00:00:00 ◼ ► Jason, it's as usual, we have 10 hours of stuff to talk about. And only five hours to do it.
00:00:06 ◼ ► I swear to God, I'm trying to keep this one short. So we have everybody now look at your podcast
00:00:12 ◼ ► players. See, I'm very, I'm very sad to say that we're gonna have to skip the baseball talk even as
00:00:17 ◼ ► both of our favorite teams, the Yankees and Dodgers. Wait, no. Hmm. You're a Red Sox fan. It hurts me.
00:00:26 ◼ ► I'm the West Coast version of the Red Sox in that they have lots of money but are disappointing the
00:00:31 ◼ ► Giants who fired their president today and replaced him with a Hall of Famer. So I missed the
00:00:38 ◼ ► news. Who did Dave replace him with? Buster Posey. Oh, wow. They put Buster Posey in charge of the
00:00:44 ◼ ► baseball. So I mean, he's a smart guy. So we'll see what happens there. Anyway, there's your
00:00:48 ◼ ► baseball. And the Yankees are in the playoffs. So congratulations to you. That's, well, you know how
00:00:54 ◼ ► we Yankee fans are. That's, that's our birthright. Just getting to the bare minimum today. I would
00:00:59 ◼ ► say hiring Buster Posey as the general manager. That's the base. That's the sports equivalent of
00:01:04 ◼ ► fan service in fiction. What are the fans gonna say about that move? Oh, I don't like him. He's,
00:01:11 ◼ ► I mean, no, he's your favorite player. And he's gonna be in the Hall of Fame. And he won three
00:01:15 ◼ ► World Championships. And it's like, shut up. Just he's the guy now. I was like, okay, all right.
00:01:19 ◼ ► Not gonna complain. He's sort of, sort of like the giant Jeter, except Jeter went and was the GM down
00:01:25 ◼ ► in Miami. Right. Right. You know, right. And I mean, presumably it's it, boy, if we're not,
00:01:31 ◼ ► if we're not talking about baseball, we're doing a bad job, but I'll just say it's really interesting
00:01:34 ◼ ► because he retired because he was tired of being a catcher. He just, his body was just absolutely
00:01:39 ◼ ► wrecked. And so he, he played that one last year and they won 107 games and they won the division.
00:01:44 ◼ ► And he said, I gave it my all because I knew I wasn't coming back. And then he and his family
00:01:48 ◼ ► moved back to Georgia where he's from. It was sort of sad of like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna miss
00:01:52 ◼ ► him. And they were there for like a year. And then they moved back to the Bay Area and they're like,
00:01:55 ◼ ► no, this is home for us. And he became like, he was then he invested in the team. He became one
00:02:01 ◼ ► of the owners. He sat on the board and it was like, what's going on here? Exactly. And this
00:02:06 ◼ ► is the answer, which is now he is gonna run the show, which is very, very interesting for a still
00:02:13 ◼ ► pretty young man, but by all accounts, incredibly bright. So I think, yeah, if you're a fan of that
00:02:18 ◼ ► team, which I am, you can't say a bad word about him. I mean, now ask me in five years,
00:02:23 ◼ ► people will say bad words about him. The other bit of not, not, we're not talking about baseball,
00:02:29 ◼ ► baseball news, of course. And I think it's near and dear to many of our listeners hearts because
00:02:36 ◼ ► my listenership, my readership is heavily skewed towards the area and the Oakland A's are no longer
00:02:42 ◼ ► in Oakland. And this is a bit of news for people who aren't sports fans. It's like at a meta level,
00:02:49 ◼ ► it's sort of sports as an anchor of community. It's Oakland lost. I mean, they never called
00:02:55 ◼ ► themselves Oakland. They had played in Oakland since the seventies. They were in San Francisco
00:03:00 ◼ ► and then Philadelphia, obviously before that. But that's still a lot of Philadelphia teams.
00:03:06 ◼ ► They've always been the golden state warriors, which always struck me as kind of weird.
00:03:12 ◼ ► Even that was just a stadium funding ploy. Cause the guy who owned newly, who owned the warriors
00:03:17 ◼ ► was playing games with Oakland, San Francisco, Anaheim, and, or orange County and San Diego
00:03:25 ◼ ► trying to get them to give him a stadium. And so he just named it the golden state warriors.
00:03:31 ◼ ► Cause he figured that that would be the way that he could keep leverage on everybody. And they,
00:03:35 ◼ ► in fact, they announced that they would play half their games in Southern California one year.
00:03:39 ◼ ► And then that announcement was enough to push it over and they never did. They played in Oakland
00:03:49 ◼ ► South of a baseball stadium in South beach in San Francisco. And so they moved across the Bay
00:03:55 ◼ ► still in the Bay, but not in Oakland proper anymore. And then of course the Raiders came and
00:04:01 ◼ ► went again. In our childhood, they spent, I don't know what a better part of a decade in
00:04:09 ◼ ► Los Angeles, Los Angeles. Yeah. And then they went back to Oakland in the Coliseum. But of course,
00:04:14 ◼ ► a couple of years ago built a massive new stadium in Las Vegas, which is apparently a huge success
00:04:21 ◼ ► for them. I just saw, I'm very, I'm kind of surprised, but maybe not that Raiders are actually
00:04:26 ◼ ► in now that they're in Vegas, it's the most expensive tickets in the entire NFL. Yeah. I
00:04:30 ◼ ► think there's some real, the problem with it. And I think that the Rams and the chargers are finding
00:04:35 ◼ ► this in LA with their new stadium as well is these are great warm weather cities for you to go as a
00:04:40 ◼ ► tourist and see your team play. And so all three of those teams have found one of the challenges is
00:04:46 ◼ ► it's not really a home atmosphere. It's almost like a neutral site atmosphere because obviously
00:04:51 ◼ ► in Vegas, right? Every airline flies to Vegas from every city. You can always get to Vegas.
00:04:56 ◼ ► So you're in Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Buffalo or wherever you are. And it's the fall or the winter.
00:05:02 ◼ ► And you're like, Hey, Vegas sounds pretty good. And we'll, we'll go there and watch our team and
00:05:06 ◼ ► go to the casinos and take, make a weekend of it. And that's been very successful for the Raiders,
00:05:10 ◼ ► but it will lose a little home field advantage that way. Yeah. And the, I guess the golden
00:05:20 ◼ ► proved the point that it could work. I think the danger is with baseball, like the A's first off,
00:05:26 ◼ ► it's entirely unclear whether there will be anything built. They have their plans are all AI
00:05:30 ◼ ► renderings of imaginary stadiums that don't fit on the footprint of this incredibly small. It's
00:05:35 ◼ ► at the Tropicana, which I stayed out once for a wedding. I was at the trop. It's this little
00:05:40 ◼ ► wedge of land. It would be the smallest stadium in baseball and they keep having these renderings,
00:05:45 ◼ ► but there's no real progress. And the funding is unclear, but the A's are going to just go to a
00:05:50 ◼ ► AAA park, a minor league park in Sacramento for a few years, because they weren't happy with the
00:05:55 ◼ ► lease negotiations in Oakland. And nobody, I think nobody is really convinced that they're going to
00:06:00 ◼ ► go there. And the danger is like, how do you play baseball in Las Vegas, unless it's first climate
00:06:07 ◼ ► controlled, which costs a lot of money. And then second it's 81 dates. I mean, 81 midweek, middle
00:06:14 ◼ ► of summer dates to get people to come to see their team in Vegas is a lot harder sell than it is when
00:06:20 ◼ ► it's the winter. And it's just a Sunday and the weekend. It's a very different kind of thing.
00:06:26 ◼ ► My conspiracy theory is that the Vegas thing is going to fall through and that the A's are going
00:06:31 ◼ ► to end up getting a stadium in Sacramento or maybe Portland, Oregon, something like that,
00:06:40 ◼ ► So the thing I saw in that, what makes it sad is there have been other teams in baseball that have left their city to move somewhere else. What we currently know is the, I mean, the list goes is very long historically. But recently, it's the nationals who were the Montreal Expos. And I forget there were so many other examples, but they had somebody published like the final game attendance. And it was, you know, there, I don't know, it was like half full at Olympic Stadium in Montreal for the last Expos game.
00:07:10 ◼ ► I mean, the big problem is the attendance was poor. And attendance has been kind of crap overall for the A's in recent years, but the A's have been a crap team. But the final series was a sell out.
00:07:22 ◼ ► No, and the A's drove them away. I think it's not as widely known. But like, literally, they were trying to create a sob story. So they doubled, they increased the ticket prices the last few years as the team has been terrible. They doubled the price to park at the stadium.
00:07:40 ◼ ► Like a lot of people go and they tailgate and all that. But it was like that they doubled the price. They were trying to drive the fans away so that they could claim poverty from that. But the fact is that they have an incredible fan base of people who are very loyal. And the reason that they moved is because this guy Fisher, who owns the team, didn't get a handout. He didn't get he actually was going to get a partial handout for for a stadium in Oakland, but it wasn't rich enough for his blood.
00:08:05 ◼ ► And he had this kind of like fantasy of going to Vegas, and nobody really believes it. But it was not like, my understanding is that several billionaires in the Bay Area separately approached Fisher to buy the team and keep it in Oakland because they're all like, why would you move? This is a top market. It can support two teams. Why would you move? And he says it's not for sale. I'm just going to move to Vegas. So what I mean, in the end, what can you do if the the other baseball owners, and this is true for all professional sports in
00:08:35 ◼ ► America anyway, they're all they're all billionaires. They've all got all the money too. And the last thing they want to do is set a precedent where the other owners can stop them from doing what they want, right? They they want absolute authority to do whatever it is they want. So they're never going to vote against another owner. No matter it takes a Dan Snyder level, where it's he's incompetent. We all hate him. And now he's horribly racist to maybe or or was his secular, all lots of sexual misconduct at his organization. And it took so much for the
00:09:05 ◼ ► NFL to kick him to the curb. And even then he made billions of dollars in profit. So yeah, they they're gonna let Fisher twist in the wind for a while. But I don't believe that that guy's going to be successful. I think he's going to have to give up eventually. And it's just it's just sad that in the meantime, they're moving for three at least three years to Sacramento to play in a triple A ball, minorly park. It's it's
00:09:26 ◼ ► bizarre. Yes. If people think about that, like the fans that they move because the fans didn't support them, that's not what happened. I'd say it's a little like Cleveland and the Cleveland Browns moving to Baltimore, where the Browns were supported. And but the city didn't want to build them a stadium. And literally the day after they moved to Baltimore, the city built a stadium, they funded the stadium. So it's like that where it's like, it's about a business negotiation. It's not about a lack of loyalty from a really good fan base. It's a shame.
00:09:55 ◼ ► Yeah, it really is. The only the only owner proof team in all of pro sports is the Packers, Green Bay Packers, yeah, who have this bizarrely unique ought to be ought to be the standard, but where they're a publicly held company where the fans got to buy the stock. Yeah, basically. And so the fans own the team. And it's on and I believe that the NFL, the rules between all the other
00:10:25 ◼ ► you know, 31 billionaires who own the teams, the rules of the league state, no one else is ever allowed to do this again. When no one can do this. That's right. And in fact, you can't corner the market on the Packers. I think if you sell your shares, you have to sell them back to the team. They don't they don't you can't know no billionaire can roll in and buy a bunch of shares and take a controlling interest. Right? You can't just come in like Elon Musk and say I had a bid an extraordinary premium because I want to become an owner. Right? Yeah, and I just need 50% of the people to agree with me. No, it's it's true. I'd say the closest thing
00:10:54 ◼ ► actually my baseball team, the Giants because they were going to be moved I had this I feel for the fans of Oakland because I went to a ballgame at Candlestick Park in 1992 in the summer to take a bite of the Giants because they were going to move to Tampa. And it was a done deal. And I forgot about that. It unraveled over the winter. And they stayed. But the group that bought the team in the winter of 92 93 it had leaders it had sort of figureheads but it was a whole bunch of millionaires in San Francisco kicking in 10 here.
00:11:23 ◼ ► 15 here five here. And to this day, although they have the guy who's the rich donor in Georgia who donates to Marjorie Taylor Greene and all of that that guy is the like primary owner. He's 20% of the ownership 15% they remain this very large group of Bay Area people who all want to keep the Giants around and and make some money on the valuation. But like, it's not like a lot and I like it. It's really good because you don't
00:11:53 ◼ ► have just one butthead who can just ruin everything. You've got a whole bunch of probably very high attitude, high income people who are who are running that board of directors. But you know, it's not just one dude. And I think that there's a safety net in that.
00:12:07 ◼ ► Well, it's just a shame because ultimately, as much as I love to, we love to joke about sports, and I like to stick the knife in you because your team didn't do well this year. And you would surely do the same to me. If you were recording app, people love the Yankees, what are you talking about?
00:12:24 ◼ ► There's a reason I had you on the show before the playoffs started given the Yankees. Right, we make jokes. But like, it's the emotional ties are so strong and so powerful. And that's why people love sports. And so to see the emotional ties severed by basically one guy who decided I'm going to divorce you and go to Vegas, and feel the pain of those people who have been like their whole lives. There's a there's a picture I don't know if you saw it. There's a picture of a guy who was holding a science and
00:12:54 ◼ ► old guy with a beard. And he has a sign that a cardboard sign with a picture of a kid on it. And it says I came to the first game and I came to the last game. I did not see that. So that guy's been going to the Ace Games for 50 plus years 5560 years, whatever it is, it's just it's heartbreaking.
