00:00:10 ◼ ► Yeah, it turns out if you want to take yourself and put you on a tube, we got the platform for you.
00:00:26 ◼ ► I love helping people, and I get the opportunity to help people at YouTube scale, which is once in a lifetime.
00:00:42 ◼ ► But it's like the stats on how much the amount of video that gets uploaded to YouTube every hour of every day.
00:01:00 ◼ ► I mean, I think that's going to be one of the themes for our discussion today, is just how hard it is to scale.
00:01:21 ◼ ► But it's possible, though, for the librarians to have a sense of how much content is in the library.
00:01:33 ◼ ► If they tried and they had nothing else to do, just sleep, eat, and try to read the whole library, you're not going to catch up.
00:01:42 ◼ ► But YouTube is at such a different scale that I don't really think that somebody like you could even fathom how much video is being uploaded per hour.
00:01:57 ◼ ► And every year at VidCon, he does a presentation on the culture, everything from me at the zoo to double rainbow to skippity toilet.
00:02:03 ◼ ► And just one is the immensity of YouTube, but also now, and I don't know if Jonas is too old for this already, but like the current generation, they don't have the singular points of focus that we did.
00:02:19 ◼ ► There are all these micro fandoms and there is no shared culture anymore, which in and of itself is just fascinating.
00:02:52 ◼ ► And so, of course, it's very different and not just disparate, but because I guess the difference is when I was Jonas's age, he's a senior in college.
00:03:04 ◼ ► The big deal was the proliferation of cable TV channels and that by the mid to late 90s, when I was his age, nobody was watching only the big three networks in the U.S., right?
00:03:22 ◼ ► It was no longer about the shared experience of, hey, everybody's watching ABC, NBC or CBS.
00:03:40 ◼ ► But it was sort of like that, that those were the Seinfeld was one of the last shows that that happened with where the whole country kind of anybody who you'd think might be watching the Seinfeld finale watched it that Thursday night.
00:03:52 ◼ ► And I think it was in the context of that, we're like, hey, we used to have shared things like this all the time.
00:03:57 ◼ ► Like every couple months, there'd be like a big event that everybody knew about and watched.
00:04:14 ◼ ► And it seems a lot closer that the 80-some or whatever number of cable channels we had to flip through in the late 90s is a lot closer to only having three major broadcast networks than today's video streaming world is to that.
00:04:32 ◼ ► Because it is, I was about to say, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions.
00:04:38 ◼ ► It's still a niche of the number of people who put themselves out there and create content, but if it's like a 90-10-1 rule, but if the 1% of the smartphone-owning world is filming themselves and putting themselves on TikTok or YouTube or whatever, that's like tens of millions of people.
00:05:02 ◼ ► She uploaded her first video 20 years ago, and it was basically her and I think Alex Lindsay, maybe Leo, uploading back then.
00:05:14 ◼ ► And she had like Chad Vader on and Kevin Rose and the big people on and like Jeff Smith.
00:05:25 ◼ ► And now there's just millions and I think there's 3 million YouTube partners and probably 30-40 million YouTube creators and bloggers.
00:05:44 ◼ ► Well, one of the things I really do admire about YouTube, and it comes up on this show with more and more frequency because I've been doing this show for so long and I've been writing Daring Fireball for so long.
00:06:15 ◼ ► And when there is some reason for me to call back to an old post, it just happened recently.
00:06:27 ◼ ► A hardware executive who kind of took the fall for the antenna gate with the iPhone 4 in 2010.
00:06:40 ◼ ► You know, and when I go back and reference old posts and there are still links, I sometimes will go through and find Internet Archive links and update my old links to point to ones that still function.
00:06:52 ◼ ► And I guess it's a longstanding to-do and maybe, I don't know, at some point maybe try to automate or pay somebody to go through and fix as many of them as possible in the archive.
00:07:04 ◼ ► Now that they're shuttering sites like iMore and Antec, I think some of those links have expired already.
00:07:10 ◼ ► But YouTube is one of those things where like an old YouTube link, if it's not still there, it was because it got taken down by a copyright violation for a reason.
00:07:24 ◼ ► And there used to be, and I'm kind of glad they gave up, that Apple used to sort of pursue people who put up like an old Macworld Expo keynote from before Apple was doing it.
00:07:58 ◼ ► And so in addition to that phenomenal scale of what gets uploaded every day and how much of the daily viewership is, of course, driven by new content, right?
00:08:11 ◼ ► The archive of what YouTube has is just probably in terms of actual size digitally is probably the biggest library there is in the internet.
00:08:23 ◼ ► And for everything, fixing your washing machine, learning how to cook consomme, just, yeah.
00:08:41 ◼ ► For years, when you were at iMore and on your own, I had you on at the end of the year for an Apple year in review show.
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00:10:11 ◼ ► When you're ready to eat, you just heat it up easily, super easily, often in the microwave.
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00:12:33 ◼ ► And rather than trying to assemble my notes this morning, I've been, thanks to a weekly or monthly reminder, keeping notes.
00:12:43 ◼ ► At the end of every month, I've been doing this, both for this episode of the talk show.
00:12:48 ◼ ► And then I'm going to use the same set of notes when I do my Apple report card for Jason Snell's Six Colors.
00:13:11 ◼ ► Because that was when I wrote the piece titled, Siri is super dumb and getting dumber, about asking Siri with Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT integration to tell me who won a bunch of Super Bowls.
00:13:30 ◼ ► I still think there's like a couple Siri servers in Eddie's back closet that have never been updated.
00:13:47 ◼ ► It's funny looking back at January when I guess, I really do, I mean, spoiler for coming months on this review.
00:13:57 ◼ ► I guess I was still thinking, hey, this is supposed to get soon midway through this OS cycle.
00:14:11 ◼ ► But I have to say, just thinking back to where my headspace was a year ago, and I remember when I wrote that series, Super Dumb and Getting Dumber, not that I didn't believe it.
00:14:22 ◼ ► And I'm not going to try to say I predicted in January that this whole thing is going to be canceled.
00:14:32 ◼ ► I guess I was surprised that they just outright canceled it and said, we'll come back next year with something new.
00:14:38 ◼ ► But it just smelled fishy, even at the time, and just sort of seemed, I hope they're right, but we'll see.
00:14:50 ◼ ► Like, it was interesting that they based the entire marketing for that year's iPhones on Apple Intelligence because it was not a hardware differentiator.
00:14:58 ◼ ► And maybe they figured they lacked enough hardware differentiation, then they had to go with some software model.
00:15:07 ◼ ► It was still built for Apple Intelligence, which they'd said wasn't shipping, but they never got rid of it.
00:15:33 ◼ ► And I think I often say this about Apple marketing is that, and there's no, it's always been the case.
00:15:40 ◼ ► I think all the way back to Shiller's title before Next was acquired in 96 and Steve Jobs came back and it was like, hey, this Phil Shiller guy is good.
00:15:59 ◼ ► But I think there's a general perception in the world, and maybe this is how, quote unquote, marketing works at many companies where the product or service, whatever it is, is made.
00:16:12 ◼ ► It's designed, it's designed, and then at the end, it's handed off to the, quote, marketing team, and they're like, okay, now you make packaging and ads for it and tell the world about it.
00:16:32 ◼ ► And it's not that they're the ones who are single-handedly driving the design and engineering of the products.
00:16:38 ◼ ► It's all sort of collaborative, but they are involved in the creation and decisions from concept forward.
00:16:47 ◼ ► And then when they do the part of marketing that is advertising and packaging and stuff, it's not like they've just been handed it.
00:16:55 ◼ ► It's sort of like the culmination of a process that they've been involved with in the beginning, and they kind of know what to make the ads about because they've been there.
00:17:06 ◼ ► And it's, well, here's the main thing that we've been thinking about for the iPhone 17 Pro from the beginning five years ago or whenever that project started.
00:17:20 ◼ ► It obviously is easier to market an actually good product than to market a not good product, right?
00:17:28 ◼ ► Because no matter what, the job of the marketing team is to make it seem like it's a good product.
00:17:43 ◼ ► Well, they do have a Marcoms team that is, they just have a much smaller Marcoms team than a lot of companies would have because the product marketing drives so much.
00:17:51 ◼ ► But I keep going back to that old guy English when he was still doing Kicking Bear, and he did that article on, do you even talk to each other?
00:18:00 ◼ ► And I remember this happened to us at WWDC once where someone came up and said, I do X, Y, Z.
00:18:06 ◼ ► And they were the same thing, and they had never met each other and never had a conversation with each other.
00:18:11 ◼ ► And it's stupefying that with the level of coordination Apple has, but with the level of secrecy they have, there can be things that are very important that aren't cross-pollinated.
00:18:21 ◼ ► And I think that's sometimes where you get that situation where the engineers are going, what are they saying?
00:18:32 ◼ ► We can move forward to February, and that brings us to the iPhone 16e, which is one of those things where I'm like, oh, yeah, remember the iPhone 16e?
00:18:58 ◼ ► I love the strategic shift from SE models every irregular, what, three, four years, I think the schedule was.
00:19:09 ◼ ► But every three, four years, they would come out with a new iPhone SE based on some two- or three-year-old or four-year-old flagship iPhone, sort of that's the shape, that's the screen.
00:19:22 ◼ ► It's years behind, a few years behind, but always quite a bit ahead of whatever the previous SE model was.
00:19:33 ◼ ► Right, and until the 16e, the iPhone SE was still on the old, believe it or not, like a year ago today, they were still selling a phone with a home button.
00:19:51 ◼ ► That the iPhone 12 months ago in December 2024 was still, still had a brand new device support for a home button with Touch ID.
00:20:17 ◼ ► And I guess we're on the cusp of looking at a 17e, which is widely rumored, you know, and that's why they put the number in it instead of calling it the new SE, that they're kind of shifted to a, hey, we'll update this one every year too.
00:20:30 ◼ ► But the thing we've, for a long time, I mean, like me, like really decades back to the 90s or even the 80s, Apple Watcher is what would Apple do if they had a 50% plus market share hit product?
00:20:50 ◼ ► And so many of the excuses that were given for why PCs sucked in certain ways was, well, you try managing 90% market share and keeping everybody happy.
00:21:11 ◼ ► The more users you have with a product like that, it's inherently slower to change or to introduce major, oh, it used to work like this with a home button, but now there's no button in it.
00:21:23 ◼ ► The whole display goes edge to edge and you swipe up from the bottom instead of a button and instead of touch ID, there's face ID.
00:21:35 ◼ ► And so one way of doing it is to be paralyzed and just never change, which is a pretty good way for a company with a dominant product to eventually die or at least lose their dominant position.
00:21:45 ◼ ► Or you can kind of shift to, hey, we'll keep putting leading edge stuff out there for people who want it, but we'll also keep the sort of comforting legacy thing around way longer than we used to like when Steve Jobs was around.
00:22:05 ◼ ► Yeah, I think when the iPhone 10 came out and that was the first iPhone without the home button, they very wisely put out the iPhone 8 as an escape hatch.
00:22:13 ◼ ► Because a bunch of their market share was not people like us, like not nerds who wanted the latest and greatest technology, but it really was people for whom smartphones were previously unapproachable, like they were trios or Windows PCs or even like BlackBerrys.
00:22:29 ◼ ► And they gave them many years of that and people would naturally go get new iPhones and get to the full screen.
00:22:46 ◼ ► When it first came out, I thought that they just wanted to deprecate faster and still have devices that could run Apple intelligence.
00:22:53 ◼ ► Assuming a perfect world where Apple intelligence shipped on time, you needed enough RAM to run it.
00:23:02 ◼ ► And it was unclear if the previous – because usually they – the next year, the old ones drop $100.
00:23:06 ◼ ► And the lowest end one, it wasn't clear it would be a great Apple intelligence experience.
