The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Were you a Prince fan?

00:00:01 ◼   ► I can't say that I was.

00:00:03 ◼   ► I... obviously, you know, as someone who grew up in the 80s, it was impossible to miss him.

00:00:08 ◼   ► And I watched tons of MTV.

00:00:09 ◼   ► And so all of the songs from the 80s are totally ingrained in my head

00:00:13 ◼   ► because I've watched them just all the time because I always, you know, watched MTV all the time.

00:00:19 ◼   ► I liked him a lot. I cannot say I was particularly a fan.

00:00:21 ◼   ► I came around to it later because like you, I was more of a...

00:00:26 ◼   ► I always put him in the pop category a bit more, which I think is fair to say.

00:00:30 ◼   ► And I was kind of probably like a more rock and roll-y kind of guy.

00:00:34 ◼   ► But I mean, after I got out of that phase of like,

00:00:39 ◼   ► you know, when you're a teenager, you tend to delete things into good and bad, a lot more.

00:00:45 ◼   ► But yeah, once I got into sort of appreciating,

00:00:48 ◼   ► oh man, he's immensely talented and he's had so much cultural impact in terms of other music and other

00:00:55 ◼   ► just other bands, just the way they behave. It's like, he's amazing.

00:00:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I tweeted something last night where it was a tribute. It was from when George

00:01:03 ◼   ► Harrison died and his son

00:01:05 ◼   ► had like a tribute and

00:01:07 ◼   ► Prince played

00:01:09 ◼   ► and didn't even sing. It was like Tom Petty and I forget who the...

00:01:14 ◼   ► somebody else, Steve... George Harrison's son was on stage. Yeah, and Petty did most of the

00:01:18 ◼   ► lyrics.

00:01:21 ◼   ► But then Prince came on with this guitar solo at the end and it's just

00:01:25 ◼   ► just like jaw-droppingly good.

00:01:27 ◼   ► And I'd always heard, and some people on Twitter, most people just

00:01:31 ◼   ► retweeted it, because it's an amazing performance, and it's just, I mean, it's

00:01:34 ◼   ► just a great song, well played, and it's just an amazing ending.

00:01:38 ◼   ► And then it's even better, because at the end,

00:01:40 ◼   ► Prince knows he'd nailed it, and he just nonchalantly tosses his guitar up in the

00:01:44 ◼   ► air, and it never comes down.

00:01:47 ◼   ► What the hell happened to his guitar? And then he just...

00:01:50 ◼   ► And he just saunters offstage.

00:01:54 ◼   ► I've seen him perform, and he is incredible.

00:01:57 ◼   ► I realize it's a guitar, not a microphone, but effectively it is the greatest mic drop I've ever seen.

00:02:02 ◼   ► I mean, in addition to being a great song and a great performance, it is literally the best mic drop I've ever seen, because it doesn't come down.

00:02:08 ◼   ► It's not.

00:02:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:10 ◼   ► And he rocks out like Jimi Hendrix style.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Which you're not accustomed to hearing, necessarily, in his songs.

00:02:16 ◼   ► But he can do it, you know what I mean? He's like, "Oh, just in my back pocket I could beat the next Jimi Hendrix."

00:02:20 ◼   ► But, uh...

00:02:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it's just in his back pocket.

00:02:22 ◼   ► Play a lot of funk and stuff.

00:02:23 ◼   ► And then there was a couple people on Twitter who were like, "How can you, you know, to me, how can you not know that Prince is one of like the top 20 guitarists of all time, maybe like top 10?"

00:02:32 ◼   ► And I didn't know. I knew he was great. I knew he could play a bunch of instruments. I knew he was a very talented musician, including the guitar.

00:02:39 ◼   ► I knew that because people told me, but I didn't know it in the way you really know it when you actually see it.

00:02:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:45 ◼   ► And I realized then that all of those guitar solos on all of Prince's songs that are so amazing are him. And I didn't know that before.

00:02:51 ◼   ► before. I just knew that they were... Well, half of the other instruments that are being played are also him.

00:02:56 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:57 ◼   ► That he's just doing it all, and in a way that's just, you know, almost

00:03:01 ◼   ► impossible to comprehend.

00:03:03 ◼   ► I think one thing that I

00:03:05 ◼   ► could probably convince you to appreciate about him a lot is that, uh...

00:03:09 ◼   ► remember when he had to change his name?

00:03:11 ◼   ► He had to? Yeah, so the record label basically had him

00:03:15 ◼   ► by the balls for producing albums under the name Prince, and he didn't like his deal.

00:03:20 ◼   ► So he's like, "Screw it."

00:03:22 ◼   ► And in the ultimate, "Fuck you."

00:03:25 ◼   ► He's like, "I'm gonna change my name to this character."

00:03:28 ◼   ► - I remember when he changed his name to the character,

00:03:29 ◼   ► I didn't realize that it was a way out of his, like a--

00:03:32 ◼   ► - It was 100% a way out of his like, "Screw you.

00:03:36 ◼   ► You're not owning my masters, my music, I'm taking it.

00:03:40 ◼   ► And you're not owning my name

00:03:41 ◼   ► 'cause I'm gonna change my name to something ridiculous."

00:03:43 ◼   ► And he never bothered explaining to that.

00:03:45 ◼   ► It's not like he went on all the shows and just told people.

00:03:47 ◼   ► He was like, "Look, I'm doing that.

00:03:49 ◼   ► I'm gonna keep focusing on my work same reason why he doesn't want all the YouTube stuff is he wants to basically be able to own

00:03:55 ◼   ► All the distribution. Yeah, because he thinks artists want he thinks artists deserve to be paid and I absolutely I've been aware of his stance on that

00:04:03 ◼   ► Last night, I mean like like half the people in the Western world last night, you know

00:04:09 ◼   ► I mean I started let you know went to listen to some events to and not on Apple music

00:04:15 ◼   ► I knew that you know first thing I tried and and I

00:04:19 ◼   ► Instantly thought well, I guess I knew that actually, you know because he's not into that

00:04:23 ◼   ► So we just started buying a bunch of stuff from iTunes. It was a

00:04:25 ◼   ► Lot of fun good stuff. I posted a link today on during fire bottom if you saw it, but uh, just just like a random

00:04:33 ◼   ► screenshot from a

00:04:36 ◼   ► movie that Prince made in 1990 called graffiti bridge where he played like him, you know

00:04:41 ◼   ► Like a sort of thinly veiled version of himself like a young songwriter and in 1990 the character he was you know

00:04:48 ◼   ► composing a song on like a little Mac and Mac and and of course it and and it

00:04:54 ◼   ► was totally legit it wasn't like a phony phony phony fake UI it was like a real

00:04:58 ◼   ► app from the day of you know like a like MIDI tracking yeah MIDI tracking like

00:05:04 ◼   ► trackers yeah so like the actual screenshot in the in the movie is

00:05:09 ◼   ► actually like an actual song that he wrote it was like so you got like a

00:05:13 ◼   ► little look at his prints his own like you know working set up workflow when

00:05:22 ◼   ► he's like trying stuff out with a Mac yeah it's like Warhol drawing on right

00:05:25 ◼   ► yeah right sketching on Mac paint right little nine-inch look at this screen

00:05:31 ◼   ► it's tiny god what would it have been if it was an SCE I think they it was like

00:05:35 ◼   ► that the guy who wrote the blog post was trying to figure out he'd nailed it down

00:05:38 ◼   ► it was either an SCE or an SCE 30 yeah the SCE 30 didn't come out until like

00:05:43 ◼   ► late in the year before the movie was made though so there's I think there's a

00:05:46 ◼   ► much better chance that it was just an SE so that would have been just a 68

00:05:51 ◼   ► 68,000 chip I think I don't know if that if they had a 6820 but it wasn't until

00:05:56 ◼   ► the SE's 68030 that the Mac really got fast so that was a pretty slow machine

00:06:03 ◼   ► you know though you got it it says a lot about his forward-looking oh absolutely

00:06:09 ◼   ► absolutely being an artist that he's like look I'm gonna try this crazy thing

00:06:12 ◼   ► that probably sounded tinny and kind of crappy to him compared to all the other

00:06:16 ◼   ► options he had, but he was fascinated enough to like, "This is cool, I want to learn how to do it."