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00:14:54 ◼ ► What what of the new products so it's September, it's the end of September as we record, which of the new products have you have you formed strong opinions on?
00:15:06 ◼ ► Harder, strong, strong opinions. I mean, I'm kind of all over the place. I've got them all like you do. I bought a series 10 watch. I had had a series seven, so I'm seeing three years of gain there. And I'm, I'm really liking that combined with a new version of watch OS. The having my iPhones live activities show up on my watch is such a good feature just to because that's, I mean, live activities are really good, but they're in my pocket right there. Live activities are in my pocket.
00:15:36 ◼ ► And so even something like flighty when I'm at, you know, it's got a live activity of where my flight is. And then I look at my watch and I'm like, Oh, it's not here. And now I can just see it in the widgets and it's not, the app isn't necessarily resident on the watch. It's just pushing.
00:15:50 ◼ ► And it's one of these great examples of Apple recycling their APIs that the, the widget on the watch is the light activity view from the, from the Dynamic Island. It's basically the same thing, but that that's a huge win that makes it so much easier to get that information that's sitting on my phone in my pocket somewhere where I'm walking through an airport and I can just look down and I can see it.
00:16:12 ◼ ► So I, and I like the size. I like that it sits closer to my wrist and the screen is still bigger. I'm and I, I've got the jet black aluminum, which looks really good. So I'm, I'm really liking that.
00:16:23 ◼ ► And then I'm a, I'm a 15 pro user going to go into a 16 pro. And that means I get the five X camera that I didn't have last year. And Oh my God, the five X camera is so good.
00:16:36 ◼ ► And that, that sensor is, I was taking pictures at a, at a concert last week and we were in the like seventh row or something, but I was at five X zoom and I got these pictures and they are so clear and the color is so good of the musicians on stage.
00:16:49 ◼ ► And I, I kinda, I just am blown away by how good that camera is and how good that zoom is.
00:16:56 ◼ ► We went to, you probably, I, in my review, I even mentioned I didn't include photos, but the Friday mid review week for me with the iPhone 16, Amy and I went to see Weezer here in Philadelphia.
00:17:08 ◼ ► There was like a, I don't know what you call it cause nobody really mashes anymore, but there was a general admission area where you stand and you know, I have to push and stuff and Amy likes to get as close to the stage as possible.
00:17:20 ◼ ► But she knows I like, I like to have a seat and that's not just because I'm old. I have, I've always enjoyed to have a seat at a concert for the occasional respite from standing.
00:17:32 ◼ ► So we were, we had seats about as, I think we were in the first row of actual seats, but there was, you know, I don't know, it's probably like the equivalent of 20, 30 rows from the stage.
00:17:43 ◼ ► So the five X camera definitely helped. And I don't know, it's not like I sit there at a concert or any live event like that with my phone out all the time taking pictures, even when I was like, Hey, I'm reviewing a phone.
00:17:55 ◼ ► This is a good opportunity to take some tested test photos from a scenario where lots of people, I mean, you go to a concert, it's stunning how many people have their phones out for the whole show really.
00:18:09 ◼ ► But yeah, it, and it reminded me of how, when they first added the zoom cameras at, I guess it was two X at first and it was sort of like, yeah, now you have, they called it telephoto and it's you have some reach, but it's yeah, you better be outside though.
00:18:29 ◼ ► Now it's, you know, and I know that the sensor on that camera still isn't 48 megapixels, even though the other two are.
00:18:39 ◼ ► I know it's a challenge with the optics together to get a longer lens, to reach a bigger sensor, but totally, I would say just, just a couple of years behind the main camera in terms of usability, just in terms of getting a good exposure in the tough lighting of a concert.
00:18:59 ◼ ► But the main thing I'm getting, cause I'm the same as you, I did not buy a max, I've never owned a plus or a max size iPhone.
00:19:17 ◼ ► But I will, it's like at five X, I find that I'm finally using it more than I ever have before.
00:19:26 ◼ ► Because even at three X there, you know, when I went through, I used the trick that you published years ago on six colors of how to set up like a smart album and photos to sort of identify photos from a specific camera, specific lens.
00:19:43 ◼ ► And I do this now every year just to sort of, well, how many photos did I take with iPhone 15 pro last year?
00:19:57 ◼ ► And I think I forget what my, I think it was like 15% of mine were with the three X, something like that.
00:20:03 ◼ ► I'm taking, I think definitely more with five X cause I'm finding situations where it's like, Oh yeah, this is kind of cool to be taking a photo of somebody that far away.
00:20:16 ◼ ► The three X, I would have taken something, but it would have been like, they were small in the middle of the frame and maybe I would have cropped it and it would have been, and you would have had the people in front of me.
00:20:25 ◼ ► And it just, it would have been a lot less satisfying and I probably wouldn't have even attempted more than one or two.
00:20:31 ◼ ► And I got to the five X with this and I was just like, Oh my God, I've got close in on everybody.
00:20:37 ◼ ► Who's on stage on parts of the stage, not even the whole stage, just parts of the stage.
00:20:44 ◼ ► And then afterward I was also, I popped it into photographic styles and was like, how does this look as a black and white?
00:20:50 ◼ ► And it's just, it, again, you could do some of that before, but the, the, the detail and having access to more of the data from the sensor to, and I don't know how much, this is one of those questions I want to ask Apple is what exactly is being saved that photographic styles has access to?
00:21:08 ◼ ► Because it's not raw off the sensor, but there is lots of extra data that you have access to that lets you take that, like we were together at the, at Steve Jobs theater and they're like, yeah, take a shot in black and white.
00:21:24 ◼ ► Cause the color data is all there that I want to know more about that, I think, but it was really great after the fact to be able to sort of say, now, how does this very saturated, beautiful picture look as a moody black and white?
00:21:44 ◼ ► Although I, I don't think so, but in the same way that we know with the hardware that in fact, I fix it, I don't know if they still do this.
00:21:53 ◼ ► They, for years and years, they, they would go to Australia to get them at the crack of the first day by the international date line to start their teardown.
00:22:05 ◼ ► And whatever you're interested about inside the new iPhones, I fix it is going to tell you in relatively short order.
00:22:27 ◼ ► Cause it's, it, it, it makes it seem like you're putting a number on battery life, but it's not.
00:22:33 ◼ ► But it is true though, that bigger, a bigger battery is in the otherwise exact same electrically component device is going to give you longer battery life.
00:22:48 ◼ ► I just assumed by the end of September that somebody would have dissected the, the hype hike files, whatever we're calling them that have this embedded data, the meted.
00:23:16 ◼ ► So I believe, I'm not sure whether the live photo video is inside it, but there's other stuff that's inside it that you can embed in it.
00:23:24 ◼ ► And as far as I can tell, that's, what's happening is they've embedded it at a whole bunch of, of sensor data.
00:23:31 ◼ ► Do they take a, like a subset that would be what they would throw at their pipeline and save that out at that point?
00:23:43 ◼ ► I, those are the details that I haven't seen and it may be hard to reverse engineer it.
00:23:51 ◼ ► It's, it's that it's not just, oh, put it into an exif viewer and here it's very obvious where the metadata is and what format it's in.
00:24:01 ◼ ► It might just be like to the outside observer who doesn't know what Apple's done because they haven't published anything yet.
00:24:12 ◼ ► It's extra data that's in the, in the container that is not, and for backward compatibility, the heaf itself is what it is, right?
00:24:34 ◼ ► The, they're, they're, that they're doing that and that they chose this format and it, right.
00:24:39 ◼ ► Cause they could have, they added JPEG XL format to it, which has some things that make raw files much smaller, which is cool.
00:24:47 ◼ ► But like they obviously want to invent or, or either invent their own thing or create something inside this format that gives them more capability.
00:24:54 ◼ ► And it's great because the problem with, I liked the old photographic styles, but what you were doing is you're choosing what got burned into your photos.
00:25:01 ◼ ► And now there, it's not the same as a raw, but you get more ability later to, more latitude to make changes later.
00:25:11 ◼ ► The interface is super weird and I think that it's one of those things where tech nerds will probably have more of a problem with it than regular people because it's that square.
00:25:32 ◼ ► And you're just dialing it in based on kind of your pleasure about what you want as an interface that people might use.
00:25:40 ◼ ► That's actually, I think pretty good, even though I think a lot of technical people will be like, what are you doing?
00:25:54 ◼ ► And they put the numbers at the top, or if you're holding it up and down in tall screen format, the numbers are at the top, otherwise they're on the left.
00:26:04 ◼ ► But they tell you as you drag around in the little grid to manipulate the current style, like what the tone, the pallet.
00:26:16 ◼ ► And the other thing that I think is a little curious and I'm wondering if it's on purpose, like they're like, yeah, this is the way we want to do it.
00:26:29 ◼ ► Maybe we should fix that, is that when you're on the phone itself and you're manipulating the current style with the sort of two dimensional XY grid of decreasing the tone, increasing the color, whatever that grid does, like you said, just make it look good.
00:26:54 ◼ ► And most of the places, you know, text editing in particular, famously, when you're moving the insertion point around on an iOS device, you get a pop over above your finger to show you what it is your fingers obscuring.
00:27:09 ◼ ► And same way that from day one, when you're typing on an iPhone keyboard, as you press the letter, there's a pop over above your fingers or thumbs that show you what letter the keyboard thinks you just pressed.
00:27:24 ◼ ► This, it's as you're manipulating it with your finger, you can't see where you are on the grid at all.
00:27:29 ◼ ► It's in it to me that the OCD, oh, I want to know exactly where the XY is in this grid.
00:27:37 ◼ ► That kind of bothers me, but I kind of think that maybe it's a deliberate choice on Apple's part, because they don't want you thinking about where you are on the grid and what the values are.
00:27:47 ◼ ► They want you to slide your finger around while you're looking at the current photo until the photo looks the way you want it to look.
00:27:53 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like a little touchpad kind of idea that you're just, that was my moment of realization was, I need to not think about what exactly is it doing here and instead move my finger around or move my cursor around on the Mac, because you can edit these on the Mac or an iPad just as easily in photos.
00:28:19 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause look, if you're a pro who has lots of feelings, you're going to probably not be using this technique anyway, and that's fine, but they, this is okay.
00:28:29 ◼ ► So this is the thing, cause I wrote about photos in iOS 18 cause I wrote a book, take control of photos, we're available where eBooks are sold, which is take control ebooks.com.
00:28:39 ◼ ► Anyway, there's my plug, but it means that I spend all summer, like digging into these things and they, they change that photos interface.
00:28:45 ◼ ► And my point here in saying this is just the new photos interface on iOS, which is like the grid is at the top and there's like collections at the bottom and sort of bottom third.
00:28:53 ◼ ► And so you end up in this kind of like multi-pane view at the start, and then you can scroll up or down.
00:28:58 ◼ ► And a lot of, especially, I think more of our listeners and readers complain because they do view that grid as like a utilitarian thing and they don't like Apple stuff, stuffing other things in their face.
00:29:09 ◼ ► But I think it's another example where Apple, it's very difficult to design for such a wide audience as the iPhone especially has.
00:29:27 ◼ ► And I know that only a certain portion of the Mac audience is super nerdy, but you could argue like a computer itself fundamentally is so nerdy compared to an iPhone.
00:29:36 ◼ ► And so you've got to design these interfaces that are understandable to very much the regular person who doesn't think a lot about software interfaces, but has some power behind it that unfolds as you use it.
00:29:52 ◼ ► And that's why I think that what they did with photos actually was pretty elegant, which is say, look, we know the grid is important, but our collection views are also important because one of the things you want to do with photos is look at your old photos.
00:30:07 ◼ ► And I think the photographic styles little pad thing is like that too, where they're like, I know that real photo nerds are not going to like this necessarily, but we need to find a way to make this incredibly sophisticated thing we're doing as simple as just kind of moving your thumb around until you find something that makes you happy.
00:30:29 ◼ ► It's interesting to contemplate it in the context of what I'm thinking in hindsight is about a 10 year old decision, but maybe it's more than 10 years.
00:30:39 ◼ ► And I've lost track of years is when Apple switched from a consumer equals iPhoto pro equals aperture to, all right, we're going all in on a new photos app, which I think we did that.
00:30:56 ◼ ► Coincidentally 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking it was like iOS seven and I think on iOS and here I'm using iOS as a catch all for iPhone and iPad.
00:31:10 ◼ ► I, I'm sure there are, I know there were some things about iPhoto that some people missed, but for the most part, I think it was a just a change in that went along with the overall iOS seven rethinking of the whole UI, not just the style being flat, but sort of a consistent language across all the apps.
00:31:34 ◼ ► The way that photos looks a lot like notes, looks a lot like mail, et cetera on the Mac, though, that was much more controversial because photos, especially the first few versions of photos were in no way, shape or form an alternative to aperture, which was a professional tool.