00:23:10 ◼ ► And I think this also let them have a low-end model that come this year if they want to keep it around and drop it even lower.
00:23:24 ◼ ► And I think Apple intelligence in particular with its RAM requirements, which to their credit, they've actually admitted, yes, it needs a lot of – it needs – I forget what the minimum is for a phone.
00:23:42 ◼ ► It's like the one feature ever in the now close to, what, 18, 19-year-old history of the iPhone where Apple has ever just come right out and talked about RAM.
00:23:53 ◼ ► Well, they didn't need to before because Android was run on an interpreter for many years, and it needed – like the more RAM you gave it, the better.
00:24:01 ◼ ► But Apple wrote native software for a native platform that they controlled, and they could be incredibly RAM efficient.
00:24:07 ◼ ► I laugh, and it is funny when you understand that these things are just computers, and computers need RAM, and, of course, more RAM is better computationally.
00:24:18 ◼ ► You and I talking about it years ago that it's not just, though, oh, they're penny-pinching and they don't want to put more RAM in.
00:24:29 ◼ ► Like all – you know, so putting – if RAM were free, and we all – anybody who's paying attention lately knows RAM is definitely still not free.
00:24:41 ◼ ► But even if it were, there still is a limit to how much RAM Apple would want to put in an iPhone because the more they put in, the more energy it would consume.
00:24:51 ◼ ► So even the cost of goods to put the RAM in aside, there'd still be a balancing act of how much RAM would suit the most people and hit the sweet spot of managing energy efficiency to power all the RAM that's running versus the benefits of having more RAM available for software features.
00:25:18 ◼ ► And that's the other thing, too, is even if it were free, it would be ridiculous – or not ridiculous, but it would be sort of a waste to ship all iPhones with 32 gigs of RAM when iOS is managing it and just fine and people aren't using more than 8 gigs or something like that.
00:25:34 ◼ ► And it is sort of the downside of the – even the best iPhone you can buy, you don't get to spec things like that.
00:25:45 ◼ ► There is a MacBook Pro where, of course, the default $1,500, $1,600 MacBook Pro comes with – what is it?
00:25:58 ◼ ► Nobody is going to make the default go up to the maximum of 128 gigabytes or whatever it's up to at this point, right?
00:26:05 ◼ ► But if you want 128 gigabytes of RAM in your MacBook, it's frigging awesome that you can do that now.
00:26:15 ◼ ► Kind of wish they were, but I kind of understand why they're not and would open up the whole Pandora's box of take up an hour of podcast time to talk about the philosophical differences between a personal computer that the user ultimately has ultimate control over and the sort of console computing approach of iOS and iPad.
00:26:40 ◼ ► But also just like unified memory versus putting it on a daughter, like a sibling board.
00:26:49 ◼ ► But I think – and I do think the 16e was probably in the pipeline before Apple intelligence was like a sure thing for that year.
00:27:05 ◼ ► But I think it would have happened even if Apple intelligence had been announced the year later for multiple reasons.
00:27:13 ◼ ► And I think the, hey, we should get our entry model, the thing that used to be the SE models.
00:27:21 ◼ ► It would be better to get these on an annual schedule too, not for Apple intelligence in particular, but for anything like Apple intelligence that they don't know is going to be a big deal in the year 2029 right now.
00:27:39 ◼ ► But will become a big deal in the year 2029, unforeseen in the year 2025 when you're planning the phone lineup three, four years out.
00:27:49 ◼ ► That if you keep the platform moving and you have plans to put the latest generation silicon in the low-end consumer phone every year, all sorts of good things happen about, oh, well, we can actually bring this feature to the low-end phone because it has this, that, or the other thing, whatever it is.
00:28:12 ◼ ► Whether it's the camera sensor or some other capability of the system on a chip, it's just insurance against future software needs.
00:28:23 ◼ ► Like maybe it wouldn't have had as much RAM, but it's like in another parallel world, again, where Apple intelligence did ship, a lot of the choices that Apple made, because Tim Cook has been bullish on AI for years.
00:28:33 ◼ ► He's always said it's one of the biggest things coming in the future, and they've put a lot of work into their neural engines, into their matrix multipliers, their neural accelerators, like just across their entire silicon stack.
00:28:43 ◼ ► They could take advantage of all this technology, but I think LLMs was a bit of a surprise to a lot of people, like just the rise of chatbots, and those need a lot of RAM.
00:28:54 ◼ ► Like we've gone all the way back to having the interface of Zork, but they need a lot of RAM, and that might just be the differentiator for Apple Intelligence was adding more RAM to it.
00:29:36 ◼ ► This has sort of sharper corners, but sharper in a way that feels sort of premium, or not cheap, but just different.
00:29:49 ◼ ► It is not an iPhone Pro caliber camera for the year 2025, but it is very, very credible as a camera.
00:29:58 ◼ ► You know, and the iPhone Air, which we'll get to, I guess, when we talk about September, has a much better single camera than the 16e, as you would hope for the price.
00:30:08 ◼ ► But as you might think, I don't know if that's possible, given the space constraints of the iPhone Air.
00:30:27 ◼ ► I kind of like the idea of, I don't have to decide which camera, because there is only one camera, but it's pretty damn good.
00:30:36 ◼ ► It sounds like if you only look at spec checklists, well, one camera lens is obviously worse slash less than three.
00:30:48 ◼ ► But there's this other trade-off of, I don't know, it's kind of nice when you go to the ketchup aisle that the main ketchup is Heinz, right?
00:30:56 ◼ ► There's the famous difference between ketchup and mustard, where everybody knows Heinz ketchup is the best ketchup and the most popular ketchup.
00:31:02 ◼ ► And while there might be other ketchups available there, just get the Heinz and you're done.
00:31:29 ◼ ► I don't know how well it's selling, but I hope Apple's happy with the results, because I think it's a much better solution than the iPhone SE strategy was for years.
00:31:46 ◼ ► And the original iPhone SE sold really well, but it seemed like they could never figure out if it was because it was small or cheap or both.
00:32:08 ◼ ► Like, people love the iPhone Pro, buy a ton of iPhone Pros, also buy a ton of just iPhones.
00:32:19 ◼ ► Yeah, and the thing I noticed, and I was paying attention to it just because in my extended, not my immediate family, but my extended family, over Christmas, there were a couple people who got new iPhones.
00:32:30 ◼ ► And they all got the 17 Pro, and because they're not immediate, nobody asked me, this wasn't like an Ask John, close family member.
00:32:44 ◼ ► But the thing I noticed, and it's sort of like the, I don't know, maybe they didn't go away, but I think they seem back more than ever, which is the carrier subsidy programs.
00:32:58 ◼ ► And I see the commercials all the time because it's NFL season, and this is the four months of the year where I see TV commercials because I'm watching live football games.
00:33:08 ◼ ► And there are all sorts of live commercials for AT&T and T-Mobile and Verizon, and they're often talking about, come on in and get an iPhone 17 Pro, I don't know, discount or free or whatever.
00:33:26 ◼ ► I mean, I've known that even at the origin of the iPhone back in 2007, 2008, when it was AT&T only, and only available with an AT&T contract.
00:33:38 ◼ ► I don't, there wasn't even an option to buy it off carrier because there was no other carrier it supported, right?
00:33:49 ◼ ► There's no point buying an unlocked iPhone when to unlock it, it would have to be on AT&T otherwise.
00:33:55 ◼ ► So we didn't really know what the actual, and I guess the subsidy, it was sort of unsubsidized in 2007, and then they figured out, hey, we can claim it.
00:34:08 ◼ ► You can get one for $299 or $199 or something if you agree to this contract, and that made sales go up.
00:34:17 ◼ ► And it's like, I guess this is how phones work, and it's not how Apple computers or iPods, whichever one you think is a better example, is it MacBooks because iPhones were so expensive or iPods because they fit in your pocket and started with an eye?
00:34:35 ◼ ► But whichever one, Apple wasn't in, never before in the business of selling products where the product wasn't, here's what it costs with our profit margin, you give us the money, then you own the device.
00:34:47 ◼ ► And those contracts seem to be roaring back, at least in the U.S., based on my extended family.
00:34:58 ◼ ► But, for example, I was talking to somebody on Christmas, and they traded in an iPhone 11 Pro with a cracked screen.
00:35:10 ◼ ► But a six-year-old phone, cracked screen, and got $1,100 from the carrier to put towards the price of a 17 Pro.
00:35:38 ◼ ► The phone does have to actually work and be usable and have a battery, and they'll give you more than it's worth to get you to buy.
00:36:01 ◼ ► The 17 Pro, I think, because they're just the most expensive, and the whole selling point of the 16E is it's the least expensive.
00:36:14 ◼ ► I think they want to get you to, oh, I'll get the most expensive phone, but I don't have to pay this eye-dropping $1,000-plus price.
00:36:24 ◼ ► I'll get it for seemingly at the moment of making the transaction a lot less, and I'm just agreeing to stay on a carrier who I had no plans to leave in the next few years anyway, right?
00:36:41 ◼ ► And it's also great business for Apple because for years they take those trade-in phones and use them in emerging markets where they don't have competitive new phones.
00:37:08 ◼ ► Yeah, and they often run these experiments like the Mini where there's two and the plus for the new phone, the 15 plus, 16 plus, because they have to plan them out so far in advance where they can't just wait and see how the first one sells and then adjust the next year.
00:37:31 ◼ ► So maybe the fact that all the rumors are pointing towards the 17E next month or February or March or whatever month it'll be this year, this coming year.
00:37:57 ◼ ► And for somebody who just for anybody who is like a recommendation from a family member who's I don't love my phone.
00:38:17 ◼ ► At this point, I'd tell them to wait for the 17E, I guess, right now at the turn of the year.
00:38:23 ◼ ► But if they really are like, I don't care, I'd say, well, I would honestly say, well, then go buy the 16E.
00:38:27 ◼ ► But it's a great phone that I would recommend wholeheartedly in a way that I wouldn't have recommended the SE a year earlier.
00:38:41 ◼ ► And I think it was past time for everybody to get over the home button, square corner screen era and get on board with the new stuff.
00:38:52 ◼ ► I think they're actually getting to a point where the silicon was so powerful, it wouldn't fit in those smaller frames anymore.
00:39:43 ◼ ► I do think that that piece, for all the consternation it generated and the sort of cold reception from Apple, executives towards it, culminating in their not participating in my live show last year.
00:40:03 ◼ ► Well, it's not exactly tit for tat, but it's, and I don't think it's, hey, you wrote this, we're not going to do it.
00:40:11 ◼ ► But I think it was, hey, you wrote this and sort of, and while they never said to me, you've got us dead to rights, it also was the case that they didn't have the next thing out.
00:40:23 ◼ ► If they had been ready to get the next thing out between March and June, then I wouldn't have written the piece.
00:40:32 ◼ ► But it would have made for, I guess, from their perception, an uncomfortable interview.
00:40:47 ◼ ► I think, hey, what the hell, the basic premise is, what the hell were they doing announcing this as coming within the next year, last June?
00:41:00 ◼ ► If they're clearly at the time when they announced it, it was on such shaky footing that they couldn't even film and show actual demonstrations of the alpha level software.
00:41:17 ◼ ► And obviously, the idea that some people read my article and thought that I was insinuating that Apple just fabricated the whole thing and that it was a pure fantasy that they were only then starting to engineer.
00:41:32 ◼ ► I mean, and of course, or the notion that everybody at Apple knew that it wasn't going to ship or was unlikely to ship.
00:41:45 ◼ ► But Apple executives are not like dip in and out of Apple like they're there for 18 months.
00:42:02 ◼ ► And the higher you go in the company, especially in the product areas, these are people who've that this is their life's work is what they're doing at Apple.
00:42:11 ◼ ► So they're not going to advocate releasing something they don't think is actually going to ship.
