedestrian walking around Philadelphia 99% of the time, as my use of AirPods
00:40:01 ◼ ► around the city. But last week I had to go somewhere. Where was I? I forget. I don't know.
00:40:09 ◼ ► I had a doctor appointment and it's, I don't know, like a one mile walk. So it's like two
00:40:13 ◼ ► miles round trip. And I had to leave because yeah, that's why I couldn't go look for my AirPods Pro 2.
00:40:21 ◼ ► I could, I didn't know where they were and I thought crap, but I knew time-wise I needed to
00:40:26 ◼ ► leave right now and sort of briskly walk to make it on time anyway. So I took my AirPods Pro 1,
00:40:32 ◼ ► which were still had a charge and I knew where they were. They're in my office. My office is on
00:40:38 ◼ ► the ground floor. They were easy to grab and I'd use them for a two mile round trip walk.
00:40:43 ◼ ► Wow, do they sound terrible? I was blown away. They sound so, and it's podcasts, not music,
00:40:52 ◼ ► just listening to podcasts. And it's not even the noise reduction. At first I was like, well,
00:40:56 ◼ ► it's because the noise cancellation is not as advanced and it's not tuning out the traffic
00:41:05 ◼ ► and was waiting in a quiet room and I'm just listening to podcasts and I'm like, these sound so
00:41:13 ◼ ► tinny and thin. And I couldn't wait to get home and find my AirPods Pro 2, which were just like
00:41:19 ◼ ► up in my bedroom or whatever, and then do a side-by-side. And I'm like, I'm blown away at how
00:41:24 ◼ ► much better I now see AirPods Pro 2 are compared to when they were brand new. And I was impressed
00:41:32 ◼ ► by them and thought, yeah, this is worth an upgrade, but not blown away. And I just thought
00:41:37 ◼ ► I'd tuck that into the show. Yep, they're great. I don't think I've gone back, but it's hard to see
00:41:43 ◼ ► in the moment, right? When you switch over, I agree switching back sometimes is the really,
00:41:48 ◼ ► you see what you lose when you go backward and you're like, oh, okay, that's the difference
00:41:53 ◼ ► there. I love them. Yeah, they're one of my favorite Apple products, I think ever. And I
00:41:57 ◼ ► was super skeptical originally about them. I'm like, Apple headphones, come on. And the AirPods
00:42:01 ◼ ► were great, but the AirPods Pro are the best. Yeah, that's what I don't travel with anything
00:42:07 ◼ ► else at this point. And talk about a product that just looking at them side by side, I mean,
00:42:14 ◼ ► obviously they're headphones. So looking at them isn't how you're supposed to judge them,
00:42:19 ◼ ► but looking at them, boy, they sure don't look like a major upgrade. I mean, they look pretty
00:42:25 ◼ ► much identical. It's a slightly different pattern of black on the white buds and they're slightly
00:42:32 ◼ ► different ear cup rubber things that go in and the case is slightly different, but at a glance,
00:42:38 ◼ ► it's impossible to tell them apart. It certainly doesn't look like it, but boy, do they sound
00:42:43 ◼ ► different. And now it has me excited wondering where, when AirPods Pro 3 will come out, because
00:42:48 ◼ ► if there is much of an improvement, boy, that's going to be something. I'm trying to think here.
00:42:54 ◼ ► What else do we have? I guess we'll start going down the list. It's just one I want to get out
00:42:58 ◼ ► of the way. It's a weird clickbait story. I put this in the notes. I don't know if you saw this,
00:43:03 ◼ ► but my son, my son sent me this. He said, did you see Apple? That Apple is telling people not to
00:43:10 ◼ ► sleep next to their iPhone when it's charging. And I thought that's insane. I can't believe my son is
00:43:17 ◼ ► so illiterate that he would think that what I don't know what he read that gave him that impression.
00:43:21 ◼ ► I was like, send me a link. He sent me a link on Yahoo news. And the headline is Apple says,
00:43:26 ◼ ► don't sleep next to charging on phone. And I'm like, what you go through. And of course,
00:43:38 ◼ ► which I don't believe is new at all, says, here, I'm reading verbatim, avoid prolonged skin contact
00:43:45 ◼ ► with the charging cable and connector when the charging cable is connected to a power source,
00:43:49 ◼ ► because it may cause discomfort or injury. Well, I don't know about that, but then the next sentence,
00:44:02 ◼ ► I don't know. That seems like good advice, right? Like this, I don't think it's a new document,
00:44:09 ◼ ► how that got spun into Apple says, don't sleep next to a charging iPhone. I have no idea,
00:44:17 ◼ ► but lo and behold, I found like two or three other stories now, like including one at the
00:44:26 ◼ ► the streets headline is even more clickbait. It's Apple issues, a surprise iPhone danger warning.
00:44:43 ◼ ► SEO and broken media business models haven't just broken like Google searches are kind of broken
00:44:55 ◼ ► now because they're full of garbage search for anything. And you'll get all these AI articles,
00:44:59 ◼ ► or you'll get a search for a recipe and you'll get a blog post with 3000 words. And then the
00:45:03 ◼ ► recipes at the bottom, like, and it's all SEO or search for an old CNET article and you won't find
00:45:08 ◼ ► it because they deleted it because they think that it's SEO. But the one that, that really makes me
00:45:13 ◼ ► dispirited is our people, professional media people, journalists, basically have apparently
00:45:21 ◼ ► over the last few years, had it ground into them so much that you need to write clickbait headlines
00:45:28 ◼ ► because the business model has been so embedded that the only way we make money is if somebody
00:45:34 ◼ ► clicks through on the headline. So we have to get them to click and trick them in any way possible.
00:45:40 ◼ ► And, and what really infuriates me is when it happens in a place where the business model does
00:45:46 ◼ ► not require clickbait and they still do it because they've hired people who have grown up in this
00:45:53 ◼ ► toxic clickbait environment. And my example that I texted to you last week is the San Francisco
00:46:07 ◼ ► And I am a subscriber. All their headlines are like, "This Bay Area City May Be Committing
00:46:14 ◼ ► Horrible Racist Acts." And I mean, it's just like, guys, I pay for it. Just tell me what city it is
00:46:20 ◼ ► so I can decide if I want to read it. Headlines and subheads are supposed to be relevant. They're
00:46:26 ◼ ► supposed to make me want to read the story because they have informed me whether it's for me or not.
00:46:31 ◼ ► And yet, and I feel like given their business model, I doubt that there's somebody saying,
00:46:38 ◼ ► "You got to write a clickbait headline." I think it's people who just have survived the last 15
00:46:42 ◼ ► years in the media and they don't understand that headlines shouldn't be like that. But I feel like
00:46:48 ◼ ► these are all examples of how broken the whole media ecosystem has gotten because of the last
00:46:55 ◼ ► 10 or 15 years of the web. And now it's like, it doesn't even matter if you need the clicks.
00:47:00 ◼ ► You're just going to write the story as if it was clickbait. Write the headline. It kills me.
00:47:09 ◼ ► I'm wrong and that by the time people listen to this show or like a week or two, I just have a
00:47:15 ◼ ► sick feeling though that this coming week is going to have a dozen more of these stories because it's
00:47:20 ◼ ► too good to pass up. Can we make that the, like, can we do a hit clickbait like headline for this
00:47:26 ◼ ► episode of the talk show? Can we call it like my iPhone burned my pillow? You won't believe how we
00:47:32 ◼ ► got burned recording this episode. Right. This, this, this, yes, this object was set on fire by
00:47:39 ◼ ► my iPhone. Won't believe it. It's really a pillow. It's like on the one hand, maybe me and you should
00:47:47 ◼ ► be like, Hey, this just makes our work look better. You know, that our work stands out at all the
00:47:57 ◼ ► places. I feel bad for these people. Like I see a lot of these, I don't know if you saw the timestamp
00:48:03 ◼ ► on these. I'm not sure about that, but I, some of the worst stuff I see is on the weekend. And it's
00:48:09 ◼ ► very clearly somebody who is a low paid person. Who's trying, just trying to make it. And they
00:48:16 ◼ ► have, you know, that they've got basically a gun to their head saying, you got to do this many posts
00:48:20 ◼ ► on the weekend because our staff's not here. So we're bringing you in to write these posts.
00:48:25 ◼ ► And that's when I really see the worst. And it's because those people are desperate and they will
00:48:30 ◼ ► do anything to fulfill their quota so that they can get paid. And they're not, they're not on the
00:48:36 ◼ ► top of their game and they don't necessarily, they don't. And some of these stories, like you
00:48:40 ◼ ► mentioned that one story that sort of ran with this and reran it, they don't want to know, right?
00:48:45 ◼ ► Like they don't want to write the article that debunks the story. They just want to pass the
00:48:50 ◼ ► story on with some rewritten headlines. Nothing makes me more dispirited than when I'm in a Slack
00:48:55 ◼ ► or a discord and somebody posts a news story and it's from a website and I click through and I
00:48:59 ◼ ► realize that all they're doing is rewriting the original news story that came from somewhere else.
00:49:04 ◼ ► And it's like, why just linked to the real story. Like I know that this is from, we've got this
00:49:11 ◼ ► covered or comic book fan number one.com. And it's like, yeah, that story was at variety. Can
00:49:18 ◼ ► you just link to variety, please? Like they have a reporter who actually reported something,
00:49:23 ◼ ► please. Can we link to that? It's it's, and it's, it's getting worse because I know you do the same
00:49:29 ◼ ► thing I do is you're trying to hunt through. You're like, well, let me find the original.
00:49:33 ◼ ► And they'll say it was originally reported by variety, but that's not the link. You have to
00:49:38 ◼ ► go to like the next paragraph and they do have a link hidden somewhere, but it's not on the phrase
00:49:44 ◼ ► as originally reported or first reported by variety. It's like, they're, they're making it
00:49:48 ◼ ► even harder to, yeah, because they, they, they want, cause their SEO extends to all their links
00:49:56 ◼ ► being self links. Right. And so the, on first reference, it'll be like, it's a story about
00:50:01 ◼ ► some actor and the link will be to their tag page about that actor with all their other stories
00:50:05 ◼ ► about that actor, because that's how they can build up this search referral power. Or at least
00:50:11 ◼ ► they believe a consultant told them at one point several years ago that that's what they should do.
00:50:17 ◼ ► And it's completely broken them now. And then you, cause you do, you want to find, I ended up doing
00:50:22 ◼ ► a lot of Google searches where I put in the subject matter and variety or Hollywood reporter
00:50:28 ◼ ► or whatever, to see if I can find what they're talking about. And, and invariably when it's a
00:50:34 ◼ ► game of telephone where there's a clickbait article that's based on something out of context,
00:50:38 ◼ ► and then it's rewritten, you have to, you have to go back several steps in order to get to
00:50:44 ◼ ► something like a boring tech note on Apple's website. Yeah. Whole world's coming to an end,
00:50:50 ◼ ► Mallory. I I'm hopeful that the, that the, some of this will get rewritten, that some, some of this,
00:50:59 ◼ ► like now that there are websites that are more likely getting their money from people paying
00:51:05 ◼ ► than from people coming in over the transom, that some, some of the people in charge will be like,
00:51:11 ◼ ► please don't write that headline that way anymore. That's not what we do here. Right. Somebody has to
00:51:15 ◼ ► stand up and say it because you've got people who spent their career having to write those bad
00:51:20 ◼ ► headlines or writing those blog posts that feed. It's like, I can't investigate this or I won't get
00:51:26 ◼ ► paid. I must just take it on face value because it's the only way I can get a post out of it.
00:51:34 ◼ ► irreparably broken. I don't know. Right. It, it, it comes back to like my, my love of outlining
00:51:41 ◼ ► and proper outlining, not just a word processor that can, has a feature to make bullets indent,
00:51:48 ◼ ► but like an omni outliner type app or the new app from Jesse Gross, Jean, the task paper was probably
00:51:55 ◼ ► best known for it as a Mac app called bike named after the bicycle for the mind thing I alluded to
00:52:02 ◼ ► earlier, which is a really, really great new newish. It's like a year old now Mac outliner.
00:52:11 ◼ ► a distant cousin of my wife. They they share a great grandfather. It's wild. It's the name.
00:52:18 ◼ ► Small, it's the name small world. Wait, wait, wait, Mac developers, the Jesse name or the gross
00:52:23 ◼ ► Jean. My wife's maiden name is Grosjean. But that's only because her grandfather decided it
00:52:29 ◼ ► would sound better if it was more French. Well, her grandfather, her great grandfather is gross
00:52:35 ◼ ► Jean and that's Jesse's too. It's yeah. We, we went through this like 10 years ago. I'm like,
00:52:39 ◼ ► how could it, it's gotta be right. And it actually, they're totally, they're totally related,
00:52:51 ◼ ► outliner as a way to structure your thoughts. Right. It with the hierarchy. And that's what
00:52:57 ◼ ► a newspaper front page was is if you really were short on time, you could just read the headlines
00:53:04 ◼ ► and you'd, you'd, you'd basically have an idea of what was important in the world, the nation and
00:53:10 ◼ ► your local community. Most, most newspapers aren't nationally focused. And then if you have a little
00:53:17 ◼ ► more time or about a particular story, there'd be a subhead, which would give you like a second
00:53:22 ◼ ► level of information that you'd be fairly well informed, at least what's going on. And then if
00:53:28 ◼ ► you really want the details, read the details and the newspaper. It's the inverted pyramid,
00:53:32 ◼ ► right? The whole idea of in for people who don't know journalism is yeah, you read the headline,
00:53:37 ◼ ► are you, are you committed? You read the subhead, are you committed? You read the lead,
00:53:40 ◼ ► the first paragraph and literally journalists were always trained. The most important information goes
00:53:46 ◼ ► in paragraph one. The second most goes in paragraph two and so on dating to the period of time when
00:53:52 ◼ ► you would write these stories. And when they ran out of space, they would just cut the article at
00:53:56 ◼ ► that point. So don't save your like big revelation for the end, because nobody will read that far.
00:54:02 ◼ ► And that's totally true, but that was in an era where you could say like, I bought your newspaper
00:54:08 ◼ ► and now I am not going to read all 12 of these stories. I'm going to read the four that appeal
00:54:12 ◼ ► to me the most, but you're competing with yourself and the product was already purchased. And so
00:54:17 ◼ ► you're performing ultimately it's a customer service thing, right? It's the, it's what we
00:54:21 ◼ ► would say in the computers. We'd say it was like the user experience, which is you bought our
00:54:25 ◼ ► product. We want you to get the most out of it by clearly labeling what all these articles are about
00:54:31 ◼ ► and the free web completely broke that where now it was all just like, we just need to trick you
00:54:37 ◼ ► into your browser, loading this page so that the ads will load so that we'll get credit for that.
00:54:42 ◼ ► Right, right. Because in the newspaper printed newspaper era, if you had the newspaper in your
00:54:47 ◼ ► hand, it was assumed you'd already purchased it, whether you're a subscriber or you bought it at
00:54:52 ◼ ► the newsstand you probably had already purchased it. So you already had the whole package. And so
00:55:10 ◼ ► caught, catches your eye and you buy a copy on the newsstand. That's a little different or a
00:55:16 ◼ ► magazine cover or something. But once you're inside, like, don't, I don't need to be tricked.
