The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Ladies and gentlemen, your pal John Gruber here.

00:00:04 ◼   ► This is a very special episode of the talk show.

00:00:06 ◼   ► It is a different episode of the talk show as you're about to find out.

00:00:09 ◼   ► And so it has a different kind of sponsorship set up.

00:00:12 ◼   ► I'm just going to tell you right here, this episode is exclusively brought to you by Meh.com.

00:00:19 ◼   ► That's Meh.com.

00:00:21 ◼   ► If you don't know what's Meh, it's a daily deal site.

00:00:24 ◼   ► You guys remember Woot, W-O-O-T?

00:00:26 ◼   ► That was a daily deal site where they put funny content and videos and stuff like that

00:00:30 ◼   ► up and they'd have one thing a day that they would sell at an extraordinary discount.

00:00:34 ◼   ► Then they sold to Amazon.

00:00:35 ◼   ► That was Woot.

00:00:36 ◼   ► They sold to Amazon and Amazon started changing everything around and eventually got rid of

00:00:40 ◼   ► everything about Woot that made Woot Woot.

00:00:42 ◼   ► So the team laughed.

00:00:43 ◼   ► They left Amazon when they could and they started a new site that was like Woot except

00:00:48 ◼   ► even better than it used to be.

00:00:50 ◼   ► And that's Meh.

00:00:51 ◼   ► It's the guys behind Woot.

00:00:52 ◼   ► They have a new site, Meh, and you go there every day and they have a daily deal.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Something is on sale at an extraordinary discount, like a G.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I wonder if they like rip these off the back of a truck sort of discount.

00:01:03 ◼   ► Gadgets, oftentimes, toys, stuff like that.

00:01:07 ◼   ► But the main reason to go there, it's not even to find the discount.

00:01:09 ◼   ► It's not a shopping site.

00:01:10 ◼   ► It's one thing a day that's available at a limited time.

00:01:13 ◼   ► The reason to go to Meh.com every day are the videos that they make,

00:01:17 ◼   ► the descriptions that they write that are hilarious,

00:01:20 ◼   ► sometimes not even about the product at all.

00:01:23 ◼   ► It's really just a great site to work

00:01:25 ◼   ► into your daily routine of places to go

00:01:28 ◼   ► when you wanna be not bored or entertained

00:01:31 ◼   ► for a couple of minutes.

00:01:32 ◼   ► So go there, check them out at med.com.

00:01:35 ◼   ► Check out the videos, check out the site.

00:01:37 ◼   ► And you can even keep your eye on the daily deals.

00:01:40 ◼   ► You might find something really, really worthwhile.

00:01:42 ◼   ► They're great and they're the ones

00:01:43 ◼   ► who are bringing you today's episode.

00:01:46 ◼   ► And without any further ado,

00:01:48 ◼   ► Ladies and gentlemen, the talk show.

00:01:51 ◼   ► This is gonna be fun.

00:01:52 ◼   ► We've got Eddie Q, senior vice president,

00:01:56 ◼   ► internet, software and services.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Eddie, welcome to the talk show.

00:01:59 ◼   ► - How you doing?

00:02:01 ◼   ► - And returning to the talk show,

00:02:02 ◼   ► which is, must mean I didn't botch it up too badly.

00:02:06 ◼   ► Craig Federighi, senior vice president

00:02:08 ◼   ► of software engineering.

00:02:10 ◼   ► - It's a rare honor to be here, John.

00:02:13 ◼   ► - Here's my question.

00:02:14 ◼   ► This is a tough one.

00:02:15 ◼   ► I wanna know it now.

00:02:17 ◼   ► Eddie, you're a big sports fan.

00:02:18 ◼   ► Has Steve Dowling sent you to like photography school for like taking

00:02:23 ◼   ► pictures after sporting events now post Super Bowl? You know I love that because

00:02:28 ◼   ► you may know Tim and I went to the Super Bowl together and he's a huge Broncos

00:02:33 ◼   ► fan huge huge Broncos fan and so when they won the game we were all excited

00:02:39 ◼   ► we got high-fiving each other we went onto the field he's taking the photos

00:02:42 ◼   ► and he's so excited he wanted to congratulate him and sent the picture

00:02:45 ◼   ► And then the next morning I wake up and I get to see all of those

00:02:48 ◼   ► Messages and tweets and everything else and I thought it was great

00:02:52 ◼   ► Because it's it shows you know

00:02:54 ◼   ► Tim is just like you and me

00:02:56 ◼   ► He's a huge sports fan and was loving it and he loved that his team actually won the Super Bowl. I

00:03:01 ◼   ► said this I

00:03:04 ◼   ► I just thought it was that's exactly what I thought

00:03:07 ◼   ► I thought it was like Tim Tim as a human being and it's a real sports fans photo. I thought it was goofy, but I

00:03:14 ◼   ► Thought it was gooey the reaction that people had to me. It was just a happy moment. All right

00:03:17 ◼   ► I'm hoping I'm hoping to have a few more for you this year

00:03:20 ◼   ► Maybe another repeat for the Warriors repeat Duke national championship, you know, well that so I don't know about the Duke one

00:03:26 ◼   ► I wasn't gonna mention Duke Eddie. No. No, I was look I've been

00:03:30 ◼   ► We've been wanting to talk to you for like three weeks, but I told I told Dallin

00:03:34 ◼   ► There's no way I'm gonna talk to John right now because we've been losing games straight

00:03:38 ◼   ► So I waited till we've won the last we've won the last like two games in a row

00:03:42 ◼   ► We're hot and I'm like, let's get on the call now

00:03:44 ◼   ► No, my my last sports related suggestion to you is just in case the Warriors keep it up and just in case, you know

00:03:52 ◼   ► Maybe WWDC sticks to the typical schedule

00:03:54 ◼   ► Maybe you want to rehearse more and if you have extra tickets for a Warriors Finals game

00:03:59 ◼   ► I know a guy, you know, maybe you could take them off your hands just saying just

00:04:03 ◼   ► You're on

00:04:08 ◼   ► Let's let's get down to brass tacks here one of the things one of the reasons that this is even happening is

00:04:14 ◼   ► that Apple is

00:04:16 ◼   ► talking about and and telling its users a lot more about what is

00:04:23 ◼   ► coming down the pipeline in

00:04:26 ◼   ► Software so for I mean and the best example of that is is that there's a big it's not even like a developer page

00:04:31 ◼   ► It's a big product marketing page on what's coming in

00:04:34 ◼   ► iOS 9.3

00:04:37 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah, we have a real feature release here with 9.3.

00:04:44 ◼   ► And so we certainly wanted to talk about it.

00:04:46 ◼   ► And we also wanted to get it out in public seeds.

00:04:49 ◼   ► So many of you are running it.

00:04:52 ◼   ► Certainly all of us here are.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And there's a lot of really cool stuff we were able to do.

00:04:58 ◼   ► And we didn't want to wait all the way till WWDC to get it out.

00:05:02 ◼   ► is so I I'm not imagining things that this is a

00:05:06 ◼   ► At least a subtle change away from keeping features as a sort of

00:05:13 ◼   ► major, you know new features that you want to promote and in the OS as a

00:05:18 ◼   ► Monolithic once a year at WWDC will announce them and once a year a couple months later in the fall

00:05:26 ◼   ► We'll release them sort of schedule

00:05:30 ◼   ► Yeah, you know a huge part of what we do with with iOS every year is we're really advancing a platform for developers

00:05:37 ◼   ► And you really can't sort of trickle out a big change for developers at the platform level

00:05:43 ◼   ► continuously throughout the year, so that's something where it makes a ton of sense for us to

00:05:48 ◼   ► Advance it all at once have a conference

00:05:50 ◼   ► Get everyone early access to the SDKs that they're going to use give them a chance to get their apps

00:05:57 ◼   ► ready and take advantage of all the new capabilities and then get it out with a major OS.

00:06:02 ◼   ► But there are things that we can do that don't have that characteristic.

00:06:06 ◼   ► You know, and if you look at the kind of features coming in 9.3 with our support for education and, you know,

00:06:12 ◼   ► shared use iPads and the classroom app or the night shift feature,

00:06:16 ◼   ► or, you know, some of the improvements we made to

00:06:20 ◼   ► photos or even the smart keyboard handling on the iPad Pro.

00:06:24 ◼   ► So these are things that we wanted to get out right away

00:06:28 ◼   ► to everyone 'cause we think everyone can enjoy them

00:06:30 ◼   ► and they aren't the kind of things

00:06:31 ◼   ► that really impact moving the platform forward

00:06:33 ◼   ► for developers.

00:06:35 ◼   ► - Right, it's not really developer changes,

00:06:37 ◼   ► but it is, they're definitely major features.

00:06:40 ◼   ► One of my favorites is for the smart keyboard

00:06:42 ◼   ► that when you'd go to Spotlight Search,

00:06:44 ◼   ► you can arrow key down to the search results.

00:06:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know you did helpfully note for us

00:06:52 ◼   ► shortly after we shipped the iPad Pro that we missed one there.

00:06:56 ◼   ► So it's been great to miss more than one, let me say.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And so we've been responding to all the kind of great feedback we've gotten on the iPad

00:07:04 ◼   ► Pro, which we're all excited about the device and so excited about how people have really

00:07:08 ◼   ► embraced it.