00:06:22 ◼   ► Yeah, and I'm sure the final output, you know, maybe didn't come right off the

00:06:25 ◼   ► Mac, you know, in a lot of ways, because, you know, he played a lot of actual

00:06:28 ◼   ► analog instruments, but maybe to get the composition right, it's that

00:06:33 ◼   ► power of digital editing and the way that you can move stuff. I mean, we

00:06:40 ◼   ► take it for granted to there and people who've grown up in an all-digital world, I could

00:06:48 ◼   ► see why they take it for granted.

00:06:49 ◼   ► But when you learn to be a writer like I did, where we didn't have word processors or computers

00:06:57 ◼   ► at our disposal all the time.

00:06:59 ◼   ► I used to actually, in high school, I used a typewriter to write stuff.

00:07:05 ◼   ► And it's like when you think about when you're halfway through a thing and you really want

00:07:09 ◼   ► move a paragraph or even just take out a sentence. If you realize you've just duplicated the

00:07:15 ◼   ► same sentence twice, something that you wrote like the page before, and it's like you either

00:07:20 ◼   ► have to retype the whole page or just live with it, you know, you start making decisions

00:07:26 ◼   ► based on convenience rather than what it should be.

00:07:30 ◼   ► Jared Polin Right. I mean, it really was, if you wanted

00:07:33 ◼   ► to get, do anywhere near a halfway decent job, it was almost impossible not to type

00:07:38 ◼   ► whole thing twice. How could you not make some sort of editing decision, you know, where you

00:07:44 ◼   ► go through it with a pen and then retype it? And you would literally have to retype the thing.

00:07:48 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure music was the same way in a lot of ways, and that digital editing, the same way

00:07:53 ◼   ► that it's revolutionized word processing, same way for music.

00:07:57 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.

00:07:59 ◼   ► So I—

00:08:00 ◼   ► Just like changing the tempo. Like, there's almost a third dimension to

00:08:07 ◼   ► music that doesn't necessarily happen in writing.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Yeah, totally. Yeah, I don't know. What I remember from those days, the early days of

00:08:15 ◼   ► Mac around that time, is yes, yes, we were constantly running up against every single

00:08:21 ◼   ► one of the limits of the machines. I mean, just stacks full of floppy disks all stuffed

00:08:28 ◼   ► to within a few bytes of being full, a hard drive that was completely full. If you go

00:08:33 ◼   ► go back even just a few more years. You didn't even have a hard drive. Everything was on

00:08:37 ◼   ► the floppy drive. Severely RAM constrained. I mean, most of those devices, a lot of those

00:08:43 ◼   ► early Macs only had a gigabyte or two gigabytes. My Mac LC in 1991 had four, a whopping four

00:08:52 ◼   ► gigabytes, not gigabytes, megabytes, four megabytes.

00:08:54 ◼   ► >> Megabytes, okay, good. That was, yeah.

00:08:55 ◼   ► >> Four megabytes of RAM. So your RAM constrained, storage constrained, the storage was incredibly

00:09:02 ◼   ► The hard drives were slow. The floppies were so slow you could hear them making the reads and writes.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:08 ◼   ► I guess you could hear the hard drives too, but the floppies—

00:09:11 ◼   ► I used to find that comforting.

00:09:12 ◼   ► Yeah, definitely, because you knew—

00:09:14 ◼   ► Something was working?

00:09:16 ◼   ► It was comforting in a way you didn't think about until it went away.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:20 ◼   ► And then you realized that if you think that something might be going wrong, you don't have that comfort.

00:09:28 ◼   ► comfort like at least back then it's like if you thought something was going

00:09:32 ◼   ► wrong like like a crash like maybe or the miss you know the system's locking

00:09:35 ◼   ► up but you could still hear the thing you were hoping was being saved being

00:09:40 ◼   ► written to you had hope that okay at least it's still writing yeah to the

00:09:44 ◼   ► disk or if it locked up and all you could hear it like it were and then a

00:09:47 ◼   ► clicking noise right there were certain oh yes you could definitely you did a

00:09:51 ◼   ► big part of the diagnosis of any problem back then was what kind of what kind of

00:09:56 ◼   ► mechanical go-but is falling apart. Right. Because there were certain... if it was

00:10:04 ◼   ► perfectly repetitious, then that's a bad sign. Yes. That's like the same thing as

00:10:08 ◼   ► going, oh yes, you could hear... sometimes you could hear it when a program had

00:10:12 ◼   ► wedged itself into an infinite loop. And that was bad. But like there was a

00:10:17 ◼   ► certain randomness to the sounds of like a file being written that it wasn't

00:10:22 ◼   ► quite repetitious that that was soothing. Because we were seeking to the different

00:10:26 ◼   ► sector, so you'd hear the...

00:10:28 ◼   ► There was, it was more of an analog relationship. It was fundamentally a digital

00:10:32 ◼   ► machine,

00:10:33 ◼   ► but there was, you know, the actual spinning disk and

00:10:38 ◼   ► the physicality of the

00:10:40 ◼   ► ones and zeros being written to the disk

00:10:42 ◼   ► gave it a certain,

00:10:44 ◼   ► a genuinely analog dimension that came across in your relationship with it.

00:10:48 ◼   ► I feel like there's probably a...

00:10:51 ◼   ► I don't drive, so correct me, but

00:10:53 ◼   ► like a manual versus automatic kind of...

00:10:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

00:10:56 ◼   ► Like you're very aware of the machine in one case,

00:10:59 ◼   ► and in the other case you're kind of divorced from it a little bit.

00:11:01 ◼   ► Well, and I think there's also a...

00:11:04 ◼   ► if you compare it to driving...

00:11:05 ◼   ► and I'm not really a car guy, but I do drive,

00:11:07 ◼   ► but I think there's also, almost undisputably,

00:11:11 ◼   ► a comparison to...

00:11:15 ◼   ► as decades go on, our cars are more and more abstract

00:11:20 ◼   ► in terms of just how much isolation there is from the noise outside, the shock absorption.

00:11:27 ◼   ► And older cars, you really feel the road and you feel it's, you're just so much less removed.

00:11:33 ◼   ► I mean, it's almost shocking sometimes when you look at a car from the 60s or 70s, let

00:11:38 ◼   ► alone further, like how thin the doors are.

00:11:41 ◼   ► You know, it's good.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Everything was a lot more thinner and you just felt the road more.

00:11:45 ◼   ► And it's more pleasing, I think overall, I mean, obviously, consumer money talks, it's

00:11:50 ◼   ► It's more pleasing to have it abstracted, but in a way, as the driver, you're removed

00:11:55 ◼   ► from the... just the feel of the road.

00:12:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Did you show me that video?

00:12:03 ◼   ► I don't know if I shared it with you.

00:12:05 ◼   ► It's like an old 1950s Buick crashing into, I don't know what, like a modern smart car

00:12:10 ◼   ► or something?

00:12:11 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

00:12:12 ◼   ► And the Buick just gets destroyed.

00:12:16 ◼   ► It was...

00:12:17 ◼   ► Like the little guy just...

00:12:18 ◼   ► so much better engineers now.

00:12:20 ◼   ► - It's absolutely amazing the differences

00:12:23 ◼   ► that they've made in the ability to--

00:12:27 ◼   ► - Survive a crash.

00:12:28 ◼   ► - I forget what they call it,

00:12:29 ◼   ► the passenger, to keep the,

00:12:30 ◼   ► to maintain the integrity of the passenger cabin

00:12:32 ◼   ► and sacrifice the entire rest of the car.