00:55:27 ◼ ► For people who don't know the reference, I forget the actual details, but I just read that recently.
00:55:49 ◼ ► Yeah. But my favorite detail of the headline, and it really was, it was like a gruesome murder.
00:56:04 ◼ ► But they sent somebody to confirm that there was some semblance of topless dancing in that
00:56:11 ◼ ► bar at some times like so that they still had the integrity that they wouldn't have run it.
00:56:20 ◼ ► no topless dancing. Like, no, there was. And it was like payphone, like boss, we got it.
00:57:02 ◼ ► in a day where that was a really tough thought over newspaper markets. So there's a lot of
00:57:15 ◼ ► And you had the Post and the Daily News. And then probably like, if you're in Long Island,
00:57:20 ◼ ► at least you had Newsday and you had the Times, obviously, and you're trying to figure out,
00:57:28 ◼ ► one of my journalism school professors was the city editor at the Daily News for many years.
00:57:32 ◼ ► And I enjoyed the contempt he had for the New York Times and how he was really committed to
00:57:37 ◼ ► doing good journalism and putting in the work and doing the footwork, but also realizing that
00:57:56 ◼ ► Actual, you don't think of Disney and journalism, but it's a big part of their business as it
00:58:02 ◼ ► stands. You and I both simultaneously, although me slower and behind you as usual, wrote about the
00:58:20 ◼ ► yeah, it's basically this piece by Kim Masters and the Hollywood reporter that basically says,
00:58:31 ◼ ► but it feels, I think it's a really well framed article speaking of like good journalism versus
00:58:36 ◼ ► clickbait. She says, when I talk to insiders, this old thing that didn't make any sense
00:58:42 ◼ ► seems like it might make more sense now. And it all is swirling around Bob Iger returning to Disney
00:58:50 ◼ ► and being under kind of like a lot of pressure to change the business and get it back in growth mode.
00:58:56 ◼ ► And that people within Hollywood think he might be positioning it for a sale, in which case he
00:59:02 ◼ ► might sell off some of his assets in order to make it more, a better position for a sale, perhaps even
00:59:07 ◼ ► to a specific buyer like Apple. And then second, this thing that I hadn't really thought about
00:59:12 ◼ ► until the last maybe month, which is the idea that technology companies are so much bigger,
00:59:18 ◼ ► more profitable and have so much more market cap than entertainment companies. And one of these
00:59:23 ◼ ► entertainment industry insiders quoted in the Hollywood reporter story says, it's inevitable
00:59:29 ◼ ► that the tech industry is going to eat these things because entertainment has now just become
00:59:34 ◼ ► streaming content. And that's part of the tech bubble. And that they said in the end, all that
00:59:39 ◼ ► will be left is Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and one other from an entertainment company. And if that's
00:59:45 ◼ ► the case, I think you and I look at it and say, well, if they're going to eat the entertainment
00:59:52 ◼ ► industry alive, Apple and Disney certainly seem like they're the best partners in terms of their
00:59:58 ◼ ► corporate culture and their fit. And I think that is, I think that's fundamentally true. I think
01:00:04 ◼ ► it's arguable that Iger would want Apple to buy them. I always just come back to the thing that
01:00:10 ◼ ► I know has stopped you too, which is, but why would Apple pay a hundred or $150 billion for
01:00:17 ◼ ► some or all of Disney? That's a harder question to answer, right? I would just want to, before I
01:00:23 ◼ ► forget, I just want to, and this is where I was like, I got to get Jason on the show because of
01:00:28 ◼ ► this, but I just, I saw, I was still writing my piece. I saw that yours was out because I got
01:00:35 ◼ ► bored and was looking at my feed reader. And as soon as I saw the headline, I just go in like,
01:00:40 ◼ ► nope. Yeah. It was like, I can't read his piece because I don't want it to pollute my thoughts.
01:00:44 ◼ ► And I'm so glad I didn't because you tied it together with the Steve Jobs analogy of the Apple
01:00:51 ◼ ► exists at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts and Disney does too. And it's like,
01:00:56 ◼ ► it really, and that, I think about it, Pixar imagineers at the, at the parks, like the ILM,
01:01:03 ◼ ► like there's so many the, the, the new ILM like stagecraft thing where they're using like
01:01:07 ◼ ► a gaming engine to beam. They put images on an LCD screen and they shoot it like it's on a set or out
01:01:15 ◼ ► in, in the world. But it's actually like all of that is this incredible. Our, our friend Todd
01:01:20 ◼ ► Visserie, right. Who works at ILM. Like these are people who love film, they're creative artists,
01:01:26 ◼ ► and they're also highly technical and understand what needs to be done on the technical side
01:01:30 ◼ ► in order to make the creative art better. Like they are. People are like, Oh, Disney and
01:01:36 ◼ ► theme parks and Apple doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, I don't know. Imagineering seems to be
01:01:41 ◼ ► exactly what Apple does on an abstract level. And so like, that's why I say, I think culturally,
01:01:48 ◼ ► they're actually pretty close. And of course jobs was a big, was when he sold Pixar, he,
01:01:53 ◼ ► he sold it to Disney. So that is a Steve Jobs company that's inside Disney. He became a leading
01:01:59 ◼ ► shareholder of Disney. Eiger was on Apple's board. Like there are so many connections here that like,
01:02:06 ◼ ► I, I think that if Apple were to buy Disney, they culturally would make it work. I don't think it
01:02:14 ◼ ► would be like an AOL time Warner thing where, where they're like, Oh my God, we can't put these
01:02:19 ◼ ► two companies together. I think that they are, they might be the two companies. Disney might be
01:02:26 ◼ ► the company that is most like Apple in the world. Maybe Nintendo is the only other competitor here
01:02:30 ◼ ► that would be like that. But like they, they see the world and I think a similar way. And that's,
01:02:38 ◼ ► I think that's interesting when you, when you're musing about this, when you're speculating about
01:02:42 ◼ ► it, I'm not sure, again, it makes the case that they should buy them, but I think if you can see
01:02:49 ◼ ► it right, you can see that resonance between them. There's like an unquenchable thirst for higher
01:02:56 ◼ ► production values and it defines which company am I talking about? It's both right. And it doesn't
01:03:02 ◼ ► matter every time there's a breakthrough, whether it's Apple with the iPhone. And it was like,
01:03:10 ◼ ► it was only the fourth model that went to the retina displays that quadrupled the number of
01:03:16 ◼ ► pixels per inch at a time when the first three iPhones were considered super high res, super
01:03:23 ◼ ► smooth scrolling, beautiful displays, unquenchable. And I'll throw a shout out and I jotted it down on
01:03:30 ◼ ► paper. I'll probably hopefully put it in the actual show notes, but there's a Neil Gabler
01:03:33 ◼ ► biography of Walt Disney, the man, which is one of my, usually I'm either bored to tears by a
01:03:40 ◼ ► biography and never even finished chapter three, or I gobbled the whole book up and this was one of
01:03:45 ◼ ► them. But like the early years of animated films, they were a sensation. It was like a technological,
01:03:53 ◼ ► I mean, motion pictures were a sensation. I mean, people screamed when the first one that was widely
01:03:59 ◼ ► distributed showed a train coming towards the screen because nobody had ever seen anything
01:04:03 ◼ ► like this before. And they thought people panicked and literally panicked and thought something might
01:04:08 ◼ ► burst through the screen. People going to the movies on Saturdays gave people something to do
01:04:14 ◼ ► and see that they'd never had before. But the way that Disney, the Disney studio never stopped
01:04:22 ◼ ► pushing the state of the art forward technically, they did this, I think it was with Snow White,
01:04:27 ◼ ► which again, just doing a feature length animated movie like Snow White, everybody was like,
01:04:34 ◼ ► almost again, like Apple, nobody's going to buy that. That's pan. Everybody thought cartoons were
01:04:39 ◼ ► something. Yes, kids like them for five minutes before the real movie, but nobody's going to watch
01:04:44 ◼ ► a 90 minute cartoon. And of course, yeah, that turned out the opposite. Kids love big, long
01:04:50 ◼ ► feature length cartoons, but they invented so many technological things to fake 3D and depth.
01:04:57 ◼ ► Right. And multi-plane camera, the whole thing. They actually, I don't think it's there anymore,
01:05:03 ◼ ► but Disney, the Hollywood Studios park in Florida used to have one of the attractions. And again,
01:05:11 ◼ ► it's like, guess which, how many people in the Gruber family liked going to see the Walt Disney
01:05:18 ◼ ► museum in the theme park? It was, I'll tell you it was 33%, but they had that multi-plane
01:05:29 ◼ ► contraption. They had the actual one or one of several that they used and I'd read about it.
01:05:35 ◼ ► And it sounded fascinating. It wasn't like, Oh, and then they invented that. And then they stopped.
01:05:39 ◼ ► It was just onward, onward, onward. When the theme parks are the same way, there's this culture,
01:05:44 ◼ ► you could see it. One thing I tried to look up and I couldn't find it. And so maybe I'm imagining it,
01:05:51 ◼ ► but it would have happened around 1994, 95, 96, when Apple was the bad years for Apple.
01:06:03 ◼ ► Obviously, I mean, it was a whole side note, but the, I think the closest Apple ever came to getting
01:06:09 ◼ ► acquired by another company was Sun Microsystems who easily could have afforded it at the time.
01:06:15 ◼ ► And Scott McNeely was like, but why, why would we buy a company with no technology we wanted?
01:06:25 ◼ ► Talk about like, where, where would the whole computing world be today? Who knows? But I seem
01:06:32 ◼ ► to recall though, that at that time when Apple was in financial trouble, that there was idle
01:06:37 ◼ ► speculation of this sort, that was Disney should buy Apple. Do you recall that? I can't, I searched
01:06:44 ◼ ► for it. And because 94, 95, 96 was so early on the web, nothing that was on the web persist from that
01:06:53 ◼ ► time or very little of it. It would have been in print, but I seem to recall. And I don't think it
01:06:58 ◼ ► was, somebody must have speculated at the time because at the time Apple was in trouble and
01:07:02 ◼ ► they're like, well, who should buy them? I seem to recall there were some people arguing, maybe just
01:07:07 ◼ ► spouting off, pulling it out of their own butt, but saying Disney should buy Apple. And it's like,
01:07:12 ◼ ► these companies ebb and flow over decades and what comes around goes around. I don't think,
01:07:18 ◼ ► I don't anticipate a time 20, 30 years from now where Disney once again would be big enough to buy
01:07:25 ◼ ► Apple. I think that's sort of over, but it, it, it, it's been in the air for a long time. I also,
01:07:33 ◼ ► I wonder, it was not just that Jobs sold Pixar to Disney. It's that I don't know how, how many
01:07:40 ◼ ► studios they seriously shopped around where they're, who they were going to collaborate with
01:07:46 ◼ ► other than Disney. Right. I mean, it was like Disney and who was second choice at the time
01:07:50 ◼ ► for, well, they had, they had, Disney had an exclusive distribution arrangement with Pixar
01:07:56 ◼ ► that they were going to have to run out the clock on. So I think there was this thought that they
01:07:59 ◼ ► were the only real suitable partner since they were yoked to them. Yeah. But, but, but when they
01:08:05 ◼ ► made that agreement, right before Toy Story even existed, I don't really think Steve Jobs and John
01:08:12 ◼ ► Lasseter and everybody else in the Pixar brain trust really wanted to do this with anybody else.
01:08:18 ◼ ► I mean, you know, Jobs of course is a famously good negotiator. I'm sure he did talk to,
01:08:23 ◼ ► I don't know, Universal or Warner Brothers or whoever else might've possibly done it, but it
01:08:30 ◼ ► just, even before they sold the company to them, just the whole idea, it just fit, it fit in a way
01:08:36 ◼ ► that it just wouldn't have been the same otherwise. There was just a, Oh yeah, this is exactly,
01:08:41 ◼ ► this is, this is an out of character for Disney to, to make these movies like Toy Story and Bugs
01:08:49 ◼ ► Life and Monsters Inc. These are, these feel like they should be Disney movies in a way that even
01:08:56 ◼ ► Disney owning Star Wars and Lucasfilm, I'm not saying that's unnatural, but it's nowhere near
01:09:01 ◼ ► as natural as the Pixar sub-brand of Disney. Cause it's just kids and fantasy and stuff like that.
01:09:10 ◼ ► And this has gone on. Yeah. I don't know about the certain times, but these rumors have been
01:09:15 ◼ ► out there on both sides. And today it's more referred to as Apple buying Disney. Whereas
01:09:20 ◼ ► back in the day, I think there was a talk about a merger. Yeah. And even Iger said that he thought
01:09:24 ◼ ► that that might happen, but today Apple has just in the last 10 years gotten so much bigger that
01:09:30 ◼ ► that's not how it would be. Yeah. I, I, and I think I'm sort of, I've sort of been thinking about this
01:09:36 ◼ ► a lot broader term just as the overall, where are we as an industry and this whole big tech moment.
01:09:43 ◼ ► Honestly, I really think it boils down to something very simple, which is that computers are
01:10:13 ◼ ► but I'm sure that at the time in the 1860s and seventies and eighties, it was underestimated
01:10:27 ◼ ► industrialists themselves who fully understood it. And I think the same thing's going on with
01:10:33 ◼ ► the computerization of everything where people who don't really understand computers just
01:10:40 ◼ ► underestimate how profoundly they're taking over everything. And naturally it's, it's almost
01:10:47 ◼ ► inevitable that companies and very different approaches to the computerization of blank,
01:10:54 ◼ ► Apple and Amazon are very different businesses. They all are to some extent. None of them are
01:11:00 ◼ ► quite like the other Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and let's count meta slash Facebook amongst them
01:11:07 ◼ ► as one of the others in there. You can't look at any two of them and say, well, those two
01:11:12 ◼ ► are doing the exact same thing. They're just arch rivals like Coke and Pepsi. No, they're all
01:11:18 ◼ ► sort of different, but fundamentally they're all humongous because the computerization of blank
01:11:23 ◼ ► is just maybe two orders of magnitude at least, or Apple is a 10 or 11 times bigger than Disney
01:11:32 ◼ ► by market cap. It's an entire order of magnitude. It's it makes sense that, that it's the computer
01:11:38 ◼ ► companies that have the money to do it. And I just don't think, I do think if Disney were to
01:11:44 ◼ ► continue to shrink in market cap stock price and, and investors were so up in arms, Disney
01:11:53 ◼ ► investors were so up in arms that if sale was sort of forced upon the company, I mean, Apple makes
01:12:00 ◼ ► more sense than anybody in terms of who Disney would want. It's really just, would Apple want
01:12:05 ◼ ► to do it? And I just, I that's where I just go back to is it just seems out of character for Apple in
01:12:11 ◼ ► a way that it's not for Microsoft, right? Like Microsoft does things like buys Activision
01:12:16 ◼ ► Blizzard for 69 billion and sure it's bold. It's not like they took it lightly. It's not like,
01:12:22 ◼ ► ah, what the heck? Sure. Go, sure. Phil Spencer, go spend $69 billion on a game studio. I'm sure
01:12:27 ◼ ► they, they, but they do things like that. Apple doesn't, the 3 billion, only 3 billion acquisition
01:12:34 ◼ ► of beats is by far their biggest acquisition. So I agree with you. And yet this is where
01:12:39 ◼ ► I have to say Apple has changed. Their objectives are not necessarily what you would say as like,
01:12:47 ◼ ► they're the most profitable company among the most in history, their most valuable company in
01:12:53 ◼ ► history. What is left for them to do? And the answer is, well, wall street says, keep going,
01:12:57 ◼ ► right? Like that, that, and that is just a fundamental of our economic system. So I would
01:13:02 ◼ ► say they're huge. Where do they go from here? What other worlds do they have to conquer?