00:07:09 ◼   ► But we all have our – as we all use it more deeply, we're all seeing things where we

00:07:15 ◼   ► can improve a bunch of things, including the keyboard support.

00:07:17 ◼   ► So we've taken this opportunity in 9.3 to make some of those enhancements.

00:07:21 ◼   ► So that is an interesting thing.

00:07:26 ◼   ► So one of the things is you guys actually are all, and I say,

00:07:29 ◼   ► not just you like Craig and Eddie,

00:07:31 ◼   ► but everybody on the executive leadership team, in addition to having,

00:07:36 ◼   ► you know, these jobs that are very specific in terms of your responsibilities,

00:07:39 ◼   ► you're also users of the products that Apple makes.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, I mean,

00:07:47 ◼   ► Well, that's why we're here for sure.

00:07:50 ◼   ► I mean, no one was more enthusiastic to get access to the inside of Apple and software

00:07:56 ◼   ► than myself and Eddie.

00:07:58 ◼   ► And certainly, you know, I am installing, I think I probably install something like 500 versions.

00:08:05 ◼   ► I mean, literally it's 500 or a thousand versions of OS X and iOS myself every year.

00:08:10 ◼   ► I mean, I have, you know, four Macs and four iPads and two phones and I upgrade them all

00:08:16 ◼   ► to the newest build pretty much every day.

00:08:19 ◼   ► So I don't know, I think I did the math wrong.

00:08:21 ◼   ► I think it's like 100,000 versions of OS X

00:08:23 ◼   ► and OIOS I install every year.

00:08:26 ◼   ► John, I've been doing this for more than 30 years.

00:08:30 ◼   ► You know, the way I started with this was bringing my Mac

00:08:33 ◼   ► into the office for my first job.

00:08:36 ◼   ► And so working on the Mac for me was like a dream come true.

00:08:40 ◼   ► So I live on our products every day.

00:08:43 ◼   ► I use all of our products every day.

00:08:44 ◼   ► They're, they're part of my life, my kids, my family. And so it's, it's great.

00:08:48 ◼   ► And we share that experience and we give each other feedback and we, uh, you know,

00:08:53 ◼   ► we, we, it's, it's what we do.

00:08:55 ◼   ► But so like you like Eddie, like you, when you get like a,

00:09:00 ◼   ► a new Mac book pro or whatever you're going to use, you know,

00:09:04 ◼   ► but you set it up yourself.

00:09:05 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely. My, my, my, first of all,

00:09:09 ◼   ► hopefully everyone can set it up themselves because that's what we build it for.

00:09:12 ◼   ► And it's really easy.

00:09:14 ◼   ► I set it up.

00:09:15 ◼   ► I, I transfer my content from my old Mac book or I just did a new iMac.

00:09:20 ◼   ► As a matter of fact, I actually bought it myself.

00:09:21 ◼   ► I bought, I went on the online store.

00:09:23 ◼   ► I wanted to see what the experience was.

00:09:25 ◼   ► I ordered it, checked all the mail.

00:09:27 ◼   ► I wanted to see the mail, the notifications that came to my phone and then installed it all.

00:09:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:32 ◼   ► And I mean, no, no joke at ease.

00:09:33 ◼   ► Seriously.

00:09:34 ◼   ► Most meetings I'm in with Eddie at some point in the meeting, he breaks out one of his devices and starts upgrading it mid meeting.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And then we're able to get on the fly feedback on the new software during the meeting.

00:09:43 ◼   ► So it's very helpful.

00:09:46 ◼   ► I know it sounds like a trivial question, but it's something I've always wanted to ask

00:09:50 ◼   ► people like you, because I can see it both ways, where I know you guys are technically

00:09:54 ◼   ► adept and have the background to do it.

00:09:58 ◼   ► But on the other hand, as the senior vice president of a semi-large corporation, you

00:10:04 ◼   ► don't have to.

00:10:05 ◼   ► If you wanted to have somebody set up your stuff for you, you could do it.

00:10:08 ◼   ► So it's always been curious to me

00:10:09 ◼   ► whether you guys go through it

00:10:11 ◼   ► because you want to get that,

00:10:12 ◼   ► like what's it like to be a real user experience

00:10:15 ◼   ► or do you take advantage of it,

00:10:18 ◼   ► the fact that you don't have to if you don't want to?

00:10:20 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, and it's not just that.

00:10:22 ◼   ► I mean, we're both involved every day

00:10:26 ◼   ► in the development of the software

00:10:28 ◼   ► that's being put together.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And so we all wanna run the latest thing

00:10:33 ◼   ► that we were just in a HAI review talking about.

00:10:35 ◼   ► We wanna get that feature

00:10:37 ◼   ► that we talked about last week and start living on it

00:10:40 ◼   ► so we can start giving the team feedback

00:10:42 ◼   ► on what we're seeing.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And so it's an integral part of how we develop here

00:10:48 ◼   ► is that we all live on the software.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And at the same time, I mean, probably like yourself,

00:10:53 ◼   ► and we're all the tech support teams for our families

00:10:56 ◼   ► and our parents and our in-laws.

00:10:59 ◼   ► And so I have all my kids are running the betas all the time

00:11:03 ◼   ► so we get live feedback, helpful feedback

00:11:07 ◼   ► from the whole family nonstop.

00:11:08 ◼   ► We're immersed in the Apple universe of feedback.

00:11:12 ◼   ► - John, let me give you an example of something,

00:11:15 ◼   ► 'cause this happens all the time for me.

00:11:17 ◼   ► I'm using our products.

00:11:17 ◼   ► So this weekend I was using Apple TV.

00:11:19 ◼   ► I've got the new Apple TV.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And by the way, which we should talk about,

00:11:22 ◼   ► there's a lot of great new features coming out with this.

00:11:25 ◼   ► This is a major release of Apple TV.

00:11:27 ◼   ► But I'm doing a purchase of a movie

00:11:31 ◼   ► and I've got a family plan, Apple Music,

00:11:34 ◼   ► the whole thing with everybody.

00:11:35 ◼   ► And the message that comes up on the screen says,

00:11:38 ◼   ► somebody from your family has already purchased this.

00:11:41 ◼   ► Would you like to buy it again?

00:11:43 ◼   ► Pretty dumb message.

00:11:46 ◼   ► And so it's an example of I got on there and it's like,

00:11:50 ◼   ► I'm talking to my team, why are we doing it this way?

00:11:52 ◼   ► And it's just a history thing of before there was family

00:11:54 ◼   ► plan, it would ask you that question,

00:11:56 ◼   ► 'cause it was a single user.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Once you have a family plan, it should just download.

00:12:00 ◼   ► It shouldn't even bother to ask you.

00:12:02 ◼   ► And so, you know, we live both Craig and I,

00:12:05 ◼   ► and that's part of what we love doing.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And so it's great to be able to have an impact

00:12:09 ◼   ► and change these things, 'cause we're using them ourselves.

00:12:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a perfect example.

00:12:15 ◼   ► One of the questions I wanted to ask you

00:12:16 ◼   ► is what was the last bug that you encountered yourself?

00:12:19 ◼   ► And that's a good one.

00:12:20 ◼   ► And it's an interesting explanation, right?

00:12:22 ◼   ► Just to clarify, what you're saying is,

00:12:24 ◼   ► it's saying that the person who's now in your family plan,

00:12:28 ◼   ► who made that purchase earlier,

00:12:30 ◼   ► made the purchase before there was a thing

00:12:31 ◼   ► called the family plan and therefore it did not automatically download.

00:12:34 ◼   ► No, it was just,

00:12:35 ◼   ► it wasn't what they did make the purchase and they were part of the family plan.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Originally when we were doing this, um,

00:12:41 ◼   ► there wasn't a thing as family plan.

00:12:44 ◼   ► And so it was designed just to ask you if you wanted to purchase again,

00:12:47 ◼   ► when we did this software for family plan, we didn't take into account that we

00:12:51 ◼   ► just said, Oh, somebody already purchased it.

00:12:53 ◼   ► And instead of just downloading it, we didn't do that.

00:12:55 ◼   ► But I want to give you, since you said,

00:12:56 ◼   ► I want to give you a little to tell you a little bit how crazy Craig and I are,

00:13:00 ◼   ► about this stuff and you said what's the latest because it just reminded me of this. I was

00:13:06 ◼   ► installing a new version of OS X on my iMac. It's a non-release version a couple of days ago and I

00:13:13 ◼   ► ran into a problem that I couldn't, I knew would be very difficult to recreate and this is about

00:13:18 ◼   ► 7 30 at night. I had just gotten home doing the update and I called Craig up and I said here's

00:13:24 ◼   ► the problem that I've got. I was leaving the next day to Yuma, Arizona by the way. I want to give a

00:13:28 ◼   ► shout out to the kids and teachers out in Yuma, Arizona that are using iPads.