00:12:35 ◼   ► It's just unbelievable.

00:12:36 ◼   ► Whereas in the old days,

00:12:37 ◼   ► the whole car would just collapse like a can of Coke.

00:12:39 ◼   ► - Yeah. - It's kind of sick.

00:12:41 ◼   ► It really is. - The engine block

00:12:42 ◼   ► would be like going right into your chest.

00:12:44 ◼   ► - It's sickening too, because you think

00:12:46 ◼   ► like those old time cars,

00:12:47 ◼   ► the old cars were so heavy that they would be safer,

00:12:50 ◼   ► but they just weren't,

00:12:50 ◼   ► 'cause the structure, the structural integrity

00:12:53 ◼   ► just wasn't there.

00:12:54 ◼   ► But it really is like it's just stepping on

00:12:56 ◼   ► an empty aluminum can.

00:12:57 ◼   ► It just, the whole thing just collapsed into itself.

00:13:00 ◼   ► And it's--

00:13:01 ◼   ► - Well, designed for different goals.

00:13:02 ◼   ► - Right.

00:13:04 ◼   ► - The ATP guys are like shaking their fists at us now.

00:13:07 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't think so.

00:13:07 ◼   ► I think Sir Cus is probably happy

00:13:09 ◼   ► about the old Time Mac talk.

00:13:11 ◼   ► - Ah, maybe.

00:13:12 ◼   ► - They had a good segment recently where they were talking,

00:13:13 ◼   ► I guess 'cause it was sort of,

00:13:15 ◼   ► One of the recent episodes was the,

00:13:17 ◼   ► hey, it's Apple's 40th anniversary.

00:13:19 ◼   ► Let's look back at our first Macs.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And I couldn't listen to Marco or Casey.

00:13:25 ◼   ► - No. (laughs)

00:13:26 ◼   ► - That's awful.

00:13:27 ◼   ► - I honestly, I consider myself a Johnny Cam lately.

00:13:30 ◼   ► - You are.

00:13:31 ◼   ► - And I'm like 97. - 'Cause you're a graphics guy.

00:13:33 ◼   ► Right. - Yeah.

00:13:33 ◼   ► So, and he's, you know, anything after that,

00:13:38 ◼   ► I'm like, come on, kids, get your act together.

00:13:41 ◼   ► - No, that was one of those times

00:13:42 ◼   ► where Syracuse, it was really, you know,

00:13:44 ◼   ► It just felt like he was creepily picking the thoughts out of my brain because it was

00:13:51 ◼   ► he was he actually started using a Mac a few years before me even though he's a few years younger than me

00:13:56 ◼   ► just because my school, my high school only had one Mac

00:14:00 ◼   ► and the longer I went I had like it was almost like they had classes for just like two or three of us

00:14:06 ◼   ► in programming as like my last two years of high school there weren't it was only like two or three other kids in the class

00:14:12 ◼   ► and I wanted a color display, so I used the 2GS.

00:14:17 ◼   ► - Oh. - It was very--

00:14:19 ◼   ► - That, I would have made that choice too.

00:14:21 ◼   ► - Well, there was only one Mac, and it was,

00:14:24 ◼   ► and I didn't want to, I guess I could have argued

00:14:26 ◼   ► for equal time on it.

00:14:28 ◼   ► I remember it was a class name named Elliot,

00:14:31 ◼   ► but it was like, we were trying to decide

00:14:34 ◼   ► which one of us would maybe use the Mac and who,

00:14:37 ◼   ► and then there were a bunch of 2GSs in the lab

00:14:39 ◼   ► that we could choose from.

00:14:41 ◼   ► I guess if neither of us wanted to use the Mac,

00:14:43 ◼   ► we could have both used the 2GS.

00:14:44 ◼   ► But he seemed more interested in the Mac

00:14:46 ◼   ► and I was fine to let him have it.

00:14:49 ◼   ► And I played with it a little.

00:14:50 ◼   ► And I remember playing with,

00:14:52 ◼   ► especially with MacWrite and MacPaint,

00:14:56 ◼   ► MacPaint in particular, and MacDraw.

00:14:59 ◼   ► But even back then with MacDraw, even in 1989 or '90,

00:15:04 ◼   ► I was instantly baffled by Bezier curves.

00:15:07 ◼   ► - But if it, oh yeah.

00:15:09 ◼   ► - I understood what it meant.

00:15:10 ◼   ► I understood what a vector graphic could offer, and I was fascinated, but damned if I could

00:15:17 ◼   ► navigate the interface. But Mac did, man.

00:15:20 ◼   ► Well, the control points are like voodoo.

00:15:24 ◼   ► So I learned the Mac.

00:15:25 ◼   ► And I say that knowing the math and how to do it, but it's still, like, it's unintuitive.

00:15:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it's very unintuitive. And everything I learned about the Mac was just completely

00:15:33 ◼   ► intuitive. I remember too—

00:15:36 ◼   ► I didn't like the Mac. So I started on Apple II Plus,

00:15:41 ◼   ► left the Apple II GS, then got into PCs.

00:15:46 ◼   ► And for whatever reason, because I was a stubborn kid, I didn't like

00:15:54 ◼   ► the Mac floppy disk. Because it had that

00:15:59 ◼   ► latch, you know, like the 3.5 inch floppy disk. I just found it inelegant.

00:16:04 ◼   ► I liked the five and a quarter ones because you could flip them over and use a hole punch and then you can get a whole second side.

00:16:10 ◼   ► You could do that with the plastic ones too.

00:16:12 ◼   ► But it was obviously harder to...

00:16:14 ◼   ► It was harder to make the hole, you know?

00:16:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:16 ◼   ► So it was dumb, but it was like a five year phase of my life.

00:16:21 ◼   ► And I mean, I was getting into like hardcore Intel assembly programming and stuff at the time.

00:16:26 ◼   ► But then I did a drafting class in high school because I like drawing.

00:16:34 ◼   ► Turns out, not the same thing. But one of the things we have to do is work on a Mac, in a Mac Draw.

00:16:40 ◼   ► Changed my mind very soon after that. I mean, the software was brilliant. I loved it.

00:16:47 ◼   ► It was such a new, different experience.

00:16:53 ◼   ► It's so funny too. I know Casey even mentioned it because Casey's way too young,

00:16:57 ◼   ► but he was baffled by the fact that the three and a half inch ones were still called floppies, even though there was nothing

00:17:03 ◼   ► floppy about them because they were in a hard shell.

00:17:05 ◼   ► It's just one of those stupid names because what they did, I think long story short,

00:17:10 ◼   ► there used to be eight inch floppies really coming back, and that predates my time.

00:17:15 ◼   ► But then like in the Apple II era and what most of us in the 80s knew were the five and a quarter inch.

00:17:20 ◼   ► I bet your parents have like a stack of five and a quarter inch floppies or yeah

00:17:25 ◼   ► probably even five and a quarter inch floppies. No because I didn't have a computer in the house.

00:17:28 ◼   ► Oh so, oh really? Yeah I've told this story before. Oh yeah you have, okay yeah.

00:17:34 ◼   ► My parents refused to buy me a computer. This is why you made, this is why your career in

00:17:39 ◼   ► technology went nowhere. A lot of my friends were getting computers. My friend Joey had an Apple

00:17:43 ◼   ► Apple IIe, which I deeply coveted,

00:17:47 ◼   ► 'cause I, from the early days on,

00:17:50 ◼   ► I perceived that Apple's computers

00:17:52 ◼   ► were of superior build quality,

00:17:54 ◼   ► and were made with an eye to design

00:17:57 ◼   ► that the others weren't.

00:17:59 ◼   ► But I would've taken any of them.

00:18:00 ◼   ► I would've taken a Commodore, I would've taken,

00:18:02 ◼   ► I would've taken any or all of them.