01:13:06 ◼ ► And they have done so well with services. You and I have talked about this services has become.
01:13:11 ◼ ► It, I die a little as an old time Mac user. I die a little inside. Every time that Tim Cook comes on
01:13:16 ◼ ► the call and says, Apple's special brand is a combination of hardware and software and services.
01:13:21 ◼ ► And I'm like, that third one, I don't know about that, but it is clearly a huge part of what they
01:13:26 ◼ ► do. What I would say to you is if you're feeling the pressure of wall street to keep growing,
01:13:36 ◼ ► Apple has taken the Apple path up to now for TV plus, which is they are putting in a lot of money
01:13:46 ◼ ► and they're building a catalog, but there's no back catalog to speak of some movies come and go,
01:13:50 ◼ ► but there's really no catalog to speak of. They're building it. And they, they are a nice little
01:13:55 ◼ ► boutique HBO ask service and it's great. I think they've done a very good job. I think it is
01:14:00 ◼ ► exceeded all expectations of what a Zach and Jamie, who they hired from Sony have done. However,
01:14:06 ◼ ► if you, if you say, okay, you're going to still make, how do we grow that? How do we expand that
01:14:14 ◼ ► business and how do we scale it? Cause it is not making TV shows is not necessarily a thing that
01:14:19 ◼ ► really scales. We can give Zach and Jamie billions of dollars every year, but it's only going to be
01:14:24 ◼ ► a pretty linear growth. And if you want to grow services massively over the next five years,
01:14:30 ◼ ► how do you do that? The answer is probably buy a streaming service and all of their intellectual
01:14:36 ◼ ► property, right? Or at least that's an answer. And that's what gives me pause is the idea that
01:14:42 ◼ ► as nice a thing as Apple TV plus is they look at that and say, yeah, but you could just buy Disney
01:14:50 ◼ ► and Hulu and Disney plus and star Wars and Pixar and, and all and Marvel and, and you've got,
01:14:58 ◼ ► and these parks, which actually they don't scale, but they are very profitable. And you like that,
01:15:04 ◼ ► right? And you can just go down the list. That's what gives me pause is not Apple following what
01:15:10 ◼ ► we think of as the Apple playbook, but Apple saying, Oh, services is good is growing great,
01:15:17 ◼ ► but what we really should do is take a quantum leap. And if they decide that that's when they
01:15:22 ◼ ► buy, if not Disney, I think they buy some, some intellectual property and some services
01:15:35 ◼ ► but it's literally all of Marvel and, and star Wars is in there now. And it's a much more relevant.
01:15:52 ◼ ► as two long-term rivals, like Pepsi and Coke, it, it is odd to me that they both are still
01:16:02 ◼ ► great publications, but I think one or both of them are just basically an end when Amazon bought
01:16:08 ◼ ► United artists, Apple would apparently sniffed around it to buy that. And the key franchise
01:16:15 ◼ ► that United artists owns is the James Bond franchise near and dear to my heart. Perhaps
01:16:25 ◼ ► the MGM assets, right? Which went to Amazon. It doesn't matter how big a fan of James Bond,
01:16:31 ◼ ► Phil Schiller is. I'm sure he wasn't advocating in their Monday morning executive meeting. We should
01:16:35 ◼ ► buy them just so that we can get the rights to the James Bond theme song, but you know,
01:16:41 ◼ ► Apple's sniffs around for stuff like that. I mean, it, it makes sense. You know, why not?
01:16:46 ◼ ► They're in this streaming business and if the price is right, they would do it. I guess the
01:16:50 ◼ ► other thing that strikes me about that with, with the services narrative and I have that same,
01:16:56 ◼ ► it's not a queasy, well, it's an uneasy feeling, right? Because it's like, you're, you're the more
01:17:04 ◼ ► Apple relies on the services stuff. It's towing the line with the dark side, right? And it's,
01:17:12 ◼ ► all of a sudden, everybody who's an enthusiast has their complaints about things that is this an ad
01:17:21 ◼ ► or not? You bought a new iPhone and you didn't get Apple care plus and 30 days after you buy it.
01:17:28 ◼ ► Now you've got a red dot on the settings app that's saying, Hey, you've still got so many
01:17:33 ◼ ► months left to buy Apple care plus for this. Or if you don't subscribe to Apple's media streaming,
01:17:40 ◼ ► their own ones, Apple music and Apple TV plus and Apple one, right? Which includes the fitness and
01:17:48 ◼ ► stuff. They put things in the operating system that you pretty hard not to call an ad, even
01:17:54 ◼ ► though they don't look like an ad it's, it's a form of advertising to take a row of the settings
01:18:00 ◼ ► app at the top. Where did they draw the line? And you can see, I mean, and people who complain about
01:18:06 ◼ ► it, I think have valid points and people who think they've crossed the line may not be wrong.
01:18:17 ◼ ► they haven't become untethered in that direction, right? They're not flying out of control in the
01:18:25 ◼ ► way that the latest versions of windows, there's some crazy stuff in a factory, fresh install of
01:18:31 ◼ ► windows on like a $400 PC with the number of ads. And I they've gone back to, I think they've gone
01:18:38 ◼ ► back to, you have to get a different version of windows to install apps from outside their app
01:18:43 ◼ ► store. And it's like, you can just reinstall it over. It's not like with the iPad or iPhone where
01:18:50 ◼ ► you can just install an alternate version of iOS to get a version that lets you go outside the app
01:18:56 ◼ ► store. You can do that with windows. It's still just a PC. You can put a full version of windows
01:19:01 ◼ ► there, but Microsoft has gone so far in that direction in a way that it's like, take a look at
01:19:08 ◼ ► where the rest of the industry is if you really want to bitch about apples, but I get it. And you
01:19:15 ◼ ► have to say, when you follow the, the, the, I always just complete this. I just lean on six
01:19:21 ◼ ► colors coverage of Apple's quarterly financials. I just wait to you post and then I linked to your
01:19:27 ◼ ► but I follow them closely enough to know that they didn't lock into this. Tim Cook. I mean, it is
01:19:43 ◼ ► eight years ago, something he was like, we're going to whatever it was triple our services
01:19:47 ◼ ► revenue in the next four years. He said he, which they beat by a mile, but yeah, he laid it out in
01:19:52 ◼ ► that one quarterly call where he's like, this is what we're going to do. This is our area of growth
01:19:56 ◼ ► because it was a time when the iPhone revenue was kind of flat and everybody was like, how are you
01:20:00 ◼ ► going to grow? Cause we want to see growth and he's like services. That's where it's going to be.
01:20:04 ◼ ► And that's what gives me pause when people say Apple wouldn't do X, right? Cause it's like
01:20:08 ◼ ► Apple hasn't done X so far maybe, but who's to say like this, what decisions will they make?
01:20:28 ◼ ► than having people pay for an ad free streaming service. And that's why Disney and Netflix and
01:20:33 ◼ ► everybody else is creating ad versions of their services and then ramping up the price of the
01:20:38 ◼ ► ad free version, because if they don't ramp it up, they're actually making less money from people
01:20:43 ◼ ► paying them more than from people paying them less. And I wrote a piece of Mac world about this,
01:20:48 ◼ ► like three or four months ago, that was basically, it is inevitable that Apple TV plus will have an
01:20:52 ◼ ► ad tier and it is, it just is. And that's so it's like, well, would Apple do that? It's like, well,
01:20:57 ◼ ► they already have an ad business. There's already a, they have a vice senior vice president or
01:21:00 ◼ ► whatever of advertising who is who has said that he's going to grow that business. Most of it is in
01:21:05 ◼ ► like app store search and stuff now, but clearly they're going to go into this, into this business
01:21:11 ◼ ► of, of TV advertising. And you think, well, Apple's never going to do that, but they are.
01:21:15 ◼ ► And, and I also hear sometimes like people were like, Oh, they're not going to be interested in
01:21:19 ◼ ► ESPN. They have a gambling partnership that they just did for ESPN bet. And so that takes it off
01:21:24 ◼ ► limits. It's like, I was watching Friday night baseball this week. And not only is the pregame
01:21:30 ◼ ► show, have a segment about your betting line, but during the game, among of the odds of like
01:21:36 ◼ ► chance that they'll get a hit chance, they'll get on base chance. They'll strike out. One of them
01:21:40 ◼ ► was just straight up odds on the over under of the game in progress, right? That is an Apple
01:21:48 ◼ ► commission and you can blame it on the MLB network that produces it. But like that stats company
01:21:52 ◼ ► that's doing those stats, they only do that on Apple TV. Plus they have a deal with Apple and,
01:21:57 ◼ ► and Apple's not like, no, no, no, don't pretend that the gambling doesn't exist. The over and
01:22:02 ◼ ► under doesn't matter. Like, no, it's there. It's right there. So be careful when you say
01:22:09 ◼ ► Apple wouldn't do it or Apple has never done it because it doesn't, maybe they have, and maybe
01:22:15 ◼ ► they're trying stuff, but also you never know, like Apple would never produce TV shows and movies.
01:22:21 ◼ ► Apple would never have a fitness feature where they have literally Apple employees who are
01:22:26 ◼ ► fitness trainers in a studio in Santa Monica, like Apple would never until they do. And that's the,
01:22:32 ◼ ► that's the part that gives me pause. It's like, I know they've never done it before, but I don't
01:22:37 ◼ ► know. I mean, given the right circumstances, they might. Yeah. And it's the best way I can put it is
01:22:42 ◼ ► I'll use two analogies. There's dams crack and then they burst. And and then there's the
01:22:48 ◼ ► Hemingway bankruptcy thing. How did he very slowly and then all at once slowly and then,
01:22:55 ◼ ► and then quickly, we have all sorts of other stuff to talk about here, but we obviously
01:23:01 ◼ ► people who are familiar with your appearances on my show here know that we love, we love sports
01:23:05 ◼ ► and we love TV sports. It it's just unbelievable how the dam broke on gambling with professional
01:23:14 ◼ ► sports. And again, it is the computerization of everything. It's online gambling. This never would
01:23:20 ◼ ► have happened. There's no, in my opinion, there is no roll of the roll of the dice for alternate
01:23:28 ◼ ► versions of the 20th century where, where sports gambling is legal in, I don't know how many states
01:23:35 ◼ ► it's up to now, but I think it's most of the country you can gamble on sports legally. There's
01:23:41 ◼ ► no way that that happens before the internet. It just, it just wasn't true. I mean, New Jersey
01:23:46 ◼ ► had casinos in the late seventies at a time when the only only state in the whole country where
01:23:53 ◼ ► you could gamble at all legally was Nevada. And then Atlantic city opened real casinos in like
01:24:00 ◼ ► 1977 or 78, but left out sports, which because it, it, it was just so verboten and they were like,
01:24:10 ◼ ► New Jersey sports gambling. No way like forget about it. There's the idea because they were
01:24:16 ◼ ► at least the idea was, and I think it's true in real casinos. The blackjack games are on the
01:24:23 ◼ ► level that roulette tables. They, the casinos want them perfectly fair. They, they don't want them
01:24:28 ◼ ► to be crooked because the rules of the game, give them the edge. They don't need them to be crooked,
01:24:34 ◼ ► but the fear with sports is that you introduce gambling and all of a sudden point shaving,
01:24:41 ◼ ► fixing games, it's all that. And we're seeing some scandals with college sports players and coaches.
01:24:49 ◼ ► There was, I forget which some obscure NCAA team, the coach tried to bet. Did you see that story?
01:24:55 ◼ ► It was some, he tried it. He had like a friend tried to bet a hundred thousand dollars on a game
01:25:01 ◼ ► where there was only like $500 grand total bet. And they were like, sir, that's an unusually large
01:25:07 ◼ ► wager. I mean, we're going to have to call a manager. And he said to them, don't worry. I have
01:25:12 ◼ ► inside information. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the coach had told him that the starting pitcher or something
01:25:16 ◼ ► wasn't going to pitch. And yeah. And literally his excuse for trying to place this enormous wager on
01:25:23 ◼ ► an obscure college baseball game was don't worry. I have, I have inside information. Yeah. That'll
01:25:29 ◼ ► get them to accept your bet. That it's that insider info is going to make sure that you
01:25:34 ◼ ► have to pay. I've mentioned this before, or I remember one thing I noticed for years and
01:25:40 ◼ ► years, cause I've always been interested in sports betting. Even when I couldn't do it legally
01:25:44 ◼ ► was Al Michaels has always obviously been interested in it. Famous, the Dean of TV play
01:25:50 ◼ ► by play announcers at this point, but he would often at the end of a, like a football game with
01:25:56 ◼ ► a 13 point lead. So the game isn't really up in the air, but somebody kicks a field goal at the
01:26:01 ◼ ► end that crosses the over underline. And he'd be like, well, there's some people out there who are
01:26:06 ◼ ► pretty happy about that field goal. And it's like, if you knew you knew, but he couldn't even say
01:26:11 ◼ ► that's what put it over the, it was a 51 point over underline and it went from 48 total points
01:26:16 ◼ ► scored to 51 or something like that. He couldn't say that he would just say, ah, there's some,
01:26:22 ◼ ► some, some TV viewers out in Nevada who were interested in that field goal. And it was just,
01:26:40 ◼ ► I often brought this up. My family has gone on several Disney cruises over the years, cruise
01:26:45 ◼ ► ships, as far as I know, every major cruise line, every cruise ship in the world has a casino
01:26:50 ◼ ► somewhere on the ship because guess what? They make money. And once you're three miles out at sea,
01:26:56 ◼ ► you're, you're only covered by international lawsuit. It's legal. Guess whose cruise ships
01:27:01 ◼ ► don't have casinos? Disney. But to me, and this gets to the, Hey, if Apple did buy Disney,
01:27:10 ◼ ► they probably keep them wholly intact as Disney. Disney, they own ESPN. ESPN is in totally full on
01:27:20 ◼ ► into sports gambling in all the ways you, we just talked about, but there's no mouse logo on ESPN.
01:27:29 ◼ ► Right? Exactly. Different brand, different rules. It's a different brand, different rules. And
01:27:33 ◼ ► look at the way Apple's treated Beats headphones. Right? I there's obviously some engineer that's,
01:27:40 ◼ ► it's not like some kind of isolated team. They get the same W one W two chips and integrate with the
01:27:59 ◼ ► Right. And they have, and beats has like a name image and licensing program with college athletes
01:28:05 ◼ ► now where they're like given paying. Cause you can do that. Now you can pay college athletes to wear
01:28:10 ◼ ► your headphones in this case. And like that's, and, and I would put that in the category of Apple
01:28:15 ◼ ► would never write like Apple would never well beats is owned by Apple and beats is paying college
01:28:20 ◼ ► athletes to wear their headphones. And that's the thing. Like, so, so I would argue whatever five,
01:28:25 ◼ ► seven years ago, if I said, Oh, a couple of Sony executives, Jamie Ehrlich and Zach van Amburg. Oh,
01:28:33 ◼ ► yeah. Like they're going to get hired by Apple and have their own offices in LA, but it's still Apple
01:28:37 ◼ ► and they're going to report to Eddie Q and they're going to make movies and TV shows and win awards.