00:31:55 ◼ ► Totally. And it felt, it didn't really feel, it really was sort of a word Apple saying we're getting out of the professional photo tool, photo library management thing.
00:32:10 ◼ ► I mean, not because aperture was unpopular, but I, I kind of think in hindsight it was, it feels to me like we need to focus all of, put all the wood of our arrow behind.
00:32:33 ◼ ► I think they were thinking too as a platform owner, especially with the iPhone, we need to provide tools for people to manage their photos in their library and edit photos and all of that.
00:32:47 ◼ ► And I'm sure they saw the inevitability of you got to manage your photos on your device and you're going to, eventually they're going to sync with the cloud, which they finally did with iCloud photo library, which was still like seven years ago now or something like that five years ago.
00:33:00 ◼ ► And, and if you look at the high end photography area, I think, I think they're like there, we have, there are competitors there that are always going to care.
00:33:08 ◼ ► Adobe is always going to care more about Lightroom than Apple would ever have cared about aperture.
00:33:13 ◼ ► And that was clear fairly early on, like before they shut down aperture, there were many years where aperture kind of got almost nothing.
00:33:20 ◼ ► And it was because the typical Apple thing, sometimes they decide to take on a category and then they just kind of move on to something else.
00:33:34 ◼ ► Lauren and I were talking about it afterward and how I learned a lesson that was reminded of at that concert, which is there's always going to be somebody who's more into it than you are.
00:33:50 ◼ ► I mean, all the words and they go to not just this concert, but the concert tomorrow, that's 50 miles away.
00:33:56 ◼ ► And they, and they've been up on what the set list is and the other markets before we got to this one.
00:34:28 ◼ ► And on one level, I, I feel bad for the Aperture people who got left high and dry, but that was probably the right decision.
00:34:36 ◼ ► But the right decision eventually was to say, we got to let this go, especially since if we're going to care about anything, we have all of these photos being taken with the iPhone.
00:34:46 ◼ ► And then, and then going photos on the Mac, that was also starting to merge the, the code bases of photos across all their platforms, which enabled iCloud photo library and sharing and all the other things that they've done since then.
00:35:00 ◼ ► What's your take on why Apple made that decision with Aperture, but stuck with Final Cut for video? Where I think everybody would agree, we're seeing to some extent that same ebb and flow you talked about, where Apple seems to lose interest.
00:35:19 ◼ ► And people who are pro video editors are like back on Premiere, they're using other tools.
00:35:51 ◼ ► I was watching a video, random video the other week, and I realized the guy was using logic to build this song.
00:36:05 ◼ ► It's not, I think what they, one thing is that Final Cut is being used in ways that are not necessarily making feature films or something, but it's got a lot of like use cases.
00:36:16 ◼ ► I wonder what it was about Aperture that made them get out of that one, but stay in logic and Final Cut.
00:36:25 ◼ ► This is like when we have those conversations about the Mac Pro, like why does the Mac Pro exist and all of that?
00:36:31 ◼ ► I think Apple knows things about its markets that we don't see, where there are markets that we are so small and so niche that we don't even know they exist.
00:36:55 ◼ ► Like you, they could spin that off into some other company, but I think that maybe it serves them to, there's that thing about the iPhone pro this year, the, that I, I felt like the iPhone pro and pro max.
00:37:11 ◼ ► They've been for a few years now, leaning into this idea that you should feature film with it, and there's incredible high end stuff you can do with it.
00:37:17 ◼ ► And I think that serves them, even though 99% of the people who buy those phones will never, ever, ever use those features because the people who buy those phones like the fact that it's so awesome.
00:37:29 ◼ ► You could shoot a feature film with this, if you really wanted to, you could do all this amazing stuff if you really wanted to.
00:37:35 ◼ ► And I think having Final Cut and logic, because they love saying this about musicians too, I think it does serve their purposes, their messaging to keep those around.
00:37:59 ◼ ► There must be a very specific reason why they, they dropped aperture, but kept the other ones around.
00:38:10 ◼ ► I mean, it's, it's really useful for them to cart out Final Cut and say, look at how amazing this is, even though nobody's making a very, essentially nobody is editing movies or TV using Final Cut Pro.
00:38:26 ◼ ► I've I'd love to get a straight answer from somebody who knows inside Apple, hint, hint, but I've always suspected that it is something, something to the effect of.
00:38:36 ◼ ► Aperture isn't as needed or what they didn't feel it was as needed to have a great Mac solution for software editing, that they feel like Final Cut still is the only real Mac style video editor.
00:38:50 ◼ ► I'm, I'm making lots of tangents here, but, but I'm going to cite another past source advantage of covering this for so long as you can cite this past source is one of the reasons Safari exists is because Internet Explorer, when it came to the Mac was actually better than Netscape.
00:39:05 ◼ ► The Internet Explorer was so good on the Mac, but you fast forward a little bit and it got really bad.
00:39:09 ◼ ► It was so bad and it hurt the Mac because Internet Explorer on Windows was fast and Internet Explorer on the Mac was slow.
00:39:15 ◼ ► And it meant that if you just bought two computers to surf the web in the late nineties, the Mac lost all of those battles of like how fast it is to load this thing because.
00:39:25 ◼ ► Apple's entire platform value for surfing the web was in the hands of Microsoft and Steve Jobs said, we can't do that.
00:39:53 ◼ ► It, it even looked old and I'm not a video editor, but you could just take a glance at the UI and it was like that even looks old.
00:40:00 ◼ ► So, and so the conventional wisdom then was, if you're going to edit video in premiere, you shouldn't use a Mac.
00:40:14 ◼ ► I know it gets used in the industry, but I hear a lot more about premiere now that a lot of people use premiere.
00:40:19 ◼ ► So I wonder if one of the reasons Apple kept final cut around is that they were not as convinced that premiere was not going to make their platform look bad.
00:40:26 ◼ ► Whereas maybe they were convinced that light room was and Photoshop, they were more assured.
00:40:31 ◼ ► Cause that's one of the strategic decisions they got to make is they, they want to have this stuff so that their platform looks good.
00:40:37 ◼ ► Like in the end, in the end, final cut incorporated would only be thinking about its market, but Apple is thinking about final cut as it impacts all of its marketing and reaching into creative professionals.
00:40:50 ◼ ► And like, there's so many things and selling high end systems, and there's so much that goes into it beyond just do people buy final cut that it changes the calculation.
00:41:08 ◼ ► It's sort of, it's really a great example because I think it was both a short-term we should do this as soon as possible and make this happen very fast for now, but also simultaneously a long-term strategic decision.
00:41:28 ◼ ► And one of the things that like IE for Mac wasn't horrible, especially when it first came out on classic.
00:41:42 ◼ ► And had a arguably the, I think it was in arguably the most standards compliant rendering engine on any platform for a while.
00:41:54 ◼ ► And that was the whole fervor for sticking to standard compliant HTML and CSS sort of fallen by the wayside in recent decades.
00:42:15 ◼ ► But where, where the first time IE took a big step backward was the move to Mac OS X and because it was a carbon application and used a bunch of older, some of the, there were ways to make carbon applications that were almost indistinguishable from cocoa ones.
00:42:43 ◼ ► IE on Mac OS X had like old looking buttons and old looking text rendering and just, and they sort of faked the Aqua Chrome instead of using the real Aqua Chrome, which it just looked like a knockoff app.
00:43:07 ◼ ► And so I think strategically what they were thinking is if we, not only do we need to control our, make our own web browser right down to the rendering engine to make it look as good as it possibly can on our system right now, but we need to be the ones with the control over it for future things, right?
00:43:26 ◼ ► And when the iPhone came out in 2007, it felt like, my recollection was Mac OS X at age six felt kind of old and established and iOS was new, but in hindsight, that's like six years.
00:43:45 ◼ ► And I'm not saying that when they'd committed to the Safari project, they had the iPhone in mind or Steve Jobs did, but something like the iPhone, like what if we make a new thing and you want to render the full New York Times regular homepage on a three and a half inch screen?
00:44:05 ◼ ► The web was a curiosity, right? But it was very clear by the early two thousands that the web was, it had gone from being a curiosity or an app that's nice to have a utility to being a foundational part of computing for everybody, right?
00:44:22 ◼ ► That was the moment where everybody was getting on the web and you can let Microsoft write and Netscape or whoever write utility software and battle it out on your platform, but when it's become a fundamental part of what your users want and it's out of your hands, you can see why they would say, no, this is base OS stuff at this point.
00:44:49 ◼ ► Web browser is a core part of the system and we're not going to outsource a core part of the system, Microsoft, especially since again, they weren't doing a very good job at that point.
00:44:59 ◼ ► I mean, that's, that's the truth is that if Microsoft seemed super committed, they might still do it, but the, the impetus was also that Microsoft obviously didn't care about, I'm sure the individual people working on the browser did, but like they did not give it resources.
00:45:13 ◼ ► They did not care that the Mac looked bad because IE was slow. They probably liked it at a high level. So, but I do think fundamentally in those years, the web browser just changed.
00:45:28 ◼ ► And that goes to your point, which is whatever that next product was going to be, if they're going to make a tablet or a phone, or if they hadn't even weren't even sure yet, they were already probably thinking about OS 10 and the Unix underpinnings and all of that being like a great place to start creating other products with other embedded software.
00:45:44 ◼ ► I have a theory too, that like their time building the iPod using someone else's operating system taught them that they didn't want to do that again.
00:45:52 ◼ ► So I think that they looked at this and were like, yeah, this is a great investment because it's not just for the Mac. This is the thing we own and we can put anywhere we want on a future iPod or other devices to be created.
00:46:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, I'm not saying they couldn't have built the iPhone without Safari, but it would have been a lot worse and it would have been weird because they really did need to make radical changes to the rendering engine to do things like, hey, fit the whole cnn.com homepage on a three and a half inch screen, not the mobile version, the full, not the baby web is, as Steve Jobs said, the real web.
00:46:27 ◼ ► That's not just using the regular rendering engine and pretending you have a Mac with a three and a half inch screen. It used scaling. It had the double, still has it to this day, the double click to zoom in on an element and stuff like that.
00:46:40 ◼ ► So what would they, their options have been if they didn't have Safari to brief Microsoft on this years in advance and see if they'll build IE's rendering engine for this device?
00:46:59 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Or do what they already did a few years later. I mean, they, you find the open source project that you write and start Safari at coincident with the iPhone, as opposed to having four years under their belt and having this fully functioning team that was really nailing it.
00:47:14 ◼ ► And to, to draw that conclusion to logic and final cut, I would say who else would build those apps for iPad OS today? Right? Well, that's a good point. That's a good point that it allows them and it's part of their strategy, right?
00:47:31 ◼ ► It allows them to span to other devices. It allows them to create those features. And again, they have partners that they could use. But I think that there's some stuff where they think we own this, we can control it, we can choose where it goes, we can put it on our platforms.
00:47:43 ◼ ► It was a knock for many years that they weren't on the iPad, but they also were able to put them on the iPad. I mean, DaVinci Resolve is on the iPad. There's some good stuff that's on the iPad already, but it's part it's strategic. This is this is part like Apple.
00:47:58 ◼ ► Apple's a very funny company and they got a lot a lot of interesting quirks about them. And one of them is their strategic use of their technology, whether it's apps and how they choose to deploy them and what features they choose to put in them, whether it's even down to their APIs and parts of their operating system.
00:48:15 ◼ ► Because I always like to think about this. Apple has iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS. I'm leaving some out. They have all these different operating systems. Now, they're all sort of the same operating system. And they've got apps. And they're all sort of the same apps, but just sort of like appearing in different places. And over time, they're trying to make it easier for them to do a lot of that.
00:48:41 ◼ ► Well, nobody else, nobody else of the entire planet has such a broad operating system strategy. And the only reason it works is that Apple's strategy includes compartmentalization, components, reusability. They recycle so much. The fact that it's eight OS's, but it's really kind of one OS, that's all part of how they do it.
00:49:04 ◼ ► And so they have to think strategically. And I think having these apps, these pro apps are a little bit like that, too, where it's like they're thinking big picture. They're thinking how they get used strategically. They are trying to be wise with the amount of effort they spend on it because they don't have, despite all their value and all their money, they don't have infinite ability to do effort in all these different areas, but they can pick their spots when they think that there's like a lot of benefit to come out of it.
00:49:34 ◼ ► Yeah. And I do think that I think we're seeing it. I think it's not like a little footnote. Oh yeah, that's a nice little Apple being Apple and the Apple can do it. I would say it's fundamental is to tie this all together.
00:49:52 ◼ ► It's the integration of the new photographic styles in the whole iPhone 16 lineup of cameras being integrated with the photos app on everybody's iPad and Mac or an older iPhone that's been updated to iOS 18 or Mac OS 15 Sequoia.
00:50:15 ◼ ► It's all part of the same project effectively, right? That the app you use to sync the photos to the cloud and edit them while you're on your big screen Mac is tied strategically to the functionality in the hardware imaging pipeline on Apple's cameras, which are called iPhones.
00:50:39 ◼ ► Yeah, no, it's all not only is it very Apple to be interrelated and interconnected like that, right? It's very much like the ecosystem. Everything's connected. Everything works everywhere. You got a brand new phone with a brand new camera on it with this grant brand new photographic styles feature, but oh, look, your Mac photos app understands it and can do the same thing and your iPad photos app can do the same thing.
