00:00:02 ◼ ► Is this the year? Am I wrong? I'm at the age now. I've got a senior in college, my son Jonas,
00:00:07 ◼ ► and the years now are just flying by like I'm flipping through pages in a book. So I'm thinking
00:00:15 ◼ ► That's a good memory. This is the year, yeah, at the end of January. So we're coming up on one year.
00:00:23 ◼ ► But I'm so worried, and we would have had to start the show over because it would have been so
00:00:57 ◼ ► Yeah. So we're excited. It's fun with a January baby because by the time Christmas rolls around,
00:01:01 ◼ ► they're like, they're fun. She's doing stuff. She's crawling around like a monster and right.
00:01:06 ◼ ► Yeah. It's a, it's, it's truly, I don't know. The ones, twos and threes are just phenomenal because
00:01:13 ◼ ► there's, they're like you said, they're doing stuff and it's like, oh my God, well, look at this.
00:01:18 ◼ ► And then for me, at least my wife would be like, shut up. He's not a robot, but I'd be talking about
00:01:23 ◼ ► it. Like, look, he is teaching himself to do X, Y, and Z. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun. I'm very
00:01:33 ◼ ► lucky. Well, but the other thing I do remember too, though, is like around that age, one and two,
00:01:39 ◼ ► it is the most fun. You will have incredible memories. You're going to have fun extemporaneously
00:01:46 ◼ ► as it happens. And it is the, it is like running an Ironman. Oh, because instead of a marathon,
00:01:53 ◼ ► it is like an Ironman where there's three things at once. Right. Yep. And it's just starting,
00:01:59 ◼ ► but I can already foresee the future. I mean, there, I already missed the days where she would just
00:02:05 ◼ ► sleep on me all day, or you could sit her on the floor and you would, you were pretty confident
00:02:09 ◼ ► that at 30 seconds later, she'd be in the same spot. And now all bets are off. She's climbing up
00:02:13 ◼ ► the stairs. She were like, oh man, we've had to get a baby gate within the last like a week.
00:02:19 ◼ ► Yep. Yep. We had one for our bottom stairs and we thought she won't try to climb up them. Now she
00:02:24 ◼ ► does. So we bought two baby gates within two weeks of each other. Yeah. I remember that part very well
00:02:31 ◼ ► to the, why, why was all of this advice about baby proofing? We don't have to do anything.
00:02:36 ◼ ► This baby, the baby just stays there. You put the baby down, you can turn around, the baby stays
00:02:42 ◼ ► there, and then you come back to where you left the baby. Why do, why do they recommend all this baby
00:02:47 ◼ ► proofing? And then they start moving a little and you're like, yeah, like you said, like you get one
00:02:52 ◼ ► gate. Yep. Six inches high. Within two weeks, we're like, oh, we, we might need to start thinking
00:02:58 ◼ ► about this. And now we're like, red alert, red alert, buy all the door latches and we got
00:03:02 ◼ ► to get this done. Yeah. Right. Well, congratulations. There is a lot going on and there are two main
00:03:10 ◼ ► topics that I am overdue to talk about on this show. And you happened in the last few weeks to
00:03:18 ◼ ► have made excellent videos about both of them. So one is the, I'll just spoil the whole show,
00:03:24 ◼ ► the recent executive shufflings at Apple. And two is just a sort of, okay, iPadOS 26 shipped with the
00:03:35 ◼ ► windowing. And here's the part where if this weren't a podcast, if it was a video, I would start
00:03:41 ◼ ► shuffling through dozens and dozens of headlines that all reference how iPadOS is now like macOS,
00:03:49 ◼ ► like macOS, iPad is now like Mac, iPad is now like Mac. No, it's not. No, no, but good and bad.
00:04:13 ◼ ► Okay. Let's do that then. But let me start. We have two sponsors for today's show. So why don't I just
00:04:25 ◼ ► knock the first one out? It is our good friends at Notion. Notion is a great note app. I mean,
00:04:33 ◼ ► I guess that's where the note in Notion comes from, but calling it a notes app is sort of
00:04:38 ◼ ► underselling. It is a system. It scales. This is where it starts to sound like, hmm, I don't know
00:04:45 ◼ ► if this is for me or not. It scales all the way from like an individual use where one person, you,
00:04:51 ◼ ► dear listener of the talk show, might want to consider making Notion your primary notes app just
00:04:57 ◼ ► for you for your personal use all the way up to Fortune 500 enterprise type situations where you've
00:05:04 ◼ ► got all sorts of rules to follow and you have all sorts of teams and collaborations and access and
00:05:08 ◼ ► stuff like that. Well, how can one system scale to both uses? Well, through very clever design and a
00:05:15 ◼ ► very focused attention to detail throughout the company. And Notion does that. And they are all over
00:05:22 ◼ ► the whole AI revolution, for lack of a better term, and what they call Notion agent. And Notion agent is
00:05:32 ◼ ► like, instead of using a notes app, and then having an AI thing on the side, and sending stuff back and
00:05:38 ◼ ► forth, it is having AI built right into your notes system with complete access to the full database
00:05:45 ◼ ► of the back end data of your notes so that when you interact with the AI bot, you don't have to tell it
00:05:53 ◼ ► things for your, the task you want to assemble that are based on all the stuff you have stored in Notion.
00:05:59 ◼ ► It already knows all of the stuff you have in Notion, including the collaborative stuff. So you can do
00:06:04 ◼ ► things like use Notion. People have been using Notion to take like meeting notes with the team ever since
00:06:11 ◼ ► Notion came out and started scaling to enterprise use. But now after a meeting where you take notes
00:06:16 ◼ ► in Notion, and it knows all the people and knows the other users, the people who are in the meeting,
00:06:21 ◼ ► then you can have Notion agent assemble, go through this meeting note and come up with action items for
00:06:27 ◼ ► each of the participants, have a summary for people who weren't in the meeting, or people who fell asleep
00:06:32 ◼ ► in the meeting, who want to catch up and figure out what they missed while they were sleeping, all of that
00:06:37 ◼ ► stuff. It is all built in. It is really, really great. And I just cannot say how much more natural it is just
00:06:44 ◼ ► kicking the tires and trying this, having the AI bot know everything in your system. And if you use Notion as your
00:06:51 ◼ ► system, where you just put everything you want, your AI system knows everything about it. And if you don't want to
00:06:56 ◼ ► use the AI stuff, you don't have to, it is still a great notes app, even without it. Notion brings all of your notes,
00:07:03 ◼ ► stocks and projects into one connected space that just works. It is seamless, flexible, powerful,
00:07:07 ◼ ► and actually fun to use. With AI built right in, you spend less time switching between tools and more
00:07:13 ◼ ► time creating great work. And with Notion agent, your AI doesn't just help with work, it finishes it for
00:07:20 ◼ ► you. Try Notion now with Notion agent at notion.com slash talk show. That's all lowercase letters. They want
00:07:28 ◼ ► me to emphasize this all lowercase letters, notion.com slash talk show to try your new AI teammate Notion
00:07:37 ◼ ► agent today. And when you use that link, you are supporting the talk show notion.com slash talk show.
00:07:56 ◼ ► No. Yeah. So I have been, and it hasn't been much of a secret, but I haven't gone and shouted it from
00:08:04 ◼ ► the rooftops either. I've been primarily an iPad first user for about a year now. I reviewed the M4 iPad Pro,
00:08:13 ◼ ► and it was the same kind of review that everybody has given every iPad Pro, where I said, man, this
00:08:20 ◼ ► is a great iPad. And the tandem OLED screen is the best screen I've, I literally own in my house,
00:08:25 ◼ ► period. It's better than my TV. It's, it's, it's incredible. And the hardware is so thin and Apple
00:08:30 ◼ ► pencil is fantastic. And the magic keyboard, the new magic keyboard is really, really good.
00:08:35 ◼ ► Who's this for? But after my review, I did something that I don't normally do. And I kept using it because
00:08:44 ◼ ► the hardware was so good that I just, I reached for my iPad instead of my MacBook Air. And when I need to do
00:08:52 ◼ ► something, I would just go to the iPad first, particularly Spark, which is my email client,
00:08:57 ◼ ► is a pile of trash on the Mac. It is like this electron bloat, extraordinary garbage fest. And
00:09:06 ◼ ► on iPadOS, it's native. It's fantastic. And so initially, I started using my iPad just as an
00:09:13 ◼ ► email machine. And then I used it for more and more things and doing things that people do on the iPad,
00:09:18 ◼ ► browsing the web and watching video. But then I did more and more. The Notion app on the iPad is not bad.
00:09:24 ◼ ► It could use a little work, to be honest. But we use Notion day in and day out. It's Nazi Labs. It's
00:09:28 ◼ ► what we run everything on. I have my ad sales in there. I write my scripts in there. We have team
00:09:46 ◼ ► Oh, it's unbelievable. I'm not like, I don't want to go back and do a Notion tangent. The ad reads
00:09:51 ◼ ► over. But I use it. We use it for everything. My whole team's in there. We build out everything
00:09:56 ◼ ► in Notion. The Notion agents you mentioned are legitimately amazing where I've gone on site and
00:10:02 ◼ ► done interviews that I just record from my phone in Notion as like field notes. And then when I'm done,
00:10:08 ◼ ► there's a full kind of summary of whatever happened. And I can just query the AI assistant inside of
00:10:15 ◼ ► Notion and say, what was that one thing that he was talking about about this thing without much
00:10:24 ◼ ► It's really amazing when you can query a system without dumping what you want to query into it
00:10:33 ◼ ► And in the LLM world, if you start from scratch with just a fresh chat GPT window or whatever,
00:10:40 ◼ ► and you say, here, take this folder, and you point it at a folder, or you do something like that,
00:10:44 ◼ ► or here's a 300-some page PDF thing, and then ask questions about it. That's good. It works.
00:10:52 ◼ ► People can use it that way. But when you can just start by asking a question, it is like another-
00:10:58 ◼ ► Order of magnitude level of convenience. And you end up asking more questions because you're like,
00:11:07 ◼ ► You do. And you can build context and you can say, hey, you answered me in this manner,
00:11:12 ◼ ► but that's not actually what I'm looking for. Remember this for future reference. And it does.
00:11:25 ◼ ► it's sort of a grown-up big screen version of their iPhone app, not just a touchscreen 1311-inch
00:11:34 ◼ ► Correct. And my biggest problem with the Notion app on the iPad is that it only supports a single
00:11:41 ◼ ► window. On the Mac, you can deal with multiple tabs. You can't on the Notion app. So I-
00:11:46 ◼ ► actually use a combination. I'll use the Notion app for my primary purposes. And then I'm also
00:11:50 ◼ ► running Notion inside of Mobile Safari so that I can have the effective tab feature. So Notion,
00:11:56 ◼ ► fix that, guys. But other than that, I just started gravitating towards the iPad more naturally. And I
00:12:02 ◼ ► still needed the Mac. But for the first time ever, I think, and this was even before iPadOS 26,
00:12:08 ◼ ► by the way, I just found more reasons to use the iPad. And I didn't try to do everything on the
00:12:16 ◼ ► iPad. And that was the key. Because we all know that the iPad doesn't do stuff exactly like a Mac.
00:12:22 ◼ ► And sometimes you just need a Mac. And every time I would try to move to the iPad, I'd be like, okay,
00:12:31 ◼ ► this sucks, and I'd leave. But after the M4 iPad Pro review that I did, I loved the hardware so much
00:12:36 ◼ ► that I just used it when the iPad made sense to use. And when it didn't, I'd use my MacBook Air.
00:12:41 ◼ ► And so that was kind of the situation I had for the better part of a year. And then beta season with
00:12:47 ◼ ► iPadOS 26 came around. And everybody was like, oh, this is a paradigm shift. This is... And in many
00:12:53 ◼ ► ways, it is. It totally changes how I use the iPad. But it's still not a Mac. There are things that you
00:13:03 ◼ ► have to use a Mac for. And what my video kind of detailed is that these are not like top level
00:13:09 ◼ ► things that are easy to change. Like windowing is one thing, right? But we're talking about like
00:13:13 ◼ ► fundamental OS, not even limitations, but design decisions that make an iPad, an iPad, and a Mac,
00:13:20 ◼ ► a Mac. They're not interchangeable, really. And the more you try, the more you just decide that it sucks.
00:13:25 ◼ ► Yeah. We are in a weird... Well, the big comparison that I like, my mind always goes to is the car
00:13:34 ◼ ► industry, where the car industry is well over, at this point, a century old. And there are still
00:13:42 ◼ ► many different car companies. And there is... Everybody loves to lament the sort of... What do
00:13:57 ◼ ► Yeah, the crossover. That's the word I was looking for. Right? And there is... It's kind of... For as
00:14:02 ◼ ► many different brands as there still are making cars, it is kind of sad. And part of it is just... I
00:14:09 ◼ ► think you know better than I do more about cars. But it's really kind of driven by the way that
00:14:14 ◼ ► that what's aerodynamic and what is therefore fuel efficient leads to a sameness in design.
00:14:21 ◼ ► But there's also just a lack of adventure. And again, I am not going to start. We have too
00:14:26 ◼ ► much to talk about. I'm not going to start a whole digression about the Tesla and the big pickup truck.