00:13:34 ◼   ► But I called Craig up, told him about the problem, and I said, "Look, I'm leaving

00:13:37 ◼   ► tomorrow." I said, "I want you guys to kind of look at this because I think this is

00:13:41 ◼   ► kind of weird. I don't think it's gonna be easy to recreate." He says, "Sure." So I

00:13:44 ◼   ► took the iMac, put in my car, drove to Craig's house, gave him the iMac, came back

00:13:49 ◼   ► home, went on my trip. Craig is engineering. The engineer was looking at

00:13:52 ◼   ► it, figured it out, and the next day got the iMac back. So it was sort of like

00:13:58 ◼   ► preserving a crime scene. That's right except we found out at the end that no

00:14:04 ◼   ► crime was committed because we fixed it. Right but if you know if you have a bug

00:14:10 ◼   ► or just an edge case that you're worried you can't reproduce it's like you really

00:14:15 ◼   ► do just want to like freeze the computer right where it is and let the engineers

00:14:19 ◼   ► you know start debugging. Yeah absolutely and it was was helpful that Eddie was

00:14:25 ◼   ► was on the case on that one. That's a really great story though. I love that he just drops it off.

00:14:32 ◼   ► It's good to know people. But that's it is interesting. But it's that's exactly the sort

00:14:40 ◼   ► of question I had is how how involved do you guys get when you run into one of these little,

00:14:45 ◼   ► you know, it's inevitable. I mean, there's nobody has ever written bug free software. It's the nature

00:14:49 ◼   ► of software. But what do you guys do when you guys encounter it? And that's driving over to

00:14:55 ◼   ► Craig's house is the answer.

00:14:57 ◼   ► I like it.

00:14:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:14:59 ◼   ► So before we forget, let's go back and talk about

00:15:01 ◼   ► what's coming up in Apple TV.

00:15:03 ◼   ► So right now it's a beta, it's tvOS 9.2.

00:15:08 ◼   ► And there is a lot of, it really is a major feature.

00:15:12 ◼   ► Just off the top of my head.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Siri dictation for text entry and searching for apps.

00:15:18 ◼   ► That's something people started complaining about

00:15:20 ◼   ► as soon as the new Apple TV shipped.

00:15:23 ◼   ► That's a big one.

00:15:25 ◼   ► Yeah, it's huge. Look, when you get your Apple TV the first time,

00:15:29 ◼   ► the first thing you've got to do is enter your Apple ID and your password.

00:15:33 ◼   ► And being able to...you've got Siri built into this remote.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Why not just tell it and spell it out instead of having to, you know,

00:15:41 ◼   ► go through the typing mechanism of doing it?

00:15:43 ◼   ► And so we wanted to do that right from the beginning.

00:15:45 ◼   ► And then searching on the App Store, we added searching across movies, TV shows,

00:15:49 ◼   ► and Netflix and Hulu.

00:15:50 ◼   ► We've added a bunch of new content providers like FX.

00:15:54 ◼   ► You can search Disney Channel.

00:15:56 ◼   ► We're adding, we continue to add more,

00:15:57 ◼   ► but obviously the App Store is a huge one.

00:15:59 ◼   ► And so we've done that.

00:16:01 ◼   ► We've added some languages, Spanish, French to that.

00:16:06 ◼   ► And we've added iCloud photo library, full support

00:16:09 ◼   ► so you can see all of your photos.

00:16:11 ◼   ► And also, one of the things that you've noticed

00:16:13 ◼   ► if you've downloaded a lot of apps on the App Store,

00:16:15 ◼   ► from the App Store, having folders now.

00:16:18 ◼   ► So just like you have on iOS, you can add folders.

00:16:22 ◼   ► - Right, so you could just group together

00:16:24 ◼   ► all your little arcade games, put them in an arcade folder.

00:16:27 ◼   ► - That's right.

00:16:28 ◼   ► - Right.

00:16:29 ◼   ► What, can you tell me, I know this is from the list,

00:16:33 ◼   ► and this is how lazy I am at preparing

00:16:35 ◼   ► for a very important talk show.

00:16:37 ◼   ► One of the features is conference room display mode.

00:16:40 ◼   ► What is that?

00:16:42 ◼   ► - We had this in the original Apple TV,

00:16:44 ◼   ► and part of this is, if you know most conference rooms

00:16:48 ◼   ► from Wi-Fi connectivities into the networks,

00:16:50 ◼   ► You have people, you have private networks that are set up for the corporation, but then

00:16:55 ◼   ► somebody comes in to present and you don't really want to let them into your private

00:16:59 ◼   ► network from the company.

00:17:01 ◼   ► And so we had this capability and we wanted to add that to the Apple TV so that it would

00:17:06 ◼   ► be easy for people to come in and present.

00:17:09 ◼   ► We can also lock the display so that instead of showing you the latest top movies at the

00:17:14 ◼   ► beginning of every meeting, it can just tell you that you can airplay to it.

00:17:18 ◼   ► We all stay on top of all the top films here at Apple when we start every meeting

00:17:22 ◼   ► But now we have now we have an alternative. That's

00:17:24 ◼   ► So it's not it's really Siri wide. I mean and this affects every platform but

00:17:31 ◼   ► The expansion to include new languages obviously that is really super important to let's just say people who speak Spanish

00:17:39 ◼   ► It's really like a make-or-break feature. How how

00:17:46 ◼   ► difficult is that to do each language going, you know,

00:17:50 ◼   ► to keep adding languages to Siri

00:17:52 ◼   ► and to keep the level of quality of Siri's recognition.

00:17:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, we have over 35 languages in Siri.

00:18:00 ◼   ► Apple TV presents an actually an interesting problem

00:18:04 ◼   ► compared to just Siri itself in that

00:18:06 ◼   ► a lot of the things that you search for

00:18:08 ◼   ► are not in the native language you're speaking.

00:18:11 ◼   ► So you're actually, let's say speaking in Spanish,

00:18:13 ◼   ► but you're searching for an English title.

00:18:16 ◼   ► And so Siri has to be aware that it's actually able

00:18:20 ◼   ► to speak multiple languages because you wouldn't,

00:18:23 ◼   ► and understand when it is that it's asking for a title

00:18:27 ◼   ► versus when it is that you're actually giving a verb

00:18:30 ◼   ► or a noun to it from that.

00:18:31 ◼   ► And so it's an interesting, challenging problem,

00:18:34 ◼   ► which is why we've been adding languages to Siri.

00:18:36 ◼   ► We're not quite, to Apple TV, we're not quite up to the 35

00:18:38 ◼   ► that Siri has, but we'll keep adding on.

00:18:41 ◼   ► and it's supporting that multi-language aspect of Siri

00:18:44 ◼   ► that makes it even more fun for us to try to resolve.

00:18:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, our machine learning teams at Apple

00:18:52 ◼   ► and within the Siri team have done some remarkable work,

00:18:55 ◼   ► and I know you've noticed some of the improvements

00:18:57 ◼   ► to Siri's both performance and its ability to recognize,

00:19:00 ◼   ► but the core technology has improved so much

00:19:03 ◼   ► that it's really helped us get high accuracy

00:19:07 ◼   ► when we take on all of these new languages.

00:19:10 ◼   ► And some of these challenges, like now we have to know, not just that you're

00:19:13 ◼   ► speaking Spanish, but while you're speaking Spanish, you're talking about,

00:19:16 ◼   ► they might be giants, but you're pronouncing those words with a Spanish

00:19:19 ◼   ► accent and Siri needs to recognize that these are, these are the kinds of things

00:19:23 ◼   ► that, uh, you know, a few years ago were just out of reach and now we have the

00:19:26 ◼   ► core technology, uh, to do it.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And I think the experience with Siri is just taken some giant leaps forward.

00:19:32 ◼   ► By the way, and, uh, at a huge scale, uh, these are billions of requests

00:19:38 ◼   ► that come in every week.

00:19:39 ◼   ► uh... to siri

00:19:41 ◼   ► across all the platforms

00:19:45 ◼   ► so in addition to that here's another one that that's added to uh...

00:19:49 ◼   ► tv o_s_ nine point two is sort of the

00:19:52 ◼   ► old-school way of text entry bluetooth keyboard support

00:19:56 ◼   ► and it's a little thing but

00:19:59 ◼   ► it's one of those were things that where the old apple t_v_ supported it

00:20:03 ◼   ► including at setup so that you could set up like if you had the apple uh...

00:20:08 ◼   ► Magic keyboard you could you could connect to it and then the new Apple TV came out and it didn't have it and everybody

00:20:14 ◼   ► Was some people maybe were a little annoyed that everything they had to do with the new Apple TV in November was up down left

00:20:21 ◼   ► Right to you know enter everything

00:20:23 ◼   ► Is is this just an issue of?

00:20:26 ◼   ► Hey, it was a new version of tvOS all new it's you know integrating it with iOS

00:20:32 ◼   ► We just didn't get to it by November or was this like a rethink like hey a lot of people are asking us

00:20:38 ◼   ► for Bluetooth keyboard support?

00:20:39 ◼   ► Let's go back and put it back in.

00:20:41 ◼   ► That's a great question.

00:20:42 ◼   ► In that case, it was really simple.

00:20:43 ◼   ► We were doing the new OS, and it's

00:20:45 ◼   ► something we wanted to get to.

00:20:47 ◼   ► We knew it wasn't the majority of customers,

00:20:49 ◼   ► and so we felt like we could add it later.