00:51:03 ◼ ► That's part of it. And then the other part of it is the reality of the fact that there's no way that they could possibly produce eight unrelated operating systems with unrelated sets of APIs and unrelated versions of their third party or their first party apps.
00:51:19 ◼ ► It's impossible, right? It's impossible for any company to do that at the at the ambition level that Apple has. And so it is both strategic ecosystem stuff and also the only way that they can make the products with the level of ambition that they've got, right?
00:51:35 ◼ ► If they only had an iPhone, they could do it. But once you start saying, well, we've got an iPhone and an iPad and a Mac and a vision pro and an Apple watch and an Apple TV and AirPods and you start doing that. And there's no way. So it's strategic ecosystem and also strategic like repurposing reusing of every little bit they can.
00:51:55 ◼ ► It's like they what is it? The every part of the buffalo? I feel like Apple people don't give Apple enough credit for that. They are they are recyclers supreme. Like I mentioned about the Apple Watch, the fact that they just use the Dynamic Island API for the widgets on the watch.
00:52:09 ◼ ► Like why? Why would they do that? And the answer is it means they don't have to build it again and developers don't have to build it again. And everybody's happy about that.
00:52:17 ◼ ► Right. And it's it's human nature. I don't know that there's any successful company that that still is being successful that this wouldn't be true for. But Apple is at their best in the areas where they're behind. And it because it keeps you hungry. Right. And what's the problem that happens with success?
00:52:47 ◼ ► Sort of let's just say cocky until we get until I think of the word, but it keeps it from settling in. And and one area where Apple cannot be seen as being ahead is the size of the sensors and their lenses in their cameras because they have to fit in the phone. And as much as from a old school iPhone perspective, we can bemoan the growing protrusion and the number of lenses on the phone.
00:53:16 ◼ ► Number of lenses on the back compared to even a point and shoot camera. It's tiny and bigger sensors are better just for capturing better images. And so they're always going to be behind.
00:53:32 ◼ ► Probably always I mean, it's hard to imagine how they would ever get a full size 35 millimeter sensor in an iPhone complacent is the word by the way. Yeah, complacent. Well, yeah, I guess that's why it's one of the words right complacency can't set in on image sensors, though. And so they have to use computational photography.
00:53:51 ◼ ► That's their advantage. But it's not just the computational photography in the iPhone itself. It's this whole ecosystem with the photos app, and that they can, you know, do things that other really no other company can do.
00:54:04 ◼ ► So, in terms of cameras, they are competing against Canon, Nikon and red, and they're shooting their own events, they're eating their dog food and shooting these keynote events using iPhones photography, even though their standard for how good they look is it should look as good as anything you see professionally produced with $50,000 cameras.
00:54:27 ◼ ► By, by doing that it keeps those companies don't control there is people who shoot with a red photo camera aren't using red software to edit their videos, right.
00:54:40 ◼ ► And conversely Adobe who makes Premiere or who makes Lightroom Adobe is not making physical hardware cameras that you buy that have special that they can do the magic of well we know the exact file format, and we know exactly how the image pipeline works in the camera and we can engineer one to work with the other.
00:55:02 ◼ ► It really is only Apple who does that, I mean, Samsung or somebody like that could maybe Google sort of comes close with the pixel phones, where they, but that's really only the editing that you get on the pixel phone itself there's no desktop Google photos that's the equivalent of Apple photos.
00:55:20 ◼ ► I mean, they've got a website that does that, but you know, it's a web app, but it's not quite the same. Yeah, I think Apple doesn't get enough credit for its ambition. And, and I know that can seem weird when people are very, very much like, Oh, this year's iPhone is so much like the last year's iPhone and all of that.
00:55:38 ◼ ► But I'd say on a grander level and also what was the last big product they introduced there was a hit and all that. I mean, there's a lot of criticism out there, but I would say Apple's existence is ambitious because Apple keeps thinking I'm going to make new products and new categories.
00:55:52 ◼ ► And we're going to update them all and we're going to run all these different apps and yeah, we're going to push on the camera sensor and we're going to push on the photo software and all that.
00:55:58 ◼ ► I think to a fault, I think that sometimes Apple enters areas that they should stay out of, but that's the ambition is that I think Apple looks at all sorts of areas and says we can make a better one.
00:56:09 ◼ ► We could do this and yeah, there's like the car project and stuff like that where it didn't work out and maybe that's all for the best that they didn't even make that product.
00:56:18 ◼ ► They were just like, forget it, forget it ever happened. But I do think that the ambition is part of the core is they think that there are places where they can make a difference and they don't care about the scale at that point.
00:56:31 ◼ ► It can be really, like I said, they try to try to do things that other people, other companies don't even try.
00:56:39 ◼ ► They don't always succeed, but they have that kind of like almost world spanning ambition. Yeah, we're going to do all of those, literally all the things and when they can do it and they pull it off, that is like ultimate Apple.
00:56:53 ◼ ► Definitely. I always think back to the, I can't remember if it was the first year I had Schiller on the talk show live or the second year, might have been the second year, but it was still up in San Francisco and I asked him if he sees with the then still growing, this is like 2016,
00:57:11 ◼ ► emphasis on the photography with the iPhone, does he see Apple as a leading camera company? And his answer was the leading camera company.
00:57:22 ◼ ► And it was like, it almost, it actually, I remember it was such an interesting answer because it was not a non answer. It was actually a very confident answer to the question, but it actually sort of broke him out of the character of, not character, but the sort of jovial Phil mood into competitive Phil mood right there in mid question.
00:57:46 ◼ ► And in hindsight, very prescient of where Apple's efforts with the iPhone and the OS's really was headed, you know, for the last decade. Really, the emphasis on photography is astonishing, really.
00:58:02 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a huge part of their ad campaigns. I mean, it's the, it's not just a longest running ad campaign in Apple history. It is a huge chunk of their annual spend on billboards and stuff is the shot on iPhone campaign.
00:58:16 ◼ ► Well, I, I mean, part of that is I think in their culture, but part of that is them acknowledging that a lot of people, for a lot of people, that's the most important thing about their phone is taking pictures or at least one of the most important things.
00:58:32 ◼ ► Yeah. And whether you're like, Hey, I want to upgrade every year and I want to go from three X to five X, even though it's a year old phone and I'll take the trade in value and whatever, or if you're more casual, but you're like, I wonder if I should trade in my four year old iPhone 12 and upgrade.
00:58:47 ◼ ► This is where people most, I think, and I mean, I hear from daring fireball readers who are like, yeah, I just upgraded from an iPhone 12. I can totally see the difference in my photos. You know, when you only upgrade every four years or five years or something like that, which is a totally normal, sane, financially prudent way to upgrade your phones.
00:59:07 ◼ ► The thing people notice first now is the ink, the, the better photography, better video, better low light, stuff like that, because a lot of the other stuff you don't notice, I don't think a lot of people really notice, Oh, the bezels around the display are even narrower than they were on the iPhone 12.
00:59:24 ◼ ► Right. And it plays into this comment that, that just in terms of pure hardware lust, like just an Apple executive holding up the new iPhone for a hero shot does just looking at the device make you want to buy it.
00:59:40 ◼ ► You don't really get that anymore because they do look the same. Right. You really have to look at the details. And that I think is just a big part of part of what I wrote about after the event a couple weeks ago. And I think part of the continuing iPhones are boring.
00:59:55 ◼ ► Slice of the narrative is that, I don't know, people just, I get, I, I sent it to, it would be cool if the new iPhone 17 next year, just before you even hear anything that it does differently or any specs, just looking at it, you're like, Oh, I would like to buy that.
01:00:12 ◼ ► Yeah. I, that would be cool. iPhone 10 had that, you know, and that's probably the last time. But it's look at laptops, right? How, how long have Apple's MacBooks more or less been the same? They've sort of, they've, they've coagulated, they've, they've condensed into the platonic ideal of what's technically possible today. And that's a unibody aluminum form factor.
01:00:35 ◼ ► Yeah. And the Apple feels very much, they solved it. That's what it is. And so, yeah, if you're sitting there in 2011 or 2023 and you're like, Hey, come on, Apple, you haven't changed your laptop in so long. It still looks the same. How boring. Nobody's going to buy a new laptop.
01:00:50 ◼ ► And like, I guess, but there are, it's, it's held to a different standard and, and, and yeah, that you can't, the dawn of the day is where Apple is completely redesigning the iPhone every three years, right? That that's not happening. They will get a huge bump if they do that thin rumored, super thin phone next year, a folding phone in a year or two, they will get a bump from that. But otherwise it's boring.
01:01:14 ◼ ► And, and a lot of tech industry commentary commentary is about people who want to write about exciting things and they are, they're sick of being bored because they focus on this so close that they're like, Oh, Apple, just another iPhone upgrade.
01:01:27 ◼ ► But the fact is, if you've had your iPhone for three or four years, that is an amazing upgrade. And that's just, it's not, I know that's not exciting, but that's just how it is these days.
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01:04:01 ◼ ► So you got the watch series 10. I haven't written about it yet. I want to I have a whole bunch of notes. I really got to finish that up. I was hoping to by the end of September, but it might be later in the week.
01:04:14 ◼ ► I have the weirdest part and you and I, you mentioned that we bumped into each other. We're hanging out at the event at Steve Jobs Theater, and it was the after the event where I bumped into you was at the watch station because at the moment I was still totally confused as to whether Apple had gotten rid of the smaller watch size, which is now 42.
01:04:42 ◼ ► It's 42 and 46 millimeters for the smaller and larger regular series watch. Put Ultra aside for now. And they never mentioned it in the keynote. And there were rumors before the event.
01:04:57 ◼ ► I guess none of them. I remember looking them up after the event and none of them were like worth calling out as how you're wrong.
01:05:04 ◼ ► But there were rumors that the watches were that that they were going to get rid of the smaller watch size. And I thought it was so strange that they didn't mention it in in the keynote.
01:05:16 ◼ ► And then we you see Apple folks after the keynote and I saw Stan Ning, who was in the keynote, and I was like, Hey, is there, you know, do you guys drop the smaller watch size and Stan was like, No, of course not. It's very popular, but
01:05:36 ◼ ► there's somewhere in my gut where I'm I'm just wondering, is this might it happen like next year, the year after? Is that where Apple's going? Or no, I don't know.
01:05:51 ◼ ► I kind of think not, though, I really do, because I kind of think as these watches increase slowly, and they are if you look like I don't know, I still have like my old series zero and series three hanging around my office.
01:06:06 ◼ ► It's definitely bigger now, but also doesn't really look bigger on the wrist because it's thinner. And those extra millimeters of thinness really do add up with a watch. I know that the numbers alone don't really speak to it, but you just put it on your wrist.
01:06:22 ◼ ► Does it look too big? Does it feel too big? I say the answer is no. But I really do think asking all of the people and let's face it, it's a lot of women who typically but get the smaller one because women tend to have smaller wrists, or like teenagers, kids, and lots of full grown men prefer the smaller size watch.
01:06:43 ◼ ► I feel like asking them like, Oh, you want a new watch this year? Now you have to get one that is way bigger, not like a millimeter or two, but way bigger. I don't think it's gonna happen. But I don't know, I still think it was so conspicuous in the keynote that they didn't really emphasize that it comes in two sizes.
01:07:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't see it. I feel like they're gonna keep that other size because I think there is such a large market for the smaller one that people just don't want the bigger one and it's gendered but not entirely.
01:07:16 ◼ ► I might have even mentioned this to you while we were standing there in the hands-on area. My theory is all of the things they wanted to talk about about the Series 10 were superlatives. They wanted to talk about how was the biggest Apple Watch screen ever and all of these superlatives.
01:07:33 ◼ ► And it's a lot easier to do that if you don't detail the other model because then you need to say the larger model is, and instead they just talked about Series 10, talked about how big it is, and then there's also this other one that we didn't talk about that is the smaller size.
01:07:50 ◼ ► One of the things I've noticed in the last couple of Apple events is that they are doing a lot of omission that they didn't do before. And it's interesting because Apple has always omitted things. A lot of tech details, like you said, they don't talk about a lot of those tech details.
01:08:06 ◼ ► Exactly, of the battery. We don't care. They don't talk about how much RAM is in there. They're like, "No, no, no, RAM is not a thing we measure." And they totally do, but they're like, "It's not relevant." But they have continued to omit things where I think that inside there is somebody, maybe Greg Joswiak, maybe Phil Schiller, I don't know, who's, "Nope, nope, nope. Let us make this as broad and simple as possible and not get into these details because all it does is add complexity to storytelling that we don't need."
01:08:33 ◼ ► And the tech specs on the website are there for people who want to know that stuff, but it's not here. And I don't think it's wrong from a marketing standpoint for them to do that.
01:08:43 ◼ ► But I do think I'm not going to be like Ben Thompson and say, "I wish we had live keynotes on stage." I mean, it would be more fun, but I understand why they don't do it.
01:08:53 ◼ ► But I will say this. The more omission they do in their video, the more like a commercial it becomes. And I felt that this time, that there were large swaths of information that you had to go to the website to get, more than a year or two ago even.