00:14:40 ◼ ► It doesn't look like anything else. And that is in and of itself exciting. And I do wish more
00:14:47 ◼ ► companies did that. And computers have worked in a very different way where we're kind of just down
00:14:52 ◼ ► to on the desktop, you can have Mac or Windows. And it has been Mac or Windows for a very long time.
00:14:58 ◼ ► And yes, and then there's Linux, right? And Linux, arguably, I know my friend David Hennemeyer
00:15:04 ◼ ► Hansen is all in on Linux now and has moved away from the Mac. And maybe more people are doing that as
00:15:11 ◼ ► they get frustrated with detail. So it's always the year of Linux is coming soon. But it is coming sooner
00:15:18 ◼ ► than ever before. It is better. I can tell just by watching a couple YouTube videos that it does seem
00:15:24 ◼ ► nicer. But it also seems nicer because the Windows are the Linux window managers no longer are ripping
00:15:32 ◼ ► off Windows, they're ripping off the Mac more. But that's it, right? There aren't and there aren't
00:15:40 ◼ ► new companies coming out of the woodwork to make computers, right? There's the framework company
00:15:44 ◼ ► that makes the modular laptops and stuff. And they are interesting and I wish them well. I don't think
00:15:50 ◼ ► they make great hardware. It's just sort of settled. The mobile industry settled even quicker than it
00:15:57 ◼ ► than the desktop industry on iOS and Android. And the open source alternatives are even more of a niche
00:16:04 ◼ ► than desktop computing. And so it's hard to say that, you know, only Apple would wind up in a position
00:16:12 ◼ ► where the Mac and the iPad overlap in so many ways. And they just don't unify them or just add
00:16:21 ◼ ► everything from one to the other and from the other to the other. Because who else is there other than
00:16:27 ◼ ► Apple who would be in that position today? But it is for all the companies that could have wound up in
00:16:32 ◼ ► this position. We've wound up in what I think is a very Apple uniquely Apple position between these two,
00:16:39 ◼ ► where inside Apple, the decision makers, I think, can look at any one of these. If we had, if Jaws popped
00:16:45 ◼ ► into the show with me and you and we could pepper Jaws with questions about all the frustrations your video
00:16:51 ◼ ► pinpointed and the ones I've had for a long time, he could defend all of them very quickly. And there's a
00:16:57 ◼ ► sense within Apple of why things are the way they are. But when you examine the same issue from a different
00:17:02 ◼ ► perspective, it just seems kind of wild, right? Like fundamentally, like as you point out, iPad hardware,
00:17:08 ◼ ► iPad Pro hardware is arguably the nicest hardware Apple makes period, right? Second, maybe in competition
00:17:16 ◼ ► only with the iPhone 17 Pro. But I think that they're honestly, I don't either, honestly, for various
00:17:23 ◼ ► reasons. And because they still don't make like a $2,500 phone, right? That the best phones they make
00:17:32 ◼ ► are actually relative to the iPad Pro very low. The iPad Pros are like, oh, what if we just make like
00:17:38 ◼ ► the Rolls Royce of handheld computers? And it shows and they are nicer than MacBook Pros. They really are.
00:17:46 ◼ ► They have better displays. Way better displays. Right. Way, just way better displays. They've
00:17:52 ◼ ► way, I think, better sound. It's certainly better sound per cubic millimeter, like per space. Like
00:18:01 ◼ ► if you're going to just consider the volume, the physical volume of the device, it's just amazing,
00:18:06 ◼ ► amazing hardware. It's comparable to a MacBook Air, which is amazing for how thin they are.
00:18:09 ◼ ► No, they're exceptional pieces of hardware. And then you get to, you get to the fact that it runs an OS
00:18:15 ◼ ► that doesn't have swap. And that's the problem, right? Because as these areas kind of merge,
00:18:22 ◼ ► I understand where Apple's coming from, because the argument you'll find from people that don't use the
00:18:27 ◼ ► iPad is, well, they should just put Mac OS on the iPad. And now that the hardware is effectively the
00:18:33 ◼ ► same, I mean, you're running the same silicon, you've got similar form factors, you've got a keyboard and
00:18:39 ◼ ► a trackpad. Could you run Mac OS on an iPad? 100% you could. But that doesn't make an iPad
00:18:45 ◼ ► an iPad. I mean, one of the reasons that the iPad is so compelling is because it is this dynamic and
00:18:51 ◼ ► unique platform. And for years, it felt limited by iOS, because that is in effect what it was. I mean,
00:19:00 ◼ ► the original, I mean, even when they forked kind of into separate iPad OS and iOS branches,
00:19:05 ◼ ► that first year, you're like, yeah, but they're the same though. And they still are very,
00:19:09 ◼ ► very similar. But with all of the windowing features that have made it over in iPad OS 26,
00:19:15 ◼ ► I think the iPad feels as much of its own computer, its own thing as it's ever felt. And yet,
00:19:23 ◼ ► I do understand and recognize frustration from both sides, because in so doing, they have inherently made
00:19:31 ◼ ► it a little more complicated. There were a lot of people that loved slide over from iPad OS 18. It was
00:19:37 ◼ ► requested all summer long, and they shipped 26.0 without slide over. There was so much hoopla, I think,
00:19:43 ◼ ► from both inside and outside the company, that in 26.1, they said, fine, have slide over back and it's
00:19:50 ◼ ► back. But it now only works from with inside the stage manager UI, which is inherently more complicated
00:19:57 ◼ ► than back in the single windowed iPad era. And so in doing this, they've made regular iPads a little more
00:20:05 ◼ ► complicated for regular people that just want to browse Twitter and watch YouTube. But then the people that
00:20:11 ◼ ► want a Mac are still frustrated because it's not a Mac. It's an iPad. And it's really, really good. And what an iPad
00:20:19 ◼ ► is, is better than it's ever been. But there are still, like you mentioned, core fundamental limitations
00:20:25 ◼ ► that I think until those are addressed, it's never going to be resolved. And short of doing
00:20:31 ◼ ► my like leading hypothesis now for what Apple would need to do to make this kind of work
00:20:36 ◼ ► is to, again, fully redesign the files app to turn it into more Finder-esque desktop power. And then I
00:20:45 ◼ ► think they would need to quite literally do a reverse catalyst wherein rather than run iOS apps on the Mac,
00:20:51 ◼ ► there would need to be a way to virtualize a Mac app on the iPad. You run it in the windowed iPad
00:20:56 ◼ ► environment. It looks like an iPad app. Now that the iPad supports menu bars like macOS does, there's
00:21:01 ◼ ► no reason they couldn't. And then instead of running macOS, you just run Mac apps when the iPad app doesn't
00:21:09 ◼ ► do what you need it to do. But then again, we get to the point of, well, then what's the point of having
00:21:17 ◼ ► Right. And I feel like that's, and then that's where Apple's like, yes, see, that's what we do know what
00:21:23 ◼ ► we're doing. And that's why they're very different and will remain different, right? Effectively, what
00:21:27 ◼ ► you're talking about is bringing AppKit to iPadOS. And I think that's probably never going to happen
00:21:35 ◼ ► because I think, but it's, but I get why you want it. And I kind of do too. And then I start, I'm not
00:21:44 ◼ ► even an AppKit developer, but I know enough and I've been following it closely enough for so long
00:21:50 ◼ ► that you start thinking of, I start thinking even as a non-developer, oh, but AppKit apps can assume
00:21:59 ◼ ► X, Y, Z and it's, oh, and they're never going to allow X, Y, Z. Like an AppKit app can just assume
00:22:05 ◼ ► that there's a Unix subsystem available. And if the app wants to and knows that there's a user slash bin
00:22:13 ◼ ► Python 3 installed at the system level. And it can, if it wants to process a bit of data with
00:22:19 ◼ ► Python, it can just do that in the background, not even tell the user, well, that's not available on
00:22:24 ◼ ► iPadOS. And kernel level extensions and all of that stuff. And so that's one of the things my video
00:22:29 ◼ ► talked about was, I was like, look, you've got DaVinci Resolve, you've got Final Cut Pro 10,
00:22:34 ◼ ► the DaVinci Resolve binary for iPad quite literally is the macOS binary. They've done a couple of things to
00:22:40 ◼ ► make it look like it's for the iPad. They're hidden by default. But if you use the keyboard commands that
00:22:45 ◼ ► are available on the Mac, it just turns them back on and it doesn't run because they never really meant
00:22:50 ◼ ► for it to run on the iPad, but it is the Mac app compiled for iPad. And yet the iPad doesn't support
00:22:56 ◼ ► a bunch of media formats that are supported on a Mac. And so if you deal with those formats, which most
00:23:04 ◼ ► professionals do, the iPad's not going to work, even though the hardware is capable and the app is
00:23:12 ◼ ► people who know more than I do listening to this show, write to me, correct me if I'm wrong here,
00:23:17 ◼ ► but I don't think I am. I have friends. I just mentioned one the other day on Daring Fireball
00:23:25 ◼ ► about the Photoshop 1.0 source code and somebody comment, which was released by the Computer History
00:23:31 ◼ ► Museum. And they had somebody take a look at it, like a professor of computer science at,
00:23:37 ◼ ► I forget, IBM or something like that. And he was like, well, there aren't very many comments in
00:23:42 ◼ ► this code. It was all most of the, it was either assembler, like 15% assembler and 85% Pascal.
00:23:47 ◼ ► But it's so clearly written that they're not necessary. And my friend at Adobe still works on
00:23:53 ◼ ► Photoshop and adjacent apps. It was like, well, that tradition has continued for 30 years.
00:24:05 ◼ ► Well, forever, really, it sort of comes from the next era where the right way to write an app for
00:24:11 ◼ ► next step. And then the right way from Apple's perspective to write an app for Mac OS 10 was to
00:24:18 ◼ ► use AppKit and rely upon the system AppKit framework for as much functionality as possible, including the
00:24:26 ◼ ► actual, not just capital F framework of AppKit, but the conceptual framework of how the app manages
00:24:34 ◼ ► events and deals with the system. And I think they still make text edit available, but for a long time,
00:24:42 ◼ ► at least the source code to text edit was available as a developer thing. So you could look at it and
00:24:48 ◼ ► effectively the Mac text edit app, which does a lot. It really is. And I know a lot of people who use it
00:24:54 ◼ ► as like they're, they just, it's their go-to app for like, I have a quick idea or meeting notes or
00:24:59 ◼ ► something like that. They just go to text edit, command N, start typing. It's a really interesting
00:25:04 ◼ ► app, but it's almost nothing to it. The app itself, it's really just a showcase of AppKit, like the RTF
00:25:11 ◼ ► rich text view. That is the primary thing you see and interact with in text edit all comes from AppKit,
00:25:18 ◼ ► the way that it supports all the fonts you have on your system and can open the system font panel
00:25:23 ◼ ► and the way that it has find and all these things come from AppKit, the way that it prints it print
00:25:28 ◼ ► printing used to be a nightmare in the days of the nineties when developers had to write their own
00:25:33 ◼ ► print stop printing stuff to interact with printers. And there, I'm not saying there's no source code to
00:25:39 ◼ ► it. I think like the, it has a pretty by Apple state. I think it's a historical legacy. It has. If you
00:25:45 ◼ ► ever look at text edit, you may never need to look in the preferences or that's now we call them
00:25:50 ◼ ► settings. It has a pretty, it has a lot more application settings than new Apple apps offer.
00:25:57 ◼ ► And that's not free from using AppKit, but text edit shows you just like what AppKit does. And that's,
00:26:04 ◼ ► that was the whole idea in the late nineties when it took Apple a little, a couple of years longer to
00:26:09 ◼ ► get Mac OS 10 out the door than they originally had hoped for when they bought next. And the next team
00:26:15 ◼ ► came in and took over Apple because their original plan was, Hey, we've got this great application
00:26:21 ◼ ► framework built into the system. We're bringing it to the new Mac platform. Rewrite all your apps in
00:26:25 ◼ ► this app. New, the code was called Coco and the big developers like Microsoft and Adobe to name the two
00:26:34 ◼ ► biggest and most important to the platform. We're like, no, we don't think we're going to do that.
00:26:39 ◼ ► Rewrite all of our Mac applications from scratch using a new framework and a different programming
00:26:45 ◼ ► language. We're not going to do that. And so it took out long story short of why it took Apple
00:26:50 ◼ ► longer to ship Mac OS 10 was they had to work out a hybrid system where they could bring more legacy
00:26:55 ◼ ► Mac frameworks, which were called carbon and have them work side by side. But the message from Apple
00:27:01 ◼ ► was always, well, okay, we'll do that. But the only reason you should probably be using carbon
00:27:05 ◼ ► is for legacy purposes with existing apps. And if you're starting a new project, you should use Coco,
00:27:10 ◼ ► you should use Coco. But where I'm going with this is that the apps that still haven't, and a lot of
00:27:17 ◼ ► the media apps like Adobe's, all of Adobe's apps, they all kind of have effectively their own framework.