00:18:04 ◼   ► But my friends were getting computers.

00:18:05 ◼   ► They were all relatively expensive.

00:18:07 ◼   ► The Apple in particular, some things don't change.

00:18:11 ◼   ► But even like a good Commodore 64 was...

00:18:16 ◼   ► - They weren't cheap.

00:18:17 ◼   ► - They weren't cheap.

00:18:18 ◼   ► And a lot of my friends had to push

00:18:20 ◼   ► because their parents were like, "That's a lot of money.

00:18:23 ◼   ► And you're not gonna use it enough.

00:18:27 ◼   ► You're just gonna play games.

00:18:28 ◼   ► We already have an Atari for games."

00:18:30 ◼   ► My parents wouldn't buy me a computer

00:18:32 ◼   ► because they said, "If we buy you a computer,

00:18:34 ◼   ► we're worried that you're never gonna leave the house."

00:18:37 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:18:40 ◼   ► I don't know if it was the right parental decision or not. I can't quite say, even in hindsight,

00:18:46 ◼   ► I can't quite say I agree with him, but maybe because, you know, I didn't have a...

00:18:51 ◼   ► I had a pretty good social life in high school, but maybe I wouldn't have had a computer at home.

00:18:56 ◼   ► I think it's probably the right decision.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Because I got so... well, because we're kind of similar, not entirely, but...

00:19:04 ◼   ► I got...

00:19:06 ◼   ► The first Apple II I got was...

00:19:08 ◼   ► I think the second summer after I moved from England here, so I didn't really know a lot of people in Canada.

00:19:13 ◼   ► And I basically spent the entire summer inside programming.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And that became part of my--I don't know how to describe it--like a recharging.

00:19:23 ◼   ► You know, when you need some alone time to go and do something just for yourself.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And that lasted all during high school, which is when I actually became good at my--you know, what my trade is now.

00:19:33 ◼   ► you know, what my trade is now. But yeah, there was a lot of time I just did not go outside,

00:19:38 ◼   ► when I really should have. Like in the beautiful summer, I'd be like, "Maybe I'll just try fixing

00:19:45 ◼   ► this little bug." In the summer between 10th and 11th grade, my high school shut down. The

00:19:53 ◼   ► building had needed a lot of repairs, especially the roof. And the school district had another

00:19:58 ◼   ► building. There was a middle school and in the decades prior that the population of the school

00:20:04 ◼   ► district decreased such that they closed the middle school, put the fifth and sixth graders

00:20:09 ◼   ► in the elementary school, and it went from three schools elementary, middle, and high school to

00:20:14 ◼   ► just two buildings. An elementary school for one to six and a high school for seven to twelve. And

00:20:19 ◼   ► in between 10th and 11th grade they shut down the high school and moved the high school to the middle

00:20:25 ◼   ► school because it was a newer it was considered it was cheaper to fix up the

00:20:29 ◼   ► middle school which had been dormant for like four or five years and shut down

00:20:35 ◼   ► high school so the computer teacher

00:20:39 ◼   ► didn't trust the movers with the computers and let students take the

00:20:44 ◼   ► computers home for the summer so I got to take an Apple to GS home for the

00:20:50 ◼   ► summer. Oh man, that's awesome. Yeah, it was awesome. And I had a job. I actually, the

00:20:56 ◼   ► school hired a bunch of kids to help move the school, so I was working as like a mover.

00:21:04 ◼   ► There's a couple good stories. That's pretty smart. Was that like a legit job? Like, they

00:21:08 ◼   ► got paid minimum wage? Oh yeah, minimum wage, absolutely. I don't, it was whatever, I think

00:21:14 ◼   ► minimum wage was. Well, it could have been just playing fast and loose, yeah. I think

00:21:17 ◼   ► I think it was either $3.75 an hour or $4.25 an hour.

00:21:20 ◼   ► $4.25 an hour.

00:21:21 ◼   ► - That would make sense.

00:21:22 ◼   ► - And backbreaking work.

00:21:23 ◼   ► I remember moving the library.

00:21:25 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:21:26 ◼   ► It's just like, 'cause what is heavier

00:21:29 ◼   ► than a box full of books?

00:21:30 ◼   ► Very little is heavier than a box of books.

00:21:34 ◼   ► And it's just thousands of books,

00:21:36 ◼   ► tens of thousands of books.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Oh, it was awful.

00:21:39 ◼   ► And we used to ride, it was like a two mile ride

00:21:42 ◼   ► to go between the buildings.

00:21:44 ◼   ► And we just had this big flatbed open-air truck,

00:21:48 ◼   ► and we would just load it up with stuff

00:21:51 ◼   ► and then find spots to sit.

00:21:54 ◼   ► Open air, no seat belts or anything,

00:21:57 ◼   ► just a bunch of kids on a truck.

00:21:59 ◼   ► - Oh man, I love that.

00:22:00 ◼   ► How old school is that?

00:22:01 ◼   ► Let's hire some minimum-rich kids

00:22:06 ◼   ► and just throw them in the back of a truck

00:22:08 ◼   ► along with some books.

00:22:09 ◼   ► - They also did hire some adults,

00:22:14 ◼   ► like day laborer types.

00:22:15 ◼   ► I mean, this is, I mean, people who just do moving,

00:22:18 ◼   ► these are not highly skilled,

00:22:20 ◼   ► this is like the bottom of the skill chain

00:22:23 ◼   ► in the laboring world.

00:22:26 ◼   ► And I remember the one day,

00:22:29 ◼   ► when we were still moving the library,

00:22:31 ◼   ► we had the card catalog.

00:22:33 ◼   ► And so it was, you know,

00:22:35 ◼   ► obviously this predates computerization

00:22:37 ◼   ► of the card catalog.

00:22:38 ◼   ► It was just this, do you remember what they look like?

00:22:40 ◼   ► They just are like--

00:22:41 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah, totally.

00:22:42 ◼   ► - Little tiny drawers. - They're like two whole

00:22:43 ◼   ► punches on the bottom, like little cards that you pull out.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:46 ◼   ► And you'd pull it out and it was just filled with index cards.

00:22:49 ◼   ► And the one guy, this guy, it wasn't a kid, it was an adult.

00:22:51 ◼   ► He was like, what the hell is this?

00:22:52 ◼   ► And we were like trying to explain to him that this is, these are like an index of

00:22:56 ◼   ► every single book in the library.

00:22:57 ◼   ► And he just takes a few out while we're on the road going like 35 miles an hour

00:23:01 ◼   ► and just throws them up in the air.

00:23:04 ◼   ► I just, I mean, I was into, I was an asshole as a teenager.

00:23:09 ◼   ► I really was.

00:23:10 ◼   ► And it did a lot of shit that I, in hindsight, I really feel like I needed,

00:23:13 ◼   ► I need to be... I need a good smack.

00:23:17 ◼   ► But I was appalled because I saw that as data loss.

00:23:23 ◼   ► Some of the stuff I did, like vandalism or stuff like that,

00:23:25 ◼   ► I wrote off just because it seemed ultimately harmless.

00:23:29 ◼   ► - Whereas I felt like... - Yeah, put a bit of graffiti on a political sign.

00:23:33 ◼   ► - Right. - But I mean, messing with books...

00:23:36 ◼   ► Oh, that was never...

00:23:39 ◼   ► - Burn a book and that's the worst. - Right.

00:23:42 ◼   ► Like, I'll tell you, the same summer, so the same summer when we're moving,

00:23:46 ◼   ► the old high school had a central courtyard

00:23:50 ◼   ► so that classes on the inside got sunlight too.

00:23:53 ◼   ► Right? So in other words, it's sort of an O-shaped building. It was rectangular, but

00:23:57 ◼   ► like a donut.