00:20:51 ◼   ► And we always planned it.

00:20:52 ◼   ► And yes, I did get a few emails and a few tweets about it.

00:20:57 ◼   ► You know what's just hilarious about this, though,

00:20:59 ◼   ► is we have a very vocal community, as you know.

00:21:03 ◼   ► And when we were getting this feedback--

00:21:07 ◼   ► even actually before making the decision not to include it in the first release,

00:21:10 ◼   ► that the team had done the analysis based on our diagnostics and usage data of

00:21:14 ◼   ► you know, how, about how many customers use a Bluetooth keyboard with their,

00:21:17 ◼   ► with their Apple TV every week. And they charted it out over time.

00:21:21 ◼   ► And it's a, it's a, it's a small rate relative to the, you know,

00:21:24 ◼   ► how people are using the built-in remote and so forth.

00:21:27 ◼   ► But we noticed that that rate of use of the Bluetooth keyboard dropped to almost

00:21:31 ◼   ► nothing during WWDC.

00:21:34 ◼   ► And what this told us was pretty much everyone

00:21:37 ◼   ► who's using it as a developer who's going to WWDC

00:21:40 ◼   ► or an Apple employee.

00:21:41 ◼   ► Now that didn't stop all of them from writing Eddie

00:21:44 ◼   ► when it was missing, but just to give you a sense

00:21:46 ◼   ► of kind of what's going on underneath all that.

00:21:48 ◼   ► - That is hilarious.

00:21:52 ◼   ► 'Cause I was going to say that I think it's a hard sell

00:21:57 ◼   ► across your family.

00:21:59 ◼   ► Like whether there's one person in the family

00:22:01 ◼   ► who's technically adept and wants to put

00:22:03 ◼   ► Bluetooth keyboard in the living room. I think it's a hard sell family-wide to

00:22:07 ◼   ► keep a keyboard in the living room. And we do have a little bit something even a

00:22:11 ◼   ► little bit better coming out in a few months which is we have a new remote app

00:22:14 ◼   ► so that if you have your iPhone you can use the keyboard on the iPhone to do

00:22:19 ◼   ► that and I think that certainly will get a lot more use. And more than that I mean

00:22:23 ◼   ► really the full you know Siri to your phone communicating with your TV and

00:22:27 ◼   ► that's a it's a great upgrade to that app. Well you could there's a remote app

00:22:32 ◼   ► for the iPhone now that you can connect to Apple TV. There is, as Craig said, it only does the

00:22:37 ◼   ► keyboard. The new remote app will do all of the capabilities that the existing new Apple TV remote

00:22:43 ◼   ► does like Siri. And like gestures, for instance, because you have obviously, you know, the trackpad

00:22:48 ◼   ► function of the remote can be done with your phone now too with that remote. So it's a really

00:22:52 ◼   ► full replacement. Oh, so I have a scoop here. There you go. That's actually heard it here first.

00:22:58 ◼   ► Well, you can't broadcast this for three months.

00:23:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:23:04 ◼   ► - I think that's gonna actually make a lot of people

00:23:06 ◼   ► very happy though.

00:23:07 ◼   ► And it might, would that work with some of the games too?

00:23:11 ◼   ► So that if there's a two player game

00:23:13 ◼   ► that somebody could use their phone

00:23:15 ◼   ► and have it be the slider

00:23:16 ◼   ► and somebody else can use the remote?

00:23:18 ◼   ► - Yes, that's exactly, you can use the metal,

00:23:20 ◼   ► the Apple TV remote for one person

00:23:22 ◼   ► and their phone for the second person.

00:23:25 ◼   ► - Oh, that sounds great.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Let's move on and sort of talk about something that it almost feels like a Groundhog Day.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And it's almost, you know, since it's February, it actually is close to Groundhog Day.

00:23:37 ◼   ► Is that last year, there were a couple of posts that came up early in the year about

00:23:40 ◼   ► Apple having little tiny sort of death by a thousand paper cut software problems across

00:23:47 ◼   ► the board.

00:23:48 ◼   ► And there was a lot of discussion about it and sort of culminated, at least for me, when

00:23:54 ◼   ► Phil Schiller was on this show at the live show at WWDC and we talked about it

00:23:58 ◼   ► and I thought Phil talked about it really openly and then it seemed to fade

00:24:03 ◼   ► away from the punditry discussion and then last week Walt Mossberg had a

00:24:09 ◼   ► column I think the headline was Apple's app problem do you got what do you guys

00:24:15 ◼   ► say to this this just the general nothing specific let's not get in any

00:24:18 ◼   ► specific app, but the general idea that Apple's software has declined in quality, let's say,

00:24:25 ◼   ► over the last five years.

00:24:27 ◼   ► I would say first that there's nothing we care about more.

00:24:32 ◼   ► So it's not just me and Eddie filing lots of radars and using our devices, but everyone

00:24:40 ◼   ► who works here at Apple, we recognize this is the single most important thing about what

00:24:44 ◼   ► we do and what we come to work to do every day.

00:24:47 ◼   ► So I take extremely seriously any time any of our customers says that they aren't having

00:24:54 ◼   ► the experience that they expected from us.

00:24:57 ◼   ► And clearly Walt's article indicates that he is at the moment in that camp.

00:25:03 ◼   ► I look at it and say, "I know our core software quality has improved over the last five years,

00:25:12 ◼   ► improved significantly.

00:25:15 ◼   ► But the bar just keeps going up and that's a bar that we embrace.

00:25:21 ◼   ► That is a challenge that, you know, every year we realize we, the things we were good

00:25:26 ◼   ► at last year and the techniques we were using to build the best software we can are not

00:25:32 ◼   ► adequate for the next year because the bar keeps going up.

00:25:35 ◼   ► We have a billion active devices now.

00:25:38 ◼   ► And you know, if you think back to just nine years ago now with the iPhone, it, how many

00:25:45 ◼   ► much think back then of kind of how you interface with technology and

00:25:49 ◼   ► comparatively how narrowly each of us interface with technology and now think

00:25:53 ◼   ► about how integral your iPhone your iPad and and and still your Mac are to your

00:26:00 ◼   ► life how many hours a day I mean we see the usage metrics and year after year as

00:26:04 ◼   ► our team builds a new phone and thinks how big a battery should we put in this

00:26:08 ◼   ► phone we have to go back to them and say guys actually you're gonna have to up

00:26:11 ◼   ► that a good bit because people are using their phones more than ever this year

00:26:13 ◼   ► year and we see that trend go up and up and up and people are doing more and

00:26:16 ◼   ► more and what this means is when you have a billion people running phones in

00:26:21 ◼   ► every corner of their lives with all of these third-party apps in all these

00:26:24 ◼   ► countries and all these languages that there are going there are going to be

00:26:29 ◼   ► issues there were always issues but now these issues are you know you have

00:26:33 ◼   ► plenty of people that can can encounter one here and there and it gets it gets

00:26:38 ◼   ► amplified and and maybe I could ask you I mean I feel like something if you go

00:26:41 ◼   ► back five years or ten years in just the nature of internet journalism and the

00:26:46 ◼   ► press and how stories like this get communicated and amplified is change

00:26:52 ◼   ► things a little bit as well and so I think that plays into this the

00:26:57 ◼   ► element of why are we hearing about this again or why do we hear about it in

00:27:00 ◼   ► the way we do but I know we put just tremendous focus on improving our game

00:27:07 ◼   ► every year yeah I there's there's a certain aspect to the the basic idea

00:27:16 ◼   ► that to me is a little bit more of a then not just me I'm saying what I

00:27:20 ◼   ► detect when I when I see people nodding their heads in agreement on Twitter and

00:27:25 ◼   ► and follow up post to say the the like Mossberg's column last week that it's

00:27:30 ◼   ► more of a gut feeling than anything that anybody can put their finger on and say

00:27:35 ◼   ► here's this one thing that's, you know, absolutely terrible. And I know just from, you know, talking

00:27:44 ◼   ► with Phil last year, and like what you're saying now, that you guys have a lot of ways that you

00:27:51 ◼   ► measure this stuff with real analytics from the the diagnostics that people explicitly opt in to

00:27:58 ◼   ► provide to you when they're setting up devices. That's right. And that it there, I sense it, you

00:28:03 ◼   ► you guys, I mean, you two are both, you know, optimistic, cheerful people, but I,

00:28:08 ◼   ► I can't help, but I suspect,

00:28:11 ◼   ► and it's not coming from your voices here on this show,

00:28:13 ◼   ► but I just suspect in general that there's a sort of frustration within the

00:28:17 ◼   ► walls at Apple that you guys have these numbers that say software quality is

00:28:22 ◼   ► going up. And then on the outside, everybody is saying, wow, so Apple software,

00:28:26 ◼   ► they're, they're eyes off the ball. Is that, is it frustrating?

00:28:29 ◼   ► No, look, I think you said a few words that I would,

00:28:32 ◼   ► I would disagree with you, said everybody.

00:28:34 ◼   ► Uh, I think the vast majority of our customers are quite happy with our products

00:28:39 ◼   ► and the feedback that they've, they get and, and they ask for help.