00:42:37 ◼ ► But I'm sure that there were people who were skeptical and dubious at the time who thought, I don't know that we should announce this.
00:42:44 ◼ ► And like I wrote in my piece, why not wait till September and announce it along with the iPhones and see how much progress it made June, July, August into September.
00:43:02 ◼ ► They should be able to show demos that wouldn't have to be edited for the demonstration purposes.
00:43:11 ◼ ► And if they couldn't do that by September, it would be even not necessarily proof that they wouldn't be able to ship come March or April, but certainly indicative that they're a lot less likely to than whoever it was who thought they could in June.
00:43:30 ◼ ► And if if anything, even more so with the news now, again, this hinges on the singular reporting of Mark Gurman.
00:43:40 ◼ ► And we haven't heard anything new about it in, I think, about two months that Apple has at least two months ago on the cusp of a deal to get a white label version of Gemini to power the upcoming new series slash Apple intelligence features.
00:43:58 ◼ ► If true, that wasn't the case when they announced Apple intelligence in June of twenty twenty four.
00:44:04 ◼ ► And it wasn't the thing that they canceled in March of twenty twenty five based on Gemini models.
00:44:17 ◼ ► They just threw out what plan A was and are going with a plan B that didn't exist at the time and therefore makes it seem like an enormous own goal to have pre announced it at WWDC twenty twenty four.
00:44:37 ◼ ► I don't know which one you think is worse, but to make at least that one particular commercial with Bella Ramsey showing features that were predicated on on those things that were announced that they had to pull and is now the subject of several, I guess, false advertising class action lawsuits.
00:44:57 ◼ ► I think the whole thing is fascinating, like Apple often I don't say often, but like Apple has their products that get delayed and their features that get delayed.
00:45:11 ◼ ► And it's because it was supposed to ship a lot earlier or like the Apple TV famously went through a ton of permutations before 2016.
00:45:19 ◼ ► When like the current version of the Apple TV came out, but like all of that stuff is internally don't go and announce it and then it doesn't come.
00:45:26 ◼ ► Steve Jobs famously mocked all of those CES announcements where they would show the future of technology that didn't come.
00:45:33 ◼ ► So the decision tree to actually, what you said, like to actually announce it and double down on it and make it like the primary feature for the most important product at the company.
00:45:46 ◼ ► Like, I think there'll be an Apple University case study on that at some point, if not already.
00:45:51 ◼ ► If Apple University, if Apple, that's a whole other argument as to whether Apple University remains what it was meant to be at this state and time.
00:46:06 ◼ ► I think I would like to think that I'm very forgiving as a professional critic, analyst, observer of the company in the industry or in my personal life of things that are like easily overlooked.
00:46:22 ◼ ► Who could have known that that was going to cause the sink to back up and then overflow or whatever?
00:46:30 ◼ ► It was an honest mistake or like an unforeseen event or catastrophe or something that happened.
00:46:44 ◼ ► I would say one of the biggest tentpole announcements out of WWDC in recent memory was not an oversight like that.
00:46:53 ◼ ► And it's clear that the software wasn't at the time it was announced was not close in their usual state of close to ready.
00:47:14 ◼ ► The first generation portrait, I forget which phone it was, maybe iPhone 7, whichever one, though, or 7 Plus.
00:47:26 ◼ ► The mobile me one, I think, is really apt, though, because like mobile me, I think when the forensics was done, it was the case of they brought in this person and they kept managing up saying, yeah, we'll get it done.
00:47:58 ◼ ► And it seems like where they get into trouble is when they have people who are very good at managing up.
00:48:19 ◼ ► They don't penetrate through the layers and find out what the ground truth is, even when they make like a big mobile me announcement or now like a big Apple intelligence announcement.
00:48:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess the comparison to mobile me was – and again, for people who don't remember, there was – man, how many generations did it go through?
00:49:08 ◼ ► We need to get more serious about having a cloud more than just giving people email and shitty sync, right?
00:49:26 ◼ ► And you told the story like Steve Jobs famously went through there with a flamethrower saying, what is LightCloud supposed to do?
00:49:41 ◼ ► And maybe that style of management has actually – it's not just that he was a singular personality.
00:50:06 ◼ ► But I think the standard that was held to – you know, and you can say, you know, we're laughing a little because I wasn't the one who was yelled at and neither were you.
00:50:16 ◼ ► I did – and I got – writing about that shook out some emails that I couldn't share that were shared with me under the – hey, I don't know how many people were there.
00:50:30 ◼ ► But the underlying thing came down to the meaning of why the fuck doesn't it do what you just said it's supposed to do, right?
00:50:37 ◼ ► If we decided it was going to do this, that, and the other thing, it needed to do this, that, and the other thing.
00:50:46 ◼ ► And anything other than that is sophistry or – and it's the way companies get led astray because it's what they're doing.
00:50:56 ◼ ► And it gets to that diversion that I mentioned before between the actual products and the product marketing, where the marketing is hewing to the story that it does this, that, and the other thing, and the product doesn't.
00:51:22 ◼ ► And then once you've agreed that that's fine, that diversion, I think, inevitably widens.
00:51:45 ◼ ► But when he talks about how companies evolve and you have a product company and after a while, like, you stop making products.
00:52:00 ◼ ► And I think every Apple enthusiast is afraid that there's that juncture where that's going to be true of Apple.
00:52:11 ◼ ► But it's very, very – I think it might even be the same interview where he – it was before the next reunification.
00:52:20 ◼ ► And he was asked, well, what would you – if you were in charge of Apple, what would you do with the Mac?
00:52:32 ◼ ► But I think what Jobs meant – and I'm not trying to make excuses or act as though he was never wrong.
00:52:38 ◼ ► And I think one of the things that's so admirable about him is that he would admit he was wrong after he had the solution.
00:52:47 ◼ ► And I think it was tough to convince that he was wrong, but he could be convinced that he was wrong.
00:52:52 ◼ ► And the way that he sort of Steve Jobs did would be – and these stories are all over the internet.
00:53:26 ◼ ► It was better than the more common way of an ego – perhaps egomaniacal leader never willing to admit they're wrong.
00:53:39 ◼ ► Like, compare and contrast with, I don't know, let's just say the current president of the United States.
00:53:45 ◼ ► There is a difference between never, ever backtracking on anything and euphemizing it by claiming it was your idea all along when you backtrack and go another way.
00:53:57 ◼ ► And it overshadowed the fact that Apple had to come out publicly and this probably wouldn't happen again because of what I wrote about later in the month, I guess.
00:54:14 ◼ ► But it was unusual and unclear to me at the time just how few people and outlets they shared the announcement that Apple intelligence was being delayed with.
00:54:26 ◼ ► I think it was literally just CNBC – I think Kit Lewing is his name, the reporter there.
00:54:35 ◼ ► Maybe Reuters and Daring Fireball were the three outlets that they gave the statement that on the cusp of what was scheduled to be Apple intelligence, what they had.
00:54:47 ◼ ► Here's the statement I got on Friday, March 7th from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, which was unusual that I got a spokesperson's name to put on it without being the verge and saying,
00:55:05 ◼ ► And in just the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduce new features like Type to Siri, which is a weird product to brag about, right?
00:55:13 ◼ ► You can just type in a box and product knowledge and added an integration with ChatGPT.
00:55:20 ◼ ► We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.
00:55:29 ◼ ► It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on those features, and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.
00:55:50 ◼ ► I don't know that I'd be on that short list at this point for a future one, but I hope so.
00:55:55 ◼ ► And I think what I wrote about it at first is probably why they thought to give it to me, to sort of put it in context.
00:56:08 ◼ ► And again, my initial take, it took me a while to think deeply about it and come up with the arguments that I made in the Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino piece, looking deeper at it.
00:56:19 ◼ ► And it's one of those things where both things can be true, where this is not a catastrophe, the fact that they delayed it for a year.
00:56:25 ◼ ► I really do think not just because it wasn't baked, but because I think they sort of panicked slightly.
00:56:39 ◼ ► I know AI hype is continuing to go onward, but in June of 2024, it was almost more, what's the word, unhinged, like pandemonium of, hey, maybe by a year from now, we won't even have operating systems.
00:57:09 ◼ ► I mean, and the equivalent would be that like in the late 90s, like when the iMac came out, should it just be a net computer, right?
00:57:18 ◼ ► Shouldn't all this stuff just all, you turn it on and it'll boot over the internet or something like that?
00:57:24 ◼ ► And it's like, I don't know, you put it in a one sentence summary and it sounds like an interesting idea.
00:57:35 ◼ ► In the future, your net computer will boot you to your personal airplanes flying you through the skies.
00:58:03 ◼ ► The, hey, we do have an Ultra version, but it's only in the Mac Studio and we're still not updating.
00:58:10 ◼ ► The Mac Pros is an interesting, hmm, what does this mean for the high end of Mac desktops, right?
00:58:20 ◼ ► Is this Apple's way of saying, hey, the Mac Studio is actually it and the Mac Pro is never going to be updated?
00:58:26 ◼ ► Or is there a shoe to drop in the M5 generation, which is where we'd be at at this point for a new Mac Pro?
00:58:37 ◼ ► I think it's just like Apple's scaling issues manifest differently in software and hardware, mostly because hardware is unforgiving.
00:58:52 ◼ ► Like that team, famously, Apple started making their own silicon and it was in-house and it's not like vendor silicon or anything.
00:58:58 ◼ ► But Apple's teams have never been huge and they're still not huge and they're responsible for a dizzying array of alphabet named chipsets now.
00:59:12 ◼ ► And there's just a limited capacity of those teams to push those things out, which is why I think you get the more popular ones more often and they have to very carefully stagger the other ones.
00:59:23 ◼ ► And they just didn't have time for an M4 Max Ultra and they didn't have time for a Mac Pro.
00:59:43 ◼ ► Because I'm not, selfishly, I'm not personally in the market for a Mac Pro if they do have one.
00:59:52 ◼ ► Like they're hitting my sweet spot perfectly, which is let me throw $5,000 or $6,000 at a 14-inch MacBook Pro and let me put, for my needs, an absurd amount of RAM in it.
01:00:07 ◼ ► I'm still using, my personal work Mac is still my M1 Max MacBook Pro from 2021 with, at the time, the maximum 64 gigabytes of RAM.
01:00:25 ◼ ► I really, I've told this story before, but a year ago when I spent a month, I don't think I actually wrote a review, but I've talked about it.
01:00:32 ◼ ► But I spent a month living on an M4 MacBook Pro with the, what do they call the matte display?
01:00:59 ◼ ► And I love that the dark option, the dark aluminum anodization is now actually very dark, not just ever so slightly.
01:01:16 ◼ ► And when I switched back after a month on it to my personal, then at the time, three-year-old or whatever, M1 Max, but MacBook Pro, I couldn't feel any difference in performance at all.
01:01:35 ◼ ► And that, going from the new thing to my old thing, is the way for me to tell how fast the new thing is.
01:01:48 ◼ ► But then I very, this is the way, especially as a nerd, you very quickly acclimate to the new speed.
01:01:57 ◼ ► It's like, you know, if you're used to driving a race car that can only go 180 miles an hour, and then you get one that goes 190, you get, and you're a good race car driver, I'll bet, you quickly get acclimated to it.
01:02:22 ◼ ► And then they put you back in your car that only goes out, the max is out at 180, and you're like, this thing is so fucking slow.
01:02:33 ◼ ► And when I went back to my M1 MacBook Pro, I didn't notice anything that was even slightly slower.
01:02:49 ◼ ► I can't bring myself, though, to trade this in for a new one just to get the matte display and the darker aluminum when 90-some percent of my days I'm at my desk and I'm not even using the built-in display.
01:03:03 ◼ ► And then, of course, this would be the year where I had, like, a personal thing in September where I was out of the home for a month or more trying to get back to work at a place where I really needed the matte display.