00:27:23 ◼ ► And in a large part, a lot of it is actually dates back to that era still. And the Adobe Photoshop for
00:27:29 ◼ ► iPhone is actually running the Mac app framework from way before the next era at Apple, or at least the
00:27:36 ◼ ► parts of it. It's like Darth Vader. It's like more man than machine or machine than man now. It's probably
00:27:43 ◼ ► more of a customized Adobe flavor of Mac app than it was the version that Adobe licensed from Apple back in
00:27:50 ◼ ► the early 90s. And I think DaVinci is probably the almost exactly the same story where the reason
00:27:56 ◼ ► DaVinci is able to run their Mac app on the iPad is that they have the whole app framework themselves
00:28:01 ◼ ► and can recompile it. Whereas if they did the thing Apple had been telling them to do for 25 years,
00:28:06 ◼ ► rely on AppKit, well, then you'd have to start all over from scratch to make a version for iOS or iPad OS.
00:28:14 ◼ ► That's totally true. It's a naughty citizen to until recently, you'd open up DaVinci Resolve,
00:28:31 ◼ ► I've been in so many Apple briefings where one of the demos is DaVinci Resolve, often for iPad or Mac or
00:28:39 ◼ ► something where they want to show off something that because DaVinci is such a, I don't know shit about
00:28:44 ◼ ► it. I don't, I'm not in that field, but it always is impressive to me. And Apple gins up these
00:28:50 ◼ ► impressive demos that show how fast it is or how it's, how efficient it can be on this new Apple
00:28:54 ◼ ► hardware. But Apple also, when they pick things to show to the media in a briefing, in addition to
00:29:01 ◼ ► showing off the hardware, whatever the message that they're trying to convey is, they also tend to pick
00:29:07 ◼ ► apps that are very attractive or follow the design guidelines and look very, and when they'd show
00:29:13 ◼ ► DaVinci and it has the menu bar in the windows, it's like, oh, this must be very impressive software
00:29:19 ◼ ► because it is not here for the way the UI is designed. No. And to give them credit, I think
00:29:25 ◼ ► they have, as they've cozied up to Apple over the last few years, it has gotten substantially better.
00:29:36 ◼ ► It really matters to Apple. And I'm sure the DaVinci people are like, well, who cares? All of our users,
00:29:41 ◼ ► their pros, they get used to anything. Professional pilots get used to the cockpit of a Boeing 737,
00:29:47 ◼ ► which is incomprehensible to a layperson. They're like, oh, I know everything. I know where every
00:29:52 ◼ ► switch is. I know where everything to change. And they're like, all of our users know it. And Apple
00:29:58 ◼ ► is like, no, you got to fix this. We're showing this to people. We want to show it off more.
00:30:03 ◼ ► You're killing us. Yep. But that's kind of the crux of the issue is that the iPad has gotten
00:30:10 ◼ ► and continues to get year on year, ever more powerful, ever more capable. But I think that
00:30:17 ◼ ► as much as I appreciate the ideology that there can be room for all of these computers,
00:30:23 ◼ ► I still need a Mac. I use my iPad 90% of the time, but I still need a Mac 10% of the time. And the
00:30:32 ◼ ► reverse is not true. There's nothing that I do on my iPad that I couldn't do on a Mac. Now,
00:30:36 ◼ ► that's not true for everybody. Some people, especially digital artists, using a Wacom tablet
00:30:41 ◼ ► that doesn't have a display on your Mac sucks relative to what you can achieve on the iPad.
00:30:47 ◼ ► But that's kind of the issue is as the iPad gets even more powerful, it just becomes all the more
00:30:55 ◼ ► frustrating when it can't do the stuff that the Mac just does and has done effortlessly for 30 years.
00:31:01 ◼ ► And the stuff, the way that because the Mac is designed the way it is, it turns out and has for
00:31:10 ◼ ► 40 years, the entire history of the Mac wound up being good for things that weren't what it was
00:31:19 ◼ ► designed to be good for because they hadn't been anticipated yet. Right. And for example, your video
00:31:25 ◼ ► emphasized, hey, so there's a bunch of different ways to run cutting edge LLM models on your own
00:31:32 ◼ ► hardware locally. And you the same one on two different machines running the same like M4 class
00:31:40 ◼ ► architecture with 16 gigabytes with of RAM on both a Mac and an iPad Pro. And one could do it and
00:31:48 ◼ ► once you got it, maybe not easily, but it could do it. And then it was like, hey, this is actually
00:31:57 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, the iPad would just initiate a jet sound event because it's like, you can't use that
00:32:01 ◼ ► much memory. Right. That's what the whole system needs to stay stable. And the Mac will just start
00:32:08 ◼ ► pushing its own system processes into swap. And the Mac becomes a horrible experience. It's super slow.
00:32:14 ◼ ► It's beach balling everywhere, but it works. And the iPad just goes, yeah, no, I'm not even going
00:32:18 ◼ ► to try. I can't do that. Right. And it probably could because I have to imagine that iPad OS is more
00:32:24 ◼ ► efficient from a memory standpoint than the Mac is. Or that it could somehow conceivably, if they added
00:32:31 ◼ ► the ability to do swap so that, you know, you could have. And technically it has it, but not in the
00:32:38 ◼ ► same way that the Mac does. Right. Yeah. And in the Mac and any desktop operating system, Windows,
00:32:47 ◼ ► Linux, any version of Unix ever, the classic Mac OS aspired to this and it would only fall short when
00:32:55 ◼ ► an actual crash happened. But if something is open, a document, an app, a process, and you leave it open,
00:33:03 ◼ ► it stays open and you never come back and find that it has been flushed. It just doesn't happen. And so
00:33:13 ◼ ► for example, one of the most comical new things, like the fact that we had to wait for it. And even now
00:33:20 ◼ ► it's like a special API that apps have to qualify for with a special entitlement is like the entitlement to
00:33:29 ◼ ► export. If you're using Final Cut or Logic, right on the iPad, Apple's own software, and you have this
00:33:36 ◼ ► big, huge project that you've been working on. And then the export is going to take a long time because
00:33:41 ◼ ► that's exporting is still for high quality video or even huge multi-track audio projects. Exporting is
00:33:50 ◼ ► computationally expensive and you have to wait. And you couldn't put the app in the background,
00:33:57 ◼ ► which is cuckoo bananas when you think about it historically. And it used to be, I'm so old
00:34:04 ◼ ► that I remember when copying things to a floppy disk on the Mac was modal and, or formatting,
00:34:12 ◼ ► you put a new, you'd buy a bunch of floppy disks, but they were all DOS formatted. So you'd have to
00:34:18 ◼ ► format them on your Mac. And when you'd format the floppy disk, it was system modal while the Mac
00:34:23 ◼ ► was formatting the floppy disk, which took a long time because they were floppy drives were
00:34:29 ◼ ► very slow. You just had to sit there and wait and wait and wait, right? And there were all sorts of
00:34:37 ◼ ► things that were system modal. And there was even a different style of dialogue box when we started to
00:34:42 ◼ ► get things that weren't system modal. And you could tell just by looking at the dialogue box style,
00:34:48 ◼ ► whether this was going to block all input until this was done and it was going to take up the,
00:34:53 ◼ ► that's it. You just wait till this is done before you can, might as well just take your hands off the
00:34:57 ◼ ► keyboard and mouse, go stretch your legs, get up, walk away. And when all of computing sort of moved
00:35:06 ◼ ► and really with the Mac, it got better. It, it, by the end of the classic era, even though it was all
00:35:12 ◼ ► kind of faked, right? It wasn't a real, the term of art at the time was a preemptive multitasking
00:35:17 ◼ ► operating system. And it wasn't really, but it faked its way to being one. And the fake part was why
00:35:25 ◼ ► sometimes if your internet explorer crashed, it would actually bring down the whole system and you'd have
00:35:31 ◼ ► to restart the whole computer. And I hope you saved the documents that were open and the other apps that
00:35:36 ◼ ► you had open at the time to a system where every app could just be command tabbed away and it would
00:35:42 ◼ ► keep doing what it was doing. And it felt like this is the future and that future, it felt so exhilarating
00:35:48 ◼ ► and wow, this is amazing. It's Photoshop is going to be, or whatever app I'm using is going to be doing
00:35:54 ◼ ► this for a very long time. And I can go do something else while that's happening in the background.
00:35:59 ◼ ► That was 25 years ago with baby computers compared to M four or M five, let alone iPad pro today,
00:36:11 ◼ ► like the compute sheer computing power. And we think today like, Oh, an iPad pro, even the most you can
00:36:18 ◼ ► spend on one, you still only get 16 gigabytes of Ram. Back then you did, you would have to like 25 years
00:36:26 ◼ ► ago, somebody would say 16 gigabytes of Ram. And you'd be like, yes. And they'd be like, I can't
00:36:31 ◼ ► wait for this glorious future when there's that much Ram. And it's, and they'd be like, and it's only
00:36:37 ◼ ► $2,000. And you'd be like, well, that's actually considered very expensive at the time. And they're
00:36:41 ◼ ► like, what? Yeah. You're like for $2,000, I can get a little thing that's this light and this thin,
00:36:48 ◼ ► and it has 16 gigabytes of Ram. And you'd be like, yes. And they'd be like, that's like infinite Ram.
00:36:54 ◼ ► And then you'd say, nope, actually that's going to feel very constrained if you want to do something
00:36:58 ◼ ► advanced. Yeah. And so something that illustrates that point, perhaps perfectly is like you mentioned,
00:37:05 ◼ ► the iPad needs to get specific entitlements developers do in order to have their apps continue to process
00:37:11 ◼ ► and run in the background. But this even extends as an issue to multitasking. So now that we've got
00:37:17 ◼ ► windowing on the iPad, I can plug my iPad into my studio display. And for all intents and purposes,
00:37:23 ◼ ► it looks like a Mac. I've got my dock on the bottom. I've got my menu bar that's static up top.
00:37:28 ◼ ► I've got multiple windows open. Here's something you'll never see on a Mac. So the iPad can move
00:37:34 ◼ ► certain apps to swap. If the memory requested by the foreground app exceeds what the system is normally
00:37:41 ◼ ► able to allocate, it puts the apps in the background into a hibernate state, not all that dissimilar from
00:37:46 ◼ ► app nap or some of the kind of features on the Mac. This you will never see on the Mac. However, I was exporting a video
00:37:53 ◼ ► individual resolve. It's in the foreground. And I tab away command tab to Photoshop, which is also running on the iPad.
00:38:02 ◼ ► DaVinci Resolve, I suspect, had the entitlements to request the largest amount of memory. It was in the middle of the export. And rather than figure out the kind of memory allocations between the foreground app and background apps, it just quit Photoshop, which was the foreground most app.
00:38:21 ◼ ► Because it's like, well, DaVinci Resolve needs the memory. And so it just closed the app. It just killed it. It didn't put it into a hibernate state. It didn't reallocate some of the RAM that was in DaVinci Resolve in the background away from it to the foreground app. No, it just killed the foreground primary running app because, well, something else needs it. And you'd never see that on a Mac.
00:38:40 ◼ ► Right. So it's like instead of falling apart the way that classic Mac OS did it, because it just wasn't built to do all that much at once in limited resources and a limited computing architecture, the Mac was built to keep everything open running forever, even if you kept opening more stuff, but even at the expense of slowing down the experience.
00:39:02 ◼ ► And that's where the dreaded beach ball comes from. Right. And some people think because sometimes you do see the beach ball when an app has spiraled into a death cycle and needs to be forced quit.
00:39:11 ◼ ► But sometimes you see the beach ball just because the system is so overwhelmed. Nothing is gone. Nothing is lost. Nothing is forced quit. It's just you got to give us a second here because we've written out the RAM from this app that you're trying to switch to to swap and we got to get it back from swap.
00:39:29 ◼ ► But to do that, we've got to get this other apps memory written to swap and hold on, hold on. It's like it's like you don't have enough servers for how many customers are in the restaurant and it's like you're all going to get your food, but it's going to be it's going to be it might be cold by the time you get it, but you're all going to get it.
00:39:48 ◼ ► Every single thing that everybody's ordered on every table is going to get to them. We promise. And it does eventually happen and catch up. Whereas like iPad OS from the iPhone is sort of like at any given time, they might just ask the customers to leave at the table.
00:40:05 ◼ ► They're like, yeah, you were going to where your your table is no longer even though you've already sat down and ordered your your outside in the lobby again. And then when it's when you want to come back in, we'll just start you all over and we'll put you at a new table and you can order again.
00:40:22 ◼ ► It sounds ridiculous. Well, why would anybody make a computer like that? Why? Why shouldn't it all be the Mac way? But there is it's it's the fact that that's why the iPad never gets a beach ball. There is no beach ball in iOS or iPad OS and things never slow down.
00:40:38 ◼ ► It is a reasonable trade off, but they are sort of mutually incompatible goals. I kind of feel like the other thing, though, the reason and we keep coming back to it. I think the iPad is in a better shape than it ever has.
00:40:50 ◼ ► For sure. Right. I look back at at my the iPad turns awkwardly turns 10 essay from 2020, I guess, when the iPad turned 10. And I think it's been a really good five years for the iPad.
00:41:03 ◼ ► But I still feel like the original sin is that Apple primarily has two real computers that they make from that are designed soup to nuts, hardware and software, both to be exactly the way they want them to be the Mac and the iPhone and the iPad is just sort of still fundamentally a big iPhone.
00:41:30 ◼ ► It is. It's there's there's no other way. And they can say, no, it's not. That's why we named it iPad OS. And before it's. Yeah. But if if for some reason the only two computers Apple made were iPads and Macs and they didn't make iPhones anymore, like some kind of hypothetical regulatory nightmare gone wrong for Apple.