01:28:41 ◼ ► Oh, Apple would never do that. That sounds ridiculous. Right. Except that's literally what
01:28:45 ◼ ► happened. And, and I think, again, I'm not, I'm not trying to make the case that Apple should buy
01:28:52 ◼ ► Disney here. I'm saying that I feel like a lot of people, I went on a rant about this in my podcast
01:28:57 ◼ ► with my curly upgrade of like, I fear that a lot of people have a vision of Apple in their head.
01:29:03 ◼ ► That is a little bit out of date because the Apple of today is so huge and they are, they,
01:29:12 ◼ ► Oh, that that's beyond like, Apple would never do that. Apple would never own a theme park. It's
01:29:24 ◼ ► there's a lot of ways to fuss over the consumer experience and take and make a lot of money from
01:29:29 ◼ ► people. Right. It's like, what part of that is not Apple, right? Like the theme park part,
01:29:33 ◼ ► but not the other parts. And, and they have shown the ability to change in ways that are surprising,
01:29:40 ◼ ► like having an entire entertainment wing that's run by intent entertainment executives. And yeah,
01:29:45 ◼ ► they report to Eddie, but like Eddie's not ordering the shows, right? Zach and Jamie are
01:29:50 ◼ ► ordering the shows. Eddie's like working with them at a high level and setting their budget or
01:29:55 ◼ ► whatever. That's the part of it. That's like, I know, I know it's weird, but just like beats
01:30:01 ◼ ► is doing its own thing in some areas, a Disney brand and an ESPN brand and anything that they
01:30:06 ◼ ► would want to want to keep, they can set some rules. It's too easy and too facile, I think,
01:30:13 ◼ ► to say, Oh no, but Apple would never be involved with gambling or it doesn't make any sense. Like
01:30:18 ◼ ► in the context of ESPN, maybe it does make sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it makes
01:30:32 ◼ ► and Apple is not going to make, and speaking of physical infrastructure and building out real
01:30:38 ◼ ► world places in the year 2000, people thought it was crazy that Apple was building out its own
01:30:42 ◼ ► retail stores. Why would a computer maker do that? Like Gateway, even their closing stores. So why
01:30:47 ◼ ► would Apple, who has no idea what they're doing with retail do this? That doesn't make any sense.
01:30:51 ◼ ► Well, today we have an entire generation of adults, my college-age son, I don't think could
01:31:05 ◼ ► but I've noticed this, that there are, there are certain people who listen to our shows and read
01:31:09 ◼ ► what we write and all of that, who are vociferous defenders of Apple. And we'll say like, Apple,
01:31:15 ◼ ► Apple has to have a reason for this. Apple can essentially like they're, they're, they're fans
01:31:21 ◼ ► and that's fine, but they're like, Apple could do anything. And yet then you say something about
01:31:25 ◼ ► like, well, why didn't Apple do this? And the response is, Oh, Apple could never do that. That's
01:31:31 ◼ ► too hard. And it's like, well, wait a second, which is, are they brilliant and everything they
01:31:34 ◼ ► do is right. Or are they incapable of solving a user interface problem in one of their platforms?
01:31:40 ◼ ► Right. And I, I am a believer that Apple is incredibly capable of, of solving hard problems
01:31:47 ◼ ► if they matter. And if they want to do them, this is one of those things where it's like,
01:31:52 ◼ ► I just don't believe Apple would never, because I've seen it right. Retail is such a great example.
01:32:02 ◼ ► Apple would never until they do it. And then you, you say, Oh, of course. And so I'm not saying
01:32:14 ◼ ► stop for a second and consider what if Apple owned Marvel and Pixar, Pixar and Star Wars and
01:32:22 ◼ ► Disney plus and Hulu, and what would they do? And what would that mean? You could view it as like,
01:32:28 ◼ ► is it a good deal or a bad deal? Is it worth the money? But just think for a moment about like,
01:32:32 ◼ ► isn't that would be interesting. And it's not so far afield to take us all the way back to
01:32:37 ◼ ► that Hollywood reporter story. It used to be ludicrous. Now I look at it and I'm like, maybe,
01:32:43 ◼ ► maybe there it's maybe the biggest financial one in history is well, blah, blah, blah. You know,
01:32:50 ◼ ► cell phones are computers. Apple makes good computers and Apple makes good minutes, but
01:32:54 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah. They're never going to do it because they have to go through the carriers.
01:32:57 ◼ ► Right. That was the thing. The argument pre-iPhone ended with, well, Apple's never going to do this
01:33:03 ◼ ► because can you even imagine Steve jobs working with cell phone carriers and let alone in America,
01:33:08 ◼ ► let alone all around the world. Well, guess what worked out. They did it. And they had, and, and,
01:33:15 ◼ ► and there's this moment again, it's that idea that like Apple is amazing, but they, they, they,
01:33:19 ◼ ► they certainly can't do that. It's like, they certainly can't work with. Dozens of carriers
01:33:23 ◼ ► across the world and all sorts of different markets. And it's like, well, they, they do,
01:33:27 ◼ ► they, they do. I remember even when the IMAX were coming out, the new IMAX, the M1 IMAX,
01:33:33 ◼ ► I remember somebody sort of saying, Oh, you know, they can't do like all those different colors.
01:33:38 ◼ ► Cause think of how many skews there would be. And it's like, they did, they did seven, six colors
01:33:44 ◼ ► and silver, seven colors and color match cables and color match keyboards and color match track
01:33:50 ◼ ► pads and color match mice, every one, a different skew. And they put it in their channel and it's
01:33:55 ◼ ► all over the world online. And a lot of them in stores and they did that and they do the colors
01:34:00 ◼ ► for the like, yes, I know that it's really hard and it seems like, well, why would you do that?
01:34:06 ◼ ► And the answer is if Apple thinks it's important, they will make it happen. They will find a way.
01:34:10 ◼ ► Let me take a break here and thank our good friends at Memberful. Oh, Memberful, Memberful.
01:34:16 ◼ ► If you're a creator, this is where you go and you can set up a membership system for your audience.
01:34:23 ◼ ► And they have a whole team that is ready to simplify the, maybe you've already got something
01:34:31 ◼ ► They've got everything you need to grow your revenue with Memberships. The most important
01:34:36 ◼ ► thing I can say about Memberful as a customer of many, many Memberful creators and sites is that
01:34:43 ◼ ► Memberful stays in the background. You don't know Memberful is there any more than you know
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01:35:02 ◼ ► own the membership list so that if you ever decide to go elsewhere, you just take your membership
01:35:08 ◼ ► list with you. They pay you directly to your Stripe account. Everything is right there in your
01:35:14 ◼ ► control. They're just there to supply all the stuff you need to make it easy. And they make money when
01:35:20 ◼ ► you make money. That's it. And they're there to help you with ideas or strategies for how to grow.
01:35:32 ◼ ► Everything you need. Check out. Easy to use customer member portal so members can go in
01:35:37 ◼ ► and change their email address if they need to change their email address, update their
01:35:45 ◼ ► a membership dashboard where you can go to see everybody who's your member. They've got analytics
01:35:51 ◼ ► that give you easy, up-to-date, in-depth view of what's working, what's not, where you should put
01:35:57 ◼ ► your emphasis, where you should steer your future example. They let you create things like members
01:36:03 ◼ ► only podcasts near and dear to probably everybody who's listening to this hard. I don't know if
01:36:08 ◼ ► there's anybody listening to this who's not listening to some members only podcasts. And
01:36:12 ◼ ► there are some people who are on today's episode who have members only podcasts. It's a big deal.
01:36:17 ◼ ► So where do you go? Diversify your revenue stream with membership at Memberful. Six Colors is one
01:36:25 ◼ ► of the places. Is the incomparable Memberful too? Yep. I have two different Memberful things and we
01:36:31 ◼ ► use them for both and they both do a great job. This is pure serendipity. This is not why Jason's
01:36:37 ◼ ► on the show, but I'm a member of Six Colors happily paying. I think, I don't know, maybe you sent me a
01:36:44 ◼ ► freebie, but I would happily pay so you should cancel my freebie if it's free. Anyway, anything
01:36:49 ◼ ► you need. Newsletters, podcasts, gift subscriptions, Apple Pay support, it's all there. Get started for
01:37:04 ◼ ► Memberful.com/talkshow. Oh, what a great service. I like it when it's serendipity with the
01:37:13 ◼ ► guests in a service like that. No, they've served me well. What else did we coincide with this week?
01:37:26 ◼ ► The Verge of all places. Yeah. Caught me by surprise with that one. I ran into those guys at WWDC
01:37:33 ◼ ► and they said, "Hey, it's the 25th anniversary of the iMac this summer. Would you like to write
01:37:40 ◼ ► something for us about it?" And I said, "Sure." I've written for them like three or four times,
01:37:45 ◼ ► I think, since I left IDG back in the day. So I said, "Sure, that was great." And they said,
01:37:50 ◼ ► "Don't write about design because I'm going to do a separate piece about design." And then that piece
01:37:55 ◼ ► fell through right at the moment where I was feeling short of my word count. And I got the
01:38:00 ◼ ► go ahead to write about the George Foreman grill. So then I threw that in there and then I was in
01:38:04 ◼ ► pretty good shape. But it was fun to revisit that. I wrote about it a little bit for my 20
01:38:10 ◼ ► Macs for 2020 project three years ago, but it was nice to try to sit there and rub my chin and think
01:38:19 ◼ ► about the big picture, about explaining to people who weren't around then maybe why it mattered so
01:38:25 ◼ ► much. And the idea that in some ways, the places where the iMac made the biggest difference were
01:38:32 ◼ ► not what you might think because that original iMac, the G3 iMac was the only one that used a
01:38:39 ◼ ► CRT display. All the rest of them were flat panels. Desktops aren't as important as laptops are now,
01:38:46 ◼ ► but it saved Apple. It literally saved Apple. It gave it the money to complete the OS X transition,
01:38:53 ◼ ► which they needed. And then they had the money to do the iPod. All of those things had to get money
01:39:03 ◼ ► from the iMac first and it really revived the Mac in general. And then I think the one that gets
01:39:16 ◼ ► But it was just sort of kicking around in PC makers. They're like, well, we'll put it on there
01:39:21 ◼ ► maybe as an option, but like really everybody's gonna use parallel and serial and that's what
01:39:25 ◼ ► it's gonna be. And Steve Jobs was like, all things that we used to have, Mac serial, SCSI,
01:39:39 ◼ ► And it's like, that's heresy. And that's one of those things that I think is a real legacy of the
01:39:44 ◼ ► iMac is that it was a transgressive computer that broke compatibility in a bunch of different ways,
01:39:55 ◼ ► could survive on the internet. You would read your email and look at the web on the Mac,
01:40:03 ◼ ► if you take that keyboard or that stupid round mouse, like I'm sitting here in a Mac studio
01:40:09 ◼ ► right now. I could literally take that stupid round mouse and plug it into my Mac studio
01:40:14 ◼ ► without an adapter. And it works 25 years later. That's bizarre. That's crazy. But USB,
01:40:21 ◼ ► right? That was the thing. And I think USB would not have made it as fast and been as popular,
01:40:27 ◼ ► were it not for the kick in the pants that the iMac gave because they announced it in the spring. And
01:40:32 ◼ ► then, and then they shipped it in August. Every vendor of peripherals was like, oh, we'll have
01:40:38 ◼ ► one. We're going to do a USB one. It was like, that was the moment where they realized they had
01:40:42 ◼ ► to promise a USB product, even though they didn't have it yet and had to deliver it because they
01:40:46 ◼ ► knew the iMac was going to be big. It's key that they got rid of the legacy ports and for Apple,
01:40:52 ◼ ► it was ADB, which I still use an ADB keyboard, but with an adapter. But the fact that they got
01:40:59 ◼ ► rid of that, that's the difference, right? The PC way of doing it. It really was true that even
01:41:06 ◼ ► though USB had been out for a while, there were a lot of PCs that didn't even include it because
01:41:10 ◼ ► they're like, well, we'd only be able to add it because of course we would just add it so that
01:41:15 ◼ ► they could still use their serial keyboard and serial mouse. So if we're just going to add it,
01:41:20 ◼ ► why bother? It's just another way of connecting a mouse. We've already got it. And if Apple had
01:41:25 ◼ ► thought the same way, they would have included ADB. Of course, I'm sure the Apple way, if they
01:41:31 ◼ ► had done that, would have been to make the new mouse and new keyboard USB use this new connector.
01:41:37 ◼ ► But then the third parties wouldn't have jumped on it because they would have already said the
01:41:42 ◼ ► Logitech and whoever else were making ADB mice at the time would say, well, just buy our ADB mouse.
01:41:48 ◼ ► If you don't like this hockey puck mouse, just buy it. Whereas the fact that you either had to buy
01:41:53 ◼ ► the one adapter, the Griffin iMate, which I'm not even sure when that came out, but of course it was
01:41:59 ◼ ► blue translucent plastic, but it wasn't cheap even at the time. So it just forced, all of a
01:42:07 ◼ ► sudden the whole industry was like, well, we better make USB mice. And a lot of people don't
01:42:11 ◼ ► like this mouse, so there's a market for it. I mean, I don't think that was deliberate,
01:42:19 ◼ ► even when she no longer was using her purple iMac. It was not universally hated, but of course was
01:42:26 ◼ ► mostly, mostly hated. James Thompson says that during OS X demos in the development of OS X,
01:42:37 ◼ ► when Steve would come in to try something out, before he came in the room, they would take the
01:42:44 ◼ ► round mouse and they would rotate it. Just so when the first time Steve tried to use the mouse,
01:42:50 ◼ ► he would just grab it and push up and it would go to the side and he'd get frustrated. And that was
01:42:55 ◼ ► their way to just remind him, you got to get rid of this mouse. It's really bad. And they just would
01:43:00 ◼ ► do it every time. And they did right, like in 2000. So two years later, two years later at
01:43:06 ◼ ► Macworld Expo, they're like, we're sorry. Just weird. Like here's, we got an oval mouse for you.