01:09:11 ◼ ► And certainly as this video-only presentation has gone on, and again, maybe it's the right decision. They're aware that the more general audience, especially for the iPhone event, is going to be watching this thing. It is a commercial.
01:09:23 ◼ ► Maybe treat it like that. But as a tech journalist who used to go to these events and get all the nitty-gritty details and write down the prices and how much storage you got at each price point and all of that stuff,
01:09:34 ◼ ► making it be more vague and more like an ad and make you go to the website is, I am personally a little frustrated by their omissions, even if I can make a marketing argument why it's probably an okay idea.
01:09:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I kind of feel like we're all talking about the same thing and it's just from Apple's perspective. And I'm not saying they should move back to live keynotes. I'm just agreeing that as someone lucky enough to get to attend them, I miss them.
01:10:07 ◼ ► Let me bring up something that we did last year, end of October. End of October last year when the new MacBook Pros came out, we went to New York. You and I were both there. And there was a video, right?
01:10:20 ◼ ► There was a video that they debuted at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 Pacific, I think it was, something like that. I don't know what it was. It was an evening. It was their spooky Halloween evening event.
01:10:30 ◼ ► And because of that, we got a briefing under embargo. We never saw the video. They just gave us a presentation with people like our own little private stage presentation except with Q&A and stuff.
01:10:44 ◼ ► And the previous year, or a few years previously, we did a thing where it was literally eight of us sitting on a couch with Phil Schiller and Greg Josbait or whoever else talking about MacBook Pro. Those things sort of still happen from time to time, but they happen in this entirely different context.
01:11:02 ◼ ► And then sometimes we just get to watch the ad that the world gets to see. But when you're working on this stuff, the details matter. But if you're making an ad, again, I have what I want to get from Apple.
01:11:15 ◼ ► But I can put on their hat and say, "Yeah, but the iPhone event, 99.9% of the people who watch that video are not tech journalists. They're just customers, and the video should be for the customers."
01:11:33 ◼ ► Yeah, and I kind of feel like our complaints are those of us who are, "Oh, the live, the pre-recorded demos can never fail. It takes away the amount of tension.
01:11:44 ◼ ► These videos are so polished that they feel like commercials." And Apple hears all that, and they're like, "Yes, thank you for noticing. We spend a lot of time on their production values, and we realize that nobody else is even trying to do what we're doing.
01:12:00 ◼ ► We're glad you noticed." And we're like, "No, no, that's what we're saying we miss about the old style." But I don't remember if it was on a podcast with me, but I remember Phil Schiller at some point saying, when the original iPad came out,
01:12:15 ◼ ► and some of the disappointment people had when it was just a mythical "Apple tablet" that was going to save the news industry and whatever else, people were like, "Ah, it's just a big iPhone." And what Schiller said was, "Yeah, but there are like zillions of people out there who heard, 'Oh, a big iPhone? Yes, that's exactly what I want.'"
01:12:37 ◼ ► And it's exactly the same way with these events, where it's like, what we're bemoaning that we miss from the live events, Apple is like, "Yeah, we don't miss that at all. That's actually what we like about this." And they are definitely more Tim Cookian, right?
01:12:50 ◼ ► Because it's, "Oh, that we can completely systemize the style of these things and get them in the can and guaranteed they're already ready to go days or a week in advance. Everything's ready to go in advance, and there's nothing at the last minute." Yeah, that's great. That sounds like something Tim Cook would really like and appreciate.
01:13:11 ◼ ► Yeah. Leave no margin for error. Make it as efficient as possible. Apple is not the same company when Steve Jobs stood up on stage at various events, right? It's not. It's not in scope, not in stock market value, not in revenue totals.
01:13:32 ◼ ► It's a very different company, and it'll be interesting to see what happens after Tim Cook leaves and how they might change to reflect whatever personality is running the company at that point.
01:13:46 ◼ ► It's a choice, but at the same time, it's a profit-making corporation. It has to behave in certain ways just because it is the way it is. It's like saying, "I like their older albums when they were poor and they were working on a shoestring and recording on an eight-track recorder in somebody's garage, and now they're the world-famous band that gets all the money in the world."
01:14:15 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it's true, but they became popular and successful, and that's what it's like now. That's just how it is.
01:14:22 ◼ ► I will tell you the single biggest… I don't feel like the rug got pulled out from under me, but I kind of do, and I'm kind of angry about it with Apple Watch Series 10, which is that they mentioned in the keynote, and it is a very cool feature, that the screen in always-on mode now can update at one hertz, which is once per second instead of once per minute.
01:14:50 ◼ ► Battery life on this review unit that I'm wearing is way better than… I don't think I wore a Series 9 review unit last year as thoroughly as I'm wearing this one.
01:15:03 ◼ ► I'm wearing this one all day every day to sleep and everything, and consistently getting 24 hours after a full charge, and then I put it on my wrist and wear it nonstop for 24 hours, taking it off only to shower, sleeping with it.
01:15:20 ◼ ► And then 24 hours later, I consistently have 25 to 33 percent battery life left, and doing some light workouts like on outdoor walks and stuff, too. Excellent battery life. And I have the always-on screen on.
01:15:35 ◼ ► But here's my complaint. They said, "Oh, and now the second hand ticks every second." That's only true on one watch face.
01:15:44 ◼ ► There are three. There are three new watch faces that will actually do it, but none of the old watch faces do it.
01:16:17 ◼ ► I was so oriented about this a little bit on upgrade last week, and I found myself getting surprisingly angry about it, because I think that this is…
01:16:26 ◼ ► It shows that there is something really rotten in the watch face development group at Apple, that something is broken.
01:16:35 ◼ ► Like, maybe even their development process is broken, or something about it is broken, because how do you release a watch that can now tick with the second hand every second,
01:16:44 ◼ ► and you don't update all of your watch faces that have second hands to tick every second?
01:16:49 ◼ ► How is that possible that you would build this whole watch if I was the engineer working on the display, and it's finally we got it?
01:16:58 ◼ ► Finally the second hand can tick, even when it's in always-on shutdown mode. We got it. We nailed it. Yeah.
01:17:05 ◼ ► And then they ship the product, and the people over in software are like, "Yeah, we couldn't update our watch faces for you."
01:17:15 ◼ ► I couldn't say it better myself. And it's partly fueled selfishly by the fact that my favorite watch face remains utility, which it has been since Series 0.
01:17:36 ◼ ► That's the watch face that most resembles how they draw analog watch hands, like in the clock app on other operating systems, or in widgets.
01:17:48 ◼ ► Or when you go to the, what's it called, view, like when you have a live activity on your watch, and then it just shows the time in the corner. It looks like utility.
01:17:57 ◼ ► So it's not just a, but all of them, a chronograph, which is supposed, of all that, you have a chronograph watch face, which is supposed to help you time things to the second or the fraction of a second.
01:18:10 ◼ ► And yet you make a chronograph watch face on a watch that is advertised as being capable of updating once per second while in always-on mode, and yet you don't, the second hand just disappears.
01:18:23 ◼ ► It is the opposite of the integration of software and hardware. It feels, I don't know, I mean, what is the explanation for this?
01:18:32 ◼ ► That they didn't tell the people who make watch faces that the watchOS 10 needs to be updated for once per second refresh of some watch faces?
01:18:45 ◼ ► My guess is that whatever development system they have for Apple Watch faces is so rooted in the early days of the Apple Watch that it's broken, and they don't have a functional version to bring up that fixes it so that they can develop these more effectively.
01:19:01 ◼ ► Because one other explanation is there, I know that there are a bunch of different sizes of displays now, and it's all complicated, but like, at some point, adding a ticking second hand to all of your watches that have second hands, all your watch faces,
01:19:15 ◼ ► that should not like be a make or break kind of thing where they're like, "No, no, no, no, no, only going forward will it be watch faces that tick every second. We can't go into the past. It's not possible."
01:19:24 ◼ ► The only explanation for that is, it's so hard for them to go into the past without breaking, I don't know, watch faces on other Apple Watches? I don't know.
01:19:33 ◼ ► But it's a problem, because it does feel like a complete invalidation of all the effort they did to make this hardware feature.
01:19:39 ◼ ► But they do update them for the new screen sizes, so they scale. So maybe one explanation as well, we always anticipated scaling to new sizes, so it's easy to scale them.
01:19:50 ◼ ► But I don't know. And who knows? Maybe watchOS 10.1 will come out with ticking seconds on all of the hands, or 10.2 or 3 or something.
01:20:02 ◼ ► And I'll rejoice, and I'll say, "Okay, I guess they were just behind." But it does seem baffling, and it is...
01:20:19 ◼ ► But yes, maybe they will do that. But I know it's not a huge thing, but absolutely, if I bought an Apple Watch, because I wanted to upgrade to get the second hand ticking, because that really always bugged me, and my favorite face doesn't support it, I would be furious. Furious.
01:20:36 ◼ ► It is absolutely true, and as somebody who wears mechanical watches frequently, and it's one of the things that has bugged me about Apple Watch, I devoted probably way too long in my original Series 0 Apple Watch review to complaining about the fact that the screen completely went off when you weren't looking at it.
01:20:58 ◼ ► And it was obviously a battery life thing, but the screen would go completely off, and then you'd have to raise your wrist, and then the screen would come on and you'd see it.
01:21:06 ◼ ► So many times, I'm looking at my watch at an oblique angle, and I still want to see the time. Apple Watch has always, even though it is an electronic watch, it has always been, to me, as somebody who just for whatever weird reason in my head prefers, really only likes analog watch dials with hour hands, minute hands.
01:21:29 ◼ ► The other faces, like the ones that show the numbers as numerals, that's where digital watch faces come from, because they show the digits. As a kid, I used to think digital meant electronic. I don't know why, like digital equipment company.
01:21:44 ◼ ► I just thought digital, I didn't get it that digital equals digits. Maybe that's just me, but the digital faces, lots of them, all of them that show seconds do update once per second when you're in always on mode. So if you use the activity digital face, you get seconds hands that numerically increment by the second.
01:22:04 ◼ ► But if you use the activity analog face, your seconds hand just disappears. I've never felt like a second class citizen as someone who prefers analog watch faces on Apple Watch before, but now clearly I do.
01:22:19 ◼ ► And the other one is that the new face that does tick every second, reflections, it's a fine watch face, but it's super minimal. It doesn't even allow any complications.
01:22:35 ◼ ► I don't have a lot of complications on most of my Apple Watch faces. I'm not a lots of complications person. I'm more or less a minimalist, but I do like some. I like the date. I like the weather. It's really weird that the only one with the ticking seconds hand doesn't let you add complications.
01:22:59 ◼ ► I'll also add that the, even, even though as much as I love utility as a watch face, even that has only been updated minimally. Like there, there are, it didn't get updated for a while when there were new complication styles.
01:23:09 ◼ ► And when it did, it didn't get like, I can make a simulacrum of utility in the California watch face. That's not quite as good, but it's got four corner complications plus one that you can put on the dial.
01:23:21 ◼ ► And then there's utility. This is Nope. I put two up in the corners and then I got one down on the bottom and I got the little date and that's, and it's like, why, why, why does it feel like it's basically barely evolved since watchOS one?
01:23:35 ◼ ► Like it's just, and I, I keep coming back to the fact that either they're horribly understaffed in the watchOS watch face group, which seems like an important feature of your watch face or watchOS is to have a watch face.
01:23:48 ◼ ► Or they made some very bad technical decisions early on and are suffering with them to this day, but either way, they got to fix it.
01:23:56 ◼ ► Yeah. And I could see how that's possible. I think it comes back. I, I, people seem to have given up. I, I don't know, maybe Mike still mentions it.
01:24:06 ◼ ► You could tell me cause you talk to Mike every week, Mike Hurley, who has always been a proponent of wishing that third party developers could do their own watch faces.
01:24:14 ◼ ► But it seems like after all these years, people have sort of given up complaining that Apple doesn't allow third party developers to create their own watch faces.
01:24:23 ◼ ► And I always think there's been two reasons for that. I think one technical and one completely non-technical.
01:24:30 ◼ ► The technical explanation is that I think Apple in the early days only trusted itself to write the code that would power the screen and to have a sweeping seconds hand to do all any animations that were on the watch faces to do them as efficiently as possible.
01:24:48 ◼ ► But maybe that means they wrote those watch faces in a way that makes them, like you're saying, like hard to update. They're not like Swift UI code that is meant to be like, Oh, it's new watches came out.
01:25:02 ◼ ► Oh, just change a number here. And all of a sudden the second hand will update every second instead of disappearing. It's Oh no, we'd kind of have to recreate the whole watch face from start to do that or something. I don't know.
01:25:14 ◼ ► Something ugly that makes it like there's no way we would ever let a third party into this world.
01:25:18 ◼ ► Right. And then the second explanation for why Apple doesn't allow third party watch faces is just branding that they see Apple watch as a watch, like a watch like a Rolex or an Omega or even a Timex where the watch face is part of the brand of the watch.
01:25:35 ◼ ► And therefore they're all come from Apple and they all look like an Apple watch branded watch face. And so, okay, so you want to be the only ones who can update the watch faces.