00:41:51 ◼ ► And they have to spin off the iPhone and they have to spin off the iPhone into an independent company. And it truly is independent. It's gone. And Apple computer. Maybe that's the new company's name. They go back to Apple computer and Apple computer, which no longer makes the iPhone only has the iPad and Mac.
00:42:06 ◼ ► I think the iPad gets a lot more computery, not necessarily more Mac, but it just gets more computery because they don't have to worry about the limitations of a phone.
00:42:18 ◼ ► Where else was I going to go? Oh, the other thing I want to go back to the how how are you feeling about the UI changes, the the windowing mode in iPad now that I iPad OS 26 has sort of been here for a while?
00:42:31 ◼ ► There is a and this is, I think, the prevailing complaint that I've seen online. There is an incredible learning curve.
00:42:36 ◼ ► Yeah. Part of it, I think I I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who hadn't used a computer before. Right.
00:42:44 ◼ ► And I was like, if I was sat down in front of an iPad and in front of a Mac, would one feel more intuitive than the other?
00:42:50 ◼ ► And my instinct was to say, well, the iPad, because you it's a phone, you you press the icon and then you always swipe up and that always gets you back home and you never get lost.
00:43:01 ◼ ► However, as soon as you start to work with the windowing environment, that all falls apart.
00:43:06 ◼ ► I think it's substantially more complex because they've had to design a system that works with both touch and with the trackpad.
00:43:15 ◼ ► And in so doing, they've made a system that I think is as good as it probably can be, but is also kind of not really good at either.
00:43:24 ◼ ► You have to use your finger very precisely to touch the corner of a window to get it to resize.
00:43:36 ◼ ► And when you go to use the radio buttons, the traffic light buttons at the top of a window, well, there's not the real estate to have the three buttons there.
00:43:43 ◼ ► So you've got to click or hover once to get them to reveal themselves and then you perform the action.
00:43:57 ◼ ► The yellow one still kind of minimizes, but not really because that's just what the iPad does anyway.
00:44:20 ◼ ► And if you have a home screen with a bunch of icons in it or if it's inside of a folder on your home screen on your iPad, well, you've got to navigate back into that folder and then open that app back up.
00:44:31 ◼ ► And or use the app switcher, which is not really present on the Mac because all apps are open and persistent if they're open.
00:44:40 ◼ ► And then the green full size button kind of performs the same function, but it also kind of doesn't because it either snaps full screen and or absorbs the full size of the iPad.
00:44:51 ◼ ► But without the kind of nuance that it would on the Mac where you can reach up to grab the menu bar, it's it's just weird.
00:45:00 ◼ ► I think they did it because they're like, well, we want it to look and feel like a Mac, but it doesn't do the things that the Mac does.
00:45:06 ◼ ► And so if you use both of them, it's even more complicated because you have to learn, relearn two interfaces that are visually identical, but are absolutely not operationally identical.
00:45:29 ◼ ► And on the Mac from 1984 onward, you go up to the top left corner and click that button in the top left corner of the window.
00:45:45 ◼ ► And my bias as a Mac user is so strong that I'm not even sure I would like to make the argument that the Mac style makes more close, makes more sense idiomatically.
00:46:17 ◼ ► And then in those years of the Web, when Windows was so much more popular still than the Mac amongst the sort of people who made like even Web apps or video, like the fake computer interface in a video game or something like that.
00:46:32 ◼ ► The close buttons were always top right because Windows was more popular than the Mac and it was sort of the bigger thing.
00:46:37 ◼ ► Of course, the iPad does it the Mac way, which is if it's got to be top left or top right, it should be top left.
00:46:47 ◼ ► Kind of drives me nuts that three years ago they switched Safari tabs in iOS to put the close button top right.
00:47:01 ◼ ► I really do think it's some numb nut who's yeah, but, you know, somebody in the Apple design team who's actually is grew up on the Windows world, not the Mac world.
00:47:20 ◼ ► And of course, they're red, yellow and green because that's famously the Mac colors since Mac OS 10.
00:47:32 ◼ ► And so that kind of does violate a certain principle of UI design, which is if two things are similar, they should do similar things.
00:47:44 ◼ ► And so the red, yellow, green window buttons on Mac and iPad, they're mostly the same, but I don't know if they're the same enough to look the same.
00:47:53 ◼ ► And a lot of what people are calling, hey, now the iPad in iPad OS 26 is a lot more like the Mac.
00:48:02 ◼ ► They're using Mac-like to mean desktop computer, which is that it has these wider general principles that even do admittedly predate the Mac.
00:48:13 ◼ ► And that the Mac borrowed from Xerox marks, which is the metaphor for multiple things on screen at once, whether they be multiple documents within one app or multiple windows from different apps that are visual at the same time, visualized and visible at the same time.
00:48:40 ◼ ► It's one of those things that seems so obvious that it's hard to remember that it had to be invented and seemed novel at one time.
00:48:46 ◼ ► But the whole concept of having an application menu with commands like file, edit, view, and then you click on the menu and you can pull down and you get these menu commands.
00:49:01 ◼ ► And the fact that the iPad didn't even have it at all was the thing that was more frustrating, angering even at times than the fact that it wasn't exactly like the Mac or that whole argument that people will make till the end of time that they should just make macOS run on iPads or vice versa or merge them into one and magically make everybody happy, which is the magic part.
00:49:31 ◼ ► But there is like a frustration like, hey, like when iPadOS came up with that heads-up display, when you'd hold that, if you had a hardware keyboard connected in some way, Bluetooth or like a keyboard case, and you held down the command key, you'd get this heads-up display that showed all the commands that were available and the shortcuts, but in a heads-up display instead of in a menu bar.
00:49:59 ◼ ► And so, yes, of course, you don't need keyboard shortcuts because you don't have a keyboard installed.
00:50:08 ◼ ► And so, like, when you sit down in a restaurant and you've never been there before or maybe you haven't been there in a while or maybe you just don't know what to have, what do you look at to decide what to have?
00:50:34 ◼ ► Like, instead of having to have a book next to your computer to look up how to do things, everything that was available as a command in the current context was available at the top of the screen in a menu bar, organized by categories, and then you could read them.
00:50:54 ◼ ► And the iPad had the complexity in its applications to need a menu and didn't have one.
00:51:16 ◼ ► You could be a typical user who never looks at the menu bar, who just sort of uses the Mail app and Safari or Chrome and the Messages app to send messages.
00:51:26 ◼ ► And you don't really use many apps, and you don't really – a lot of users never go to the menu bar.
00:51:31 ◼ ► But if they ever do need something up there, they can, like, watch a video or read the search results for how do I do this.
00:51:38 ◼ ► And it says go up here to file, go down to this, click that, and then in the next thing that opens up, click this.
00:51:48 ◼ ► And there is the expectation once you've done that once or twice on the Mac that you're likely to have to interface with the menu bar in the future.
00:51:56 ◼ ► And so if you go, oh, I don't really know how to do this, you poke around the menu bar.
00:52:02 ◼ ► People are not used to doing that on the iPad, and so some apps – this is where it gets even more complicated.
00:52:08 ◼ ► Some of the more sophisticated apps that did have a bunch of those keyboard shortcuts and have had keyboard shortcuts for years, they're getting updated now.
00:52:16 ◼ ► But for a while, and still some that I can think of today, there are apps that are not updated.
00:52:20 ◼ ► And so it puts every single keyboard shortcut that's been supported on the iPad for three, four years in that iPadOS app all in the file menu.
00:52:27 ◼ ► So you go up to file, and it's just a bunch of random crap that should not all be in the file menu.
00:52:36 ◼ ► And then conversely, there are some things that can only be done inside of the window because they expect most users to never interface with the menu bar or the menu bar has never been there.
00:52:48 ◼ ► So the iPad apps are built around this idea that, well, everything is accessible through the interface.
00:52:53 ◼ ► But now some things aren't, but I can't think of, honestly, a single app, not even Final Cut Pro, which is made by Apple, where there is a function on iPadOS that must be performed through the menu bar.
00:53:10 ◼ ► But that by nature makes it so that most of the commands are not placed in there logically or in an area where you'll have to interface with them because, well, you'll just do it with your finger on the iPad because sometimes you don't have the menu bar there.
00:53:26 ◼ ► And then the other issue that I think is the most breaking about this new windowing environment, there are exceptions, and some I will admit from Apple.
00:53:35 ◼ ► Like I just realized that iMessage on the Mac, you can't press Shift-Command-N to open a new window.
00:53:46 ◼ ► On the Mac in general, you can press Shift-Command-N and a new window will open in that same app that you're in.
00:53:52 ◼ ► One example that I can think of that I use with Frequency on the Mac, and it makes me so annoyed every time I have to use it.
00:53:57 ◼ ► I have a Bamboo Lab 3D printer, and their desktop app is clearly ported from a multi-platform kind of app building environment.
00:54:18 ◼ ► The iPad has supported windowing for a number of years, once again, but the number of apps that used it was so, so few that it's not habitual or second nature to just go, oh, I'll just open up a new window.
00:54:38 ◼ ► And so when you're inside of the new windowing environment, or particularly when you're using the windowing environment inside of Stage Manager, which is how I prefer to use it, because while I hate Stage Manager on the Mac, I think that your real estate is so limited on the iPad that it's really great.
00:54:57 ◼ ► So you can have a Safari window in every single stage, but if I'm in another app and I'm in another stage where an app is open in another stage, as soon as I request the app, it just rips it out of that stage and pulls it into the stage that I'm in presently.
00:55:10 ◼ ► And so you get this weird kind of amalgamation of some things that are windowed apps that cannot have multiple instances, some that can have multiple windows, but not multiple instances, some apps that can be open across multiple stages performing different functions.
00:55:27 ◼ ► And so it's this, and again, I think it'll get better, but this is part of you kind of get what you deserve.
00:55:35 ◼ ► Apple's had so many different windowing modalities in iPadOS over the last four or five years that until there's been this expectation over a few years of, oh, well, this is how an iPad app works, it's kind of just a mess because you've got every app doing something different over every version of iPadOS, which it has supported.
00:55:53 ◼ ► And the reality is, I think there's so few people that want to do this anyway, because the iPad has so few pro users that I wouldn't be surprised if then in a few years stuff is still broken and certain apps still don't work well and certain apps go, well, we're never adopting the menu bar because our usage, our analytics detect that almost nobody uses it anyway.
00:56:15 ◼ ► Whereas with the Mac, it might not be the best way to do stuff, but that's just the way that it is because the iPad, because the Mac has been the same way forever.
00:56:23 ◼ ► So, yeah, there's an interesting contrast is with the notes app, Apple notes, and Apple notes can do more things than notes on iOS, right?
00:56:37 ◼ ► And iPad, but yet it's not in a way, though, that makes you don't wind up with, oh, well, that's this note in Apple notes can only be visible on the Mac.
00:56:49 ◼ ► It's it's just like a sort of convenience features, but to create notes that are cross platform, same way that the iPad can make pencil drawings in an Apple note that you can't create because the pencil only works on iPad.
00:57:08 ◼ ► But when you just look at the main window of Apple notes, you don't see that complexity.
00:57:15 ◼ ► It actually looks like it exposes about or maybe the exact by default same set of features that are on the iPad.
00:57:22 ◼ ► You have to go to the menu bar to see the extra features that you can get because of AppKit and stuff like that.
00:57:35 ◼ ► So another app that is in a certain fundamental level, like a lot like notes and I've just oh, yeah, yeah, there's like three columns.
00:57:56 ◼ ► There's the mailboxes, then the messages in a mailbox and then the message that you've selected.
00:58:01 ◼ ► And then Apple notes, you've got folders and then the notes in the folder that you've selected and a note.
00:58:07 ◼ ► But Apple mail has long had the ability to open up more than one viewer window, like the main window.
00:58:14 ◼ ► And I tell this to people, there's probably going to be a bunch of people listening to the podcast who are like, you can do what?
00:58:36 ◼ ► And so if you've got like a work account and a personal account, you could keep both windows open on two different accounts and have the full thing or open three of them or four of them or five or six.
00:58:50 ◼ ► Now, you know, at that point, I think you should start closing your mail windows, but there's no limit on it.
00:58:56 ◼ ► And it is tricky and it makes a hard, you know, I know from working on apps myself and having developer friend app who make apps like Net Newswire, my friend Brent makes.
00:59:26 ◼ ► And one of the nice things about the Mac, too, is because the Mac is the Mac and because it has this established expectation of being open
00:59:37 ◼ ► I mean, in the quite literal example of Apple Notes, there's like Pro Notes and Notes Commander.
00:59:43 ◼ ► There are third-party apps that add a ton of really useful functionality to notes, markdown and templates and inline calculations and slash commands like you'd get in Notion.
00:59:53 ◼ ► And then you move over to the iPad and that paradigm is gone because, of course, there are no apps that can run in the background or on top of other existing applications.
01:00:15 ◼ ► I said, I've made peace with the fact a $2,000 computer can't do some of the things that I need my $700 MacBook Air for.
01:00:30 ◼ ► And my hope for the iPad is that this is just the breakthrough year where they erased a bunch of their own previous self-imposed rules.
01:00:41 ◼ ► Like they clearly imposed on themselves at Apple a rule that we're not going to have not Mac-style windows, but desktop computing-style windows.