00:23:59 ◼   ► Three floors, central courtyard. And one of the classrooms on the

00:24:02 ◼   ► third floor had, like, a janky old

00:24:06 ◼   ► big-ass color TV, and it wasn't new at the time.

00:24:09 ◼   ► and we dared each other to throw it out the window into the courtyard to see what kind of noise it

00:24:16 ◼   ► would make. And ultimately, me and another guy took it. Neither of us would do it by ourselves,

00:24:22 ◼   ► but we'd... And it was heavy enough that I don't know if I could have. It was really heavy. But me

00:24:26 ◼   ► and another guy, I don't want to name them. Just in case. I don't want to put his name on the right.

00:24:32 ◼   ► I can afford it. And another kid opened up the window and we tossed this big ass color

00:24:39 ◼   ► TV out the window and it made the greatest noise. Oh my God, it was worth it. So I did

00:24:46 ◼   ► that and I didn't feel at least a bit guilty about it. And then there was a discussion,

00:24:53 ◼   ► there was a meeting later about the TV and did anybody know about the TV in the courtyard?

00:25:01 ◼   ► Nobody could remember anything about that.

00:25:04 ◼   ► That's weird.

00:25:05 ◼   ► But the tossing the cards out of the card catalog, though, to me that was beyond the pale, because it's like data loss.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's not...

00:25:15 ◼   ► Yeah, the way you put it is just data loss.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Have you seen that...

00:25:21 ◼   ► I think on one of the BOS CDs that they shipped the OS on,

00:25:25 ◼   ► like one of the demo movies was them tossing monitors off the top of their office block?

00:25:30 ◼   ► block? No, I don't think so. Like, it was exactly what you described. They just

00:25:35 ◼   ► dragged a bunch of old monitors up and they just threw them off the roof. Which maybe explains why they

00:25:42 ◼   ► went out of business. But it was pretty funny. Ask Lisio about that. He'll probably

00:25:48 ◼   ► has a link or something. Alright, I'm gonna see if I can Google it after the show.

00:25:52 ◼   ► B.O.S.T.L. is tossing monitors off the roof. Yeah, so being a letterman addict probably

00:25:58 ◼   ► didn't help either because tossing a TV off of a high floor of a building is a very Letterman

00:26:04 ◼   ► like thing to do.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Yes.

00:26:06 ◼   ► The difference is that if the Letterman show tossed a TV off the roof, they bought the

00:26:10 ◼   ► TV.

00:26:11 ◼   ► Yes.

00:26:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:13 ◼   ► I controlled the environment.

00:26:14 ◼   ► There's no way anybody's gonna get hit by that TV.

00:26:17 ◼   ► I did not buy the TV I threw out the window.

00:26:23 ◼   ► But I had a job.

00:26:24 ◼   ► I had it was a full time job.

00:26:25 ◼   ► We worked, you know, eight hours a day.

00:26:27 ◼   ► I played tons and tons of basketball all summer long, filling in the gaps whenever it wasn't

00:26:33 ◼   ► working.

00:26:34 ◼   ► And then every other waiting moment was spent on the computer.

00:26:38 ◼   ► And I thought that, you know, the fact that I held a job and still played recreational

00:26:41 ◼   ► basketball all the time, and went to movies with friends on weekends and stuff like that,

00:26:47 ◼   ► seemed to me like I was able to have a computer.

00:26:48 ◼   ► But my parents were like, "See, this is why we can't buy you a computer."

00:26:51 ◼   ► Even though I was doing all that other stuff, they somehow seemed to think that I was spending

00:26:55 ◼   ► Ah, you turned out okay.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I don't know about that.

00:27:00 ◼   ► Well, for the sake of this argument, yeah, yeah, whatever.

00:27:06 ◼   ► The difference though, I would say this, and I think that it was the fact that I just didn't,

00:27:10 ◼   ► like I said, I got to play with that one Mac in the lab enough that I saw what it was all about,

00:27:14 ◼   ► and I saw the appeal, and I really saw the cleverness of having a system that was fundamentally a graphical user interface.

00:27:24 ◼   ► But the idea of getting obsessed with user interface design just hadn't occurred to me yet.

00:27:30 ◼   ► And the profoundness of the cleverness of the Mac's UI system, I needed to use it more to appreciate it.

00:27:43 ◼   ► I don't think it had occurred to anybody yet, with the exception of the people that worked on the Lisa and the Mac.

00:27:50 ◼   ► It seems that's one difference with Syracuse to me

00:27:53 ◼   ► It seems like you listening to his early history of computing that he got he got that aspect of the Mac

00:27:59 ◼   ► With almost maybe instantly but certainly with less exposure to it than I did I needed to own one

00:28:06 ◼   ► Which is which I did when I got to college to had that Mac

00:28:10 ◼   ► Like I said the aforementioned for four megabyte of RAM

00:28:13 ◼   ► 40 megabyte hard drive Mac LC and then I really really appreciated it

00:28:19 ◼   ► So I liked the Mac, like I said, in the drafting class. I was like, "Okay, I get it. This is something totally different."

00:28:25 ◼   ► But I didn't really appreciate one until I bought one immediately after the next acquisition.

00:28:33 ◼   ► And then I was stuck with OS8 for a year.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Nice.

00:28:40 ◼   ► And I felt immediately like, "Oh man, I'm stuck with the top-earning system. It's not good."

00:28:46 ◼   ► And then I learned all of the great things about it.

00:28:49 ◼   ► So yeah, I do consider myself a Johnny-Come-Lately.

00:28:53 ◼   ► But what I mean by "nobody had appreciated it,"

00:28:57 ◼   ► I don't think the people at Xerox PARC were necessarily thinking about

00:29:01 ◼   ► design the same way that Apple was when they went to actually try to implement

00:29:06 ◼   ► first the Lisa and then the Mac.

00:29:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:10 ◼   ► Yeah, it's hard to say without using the--

00:29:13 ◼   ► I've never gotten the chance to use the Xerox Star,

00:29:15 ◼   ► but I've read enough about it and the work that Xerox did

00:29:18 ◼   ► and seen it and kind of looked at it.

00:29:20 ◼   ► 'Cause I used to be a little bit more obsessed

00:29:24 ◼   ► with the whole, that stupid, the angle that Apple,

00:29:27 ◼   ► Apple really didn't even do anything with the Mac,

00:29:28 ◼   ► they just ripped off Xerox, which legally isn't true

00:29:31 ◼   ► because they actually got Xerox

00:29:33 ◼   ► in exchange for a bit of Apple stock.

00:29:35 ◼   ► It was totally on the up and up legally.

00:29:36 ◼   ► They said, how about we give you a little bit of stock

00:29:39 ◼   ► in the Apple computer and then let us--

00:29:41 ◼   ► I just think that's a fast al argument. Yeah in general. Well, it's wrong matter who cares like no

00:29:46 ◼   ► But it's at the time it was it at the time when there was more more arguments between you know

00:29:53 ◼   ► PC sure at the time it was a point but I mean it's only it's only a point if you're

00:29:59 ◼   ► Trying to make an appeal to authority argument, right?

00:30:03 ◼   ► And I never got too bogged down and I mean somebody might be able to dig up some old usenet post that

00:30:09 ◼   ► - I was very anti-old school Macos for a while. - I found it tiresome because I was 100% certain that I was on the right side.

00:30:24 ◼   ► And it seemed to me like the people on the other side didn't really have anything to contribute anyway, so if they want to be wrong, they can be wrong.

00:30:32 ◼   ► Like it wasn't worth trying to convince them there was what was what would be the point if you know if you can't see

00:30:37 ◼   ► How superior this is then you know forget about it. I mean Syracuse I mentioned it

00:30:42 ◼   ► I'm going and you had it too - what's that kind of thing? All right. Oh, yeah

00:30:47 ◼   ► I

00:30:52 ◼   ► Thought one of the things that I thought was I had to me

00:30:55 ◼   ► Do you remember do you do you when you I don't know if you were too late?