00:28:42 ◼   ► And that's why we built things like Genius bars, which have been very popular.

00:28:45 ◼   ► Uh, why we, you know, we spend a great deal of money and effort on our Apple

00:28:50 ◼   ► care and support lines so that when people need help, um, you know,

00:28:54 ◼   ► training all of those things.

00:28:55 ◼   ► So I think it's, it's not to say that we don't have any bugs or

00:29:00 ◼   ► that we don't have any issues.

00:29:01 ◼   ► Every piece of software does.

00:29:03 ◼   ► We care deeply about it, which is why we all, you know, do all of these

00:29:07 ◼   ► different touch points, monitor them, look at them, make sure we're addressing them.

00:29:11 ◼   ► And, and at the same time as doing that, upping the game even more, because part

00:29:16 ◼   ► of upping the game is not just standing still and making the things that you have

00:29:20 ◼   ► worked, but making them even better, making them easier to use, those are all

00:29:24 ◼   ► the things we have to do at the same time.

00:29:26 ◼   ► - And Apple customers deserve the best.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And that's absolutely what we're signed up for.

00:29:34 ◼   ► So if and when we hear people are having challenges,

00:29:39 ◼   ► while on the one hand, we're frustrated, of course,

00:29:43 ◼   ► to hear it overall characterized as this,

00:29:47 ◼   ► the quality is dropping overall,

00:29:50 ◼   ► because we know that's not true,

00:29:51 ◼   ► but at the same time, there's certainly reality

00:29:54 ◼   ► if people are having these experiences,

00:29:57 ◼   ► then there's something we can improve.

00:29:59 ◼   ► And I can tell you the number of meetings we have

00:30:03 ◼   ► and have had even over the last few weeks

00:30:05 ◼   ► where we're constantly talking about how do we up the game?

00:30:09 ◼   ► Because when you talk about a billion customers

00:30:12 ◼   ► and you talk about the kind of upgrade rates we have,

00:30:15 ◼   ► I mean, I think back to when we shipped Snow Leopard

00:30:18 ◼   ► and how many people installed 10.6.0?

00:30:23 ◼   ► Effectively no one.

00:30:24 ◼   ► Okay.

00:30:25 ◼   ► I mean, you know, approximately no one.

00:30:27 ◼   ► In fact, we used to talk about, well, the, the, the upgrade rate to this OS

00:30:30 ◼   ► will about match the sales of new Macs that have it installed, you know?

00:30:34 ◼   ► I mean, people just didn't upgrade.

00:30:36 ◼   ► And if they did upgrade, it's like, why don't we wait for 10.6.5 or something?

00:30:39 ◼   ► You know, now we release a piece of software and in a matter of a couple

00:30:45 ◼   ► of weeks, we have, you know, coming up on 50% of our base running that piece of

00:30:49 ◼   ► software, I mean, hundreds of millions of people suddenly pounding on it, running

00:30:53 ◼   ► a diversity of apps that just is unprecedented

00:30:57 ◼   ► and using it in these incredibly connected ways.

00:31:00 ◼   ► And so, yeah, the bar is higher

00:31:04 ◼   ► and we will continue to adapt every year

00:31:09 ◼   ► to meet that challenge.

00:31:10 ◼   ► - And the scale, John, for this is truly amazing

00:31:14 ◼   ► because of the usage that people,

00:31:16 ◼   ► I mean, they rely on these for their lives.

00:31:18 ◼   ► I'll give you a couple points that we peak out

00:31:22 ◼   ► at 200,000 messages a second

00:31:25 ◼   ► that are sent on messages, for example.

00:31:27 ◼   ► We do 750 million transactions every week

00:31:32 ◼   ► in our app store, iTunes store.

00:31:34 ◼   ► We've done billions of dollars,

00:31:37 ◼   ► now you're talking about dollars for payments in Apple Pay.

00:31:40 ◼   ► So, you know, this is like,

00:31:42 ◼   ► it's a part of everyone's lives, and it's great,

00:31:45 ◼   ► we love this, this is the reason why, you know,

00:31:48 ◼   ► we do what we do and we get up in the morning

00:31:51 ◼   ► we're excited about coming in is because we can do more.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Um, and so the scale of this is, is huge, huge.

00:31:58 ◼   ► So what was the number for hot for messages? 200 K per second at the peak.

00:32:04 ◼   ► That's right.

00:32:05 ◼   ► People got a lot to say apparently.

00:32:08 ◼   ► Yeah. That was probably right. Uh,

00:32:10 ◼   ► like right at the moment in the first quarter of the Superbowl where they didn't

00:32:14 ◼   ► over overturn that catch.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Yeah. For some reason,

00:32:19 ◼   ► For some reason, it was really high from North Carolina. I don't know what was

00:32:22 ◼   ► but that is extraordinary. So that Eddie, that gets to a specific point.

00:32:29 ◼   ► And this is clearly an, in a ball that's in your court is,

00:32:33 ◼   ► is the general meme that Apple doesn't do online service as

00:32:38 ◼   ► well. And you know, that's, that's your responsibility.

00:32:41 ◼   ► What do you say to that?

00:32:44 ◼   ► Well, I think you go back to the things that we do really well.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Some of that we earned, to be clear, right? Part of the reason we did that many years ago

00:32:54 ◼   ► with MobileMeer Maps, but we've corrected those. And you look at iCloud,

00:32:58 ◼   ► we do, you know, we have 782 million iCloud users.

00:33:03 ◼   ► Some have multiple devices, which is why we have a billion devices.

00:33:07 ◼   ► They upload billions of photos every single week, every single day.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And you look at the scale of messages, you look at Apple Pay, you look at our stores,

00:33:19 ◼   ► We run some of the largest services in the world, very successfully.

00:33:24 ◼   ► You take a look at Maps, we've corrected more than 2.5 million customer feedback

00:33:33 ◼   ► that we've gotten from customers directly to Maps, that we've corrected and notified them back that we fixed them.

00:33:38 ◼   ► So the scale of this is huge and I would compare it to any company out there.

00:33:44 ◼   ► And the ramp is unbelievable.

00:33:46 ◼   ► I mean, you consider when we launch a new release of iOS and OS X and the corresponding

00:33:52 ◼   ► cloud services, how we go from effectively zero to unbelievable international scale,

00:34:01 ◼   ► you know, literally overnight.

00:34:03 ◼   ► It's incredible.

00:34:04 ◼   ► And the team has, you know, done that at a scale, I think, that is, I can't think of

00:34:10 ◼   ► another example of what happens when we turn the lights on on a new service like we do.

00:34:16 ◼   ► And you know it generally goes off without a hitch the other thing I love about which is and I love this

00:34:23 ◼   ► We're not out harping

00:34:25 ◼   ► Our services as the brand the service isn't the thing it's the experience

00:34:30 ◼   ► And so you know whether you're typing in a note on your iPhone, and it's on your Mac

00:34:36 ◼   ► We're not

00:34:38 ◼   ► Advertising this as notes services or anything

00:34:40 ◼   ► We just want the experience to be so a lot of these things are behind the scenes and they just work and it's great for

00:34:45 ◼   ► customers. Yeah, even iMessage is a good example of that. And I personally have, I

00:34:51 ◼   ► I'd send, I don't even know, I'm a big chunk of that 200,000 messages per

00:34:56 ◼   ► second. I spend, I send a lot of messages and almost all my messages are

00:35:02 ◼   ► blue. Well you have good friends. But if you just look at how many people are

00:35:13 ◼   ► are using iMessage and how many messages they're sending, it compares, you know, very, very favorably

00:35:21 ◼   ► to a lot of the independent messaging apps and services out there like what app, what app and

00:35:29 ◼   ► WeChat and things like that. And I feel like that's one of those things that Apple doesn't

00:35:33 ◼   ► really get credit for, that they've got this messaging service with an extraordinary number

00:35:39 ◼   ► of users who are extraordinarily engaged with it and it's not really

00:35:43 ◼   ► figured into, you know, what Apple does at all because you guys don't really

00:35:48 ◼   ► brand it that way. You're just like, "Hey, just use this app and send it, you know,

00:35:51 ◼   ► send it to the, send your message to the person you know," and it goes through.

00:35:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's what's great really about what we do is we tie

00:36:00 ◼   ► together, you know, the hardware, the software, and the services in a way that

00:36:04 ◼   ► you aren't thinking you just used a cloud service necessarily when you bought

00:36:09 ◼   ► your new iPhone and all your settings came back exactly the way you expected

00:36:12 ◼   ► and so forth or when we do a feature like Apple Pay. I mean Apple Pay is a

00:36:16 ◼   ► hardware feature, it's a software feature, it's a cloud feature, and it just works.