01:00:59 ◼ ► They even went out of their way, bent over backwards as it, before iPadOS 26, as it got more window-like in the interface, they still didn't call them windows a lot of the time.
01:01:11 ◼ ► I have a friend who pointed out that Apple's own documentation for Stage Manager goes out of its way.
01:01:19 ◼ ► It does talk about windows sometimes, but it goes out of its way to avoid using it if it can.
01:01:26 ◼ ► When if they just called them windows, it would be so much easier to understand and might make the design of the system more easily understandable.
01:01:37 ◼ ► And it was a noble thing to try to just move away from the paradigm of overlapping rectangular windows.
01:01:54 ◼ ► And now that there's a different team in charge of user interface design at Apple, you know, that they can rectify and unify some of this.
01:02:02 ◼ ► Because I also feel like some of the remaining incoherency in iPadOS 26 is the fact that Stage Manager predates this.
01:02:24 ◼ ► And I feel like there's some conceptual unification to be had there that they haven't even tried yet.
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01:05:42 ◼ ► So I loved, I loved your iPad video too, as why we just spend an hour talking about it.
01:05:59 ◼ ► And I saw some of your screenshots when you did the thing I mentioned of, oh, here come all the headlines and all the hot takes on social media.
01:06:07 ◼ ► And I saw you on threads arguing with a few people from the, hey, what's going on at Apple?
01:06:32 ◼ ► As you pointed out in the video, the proof, all the proof we need is the starring role he had at WWDC in the keynote to introduce liquid glass.
01:06:41 ◼ ► And by, through Mark Gurman's reporting on his departure for Meta, I think the euphemistic description is that Apple executives had been bracing for it for days.
01:06:56 ◼ ► And I believe, I am to understand that the days was one day when Apple found out about it.
01:07:09 ◼ ► But I think that Apple's executives found out Tuesday for sure that he was leaving for Meta.
01:07:26 ◼ ► Where at the end of this week, it was, and it's all happened in one week, which was, does create, from a casual person's perspective, the illusion of a mass exodus.
01:07:36 ◼ ► At the end of the week, which would have been the, if true, would have been the biggest and most problematic exit for Apple.
01:07:44 ◼ ► That Gurman reported on a Saturday that Saruji had told Tim Cook he was unhappy at Apple with nothing in the story describing what he was unhappy about.
01:07:54 ◼ ► Didn't even allude to whether he was unhappy with the direction of Apple Silicon, what he was being told to work on.
01:08:07 ◼ ► Was he unhappy that with the reports that with Cook apparently at the age of 65 preparing to step down as CEO, unsurprisingly, maybe in the next year, that Saruji wasn't named?
01:08:21 ◼ ► And now he's mad because it's apparently, by multiple reporting, going to be John Ternus.
01:08:28 ◼ ► He just said he's unhappy at Apple and that if he, and thinking about leaving, and if he does leave, he would not retire.
01:08:35 ◼ ► And then on Monday morning, Saruji put out a memo that was obviously meant to leak, and they knew it would leak to his team saying, in effect, I mean, I could quote it, but I'm happy.
01:08:52 ◼ ► Yeah, the end of the quote, particularly, I believe, was, I have no plans to leave anytime soon.
01:09:04 ◼ ► Oh, well, Jeff Williams, whose retirement was announced in the summer with a six-month sort of ramp down, and then that came to pass in November, and now he's gone.
01:09:23 ◼ ► He's actually, he doesn't look at, he's like, Jeff Williams is one of those guys who, on video, doesn't, you don't think he's strikingly tall, but I think he's 6'5".
01:09:36 ◼ ► Lisa Jackson, long-time environmental chief at Apple, retiring in her, I think, early 60s.
01:09:58 ◼ ► She was there nine years, which is the same, is actually slightly longer than any other chief legal officer since Jobs has returned to Apple.
01:10:16 ◼ ► I think the only reason it was perceivably freaky was that it was amongst this Alan Dye stuff, and then it was also the same week that John Gianandrea kind of officially had his step away, too.
01:10:38 ◼ ► He's sort of the opposite of the Suruji story, right, where Suruji is incredibly, by all accounts, incredibly competent.
01:10:51 ◼ ► Their phone chips, their desktop computing chips, the whole transition from Intel to Apple Silicon on the Mac was more.
01:11:02 ◼ ► Every one of Apple's transitions for the Mac over the last 40 years have been surprisingly seamless for something that is technically very difficult.
01:11:10 ◼ ► But this one took the cake in terms of if you didn't know anything, all you know is your computer is thinner, cooler, and the battery lasts seemingly impossibly long.
01:11:22 ◼ ► But it wasn't true, didn't leave, and he does a great job, and it seems like that would be a problem if he surprised Apple by up and leaving.
01:11:32 ◼ ► And G. Andrea was in charge of an area where Apple is famously, infamously behind all of its peers, AI, I think, and from a general customer level.
01:11:46 ◼ ► Just somebody who's never heard of John G. Andrea doesn't know me as J.G., doesn't know him as J.G., doesn't know anybody whose initials are J.G.
01:11:55 ◼ ► All they know is that when they talk to Siri, it is frustrating and stupid and incompetent.
01:12:01 ◼ ► Well, that was his domain, and it went from bad to worse, I would say, in the Apple intelligence era, as my big baby of 2025 was the Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino piece I wrote in February, March, whenever that was.
01:12:20 ◼ ► Which I think has, was considered very well, and I think was taken very well by my readership outside of Cupertino, and I think taken very well within a certain level of employees within Cupertino, and then as you went up the pyramid of-
01:12:42 ◼ ► But I think has aged extremely well as the year went on, and I really do think, I think it's a leadership difference between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs that under Cook, he, I don't know if it was a gentleman's thing for John G. Andrea himself,
01:13:04 ◼ ► Or if it's from Tim Cook's perspective, protecting Apple institutionally from looking bad.
01:13:12 ◼ ► But I think, I have no sources on this, this is just my read as a Cupertino-ologist, is, I think G. Andrea was out the moment that Gurman first reported, hey, that advanced Siri shit that they talked about at WWDC, that's going to be delayed.
01:13:32 ◼ ► And he started reporting that in January or February, before Apple announced the delay.
01:13:38 ◼ ► It was more or less the come-to-Jesus moment where they're like, hey, we said in June we're going to ship this.
01:13:45 ◼ ► If we're going to ship it this year, it's kind of got to be now, because the next WWDC is coming.
01:13:54 ◼ ► And I think they looked at it, and I don't know who, again, stuff like this doesn't leak out of Apple, even Gurman doesn't get it.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Which people within Apple were like, I don't know, I think maybe we could ship what we have.
01:14:19 ◼ ► There's the whole thing that they're talking about, which still isn't announced here at the end of December.
01:14:24 ◼ ► But the whole idea that they're going to license from Google Gemini to use on a white label basis to use as the model for these features.
01:14:39 ◼ ► And it certainly wasn't the plan at WWDC 2024 when they said this will be coming within the next year.
01:14:57 ◼ ► But rather than announce it or fire him, it was like, we'll let him hang on until the end of the year.
01:15:02 ◼ ► And kind of when this all dies down, save as much face as possible and announce his retirement.
01:15:10 ◼ ► And who knows what the, I mean, it could be that he had an operating or contractual agreement with Apple that they would say,
01:15:28 ◼ ► And by all respects, from a research standpoint, is one of the most important people in the entire field.
01:15:34 ◼ ► It just would seem that either he wasn't a good organizational fit for Apple or he lacked the organizational oversight that would be required to make this thing happen.
01:15:51 ◼ ► And then there was the massive kind of report from the information, which Apple has spent not an inconsiderable amount of time attempting to dispute, which is atypical for them.
01:16:15 ◼ ► Craig Federighi in particular was not bullish on AI and kind of thought it was a waste of time.
01:16:24 ◼ ► They were trying to change and improve Siri based on the existing model, the transformer model that Siri had been built on.
01:16:32 ◼ ► And then when OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, that's apparently what changed everything for JG's team.
01:16:38 ◼ ► But then Craig Federighi still was allegedly bullish on it for a few months until he tried it and then thought, holy crap, we need to get on this.
01:16:47 ◼ ► And then that's where the disputes internally were alleged to have happened, where there were multiple development tracks because Federighi's team thought that Gian Andres' team was ineffectual.
01:17:03 ◼ ► And yeah, well, and then allegedly, and the last thing, and again, this is all circumstantial.
01:17:10 ◼ ► But the last kind of nail in the coffin report was that JG wasn't able to get the hardware that he had requested and needed, the GPUs particularly, in order to build out that model set because everything was said to happen on device.
01:17:29 ◼ ► If you go back and watch WWDC, and particularly the talk show episode, when you had them on from a couple of years ago, you look at what they, yeah, you look at what they said would be coming relative to where LLMs and AI is now.
01:17:45 ◼ ► And you're like, I don't even know how that, how the local, that wouldn't even have happened.
01:17:52 ◼ ► It's just the way that everything has changed, even in just the last 18 months, makes it such that the statements that they were making two years ago, then would have been aspirational, if not completely effectual.
01:18:09 ◼ ► And that's, that's where I think we're coming to this, this axis where they're, they're in discussions with Google, because what do you even do?
01:18:15 ◼ ► They're so far behind in the, the, what they had promised would come is so not going to happen in the way that they said it would, that they've got to do something.
01:18:24 ◼ ► But if they're not, if they're not, if the deal's not even done yet, how long is it going to be until we as consumers see something that's shippable next year?
01:18:39 ◼ ► And I think the only thing that surprised maybe some people is that Apple's press release spoke quite highly of him and said that he's capable and he's going to stay at Apple and some kind of non-administrative capacity until he retires next year.
01:18:54 ◼ ► And, and I think this is probably mostly comes down to optics and then to maybe some kind of operating agreement where, yeah, but, but, but, well, it seems, it seemed hard for them to want to say.
01:19:08 ◼ ► And the Lisa Jackson, Kate Adams press release a couple of days later, and it seemed a lot more, man, they'd done great work and we're glad there, you know, we wish them the best.
01:19:34 ◼ ► Mark Papermaster was an Apple executive in charge of hardware for the company's iPhone.
01:19:39 ◼ ► And after the iPhone 4 and Antenagate, which broke as the, the, the, the iPhone 4 came at the end of June or middle of June.
01:19:49 ◼ ► And then it was July where the Antenagate scandal, whatever you want to call it, which I think was overblown.
01:19:59 ◼ ► It was a real issue where there was a, a, a, a defect, not a defect, but a, a unwanted, one of the trade-offs with the design was that the one, if your skin get, bridge the gap between two parts of the external antenna, that it would attenuate the signal of the antenna.
01:20:23 ◼ ► And famously, Jobs told people before they just broke down and had a special press conference, you're holding it wrong, right?
01:20:32 ◼ ► Just don't, don't have, and some people's skin, because of the nature of their oils, didn't make it happen.
01:20:41 ◼ ► But the reason I say that it's almost provable that it was a non-issue was that the iPhone 4 was the leading iPhone for the longest amount of time of any iPhone, because it was the last one that was released in June.
01:20:53 ◼ ► The iPhone 4S was the first one to come out on the modern schedule of September or October.
01:20:59 ◼ ► I think it was October, because that also was the first one that came out after, or right before Steve Jobs had died, but right around the time of his death.
01:21:17 ◼ ► And the Verizon iPhone, because it was actually a totally different antenna technology, CDMA versus, what was the other one called, Quinn?
01:21:48 ◼ ► But I have a source inside Apple, who back on July 23rd at the AntennaGate conference, described to me that this is, and two weeks before they fired him, said, Papermaster is, quote, the guy responsible for the antenna.
01:22:09 ◼ ► I'm sure once you get to that level, everybody gets some kind of nice truckload of money as they leave the company.
01:22:33 ◼ ► And if people come away thinking Tim Cook is indecisive personally because they couldn't even fire John Giandrea after they had to delay the single biggest announcement they'd made in years for over a year and clearly go back to ground zero and maybe even license from another company the core technology behind it.
01:22:56 ◼ ► There's the whole part that Federighi's team was supposed to work on, which is the interface to the more personal Apple intelligence.
01:23:19 ◼ ► The Luca Maestri, the CFO, was like, hey, we're not going to give you as much money as you want for server hardware or whatever.
01:23:25 ◼ ► Does it seem to anybody, does it seem to you, Quinn, that the problem with Apple's internal AI technology was that they didn't throw enough money at it, at the hardware?
01:23:36 ◼ ► I think if there's anything that could be said, it's that if there's any problems outside of JG's realm directly, I could perceivably identify maybe that Apple, because this kind of early AI stuff.
01:23:53 ◼ ► Well, first of all, opening, I kind of came out of nowhere, but then even after that, whether there was a little bit of delay to determine how important or how much market demand there was for it, or whether or not that was something Apple would be interested in, and whether it was counter to the way that culturally they've operated, I could see that maybe being the case.
01:24:11 ◼ ► And then the other thing that I can maybe see being one of the reasons for which I think it's still ultimately JG's fault, but over years, there has been quite a bit of extensive reporting.
01:24:22 ◼ ► And again, maybe this is not true, but it's been said for quite some time, so I have the tendency to believe that it is, that Tim's administrative style amongst his C-suite is, don't come to me with problems.