01:25:47 ◼ ► But if you're going to take yourself seriously as yes, of all the other things that Apple watch does that make it like a computer, it is first and foremost, a watch.
01:25:56 ◼ ► No watchmaker who had the ability to update the second hand once per second wouldn't update the second hand once per second. It's, it's almost like, Oh yeah, it's a watch too.
01:26:06 ◼ ► Yeah. And I also think the more watch faces they add, the less that argument makes sense, right? Like once, once there are 20 watch faces or whatever saying, well, no, this is the essential Apple watch face are the 20 that we make.
01:26:19 ◼ ► Does it matter if David Smith gets to make two or three? Like it just, I'm not sure I believe, especially if it's to a template, I guess.
01:26:28 ◼ ► Look, if there were third party watch faces, they would need to be to a template and they need to honor Apple's complications and et cetera, et cetera.
01:26:34 ◼ ► And they need to get approval from Apple. And like, there's so many things about it that would be there that look, Apple wants to get control of it and keep control of it.
01:26:41 ◼ ► That's a very Apple thing to do, but I got to believe that there is a skeleton in the closet here that makes all of this not possible and bad.
01:26:48 ◼ ► And, and the other thing that often happens is they've got the replacement and they know how they're going to fix this, but it's not ready yet.
01:26:54 ◼ ► And so they just keep kicking the can down the road until they finally have the solution.
01:26:58 ◼ ► But it's, it's one of my ongoing nags about Apple watch and watch iOS for the last few years is what's, where is the pace, not even third parties, where is the pace of Apple watch face updates?
01:27:09 ◼ ► Like old ones that don't get updated and new ones get three new ones get added. None of the old ones get updated. It's just frustrating and dumb.
01:27:20 ◼ ► I heard that it was none that were close to me, but it is, that is an interesting, right? Cause that would be the other way to do it is say, Oh no, no.
01:27:27 ◼ ► If you buy the series 10, these, these watch faces just, or you upgrade to the new OS, these watch faces are just gone. They're gone.
01:27:35 ◼ ► The watch face they used to call Siri is gone, but that's sort of been replaced by the new smart stack. I think rarely, I think they sort of see that as a replacement chronograph is gone, but there still is chronograph pro kind of didn't make sense that there were both.
01:27:50 ◼ ► The one that I actually used that was removed is Explorer, which is, was sort of, I forget if it debuted when they added cellular, but it, you know, I kind of liked it. And if you know that I like utility, you can see why I liked Explorer, but I don't miss it.
01:28:07 ◼ ► But there it's the first time they eliminated watch faces. And I feel as somebody who really feels attached to utility, I can imagine that Explorer might've been like my second or third favorite watch face and they got rid of it. So I can, I'm sure there's somebody out there who was their favorite.
01:28:23 ◼ ► And that really feels like a bummer. And I wonder what happened to their watch if it was set to Explorer and then they update to watch OS 11 and it's here's modular. Good luck. Yeah. Hope you like modular.
01:28:37 ◼ ► Yeah, but we'll see. I don't know. I think it'll be very telling whether this gets added in a point update to watch OS 11 of which I will say again, or if not, otherwise I kind of feel like it's sort of a smell of, like you said, like something terribly gone wrong in the engineering.
01:28:57 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a watch. All right. Let me take one more break here and thank our good friends at Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/talkshow. That's how you know you came here, but you guys know Squarespace.
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01:31:14 ◼ ► Here's the other thing I linked to your piece. Let's talk about the meta Orion, which neither of us have used. Ben Thompson is still very excited about it.
01:31:26 ◼ ► He is. He should be. I think this is the problem, right? Everybody wants to be so polarized about this and be like, "Ah, meta's destroyed Apple," or "Oh, meta's got to... it's all vaporware and it's not real and Apple is real."
01:31:38 ◼ ► And that's what I tried to say, right? I was trying to channel you. I'm going to be honest here. That post I was like, "I think I could do a Gruber-esque thing here," which is, here's the game.
01:31:47 ◼ ► The game is that maybe there's AR glasses in the 2030s that replace the smartphone or augment the smartphone and it's the next big tech product. And how do you get there?
01:31:56 ◼ ► And Apple and meta are playing the game, but they're playing it by their own rules because there are no rules. They can just choose.
01:32:02 ◼ ► And so Apple is doing like Vision Pro and Mark Germa reported that more than a year ago that Apple had concluded that they weren't going to be able to make an AR product, just AR glasses, anytime soon.
01:32:14 ◼ ► And that's why they just kind of plowed ahead with Vision Pro. Whereas meta got the product that they also concluded is not a product they can ship and they showed it to the world.
01:32:24 ◼ ► And I think what meta did is totally understandable and reasonable for meta and is good for them and is good for the category and there are a lot of good things about it.
01:32:33 ◼ ► I also think that Apple, Apple doesn't do that and that's a totally valid thing for Apple to do. I think both of these companies are headed in exactly the same direction.
01:32:42 ◼ ► I suspect that they are pretty close to each other in terms of development, maybe ahead in some places and other ahead in others, but I don't think Apple is like, "Oh no, glasses, we forgot."
01:32:52 ◼ ► I think that that's the goal. I think that Tim Cook has stated that that's their goal or at least it's been reported that that's Tim's goal.
01:32:59 ◼ ► So I just, what frustrates me is the people who are like, "Ha ha, see, Apple totally missed the boat with Vision Pro and meta gets it."
01:33:07 ◼ ► Because clearly the Vision Pro is not the end product that Apple wants. It is more like what meta is doing.
01:33:13 ◼ ► It's just that Apple is not going to show you their $15,000 prototype that won't ship till the end of the decade because Apple doesn't do that.
01:33:21 ◼ ► Right. Somebody, I actually forget who I'm stealing it from. Some reader sent me this, but I love it.
01:33:28 ◼ ► That it strategically, maybe, and I don't really think there's even a maybe about it. I think it's at least part of what meta is doing is strategic Osborne-ing.
01:33:40 ◼ ► So Osborne-ing is, I think it predates both of us, right? I mean, I don't remember the Osborne computer at all.
01:33:47 ◼ ► I had a friend who had one, but I was, I don't remember that. For those poor kids, they just got a useless suitcase computer.
01:33:55 ◼ ► But in the early days of PCs, when there were all sorts of brands, which was super exciting, Commodore and Apple and Atari made home computers and Osborne and other, TI, Texas Instruments.
01:34:07 ◼ ► There were all these brands and Osborne had a computer and it was some measure of success. And then at some trade show, they decided to promote their next generation model.
01:34:18 ◼ ► And it immediately got all their customers to stop buying the one they were currently selling.
01:34:24 ◼ ► And then the new one that they'd already started bragging was delayed and it got delayed to the point where they went out of business.
01:34:32 ◼ ► And it's the legendary epitome of don't talk about things that you aren't ready to ship because you never know.
01:34:40 ◼ ► Right, right. Don't pre-announce. So this is like putting the clamps down on the future of this category by saying, no, no, that's the future out there. There it is.
01:34:50 ◼ ► Right. And so in some sense, what Meta's effectively done, and I think it's probably true. I don't know. I mean, in some sense, it was Meta Connect, their big developer conference.
01:35:03 ◼ ► They want to have exciting stuff to show. I think they have shown unreleased stuff in the past.
01:35:11 ◼ ► They don't have the cultural aversion, institutional aversion Apple has to ever talking about unreleased products.
01:35:18 ◼ ► But this is out there in terms, I don't remember anything that got this much excitement either.
01:35:23 ◼ ► But I don't know that they would have done it if not for the fact that this was the year Vision Pro came out.
01:35:36 ◼ ► VR goggles you put over your head that stick out and you need a head strap to hold in place and power a computer.
01:35:44 ◼ ► And there's pass through AR using cameras and screens inside the goggles. Meta sells the exact same product at one tenth the price.
01:35:54 ◼ ► That's the price. Yep. And the question is, is it one tenth the quality? There's no way. There's no way it is. I don't think so.
01:36:03 ◼ ► Right. I mean, I have a three, not the three S or whatever it is. That's what I think I have to. It's not it's it's I mean, it's not as good, but it's pretty good.
01:36:12 ◼ ► Right. It is pretty good. And they might they have more of they've always had more of a focus on gaming and they ship with gaming style controllers, sort of like the ones that came with the Wii that you hold and wave in your hands.
01:36:24 ◼ ► And so therefore, it might be overall a better product for more people. They almost certainly have sold more Quest headsets than Apple has sold. Absolutely. Vision Pro just counting users. Even dollars. Probably counting dollars. Right.
01:36:43 ◼ ► But at a technical level, it's just a different class device. I mean, it is very, very Vision Pro is far more advanced. And it clearly it forced meta.
01:36:56 ◼ ► It didn't force them, but they chose to respond. And Mark Zuckerberg posted a thing on Instagram or wherever it was where he had his sort of and I thought it was interesting.
01:37:06 ◼ ► I thought I was glad that he did it. And I didn't think it was super defensive, but it was his slant, you know, filmed in a very casual Instagram style, like in the living room.
01:37:16 ◼ ► Here's what he thinks of Vision Pro and the different tradeoffs they made, et cetera. And so but they're I think it's the existence of Vision Pro and the hint that they're technically behind that made them want to show these goggles.
01:37:31 ◼ ► But or the Orion glasses. But I it is in a sense, I think they were successful at competitively Osborne in the Vision Pro.
01:37:41 ◼ ► That's sort of what you and I are talking about here is this collective response of, oh, that's the right idea. This is the thing I want in two or three years.
01:37:49 ◼ ► Not that I don't want a two or three better. I don't want two or three years of future advancement on the Vision Pro idea.
01:37:56 ◼ ► I want two or three years advancement on this Orion idea, these glasses. Yeah, right. I mean, it might be three or three or four or five years.
01:38:04 ◼ ► I mean, I keep thinking it's a it's a 20, 30, 20, 29 kind of thing. But yeah, I think it's an interesting I think Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are good for each other.
01:38:12 ◼ ► I think that Cook I think Apple announcing the Vision Pro validates Zuckerberg's idea that there's a product category here.
01:38:20 ◼ ► And I think that he was even though they had their complaints about the Vision Pro. Well, come on. It was a greatest validation of their strategy that Apple also thinks that a product like that should exist.
01:38:30 ◼ ► It's like validation of the whole VR meta strategy. And then they also tried to do their own kind of like their own Vision Pro.
01:38:40 ◼ ► And that's no. And I think that says something about what Apple is trying to do with this product, which Apple is not calling it this.
01:38:45 ◼ ► But like Vision Pro, it's basically a developer kit. Like it's not priced. It's not priced for mass production, which is why Meta tried it.
01:38:53 ◼ ► And then was like, we're not going to even sell that. We're going to sell three hundred dollar one instead of the meta actually wants to make money selling these things into the market.
01:39:04 ◼ ► I think that's the only reason you bring out a thirty five hundred dollar product like that is you don't actually care how many you sell.
01:39:09 ◼ ► You just want to you want to put your thing out there and you can't pre announce. So you just put something out there and say, here's the thing.
01:39:20 ◼ ► And now you've got this other thing where now meta, I feel like is is giving Apple some validation because we've seen the reports internally.
01:39:30 ◼ ► Apple absolutely feels like those glasses are the end point. And this is meta saying, yes, they are the end point.
01:39:37 ◼ ► And so I think they're feeding on each other and and egging each other on, which I think is actually really great because I think Apple needs to be motivated.
01:39:52 ◼ ► And so meta setting the bar and saying this is where we're going and we've got it functional enough to show people is going to be a motivator for Apple, which I think it's I think it's all good.
01:40:03 ◼ ► And I think that I was saying this we did it. We were texting a few days ago because I was saying that I agreed with you and not Ben on dithering the other week because I think that Ben was rightfully dazzled by the product.
01:40:15 ◼ ► And that's great. But I think he was like, this is why Apple going through all that pass through in those high resolution cameras and all of that is a mistake because you don't need that.
01:40:23 ◼ ► And my take on it is that's why Apple has the high resolution cameras and why they have the display that shows your eyes on the outside is Apple built the Vision Pro to be a simulator of what AR glasses would be because that's their end product.
01:40:38 ◼ ► That's what they want to make. And this is not that. But they want you to think. So spatial computing is the same thing.
01:40:44 ◼ ► If all they did was VR games. Well, how do VR games apply when you're walking around your neighborhood with your AR glasses on but running apps that are floating in space as you move around an AR environment that is what you want in the end product.
01:40:59 ◼ ► So Vision Pro you look think of it that way. Think of Vision Pro as an AR goggles and AR glasses simulator because they can't do the glasses yet.
01:41:13 ◼ ► And I wonder I've been thinking about this ever since I got the review unit of Vision Pro or even actually ever since the WWDC last year when I got the demo of it and they showed it actually is vision is an interesting name for the platform.
01:41:29 ◼ ► Right. I mean it it I'm not saying they're giving away that it's that when they come out with glasses they'll still be running Vision OS but if they're not if they actually have an entirely different operating system for the glasses.
01:41:44 ◼ ► It really makes you wonder what the hell JAWS is doing running marketing where they gave the name vision to the other platform and the one that you actually use for your vision isn't named vision.