00:36:21 ◼   ► And it's a tremendous complex undertaking but the customer doesn't

00:36:26 ◼   ► have to think about any of those component pieces. They get an

00:36:29 ◼   ► experience that hopefully delights them. I'll give you a real quick anecdote,

00:36:33 ◼   ► hopefully quick. I was on an airplane recently and the plane took off and I

00:36:38 ◼   ► got on the Wi Fi and an online service from a different company wasn't an Apple thing,

00:36:43 ◼   ► it was somebody else gave me a warning that I couldn't, you know, look like I was signing

00:36:48 ◼   ► in from an unusual location, because it was, I don't know where the plane Wi Fi was saying

00:36:52 ◼   ► it from. How do I want to verify that it's really me and I had the only options were

00:36:56 ◼   ► to get a phone call or an SMS text message, which I can't get because I'm 10,000 feet

00:37:02 ◼   ► up in the air. And I showed it to the guy this the my my friend for the day sitting

00:37:06 ◼   ► next to me on the plane who you know we'd spoken before the flight took off

00:37:10 ◼   ► and he was like oh yeah you can get text I'm texting my I'm texting my wife right

00:37:13 ◼   ► now he was saying he was sending an i-mess right and I just like oh yeah

00:37:18 ◼   ► okay I'll do that you know cuz I didn't want to explain but he was he thought he

00:37:22 ◼   ► was solving my problem because he just thought no no it's great this is

00:37:25 ◼   ► absolutely wonderful I'm texting right now he didn't really have to think about

00:37:29 ◼   ► what he's using to text he's just doing it yeah I think I think that's a

00:37:33 ◼   ► fantastic example. So let's shift from services to talk about a specific bit of

00:37:47 ◼   ► software which isn't really about how it works but really sort of how its design

00:37:50 ◼   ► and it's iTunes on the desktop and here is where I wanted to quote Walt. So

00:37:55 ◼   ► here's what Walt Mossberg wrote, "Apple's iTunes program was once the envy of the

00:37:59 ◼   ► world. A combined digital music store and player could also sync your iPod.

00:38:02 ◼   ► And it worked on both Mac and Windows. It was reasonably fast and very sure-footed.

00:38:07 ◼   ► Now I dread opening the thing. And that's sort of damning, and the thing that to me is more damning

00:38:17 ◼   ► is that I don't... I see a lot of people who agree with that, and I don't see anybody who really

00:38:21 ◼   ► disagrees with it. Yeah, look, let's go back to Walt's thing specifically to address, which is

00:38:31 ◼   ► this is performance issues and that.

00:38:33 ◼   ► We've actually looked at it, nothing to do with iTunes.

00:38:35 ◼   ► But your question is still dead on because it's something we started about

00:38:39 ◼   ► two years ago thinking about what we wanted to do with iTunes.

00:38:42 ◼   ► And let me walk you back with where it's designed from and

00:38:46 ◼   ► where I think it can go to.

00:38:48 ◼   ► So first of all,

00:38:49 ◼   ► we designed it in a time when everybody was syncing directly via cable.

00:38:53 ◼   ► So the things didn't exist in the cloud.

00:38:58 ◼   ► And having a centralized place where all of your content was there

00:39:01 ◼   ► to sync was really key because it made it really easy to do.

00:39:04 ◼   ► It didn't matter where the content was.

00:39:06 ◼   ► You didn't have to launch multiple apps.

00:39:07 ◼   ► You didn't have a separate app that made it really difficult

00:39:09 ◼   ► to see.

00:39:10 ◼   ► And so it worked really, really well.

00:39:12 ◼   ► And by the way, given that we have a billion devices out

00:39:14 ◼   ► there, there are still hundreds of millions of people

00:39:16 ◼   ► doing exactly that.

00:39:18 ◼   ► When we went to Apple Music, we said, well, let's see.

00:39:21 ◼   ► We're building a new service.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Why don't we do it all in the cloud?

00:39:24 ◼   ► Apple Music's all in the cloud.

00:39:25 ◼   ► Let's do it that way.

00:39:27 ◼   ► And one of the things that we wanted to do that was different

00:39:29 ◼   ► was we didn't want just the music that lived in the cloud.

00:39:32 ◼   ► If you had music, whether it was a live performance

00:39:37 ◼   ► with Bruce Springsteen, for example, which I just bought,

00:39:39 ◼   ► 'cause I haven't seen the new show and I'm a huge Bruce fan,

00:39:42 ◼   ► how do I get that to the cloud?

00:39:43 ◼   ► Well, in most of the services that are out there,

00:39:45 ◼   ► there's no way to do that.

00:39:47 ◼   ► Because it lives in iTunes, it lets you do that,

00:39:49 ◼   ► and it's very easy to upload that into the cloud

00:39:52 ◼   ► and then exists in all of your devices.

00:39:54 ◼   ► And so we decided that in the short term,

00:39:56 ◼   ► what we wanted to do is really make it

00:39:58 ◼   ► so that when you're in music and iTunes,

00:40:00 ◼   ► all you see is music.

00:40:02 ◼   ► And if you were doing a separate music app,

00:40:05 ◼   ► it would really look a lot like iTunes

00:40:07 ◼   ► when you're in the music player,

00:40:09 ◼   ► because there's only one area

00:40:10 ◼   ► where you pick which media type you wanna do.

00:40:13 ◼   ► That's not to say that we are continuing,

00:40:15 ◼   ► and we'll continue to think about what's the best way

00:40:18 ◼   ► to architect the app,

00:40:19 ◼   ► and whether it makes sense to do a separate app.

00:40:22 ◼   ► For some of the components that are in there,

00:40:23 ◼   ► or all of the components that are in there,

00:40:25 ◼   ► but right now we think we've designed iTunes,

00:40:27 ◼   ► And you'll see we've got a new refresh

00:40:29 ◼   ► with the new version of OS X that's coming out next month

00:40:33 ◼   ► that makes it even easier to use in the music space.

00:40:37 ◼   ► - There are definitely, there's a big responsibility

00:40:40 ◼   ► in transitioning the experiences for a lot of these apps.

00:40:44 ◼   ► So these are so important to people

00:40:45 ◼   ► and we see it every time we change them at all.

00:40:47 ◼   ► And there are cases where, if you look at photos,

00:40:50 ◼   ► where we did a really bold rethink

00:40:53 ◼   ► of where photos needed to go and how to transition it.

00:40:56 ◼   ► And by and large, I think that's been well received.

00:40:58 ◼   ► Um, and, uh, I, I, I personally love it.

00:41:01 ◼   ► And, uh, but, but you'll hear people who say, hold on, you know, there was a reason

00:41:05 ◼   ► why I liked the way things used to be.

00:41:07 ◼   ► And, uh, people are pretty serious about their music and, uh, about their

00:41:12 ◼   ► collection.

00:41:12 ◼   ► And so, um, I think, I think we, we talk, we debate pretty heavily internally, the

00:41:19 ◼   ► right, the right way to evolve these things.

00:41:21 ◼   ► And, and, you know, we, we tend to err on the side of being pretty bold.

00:41:24 ◼   ► Um, but, uh, there, there's a lot of responsibility.

00:41:28 ◼   ► We can, we, you get the other side of these, these stories.

00:41:31 ◼   ► Um, you know, some of the people, when you talk about people nodding your, your head,

00:41:35 ◼   ► if I, if I look at some of the comments that come online, when people say, yeah,

00:41:38 ◼   ► Apple, uh, Apple's quality is bad.

00:41:41 ◼   ► And someone will say, yeah, like when they took away my, my iPhoto app and replaced

00:41:45 ◼   ► it with photos, I don't like the new photos app and that's why they think Apple

00:41:49 ◼   ► software quality is bad.

00:41:51 ◼   ► Now, many of us would say, well, hold on.

00:41:52 ◼   ► there's exactly an example of where Apple's software quality is quite good. We delivered

00:41:57 ◼   ► something faster, cleaner, simpler, but someone's going to say no, but it's changed and I was

00:42:03 ◼   ► attached to it. And so this is a tricky balancing act and I think our customers give us a lot

00:42:10 ◼   ► of responsibility to thoughtfully evolve their experiences and we try to take that responsibility

00:42:15 ◼   ► very seriously.

00:42:16 ◼   ► I don't think anybody would disagree that institutionally Apple compared to its, any company you might compare it against,

00:42:23 ◼   ► has been always more willing to push through changes.

00:42:28 ◼   ► Whether you go back to the 80s and say that the Macintosh debuted without any kind of command line at all,

00:42:34 ◼   ► which was the only way anybody knew how to use a computer up until then.

00:42:37 ◼   ► And they're like, "No, this is the right way."

00:42:39 ◼   ► to another almost canonical example of it was the 1998 original iMac shipping

00:42:46 ◼   ► without a floppy disk and it's nobody had ever how can you have a personal

00:42:49 ◼   ► computer without a floppy disk little things like that do you do you guys find

00:42:54 ◼   ► though that it's getting harder to do that now that you're talking about

00:42:58 ◼   ► having 700 800 million users is it harder because of that resist that that

00:43:04 ◼   ► natural part of humanity that just is resistant to change of any kind sure of

00:43:08 ◼   ► Of course it's harder.

00:43:09 ◼   ► When you have more customers, those things are harder to do.

00:43:12 ◼   ► But that doesn't, at least for me, and I've been here when we were really small and now

00:43:17 ◼   ► when we're much larger, it hasn't really changed.

00:43:20 ◼   ► We're still willing to push.

00:43:21 ◼   ► We just have to make sure that we think about the ways that people are using the product

00:43:26 ◼   ► and when we make the changes that they're not significant and we're improving more than

00:43:31 ◼   ► we're actually taking away or that it's the right thing to do.