01:24:39 ◼ ► And so JG and Craig, I could maybe see a situation where they're trying to work through who's going to do what and for what, and it just takes too much time, and I don't know.
01:24:50 ◼ ► But yeah, those are the only things that I can think of that don't pretty much squarely fall on JG as being the problem, you know?
01:25:05 ◼ ► It might have also come from other places, too, but that there's not just one branch of, quote, AI, right?
01:25:19 ◼ ► And apparently, he was dismissive of it overall, as a lot of AI researchers in other fields were.
01:25:26 ◼ ► And there's this whole – I think the term is hill climbing that is the lingo within the field that JG was more an endorsement of.
01:25:36 ◼ ► And it's sort of like maybe like classic – it's not quite disruptor theory, but it's sort of like the way disruptive technologies come, where the entrenched whatever thinks, oh, this is cute, right?
01:25:54 ◼ ► That's what PCs – that's what x86 hardware did to server-specific hardware like Sun Microsystems, right?
01:26:05 ◼ ► And then Google built out its entire infrastructure with consumer-grade x86 hardware that costs like 10 times less per server or more less and just built a system.
01:26:22 ◼ ► And they're like, well, we just built an architecture where individual servers can fail and it doesn't matter.
01:26:31 ◼ ► I think that the JGs of the AI field were like – who were outside the LLM thing were like, well, that's cute.
01:26:38 ◼ ► And, yes, it's a neat trick, but that's not actual AI and that's not going to be the future and whatever.
01:26:44 ◼ ► And famously, multiple sources have reported that he was not a fan of chatbots and thought chatbots were not a good interface to AI.
01:26:56 ◼ ► I was going to say, by contrast, it's reported that Federici tried them and was like, no, this is – we've got to do this.
01:27:05 ◼ ► And I'm not saying – I still don't think Apple will or should ever come out with a chatbot of its own, right?
01:27:17 ◼ ► In the same way that Apple – I love – I'll stick with the analogy that Apple still to this day dominates the graphic design industry and desktop publishing without making any of the primary software that people use for desktop publishing.
01:27:35 ◼ ► Yes, there's the whole question one year after the acquisition, what are they going to do with Photomator or, as I like to call it, Photomator.
01:28:06 ◼ ► And it's chat GPT who's building out like a trillion dollars of server architecture to serve it.
01:28:14 ◼ ► There is the possibility that Apple is going to get the latest Google Gemini model white labeled for Apple intelligence for the paltry sum of a billion dollars a year when Google's already paying them like 25 billion a year for the ads.
01:28:31 ◼ ► So it's like, how about instead of 25 billion next year, you pay us 24 billion and we get Gemini for free and Google's short.
01:28:36 ◼ ► And so there's a there's a path forward where Apple doesn't need to provide it on its own.
01:28:49 ◼ ► And that apparently was the come to Jesus moment for Federighi was that he like over the winter break two or three, three or four years ago or whatever was like, I'm going to try this chat GPT thing.
01:28:59 ◼ ► Everybody's talking about and really dug into it and was like, whoa, this is amazing because it is.
01:29:04 ◼ ► Anybody who's really dug into any of these chat bots, whether Claude or chat GPT or even Grok is amazing in certain ways.
01:29:32 ◼ ► But helping you with it and supervising it and correcting it, you're going to get incredible results.
01:29:40 ◼ ► But I kind of the other thing, too, and I want to go back to it before I forget, was the whole story about, well, A, we know.
01:29:48 ◼ ► It's been announced that Mike Rockwell, who's moved from the Vision Pro team to take over under Craig Federighi, the AI consumer facing stuff.
01:30:00 ◼ ► Again, that to me is the proof that JG was actually – Cook made his decision and he was out at that point.
01:30:07 ◼ ► I kind of thought at the time, I bet they announced JG's exit before WWDC and that didn't come to pass.
01:30:13 ◼ ► I think I just underestimated Tim Cook's patience and let's really let the embers on this fire burn out and cool before he – we officially part ways with him.
01:30:27 ◼ ► But it makes no sense that he was still at Apple after the – Mike Rockwell is leaving the Vision Pro team to take over this plate of stuff.
01:30:44 ◼ ► But there was also the report that while they were creating the Vision Pro that Rockwell wanted to have verbal commands for a lot of stuff because they were inventing this interface.
01:30:56 ◼ ► There's a lot of stuff where it is visual and you poke at it and you look at it and you make gestures to look at it.
01:31:03 ◼ ► But there's a lot of stuff where maybe having visual verbal commands would really help because of the limited input or the different input and that they were so disgusted by the state of Syria at the time that they looked into building their own voice command AI system within Vision Pro, which is the way a lot of big companies work.
01:31:32 ◼ ► And like the Oracle one is like a whole legal arm and then a little bit of engineering off to the side.
01:31:38 ◼ ► And the Apple one famously – this is what – the cartoon was made when Steve Jobs was still in charge.
01:31:48 ◼ ► And then there's Microsoft, which is a real neat pyramid, but all the points of the pyramid have guns pointed at the other parts of the company.
01:32:02 ◼ ► Where Rockwell's team was making its own AI, Federighi's team was making its own AI team.
01:32:09 ◼ ► All of a sudden, there's three different AI teams, the one that's supposed to be the one for the whole company, one within Rockwell's team at Vision, one that Federighi was running to actually build stuff that might actually be worth shipping to customers.
01:32:23 ◼ ► I'd also think that it is very, very key – and I think it will parlay into the Alan Dye discussion, so put a thumbtack in that.
01:32:32 ◼ ► But I do think – hey, I think Apple is getting its shit together on this whole AI front thing.
01:32:54 ◼ ► But when Apple first started building out the whole AR thing, and AR kit was a big deal at WWDC, they suggested Rockwell as a guest for my show.
01:33:07 ◼ ► And the song and dance of Apple's executives appearing on my show and who's going to be the special guest outside the regulars of, say, Jaws and Federighi is that Apple won't tell me, like, hey, this is – WWDC this year is all going to be about Apple intelligence.
01:33:27 ◼ ► But when they said, hey, we were thinking maybe Mike Rockwell would be a good guest this year, and this is obviously before the show, and then I don't ask extra questions.
01:33:38 ◼ ► I just say, well, that sounds good to me, too, and I'll bet it'll make sense after I see the keynote.
01:34:05 ◼ ► And my impression of them both from the onstage part that everybody can watch and just watch the videos and see, but also the backstage part, which isn't extensive.
01:34:18 ◼ ► It's not like they stay super long after the show is just that he – Mike Rockwell seems like a very Apple-like executive in the way that Eddie Q is extremely Apple-like.
01:34:30 ◼ ► The way that Phil Schiller is perhaps the purest, 100% unadulterated example of an Apple-like person and that Jaws is very Schiller-like in a lot of ways.
01:34:50 ◼ ► And, in fact, by the time I got offstage and I'm, like, thanking the audience and he had left, I went to thank him for being on the show and he was already gone.
01:35:01 ◼ ► I mean, and you could watch the video and see how much longer I was onstage than JG and Jaws and Federighi, who were both still there and having a glass of water or a bottle of water or something or some other beverage backstage.
01:35:31 ◼ ► And Mike Rockwell, on the other hand, very, very nice to meet and very – my off-the-record interactions with him.
01:35:46 ◼ ► I'd love to hear your thoughts that, hey, wait, if Vision Pro is considered a bust, why is it good news that the Vision Pro guy is taking over Siri?
01:35:55 ◼ ► My take would maybe be that Vision Pro being a quote-unquote bust doesn't necessarily fall on Mike Rockwell.
01:36:13 ◼ ► It's – for as much as I just complained about the iPad, the Vision Pro has none of that.
01:36:18 ◼ ► Even though it still derives its own iOS, it does feel, while intuitive, entirely different than iOS and iPadOS.
01:36:29 ◼ ► And so much of the interaction elements and so much of the UX is really polished and really well done.
01:36:40 ◼ ► That doesn't mean that the hardware is practical or accessible because it absolutely isn't.
01:36:44 ◼ ► But Vision OS, which is much of what Rockwell was in charge of, is the best part about the Vision Pro.
01:36:53 ◼ ► And I keep making the analogy, and I'll stick with this one too, that it's a lot like the original Macintosh in 1984, which was – inflation adjusted $7,200.
01:37:07 ◼ ► But at least at the time that the Vision Pro shipped, from that point to 1984, it was like $7,200.
01:37:14 ◼ ► So twice as much money, sold so poorly that it was the precipitating factor to the board chasing Steve Jobs out of the company.
01:37:21 ◼ ► So like when kids today are like, hey, how did that ever happen where Apple ran Steve Jobs out of the company?
01:37:28 ◼ ► And it served – the basic concepts were so right that it served as the basis for what we still use today as the Mac.
01:37:38 ◼ ► And it was too big, too heavy, too expensive because you think, well, it was just this tiny little computer.
01:37:44 ◼ ► But the form factor that really made computers, desktop computers, popular is the laptop, right?
01:37:51 ◼ ► And the Macintosh had a handle, and it had a bag you could buy for it and put it in a bag so you could take it with you.
01:38:04 ◼ ► It just was a long time ahead, and in the same way that the Vision Pro put the cost aside, it's too freaking big and heavy, right?
01:38:12 ◼ ► And it won't be too long where computers like that, whether they're Apple's future vision computers or if some other company does take the lead and define the form factor, they are not going to be big or heavy at all, right?
01:38:24 ◼ ► Because nobody – in the same way that nobody wants a bigger, heavy, big, heavy, portable, quote-unquote, portable computer, nobody wants something that needs – you need to worry about what style of headband you have so that your neck doesn't hurt when you use it.
01:38:40 ◼ ► But, man, from building it from scratch, it is an amazing foundation for it going forward.
01:38:45 ◼ ► And I think that's where Rockwell's would – it sounds – and it sounds to me like he wanted this job.
01:38:58 ◼ ► I think he's been interested in it from when he was developing the Vision Pro seven years ago, that, hey, this is core technology that Apple should make good going forward.
01:39:11 ◼ ► I'll segue into talking about Alan Dye, which is the other common feedback I've gotten now that Alan Dye's left, and I'm dancing on his – not his grave because he's – thankfully, he's apparently in good health.
01:39:43 ◼ ► And I don't know, and I've spent the last month trying to dig around and get more information about it, and if anybody listening has more information.
01:39:52 ◼ ► But I get the impression that in the same way that Mike Rockwell wanted to build his own Siri, that they kind of built their own interface.
01:39:59 ◼ ► And I'm sure people in Alan Dye's team had a role, but it was more in the what it looks like than what it works like aspect.
01:40:14 ◼ ► I don't think Alan Dye had anything to do with him, and I don't even think he knew – this is part of why I don't think he was ever suited for the job in the first place – is I don't even think Alan Dye knew that they had gone behind his back to create the whole Vision OS concept of a user experience.
01:40:33 ◼ ► Because I think all he ever thought about is what it looks like, and then he got to say, oh, well, my team will make some icons and decide what the anti-aliasing will look like around the window edges or something like that.
01:40:48 ◼ ► Well, and the great irony in all of it, too, is I think that people who draw the conclusion that liquid glass has directly derived Vision OS haven't really spent much time in Vision OS.
01:41:06 ◼ ► Even still, I think of all of Apple's platforms, Vision OS looks the most distinct, and I think it's because it changed at least, and it's because liquid glass doesn't really look like vision OS.
01:41:17 ◼ ► It had its own brand new thing, whereas liquid glass was trying to bring a new design paradigm to a layout and app ecosystem that is already clearly defined, right?
01:41:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm not a liquid glass hater, I keep saying, and I really am not, but I do think that overall liquid glass, as we see it on iOS, iPad, and Mac, is sort of like the Samsung take on something like Vision OS.
01:41:58 ◼ ► And I'll just hold iOS's where the new liquid glass in the 26 OS's clearly looks best, right?
01:42:13 ◼ ► Maybe tvOS, which is kind of the nature of tvOS, is that it doesn't really have windows and depth.
01:42:25 ◼ ► But it's, I don't know, it's, it's, it's, it's, but looking at iOS, to me, it looks like iOS as a knockoff of Vision OS.
01:42:37 ◼ ► And I think that was, yeah, I think that was outside, I don't think that, I think that was above and beyond Alan Dye.
01:42:48 ◼ ► I would love to hear from you as an anonymous source and tell me, no, no, Alan Dye personally deserves tons of credit for Vision OS and the way the whole thing looks and works.
01:43:03 ◼ ► And one of the other things that I think is true of Vision OS is because it's so focused on mixed reality and those pass-through cameras, the classical nature of the UI elements are more natural because you have the backdrop.
01:43:21 ◼ ► And so you can take on window chrome in the color of what's behind it much easier than you can on an iPhone, which is still ultimately a slider holding you in your hand that is not using the rear-facing camera.
01:43:37 ◼ ► But by consequence, to make it look impressive, especially when you're looking at it on like a background, well, you got to make it really, really clear.
01:43:53 ◼ ► And throughout the entire beta cycle, it was more transparency, less transparency, a little somewhere in the middle, more again.
01:44:00 ◼ ► And I think, you know, in 26.1, giving people the option directly in the UI to dial back the liquid glass, that's proof that Apple themselves is not hyper-confident in it.