00:30:59 ◼   ► I mean ResEdit was still a thing in the...

00:31:01 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah.

00:31:02 ◼   ► ResEdit to me was...

00:31:04 ◼   ► is maybe the...

00:31:06 ◼   ► my favorite Mac program of that time.

00:31:09 ◼   ► Loved it.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Loved it.

00:31:11 ◼   ► I...

00:31:12 ◼   ► while being foreign to me, I love the idea of a resource fork.

00:31:15 ◼   ► I love the idea of stuffing extra information in there.

00:31:19 ◼   ► On the Windows side, they tried to do something similar.

00:31:24 ◼   ► The EXE format is a flat format, but you can have resources appended to it.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:32 ◼   ► But it's not the same thing as having an actual resource fork. Which is good and bad.

00:31:37 ◼   ► Good in that it's just one flat binary stream.

00:31:42 ◼   ► Bad in that you don't have the

00:31:48 ◼   ► wants an express expressiveness of like a like a resedit or a multi resource file

00:31:54 ◼   ► well and it did it in it the whole idea predated the era of universal the

00:32:03 ◼   ► internet it's the internet that really solved the problem of every computer I

00:32:07 ◼   ► think the internet I think the internet turned everything into the lowest common

00:32:12 ◼   ► It did. That was...

00:32:13 ◼   ► ...a Unix binary stream thing.

00:32:15 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:16 ◼   ► It reset the clock in a lot of ways, in some ways negative, you know.

00:32:20 ◼   ► Exactly. It's not to say that it meant the best thing won.

00:32:23 ◼   ► It just meant, though, that there might be a good reason to go with the lowest common denominator solution of everything is just a single fork file.

00:32:31 ◼   ► I was coming from OS/2 at the time, and even NT, which both had multiple resource file forks.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Right. Like at that time, all of the file systems had followed what the Mac had done,

00:32:45 ◼   ► which was like, okay, there's data in one segment, and then there's a bunch of other segments that have,

00:32:50 ◼   ► you know, either metadata or, you know, what you guys call resource

00:32:55 ◼   ► forks. The concept-- Extended attributes, which you still have to do. Conceptually, though, is what really-- it's not even the technical

00:33:00 ◼   ► details of whether it was a two-fork, multi-fork file system, or if they had done something

00:33:05 ◼   ► more of a hack, like let's say it's, or you know, like a lot like what we have on OS X now,

00:33:11 ◼   ► where your app is really just a folder that the binder treats as a file, and the resources, you know.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Just imagine if the original Mac had gone with the same thing, where it's a special magic kind of folder,

00:33:22 ◼   ► and in the folder are all the resources, and every one of the resources is itself actually just a flat file.

00:33:27 ◼   ► It's the conceptual design of having this one app that you could edit all that stuff with,

00:33:34 ◼   ► with all these different resources so that even in the nerd mode of either being a developer

00:33:41 ◼   ► or just being an enthusiast who wants to customize the icon for a file or an app or a folder

00:33:49 ◼   ► or any of the other many many things you could edit and manipulate and res edit the fact that

00:33:57 ◼   ► even when you did those things you were still within same the same gooey universe and you

00:34:03 ◼   ► you didn't have to resort to a command line or something.

00:34:05 ◼   ► Yeah, no, in some ways that's kind of like the small talk, like living in an environment.

00:34:10 ◼   ► Yes, I do think so. I think in a strange way, even though the Mac, the original Mac,

00:34:15 ◼   ► I don't think you would say the technical way was all that influenced by small talk.

00:34:20 ◼   ► No, it's super different. But the concept is a little bit the same, right?

00:34:22 ◼   ► Yes, that you stay completely committed to this limitation that you're self-imposing,

00:34:29 ◼   ► and beauty will come out of it.

00:34:31 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

00:34:33 ◼   ► And, you know, it's funny, Next used to do that with, like, apps that shipped even on OS X up until...

00:34:42 ◼   ► Oh, I'm going to make up a number. 10.2? 10.3?

00:34:47 ◼   ► Most of the apps would ship with Nibs, which were Next interface builder files,

00:34:52 ◼   ► which you could open up in Interface Builder, which has since been merged into Xcode.

00:35:00 ◼   ► And then edit the UI of the app that you...

00:35:03 ◼   ► Like, if you didn't like the arrangement of dialog boxes, you could change it.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Just like in ResEdit.

00:35:12 ◼   ► These days, they've moved away from that.

00:35:15 ◼   ► They all get compiled down into stuff that you can't edit afterwards.

00:35:20 ◼   ► From a software reliability point of view,

00:35:27 ◼   ► I think that's probably a good idea. But I like that the old west style of stuff was common between both platforms.

00:35:37 ◼   ► The classic Mac OS was... and I'm not saying that it should have... in hindsight that it should have gone through to today.

00:35:46 ◼   ► I mean, there's certainly some advantages to the Mac OS X philosophy of the design of the system.

00:35:53 ◼   ► where things started getting locked down and some of the technical aspects of it

00:36:00 ◼   ► were not as conceptually beautiful but more practical. That's when I first kind

00:36:07 ◼   ► of became familiar with Syracuse. I would argue that back then it was

00:36:16 ◼   ► mainly myths and I would argue the future looking pragmatism and he would

00:36:21 ◼   ► argued that, well, it just sucks in terms of, let's say, window sizing.

00:36:25 ◼   ► Right. And like, well, look, it's all done on the GPU, and they're doing a bunch of stuff,

00:36:29 ◼   ► and it's going to get better. And he'd be like, yeah, but it sucks. And he was

00:36:33 ◼   ► he was right. He's right. I think I'm also

00:36:37 ◼   ► right, but the, you know. There was a beauty

00:36:41 ◼   ► to the original Mac OS, though, that hasn't matched since, and I don't think everyone... I totally agree with you.

00:36:45 ◼   ► And I completely agree with John Siracusa that iOS

00:36:49 ◼   ► is closer, much closer than Mac OS X is to the...

00:36:53 ◼   ► The original, anyways, yeah. I think now we're getting into

00:36:57 ◼   ► more convoluted territory, where I'm not so sure.

00:37:01 ◼   ► Well, the big difference, and this never would have made sense in the era

00:37:05 ◼   ► of the original Mac. I don't think it ever would have

00:37:09 ◼   ► occurred to anybody, even Steve Jobs, to lock

00:37:13 ◼   ► the system down and not even allow you to...

00:37:17 ◼   ► Like the ResEdit's a perfect comparison.

00:37:20 ◼   ► There's never gonna be a ResEdit for iOS

00:37:23 ◼   ► that lets you dittle with the icons for apps

00:37:26 ◼   ► or other resources in it.

00:37:27 ◼   ► 'Cause that doesn't, there's another aspect of iOS

00:37:31 ◼   ► that that would be philosophically opposed to.

00:37:33 ◼   ► There's a sort of do not allow you to shoot your,

00:37:36 ◼   ► like part of the design of iOS is to design a system

00:37:40 ◼   ► that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot.

00:37:42 ◼   ► Even if you'd really, if you've got like a real itchy,

00:37:46 ◼   ► you know, case athlete's foot and you just want to shoot yourself in the foot,

00:37:49 ◼   ► you're not, you can't do it in iOS by itself. That just never would have

00:37:56 ◼   ► occurred to anybody in the Mac OS era. Like I don't think the fact that, you

00:37:59 ◼   ► know, I mean it wasn't like the machine shipped with ResEdit, you had to put it

00:38:03 ◼   ► on your machine, but not even allowing you to do ResEdit or not allowing, you

00:38:08 ◼   ► know, having a ResEdit that wasn't allowed to edit certain system files or

00:38:12 ◼   ► something like that. It just didn't make sense. I mean, some of the hacks we would do, we would go right into it. Remember there was the system suitcase.