01:04:05 ◼ ► But I'm so skeptical about the rumors about a touchscreen coming to the Mac that I think I want to buy the M5 that doesn't have a touchscreen as the last ever one.
01:04:14 ◼ ► And then if the touchscreen turns out to be a great idea that I actually like, I'll get to try it in a review unit and I'll sell my M5 one early.
01:04:23 ◼ ► I just want the touchscreen because then they can put macOS on the iPad and everyone will be quiet about that.
01:04:57 ◼ ► I don't, it's, I'd say a quiet month that we don't have much to talk about unless you think otherwise.
01:05:02 ◼ ► No, I think the only thing worth calling out there is something you've said often in the past is that Apple keeps having these legal battles over App Store and not over iPhone.
01:05:13 ◼ ► And I always wonder if that goes back to, there was this point where Tim Cook said they're going to double services revenue in two years.
01:05:22 ◼ ► And then after that, we started seeing like series after series of like really like penny pinching App Store policies where they really wanted to get every cent out of everybody.
01:05:30 ◼ ► And then they accomplished that, they doubled the services revenue and I thought, okay, this is all over.
01:05:34 ◼ ► But it never seemed like they let go of the idea like we really need to be a services business now and so much of the services revenue is App Store.
01:05:42 ◼ ► And I still don't know if it's worth the amount of like combat they've had to go into over App Store rather than their core businesses.
01:05:53 ◼ ► But I also think that the counter argument is, well, where's the downside for us pursuing it for Apple pursuing the route that they've taken?
01:06:16 ◼ ► The 500 million or whatever, Euro, I think I estimated it to $500 million, but it's roughly one-to-one.
01:06:39 ◼ ► I just remember that Phil Schiller email where he's like, do we need to keep doing this?
01:06:50 ◼ ► The one where he was like, where Schiller proposed like, hey, once we get to a billion dollar run rate, why don't we just keep cutting the commission to keep it at a billion?
01:07:00 ◼ ► I don't think there was as entered as evidence, anyone telling him to fuck off like Luca, but obviously it happened.
01:07:07 ◼ ► You know, I don't think they told Phil to fuck off, but I think they obviously chose a different route where they decided to keep the, rather than slowly decrease the commissions over the years to keep the run rate around the same.
01:07:33 ◼ ► If in some alternate universe where Steve Jobs had never gotten cancer or had beaten the cancer or stayed ahead of it for many more years, I still think Apple would have had to shift from the, what we know is the Jobs era strategy of taking their profit and putting it in the bank.
01:07:53 ◼ ► And just sitting on an ever-growing mountain of cash that's managed by the mysterious Braeburn capital, Braeburn being an Apple variety.
01:08:02 ◼ ► But when Jobs was CEO, they more or less, they were making large amounts of profits consistently for several years, especially in those last few years after the iPhone launched.
01:08:12 ◼ ► And they were just sitting on the cash and it was sort of, I think, very much when you hear about like my and your grandparents' generation who grew up in the depression and that they were familiar with the era of the, it's a wonderful life when there were runs on banks.
01:08:31 ◼ ► And if your money was in the first savings of Sioux City Bank and there was a run on your bank, you might lose your savings because it wasn't insured.
01:08:43 ◼ ► And I had old relatives when I was a kid who would talk about the fact that they kept their money in coffee cans hidden in their house somewhere where they wouldn't even want to tell their relatives.
01:08:54 ◼ ► And Apple almost went bankrupt and you've heard the stories like they couldn't, like people who, like Apple executives who remembered that wouldn't give you money to buy a server.
01:09:05 ◼ ► And there was a penny-pinching attitude or a, hey, we should protect ourselves with lots of cash.
01:09:16 ◼ ► And I think also that the scale just grew to the point where it was no longer feasible.
01:09:22 ◼ ► We can still have plenty of cash and we can do share buybacks and pay dividends and do things with the cash like that.
01:09:31 ◼ ► And so they've, I think, I'll bet they have more cash than they've ever had while doing record numbers of share buybacks and paying enormous dividends over the last 15 years to their shareholders.
01:09:44 ◼ ► I think the same thing could have been true with the commission rate for the app store where they could have gradually lowered the commission rate from a 30% to 25% to 20% and still grown the amount of money that they were generating from their commissions from the app store.
01:10:02 ◼ ► Maybe, you know, and there's some kind of argument in there, like with tax rates, where if the government wants to maximize the amount of income that the government generates, the tax, the ideal tax rate is not 100%.
01:10:19 ◼ ► If the only tax in a country was an income tax, just for the sake of simplicity, no sales tax, no VAT, just an income tax, taxing your citizens 100% would not maximize the amount of revenue the government would make because no one would work if they had to pay 100% in taxes or a few people would work, right?
01:10:43 ◼ ► And the ideal tax rate is not 0% because if you tax people 0%, they might think, hey, that's great.
01:10:54 ◼ ► The ideal tax rate is somewhere in between where it keeps people the most motivated to work and provides the – it's like a calculus problem where it maximizes –
01:11:07 ◼ ► it's the place where the government revenue and citizens' motivation to work harder is both maximized at a certain point.
01:11:17 ◼ ► And there's an ideal commission rate for something like the App Store where it may not make developers totally happy because there's going to be developers who want that to be zero.
01:11:42 ◼ ► And I think that Apple would actually in some ways make more money with a lower rate because it would get more developers to say, okay, for that rate, we'll keep our subscription in the App Store or we'll steer more people to the App Store, right?
01:11:59 ◼ ► And it's probably true they were going to lose Netscape – or not Netscape, Netflix, no matter what.
01:12:06 ◼ ► Because I think Netflix got so big where they really wanted to have just – they only wanted direct – it's not even about the commission, right?
01:12:13 ◼ ► I think Apple could have dropped the commission to zero for Netflix and they still would have stopped in-app transactions for subscriptions because they want a direct relationship with their customers.
01:12:24 ◼ ► But for a lot of developers who've left the App Store or gone to some kind of split thing where you can subscribe or buy outside the store or buy inside the store, I think at a lower rate, you'd get more developers either only staying in the store or steering – saying this – the App Store, the in-app purchase is the best way to buy our software or service.
01:12:48 ◼ ► And that would actually increase the amount of money Apple made because more developers would be there even if the rate they were taking from each single dollar through the store were lower.
01:13:00 ◼ ► And I think there's a certain level of just very, very obstinate stubbornness with their, hey, nobody can make us change this.
01:13:11 ◼ ► And the more governments around the world try to make them change it, the more they're digging in.
01:13:18 ◼ ► Yeah, 30% was revolutionary when it came out, like compared to what a lot of the other stores were charging at the time.
01:13:23 ◼ ► But there is an argument that you could have been Thompson-ed your way to a managed ecosystem over the last 20 years.
01:14:01 ◼ ► Judge Gonzalez Rogers, that's the month where she kind of had enough of Apple's bullshit.
01:14:07 ◼ ► But again, I think Apple – I guess the point I wanted to make a couple minutes ago is I think there are people within Apple, and I do think this comes from Tim Cook because I do think it is – it's how his mind works.
01:14:20 ◼ ► And nobody but a fool is going to disagree with that, and therefore, if one choice gets you four and the other gets you three, four is the way to go.
01:14:46 ◼ ► I think the goodwill that Apple is continuing to squander with its obstinacy in these cases in the U.S., in the EU, and in other places everywhere, almost everywhere around the world.
01:15:03 ◼ ► I'm sure anybody at Apple would concede that it's not a good look for them and that they know that some developers, developer relations are frayed because of it.
01:15:14 ◼ ► But I do think that they – I think the proof of the way they're acting is evidence that they underestimate the value of those things that are being damaged, the goodwill, their reputation, how they are perceived.
01:15:33 ◼ ► You can't put a financial vet number on it, but I do think that they're underestimating how much they've squandered in that regard.
01:15:42 ◼ ► Even just the user experience, not even for the developers, because I think like the classic ranking is what's good for Apple, then what's good for customers, then what's good for developers.
01:15:50 ◼ ► But even for customers, like the preponderance of MacGyvering that they've done to just buy something on the App Store in all these different countries now, it's just – it's not been a good UX for a long time, and it doesn't seem like it's getting better.
01:16:17 ◼ ► I don't think we have to rehash it, but it's a great book and sort of opened my eyes to a lot of aspects of Apple's relationship with China that just never – it's not that I never pulled the strings.
01:16:34 ◼ ► It's – he both collected all of the reporting that was extant on the issue and took that and then did so much original reporting.
01:16:48 ◼ ► And Johnny Ive and Sam Altman jointly announced I.O. with lowercase I, lowercase O, much to my consternation.
01:16:58 ◼ ► But that's – in fact, here we are in the end of December, and it's still just an announcement, right?
01:17:25 ◼ ► I think they do care a lot, but it is a unique animal, right, where I don't know that anybody at Apple wants to be driving a car.
01:17:39 ◼ ► Because – and whatever their own car project was and however many people at Apple were filled in enough to think, yeah, maybe in a couple years that's what I'll be driving.
01:18:08 ◼ ► But Apple just has so many pieces on the board now that it's hard to tell what's, like, at maintenance mode.
01:18:29 ◼ ► And I do think that the next generation thing, there is – right from when they announced it many WWDCs ago.
01:18:41 ◼ ► The whole premise of it, of giving Apple more control or putting in Apple's hands more of the interface to the car, that that – hey, is that really going to fly with these proud car makers who want to put their brand forward?
01:19:33 ◼ ► And you've still got – the Rivian CEO was on with Ben Thompson on Stratech in his last interview of the year saying that they're as firmly entrenched in doing their own thing for the entertainment and not doing CarPlay or Android Auto than as they've ever –
01:19:57 ◼ ► Again, I think it's German was rumored to be trying or testing CarPlay integration but only CarPlay, which is kind of interesting.
01:20:06 ◼ ► But I also think explicable because I think iPhone users really – a lot of iPhone users really want CarPlay in particular.
01:20:14 ◼ ► And I think for most Android users, not all because there's definitely the subset of Android users who buy flagship phones and are really, really care about Android in a way that iOS nerds care about iOS.
01:20:27 ◼ ► But I think for the most part, that doesn't spread to mainstream people, people who don't listen to the talk show or don't know – or a better example, people who don't know who MKBHD is, right?
01:20:40 ◼ ► Those people who have Android – people who have an Android phone and have never heard of Marques Brownlee are the sort of people who do not give a shit what's going on with their computer in their car, right?
01:20:54 ◼ ► And I think they're probably happy and impressed by Tesla's or Rivian's built-in system because they're not juiced into the Android ecosystem the way that casual – a lot of casual iPhone users are where they've got a podcast app on their phone, whatever it is, and they want it in their car.
01:21:15 ◼ ► Or, I mean, Apple could just – when you turn the phone sideways, the same way they have bedtime mode, they could give us CarPlay mode in a car without needing the integration, and then you could have it everywhere.
01:21:29 ◼ ► That brings us to June and then the halfway mark of the year afterwards, but that's WWDC 2025.
01:21:40 ◼ ► I guess in hindsight, the big thing was liquid glass and the visual changes to the user interface.
01:21:58 ◼ ► And selfishly, because of what I do professionally, combined with my rocketing through – not towards, but through middle age and my memory, therefore, not being what it used to be, keeping track of what is the current version number of this OS.
01:22:27 ◼ ► But the Mac being behind because up until 10.13 or 10.14, they just kept adding a decimal.
01:23:19 ◼ ► This new system where all of the OSs get the same primary integer and that integer is based on the main year that those OSs will be the current OS.
01:23:33 ◼ ► They didn't make that mistake because a lot of companies named it the same year and then would ship it to next year and then it seemed old and they were smart enough to avoid that.
01:23:45 ◼ ► I don't even know that inside Apple they even – once they decided we should name them by the year, I don't even know that there was much internal discussion over whether it should be like these – the ones we use today should be 25.0 or 25.2 or 26.