01:44:13 ◼ ► Because when was the last time Apple ever gave you options like that that weren't directly in accessibility?
01:44:21 ◼ ► And it also, it brings back, what were we talking about earlier with, oh, the slide over coming back in 26.1.
01:44:27 ◼ ► It also makes me wonder, like, what is going on over the summer when Apple has these betas from WWDC?
01:44:38 ◼ ► Because there were, I would say, the two most common things that I heard that had no pushback from the other side.
01:44:49 ◼ ► It was only from one perspective, which was, hey, a lot of this shit is way too transparent and you can't read it.
01:45:06 ◼ ► And I don't see why it couldn't still be there and work alongside the desktop-style windowing features that they had.
01:45:16 ◼ ► And I heard the stuff about the transparency being way too see-through and not working.
01:45:25 ◼ ► And then only after it actually shipped and then 26.1 came out, did they actually go, oh, okay, you think slide over should come back?
01:45:35 ◼ ► I mean, that would be the optimistic take, that the work on this started in the summer, that they heard the feedback in the summer, but they're like, we've got to ship in September.
01:45:45 ◼ ► So, you know, these 26.0 releases aren't going to have this, but we'll get the work started for 26.1 to bring slide over back, to bring it, add an option that's not hidden away in accessibility to have tinted instead of transparent, which I don't use.
01:46:19 ◼ ► I actually had a laptop that I was restoring that was still running Sequoia, and I opened up Sequoia, and I thought, holy crap, this looks so good.
01:46:47 ◼ ► My podcast station that I'm talking to you on is running 26 Tahoe, and my main work Mac upstairs in my office is still running Sequoia.
01:46:58 ◼ ► I mostly see Sequoia, but every time I come down here and I'm using this and I'm like looking at notes and I'm looking at Safari and I'm looking at this, I'm like, oh, my God, this is worse.
01:47:18 ◼ ► You know how like when you're a little kid and you have a big piece of cardboard and then you're going to paste or attach little pieces of cardboard on top and you make a little roll of Scotch tape, a little roll of it.
01:47:32 ◼ ► And then you put it on and then you set the thing on the roll and that's how you stick it on.
01:47:44 ◼ ► Not so it's flat, but so that it creates depth, but that the depth wasn't supposed to be there.
01:47:53 ◼ ► And when you look at a child's art project that is made that way as an adult, you think, well, be very careful with that because all of those things could just fall off very easily.
01:48:15 ◼ ► The whole interface looks fragile in a way that something held together with little rolled up pieces of Scotch tape is inherently fragile.
01:48:23 ◼ ► And when I go back, I'll go upstairs when we're done recording this show and it's going to be the proverbial glass of ice water in hell for my eyes after two hours of looking at this.
01:48:35 ◼ ► And I'm exactly with you where I still have my year old iPhone 16 Pro running the old iOS so that I have a modern phone for points of comparison.
01:48:49 ◼ ► It's one of the things I like having a new iPhone every year and keep the old one on the old OS so I can look at them side by side.
01:49:05 ◼ ► And some of the buttons, we were right for 13 years since iOS 7 that Apple should have been making buttons that look like buttons.
01:49:14 ◼ ► And it is nice in liquid glass that most of the buttons now look like buttons and stuff like that.
01:49:33 ◼ ► That's the other tell without having a source that Alan Dye's team wasn't really behind it.
01:49:38 ◼ ► And one of the great things about Vision OS and even, frankly, iOS is that the displays on which they're running, by and large, are HDR.
01:49:55 ◼ ► But then when you use other UI elements like the search or the find bar, if you do Command F, it pulls up either in light mode or dark mode based on your system.
01:50:10 ◼ ► If you didn't know they were there, you would not see them on a MacBook Air or on a studio display or the only platforms you'd maybe see it on is a MacBook Pro with a really nice, super bright mini LED that has enough kind of brightness to be able to distinguish between the two.
01:50:45 ◼ ► As I wrote about, you quoted from my reporting, very nice of you to do so in your video, the Alan Dye news within the rank and file of Apple's designers within the company was too good to be true.
01:51:09 ◼ ► How could they be so unhappy with the leader of this organization and not have the people above Alan Dye recognize this?
01:51:42 ◼ ► I mean, I have the whole something rotten in the state of Cupertino proves that I don't care about that.
01:51:50 ◼ ► But there is at some level, a level of diplomacy that needs to be had and a there's a whole list of things I wish I'd gotten around to complaining about under Alan Dye's leadership that I just never got to specific little things.
01:52:05 ◼ ► But I think over I saw like on Hacker News, they're like, oh, how come Gruber never criticized this guy before he left Apple?
01:52:21 ◼ ► But I think what I also had heard before, but then I also heard very, very strongly afterwards from the rank and file who were like popping open champagne or whatever their favorite beverage of choice.
01:52:37 ◼ ► I can't believe Stephen LeMay, who is beloved within that that level of the company, beloved, like so many people saying of all the people they could have picked to replace Alan Dye, especially on a dime.
01:52:52 ◼ ► Not like I never had a disagreement with him, but also these are people who would be the first to tell you, is there anybody you've ever worked with who you've never had a disagreement with?
01:52:59 ◼ ► They'd say, oh, no, of course not, because we're all strongly opinionated designers at Apple who think we're the smartest designers in the world.
01:53:09 ◼ ► That's the gist of the downside of Stephen LeMay is people have said, well, I disagreed with him about one decision that he made.
01:53:14 ◼ ► But the thing that they all said about Alan Dye was that he was so political in a way that felt and you think, oh, some people might think all big corporations are inherently political.
01:53:32 ◼ ► It's me and you, our friendship, me and John Gruber and Quinn Nelson is political in some ways.
01:53:43 ◼ ► But what we think of as politics gets more obvious in a bigger organization with a defined hierarchy.
01:53:58 ◼ ► I think his right-hand man, Billy Sorrentino, I hope I'm getting his name right, who I had never heard of before.
01:54:35 ◼ ► I do think, though, you've got to prove it, right, that if your background is in print graphic design for magazines and you want to head up user interface design for the leading user interface design company the computing industry has ever seen, you should know what the hell you're talking about and know the art and be like, oh, but look at my library.
01:54:59 ◼ ► I've always wanted to do this, that these are people who, you know, what I've heard from Billy Sorrentino when he was at Wired, again, total political operator and was despised by the actual working designers because he just had no interest or talent at it.
01:55:18 ◼ ► And so I think basically that they were very good at making the people above them, the Federighis, the Jawses, Tim Cook, obviously need to be happy that they were happy with the work coming out of Apple's user interface design team.
01:55:34 ◼ ► And whatever things a lot of us saw as the deficiencies in user interface design aren't things that those people in Apple's C-suite saw.
01:55:48 ◼ ► And that whatever it is they wanted out of the UI design team, Alan Dye was very good at delivering.
01:55:57 ◼ ► This is part of what you have to have a big mind here, a big boy mind, and be able to hold two thoughts in your head, which is that overall Apple's user interface design work still is the best in the industry.
01:56:11 ◼ ► That it can be true that Apple's platforms still have the best user interfaces of any of the companies they compete with and that they are worse than they ever have been and fail in certain fundamental, the equivalent of grammatical errors in prose or punctuation errors in copy editing.
01:56:33 ◼ ► That they fail in certain fundamental levels from the perspective of a practitioner of user experience in ways that Apple's software used to be perfect, in the way that Apple's advertisements always are grammatically perfect and the punctuation is right, that both things could be true.
01:56:52 ◼ ► And I think that's how he skated along for so long, that from the perspective of Tim Cook or the people right below him, they're like, well, our user interfaces are still clearly the best in the industry here.
01:57:03 ◼ ► Let me spend a day with Android and get angry about the user interface and be like, well, ours is way better than this, which I think is correct.
01:57:13 ◼ ► But I think and that he was just good at the politics of it and telling them what not just telling them what they wanted to hear, but delivering what they wanted to be delivered, which wasn't enough.
01:57:26 ◼ ► And that's where I think it's even more tricky, too, because ultimately it falls on Dai's head because he's the one that was heading the entire kind of effort.
01:57:38 ◼ ► But human interface kind of element designers are not inherently graphical interface designers.
01:57:45 ◼ ► There's a bunch of different kind of modalities that all have to work together and you have to have someone at the top to head the whole team.
01:57:58 ◼ ► And I think we'll get to the point for the people that think, oh, great, Allendeye's gone, liquid glass is like, no, liquid glass is sticking around for years.
01:58:12 ◼ ► You look at iOS 7 and iOS 11 is kind of, I think, where post iOS 11, we didn't see much visual change until, well, now.
01:58:21 ◼ ► But you look at iOS 7 and iOS 11 and they look so different, even though the concepts, the principles are the same.
01:58:39 ◼ ► This is just a really thin blue word on top of a white window at the top of the corner.
01:58:43 ◼ ► And I only know it's a button because it was a button before when it looked like a skeuomorphic button.
01:59:07 ◼ ► The only thing of concern, I think, is just that Dai was able to play the system for so long that even the top ranks seem to be kind of, I don't want to say blindsided, but they were convinced enough to let them kind of continue.
01:59:38 ◼ ► And maybe Dai didn't even give them the opportunity, said I'm leaving and this is what it is.
01:59:44 ◼ ► I, and again, I have to speak here without sourcing because the people who would know are very limited because, as you pointed out in your video about their, famously, more than any other company by far, Apple's executive ranks are very stable and that people tend to be career people.
02:00:05 ◼ ► He had been at Apple and then left and went to Macromedia for a couple of years in the 90s.
02:00:14 ◼ ► He was one of the people who was there, like the way that Jobs discovered that this young kid named Johnny Ive was in the design team and had made the thought he, Jobs went in there and thought, this company making all these boring, ugly beige computers and these laptops that catch fire in airplanes.
02:00:31 ◼ ► I'm going to have to fire all the industrial designers, went into the industrial design lab and saw all these amazing products that they weren't shipping.
02:00:46 ◼ ► Phil Schiller was there in marketing and Jobs described him as the best demo man in the computer industry history.
02:00:57 ◼ ► Very few people at Apple at the executive level were like that when Jobs came back, but Schiller was one.
02:01:08 ◼ ► I think you said in your video, John Ternus was nine years old when Jaws started working at Apple.
02:01:27 ◼ ► And I don't think executives at Apple, I just, I'm not saying that they're not competitive about their salaries and stock compensation.
02:01:43 ◼ ► But none of these people who work till they're 60 or in their 60s, none of them need to financially, right?
02:01:49 ◼ ► Phil Schiller is still there running the App Store and running point on the international relations stuff with the EU and the compliance efforts in that regard.
02:02:24 ◼ ► And it wasn't, if he wanted more money at Apple, the way to do it isn't to say, well, I've been talking to Meta and here's their offer for me.
02:02:37 ◼ ► I think it actually would be more shocking and what the hell are you doing, why are you even coming to me with this, than just saying, hey, I'm leaving.
02:02:53 ◼ ► I think it would be more like, did you get a brick dropped on your head if he came to Tim Cook and said, are you going to match this offer from Meta?
02:03:08 ◼ ► And Johnny Surugi every year has feelers put out to Qualcomm and Intel and whoever else, or Google, who makes their own chips.
02:03:18 ◼ ► And every year he's seeing what he's worth and then he goes to Tim Cook and gets a raise.
02:03:35 ◼ ► I don't know how much money, I suspect, a genuine mountain of money came to him from Zuckerberg and that he saw that as appealing.
02:03:42 ◼ ► He got a C-level title, even though he still reports to Boz at Meta, which is a very strange structure for someone with a chief in their title.
02:03:53 ◼ ► But I think it is maybe the luckiest thing that's happened to Apple in a very long time.
02:03:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I like your kind of your reference that both companies are probably better for it.
02:04:34 ◼ ► And I really do think their goal of having everything they do be carbon neutral by 2030 is genuinely sincere.
02:04:41 ◼ ► I think it's a little weird that she's not being replaced and that her job is being sublimated to several other positions.
02:04:52 ◼ ► I think the optimistic take on that is that they don't need a singular person in that role anymore because she came in out of the Obama administration where she was the Environmental Protection Agency chief and sort of made it.
02:05:06 ◼ ► I think the pessimistic take is that the political climate has changed and now Apple doesn't need to worry.
02:05:20 ◼ ► And if it really is Apple 2030, like they had been saying, that's only four years away.
02:05:25 ◼ ► So one would expect that most of the framework has already been set up by her and her teams.
02:05:43 ◼ ► But I do think it's sort of infused in Apple's hardware culture at this point and software.
02:05:48 ◼ ► And I know AI throws a monkey wrench in this for other companies and might for Apple, too.
02:05:54 ◼ ► And I think that we'd have to look at their accounting for what counts as Apple carbon expenditure versus, oh, well, that's not us.
02:06:25 ◼ ► I think that this eventually, I suppose we could say this is what will likely lead into Tim Cook's ultimate replacement, which has been suggested by many to happen probably sooner rather than later.
02:06:39 ◼ ► I know Tim Cook has been alluding to the idea that, well, I'm not going to be at Apple for – he's been saying for almost a decade that he's not going to be at Apple for that much longer.
02:06:53 ◼ ► I made the prediction in my video that I think that 2026 is going to be the time that that happens because Arthur Levinson, who's chairman of the board, he can't stand for re-election this February.