01:43:12 ◼ ► JS Yeah. Wasn't they, when they, when they went from one color, the, I always pronounce it wrong,
01:43:31 ◼ ► JS When they went to the five colors, didn't they add like a dimple on the mouse button? I think the
01:43:37 ◼ ► original Bondi blue one had no dimple. So it was much, it was even easier to misorient because it
01:43:43 ◼ ► was a circle. But anyway, yeah, the USB thing was super interesting. One thing that noted,
01:43:47 ◼ ► I noticed last week, looking back on it was forget if it was your piece or somebody else's or
01:43:53 ◼ ► multiple of them. But talking about that, they showed like a, there was a close up photograph
01:43:59 ◼ ► of the ports panel on the iMac. And it just struck me how low the industrial design was. Like there
01:44:08 ◼ ► were gaps around everything. It was just sort of a piece of plastic with a hole in it. And then
01:44:13 ◼ ► behind it, you could see, they just put like a generic ethernet card. And there was like a gap
01:44:19 ◼ ► around the ethernet port and a gap around the USB port. Like nothing was as seamless as it is
01:44:26 ◼ ► it quickly. It didn't take very long under the new jobs regime to start closing those little air gaps
01:44:33 ◼ ► around things like that. It was very crude in some ways looking just at the details of how the USB
01:44:41 ◼ ► port melded with the plastic around it. I remember at the time I started writing Daring Fireball in
01:44:48 ◼ ► 2002. But I was equally obsessive about all of this stuff at the time. If anything, more worried,
01:44:55 ◼ ► more obsessive because Apple seemed to be in trouble. And I really, it seemed pretty clear
01:45:01 ◼ ► that if Apple didn't make it, I'd either have to switch to using Windows for everything or,
01:45:07 ◼ ► I don't know, become a carpenter or something. But I remember being focused so much more on the OS
01:45:16 ◼ ► story, right? And that's the whole reason they bought NeXT. The whole idea was we need a new
01:45:20 ◼ ► next generation operating system. Our efforts internally had failed. We need something. We're
01:45:26 ◼ ► either going to buy B or we're going to buy NeXT. We went with NeXT. And now here's the plan. And it
01:45:33 ◼ ► kept changing. And it was all, it had to be, I mean, it's not a mistake, but it was like they
01:45:39 ◼ ► bought them at Christmas, 1996. And so effectively beginning 1997, and they were like, we'll have
01:45:46 ◼ ► this new operating system out in 1998. No. And then it was like, oh no, we'll have it out in
01:45:52 ◼ ► 99, no, 2001. I don't know. It's hard. OS X, Mac OS X was a very, very, very hard project to get to,
01:46:00 ◼ ► but that's what I was focused on. And the up and downs of, well, so there was the Rhapsody and the
01:46:08 ◼ ► Blue Box, the Yellow Box, the Yellow Box. Yeah. They were trying to figure out a way to navigate
01:46:13 ◼ ► that thing where they could use most of the technology brought over by NeXT, but make it just
01:46:19 ◼ ► compatible enough with the Mac that Mac users would be able to move to it and not have everything
01:46:25 ◼ ► break. And that sort of became, in the end, it became Cocoa and Carbon. But there was originally,
01:46:31 ◼ ► it was going to be like an emulator for Mac OS. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, we can't do
01:46:36 ◼ ► that. And they, and they, but it was, again, talk about things that don't get enough credit.
01:46:47 ◼ ► right? To this day, everything is, is, and that's a legacy from NeXT and some decisions they made
01:46:58 ◼ ► Yep. There was a strategy. I think the Yellow Box was the name of it. That was because NeXT step or
01:47:05 ◼ ► OpenStep ran on Intel hardware and there was, there was an idea that what we now call Cocoa
01:47:12 ◼ ► would run on Windows. And so like Carbon apps would only run on Mac OS X or Rapsody or whatever
01:47:18 ◼ ► the name was, and Cocoa apps would run there too, and would be best there. But if you wrote for these
01:47:23 ◼ ► NeXT frameworks, you could also run your apps on Windows because they were going to ship the,
01:47:28 ◼ ► and they did all, but the software, software, software, OS strategy frameworks was all what
01:47:33 ◼ ► I was thinking. And I, my, it's very vivid. I just remember when the news broke that Apple shipped
01:47:39 ◼ ► this new computer and it was like, Whoa, look at that. That is not just like a new beige box. This
01:47:45 ◼ ► is a state, a hardware statement. I just, that's the, it was like a thunderclap moment. I didn't
01:47:52 ◼ ► get to watch it live. I wasn't covering them. I wasn't at the Flint center or wherever it was held.
01:47:58 ◼ ► They, there was no tech. It wasn't even possible to, to live stream the event. You had to read
01:48:03 ◼ ► about it somewhere, but it made news, right? I mean, and it's, I linked to Steven Levy's
01:48:10 ◼ ► cover story for, I think it was a cover story for Newsweek. Certainly should have been if it
01:48:14 ◼ ► wasn't. And there was lots of coverage in Fortune where Brent, he wrote the, co-wrote the book,
01:48:20 ◼ ► Being, Becoming Steve Jobs, had, had a bunch of access to Steve Jobs and he was on the cover there,
01:48:26 ◼ ► but it just, cause it looked, it, it, it, it was meant for a magazine cover cause it was a very
01:48:31 ◼ ► attractive device and it didn't look like other computers. Right. And it was like a statement.
01:48:36 ◼ ► And the whole idea of an all in one Macintosh, it just sort of, it was like a statement that said,
01:48:50 ◼ ► we're back to making things that are of the same DNA that, that made the Mac, what the Mac,
01:49:02 ◼ ► essentially when he came back to Apple, he's like, what do we have here? I actually likened it to the
01:49:08 ◼ ► princess bride where it's like, can we get a list of assets? Why didn't you mention a wheelbarrow
01:49:12 ◼ ► and a Holocaust cloak? Now we've got something. It was like that. And it's like, what do we have?
01:49:16 ◼ ► Well, we got Johnny Ive. He's playing around with all this plastic stuff. Like, all right,
01:49:19 ◼ ► well, we got this diskless workstation thing called Columbus. We could probably adapt that
01:49:23 ◼ ► into something. It's like, all right. Okay. Okay. What else do we have? And then Steve Jobs supplied.
01:49:27 ◼ ► We have the original vision of the Mac, which is a computer for the rest of us and all in one
01:49:31 ◼ ► that is not maybe the most ergonomic kind of thing, but you can move it around. It's got a
01:49:37 ◼ ► handle, it's got a carrying thing. And, and that was a huge advantage. And keep in mind,
01:49:42 ◼ ► it was, it was not that long after, right? It was, it was 25 years since the iMac came out.
01:49:48 ◼ ► The iMac came out, what, 14 years after the original Mac. So Steve came back to the company
01:49:54 ◼ ► and he was like, we still haven't nailed that. Let's nail that. Let's go back to the idea of
01:49:59 ◼ ► creating an appliance that is friendly, that you can put on the desk, that people will be able to
01:50:05 ◼ ► use. And so he, he was playing the hits in a way. He was saying we didn't nail it with the original
01:50:09 ◼ ► Mac because the computer industry didn't, computers didn't end up looking quite like the
01:50:15 ◼ ► original Mac. The GUI sort of happened with Windows 95, but everything's a beige CRT with a bunch of
01:50:22 ◼ ► cables and a beige modem and a beige computer tower and all of that. So like, let's do that.
01:50:27 ◼ ► And we'll use the translucent plastic from that kid in the design team. And we'll use this
01:50:31 ◼ ► diskless workstation concept and we'll throw out a bunch of old stuff and we'll make it happen.
01:50:36 ◼ ► I was struck thinking about it, struck by how much it was really Jobs going back to his old
01:50:41 ◼ ► playbook and say, look, what was the original idea for the Mac? Let's do that again. And it is that,
01:50:48 ◼ ► I mean, it really is what he envisioned. It's that same all in one thing that he was thinking
01:50:53 ◼ ► of with the Mac. I, I probably, as you're listening to me talk right now, the album art
01:51:00 ◼ ► for this chapter, but there's a, it was from the second generation when they went to five colors,
01:51:05 ◼ ► but the, the Yum poster and I, I tweeted it on, well, whatever you call it, posted about it on
01:51:13 ◼ ► Mastodon and Threads yesterday or the day before. And so many people responding to my post about
01:51:19 ◼ ► what a great poster it was and just sort of, cause I, I consider those five colored iMacs,
01:51:25 ◼ ► the original iMac too. It's just, it's not really a new generation. It was just sort of the second.
01:51:29 ◼ ► Yeah. They're all G3 iMacs. And this, oh, this idea of, of translucent plastic is a hit. Well,
01:51:36 ◼ ► yeah, let's do it in all the colors. I can't tell you how many people responded to it and said,
01:51:40 ◼ ► yeah, either I still have that poster or I did. And I wish I still had it. Walt Mossberg replied
01:51:46 ◼ ► to me on Threads that it was hanging in his office at the Wall Street Journal for years.
01:51:50 ◼ ► Just a, just a statement. Just yes, computers are fun. They're super fun. So let's make them look
01:51:58 ◼ ► like they're fun. Right. And the whole idea that let's just put everything you need in the box.
01:52:04 ◼ ► That's it. And cause every other computer, like it wasn't just that they were boring and beige.
01:52:08 ◼ ► It was that everything you needed for them, did you need another hard drive or an external drive
01:52:13 ◼ ► or this or that? It was either a tower that you took apart and God bless you with some of them
01:52:20 ◼ ► getting to the components, but putting them into drive bays and hooking things up inside and then
01:52:26 ◼ ► resealing the case. Or they were these external things that you stacked up on your desk and plugged
01:52:32 ◼ ► in and just including the modem as an internal component. It, it, it sounded, again, I think a
01:52:39 ◼ ► lot of the, the John Dvoraks of the world thought that was stupid. Why if people want a modem,
01:52:44 ◼ ► just buy the modem. It's not really safe, but it gave them, there's that poster that I love that
01:52:50 ◼ ► Yum visual poster of the five IMAX and the TV commercial that everyone remembers is the Jeff
01:52:57 ◼ ► Goldblum one. Right. No step three. And that is, that is, that is so jobs, right? And that is the
01:53:04 ◼ ► idea that you plug it in and then you plug your phone line in basically into the iMac or the iMac
01:53:09 ◼ ► into the phone line of the wall and you're on the internet. And the internet is the, is the also an
01:53:14 ◼ ► unsung hero of this transition because like I said earlier, this was at a time where windows is sort
01:53:20 ◼ ► of one, right? Like when the windows 95, they had kind of closed the gap as much as mattered to most
01:53:25 ◼ ► people in terms of the user interface, but the internet people wanted to just get on the internet.
01:53:30 ◼ ► They wanted an email. They wanted to see the web. They wanted online services and stuff like that.
01:53:35 ◼ ► And the iMac could be sold and that's why it had the I in the name, right? The iMac could be sold
01:53:40 ◼ ► as an internet appliance. It wasn't even like, does it run the program I run at my job or
01:53:44 ◼ ► something? It's like, yeah, you don't worry about that. You buy it, you plug it in these two things
01:53:49 ◼ ► and you're on the internet to do whatever things you can do to explore the internet. And that was
01:53:55 ◼ ► a moment where suddenly being the Mac, being a Mac and not a PC didn't matter. And that was,
01:54:02 ◼ ► I mean, how do you close the sale otherwise? If you're like, well, no, no, you can't buy an iMac
01:54:06 ◼ ► because it doesn't get you on the internet game over. But instead it was like, yeah, this is a
01:54:12 ◼ ► stylish little blob that you can put on a table in your house and plug in these two things and
01:54:17 ◼ ► you're on the internet. And that was super important to uptake of this product that it was not,
01:54:22 ◼ ► Oh, it's not compatible. It's scary. Cause max that's why people didn't buy max. Right? Number
01:54:28 ◼ ► one reason is that they weren't compatible with the rest of the world and they weren't compatible
01:54:32 ◼ ► with the internet. And for a lot of people in 1998, that is all that, Matt, they literally
01:54:40 ◼ ► floppy disk in a PC, it would be unrecognized. Do you want to format or you want to format this disk
01:54:46 ◼ ► right? Exactly. And the Mac eventually grew to buy by necessity, grew to have the built-in ability to
01:54:53 ◼ ► read dos formatted fat 32 or fat 16, whatever the hell the format was floppy disks, but vice versa,
01:55:01 ◼ ► if it didn't go both ways, it w it wasn't compatible. So you couldn't even share a word
01:55:07 ◼ ► doc, even though I have word on my Mac and you have word on your PC and they could read the same
01:55:13 ◼ ► doc files or Excel files. If you, I couldn't put a floppy disk in your computer and have you read it.
01:55:18 ◼ ► So it was like, why am I even bothering with this? Right? Exactly. And I think that's one of the
01:55:22 ◼ ► reasons that goes to why the iMac doesn't even bother with writable storage is part of the
01:55:26 ◼ ► philosophy is like, look, you're not going to put things on a floppy disk. We're not going to do that
01:55:30 ◼ ► anymore. And they, they knew the writable disks were coming. Writable CD-ROMs are coming. You can
01:55:35 ◼ ► buy a USB floppy if you really wanted it, but they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Here's what
01:55:38 ◼ ► you're going to do. It's got built-in ethernet. So if you're in a network, you just do it that way
01:55:43 ◼ ► by file sharing. And otherwise it's got the modem. You're going to email that file. You're not going
01:55:48 ◼ ► to walk it somewhere on a floppy. You're going to either use ethernet or you're going to email it
01:55:54 ◼ ► because the internet is now what connects all of us. Right. Or if it was a story. Yeah. And,
01:55:59 ◼ ► and to go back to our graphic design print world work of the nineties, it had all moved to zip
01:56:07 ◼ ► drives at the time, which were just by, by those standards. I think they were like a hundred
01:56:12 ◼ ► megabytes. So they were like, yeah, it's like a, yeah. An order of magnitude better than a
01:56:16 ◼ ► floppy disk. Two, two orders of magnitude. It was like a hundred times bigger than, Oh, I guess
01:56:20 ◼ ► you're right. Yeah. Yeah. It just it's yeah. Roughly this amazing, right? Roughly the same
01:56:24 ◼ ► size as a floppy disk, but faster. Why do we still have the floppy? Why do we still have in
01:56:29 ◼ ► the answer was because you might have to boot from it. It's like, forget it. Right. Like you
01:56:33 ◼ ► boo from the CD rom drive and you'll like it. Right. It's like, okay, let's do this. Yeah. So
01:56:37 ◼ ► just brilliant. And that TV commercial, that was it. And people had this idea and it was true. It
01:56:53 ◼ ► Oh, that's it. There is no step three. That's it. No step. It was fantastic. And it really is true
01:56:59 ◼ ► that for all the different weird names where Apple does not like to explain what they mean,
01:57:04 ◼ ► what does the R in iPhone 10 R stand for? Well, you and I both, Oh, I always ask. And then they
01:57:11 ◼ ► never tell you. They're like, whatever they told us what the I stood for. The I stood for internet
01:57:16 ◼ ► it all of the products since the iPod, which is crazy because the iPod didn't have networking,
01:57:21 ◼ ► but it eventually silently without explanation stood to mean cool Apple product. I would ever
01:57:30 ◼ ► meant it was the cool thing from Apple, but with the iMac, the I stood for internet. And it
01:57:35 ◼ ► absolutely was part of the reason a huge part of the reason that Apple still exists to this day,
01:57:41 ◼ ► because in the early to mid nineties, all of the software Mojo was on the windows side.
01:57:48 ◼ ► All the Mac had left was the graphic design, print production stuff, and a dough to go back to Adobe
01:57:54 ◼ ► circle back two hours ago, all the whole Adobe suite moved to windows and stayed in parallel.
01:58:00 ◼ ► We could go off on a tangent about this, but like when Microsoft word six infamously shipped on the
01:58:06 ◼ ► Mac with a very windows style interface compared to word five, which was a beloved Mac app.