00:38:20 ◼   ► There was actually, there was a, I mean, that's part of the things, one of the things that I say made the original Mac so beautiful is that the entire file system was, there was no crap.

00:38:32 ◼   ► crap. There was like, or in his years went on very, very little

00:38:35 ◼   ► crap. Like it was just a folder that said system folder and

00:38:39 ◼   ► inside was a suitcase file called system. And that had all

00:38:43 ◼   ► the resources for the system itself. And they're all neatly

00:38:46 ◼   ► organized. There were no hidden folders or anything like that.

00:38:49 ◼   ► The only hidden folder I can remember would be the desktop

00:38:52 ◼   ► folder that had the root level of the hard drive. There was an

00:38:56 ◼   ► invisible folder called the disk desktop folder, which is the

00:38:59 ◼   ► actual location in the file system where everything you put

00:39:01 ◼   ► on your desktop was.

00:39:03 ◼   ► - Notably under the root of the disk, not under the user.

00:39:08 ◼   ► - Because there was no user.

00:39:10 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Well, that's, I mean, this is why things got

00:39:13 ◼   ► a little bit interesting when LSTAN came along, right?

00:39:15 ◼   ► Like things got a little bit freaky.

00:39:18 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:18 ◼   ► - And that's why we started,

00:39:20 ◼   ► I don't remember if it was a beta that actually hid

00:39:23 ◼   ► anything outside of user.

00:39:27 ◼   ► - Oh, man.

00:39:28 ◼   ► I think that they're wireless.

00:39:30 ◼   ► I think they--

00:39:30 ◼   ► floated but they went back and forth on a lot of those things yeah let me take a

00:39:36 ◼   ► break while we're yeah you think so thank our first 41 minutes and we haven't

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00:41:49 ◼   ► sponsoring the talk show. I didn't even have this in the

00:41:53 ◼   ► I do I always prepare very copious and well-organized notes for the show. I did not have tripped on memory lane

00:41:59 ◼   ► Here's how much I like the Mac

00:42:01 ◼   ► I like the Mac so much of when I was a freshman in college and finally owned one and had it I spent my entire

00:42:05 ◼   ► Freshman year all of my free time

00:42:08 ◼   ► Either playing games or hacking or diddling with the system resources and in res edit

00:42:14 ◼   ► And didn't you know didn't go out drinking or anything like that?

00:42:19 ◼   ► All I did recreation I just continued to play basketball. I played basketball and I sat in my dorm room staring at my Mac LC

00:42:25 ◼   ► Just staring at it and we didn't have a network at the time

00:42:30 ◼   ► There was no there was no internet in the dorms at Drexel University at the time

00:42:34 ◼   ► So, you know what and modems were modems are so expensive. They were preposterous. We're like not a joke

00:42:39 ◼   ► Yeah, there were preposterous what 91 90? Yeah 91 to 92. Yeah. I've told this story before too. We we wired up

00:42:48 ◼   ► the dorm room Calhoun Hall at Drexel with

00:42:52 ◼   ► Phone net I forget what they were called

00:42:55 ◼   ► But there were these little and they were these were pretty cheap you could get them you order them out of the back of Mac

00:42:59 ◼   ► World magazine or Mac user you may order these things get them get yours from Mac connection

00:43:04 ◼   ► It was about 15 bucks and you'd get a little

00:43:06 ◼   ► About the size of a mouse maybe even part smaller than the mouse of the day

00:43:12 ◼   ► and it would plug into the serial port of your Mac and then it was a phone connector on the other side on the box.

00:43:20 ◼   ► And so then you could use phone cable, just regular old telephone cable to create a local talk network.

00:43:26 ◼   ► Oh man, Macs are good at that. So then you're playing video games again.

00:43:30 ◼   ► Right, Spectre was the name of the, it was like a first person shoot, like a vector based, you know, pseudo vector based tank game.

00:43:38 ◼   ► and we wired up the whole floor and we figured out, you know, and then we figured out that,

00:43:44 ◼   ► you know, this is like the first time I learned how, you know, some electrical stuff work,

00:43:49 ◼   ► that there's nothing really magical about phone cable. It's just copper. That's all it is. There's

00:43:55 ◼   ► no, it's just copper and, you know, electrons move on it. There's, you know, and the colors are just

00:44:00 ◼   ► to match up. There's nothing different about them. So, yeah, we figured out we could, we just ran

00:44:06 ◼   ► speaker wire through the drop ceiling all around the the I forget what floor I

00:44:11 ◼   ► was on the eighth floor seventh floor of Calhoun Hall and then just ran phone

00:44:15 ◼   ► wire between anybody who wanted to get on the network or not you know and you

00:44:21 ◼   ► don't have to do any soldering or any just you know connect the just make sure

00:44:24 ◼   ► the cable and then just electrical tape it up so we had the whole floor wired up

00:44:29 ◼   ► networking there was a chat app oh my god it was like the first time I ever

00:44:33 ◼   ► had, I forget what it was called. Boy, somebody out there will remember it.

00:44:37 ◼   ► But... >> For the Mac? It wasn't the... >> Well, you just had...

00:44:41 ◼   ► >> Hotwire, was it? >> No, it was way before that. >> Way before that, yeah.

00:44:45 ◼   ► >> I guess you'd have to know, you didn't have a user ID, you'd have a Mac name, though.

00:44:49 ◼   ► So your Mac would have a name on the local TOTS network. So that's how you'd, you know,

00:44:53 ◼   ► that was like your ID. But you could like effectively just send DMs to each other.

00:44:57 ◼   ► Which was amazing. Of course, everybody does this all the time now,

00:45:01 ◼   ► but it was like my introduction to text.

00:45:03 ◼   ► Yeah, that is really cool.

00:45:05 ◼   ► And it was all through a proper Mac interface.

00:45:07 ◼   ► There was no, it wasn't like you had to go to a terminal type application or anything like that.

00:45:12 ◼   ► It was great.

00:45:13 ◼   ► And then we found out the kids on the floor above us had done the same thing.

00:45:16 ◼   ► So did you bridge them?

00:45:19 ◼   ► Yeah, there was a lot of trash talking about who was...

00:45:21 ◼   ► Let's call it an internet.

00:45:22 ◼   ► There was a lot of trash talking about who was better at Spectre.

00:45:25 ◼   ► And so we ran some wire outside my room up to the one...

00:45:30 ◼   ► Physically-created internet.

00:45:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:33 ◼   ► And then one day, the guy, I forget his title, but whoever it was, he was the guy who was

00:45:38 ◼   ► in charge of that dorm.

00:45:40 ◼   ► You know, like...

00:45:42 ◼   ► I forget his title, but the guy that was in charge of that dorm?

00:45:45 ◼   ► But he had like a name.

00:45:46 ◼   ► That sounds like an 80s villain.

00:45:47 ◼   ► Yeah, well, he was a nice guy.

00:45:50 ◼   ► It was a very 80s movie situation where I got a knock on the door and was told to come

00:45:55 ◼   ► down and meet him.

00:45:56 ◼   ► And it was me and the guy above me who's...

00:45:58 ◼   ► He said that...

00:45:59 ◼   ► He said his smoking jacket was like one of those candy... with those candy cigarettes.

00:46:04 ◼   ► The dorm faced south, or at least my side of the dorm faced south.

00:46:09 ◼   ► And so it caught the afternoon sunlight.

00:46:12 ◼   ► The afternoon sunlight came into our dorm room.

00:46:14 ◼   ► He said he was coming up the street yesterday and noticed a very bright...

00:46:18 ◼   ► This is where we screwed up is that we just used speaker wire instead of...

00:46:23 ◼   ► We didn't really try to disguise it, and that the copper of the speaker wire really, it was bright.