01:24:03 ◼ ► There are – and trust me because when I wrote about it, I heard from a handful of them.
01:24:22 ◼ ► I completely – and there are – the people who feel this way are – feel very, very strongly about it.
01:24:42 ◼ ► But I don't think it makes any sense from a marketing perspective because, for example, the version that started auto-installing on people's phones that have the –
01:24:54 ◼ ► hey, I'll just take the upgrade whenever you push it to my phone was 26.2, which only came out 10 days ago.
01:25:01 ◼ ► So most people who are going to be running iOS 26 only got it or are starting to get it now.
01:25:09 ◼ ► So it's – they're all – the fact that it shipped for the early – us early adopters or people who bought the brand new iPhone 17 generation in September,
01:25:21 ◼ ► And even for the people who jumped on it on day one, most of the time they're going to spend with it will be in 2026.
01:25:30 ◼ ► And most of the releases will happen in 20 – like there'll be releases for it from January to September 2026.
01:25:38 ◼ ► I do guess the downsides, I guess it sort of commits Apple to keeping all of these OSs on an annual schedule.
01:25:48 ◼ ► But I don't – forever is a long time, but for the near future, everything has been getting – everything Apple does, hardware and software, has getting more annualized.
01:26:02 ◼ ► The iPhone has always been the one product that never budges from it, but everything has been getting more annual, cycleized.
01:26:12 ◼ ► And I think that's a good – I think Apple is a more annual company than any other big company.
01:26:24 ◼ ► It's an artificial constraint and out of constraints, necessity is the mother of invention, right?
01:26:31 ◼ ► It's good to have to ship on a regular basis and not pull a Windows Vista and sort of let seven years spiral out of control because you want to make this thing so big and impressive.
01:26:45 ◼ ► And the risk is that maybe it keeps you from doing the big impressive thing that would take five years to build.
01:26:59 ◼ ► You probably could by just sort of making the annual – nobody has to – if tvOS 27 is really not an impressive update, if it could have been 26.9, 26.10, 26.11, but they just call it 27.0 to keep it in parallel, nobody cares.
01:27:26 ◼ ► But also, they went to 64-bit in an incredibly managed way over a bunch of years that was almost completely transparent to end users, which was not the case with a lot of people.
01:27:37 ◼ ► And they just replaced things sequentially, like one thing this year, one thing the next year, get your binaries updated, do these things.
01:27:57 ◼ ► There was one thing I wanted to mention is the reason I like this so much is it's the fresh bread thing.
01:28:12 ◼ ► And I think when they don't update things and you buy it like in the second or third year, you're paying the same money because Apple never lowers prices.
01:28:27 ◼ ► So I think it behooves – it's a good feature for consumers to always have like a fresh operating system, a fresh chipset, a fresh thing in the products on an annual cadence.
01:28:38 ◼ ► And it is the difference between – it's another one of the – the difference – one of the many differences between hardware and software.
01:28:45 ◼ ► And I think in today's world for security reasons and for sort of feature parity and syncing, it's more important than ever for Apple to be pushing most people to stay up to date.
01:29:06 ◼ ► I'm still probably – if you ask me to make my commitment right now, I'd say I'm going to pass on the whole year of macOS 26 Tahoe on my main work Mac.
01:29:16 ◼ ► It might be the – and going back half an hour there, it might be the main reason I don't buy an M5 MacBook Pro next year in the early part of the year when we expect it to come out because it will only run macOS 26.
01:29:32 ◼ ► But for the people who aren't making a decision on very – for very specific nerdy reasons that I'm thinking I might stay with macOS 15, it's more important.
01:29:53 ◼ ► I think by far and away Apple's original content movie is the biggest hit they've made.
01:29:59 ◼ ► I actually still have not watched it even though I very much want to and really wanted – I wanted to see it in a theater but just never got around to it.
01:30:07 ◼ ► And now it's out and it's gotten all the way to being available free to stream on Apple TV and just haven't had a movie night where it felt like the right call.
01:30:20 ◼ ► We can just talk that it's – I don't think it's a coincidence that they pushed a big budget Brad Pitt action movie about F1 in the same calendar year when they signed a big deal to make Apple TV the home of F1, actual F1 racing on streaming.
01:30:37 ◼ ► Push is a good word because I remember you wrote about the push notifications or how it showed up across the entire operating system.
01:30:52 ◼ ► There's this old story, and I don't know how true it is still, that marketing would never let –
01:31:03 ◼ ► Yeah, there was this old story that marketing would never let services push, like, those kinds of messages.
01:31:13 ◼ ► And I don't know if that's still true, but I always remember those stories whenever I get a push notification ad.
01:31:31 ◼ ► I bet there's like any – wherever there's smoke, there's fire and there's something to it.
01:31:38 ◼ ► But I don't think it's quite as true as, hey, when Phil Schiller is on vacation, you can do anything you want no matter how angry he's going to be when he comes back.
01:31:51 ◼ ► Well, it's the thing like some people really – my understanding is the argument was some people value the experience.
01:31:55 ◼ ► It was the same thing like Steve not wanting too many Apple logos is that the overall brand value was important.
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01:34:40 ◼ ► That was huge, though, because he was chief operating officer, succeeded Tim Cook, but he also became head of design at Apple.
01:34:48 ◼ ► And I know people like to say that ops didn't get in the way of design, but it absolutely did.
01:34:57 ◼ ► And you and I have talked about this privately, but the entire design team almost, the original design team is at love from with Johnny Ive now.
01:35:07 ◼ ► For a company that has become Apple on Johnny Ive design is now, for the first time, I think, totally going in a new way, new blood, new generation.
01:35:27 ◼ ► It remains to be seen how much operations is still in the way of design or contributing to design or I don't know.
01:35:52 ◼ ► And I do think, I said this last week with Quinn on the show, Tim Cook was COO before he became CEO.
01:36:03 ◼ ► But there aren't many examples of CEO transitions for modern Apple, where I would define modern Apple as from the reunification with Next in beginning of 1997.
01:36:33 ◼ ► It's not even, well, we want to avoid the mistake we made in 19-whatever, 1990-whatever, when we hired Michael Spindler.
01:36:47 ◼ ► But there was the, well, if the old COO, who was a tall, southern man, who's sort of soft-spoken and began appearing in Apple keynotes, became the next CEO, wouldn't Jeff Williams be the obvious choice for the next CEO after Cook?
01:37:06 ◼ ► And I think it was probably true that he was the, if something emergency happened, if Tim Cook suffered a medical crisis or something and-
01:37:27 ◼ ► I think it's almost certainly the case that Jeff Williams would have been named his emergency successor or, in the case of a health crisis or something, the temporary CEO.
01:37:35 ◼ ► It's the hit-by-a-bus scenario that every company has to, as a part of being a public company, account for.
01:37:48 ◼ ► So, presuming that Cook, the fact that he's still in the job right now at age 64, 65, whatever he is, was always his plan, and I think it probably was, I don't think there was ever any plausible scenario where Jeff Williams would be his successor upon his planned retirement.
01:38:05 ◼ ► Whether his planned retirement is, let's just say, leaving early in 2026, like we're months away from Tim Cook saying, hey, I've had a good run and I'm resigning or retiring.
01:38:16 ◼ ► I don't think there was ever a plan that it would be Jeff Williams because Jeff Williams is 62.
01:38:21 ◼ ► And I think Jeff Williams, if he ever had any aspirations of being the CEO, they were long ago.
01:38:29 ◼ ► You know, I don't know that he ever did because I think he knew he could do the math on Tim Cook's age as well as he could.
01:38:36 ◼ ► I do think it's why Jeff Williams appeared in all the Apple Watch segments publicly for so long for the last 10 years to familiarize the public with him in case he ever needed to step up into a bigger role.
01:38:57 ◼ ► Right. And I do think it's why I don't think Sabi Khan is in any way being positioned for that.
01:39:05 ◼ ► The current COO who had worked under Jeff Williams for a long time and has been at Apple for a very long time was, in fact, the legendary figure who – of that story of – from, I don't know, 2008, 2009, when there was some kind of internal meeting at Apple about an emergency in China.
01:39:23 ◼ ► And somebody in the meeting, he was like, well, you're going to have to go there and fix this.
01:39:31 ◼ ► And that's when the guy realized, oh, you want me to go like now and just said, okay, and stood up from the meeting, left, and went right to SFO with what he had in his pockets.
01:39:56 ◼ ► I barely know what he looks like because every once in a while I look at the bios page.
01:40:02 ◼ ► I would guess that the fact that he has no public presence in keynotes or any other press event means that he's not in any way being prepped to step up to a larger role.
01:40:15 ◼ ► I believe he's now at the largest role he's going to have at Apple and that's it and it's sort of off the beaten path.
01:40:21 ◼ ► Compare and contrast with the people who are speculated as possible successors to Cook, John Ternus and Craig Federighi, Jaws even, who are obviously very, very public and featured annually in their public keynotes.
01:40:36 ◼ ► But also, and I think Quinn mentioned this in his video, like it does clear the deck, like in a way that Steve Jobs never did because Scott Forstall was very contentious with Tim Cook when Tim Cook took over.
01:40:58 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think, again, boy, I wish somebody would write a book and really detail that.
01:41:06 ◼ ► But there was a, what do they call it about Abraham Lincoln, that he had a cabinet of rivals that he named because of the, maybe not cabinet of rivals, but that it supposedly, or the way it's told historically,
01:41:20 ◼ ► is that because of the civil war and the need to unify the country that he'd stocked his cabinet with some of his biggest political rivals, but who were on the side of the union and that they had this forever, whatever other disagreements they had about this, that, the other thing.
01:41:37 ◼ ► And we disagree with each other vehemently in these other regards, but we need to save the country.
01:41:42 ◼ ► And I think Steve Jobs sort of ran his executive cabinet in a similar way where he could have people who hated each other, but because everything went through Steve, he could manage that, right?
01:42:00 ◼ ► I think it's maybe the opposite of a secret that Johnny Ive in particular did not get along with Scott Forstall.
01:42:07 ◼ ► I've heard from multiple sources over the years that at some point, this is after Steve had passed and Cook took over, because I think avoiding this sort of declaration is exactly the sort of thing that Steve Jobs was good at, right?
01:42:24 ◼ ► And as much as it's like, he wasn't just like running around telling people their work is shit, or why the fuck doesn't it do what it was supposed to do?
01:42:31 ◼ ► He could have two people who hate each other work together because they both loved working for Steve Jobs.
01:42:45 ◼ ► Right. But at some point before Tim Cook pulled the band-aid off and said, okay, we got to fix this, Forstall's out, and we'll move on without him, that Johnny Ive had declared that he would no longer attend any meetings if Forstall was going to be present.
01:43:02 ◼ ► I don't know if that's true, but I've heard that multiple times, certainly jibes with everything we do know about the personality conflicts.
01:43:22 ◼ ► And the people who worked under him, I never heard, I never heard from somebody who worked under him who didn't like him.
01:43:29 ◼ ► And they thought he both did good work, had good taste, led the team to produce good work.
01:43:37 ◼ ► And I think the early, how we view in hindsight, the early versions of iOS and iPadOS and the apps for them speak to that.
01:43:45 ◼ ► And that he had their back across the company when they needed something from outside the division.
01:43:53 ◼ ► If they needed, I don't know what it would be, but if it's some kind of feature, resources or servers or some kind of API access from somebody else outside Forstall's purview, he had the team's back.
01:44:09 ◼ ► He also seemed to be able to uniquely distill, what I've heard is when he wasn't there, it was chaos because nobody could get Steve the yellow icon he wanted.
01:44:25 ◼ ► So he was very good at translating what Steve wanted into things that his team could produce.