01:58:12 ◼ ► Mac users rejected it. And it took until office 98, speaking of 98 for the Mac to have, or Microsoft
01:58:21 ◼ ► to build the Mac business unit, the Mac BU that was dedicated to building Mac style versions of
01:58:27 ◼ ► the Microsoft apps. Windows users don't have tastes like that. So Adobe making Mac style
01:58:34 ◼ ► versions of Photoshop illustrator, whatever else was in the suite, windows users were like,
01:58:41 ◼ ► whatever it was good. It was, well, it was like a ice water in hell. It was a better style,
01:58:46 ◼ ► but if you were a Mac user used to Mac Photoshop and you had to use sit down in front of Photoshop
01:58:51 ◼ ► and windows, it was the one part of windows. You were like, Oh, everything's the same. All the
01:58:55 ◼ ► windows, all the menus are the same. The pallets are the same. The file formats are compatible.
01:59:00 ◼ ► So the best the Mac could do at the time was, Oh, well like the Adobe suite is available on both
01:59:06 ◼ ► and it's identical. But by the late nineties, all of the companies, you don't think of them as
01:59:13 ◼ ► software companies, but what was amazon.com? It's a website is software, right? I mean,
01:59:19 ◼ ► there's a hardware component to have the servers, but all the companies you had heard about these
01:59:23 ◼ ► companies like Yahoo and Amazon, some Stanford research project called Google that's coming out.
01:59:29 ◼ ► All of that stuff was on the web. And Bill Gates famously penned a memo where he kind of turned
01:59:35 ◼ ► the company around where Microsoft was in denial about the fact that the windows had Germany,
01:59:41 ◼ ► whatever, have you pronounced that word was kind of over the, the web was becoming the new universal
01:59:48 ◼ ► platform, even more universal than windows. Cause if when they tried to undermine it right with like
01:59:57 ◼ ► it didn't work. It didn't take in the end. The, I came to represent Apple to the point where for
02:00:03 ◼ ► a while there, I think you could argue that the eye was the most important brand at Apple, not the
02:00:07 ◼ ► Apple logo, which is not what they wanted, but that's where they needed to. To start is like
02:00:12 ◼ ► iPod is named the way it is because they wanted to say the iMac that's cool. Well, this is too.
02:00:17 ◼ ► And they went and that's why we have the iPhone in the, and the iPad and the, I, today it's Apple
02:00:23 ◼ ► watch and Apple vision pro and all of that. But like, there was a time when Apple something was
02:00:28 ◼ ► not as impactful as I something, everything, even stuff that was all Mac that remained Mac only like
02:00:35 ◼ ► the eyesight camera, which is a brand they should I Cal it's just, it, it just was a prefix for Apple
02:00:42 ◼ ► that, you know, it clearly was something that Steve jobs believed in that seemingly the rest
02:00:51 ◼ ► of the company did not. I mean, I don't know who else, Johnny. But as soon as Steve jobs
02:00:58 ◼ ► died, they stopped shipping. I named products and, and while he was alive, everything, I mean,
02:01:03 ◼ ► famously when he introduced the iPhone, what are we going to call it? Yeah, that's right. iPhone.
02:01:07 ◼ ► Cause there was like in the speculation up to the release of the iPhone, somebody figured out Cisco
02:01:12 ◼ ► own a trademark, bizarrely for a product named iPhone and they worked it out. They paid them
02:01:18 ◼ ► off or whatever, but iPhone iPad, everything up until 2011 was I whatever. And then everything
02:01:26 ◼ ► afterwards I forget is I can't remember if there's literally cloud was, was jobs as last event. And
02:01:34 ◼ ► that was the introduction of iCloud. So I think, and I think the iCloud is the last product name
02:01:39 ◼ ► with the eye in front of it. I mean, and whether it's because the people left after he died,
02:01:44 ◼ ► didn't like it anymore, or I don't think it was quite like Phil Schiller was in there saying the
02:01:50 ◼ ► stupid I names got to go. This is dumb, Steve. And then he waited until they died or Johnny
02:01:54 ◼ ► or whatever, but maybe it might've been more that Steve was the one who didn't want to put Apple in
02:02:01 ◼ ► front of everything. I mean, famously there's a famous story about the original Mac before they
02:02:06 ◼ ► come up with the Cloverleaf logo for the command key. They were all apples, right? Cause from the
02:02:12 ◼ ► Apple two, there were two Apple keys. Yeah. Open Apple and closed Apple. Open Apple and closed
02:02:23 ◼ ► early versions of the original system. One had it was Apple P for print and Apple S for save.
02:02:30 ◼ ► And Steve was like, there's too many Apple logos. We're abusing it. This is supposed to be the Apple
02:02:35 ◼ ► logo is precious, which is kind of right. So there'll be one, just one up in the upper left
02:02:40 ◼ ► corner of the Apple menu. That's it. And no more apples. So they had to invent Susan care came up
02:02:46 ◼ ► with the Cloverleaf from a, what was it like a park sign and yeah. In Scandinavia, somewhere in
02:02:52 ◼ ► Scandinavia, it was, but you know, maybe that mindset of, you know, we want to be precious
02:02:59 ◼ ► with using Apple was sort of what kept him on the eye names, but whatever it certainly worked out
02:03:04 ◼ ► for them to the point where people call the Apple watch the eye watch. Exactly. They, they it's true.
02:03:11 ◼ ► It's true. And, and yet now to go back to our, our Disney conversation, right? Apple today is not,
02:03:18 ◼ ► is, is back to being an iconic brand in a way that maybe it lost its way for a while. And now
02:03:24 ◼ ► they have, they made a dedicated choice to put Apple as the brand name up in the front that like,
02:03:30 ◼ ► literally, what is the watch that Apple makes? It's the Apple watch. Like you don't need another
02:03:36 ◼ ► name for it. It's just Apple watch. That's. And, and that's where they are now. And that,
02:03:42 ◼ ► that is they're, they're on top again. It's hard to imagine from the perspective of today,
02:03:47 ◼ ► how broken the Apple brand was in the nineties, but like, it was real broken to the point where
02:03:54 ◼ ► the iMac was became like more valuable as the iMac than it did as a thing from Apple. And so the iPod
02:04:01 ◼ ► logically was called iPod. And that's how they got people to try the Mac again was to love an
02:04:10 ◼ ► iPod so much that they thought, Hey, I love this Apple product. Maybe that computer they make,
02:04:16 ◼ ► maybe I should try that. I've never had one, but maybe I should try it. And they sold so many Macs
02:04:21 ◼ ► to people who fell in love with the Apple brand because they love their iPod so much. It's just
02:04:25 ◼ ► like that in the Apple store being making it easy to try a Mac and see it and see what you could
02:04:31 ◼ ► get out of it. That's how the rehab of that brand happened. It's hard to imagine now, but really
02:04:36 ◼ ► they had, they spent a good decade rehabbing the Apple brand, but now it's on top again.
02:04:42 ◼ ► I remember in 2000, 2001, I was living in suburban Boston when I worked at barebone software and
02:04:49 ◼ ► we used to go, my wife and I would go to the Rockingham mall where there was the closest Apple
02:05:02 ◼ ► It was, well, obviously not 2000. That would be 2001, but 2001, 2002, I think 2002. Yeah. I lived
02:05:10 ◼ ► But that, that all just, yeah, that, that happened, that happened and the iMac. Yeah. So in the end,
02:05:21 ◼ ► like, cause it didn't lead to a, a huge cavalcade of standalone desktops that were what everybody
02:05:28 ◼ ► wanted. And it wasn't like brightly colored computers. Cause after the G3 iMac, they didn't
02:05:31 ◼ ► really do bright colored computers anymore until the M1, essentially they didn't do that. It didn't
02:05:38 ◼ ► even lead to, it didn't lead to brightly colored pro max. They did the one blue one and then they're
02:05:41 ◼ ► like, Nope, people don't like it. We're going to make them boring and gray. Like none of those
02:05:45 ◼ ► things are the, are the things that in the long run affected it. It's more like rehabbing the
02:05:50 ◼ ► Apple brand, giving them a cashflow so that they could do OS 10 and ultimately the iPad and then
02:05:55 ◼ ► continue on. And like, and the USB, like it's those weird kind of like choices that they made
02:06:02 ◼ ► that actually like are the demarcation line between like before and after those are the places
02:06:08 ◼ ► where it made its biggest impact. Yeah. And it exemplified that Steve jobs slash now just
02:06:14 ◼ ► institutional Apple mindset of we're not going to ask our users what they want and build based on
02:06:19 ◼ ► the polling. We're going to figure out what they want and, and build that. And nobody was saying,
02:06:25 ◼ ► get rid of all of my AD, all the ADB ports on your exciting new Mac so that none of my existing mice
02:06:30 ◼ ► and keyboards work without a peripheral and replace it with this thing. That's brand new. Nobody was
02:06:36 ◼ ► saying that, but it was the right decision. I got a note from somebody who used to work at Adobe
02:06:41 ◼ ► speaking, just calling back to an earlier part of the show and who got to know John Warnock as a
02:06:46 ◼ ► young, young intern at Adobe, who just had the gumption to, to ask, to have lunch with John
02:06:53 ◼ ► Warnock. And he said, sure. And, and gave him advice and it said, it said, what do you, what's
02:06:59 ◼ ► your top advice? And he said, here's my top advice. Don't ask people what they want, watch what they do
02:07:04 ◼ ► and then build something based on that. And again, that's the, that the I Mac exemplifies that,
02:07:11 ◼ ► right? Nobody was asking for pretty translucent blue plastic, but you know, people like things
02:07:18 ◼ ► that look fun. People like things. And USB has stood the test of time, right? I mean, the fact
02:07:24 ◼ ► is it's like, well, how are we ever, ever, ever going to get out from under Scuzzy and max serial
02:07:30 ◼ ► and ADB and the floppy drive? How are we ever going to do that? And the answer was the only
02:07:36 ◼ ► way we're going to do it is if we make people adopt the new standard. And so we're going to
02:07:41 ◼ ► just cut them off and Apple does that to this day. Right. I know it frustrates people, but like,
02:07:45 ◼ ► I, I understand the frustration, but I also almost always understand why Apple does it where they're
02:07:51 ◼ ► like, look, look, we could, we could stretch this out, but that doesn't make anybody happy. It just
02:07:56 ◼ ► stretches out the pain. So we're just going to make like, it's a, it's the dock connectors
02:07:59 ◼ ► going away and now it's lightning and that, and then we're about to enter probably the,
02:08:03 ◼ ► Oh, your iPhone doesn't use lightning anymore. It uses USB-C. It's like, okay. And the Mac don't
02:08:09 ◼ ► go into USB-C. It's like, Oh yeah, I know there's pain there, but like at some point trying to
02:08:14 ◼ ► create a long transition, just, just stretches out the pain and, and instead of just like,
02:08:20 ◼ ► let's do it, let's make the change. And you'll all thank us later. When you can't imagine going back
02:08:29 ◼ ► dysfunctional that they had done nothing to get rid of any of those three different peripheral
02:08:35 ◼ ► standards that had to be on every Mac. It's like, let's get it out of here. USB. That's it.
02:08:39 ◼ ► >> Let me thank our third and final sponsor of the show. It's our good friends at Squarespace. I can
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02:11:51 ◼ ► talk show. Last but not least, man, and this is, man, we could go for another three hours talking
02:11:57 ◼ ► about the iPad. You wrote about your using the iPad as a travel computer. You just were down.
02:12:04 ◼ ► Your mom lives in Arizona, I believe, right? Yeah. Yeah. Outside of Phoenix. And I went through a
02:12:11 ◼ ► period of time when I tried really hard to not travel with a laptop and just travel with an
02:12:17 ◼ ► iPad. I love using my iPad. I'm not going to not travel without the iPad. I'm going to bring the
02:12:22 ◼ ► iPad. But I was like, do I really want to bring an iPad and a laptop on this? So I tried very hard
02:12:27 ◼ ► for, and wrote about it a lot and talked about it for many years to do the, when I go somewhere,
02:12:31 ◼ ► I'm just going to bring the iPad and the magic keyboard case, and I'm going to be able to do
02:12:36 ◼ ► my podcasts and write my articles and I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to figure out a way
02:12:39 ◼ ► to make it work. And ever since I got an Apple Silicon MacBook Air, basically, I don't do that
02:12:44 ◼ ► anymore. I travel with both again. I'm back to that. And I was down on a Friday morning at my
02:12:49 ◼ ► mom's house thinking I need to write something. And I, it was taken, literally I was in the shower
02:12:54 ◼ ► and I was like, oh, that's what I could write. I could write about the fact that I'm doing this now
02:12:58 ◼ ► is that's what happens. Sometimes you're like, oh, that's a piece. I'm going to write that up.
02:13:08 ◼ ► I tried this so, so hard for so long. Why did I stop trying? And, and it has been interpreted
02:13:14 ◼ ► was at the top of hacker news. People were sending me messages. I mastered on you write about any of
02:13:19 ◼ ► this and you're going to get the people who are like, how dare you, sir. And you're going to get
02:13:22 ◼ ► the people who are like, why did you even try to use an iPad? Because it's silly. And the truth is
02:13:28 ◼ ► I, I liked the idea of only traveling with one of those devices. I tried very hard and I have come
02:13:34 ◼ ► to the con the Apple Silicon MacBook Air is so good and it's so small and it, and it's so flexible.
02:13:40 ◼ ► And I decided as many of our colleagues have done David Sparks, I think is a really good example of
02:13:47 ◼ ► this. I've decided I'm done trying to push the iPad where Apple doesn't seem to want it to go.
02:13:56 ◼ ► I was pushing it before. And now I think I've just decided I will accept the iPad for what it is. I
02:14:03 ◼ ► still write articles on my iPad in that keyboard case or in a stand with an external keyboard
02:14:09 ◼ ► at my, in my kitchen. Like I like it as a change of pace. I like traveling with it, but I'm going
02:14:16 ◼ ► to stop doing things like, like if I want to use a, like the stream deck doesn't work with it. And
02:14:22 ◼ ► I use that for a lot of automation stuff and it's got shortcuts, which is great, but it doesn't do
02:14:27 ◼ ► like global keyboard shortcuts for automation. So that's a frustration. And then the podcasting
02:14:32 ◼ ► thing while I know esoteric, cause most people aren't podcasters is emblematic in a way of like,
02:14:36 ◼ ► there is a fundamental thing that I need that the Mac does and the iPad just can't do it. And I can
02:14:43 ◼ ► work around it or I can just give up and say, am I recording a podcast on this trip? I went to
02:14:47 ◼ ► Colorado with my family for a family, for an event with like all of Lauren's family being there. And
02:14:54 ◼ ► I had one podcast to do, and you know what I did? I brought the MacBook Air and a microphone. I opened
02:14:59 ◼ ► the MacBook Air one time, recorded the podcast, posted it, closed the MacBook Air and that was it.
02:15:03 ◼ ► But I like, I just decided that was easier. It was just easier to do it that way. So I did it that
02:15:08 ◼ ► way. So I, I, for me, it's more like I, I, I tried to make the iPad more than it was. And then I
02:15:16 ◼ ► realized I should stop, right? I should just stop and accept it for what it is. And I love it for
02:15:21 ◼ ► what it is, but like, if I want flexibility, if I want to be able to do sort of like anything I want
02:15:32 ◼ ► - It's the most confounding platform in the history of computers. It really is. And I used to,
02:15:39 ◼ ► I used to roll, I rolled my eyes for years and even talked to people in iPad product marketing.