01:41:55 ◼ ► I think it's because they know that it's one platform right that totally that when they come out with glasses they'll be running.
01:42:11 ◼ ► It may just be Apple vision and their glasses and whether they're glasses or goggles VR goggles or whatever but it's the operating system is surprisingly the whole idea everything about it is surprisingly AR focused for a VR headset right the pass through the they built these are one chips to decrease the latency to almost impossible levels.
01:42:40 ◼ ► The number of milliseconds all to simulate what you would get if you just put a pair of $10 chemistry class safety glasses on right.
01:42:51 ◼ ► I mean that's all they're simulating it's an incredible amount of effort the whole eyesight thing where they show your eyes on the front with simulated depth to make it look like that it's.
01:43:04 ◼ ► It's all it's simulating AR from your perspective using it and from everybody's perspective looking at it.
01:43:10 ◼ ► Yep as best they can as best they can with a product that they that they could ship and yeah exactly that's what it is.
01:43:17 ◼ ► It's an it's an AR operating system developer kit that they're calling a product and I mean this is not.
01:43:26 ◼ ► At the time they shipped it I thought who should buy this is no nobody should buy this unless they're a developer they want to taste of the future because like it's clear that this is just we need it's Apple saying we need to ship something some other company would say we need to show somebody our prototype but Apple.
01:43:44 ◼ ► For whatever reason and we can argue about whether they should keep that strategy Apple didn't do it that way Apple is going to ship that product or they're not going to talk about it and so they shipped it and that's what vision pro is it's.
01:43:55 ◼ ► It's basically a tech demo is a shipping product and it's got a lot of cool things about it but you know I would never recommend that anybody buy it today.
01:44:08 ◼ ► I mean if they had immersive basketball games or or whatever today then there would I would say yes you should do it but it's good for movies but like it could be there it's right on the verge of having some some major potential markets but I'm not sure.
01:44:23 ◼ ► If you fly always my mind turns to flying but if you fly across the country or across the oceans frequently and have a lot of time on an airplane it's I think it's yeah and it's within your budget it's.
01:44:37 ◼ ► A no brainer in terms of getting entertainment by just to watch 2D movies right it's a really good viewing experience for it I there are I see I hear from people who really love working with it they love taking it to like coffee shop.
01:44:51 ◼ ► I've written on it not in the coffee shop no no I do the thing where I need to like be in a different place and I will crank up the Joshua tree and just be nowhere where I have no distractions and all right I definitely have found some value again what I spend $3500 on to do that no.
01:45:07 ◼ ► I would not but I I can glean value in it and that's what I try to do to this is our business is like what would this be good for.
01:45:14 ◼ ► But $3500 are probably other options right but I just I don't think I really don't and Apple this is the sort of information that is just so tightly held I mean within the upper echelons of Apple's executives but are the sales of vision pro to date a disappointment to Apple.
01:45:35 ◼ ► My guess I have no inside information at all I don't know how anybody could because I don't know anybody how anybody who really knows the numbers they expected would blab about them.
01:45:45 ◼ ► But my guess is no I don't think that they're thrilled about them I don't think it's surprisingly more popular than they expected.
01:45:53 ◼ ► But I also don't think that it's less popular than they expected I think this is about what you could expect for a 3500 to $4000 with corrective lenses headset that's too heavy only gets two hours of battery life two and a half if you're watching video you can probably get through a feature film.
01:46:12 ◼ ► Heavy have I mentioned that it's heavy, there's a lot of problems with it I think it's sold about as well as they expect, but the number one complaint and the thing and I've I've guilty as charged for making this and scratching my head gee I wonder what they're doing is why isn't there more content why didn't they open up the creative Hollywood budget arm of Apple and have more immersive content ready to go on day one.
01:46:38 ◼ ► Well, if the idea is that day one is when this product, which they never knew wasn't going to reach mass market was, then the answer is well no but yes this is how they're going to build up a library of content so that when they debut.
01:46:54 ◼ ► The first generation of a vision hardware product whether it's a new version of the VR thing or when they get to the AR glasses, and it is at a price that is more just lower significantly lower price with a lower weight and longer battery life and oh yeah, I think maybe I would like to buy one of these or try it or something like that.
01:47:17 ◼ ► Now there's three years of immersed three or four years of immersive content from Apple for this platform. Right, but it's how do you solve that chicken and egg platform of getting immersive movies made and a library of immersive content and apps that are only appropriate for the vision platform.
01:47:38 ◼ ► How do you get from nothing to there for when there's a mass market hardware product. You have to have something there for people to use and sell and that's what they've done.
01:47:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I think what I would like to see from them is more of a commitment to growing that platform which means they have to do some very on Apple like things Apple has gotten by on the gravitational pull of its platforms being so powerful the last 15 years that they can just make a platform and people will come there and that's not happening with the vision Pro and I would argue that.
01:48:11 ◼ ► That's what requires a strategy change is they need to spend money on content and that goes on immersive content. They also need to spend more than they're doing and they need to spend money.
01:48:23 ◼ ► I would say on developers. I think they assumed that developers would flock to this because it was a new Apple platform and the truth is a few indie developers have but nobody's making any money on it and you talk to any developers and they'll tell you.
01:48:36 ◼ ► That veritable tens of users are using their apps on vision Pro. It's almost non-existent and so if this is the future direction of Apple one Apple product line one thing you might want to do is take a page from.
01:48:52 ◼ ► I don't know whether it's game consoles or what you want to do, but make it worth their while to be on the platform and I know that you would never do that on one of your other platforms, but maybe you go and you start picking off developers and saying what can we do to get you on our platform.
01:49:08 ◼ ► We will give you hardware. We will pay you in advance on your sales that you're never going to earn back right. I think they could do more of that if this really is a long game thing. I think they have to look at what the adoption rate is on the development side and say
01:49:25 ◼ ► we just got to spend money to kickstart this because that's what's going to give us and maybe they look and say look we're not going to really have a consumer product for four or five years. So there's no point in doing it now. Let's do it in three or four years, but I would argue if you've got a product on the market.
01:49:39 ◼ ► Maybe now is the time to start kick start that and shell out. You got to pay money. If you want to build this platform, you're going to spend money and some of it is going to have to be outside of Apple. I really think you're going to have to do that. So I think they should.
01:49:51 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's where the arrogance, the pride, whatever the word of is. I don't know. Maybe they're all of these are the words I was looking for.
01:49:59 ◼ ► I've used all those words. Those are all hubris. Maybe hubris is the word I was looking for but that where they're cockiness over not needing to do developer outreach to turn IO iPhone and iPad into huge developer platforms with zillions of developers and an assumption that whenever anybody is going to come out with a new thing, of course, there's going to be an app for it, right?
01:50:24 ◼ ► So chat GPT comes out at the end of 2022 and it's becomes a sensation last year. Of course, there's iOS apps for it, right? Apple didn't have to do any.
01:50:39 ◼ ► And you name their competitor, Claude and all of them. They all have iOS apps, right? And Apple didn't have to bribe them. It didn't have to have fly them out and wine them and dine them and convince them to do it because it's the iPhone, right?
01:50:54 ◼ ► So I don't think sales to customers of Vision Pro are a disappointment to Apple internally. I really don't. I think it's about what, yeah, they'd say, yeah, it's not great, but it's about what we expected. I think developer response to Vision OS is, hey, what happened?
01:51:10 ◼ ► That's why, what do you mean Netflix doesn't want to make an app? And it's a combination of two things, right? There's a collection of developers who are very bottom line driven. Everybody's bottom line driven, but they're very bottom line driven where they look at that and they say there's nobody there. No.
01:51:25 ◼ ► And then there's the, they make money, but they also are enthusiastic about Apple's platforms, those smaller developers, indie developers, and people who are like, well, I'm excited because this is a new platform and I'll learn a lot and I'm already on Apple's other platforms. And I think Apple, if Apple believed that the ones that are very bottom line oriented were going to rush to Vision OS, I think that that was a delusion.
01:51:47 ◼ ► And maybe, or maybe, maybe they believe that maybe they didn't. I do think that they believed that their developers would come through with some really great, innovative, fun Vision OS things from the brilliant minds of Apple app developers.
01:52:03 ◼ ► And there, I would say Apple's lack of outreach, the fact that it rolled out only in the US to start, that it cost $3,500 and that we've had 10 years, 15 years where app developers kind of feel like they are mistreated by Apple.
01:52:18 ◼ ► I think Apple miss, maybe, maybe overestimated how their developer community was going to react to a platform that wasn't going to make the money. And I think it's that thing where I think Apple thinks, oh, they love us and there's more, they love the money that they make on our platforms than they counted on.
01:52:35 ◼ ► I don't know. It is, I would say it's absolutely, I don't, I think they, I don't think that they've sold fewer than I thought. I think, yeah, at that price point, I remember when I, when Mark Erman reported there was going to be a $3,000, which is actually undershot it, I said, this sounds like a developer kit.
01:52:55 ◼ ► Why would, I don't understand how there's a product for $3,000, but what, what did surprise me is the lack of indie developer apps on the platform to this day.
01:53:06 ◼ ► And, and at the other end of the scale, like the Netflixes, the fact that Google didn't make a YouTube app, I think that caught Apple flat-footed because I think Apple thinks, and again, I think it's a little bit of hubris where, and they know, especially Netflix, maybe Google, they weren't as surprised by it because Google doesn't care so much about their, any of their iOS apps being iOS-y.
01:53:30 ◼ ► I don't think their apps have the new dark icons yet, or all of the stuff like so many, all the apps that I really care about on my phone, the release notes for the last month have been like, oh, new widget support and dark icon support and tinting support and stuff like that.
01:53:45 ◼ ► Wait a year for Google to catch up on that stuff. It's always been true, but Netflix obviously cares very deeply about their software and apps. And I know that their Apple TV app famously doesn't integrate with the Apple's own TV app for up next and stuff, but that's all a strategic decision on Netflix's part, which we could do a whole podcast about.
01:54:08 ◼ ► But that they want Netflix, even on Apple TV to be your home screen and it's, they're the one company that could, that can kind of get away with that, but they do care about their Apple TV app very much.
01:54:20 ◼ ► And it's a good app and their iPhone app is really, really a nice app. So I think Apple looks at them and thinks, well, they really care about the presentation of their product. Of course, they're going to want to.
01:54:30 ◼ ► Yeah, they could make a really good vision pro app. They could build their own theater and it would be Netflix theater branding and all of that. And YouTube, I think YouTube is an even stronger one where like they've got, they've got 360 immersive videos on YouTube and stuff.
01:54:45 ◼ ► There's 3D and 360 videos on the quest that you can get in the YouTube app and then they're not there. You're right. I think Google's app development makes it not a surprise, but like it actually would be a really good.
01:54:59 ◼ ► Well, and even some of their partners who are there, like HBO is there, or Max, right? And Warner Brothers has 3D movies in their catalog and there's no 3D content in their app.
01:55:11 ◼ ► But Disney sort of has a special relationship with Apple that they don't have. And the other thing I've heard from a little birdie is that the whole Disney integration with Vision Pro wasn't serendipity or luck, but kind of came down to fewer people inside Apple saying, hey, we should reach out to Disney and see if we can get them on board with this.
01:55:33 ◼ ► Then you would think we're involved. You would think everybody at Apple's, well, of course we'll call Bob Iger and get, no, it was sort of a skunkworks thing.
01:55:42 ◼ ► And then everybody at Apple's like, oh yeah, that was a good idea to do. Well, maybe you should have done it with more other companies.
01:55:50 ◼ ► I'll just say this, shipping versus shipping. The only products that we're talking about that are actually shipping are Vision Pro, which is $3,500 and up, and which is really high resolution and the best AR pass-through in a VR headset by far that anybody offers.
01:56:08 ◼ ► And Meta sells now a $300 Quest 3S and it's perhaps a better idea for the market today, just very different though and technically very different.
01:56:21 ◼ ► And Meta sells a pair of smart glasses made by Ray-Ban that are, I've looked it up, it's everybody, they're somewhat popular, but they are not like Apple scale popular.
01:56:33 ◼ ► The IDC, say what you want about IDC's estimates, but it's the best we have to go on. The estimates like 700,000 pairs of them have been sold.
01:56:42 ◼ ► I saw them at the Apple event. I saw a couple creator types at the Apple event a month ago who were wearing them.
01:56:50 ◼ ► And I only thought to notice, because now at an event like that, when I see what I know are Ray-Bans, I think, oh, are those the ones with the little camera in the corner?
01:57:04 ◼ ► If you know to look for it, you know to look for it. But otherwise, like a normal person, if you just, not sunglasses, just had regular clear lenses in yours and you went to the airport, people would just think, oh, you've got Ray-Ban style glasses.
01:57:16 ◼ ► That's what they look like. But those don't have any display tech at all, right? They have a camera and they have speakers and they do AI integration where you can talk to them and people seem to like them.
01:57:30 ◼ ► AirPods with a camera that you put on as glasses, which is why I think that it would be an interesting wearable direction for Apple because you tie that into an iPhone in your pocket with Apple intelligence and now it can also see what you see.
01:57:44 ◼ ► And it's otherwise basically AirPods. That sounds like an interesting possible product that, again, I'm sure they've done in their labs. But do they believe that it's actually a product they should ever release? I don't know.