01:44:45 ◼ ► But I also think it was probably true that it was untenable to keep him and Johnny Ive.
01:44:57 ◼ ► If it really, I think that's too simplistic because I suspect that more of the other people at that level were like, if somebody's got to go, it should be Forstall because I don't think he was popular with them either.
01:45:17 ◼ ► And I think it was also part of Cook listening to the one thing he claims to listen to Steve Jobs about, which is his advice to don't ask what I would do.
01:45:32 ◼ ► And Apple is very much as much as it's like a tree where the central rings of the tree are all infused with Steve Jobs' DNA.
01:45:49 ◼ ► The company is much more in Tim Cook's mold than it was before, which is a sign of good leadership that he was able to steer the company without breaking it, right?
01:46:06 ◼ ► Like, it's someone who's done profound work for Apple and is going out without any, like, controversy or...
01:46:15 ◼ ► I think the guy had a very long run, and I think he did a very good job, and I think he retired.
01:46:24 ◼ ► And I think, unlike Phil Schiller, who could retire as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and let Jaws take over that entire role, but had other significant product positions that he could still run, the App Store and Events are the two, in that role as Apple Fellow.
01:47:03 ◼ ► Like, it's usually a euphemism when somebody, politics, corporate, whatever it is, retires or resigns to spend more time with their family.
01:47:42 ◼ ► What do we wait, what's the alternative for Jeff Williams to work there as COO until he's 80 and die in the job?
01:47:53 ◼ ► But I do think it does raise those questions about who is making industrial design choices at Apple and what is that going to look like for the next 10 years?
01:48:03 ◼ ► And I've heard, given, and again, a lot of it got, you know, we're skipping ahead to December and the Allen Dye stuff.
01:48:16 ◼ ► I sort of took that as not that Jeff Williams was running design and was going to suddenly impose his taste on design.
01:48:27 ◼ ► And there's no evidence, zero evidence that anybody can point to from that point onward after Johnny Ive left and this was reorganized that there was any kind of shift like that.
01:48:47 ◼ ► And I've heard, I did hear, it wasn't like, oh, it was in name only and they didn't really report to him.
01:48:55 ◼ ► Jeff Williams was there in design meetings as the person who they were reporting to all the time and frequently.
01:49:03 ◼ ► What I heard from other people who were in those meetings was he just, he was there to okay stuff.
01:49:16 ◼ ► It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't, it certainly wasn't essential to the design process in any way.
01:49:22 ◼ ► Although I did hear that, like, in the Steve Jobs era, there was like a literal wall of fire where operations people could not get in to design.
01:49:32 ◼ ► And I don't know how many, like, $5 billion chamfer edges you could push through anymore at that point.
01:49:51 ◼ ► If it really, from when Steve Jobs was still there to when Jeff would, and then skip the whole Johnny Ives as chief design officer transition, and then Johnny's gone.
01:50:32 ◼ ► That might be the sort of thing where a different answer comes out of the medium than before or during the Johnny Ives transition years.
01:50:42 ◼ ► And I don't think it's like totally, hey, we could make this thing out of cheap plastic or we could make it out of premium polished titanium.
01:51:00 ◼ ► It's impossible not to think that Jeff Williams was more interested in that lost half point of margin than other people who were in charge of design before.
01:51:12 ◼ ► Or just Johnny Ives from when Johnny Ives was still there and the chief design officer, right?
01:51:17 ◼ ► I don't think – I think I could say as a fact without trying to get in contact with both of them and get them on the record.
01:51:25 ◼ ► That Johnny Ives gave a little – cared a little less about each tenth of a percent of profit margin than Jeff Williams did.
01:51:42 ◼ ► And I think in the same way that Jeff Williams was still the chief operating officer and had all of those responsibilities, it's not that he was doing design on the side.
01:51:50 ◼ ► But it was sort of like at some point things that are ready need to be – get the final okay and that's who they went to.
01:51:56 ◼ ► And I think even when Johnny, in his second half of his stint as chief design officer, was spending most of his time on and finishing Apple Park, still those decisions eventually came to him for, okay, these are the colors we're going to go with this year, right?
01:52:32 ◼ ► The awe-dropping event when the iPhone 17, 17 Pro Max, the – oh, not 17 Air, just the iPhone Air, AirPods Pro 3,
01:52:56 ◼ ► I've – we're running long and I think as we usually do, as I recall, is we spend more time looking back at the earlier part of the year where it's more reminiscing and the more recent parts of the year that everybody's still got in their RAM we can spend less time on.
01:53:13 ◼ ► You know, I know the rumors even just last week, some new rumor came out that the iPhone – the next iPhone Air might be on pace for September again, not for an 18-month refresh.
01:53:35 ◼ ► If they added a number to the one that didn't have a number, the SE, and then they took away the number from a new one.
01:54:02 ◼ ► Yeah, is it a little bit more like iPad Air and MacBook Air where they don't give them names and, yes, you just look up which chip is in it, right?
01:54:19 ◼ ► I think the new – I don't have much to say about these things that I haven't said repeatedly over the last few months.
01:54:26 ◼ ► I think about them, I do really wish I did buy an iPhone and now carry my own iPhone 17 Pro, not Macs, specifically and mainly because it is narrower in my hand.
01:54:40 ◼ ► It is the thing that kept me from buying, and I was so close, really, and no pun intended from my other podcast, dithered for months over which one to buy for myself because I had the luxury of both as review units that I could switch back and forth with.
01:55:02 ◼ ► It is really – it takes two minutes to switch with no tools, no worries about water sealing or anything.
01:55:09 ◼ ► Really, really – and kudos to my carrier Verizon for never once giving me any grief over the fact that I changed my SIM probably 20 times.
01:55:19 ◼ ► It does make it a little harder to review because, like, it's so easy to review when you can just move a SIM card back and forth.
01:55:32 ◼ ► And I read somewhere that Apple and Google are working to really make it pretty easy going from Android to iPhone 2, which is the part that still really sucks compared to a SIM card.
01:55:43 ◼ ► But it's – if the Air had two sizes, a bigger size like Macs and a narrower size, the width of the iPhone 17 or 17 Pro, I would have bought the Air in that smaller size.
01:56:08 ◼ ► I've really been paying attention now that I bought and committed myself for the next year to a 17 Pro, how many times I'm using one of the other cameras for something other than macro.
01:56:27 ◼ ► But every time I do go back to using the Air for a day or just pick it up because I still have my review unit, I do appreciate the extra five centimeters of minimum focal distance.
01:56:39 ◼ ► Where for years now, the main camera on the iPhone Pros has a 20 centimeter minimum focal distance.
01:56:46 ◼ ► In other words, if your camera is closer than 20 centimeters away, the main camera cannot focus on the subject.
01:56:53 ◼ ► And you might say, well, I get closer than 20 centimeters with the 1X camera all the time, and it's focused.
01:56:59 ◼ ► That's because your phone and software has switched to the 0.5X ultra-wide, and it's simulating the field of view of the 1X.
01:57:14 ◼ ► And if you turn off macro mode, you will notice that as soon as you get 19 centimeters away from the subject, it'll start getting blurry.
01:57:21 ◼ ► And the iPhone Air, which only has one camera, and it has a smaller sensor because it's the Air and it's sort of a thinner, by definition, device, has a totally different camera system.
01:57:40 ◼ ► But when you're doing something like photographing something in your hand or a piece of paper on the table in front of you, that distance is actually right where I want my camera, my phone to be.
01:57:55 ◼ ► I would rather have three cameras than the one camera, but that one camera, I could live with it.
01:58:24 ◼ ► Even with the 17 Pro, which really has improved the telephoto camera to, it's the best by far they've ever had.
01:58:32 ◼ ► It's the first time where they've got the trick where the 4X uses the whole sensor and does the quad pixels.
01:58:50 ◼ ► It is using the – it's just using the center area of the sensor, and it's the first time the telephoto has done that.
01:58:57 ◼ ► And it's really noticeably more usable at 8X, but you need a lot of light compared to that 1X.
01:59:12 ◼ ► I've never owned an Ultra before, and I've only – I think I've only ever bought four Apple Watches.
01:59:32 ◼ ► I was curious what you're using, because I know you really love Apple Watch, and I know you were the one who made me – you're the friend I had who owned the ceramic.
01:59:42 ◼ ► I'm going to have to upgrade at some point, though, because I have a Canadian Apple Watch, and there's something – like, they don't roam as well as the phones do.
02:00:03 ◼ ► I – there's sometimes you can – man or woman, you can sort of – if you're a stranger, you see them at the airport or just on the sidewalk, it's – yeah, they kind of look – maybe they're like a hobbyist rock climber or active person who would want to rug in.
02:00:16 ◼ ► They're so functional, and they're not that expensive compared to what watches used to cost or what, like, other watches still cost.
02:00:29 ◼ ► The battery life on the Ultra – I honestly think Apple undersells it to avoid making the Series 11, Series 10 look bad in comparison.
02:00:38 ◼ ► I honestly think maybe the most dishonest Apple's ever been about battery life is with the Ultra watches, and it's on the underselling how long the battery lasts, simply because I think if they really – I think if they added enough more hours of expected battery life as they could legitimately, it would just make the other ones look worse.
02:01:14 ◼ ► I mean, if you are doing, like, all the hardcore workout stuff, like, you'll run it down faster, but if you're using it as a watchy watch.
02:01:31 ◼ ► Yes, and I know you and I have talked about this on the show and privately many times over the years, and I think it's – I think the most interesting thing about the fact that they didn't have an event for that isn't the products themselves.
02:01:42 ◼ ► It's what it says about Apple marketing and PR, that they still do value the attention they get when they hold an event, even if the event is mostly virtual or streaming and the only people who come are invited press to New York or something.
02:02:01 ◼ ► There is a – I've always appreciated this, and I don't think other companies do it as well, even though they get less attention for their events.
02:02:14 ◼ ► And if they inherited the – hey, all Apple has to do is say they're holding a special event, and you know how much – you know how they're going to dominate tech news for days up to, on, and after.
02:02:28 ◼ ► There's people who are most concerned about not the long run of the company or the company's marketing credibility, but the short-term marketing credibility.
02:02:45 ◼ ► And I think they still – I think Apple internally still respects that, and they still preciously guard the attention that their events have.
02:02:56 ◼ ► And if they're on the fence about whether an announcement is, quote-unquote, worth holding an event, they err on the side of not doing it.
02:03:07 ◼ ► They are very nice updates, so you look at all of the numbers, if you like looking at numbers, like Tim Cook, from benchmarks and et cetera.
02:03:14 ◼ ► The M5 versus M4 year-over-year or generation-over-generation if it's not quite 12 months.
02:03:33 ◼ ► There's nothing novel that would benefit from stage time where they could take you through and tell you a story about it.
02:03:38 ◼ ► That October is also when they announced the F1 Apple TV deal, which we kind of talked about.
02:03:44 ◼ ► And I guess the thing we didn't talk about is that it's like the MLS soccer, but I think F1 is going to have more attention because I think more people care about F1, even in the U.S., than they do about MLS soccer.
02:03:58 ◼ ► But in both cases, they get to do – and again, this is one of those things where you can just listen to what Apple says and believe them.
02:04:05 ◼ ► Eddie Q has come out and said that we would like to control, own the whole sport so we can do it our way.
02:04:11 ◼ ► And yes, they were in the bidding for the NFL, but if they had gotten NFL games, it would have been something like the Thursday night football package where they get one game a week.
02:04:21 ◼ ► Or like Netflix has, which everybody listening right now, as the episode is new, will remember that Netflix hasn't had any NFL games all year, but they had a Christmas Day package of two games.
02:04:37 ◼ ► Certainly they could have, but I think – and they bid, and when they have Friday night baseball where they do one or two games every Friday night, and that's it out of the thousands and thousands of baseball games MLB plays every year.