02:07:33 ◼ ► And you look at Nadella and how successful Microsoft has been under his tenure, and why would you not let him be bold?
02:07:40 ◼ ► But, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if next year Cook announces his intentions to retire, if either not next year or the year to follow.
02:07:47 ◼ ► And then I don't think that – I suspect that his successor will not be immediately named, but who knows?
02:08:00 ◼ ► One of the things we didn't talk about, because there's no point, just go watch Quinn's video, which is so good and covers it, but covers the way that at other companies like General Electric with Jack Welch and Disney, the whole sort of back and forth with Bob Iger.
02:08:16 ◼ ► And then the guy leaves, and here's the guy who is my successor, Bob Chapek, and then he's the CEO for a year and really did fuck up a bunch of things.
02:08:25 ◼ ► But then it makes you wonder, but then Bob Iger, so I'm back in, but it's, well, now it really – I got to question Bob Iger because you're the guy who picked this guy, and he was an idiot.
02:08:35 ◼ ► This stuff is hard, and it does seem like Apple and Tim Cook are handling it very well and making it look easy and obvious.
02:08:44 ◼ ► Your other example was Amazon, where Amazon, there were like maybe two people who Jeff Bezos were in position to succeed him.
02:09:16 ◼ ► And he got to say, OK, and walk away with his dignity intact, low-key, no drama, didn't affect the stock price.
02:09:30 ◼ ► But it's a more common practice for a CEO who steps aside on his own terms to hand the existing executive suite to his successor and then a bunch of those executives leave because they are like, hey, I was with him.
02:10:08 ◼ ► And so when Tim Cook's like, all right, I'm done, it's natural to go, yeah, do I need to really stay around?
02:10:14 ◼ ► Is it time for me to – I don't want to work for a new guy who was 15 years my – I'm 15 years his senior.
02:10:29 ◼ ► I mean, the average C-suite tenure in Fortune 500 companies is only seven years anyway, and Apple's average is over 10.
02:10:37 ◼ ► And so it's just natural that – and you look at the C-suite as it currently exists, most of them are pretty much retirement age.
02:10:55 ◼ ► And anything with helping – and this is why I kind of – I think that Cook is a better manager than people give him credit for.
02:11:18 ◼ ► I would be surprised if Federighi left because he still, I think, got a few years like him.
02:11:26 ◼ ► And despite what a lot of reports and people suggest, everything that I've read and heard about Federighi is that he doesn't have illusions of grandeur either.
02:11:39 ◼ ► I think he has a good working relationship with Ternus and he doesn't feel the need – he's not going to feel jaded if he doesn't get picked as the next CEO.
02:11:49 ◼ ► And so – but I do think that by, quote, unquote, clearing the board, which is very atypical for outgoing CEOs, it gives Cook, especially if he already has his replacement in mind, which I suspect he does, to go to Ternus or whomever is his successor and say, look, who within the company do you think would be best suited to this kind of position?
02:12:11 ◼ ► So Ternus can quietly build out his C-suite before he's even named and then everybody's ready to go on day one and they're all on board with the new guy.
02:12:24 ◼ ► Cook doesn't abandon ship entirely, which again, I don't think he will because I think come February he'll say, hey, I'm the chairman and he's going to stick around and he'll be there to help.
02:12:31 ◼ ► But he's not going to be a Bob Iger that tries to micromanage the day-to-day within it.
02:12:42 ◼ ► But I would be shocked if he's not an absolutely fantastic chairman just as he's been CEO.
02:12:48 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think the closeness of Apple and Disney – Jeff Williams literally just joined the Disney board.
02:12:58 ◼ ► And I keep thinking about the fact that if the timing had been a few decades different and Apple had been where they are now with Apple TV and Apple Originals and the shows and stuff like that, that it would have been Apple that bought Pixar, not Disney, right?
02:13:14 ◼ ► That the fact that Steve Jobs had two companies, a computer company and a film studio and sold the film studio to Disney.
02:13:26 ◼ ► But they get along well and Disney embraced Vision Pro to an extent maybe more than any other big company out there, right?
02:13:39 ◼ ► I think it's good for Tim Cook to look at that succession and if he'd maybe clarify his thinking and dotting his I's, crossing his T's.
02:13:48 ◼ ► And if it's Ternus really, really thinking and talking to John Ternus extensively to make sure that he's not a Bob Chapek, which I don't think he would be, but just sort of, hey, I better make triple sure on this one because I don't want to do an Iger and step up to the chairman position and a year later come back and here I am again.
02:14:11 ◼ ► And that's why I think that's why we've seen all of these CEO potential successors fairly front and center for the last several years.
02:14:21 ◼ ► I think that's why Jeff Williams, despite being very Cook-esque and having, honestly, sorry, Jeff, pretty terrible on-screen presence.
02:14:29 ◼ ► As much as in the keynotes, he was rumored for years to be Tim Cook's replacement and or back up in case something happened to Cook.
02:14:37 ◼ ► I think that if Tim Cook had been hit by a bus or whatever the proverbial sudden exit would be, I think the emergency, we need a replacement in an emergency or just a medical condition where they needed a temporary CEO like Cook did with Jobs several times while he was battling his health issues.
02:14:57 ◼ ► I do think that's why he was front and center on keynotes with a, not a bad presence, but I think a presence that made Tim Cook seem dynamic.
02:15:12 ◼ ► And his on-screen and in-person development has been pretty substantial over the last few years.
02:15:18 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think that that's one reason why so many people, and I don't think it would be, if surprise, surprise, it turns out that it's not John Ternus, that it is Craig Federighi, none of us are going to be shocked.
02:15:46 ◼ ► Like, this is back to the early 90s of Michael Spindler hiding under his desk and stories like that.
02:16:08 ◼ ► And I think one reason so many people think that might seem likely is that he is the most dynamic presence on stage.
02:16:27 ◼ ► The Peter Principle, where in a large organization, people tend to rise to their level of incompetence, right?
02:16:35 ◼ ► And you keep getting promotions until you get promoted to a position that you're not good at.
02:16:44 ◼ ► That if somebody in a large organization with a lot of levels of hierarchy, that somebody who's really good at their current level, you move them up.
02:17:03 ◼ ► But I do get the opinion from what I've heard about him and the times I have interacted with him backstage at events and stuff like that.
02:17:11 ◼ ► I think that he sort of intuitively recognizes the Peter Principle and that rising to lead all of Apple's software is like where he belongs.
02:17:27 ◼ ► There's no reason for him to feel like he's overlooked or not famous or not renowned or doesn't isn't built a resume.
02:17:45 ◼ ► I know he said it on my show a few times that like he like one of his hobbies is writing like iPhone and Mac apps in his spare time.
02:17:54 ◼ ► And so like when they're in meetings talking about like the Swift programming language or Swift UI, like he's thinking like a developer, like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.
02:18:06 ◼ ► He's talking from that perspective that may not apply to any of the other areas of Apple.
02:18:11 ◼ ► And maybe Ternus, on the other hand, we haven't seen it because we've only seen him in the context of hardware announcements.
02:18:16 ◼ ► But maybe he does have interests and enthusiasm above and beyond just leading the hardware.
02:18:26 ◼ ► Yeah, and like I mentioned, I think there's this perception that in organizations, particularly when you get to the C-suite, that every single person that is in any kind of VPP capacity aspire to the CEO.
02:18:39 ◼ ► And I think that there's a certain type of person that you have to be to get to any of those positions.
02:18:44 ◼ ► However, especially if you're happy and you're in a position where you're validated and have the ability to do stuff.
02:18:51 ◼ ► And like you mentioned, particularly with Apple, more so than a lot of other companies, people are not – they're not there for the cash.
02:18:59 ◼ ► They're not – they're there because they want to change the world and they want to get on the subway one time a year where they're not taking their limo.
02:19:05 ◼ ► And they see everybody using the thing that their team helped design and it's bigger than that.
02:19:10 ◼ ► And that's why I think it's not – I wouldn't be surprised if Federico even presented the opportunity and he just was like, no.
02:19:21 ◼ ► And in as much as the new CEO is someone I have rapport with that will let me keep doing kind of what I think is best in the kind of vertical.
02:19:29 ◼ ► I wouldn't be at all shocked if there's just – there's no interest in – it's not a I feel betrayed because I've been skipped over or whatever.
02:19:36 ◼ ► It's just a – it turns out these guys that are really professional, bold, that don't lead, are pretty professional and they know how to lead, you know?
02:19:48 ◼ ► There was a famous story or famous in talk show lore where I had Eddie Q and Craig Federighi on remote.
02:20:03 ◼ ► But there was a story where Eddie was having a problem with his iMac and Craig came over to his house to fix it.
02:20:18 ◼ ► And so I think if Tim Cook went aside and said to Lisa Jackson, hey, what are you thinking, you know, about your career?
02:20:30 ◼ ► He might have said, well, I think it would be better if you did it at the end of 2025 because I'm thinking about leaving – I'm going to transition to chairman in 2026.
02:20:39 ◼ ► And I think it would be better if the people on the fence at the end of their careers stepped aside before the transition than after to avoid the – again, with Cook here, the whole reason we're talking about this is that all of these departures happening in a week created this perception that there's turmoil.
02:21:01 ◼ ► Well, imagine if something like that happened with a new CEO in place, how much more they'd be like, wow, the Apple named a new CEO and all the executives are leaving.
02:21:14 ◼ ► Yeah, well, and that's what a Yale researcher discovered is that average turnover when there's a new CEO is 30%, which is substantial.
02:21:31 ◼ ► There are not a lot of companies that are operating so well where things are going so great that they don't have to worry about – like most companies that are getting massive turnover are because they're imploding, right?
02:21:45 ◼ ► It's not typical to have a company that has been so successful and so stable and so secured for as long as Apple and particularly so being that Apple is in the public eye more than any other publicly traded company on the planet.
02:22:02 ◼ ► And that's why I think it's all the more important that it comes from Cook, who by every measure is one of the best CEOs of all time.
02:22:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and so I also conversely think that the other executives like Eddie – just to name two, Eddie Q and Jaws, who are both I think around 60, 61 and have both been at Apple for 35, 40 years.
02:22:27 ◼ ► If they don't leave before the transition, I think it's because they don't plan to leave in the next two, three, four years, you know, that they plan to stay until they're 65, 66.
02:22:38 ◼ ► And if they don't leave before this transition happens, which I firmly believe is going to happen, it's probably throughout 2026.
02:22:47 ◼ ► I think it will start with Cook taking Levinson's spot as the chairman of the board and a dual role, which people will –
02:22:56 ◼ ► And some kind of further hints like to the Financial Times that succession planning is proceeding and everybody's in agreement and just make – so don't be surprised, but maybe it's not early in the year.
02:23:08 ◼ ► Maybe it's later in the year and that he's going to see the iPhone – he wants to see the iPhone foldable come out as the feather in his cap or – I don't know.
02:23:35 ◼ ► And so I kind of feel bad for them that they probably had this planned months or maybe even like a year in advance.
02:23:52 ◼ ► So I wouldn't be surprised if it's like a year from now when Cook – not Christmas week, but early December or late November or something like that.
02:24:07 ◼ ► And you give the successor time to be able to be integrated, to be kind of shown to the public.
02:24:13 ◼ ► But then you're not around so damn long that by the time you finally get out of the way, the new CEO can't do anything, a la Bob Chapik and Disney.
02:24:26 ◼ ► And Ternus has been in WWDC before because a couple years ago when they announced the new M2 MacBook Airs, they happened at WWDC.
02:24:35 ◼ ► But if Ternus has a speaking spot in the WWDC keynote too, even though it's usually a software thing where Federighi is the star because it's about software, it's like, hey, we're putting John Ternus in everything this year.
02:24:47 ◼ ► Whether it's hardware or software related or not, we're all going to be talking in the second week of June like, hey, why'd they put Ternus in the keynote?
02:25:02 ◼ ► I think with Q and Joswiak, I think those guys might, Phil Schiller-esque, stay around forever anyway.
02:25:08 ◼ ► But I think Deidre O'Brien is also one very soon to probably announce intentions to retire and or to be on board for another three, five years.
02:25:39 ◼ ► And I think by all accounts has the reason there were lots of complaints about the Angela Arntz retail operation,
02:25:46 ◼ ► that it was a little too boutique-y, a little too luxury-focused, a little too aligned with the Johnny Ive Apple Watch.
02:26:02 ◼ ► And I think Angela Arntz was there for the $20,000 Apple Watches and some of the flashier Apple stores.
02:26:23 ◼ ► And I think Deirdre O'Brien would say that's exactly what I want to hear, that nobody's complaining about the stores.
02:26:29 ◼ ► And if you don't talk about who's leading or running the stores, that's the way it should be.
02:26:46 ◼ ► If Tim Cook and Jeff Williams were in a car accident together and both were incapacitated,
02:26:58 ◼ ► I think Deirdre O'Brien could have been the one who is the temporary CEO for a stint waiting for Tim Cook to recuperate or something like that.
02:27:10 ◼ ► But again, if it doesn't happen, then I bet she's planning to be here for quite a while.
02:27:31 ◼ ► I will definitely link to the videos we've talked about extensively here in the show notes.
02:27:46 ◼ ► We're finally to the point that if I'm not the top recommendation, I'm at least second or third.