02:15:46 ◼ ► And I mean, I'm not, I'm not a, never, it's always collegial having briefings with, with Apple folks,
02:15:52 ◼ ► but renaming iPad OS instead of just saying that it runs iOS. Cause it really it's, they're
02:15:59 ◼ ► obviously siblings in a very tight way, but I'm, I'm down with it. I, I, I agree that it it's,
02:16:06 ◼ ► it's worth its own name. It is different. It is, it is not a big iPhone, even though it's kind of
02:16:12 ◼ ► a big iPhone, right? It makes it so hard to pin. The Mac is, is a PC. It is a full blown computer,
02:16:22 ◼ ► a Unix workstation, and you can compile software on it and you can still do things, even with the
02:16:30 ◼ ► things people worried wouldn't make the transition to Apple Silicon, like turning off system
02:16:35 ◼ ► integrity protection, if you really want to, so that you can go and inspect and tweak and replace
02:16:41 ◼ ► pieces of the system software, you can still do stuff like that. Like stuff that nobody in
02:16:46 ◼ ► their wildest dreams imagines Apple's ever going to do with the iPad, right? There is no system
02:16:50 ◼ ► integrity protection toggle for, for the iPad. And I don't think there should be, you know what it is
02:16:58 ◼ ► and you know what the iPhone is. It's a phone and yes, people are frustrated and we'll see what
02:17:02 ◼ ► happens with EU seemingly forcing Apple's regulatory hand with sideloading. We'll see where that goes.
02:17:10 ◼ ► I know people have been frustrated that you can't, if you choose toggle a switch so that you can just
02:17:16 ◼ ► install apps from the web if you want with a, you know, hopefully appropriate warning, but you know
02:17:25 ◼ ► what the iPhone is. It still is very well defined where it fits in people's lives and people can
02:17:31 ◼ ► quibble with the design decisions Apple have made on where to draw those limits. But the iPad
02:17:36 ◼ ► straddles all of it. It's, it is, you can look at it and say that it's so close to being Mac like
02:17:43 ◼ ► that it should just be more Mac like, and you can also see that what so many zillions, zillions,
02:17:50 ◼ ► uncountable number of iPad thriving users who love it just love that it for them really is like a,
02:18:06 ◼ ► Eric Michael Rhodes I think, I think there's so much mixed up here too, because I strongly suspect,
02:18:12 ◼ ► and I do not have a lot of detail about this, but I strongly suspect that Apple at one point assumed
02:18:21 ◼ ► that they were putting the Mac out to pasture and they were going to do minimal effort on the Mac.
02:18:25 ◼ ► It was going to be a legacy platform and they were going to build the new Mac like platform
02:18:32 ◼ ► on the iPad. That was what they were going to do. And I think they changed direction and they said,
02:18:38 ◼ ► you know what, we're not going to do that. I suspect even it might've been the moment where
02:18:41 ◼ ► they decided they were actually going to do Apple Silicon for the Mac, right? Because they would've
02:18:45 ◼ ► been very easy for them to put the Mac out to pasture and just kind of take Intel chips and
02:18:49 ◼ ► let it kind of fade away. And I think at some point, and I, one day, I hope somebody will tell
02:18:54 ◼ ► me this for true, but it feels like Apple went from thinking that the iPad was the future of
02:19:00 ◼ ► computing and that this would be the next generation computing platform, general purpose,
02:19:05 ◼ ► to saying, no, it'll be the Mac. We're going to stick with the Mac and we're going to make,
02:19:11 ◼ ► we're going to import and they did stuff, right? It's like, we're going to do catalyst and we're
02:19:15 ◼ ► going to let Apple Silicon Macs run iPad apps and we're going to do all this stuff. So like
02:19:20 ◼ ► it can pick up the iPad and pieces of the iPad. What we're not going to do is sort of like put it
02:19:26 ◼ ► on an island and make the iPad do Mac things. It's more like we're going to let the Mac be more
02:19:31 ◼ ► iPad-y at times, which is why when there's rumors like that rumor that Mark Gurman had at one point
02:19:37 ◼ ► about like a touchscreen iMac, I started to think if now I believe that if Apple ever does something
02:19:42 ◼ ► that looks like an iPad, but, but does Mac like things, it will literally be a Mac that has a
02:19:49 ◼ ► compatibility mode, not an iPad that has been tricked out with a terminal, right? I just don't,
02:19:57 ◼ ► it feels like that was a place they weren't going. And at some point they said, we're not going to go
02:20:02 ◼ ► there. We're going to keep the iMac or the iPad a little bit purer and more iPhone-like with more
02:20:09 ◼ ► capability, but like purer and the Mac is where anything can happen. And like they, I don't know
02:20:16 ◼ ► when 2017, 16, I don't know when, but like the rhetoric changed about the iPad. I'm sure the Mac
02:20:25 ◼ ► round table, you know? Yeah. And then there was a moment that I'm sure they actually regret now in
02:20:30 ◼ ► 2018, where they pointed out that the iPad pro is faster than 90% of all PC laptops that sold in the
02:20:35 ◼ ► last year. Like that. I think they, I think they regret that because they were like calling it out,
02:20:40 ◼ ► like look at, look at the computing prowess of the iPad and like, but that's actually not where
02:20:46 ◼ ► they're, where they're going. Cause now that's the Apple Silicon argument, but it's not the iPad
02:20:50 ◼ ► argument anymore. Right. And I remember for years, I was never obsessed with benchmarks.
02:20:55 ◼ ► I'm glad that other reviewers are, but it's just not my vein. I'm not good at it. And I'm just not
02:21:01 ◼ ► as obsessed with it. But there were a series of years where I remember not just with iPads,
02:21:06 ◼ ► but even iPhones where I was just vaccinated watching geek bench, single core scores, approach
02:21:14 ◼ ► high-end MacBook pros. And it was very clear they were going to pass it. It was, it was clear. And
02:21:21 ◼ ► I remember writing about it and people would be like, you're crazy. There's no way a phone is
02:21:24 ◼ ► ever going to get a better single. And I'm like, look at the, look at the, the, the slope of these
02:21:29 ◼ ► graphs. It is absolutely going to happen. And then it did happen. And yet the back still didn't move.
02:21:35 ◼ ► I think you're right. I remember you talking about this on this show and I've come more around to
02:21:41 ◼ ► your argument. You know, you're obviously more iPad power usery than I am. I mean, it's, it's
02:21:47 ◼ ► obvious from all of your, our combined writing. I, there's something almost broken in my brain
02:21:57 ◼ ► in the way that my brain is melded with the Mac way of doing certain things. And it would have,
02:22:03 ◼ ► I think, and I think I was in denial about it, to be honest, I think because I would have found it,
02:22:09 ◼ ► if that's the way things had turned out, it would have been much more difficult for me to adjust.
02:22:32 ◼ ► iMac style 27 inch things running iPad OS or whatever, whatever else it would take for the iPad
02:22:38 ◼ ► platform to have fully obviated the Mac. I think it was more vague and it was just sort of it like,
02:22:48 ◼ ► like one of those gnomes stealing underpants plans, right? Where it's like, the Mac is old,
02:22:54 ◼ ► right? It dates back to 1984 on the Mac, the Apple side and 1988 or 89 on the next side.
02:23:02 ◼ ► And Mac, even Mac OS X, by the time the iPad came out was a decade old. And it's, it's,
02:23:10 ◼ ► it just, I think just sort of a gut feeling of something this old should be replaced by
02:23:17 ◼ ► something new. And this iPad clearly had so much potential, right? Just the first one you're looking
02:23:22 ◼ ► at and you're like, and as much as that first one really was just a big iPhone, it's like,
02:23:33 ◼ ► hands-on for the very first original iPad, me and Dan Morin were the last two media people who
02:23:41 ◼ ► really got, we practically literally got kicked out of the hands-on area. Because, and we were
02:23:54 ◼ ► Yeah. A vertical keyboard dock. And it's the fact they had the keyboard dock obviously arranged and
02:23:59 ◼ ► it was a late, famously, there were plans until very late in the game that they were going to have
02:24:05 ◼ ► two ports on the iPad, one the long way and one the skinny way. And there'd be two 30 pin connectors
02:24:10 ◼ ► so that you could connect it to the keyboard dock either way. But we were just sitting there in
02:24:16 ◼ ► front of this iPad, which, you know, seemingly we were, I remember talking with Dan about it. Like,
02:24:22 ◼ ► it seems like you ought to be able to put it the other way. You know, like we were just like,
02:24:27 ◼ ► this is amazing. Right? They have, they always have like a dummy Johnny Appleseed, 1963 at
02:24:37 ◼ ► computer. This is not a phone. And you hook it up to this keyboard. And they didn't have trackpad
02:24:42 ◼ ► support for almost 10 years. Right. Or it was 10 years. But even without it, just reaching out and
02:24:47 ◼ ► touching the screen, it was like the, the potential is so rich. And I just feel like it was just like
02:24:53 ◼ ► a gut feeling. Like, of course, this is going to grow to make the Mac seem so old and antiquated
02:25:01 ◼ ► that this will be the bright future. And just like I said, like a gnomes eating underpants,
02:25:06 ◼ ► this is new, the Mac is old, dot, dot, dot, profit. And then when it really came time in the middle of
02:25:14 ◼ ► the teens for that to prove true, and it had to be a cohesive roadmap, I kind of feel like they
02:25:22 ◼ ► looked at it and are like, there is no, there's no path to get there. Right. Like to keep the iPad,
02:25:26 ◼ ► the iPad, we're not going to have a Unix subsystem under the hood that's exposed to users,
02:25:33 ◼ ► but without this Unix subsystem exposed to users under the hood, how in the world is Xcode ever
02:25:38 ◼ ► going to work? How are we going to build their operating systems? Yeah. I don't even want to say
02:25:42 ◼ ► they took their foot off the gas, but it does feel like they recalibrated. Cause I do think that like
02:25:47 ◼ ► the change that they made to files and adding external display support last year and stage
02:25:53 ◼ ► manager, but also like the magic keyboard and the trackpad support, like they did a lot of this
02:25:57 ◼ ► stuff to make it more Mac-like. And I think the question is, was that part of a more cohesive
02:26:03 ◼ ► strategy to advance the platform or not? I think, I think in the end, what you say is right, which
02:26:10 ◼ ► is the Mac going to Apple Silicon, it gains a lot of benefit. It also gains the software platform,
02:26:17 ◼ ► right? It, the Mac Apple Silicon Mac can run if allowed. And that's an issue where a lot of people
02:26:22 ◼ ► don't allow it, but like it will run iPad apps. It just runs them. Right. And it's fine. Like I,
02:26:27 ◼ ► the MLB app just runs on my Mac. Right. And there is not a Mac app for MLB. It just runs on my Mac
02:26:33 ◼ ► and that's great. Right. And, and that seems to be what they've decided is we're going to unify
02:26:38 ◼ ► instead of unifying, like on iOS, we're going to keep Mac OS around, but they did the, they did
02:26:43 ◼ ► the work to take all the low level stuff and get it to be aligned across all the platforms. Cause
02:26:48 ◼ ► they had both, they had drifted apart and that allowed them to do catalyst, but it also allows
02:26:53 ◼ ► them with Apple Silicon to just run those apps on there. And you can see you're sort of like
02:26:57 ◼ ► building up this whole layer, which is why I said earlier at this point, if I'm Apple and I'm like
02:27:02 ◼ ► intrigued by the idea of something that's more like a convertible laptop, something that could
02:27:07 ◼ ► be touch and maybe thinner. I don't think you would build, like, I don't think there's a facility
02:27:14 ◼ ► to build all that stuff into the iPad. Like the iPad is the iPad. The Mac is the superset. Right.
02:27:21 ◼ ► So you would take the iPad and say, Oh, when you fold the keyboard back, it becomes an iPad.
02:27:27 ◼ ► That's what you'd say. You wouldn't say, right. Enter Mac mode on your iPad. You'd say your Mac
02:27:32 ◼ ► can be an iPad sometimes, but it's still a Mac and it runs the same apps on either side. That's
02:27:39 ◼ ► how you would, that's how you would have to do it. And I'm not saying they will do that. I'm just
02:27:43 ◼ ► saying that it's another indicator of my progression of sort of like how I view where Apple
02:27:49 ◼ ► is taking these platforms that I just don't think that Apple is, is looking at the iPad and saying,
02:27:54 ◼ ► one day the iPad will do everything that people look to the Mac to do. And then the Mac won't be
02:28:00 ◼ ► relevant anymore. I just don't think, I don't think they believe that. No, I don't think so either.
02:28:04 ◼ ► I mean, and one of the tests is for a real computer is can you use the computer to make
02:28:11 ◼ ► software for the computer? Right. And we go back to the original Mac in 1984, you couldn't write
02:28:17 ◼ ► Mac software on an original Mac. You had to have a Lisa. And when the Lisa was, I don't know,
02:28:26 ◼ ► like $10,000. And that did not last long. Macintosh programmers workshop came out pretty
02:28:32 ◼ ► quickly thereafter. And I never used the Lisa. I don't know about you, but I don't know, speaking
02:28:36 ◼ ► of computers, I never saw. It didn't take long for the Mac to bootstrap itself to be able to
02:28:42 ◼ ► write Mac software on a Mac. And Playgrounds feels like it might eventually be essentially
02:28:48 ◼ ► an iOS app only Xcode. Right. It could be right there. And there's, you can take like a Playgrounds
02:28:54 ◼ ► project from iPad and import it into Xcode now. And it gets to some of those things with the
02:29:01 ◼ ► pro AV apps, the logic and Final Cut. Right. Where now they finally, and I think it was
02:29:07 ◼ ► a justifiable finally, have real professional versions of Final Cut and logic for the iPad.
02:29:14 ◼ ► And you can, which one, one's more of a, the Final Cut is more of a subset of on the Mac,
02:29:25 ◼ ► Mac back to the iPad. And Playgrounds is sort of like that, but even then it's only for making iPad
02:29:31 ◼ ► style apps. Right? Like you can't imagine writing Mac apps and Apple doesn't just write apps on the
02:29:38 ◼ ► Mac. They write the operating systems, they write the firmware for them. What, what computers do
02:29:42 ◼ ► you think write the firmware that runs the AirPod Pro 2 noise cancellation? They do that on the Mac,
02:29:48 ◼ ► right? You'd have to be able to write all that software. It's it just, I do. I think I,
02:29:55 ◼ ► I kind of feel like in the early PC era, platforms came and went every couple of years. Nothing,
02:30:04 ◼ ► if you were lucky, if you got a full generation, like the Commodore 64, which had, I don't know,
02:30:17 ◼ ► over a decade long run of relevance, but then went away and it was just understood that
02:30:23 ◼ ► platforms died after a decade or so replaced by something new. And the Mac and Windows were these
02:30:32 ◼ ► two things that came out of that era and seemingly had instead of a decade, decades. But I still think
02:30:40 ◼ ► a lot of people of our generations just sort of had an assumption, but they're going to come to
02:30:43 ◼ ► an end eventually, right? Then we're not going to be using Macs forever, but I kind of feel now
02:30:48 ◼ ► we are. I don't, I don't foresee in, I think 25 years from now, there's still going to be a Mac.