02:04:54 ◼ ► So it's not that they stay away from sports if they can't own the whole sport, but they're much more interested – they'd be much – I think they're much more interested in owning something like F1 or MLS soccer than they would be in doing two games a year on Christmas Day for the NFL.
02:05:13 ◼ ► I would love to know, and they haven't announced anything, but I feel like the one thing that's unique about F1 for Apple and their whole product, put all their products on a table, is F1 in particular could have an incredible Vision Pro experience with some kind of live cameras in the car that could somehow do immersive.
02:05:40 ◼ ► They haven't announced anything like that, and all the sports stuff they do for immersive video isn't live, but eventually it will be.
02:06:04 ◼ ► No, I think the only other story is that with the Apple Silicon, because a lot of people have left Apple and got bought by Qualcomm, got bought by other people, it's a much more competitive ARM space now.
02:06:16 ◼ ► So I think it's nice to see Apple still pushing forward and not sort of resting, saying we can take two years between updates.
02:06:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I think they are, but I also think it was inevitable that everybody else is sort of catching up to some degree, that the gap is narrowing, because I don't think there's any scenario where the gap that Apple Silicon had in 2020 could be maintained going forward.
02:06:45 ◼ ► Because I think they really sort of, with phones, I mean, phones were never on x86, but I think when Apple came out with the existence proof that desktop PCs are actually better on ARM than they are on x86, and therefore they could be, it just punctured the idea that it would never make sense.
02:07:05 ◼ ► And now I think the whole industry is sort of moving that direction, which is going to have trickle-down benefits, even for phones, right?
02:07:13 ◼ ► Well, Qualcomm bought Nuvia, which was a startup from a bunch of people who left Apple, who were working on previous Apple Silicon chips.
02:07:22 ◼ ► So all that technology, and also that approach of building up rather than stripping down, I think was fairly transformative.
02:07:30 ◼ ► Yep. All right, November. We talked about Apple and Google and Gurman's reporting that they might be collaborating for Apple Intelligence. We don't need to cover that again.
02:07:39 ◼ ► There was my post where I had the title, exploring in detail Apple's compliance with the EU's DMA mandate regarding Apple Watch, third-party accessories, and the syncing of saved Wi-Fi networks from phones to which they're paired.
02:07:53 ◼ ► Which is just to revisit the EU stuff, and combine that with a recent thing, which is December, but I'll put it here, where Apple has issued their compliance for the Japanese MSCA, Mobile Software Something Act.
02:08:10 ◼ ► Which I think addresses many of the same top-level issues as the DMA, where now Japan gets alternate app marketplaces, they get alternate payments within apps if developers want them.
02:08:25 ◼ ► And none of the downsides, like features being pulled, like this Wi-Fi syncing of a new device, or the big one to me, because I use it all the time.
02:08:36 ◼ ► And for people who haven't used it, either because they don't have a compatible device or because they live in the EU and can't use it, the iPhone mirroring app on Mac, which still isn't available.
02:08:47 ◼ ► And at this point, unless the EU changes, I don't think ever will be available in the EU.
02:08:52 ◼ ► And off the record, people, and I don't have any specific examples, but people at Apple, without telling me what they are, are saying that there are future features that they don't see a path to release in the EU under the DMA as it is now.
02:09:08 ◼ ► Because they are like iPhone mirroring, where they are in conflict with the DMA because they involve the iPhone and other Apple products communicating via private APIs.
02:09:28 ◼ ► You can argue about whether the government should be regulating any of these things at all.
02:09:33 ◼ ► But if you think that government should be saying, yes, these cell phones are so important to the society that government should have a role, which is an argument I'm very amenable to, the Japanese law is very specific and says things like you have to offer alternate marketplaces for apps.
02:09:49 ◼ ► But it doesn't step into the sort of, hey, we should design your product from head to toe, and we'll define what other products your phone should talk to, sort of monolithic approach to regulation that the DMA has.
02:10:08 ◼ ► I could obviously go on for much longer about that, but I think it's an interesting example.
02:10:13 ◼ ► And I think that this little tiny thing about, hey, now in the EU, if you buy a new Apple Watch, when you first pair it, it will no longer know all of your iPhone's known Wi-Fi networks that you've already saved.
02:10:27 ◼ ► It'll only know the ones your iPhone connects to from that point going forward, because if they were going to continue doing that in the EU, they'd have to offer the same feature to other competing devices.
02:10:44 ◼ ► I know the other counter argument I've seen people make is that it's just pure spite to make people in the EU hate the DMA.
02:10:50 ◼ ► But nobody, this issue is so specific and so particular to just one thing, whether a brand new, newly paired Apple Watch already knows all of the Wi-Fi network passwords that your iPhone does.
02:11:03 ◼ ► Nobody is going to go complain to the representative in the EU that they should do something about this, right?
02:11:17 ◼ ► It is simply because Apple can't bring itself to allow any third-party device, like from Meta or any other no-name company, to you pair it with your iPhone and you assume, well, if it can pair with my iPhone, whatever it gets, Apple must think is okay.
02:11:35 ◼ ► And all of a sudden, it knows the details of every Wi-Fi network your iPhone knows, which is incredibly privacy invasive.
02:11:57 ◼ ► And I think now we're seeing, I think the Japanese law is a good counterexample of a law that addresses the things people think the DMA is specific about.
02:12:06 ◼ ► People think at a very basic level it's about alternate marketplaces and alternate forms of payment in app, right?
02:12:14 ◼ ► And the Japanese have gotten them without any of the downsides that the DMA brings to everyone in the EU.
02:12:20 ◼ ► And so I think it's just an interesting counterexample that's not a hypothetical anymore.
02:12:39 ◼ ► Also, we now have a counterexample where they're kind of gracious in their public statements.
02:13:12 ◼ ► Like, never mind AI, but CGI, shooting that practically is just – I mean, that's catnip to anybody who loves, like, visual effects and production.
02:13:50 ◼ ► That gets us to the last month of the year, December, where I feel like the only news is the personnel news.
02:13:56 ◼ ► And Quinn and I talked about it in a previous episode, so I don't think we need to spend a lot of time here.
02:14:02 ◼ ► But I will say, because I brought up Mark Papermaster on the show with Quinn, and it was just extemporaneous.
02:14:11 ◼ ► So Papermaster was brought over to head up – I forget which – what his exact title was.
02:14:24 ◼ ► And there was a – when he was brought over in 2007 or 2008, there was a mini-controversy about his non-compete at IBM, where Apple had poached him from, and what it meant.
02:14:37 ◼ ► But then come 2010 with the iPhone 4 and the antenna saga, ultimately he took the fall for it.
02:15:08 ◼ ► And my own reporting had said that there was sort of arrogance from Papermaster's team over the antenna that they did.
02:15:52 ◼ ► If you needed your iPhone to absolutely stop loading a web page, you could touch that spot and it would freeze.
02:15:59 ◼ ► Right, but it's interesting to compare his ouster in 2010, which happened very quickly after the antenna things happened.
02:16:09 ◼ ► They didn't say we fired him over the antenna thing because they didn't want to slam the antenna thing because they just had kind of fixed the PR fiasco of saying this antenna is fine.
02:16:18 ◼ ► And the iPhone 4 went on to remain on the market for 18 months, not 12 months because it was the last phone with a June release, not an October or September release.
02:16:33 ◼ ► And then John Giandrea announced a very graceful, quiet – and it was very quickly superseded by other personnel moves in the same week.
02:16:44 ◼ ► I would say even more quiet than we thought on the day that his retirement from Apple was announced.
02:16:59 ◼ ► I believe that John Giandrea was – his goose was cooked at Apple before March of last year, in February or so, which I think was when Gurman first started reporting,
02:17:19 ◼ ► And it makes sense that that conversation was happening within Apple, and Gurman heard it.
02:17:27 ◼ ► And if anything, underestimated the significance of the delay, that it was more or less hitting the reset button on the underlying model and would be a full year delay, not like months.
02:17:38 ◼ ► I think at that point that John Giandrea's goose was cooked, but it's Tim – I think it's a purely stylistic difference between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, where I think – I think – and I have no inside information on this.
02:17:53 ◼ ► I think Tim Cook's thinking is, well, it's not so much the gentleman's agreement of once you're at the senior vice president level, everybody's got a golden parachute and gets lots of money and gets to save as much face as possible.
02:18:07 ◼ ► I mean, whatever his severance was, I'm sure was in a contract and would happen no matter what – how quickly he was ousted from the company.
02:18:15 ◼ ► But I think Tim Cook's style is to make as little fuss about it as possible and have it be as quiet as possible and make it look as much as possible like, this is all fine, this is all good, and it's just a delay.
02:18:35 ◼ ► I mean, I think it was John – I'm forgetting his name, John Browlett, head of Apple Retail before Angela Aarons, is the only other Tim Cook exit that I remember, and that was also not very noisy.
02:18:54 ◼ ► I'll put – I made a note here on my sheet here, so I'll try to work it in the show notes.
02:18:59 ◼ ► But he had been in charge of some retail outfit in the UK, and when he was hired, I got a bunch – a bunch of people piped up on the internet.
02:19:11 ◼ ► It's like a discounter, and you go in there, and all anybody cares about is the price, and you get a terrible customer experience.
02:19:28 ◼ ► Right, and went in a complete – and again, I often say over and over again, one of my main theories of all of life is that it's – the way to make the fewest mistakes possible isn't to shoot for making zero mistakes because nobody's perfect, and everybody makes mistakes.
02:19:45 ◼ ► And if you're focused on making zero mistakes, you're going to find yourself defending the mistakes you made to create – to argue for the perception of never making a mistake rather than actually fixing them.
02:19:59 ◼ ► The best strategy is, of course, to make as few mistakes as possible, but to have an open mind that you are making – you might be making mistakes.
02:20:07 ◼ ► Be open-minded to be convinced when you have made a mistake, and then fix the mistake as quickly and as honestly as possible, and then move on.
02:20:18 ◼ ► And the John Brownlee, we're going to bring in a discount retailer, maybe Tim Cook-liked from a numeric perspective of margins and pricing.
02:20:29 ◼ ► Yeah, and maybe got along with him personally on that regard, and then very quickly listened to the fact that it was nails on the chalkboard to the Apple retail culture.
02:20:41 ◼ ► And things Tim Cook does believe, like that it should be a very nice customer experience to walk into an Apple store and buy a product or get one serviced, and acted quickly, and then hired somebody from a completely different background.
02:21:00 ◼ ► I kind of personally – I feel like if it were me – and again, I don't have any employees.
02:21:05 ◼ ► I would probably, because I'm not abrasive and I do tend to avoid confrontation, I probably personally would go the Tim Cook way of letting John Gianandrea leave gracefully 10 months later, even though all of his responsibilities had been taken away in February.
02:21:22 ◼ ► But as an observer, not someone who would have to do it and have the uncomfortable conversation myself, I think the Steve Jobs, Mark Papermester way of, you know what, I think you're a bozo, and now that I think you're a bozo, you've got to be – I want you out of here in an hour, is a little bit better.
02:21:43 ◼ ► You know, and I think the Forrestal thing shows – I don't think by any account Tim Cook is shrinking violet.
02:21:55 ◼ ► And the guy just got up and went to SFO and bought a ticket to China with nothing but his backpack.
02:22:04 ◼ ► So I don't think he's a shrinking violet, but I also think he's far more in control of his emotions than Steve Jobs.
02:22:16 ◼ ► And that he can – however angry and however – or whatever the emotion would be to describe his disappointment over the Apple intelligence fiasco, for lack of a better word.
02:22:34 ◼ ► And if that's the worst failure under Tim Cook, I think that's great because it's easily fixable soon, perhaps.
02:22:43 ◼ ► It's super interesting because Scott forced all ran Siri and then Scott left and it's unclear – like it just bounced around.