00:43:35 ◼   ► And so you have to be a little more conscious of understanding all of the different ways

00:43:38 ◼   ► and which customers use it, but you bet we got to keep pushing because if you want to

00:43:43 ◼   ► innovate you got to move.

00:43:45 ◼   ► You can't sit still with what you have.

00:43:47 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's so strong internally.

00:43:49 ◼   ► I mean the base instinct of everyone here is let's do it the right way.

00:43:57 ◼   ► If this is now the right way, forget the past, let's do it the right way.

00:44:00 ◼   ► And it's a second thought then to, well, hold on.

00:44:03 ◼   ► Okay, what does that mean for the transition and taking our customers along with us on

00:44:08 ◼   ► this, but it's so integral to who we are and how people think here, that yeah, there's

00:44:14 ◼   ► more of an external, there's a larger customer base that we have responsibility for, but

00:44:19 ◼   ► we know part of why they're Apple customers is because that's what they expect from us.

00:44:23 ◼   ► We would be doing them a disservice if we stopped pushing.

00:44:27 ◼   ► All right, let me make the specific comparison between two apps that we've just been talking

00:44:32 ◼   ► about is iTunes and photos for Mac.

00:44:37 ◼   ► So in the digital hub era, when the Mac was positioned, here's our idea for the Mac.

00:44:43 ◼   ► It's your digital hub for all of these little devices like cameras and iPods that you have

00:44:47 ◼   ► in your life.

00:44:49 ◼   ► iPhoto was the Mac solution to photos and iTunes was the Mac and Windows solution to

00:44:54 ◼   ► music.

00:44:55 ◼   ► And then later, media, like TV shows and stuff.

00:45:00 ◼   ► The new strategy is clearly iCloud centric.

00:45:03 ◼   ► guys have been explicit about that since iCloud was announced in on stage in 2011.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Yeah. And it didn't come right away. It wasn't like photos for Mac came out immediately. But

00:45:13 ◼   ► that was the answer in and last year was really that transition year. But the idea was look,

00:45:19 ◼   ► iPhoto was great for then. But now we've got this photos app, which is truly just appear to what

00:45:26 ◼   ► you've got on your iOS devices. And it's really designed for the modern age in the modern modern

00:45:30 ◼   ► model and iTunes and music haven't really made that shift is is that

00:45:35 ◼   ► because music is different and because iTunes has different responsibilities or

00:45:39 ◼   ► is it because iTunes has to exist for Windows and iPhoto didn't or or is it

00:45:43 ◼   ► something else no it's look I think you're seeing music make that

00:45:46 ◼   ► transition now since last year when we introduced Apple music the truth is

00:45:51 ◼   ► music before that was very local it really didn't live in the cloud and you

00:45:56 ◼   ► You moved your content by moving it to a device locally,

00:46:01 ◼   ► and then the device was there.

00:46:02 ◼   ► And then if you wanted to update that device,

00:46:04 ◼   ► you brought it back.

00:46:05 ◼   ► Now that we've-- and it's not just bringing a subscription

00:46:08 ◼   ► service, as I said.

00:46:09 ◼   ► It's about bringing all of your music,

00:46:11 ◼   ► no matter how you acquired it.

00:46:12 ◼   ► If it doesn't exist in the subscription service

00:46:15 ◼   ► and you bought it yourself separately,

00:46:17 ◼   ► or it's available separately as a bootleg, all of the things

00:46:20 ◼   ► that you consume with music.

00:46:22 ◼   ► And we're seeing that transition now.

00:46:24 ◼   ► So for myself, I live in a world where my music

00:46:28 ◼   ► is all in the cloud.

00:46:29 ◼   ► And I think we're gonna see more and more customers.

00:46:31 ◼   ► We just passed over 11 million Apple Music subscribers,

00:46:35 ◼   ► and all of those people live in a world

00:46:37 ◼   ► where music is in the cloud.

00:46:38 ◼   ► - So that's a big, 11 million Apple Music subscribers

00:46:46 ◼   ► is a big number, and it's only since,

00:46:50 ◼   ► I mean, when did it come out of beta?

00:46:53 ◼   ► It came out in September, but we gave away the first three months for free.

00:46:57 ◼   ► So think about it as later in the year, October.

00:47:03 ◼   ► And the growth rate is good on that.

00:47:07 ◼   ► We've been very pleased.

00:47:08 ◼   ► It's great.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Just this past week, we introduced it in Taiwan, and we also introduced it in Turkey, which

00:47:15 ◼   ► has been great.

00:47:16 ◼   ► We introduced a version for Android, our first Android application.

00:47:20 ◼   ► That's our second.

00:47:22 ◼   ► had moved to iOS. That's true, thank you. Much loved app on the Android Play Store.

00:47:29 ◼   ► It's always a good source of humor is to go... it's like going to read the

00:47:35 ◼   ► Yelp reviews for your favorite local restaurant and seeing the people who

00:47:39 ◼   ► don't get it. And one of the things we've learned by the way as we've gone to

00:47:44 ◼   ► Apple Music is that we have to educate people as much as all of us know about

00:47:50 ◼   ► music subscriptions, when you go around the world,

00:47:52 ◼   ► what does it mean to have access

00:47:55 ◼   ► to all of the music in the world?

00:47:57 ◼   ► And what does that mean and how does that work?

00:47:59 ◼   ► And that's something that we're doing

00:48:02 ◼   ► a lot of work on right now.

00:48:04 ◼   ► 'Cause we noticed that a lot of times

00:48:06 ◼   ► people just didn't understand the concept.

00:48:07 ◼   ► What do you mean I pay 99, what do I get, how do I get it?

00:48:11 ◼   ► All of those things.

00:48:12 ◼   ► And that's been a big part of moving the number

00:48:15 ◼   ► and continuing to move the number forward.

00:48:18 ◼   ► - All right, before we wrap this up,

00:48:19 ◼   ► there's a topic I want to get to,

00:48:21 ◼   ► and I guess it's a little bit more

00:48:22 ◼   ► on Craig's side of the court,

00:48:24 ◼   ► but I've got some good friends

00:48:25 ◼   ► who if I don't talk about this,

00:48:26 ◼   ► I think are gonna shoot me,

00:48:28 ◼   ► 'cause I have the opportunity.

00:48:29 ◼   ► - Is this about dynamic dispatch and Objective-C?

00:48:31 ◼   ► I'm ready.

00:48:32 ◼   ► - No.

00:48:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:35 ◼   ► It's about radar.

00:48:36 ◼   ► So Eddie mentioned that with Maps.

00:48:38 ◼   ► Maps has a feature where if you see an error,

00:48:41 ◼   ► you can report the error,

00:48:43 ◼   ► and when it gets fixed, you get notified,

00:48:45 ◼   ► and it says, "Hey, thank you for reporting

00:48:47 ◼   ► that this road is not where it used to be, or there's a new road here. We have now fixed it.

00:48:53 ◼   ► What I hear a lot from my friends who are third-party developers is the sense that radar

00:49:01 ◼   ► is nearly a black hole, that you file your report, it goes in there, and an awful lot of bugs that

00:49:09 ◼   ► even ones that are submitted with examples, like here, run this example code and it will prove that

00:49:14 ◼   ► that this is a bug in this new version of the OS.

00:49:17 ◼   ► And then you just never,

00:49:18 ◼   ► they just never hear anything about it.

00:49:19 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:49:20 ◼   ► - Like how can radar get more like Apple maps

00:49:23 ◼   ► where it gives, I'm serious.

00:49:27 ◼   ► I think that developers really,

00:49:28 ◼   ► and I feel like it's a,

00:49:30 ◼   ► what's the, I don't know what the opposite

00:49:33 ◼   ► of a virtuous circle, an in-virtuous circle,

00:49:35 ◼   ► where developers, if they feel like it's a black hole,

00:49:37 ◼   ► they report fewer bugs

00:49:39 ◼   ► because they feel like they're wasting their time.

00:49:40 ◼   ► And developers not reporting bugs is, I'm sure,

00:49:43 ◼   ► not what you want?

00:49:44 ◼   ► - That's for sure, yeah.

00:49:47 ◼   ► I mean, quite honestly, we're not where we wanna be

00:49:50 ◼   ► with radar as an externally facing tool.

00:49:53 ◼   ► I mean, it's the lifeblood of the organization

00:49:55 ◼   ► in terms of how we manage our bugs and manage our releases

00:49:58 ◼   ► and I file tons of them

00:50:00 ◼   ► and so does everyone who works here in software.

00:50:05 ◼   ► But our external interface is not great.

00:50:07 ◼   ► And a big part of that is something we struggle with

00:50:10 ◼   ► is how we sort out communicating about the issues

00:50:14 ◼   ► that we fix, because you may report an issue,

00:50:18 ◼   ► we may dupe it to a bug that we're working on fixing,

00:50:22 ◼   ► we may fix that bug, maybe we fix it in iOS 10,

00:50:24 ◼   ► maybe we fix it in something that's probably

00:50:26 ◼   ► gonna go in iOS 9.3.