02:30:59 ◼ ► The, when I talked to Phil Schiller, maybe the last time I did a one-on-one with Phil Schiller
02:31:11 ◼ ► was for the 25th anniversary of the Mac, I think. And it was Phil and Jaws and I forget who else was
02:31:20 ◼ ► in, was there, but it was a time where I basically said, do you foresee the Mac kind of fading away
02:31:29 ◼ ► with these other products there? And he could have done the PR thing, right? And what he said was the
02:31:36 ◼ ► Mac goes on forever. That's what he said. The Mac goes on forever. Not you never know. It was the
02:31:44 ◼ ► Mac goes on forever. And I think about that from time to time, because there was a moment where I,
02:31:48 ◼ ► like I said, I was like, I'm not sure the Mac goes on forever. And now I think maybe the Mac goes on
02:31:53 ◼ ► forever. I think maybe that is essentially that, that either that or the iPad and Apple's platforms
02:32:00 ◼ ► and the vision pro and all of that will evolve and keep evolving at this pace where at some point,
02:32:08 ◼ ► then there will be that more natural death where you'll realize that actually everything I use my
02:32:15 ◼ ► Mac for now, I can do on those systems. And they've evolved to the point where it's irrelevant
02:32:21 ◼ ► that the Mac, right? Cause like, it's very rare that a thing that you love, you're talking about
02:32:25 ◼ ► when Apple was maybe going out of business and we're all horrified by it. It's very rare that
02:32:29 ◼ ► a thing that is used and loved is just the plug is pulled while everybody's using it and they scream.
02:32:34 ◼ ► Right. What happens is what happens is it becomes irrelevant. So when it finally dies, nobody cares
02:32:40 ◼ ► anymore except collectors and some aficionados, but like everybody else has sort of moved on. So
02:32:46 ◼ ► it's like, I can't imagine like when I stopped using a TiVo, it was like, Oh, I love TiVo. I
02:32:50 ◼ ► did. But by the time I dumped my TiVo, it was irrelevant because everything was streaming at
02:32:56 ◼ ► that point. I had given, I wasn't using it anymore. That's the more likely tech irrelevance for the
02:33:01 ◼ ► Mac would be that all these other Apple platforms have reached the point where you don't need the
02:33:05 ◼ ► Mac. Oh, they all do all those things. It turns out that I'm not using the Mac for those things
02:33:09 ◼ ► anymore. And that's when it ends. I still use a TiVo, but that's really, we'd have to get my
02:33:13 ◼ ► wife on to explain why I could, I could switch to doing everything through the Apple TV box, but
02:33:19 ◼ ► iPod would be a perfect example of that. Right? There were no riots when Apple sold the last iPod.
02:33:25 ◼ ► I mean, again, because it had become irrelevant by that deep, deep, deep affinity for some of the
02:33:30 ◼ ► models, people collect them and people love them. And, and there's a part I know. And I know the,
02:33:35 ◼ ► the oddest one was the hard drive based ones that had the biggest storage, right? Because they were
02:33:40 ◼ ► like professional DJs who were like, I need to store like 80 gigabytes of music on a thing. And I
02:33:46 ◼ ► used to show up at a wedding with this pack of cards. And now what am I supposed to do again?
02:33:50 ◼ ► I got to take a whole laptop, but yeah, it, I think people sort of had that idea. And I think,
02:33:55 ◼ ► I think the Mac is, is I really do. I think it's here forever. I think it has a longer future than
02:34:00 ◼ ► the iPad ahead of it. I really do. You mentioned vision pro last thing I want. I'm so glad you did.
02:34:06 ◼ ► Cause the one thing I wanted to mention was talking about this for travel and framing it in
02:34:10 ◼ ► the perspective of, well, what do you put in your backpack or your briefcase to go on a trip? Right?
02:34:16 ◼ ► Do you take the iPad and the Mac book to me? That's the thing that the, the elephant in the room is
02:34:23 ◼ ► the vision headsets. And I'd say just vision headsets because there's clearly the $3,500
02:34:36 ◼ ► Let's blast fast forward three or four years. And there's a vision non-pro that's only $1,500
02:34:42 ◼ ► or whatever it, and it is, it turns out that as I think is going to be true, it's going to be a
02:34:48 ◼ ► phenomenal device to use while you're sitting on an airplane or a train and a phenomenal device
02:34:55 ◼ ► to sit at a hotel room at a desk and sort of catch up on stuff on a virtual big screen.
02:35:08 ◼ ► even if it's a Mac book pro and an iPad with you, they both pack flat. And yes, it is. I, I,
02:35:15 ◼ ► I don't know why I obsess over the extra weight of my 11 inch iPad, but I do. And I think I should
02:35:22 ◼ ► leave it at home, save my shoulders a little bit of wear and tear the vision pro I think is
02:35:31 ◼ ► trips. If it's like overnight length, maybe not like a day trip to New York, but overnight type
02:35:37 ◼ ► trips is inherently going to be a pain in the ass to travel with packing wise, right? Because
02:35:44 ◼ ► no matter you saw it in person, and even if for everybody out there listening, who still hasn't
02:35:48 ◼ ► seen one in person, let alone tried one, it's, you know, you can just look at it. It doesn't pack
02:35:55 ◼ ► flat. So where do you put it? It's, it's like taking a big over the ear head headphones instead
02:36:01 ◼ ► of just earbuds it's takes some strategy. There's no way I feel like that's a breaking point for the,
02:36:10 ◼ ► Hey, do I take my iPad and Mac book? If you're also going to take a vision pro all of a sudden
02:36:18 ◼ ► Yeah. And, and what it sounds like, basically you'd be able to run anything you'd run on your
02:36:31 ◼ ► it's Mac compatibility is it is doing screen sharing. So you would, what basically you'd
02:36:37 ◼ ► bring up, you'd have to bring a Mac with you. I do wonder in the long run, and this goes back
02:36:45 ◼ ► Mac, the ultimate solution to the Mac OS is that is emulation is a virtual machine or virtualization.
02:36:53 ◼ ► And that, that first off M M2 iPad pro, like it could run Mac iOS in a virtual machine if it
02:37:02 ◼ ► wanted to. And that would be the answer to my iPad is not as functional as the Mac would be.
02:37:11 ◼ ► but it'll, it'll virtualize it. I don't know if Apple will ever do that. But when I look at the
02:37:16 ◼ ► vision pro, I think surely they're not going to say you always must bring a Mac with you
02:37:23 ◼ ► in order to use Mac software. I surely the long game there is that it can be a Mac too,
02:37:31 ◼ ► right? Just running again in virtualization, Apple Silicon, it's all the same. And that would be
02:37:37 ◼ ► really interesting if I didn't have to bring a MacBook air with me, literally just so that I
02:37:43 ◼ ► could open it up and then have it pop up into the vision pro. And with 10 more years, just to pick
02:37:49 ◼ ► an even number of increases in performance in Apple Silicon, CPU, single core, multi-core,
02:37:57 ◼ ► 10 more years of the natural expansion of levels of Ram and memory and what's available, what a,
02:38:05 ◼ ► what the computer in a, in one of these devices can do in its spare cycles. It, I like you said,
02:38:12 ◼ ► if an iPad could already clearly, if Apple technically allowed it run a virtualized Mac OS,
02:38:19 ◼ ► well, it's clearly vision pro probably could right now. And if not, it certainly will within
02:38:27 ◼ ► a handful of years, let alone 10 years. So yeah, I could see that I could see a future where the
02:38:33 ◼ ► forever Mac is purely software. I really, it's a virtual, it's a virtual machine that can run
02:38:40 ◼ ► sort of wherever you want. And, and, and that, yeah, I, I, I have that thought too, that, that
02:38:47 ◼ ► in the end, like every now and then I see people like version writers really like to write about
02:38:51 ◼ ► that Samsung decks thing where you plug a Samsung phone into a monitor and it's sort of a weird
02:38:55 ◼ ► desktop computer. And it's like in the grand scheme of things, like use a 10 years out, or
02:39:00 ◼ ► is it unreasonable that every Apple product can be any Apple product? If you, if you put it in the
02:39:07 ◼ ► right context, maybe, and vision pro seems to be especially the product that could do that right.
02:39:12 ◼ ► Where it's sort of like, it is a virtual reality product. So if you say, I want a Mac right here
02:39:19 ◼ ► on this empty desk in the long run, shouldn't vision pro be able to put a Mac on that empty
02:39:25 ◼ ► desk? I think it should right in the, in the end. And it'll, if it's, if it's all virtualized inside
02:39:30 ◼ ► Apple Silicon, I don't see why not other than wanting to sell a vision pro user an additional
02:39:37 ◼ ► Mac, but you know, I don't know in the end, if that's the right thing for the product to do,
02:39:41 ◼ ► I think Apple will let it do. Yeah, I do too. And I think, and I think it gets around a lot of the,
02:39:46 ◼ ► I don't know how to describe them, but the objections that Apple has internally to allowing
02:40:00 ◼ ► Unix subsystem access to the actual file system on an iPad or iPhone. But if it's all virtualized,
02:40:06 ◼ ► it's just in an app. It's not, you'd still have Unix. You'd still have all the command line stuff
02:40:10 ◼ ► you want, but you'd only be diddling with the virtual internals of the virtual Mac with no
02:40:31 ◼ ► newer than the Mac completely sealed off from the user being able to touch them for, for good
02:40:39 ◼ ► reasons, but with bad trade-offs it's there are reasons both ways, but virtualizing it solves
02:40:49 ◼ ► Yeah. And I certainly would love, I mean, that would solve my travel problem. If I could just
02:40:54 ◼ ► a virtual machine of Mac iOS on an iPad when I need it and then shut it back down again,
02:40:58 ◼ ► I'm not saying they will do that, but that would solve a lot of my problems. If my product,
02:41:02 ◼ ► if I'm bringing a keyboard and trackpad case along with me, anyway, I could, I could fake it in a Mac
02:41:08 ◼ ► app for a while and then just get rid of it and go back to using my iPad. But there are all those
02:41:13 ◼ ► arguments are like, why don't, but they they'll sell me both. So they make more money. It's like,
02:41:17 ◼ ► yeah, I know in the short term, but in the long term, I think it's worth thinking about that
02:41:20 ◼ ► moment where like all these Apple platforms are all capable of running virtually on all,
02:41:25 ◼ ► it's all the same hardware essentially, right? Like a MacBook air and an iPad pro that are
02:41:29 ◼ ► running them too. They are not that different. Those two computers are not very different.
02:41:34 ◼ ► And so at that point you can almost mix and match and just say like run, run whatever, wherever.
02:41:39 ◼ ► And, and the vision pro of all of them is like every, I think everything will be virtualizable
02:41:45 ◼ ► inside the vision pro eventually. Cause that's the whole point of it is just create a, it's not
02:41:50 ◼ ► hardware, it's virtual hardware on demand. I would think that it would definitely get there in the
02:41:54 ◼ ► next 10 years. Right. And actually turns the portable Mac experience into something superior
02:42:00 ◼ ► because right even right now, I mean, again, we did not get to try the Mac, Mac virtual display
02:42:07 ◼ ► in the demos they gave out at WWDC, but talking to people at Apple who've used it, it is by their
02:42:14 ◼ ► accounts, not like marketing people, but engineering type people. It's really good and usable and
02:42:20 ◼ ► credible on this first generation one, three quarters of a year before it actually ships
02:42:26 ◼ ► future ones, it's going to be great, but you'll have not just a 4k display like this one's
02:42:31 ◼ ► promising, but you know, six or eight K displays eventually no problem. Right. I mean, there's no
02:42:37 ◼ ► doubt in my mind that like a five year from now vision pro is going to be able to simulate like
02:42:41 ◼ ► a giant 8k display in front of you that if it, and if it's the only thing you take in your backpack,
02:42:48 ◼ ► wow, now you're traveling lighter, I guess, except for the battery packs, you'll need to take me out.
02:42:54 ◼ ► But you know, still you'll probably save, it's probably going to weigh less than a MacBook pro,
02:42:59 ◼ ► but you'll have a giant virtual display. So the future is bright, but I do think that it will
02:43:05 ◼ ► in the near term next year and the year after it's, it's definitely going to change people's
02:43:11 ◼ ► hey, what do I take with me when I go on this trip? I think you're right. I, and I don't know
02:43:21 ◼ ► it's just one of those things where I'm like, well, I need to, I need to actually have one
02:43:25 ◼ ► and live with it. I can't just go by marketing materials or a pack can 30 minute demo. I love
02:43:30 ◼ ► that I got to have it. I love to talk about it. I still think about it. It kind of haunts me that I
02:43:35 ◼ ► only got those sweet, sweet 30 minutes with it. Yeah. But I don't draw any conclusions from it.
02:43:40 ◼ ► It's everything is different when you use it for real. Anyway, Jason, it's always good to have you
02:43:46 ◼ ► on, even if it's a brief show like this one. Yeah. They can all be marathon. Sometimes we've got to
02:43:51 ◼ ► cut it short, certain sweet Titan bright. We got, we, we it's like Bob Barker got to 99. Didn't go
02:43:58 ◼ ► over. We got to buy my count here two 52, but we didn't go over the three minute mark. So we win.
02:44:03 ◼ ► Yeah. This isn't like, this is Marco Arment or a star Wars talk here. We don't go over three hours.
02:44:12 ◼ ► Did you remember as a kid, you go back to the prices, right? With the, in the, in the showcase
02:44:17 ◼ ► showdown, when you got to be the fourth person and you you'd have the lucky option. If you thought
02:44:22 ◼ ► everybody else overbid, you could go $1. And remember when you knew that that was obviously
02:44:27 ◼ ► the right strategy and then somebody wouldn't do it screaming at the television. I mean,
02:44:34 ◼ ► I have that when nobody knows the answer in final jeopardy and I know it's exactly the same feeling.
02:44:38 ◼ ► Right. It was just like, come on guys, come on. How is it that I know this and you don't? Right.
02:44:42 ◼ ► I would have zero chance of winning on jeopardy or qualifying on jeopardy. I'm way, I think way
02:44:47 ◼ ► too slowly. And I don't even know enough trivia, but whatever trivia I know, I'm not fast. Like
02:44:53 ◼ ► our friend Glenn, who actually is jeopardy player champion champion winner. But when I know the
02:45:00 ◼ ► answer, I know it's bad. If they don't know it, it doesn't make me angry. Anyway. Thank you, Jason.
02:45:06 ◼ ► Everybody of course can follow you at six colors.com and you always, even when you do write at
02:45:12 ◼ ► unusual places like the verge or your weekly regular Mac world column, it's always linked to
02:45:17 ◼ ► from six colors, right? The upgrade with Mike Hurley, fantastic podcasts, always, always worn
02:45:25 ◼ ► out episodes on my podcast player. Thank you. And the incomparable network chock full of pop culture
02:45:32 ◼ ► goodness. What else do, what else do you have? Those are the, I think biggest highlights. I'm
02:45:37 ◼ ► believe it or not. I'm actually on Mac break weekly with Leo Laporte every Tuesday with Andy
02:45:42 ◼ ► and Iko, who I have been working with for like 30 years now. So how do you do it? I don't understand