02:22:54 ◼ ► But even then, Craig Federighi was running his own on-device intelligence under Sebastian, which was doing – which is doing really well.
02:23:17 ◼ ► And I think that the whole thing where the – oh, John G. Andrea asked for however many zillion dollars of servers for AI training and Luca was like, nah, you're going to – we're going to cheap out on you.
02:23:30 ◼ ► I'm sure there's some truth to that, that you ask for a lot and you get a little bit less.
02:23:38 ◼ ► Does anybody really think that the problem with Siri and Apple intelligence overall is that Apple didn't spend quite enough on servers for training?
02:23:54 ◼ ► I just think it's an – I think comparing John Gianandreia to Mark Papermaster's Ousters is just a little thing we can pinpoint as, oh, that is a very different approach that Steve Jobs had.
02:24:21 ◼ ► I think not for Gianandreia personally but for the company itself to make everything look smooth and there are as few surprises or disappointments as possible.
02:24:32 ◼ ► And that everybody at Apple is the best and that you could quietly leave in December and that's it.
02:24:39 ◼ ► But I do think though the other thing you mentioned was the way that Siri sort of bounced around and hasn't really had a DRI in Apple's terms of directly responsible individual.
02:24:49 ◼ ► And there was also the story that – I don't even know if it's speculation that Mike Rockwell's division running Vision had – he had thought about doing his own thing for voice commands because he thought, well, voice would be a great thing for this new system.
02:25:13 ◼ ► Right, and that whatever Siri had to offer them as voice control sucked so bad that he literally thought about building his own but they had so much – I guess had so much else to do that it's like, no, he didn't.
02:25:23 ◼ ► But I don't think it's a coincidence that the guy who was so unhappy with the state of Siri a couple years ago while building out the Vision platform is now the guy who is now in charge of Siri and Apple intelligence.
02:25:35 ◼ ► And there is a DRI and it's Mike Rockwell who reports to Craig Federighi and I think the other thing that is clarifying about that hierarchy is to stop pretending that anything in – with the name AI or LLM or machine learning or whatever isn't part of software engineering.
02:26:05 ◼ ► I think the idea that there was this other software division and it just happened to be in these fields that are called AI or LLM or machine learning and it wasn't under Craig Federighi was a problem hierarchically.
02:26:18 ◼ ► Well, I mean they were building a lot of that stuff for the special projects like for Titan and for everything else like computer vision, like being able to pull data in and make these models.
02:26:27 ◼ ► So it was disparate, but again, it was one of the big pillars that Tim Cook always talked about, like automation and AI were his big bets on the future.
02:26:36 ◼ ► And it just – it always seemed odd to me that it – it made sense that JG would be – like they would have someone like him, someone looking at this as a big pillar of the future of all Apple, robotics and automation and everything.
02:26:52 ◼ ► Autonomy, like it's just so key to all those technologies, but then it never seemed to actually flourish.
02:26:57 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think it's almost an example of why Apple is set up in the functional way that it is set up, right?
02:27:04 ◼ ► And that letting – thinking that AI and autonomy were functional and deserve to be their own division, I think was a mistake in – I think that was the mistake more than hiring John Gianandrea personally, although I think in hindsight that was a mistake too.
02:27:21 ◼ ► And it does tie back to something you said earlier, Rene, about LLMs and John Gianandrea, by all accounts, was never a fan of LLMs as a technology and was sort of from a totally different branch of AI, the hill climbing, more traditional branch, that sort of viewed LLMs as, oh, that's cute.
02:27:56 ◼ ► It just turns out that with enough computational power, like literally tens of billions of dollars of computation put into the training, and then by having sufficient computing resources available for inference,
02:28:22 ◼ ► From practical terms, what is practically available today in December 2025, LLM technology is orders of magnitude more useful and practical than any other branch of AI in terms of what it can do.
02:28:38 ◼ ► It was one of the cornerstones of Siri originally when Apple bought it was semantic inference.
02:28:47 ◼ ► And it would have seemed like that was a hint and a half that it would be important a decade, decade later.
02:29:21 ◼ ► Anything you're not personally responsible for designing, implementing, shipping, and supporting is trivial by nature.
02:29:52 ◼ ► The part I thought was interesting when you wrote about Alan Dye was that originally iOS 7,
02:30:09 ◼ ► And then when Liquid Glass came out, it's like, we're going to make it computationally expensive.
02:30:13 ◼ ► We're going to do these effects that are so hard that if you don't have our class of silicon
02:30:44 ◼ ► But that was the main, I think the post I had was that Alan Dye was in Tim Cook's blind spot, right?
02:30:59 ◼ ► I think the weak spot was that both things can be true, that Alan Dye was a terrible leader for Apple's human interface and had surrounded himself with worse people like Billy Sorrentino, who went with him to Meta, who I've heard a number of stories.
02:31:14 ◼ ► I hope to report, but let's just say that nobody at Apple who was cheering Alan Dye's departure was sad about Billy Sorrentino going with him.
02:31:23 ◼ ► But how could they languish for so long and be in a position where Apple would put him in the biggest spot in the keynote this year at WWDC to take credit for and introduce liquid glass?
02:31:37 ◼ ► Like I said, he was in a blind spot, which I think because both things can be true, that Apple's human interface design has been going in the wrong direction overall, honestly, for over 10 years.
02:31:57 ◼ ► And it still is true, though, that Apple's human software human interface design is the best in the industry overall and that both things can be true, that their interface, that they were so far ahead that they could have a poor leader and still be putting out the best human interfaces in the industry.
02:32:23 ◼ ► And a big part of that isn't that they were entirely spending earned capital in that regard.
02:32:30 ◼ ► It's that there's so much talent in the ranks of the company, the rank-and-file designers who've been there for a long time or are new but are talented, the people like Stephen LeMay, who's now replacing Alan Dye as the leader, who's been there since 1999.
02:32:49 ◼ ► Right, that you can have a leader who doesn't get it like Alan Dye but still be producing, making lots of decisions that are good human interface and still doing it, but that it's untenable in the long run and that you need somebody in charge whose taste is at such a high level that it's above the product, right?
02:33:12 ◼ ► That you've got, this gets back to my old talk on the auteur theory of design, but what you want is somebody in charge of Apple's human interface design who's ever unsatisfied with where they are because their taste is higher than what they've shipped.
02:33:29 ◼ ► And no matter how good it gets and how many years they've been doing it, and I think that defines Steve Jobs, that he was never, ever satisfied.
02:33:35 ◼ ► Always, no matter what they've shipped, that it was all of a sudden, no, you can only see what's wrong with it and wants it to be better because his taste was so high that you couldn't really achieve it.
02:33:46 ◼ ► Whereas I think Alan Dye had taste that was underneath the level that Apple was shipping.
02:33:52 ◼ ► And I, unfortunately, either, I don't, I'm not going to say all, but obviously a majority of Apple's senior leadership couldn't see the problems that the rest of us see.
02:34:03 ◼ ► The little, the thousand paper cuts that have developed over the last 10 years and lessons that Apple has forgotten, things that were better before, solved problems that have gone away, like the proxy icons for document windows that you could.
02:34:22 ◼ ► Simple affordances that were so clever and that Apple innovated and Apple created and Apple brought to market and then Apple walked away from because they added a little bit of visual distraction, not even clutter.
02:34:40 ◼ ► It's heartbreaking in a way, but that Apple senior leadership, they were things that they didn't notice.
02:34:45 ◼ ► And so they thought it was okay because they still had the best human interface in the world.
02:34:49 ◼ ► And I think Alan Dye is very, from everything I've read, and it would explain how he lasted and was still there and in the position he was to get a prime keynote spot, was a very, very good political worker within the company.
02:35:05 ◼ ► And that, that sort of politics, internal politics first attitude is so contrary to the personality types of everybody I've ever known who works at Apple and in the rank and file engineering or design.
02:35:22 ◼ ► It's like, oh, and you could say, oh, I work at a company and it's the executives who are good at politics who always succeed.
02:35:29 ◼ ► It might be the way business works at most companies, but it's definitely not how it typically worked at Apple.
02:35:34 ◼ ► And it's sort of poison within Apple's culture to have, I mean, obviously everybody who, who achieves the senior vice president title is good at politics and inside the company in some way, obviously.
02:35:55 ◼ ► So in some, in a weird way, the surprise departure of Apple's senior vice president of design, I think is, I think the best news to happen to Apple all year.
02:36:04 ◼ ► And it was the last thing to happen to all year, but it wasn't their choice or doing, but, you know.
02:36:12 ◼ ► He's been there since the Steve Jobs days, like famous for his interesting conversations with Steve.
02:36:22 ◼ ► You contrasted the liquid glass unveiling to when Steve Jobs unveiled Aqua and just the way he spoke about it, like with the lickable icons and the delight he took in presenting it.
02:36:38 ◼ ► And the other thing too, though, and I'll emphasize this, where there is, I, most people focused on liquid glass are focused on the, the lickability difference.
02:36:52 ◼ ► And it's not about dating or trendiness or it's certainly more of today's style of 2025.
02:37:04 ◼ ► But the bigger problems, and I think Steve, so I think Steve and LeMay will do a better job with that.
02:37:09 ◼ ► But I don't think that's the main problem with Alan Dye's leadership are the things that would apply even if, remember when macOS, it never actually shipped because Steve Jobs put the kibosh on it.
02:37:36 ◼ ► And there was, the main default theme was called platinum, but you could switch to other themes.
02:37:41 ◼ ► And there were third-party utilities that did the same thing, like the ARIN system extension, which would make all your windows look like BOS.
02:37:59 ◼ ► And when Steve Jobs came back, he was like, these other ones are ridiculous and ugly and stupid, and we should be making the decision for what our OS looks like, not the user.
02:38:10 ◼ ► So they shipped an OS with an appearance manager where you could choose your appearance, and there was only one choice, which is ridiculous.
02:38:21 ◼ ► There was one, I think it was called techno, where that looked like architectural drawings.
02:38:27 ◼ ► It made all the windows look like they were made out of paper, and the system font changed to like a handwriting font, like an architect's handwriting font, not like Comic Sans.
02:38:36 ◼ ► There was one called Gizmo that looked like sort of Toy Story, futuristic, primary colored things.
02:38:49 ◼ ► But you could change the theme of the system and get an entirely new, not just like color theme, like dark mode, light mode, but totally different shape to buttons, different system font, different borders.
02:39:03 ◼ ► But the fundamental aspects of the Mac interface, human interface from a usability, a user experience standpoint, stayed the same, right?
02:39:13 ◼ ► That whether buttons in background windows were still clickable, or you had to bring the window forward to click them.
02:39:30 ◼ ► So if you could today put in a theme file, just go to Settings, User Interface, Theme, and pick.
02:39:40 ◼ ► And you could pick like an iOS 18 theme to make your phone today running iOS 26 look like it did a year ago.
02:40:09 ◼ ► The main problems of today's Apple user interface, human interface design, are aside from those aesthetic details of the theme.
02:40:19 ◼ ► There are the usability things that would be just as true if you got rid of the liquid glass theme and went back to last year's theme.
02:40:32 ◼ ► The thousand little paper cuts of things you can't do, things you ought to be able to do but can't.
02:40:39 ◼ ► Like when you make, just to name one example, like when you make multiple lock screens on your phone, which is a cool feature.
02:40:51 ◼ ► Whatever, the most recent one you've made is on the right and the first, oldest one you made is on the left.
02:40:58 ◼ ► And if you'd like to, because you have seven of them, but the two you use the most frequently are the first one and the seventh one.
02:41:16 ◼ ► If you've got a list of seven things and there's a good reason you might want to reorder them, then there's a way to reorder them that is intuitive to the user to do.
02:41:34 ◼ ► And that's why it's so galling to see Alan Dye bringing up the Steve Jobs quote that design isn't what it looks like.