00:50:28 ◼   ► You wanna know that we've fixed it,

00:50:30 ◼   ► we don't necessarily right now have a great way

00:50:33 ◼   ► to decide when we wanna communicate to you

00:50:35 ◼   ► that there's a release that it's getting fixed in,

00:50:37 ◼   ► that we're promising that the fix is gonna happen,

00:50:40 ◼   ► And so we fundamentally have communication feedback problems

00:50:43 ◼   ► that we need to sort out.

00:50:44 ◼   ► I can tell you that the reports do get read,

00:50:47 ◼   ► that they do influence what we do,

00:50:50 ◼   ► but our back channel communication needs some work

00:50:54 ◼   ► because we are reading them,

00:50:58 ◼   ► we just don't tell you what's happening with them.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And I understand absolutely the frustration

00:51:02 ◼   ► of a lot of developers who file those bugs.

00:51:05 ◼   ► - Do you agree that that sort of improving that

00:51:09 ◼   ► as a, it's sort of a point where the trickle down from that,

00:51:14 ◼   ► where if you guys could improve

00:51:15 ◼   ► the back channel communication from radar,

00:51:16 ◼   ► it would influence the sort of lots of little bugs

00:51:21 ◼   ► getting fixed that people are complaining about

00:51:24 ◼   ► and address, it's like a centralized place

00:51:26 ◼   ► to address the widespread entire user-based wide program,

00:51:30 ◼   ► problem of, hey, this little thing is going wrong

00:51:33 ◼   ► and I don't understand why.

00:51:35 ◼   ► - I think it helps.

00:51:37 ◼   ► I think we have other ways also

00:51:38 ◼   ► that we're getting a lot of great feedback.

00:51:40 ◼   ► We did our first, as you know, public beta for iOS

00:51:43 ◼   ► in a year ago, the public beta for OS X.

00:51:45 ◼   ► And actually in that way brought, you know,

00:51:47 ◼   ► over a million people into the program.

00:51:51 ◼   ► And we did include in those a feedback assistant tool,

00:51:54 ◼   ► which was meant as a, you know,

00:51:57 ◼   ► kind of radar-like feedback tool,

00:51:59 ◼   ► but one that we could, you know,

00:52:00 ◼   ► the average person could use, whether an iOS and OS X.

00:52:02 ◼   ► And it automatically, not only does it give us

00:52:05 ◼   ► what the user types, but it automatically gives us

00:52:07 ◼   ► a lot of additional diagnostics.

00:52:11 ◼   ► They get prompted and says,

00:52:12 ◼   ► oh, is it okay if we send this, this and this back?

00:52:14 ◼   ► And gives us some really great actionable information

00:52:17 ◼   ► about the issues they uncover.

00:52:18 ◼   ► And so that's another great channel

00:52:20 ◼   ► to find out about the issues people are running into.

00:52:24 ◼   ► And it's made a huge difference

00:52:25 ◼   ► on the quality of our software.

00:52:28 ◼   ► I mean, just one metric and it's not,

00:52:31 ◼   ► there are lots of different ways in which,

00:52:33 ◼   ► lots of different kinds of feedback we get,

00:52:34 ◼   ► but something that's very measurable

00:52:36 ◼   ► are things like crash rate.

00:52:37 ◼   ► And I can tell you in the past,

00:52:39 ◼   ► you'd see this seesaw pattern

00:52:40 ◼   ► where a .0 release would come out

00:52:42 ◼   ► and that would have a certain high crash rate

00:52:45 ◼   ► and then we'd issue our software updates

00:52:47 ◼   ► and that rate would go down.

00:52:49 ◼   ► After doing the public beta here for iOS,

00:52:53 ◼   ► our release, our .0, our 9.0 was better

00:52:58 ◼   ► than any previous release of iOS 8.

00:53:01 ◼   ► That the numbers that,

00:53:02 ◼   ► and those are the kind of systematic steps

00:53:04 ◼   ► where you can get feedback from our users,

00:53:06 ◼   ► both automatic and the kind of things

00:53:08 ◼   ► where they write up an issue

00:53:09 ◼   ► and it helps us improve the product.

00:53:11 ◼   ► So you're gonna see more and more of that from us

00:53:14 ◼   ► and we think it continues to pay off.

00:53:16 ◼   ► - So just to reiterate that,

00:53:19 ◼   ► I just wanna make sure I heard you correctly.

00:53:20 ◼   ► You're saying that when 9.0 came out, the release version,

00:53:23 ◼   ► that the crash rate for apps was actually lower

00:53:26 ◼   ► than the version of iOS 8,

00:53:28 ◼   ► whatever the stable version of iOS 8 was

00:53:30 ◼   ► that people were upgrading from.

00:53:31 ◼   ► - That's right, of our apps.

00:53:34 ◼   ► - Right, oh, okay.

00:53:35 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. Third party apps are a,

00:53:39 ◼   ► I don't actually have the number on that,

00:53:40 ◼   ► but that's always a challenge.

00:53:42 ◼   ► I mean, one thing honestly that can happen to us on quality

00:53:46 ◼   ► is sometimes also a third party will happen to ship an app

00:53:49 ◼   ► about the same time we ship an OS update

00:53:51 ◼   ► and independent of that, that app starts crashing

00:53:53 ◼   ► and that affects user, so you gotta cut,

00:53:55 ◼   ► it's always a challenge to cut through the noise,

00:53:57 ◼   ► but we have pretty good analytics

00:53:58 ◼   ► and our numbers are showing we're on the right track there.

00:54:03 ◼   ► Well, it's about the time to wrap this up.

00:54:06 ◼   ► I wanted to know though,

00:54:06 ◼   ► because you guys were nice enough to come on.

00:54:08 ◼   ► Is there anything that I haven't asked you

00:54:10 ◼   ► that you wished I had?

00:54:11 ◼   ► Is there something that you guys wanted to talk about

00:54:14 ◼   ► that we haven't discussed?

00:54:16 ◼   ► - Well, since this is an audio podcast and not a video one,

00:54:19 ◼   ► I'm disappointed that you can't see

00:54:22 ◼   ► the purple shirt I'm wearing.

00:54:23 ◼   ► - He did really rise to the occasion.

00:54:25 ◼   ► I don't know if Eddie thought he was gonna be on camera here

00:54:27 ◼   ► but he's in full stage wear.

00:54:30 ◼   ► It's-- - You know,

00:54:31 ◼   ► I thought about that just before we got on the air.

00:54:34 ◼   ► I linked to a story the New York Times had

00:54:38 ◼   ► about this amazing science that astronomers have done

00:54:42 ◼   ► where they've measured as audio this gravitational wave

00:54:47 ◼   ► that proves this thing Einstein predicted 100 years ago

00:54:50 ◼   ► that if two black holes collided,

00:54:52 ◼   ► you'd be able to produce this gravity wave

00:54:54 ◼   ► that you could hear.

00:54:55 ◼   ► And I thought, wouldn't that be great if we had a microphone

00:54:57 ◼   ► that could produce a sound--

00:54:59 ◼   ► - Of Eddie's shirt?

00:55:00 ◼   ► Eddie's shirt.

00:55:01 ◼   ► We all just didn't a synesthetic experience.

00:55:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:09 ◼   ► I know it's all the senses come alive when we

00:55:11 ◼   ► see Eddie's shirt.

00:55:12 ◼   ► We just didn't have enough time to set up the

00:55:15 ◼   ► technology.

00:55:15 ◼   ► Maybe next time.

00:55:17 ◼   ► This was great.

00:55:19 ◼   ► I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did.

00:55:22 ◼   ► I love it.

00:55:22 ◼   ► John, I got one question for you though.

00:55:24 ◼   ► So since we started with sports and it's almost

00:55:27 ◼   ► baseball season, give me your world series

00:55:29 ◼   ► prediction.

00:55:29 ◼   ► Oh, I, uh, I hate to say it, but I, I think the Cubs, it doesn't seem like a good bet,

00:55:40 ◼   ► but boy, the Cubs look good in the national league and in the American league.

00:55:46 ◼   ► Boy, I don't, I'll just go out in the lemon, say the New York Yankees.

00:55:53 ◼   ► That was fulfilled.

00:55:55 ◼   ► So that's, that's great.

00:55:57 ◼   ► You gotta remember though, it is an even year.

00:56:00 ◼   ► And in even years, the San Francisco Giants always win.

00:56:03 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:56:04 ◼   ► - That's the weirdest little like, inexplicable,

00:56:07 ◼   ► like they've, and they've kept a core together.

00:56:09 ◼   ► I don't understand that at all.

00:56:11 ◼   ► I don't know if they just party way too hard

00:56:13 ◼   ► after they win the World Series

00:56:14 ◼   ► and it tanks the hole next season or what.

00:56:17 ◼   ► But that is the weirdest little mini dynasty streak

00:56:21 ◼   ► I've ever seen.

00:56:21 ◼   ► - It is great. - So I don't know.

00:56:23 ◼   ► I don't know that I'd wanna bet against the Giants next year.

00:56:26 ◼   ► All right, well, it was great talking to you.

00:56:27 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:56:29 ◼   ► Thank you both.

00:56:29 ◼   ► Eddie Q Craig Federighi.

00:56:31 ◼   ► I really greatly appreciate the time.