01:57:59 ◼ ► Right. But those cost $400 to $500, depending on what you get with them. So that's what they're able to sell today for $500. So what price are we talking about? If we're all going to agree that Vision Pro is too expensive at $3,500, even though you can go out and buy one literally today.
01:58:17 ◼ ► And we all agree that, oh, if they could only make these Orions for $10,000, which we have to take their word for that. I mean, who knows if that's even the right price? Who knows if that's the cost of goods and would be selling at a break even?
01:58:30 ◼ ► Who knows if they're saying if we did make them, they'd cost $10,000? Who knows? We have to take it with a grain of salt, but that's all we have.
01:58:37 ◼ ► But if we agree, oh, that makes sense that they wouldn't even bring it to market if that's how much it would cost. But we know what they can build for $500 today and it's the Ray-Bans that don't even have displays at all.
01:58:50 ◼ ► And so how close are we to something $500-ish that gives the holy shit experience of these Orions? I don't think it's anywhere close.
01:59:10 ◼ ► It's going to be that product they can't ship. It'll be a different version of maybe that concept. So not quite that. Can they get the price down? Maybe they can get the price down, maybe not.
01:59:25 ◼ ► But so, okay, so by 2030, will there be AR specs for sale? Probably. What will they cost? I don't know, man. My guess is that it's $2,000 or $3,000 to start.
01:59:37 ◼ ► And then it will start coming down in price over time. But for a product priced so that people will want to use it as an everyday augmentation to their smartphone, because we're still also talking about compute in the pocket, which means a smartphone.
01:59:53 ◼ ► And then input on the wrist, which means an Apple Watch or equivalent, right? So on top of all that, you buy this thing and it's several thousand dollars as an accessory. It's like an iPhone accessory or whatever smartphone you own from whatever company accessory.
02:00:09 ◼ ► When does that get down to a price that it becomes potentially an Apple Watch-like accessory, remembering what the Apple Watch started with? I mean, that's why I keep coming back to I'm excited about this category, but this is a 2030s product category.
02:00:26 ◼ ► And for it, if it even becomes a broad success, I feel like you wouldn't even see it until like 2035. That's my guess right now, if then. This is going to be tough. Not to say that there isn't a great product category in here, and not to say there won't be five years of giddy, weird experimentation on the high end cutting edge by tech nerds like us.
02:00:46 ◼ ► But this is like the fact that Apple and meta two companies with lots of resources through their resources at this. And here in the middle of the 2020s are like, Yeah, it's not ready yet.
02:00:58 ◼ ► Suggest to me that it's really not ready yet. It's just not there. And it's going to be years.
02:01:04 ◼ ► Right. And I kind of feel like this is one area where metas overall message might be working against them because they're they've leaned into, hey, $3500 is ludicrous. It doesn't matter how good the resolution is, we're selling the quest for $300 an entire order of magnitude difference.
02:01:22 ◼ ► That's a good price for these headsets, right? $300. We're selling these sunglasses that are cool, and people really like them, and we're adding new features to them for $400. But then all of a sudden, when they want to sell Orion, and it costs $4,000, now they're selling a product that's exactly what they've been saying.
02:01:41 ◼ ► Don't pay attention to what Apple is doing. It's too expensive, right? And if we were waiting for meta bid to be able to sell Orion for under $1,000, I think you're looking well beyond 20. They're not thinking that I'll just add this app, it is not unprecedented for Apple to show something that isn't ready to ship yet.
02:02:05 ◼ ► Yeah, but they thought that was going to ship though, right? They thought it was good. It was ready.
02:02:14 ◼ ► No, it was like a preview. But I do believe that they felt, right? I mean, that's the problem is that they felt very confident that that product was going to be out the door.
02:02:29 ◼ ► Right. But that's the lesson. This is part of the reason that Apple keeps things secret.
02:02:34 ◼ ► It's not all about the secrecy for the sake of secrecy. It is that there are other reasons not to talk about things that you're not 100% certain that you can ship.
02:02:48 ◼ ► And they can say that the phrase that Boz used several times, Zuck used it too, is that they have, quote, line of sight towards bringing what you see in Orion to product.
02:02:59 ◼ ► But there's a lot of parts that are yada, yada, yada. And I would say Apple had much better line of sight to bringing AirPower to product when they showed it than Meta has today for bringing Orion.
02:03:11 ◼ ► And Apple couldn't do it. And they gave up. Or I'm not saying they couldn't. I mean, in theory, they could have stuck with it.
02:03:22 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was a shorter this is this is a years out. And I appreciate them admitting I look, they could have been big and people could have made assumptions.
02:03:32 ◼ ► And instead, they're like, no, we can't sell this thing because it would cost too much. And it doesn't quite work yet. But we can see where it's going.
02:03:38 ◼ ► And we think that it's exciting enough to demo for you to see where we're going and what our vision is. Great. That's all good.
02:03:43 ◼ ► But I wonder I wonder if that line of sight includes partners. That was the other thought that I had is I wonder if one of the ways you make it not cost $10,000 is that you just sell the glasses and you have it works with Android phones.
02:04:02 ◼ ► And you take you take the other accessories that are a part of this product and you just put them you basically are running on other people's devices so that it becomes an accessory.
02:04:12 ◼ ► Because that's what Apple is going to do. If Apple does a product like this, they're not going to sell you another wristband and another thing to put in your other pocket.
02:04:20 ◼ ► It's going to work with your iPhone and your Apple Watch. Right. That's what they're going to do.
02:04:24 ◼ ► And I wonder if that's a way for Metta to cut a lot because right now they've got like a computing brick and they've got an accelerometer wristband and all of that.
02:04:34 ◼ ► So you take all that stuff out and now you've cut a bunch of expense out of your product. But you do have to work with partners at that point.
02:04:40 ◼ ► I suspect, though, that they can't, though, because I don't even think on Android that they can, through installing an app, have the sort of access to the hardware to serve the purpose that the puck does for the glasses.
02:04:52 ◼ ► They probably need like I said, they probably need to line up partners like partners who were excited enough, like Samsung or somebody else or even Google to say, yeah, we're going to we're going to work on this way that you can do distributed computing for external devices, blah, blah, blah on Android.
02:05:07 ◼ ► And it's optional or or there it's somebody who's a licensee of of Horizon OS that they're working on headsets with who are now also going to work for them on on the compute inside the smartphone.
02:05:19 ◼ ► Because it will be a real bummer if it's no there is a second phone that doesn't work as a phone that you also have to carry in your pocket when you use this like what nobody wants to do that.
02:05:29 ◼ ► So I do wonder, but it's yeah, line of sight. What does that mean? I I think it means they got it working at a point where they feel like they can see they can see it that the issues are bringing the price down, figuring out the software.
02:05:44 ◼ ► These are not minor issues, but at least they have something that's functional. I mean, right.
02:05:49 ◼ ► That can sometimes see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's so far away and it's so dark inside. You have no idea what traps there are inside the tunnel.
02:05:57 ◼ ► Exactly. No, that's that's true. I'm reminded of those stories where it's like they were working on the initial multi-touch on the iPhone.
02:06:03 ◼ ► It was literally like a table with a projection on it. And so I think I think for these guys, it's it's similar where it's sort of like a Mac Pro.
02:06:10 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. So they're like, well, we got it working in in this thing that costs us ten thousand dollars.
02:06:16 ◼ ► We got and it's probably pretty shaky, but like we got it working. So we think we can refine it from here, but it's going to take us years.
02:06:22 ◼ ► I mean, that shows you how not close they are because it's still going to take years. But again, I think it works for them.
02:06:29 ◼ ► I think it's a good I think it's a great move on that as part. And I think it may be a kick to Apple a little bit.
02:06:36 ◼ ► But I do think fundamentally that these that the vision is the same, that Apple also wants that product.
02:06:42 ◼ ► Tim Cook really does believe in in an augmented reality product and and that they're both taking different pathways to get there because they're both really different companies.
02:06:50 ◼ ► But I don't think I think in the end, in 2030 or whenever we might end up seeing two very similar products arrive.
02:06:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree. And I think it is a rivalry that is much more interesting and good for Apple.
02:07:05 ◼ ► Not that Samsung isn't a huge and worthy rival in its way with phones, but I don't I don't think Apple ever looks at any of those phones and things.
02:07:14 ◼ ► Ah, we can't do that. They got they got us there. Like the whole foldable thing. Apple doesn't want to build a foldable yet.
02:07:21 ◼ ► There's no doubt that they could. Right. And if they did, they would have by far and away the better OS for running on a tablet side screen because they have iPad OS.
02:07:31 ◼ ► They just don't want to build it. They're not like looking at those foldables and the sales and thinking, oh, we're really behind the eight ball there.
02:07:38 ◼ ► I think it was on the verge this weekend that was like Apple's Apple missed the boat on foldables because this the pixel fold is is is OK, but still has a bump in it.
02:07:47 ◼ ► But you get over it and you just deal with it. And I thought, look, I nobody is going to believe that Apple hasn't tried all of these things.
02:07:56 ◼ ► Right. Right. I Apple is not missing the boat here. Apple doesn't want to get on the boat yet.
02:08:02 ◼ ► No, it's not good enough. It's not good enough. And the truth is, the sales figures are so poor that they've got they feel like they've got time.
02:08:09 ◼ ► They don't feel like they're losing sales because they don't have a foldable. Right. They're like, we got time.
02:08:14 ◼ ► We got to make this work. And it needs to be our standards. And sometimes that does come back to bite them.
02:08:18 ◼ ► And they they are a little bit behind. I think Apple intelligence certainly. But even when they went to big phones, they could have done that a year or two sooner and they didn't.
02:08:26 ◼ ► They survived and thrived in the end. The truth is the folding phones. Yeah, they're not satisfied with the current state of the art.
02:08:33 ◼ ► And the moment they are and they think that you're right, their history with the iPad gives them a much better not only UI,
02:08:41 ◼ ► but software library, because if you've used I mean, I've tried a bunch of weird Android tablets.
02:08:47 ◼ ► And let me tell you, the most shocking thing of all is just once you get out of a phone size, Android apps are terrible.
02:08:53 ◼ ► But they're good as phone apps. But then tablet apps, it's like really all over the place and kind of a mess.
02:08:59 ◼ ► So huge advantages for Apple to make a folding device when they think it's good enough.
02:09:03 ◼ ► But I have to believe even something like the pixel fold, they look at it and they're like, no, not there yet.
02:09:10 ◼ ► Not ready yet. And I think the problem with pixels overall is that Google just their heart isn't in it.
02:09:16 ◼ ► Really, as good and well regarded as pixel phones have been, especially as cameras for the whole nine generations.
02:09:24 ◼ ► They're an asterisk in unit sale thoughts. And it's not like Google comes out with their big annual keynote and it's all about the pixels.
02:09:40 ◼ ► And this was the takeaway of their annual keynote is head to head competition with Apple for the next generation of computing.
02:09:48 ◼ ► And I think it is by my overall takeaway from this is it is great that they have a very talented competitive company who with a very different message for where this is going right now or what the state is right now.
02:10:04 ◼ ► Today, as opposed to the oh, yeah, here's a bunch of Galaxy phones that all look like iPhones, right?
02:10:11 ◼ ► This is oh, we have a totally different idea of the future or the near term future of A.R.
02:10:17 ◼ ► Here it is. And we are we are committing I'm committing this from Zuckerberg's perspective.
02:10:26 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, their A.I. stuff is also really interesting. But yeah, I think I think so.
02:10:30 ◼ ► I think also one of the things that impresses me, we can talk about that product not existing, but they do have products that exist.
02:10:36 ◼ ► And the fact is, if somebody came to me and said, I'm I'm thinking of I'm thinking of gaming and something fun for the kids and put it under the tree or whatever for this holiday season.
02:10:55 ◼ ► VR games are really fun. It's a good platform full of games that are just hilarious and fun.
02:11:07 ◼ ► You could get a you could get a Nintendo Switch, but it's they're going to replace that next year with a new version of it.
02:11:22 ◼ ► I could really recommend the Quest to people. Your kids can play it without taking the living room TV.
02:11:29 ◼ ► Also true. Oh, man. Having two kids come home from college was definitely like, well, there goes the living room.
02:11:36 ◼ ► I guess I'll watch my shows on my iPad, I guess. Or Vision Pro, if you've got one, you can do that. All right, Jason.
02:11:42 ◼ ► Thank you for returning to the show. Thank you. And congratulations. I cannot let the show in without congratulating you on 10 years of six colors.
02:11:56 ◼ ► I appreciate it. It's hard to believe that I've been working in my garage for 10 years. But here I am. Here you are still in the garage.
02:12:04 ◼ ► Well, I'm happy that you're there. Everybody can, of course, six colors dot com spell colors, whichever way is most natural for you.
02:12:12 ◼ ► Throw you in there if you want. I'm just going to redirect it to the American spelling. Sorry. Upgrade your weekly podcast with Mike Hurley is on the Relay Network and is a must listen podcast, in my opinion.
02:12:25 ◼ ► Also 10 years old. Same thing. 10 years old. Same week. Unbelievable. Where does time go? Amazing.