00:46:28 ◼   ► It like blinded him, and he saw like a very bright line between our dorm rooms.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And when he got closer and figured out what it was, you know, that this is a fire hazard,

00:46:36 ◼   ► and we've, you know, got to take this down immediately.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And he obviously, and I tried to explain to him that, I think I'm correct, that it was not a fire hazard.

00:46:47 ◼   ► I don't think there's enough voltage in it.

00:46:49 ◼   ► Right, there's not enough voltage, you know. It's not a fire hazard.

00:46:52 ◼   ► Also, not a dumb suggestion.

00:46:55 ◼   ► No, not a dumb suggestion. And I could totally see why as someone with a job that, you know,

00:47:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:01 ◼   ► needed to deal with this. So we said, "Oh yeah, we'll get right on it. We'll take it

00:47:05 ◼   ► right down." And all we did was take down the bridge between the two floors, of course.

00:47:10 ◼   ► And hope that he didn't make any kind of spot inspection. Because it also seemed clear he

00:47:16 ◼   ► had no idea. He, I think he, because he saw it, he thought it was a connection between

00:47:20 ◼   ► my room and the kid above me's room, not a connection between like 30 dorm rooms.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:26 ◼   ► Those were the days.

00:47:28 ◼   ► Can't compete with that.

00:47:35 ◼   ► Maybe could have used like a shielded wire a little bit more.

00:47:38 ◼   ► What do we get?

00:47:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:47:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I think we could have, you know.

00:47:44 ◼   ► Money was a problem, though.

00:47:45 ◼   ► I mean, this was a network that we, you know, other than everybody had a $15 box they had

00:47:49 ◼   ► to buy themselves. And I would say the rest of it cost us about $10.

00:47:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:55 ◼   ► Wherever we went to buy speaker wire in bulk and electrical tape.

00:48:00 ◼   ► I like that you stepped up from just using the tin that you can get from gum wrappers,

00:48:07 ◼   ► burning off the paper side and then just using the tin and just wrapping it together.

00:48:12 ◼   ► I'm trying to Google the name of this app, and I cannot find it. I don't know how to--

00:48:17 ◼   ► because it was something that was only of use in the maybe late 80s, very late 80s and early 90s,

00:48:22 ◼   ► it all predates the internet and it predates Google. So I know it's like impossible.

00:48:25 ◼   ► You know what?

00:48:26 ◼   ► You used to go to the chooser.

00:48:30 ◼   ► I would think about like old school Unix names.

00:48:32 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it wasn't a Unix name. It was a total Mac thing. It was a pure Mac.

00:48:36 ◼   ► Not that it was a port, but like a riff on it.

00:48:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:40 ◼   ► It was like...

00:48:42 ◼   ► Wasn't talk like something you could do?

00:48:44 ◼   ► Local talk, but the...

00:48:46 ◼   ► No, yeah, local talk was the protocol. But talk on Unix.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I remember talk. And there was like variants of it, like end talk and talk.

00:48:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:57 ◼   ► Amy and I used to use that extensively, because this is an entirely retro episode of the show.

00:49:05 ◼   ► So Amy was in Pittsburgh and I was in Philadelphia. And even though it's still the state of Pennsylvania,

00:49:10 ◼   ► It was still this is how ancient the early 90s were

00:49:13 ◼   ► It was long distance phone calls were still a thing. So we used to write just by talking a few minutes a week

00:49:19 ◼   ► We'd rack up $100 a month phone bill, which was massive

00:49:22 ◼   ► college student

00:49:25 ◼   ► There was no way to

00:49:27 ◼   ► cost effectively

00:49:29 ◼   ► Speak on the phone from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia

00:49:32 ◼   ► and then we just got you know, we got email and we'd email each other and then

00:49:35 ◼   ► when we discovered

00:49:38 ◼   ► like talk and then talk but we had to use them like she had to use it from a

00:49:43 ◼   ► Like a lab at Pitt at University of Pittsburgh

00:49:47 ◼   ► She didn't have a computer in her dorm and eventually I think I got a modem soon enough

00:49:51 ◼   ► But I think when we first started doing it, I might have had to go to the lab, too

00:49:54 ◼   ► so we'd have to like schedule a time because you wouldn't be able to get in touch, you know, like

00:49:59 ◼   ► like the whole idea of how do you start texting with somebody is

00:50:04 ◼   ► is a totally different problem when you don't have the phone with you at all times.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Yeah. There's no better sexy talk than scheduled time in the lab.

00:50:13 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, but it worked. It was amazing.

00:50:18 ◼   ► You could see what each other was typing at the same time, too. At least with one of them. The one we liked the best.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Oh, like character by character? With the deletes? Yeah. I kind of missed that.

00:50:27 ◼   ► And you could make jokes with it. It was good. It was a good way to make jokes where you would type something in and delete, delete, delete.

00:50:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm of two minds to that.

00:50:36 ◼   ► I'm kinda glad that people don't get to see

00:50:37 ◼   ► what I was about to say.

00:50:38 ◼   ► But I remember those apps when it was like--

00:50:42 ◼   ► - You had to be careful.

00:50:43 ◼   ► You had to be careful. - Yeah.

00:50:44 ◼   ► I'd like a three digit ICQ code at one point,

00:50:52 ◼   ► which I never used.

00:50:56 ◼   ► Do you remember ICQ at all?

00:50:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I never really used it though.

00:50:59 ◼   ► - Really, well, mostly PC thing.

00:51:02 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:51:03 ◼   ► And I remember not getting, it was like a real eye-opener to me where I heard of it

00:51:07 ◼   ► and I saw it, and I don't think I ever signed up for it.

00:51:09 ◼   ► But it was like six months after I became aware of it when I realized that the name

00:51:15 ◼   ► was a pun.

00:51:16 ◼   ► Because I also remember IRC, and IRC was just Internet Relay Chat.

00:51:21 ◼   ► And I did use that, of course.

00:51:23 ◼   ► And then I thought ICQ was just the same thing where it had meant something, and I didn't

00:51:27 ◼   ► realize that it was ICQ.

00:51:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it's got a cute name.

00:51:32 ◼   ► Which explains why I had no interest in using it.

00:51:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:36 ◼   ► Well, I also at the time did not have any interest in talking to people that weren't in front of me.

00:51:41 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:51:44 ◼   ► Which has changed as I have become employed.

00:51:48 ◼   ► Are you still looking? Like you're still looking?

00:51:51 ◼   ► I am. I'm tweeting. I'm going to tweet here. This is a live... This is a tweet live during the function.

00:51:55 ◼   ► A live tweet.

00:51:56 ◼   ► Anyone remember the name of the early 90s chooser extension for instant messaging on local talk?

00:52:00 ◼   ► Let's see if Twitter can come to us.

00:52:05 ◼   ► Can save the day?

00:52:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:08 ◼   ► Fill in the role of the live audience.

00:52:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:12 ◼   ► I just want to say we actually had a plan.

00:52:16 ◼   ► Like I have an OmniOutliner document here about what we're going to talk about.

00:52:20 ◼   ► Let's get into it.

00:52:21 ◼   ► And you know what? The first one was Prince.

00:52:23 ◼   ► Right. We did that.

00:52:25 ◼   ► And we're still doing that.

00:52:27 ◼   ► Well, what was next on your OmniOutliner? Was it the Ben Thompson Apple...

00:52:32 ◼   ► Yeah, the Apple services stuff.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Right. So, Ben Thompson...

00:52:34 ◼   ► I don't want to drag you back to this, because I love the tript on...

00:52:36 ◼   ► No! No, I've refilled it up. I'll just wait until my Twitter replies have the...

00:52:40 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, we'll get back to that.

00:52:41 ◼   ► So, how would you summarize Ben Thompson? Ben Thompson had a great piece on...

00:52:47 ◼   ► Ben Thompson as a person?

00:52:49 ◼   ► No, no, no. The Ben Thompson.

00:52:51 ◼   ► Ooh, I don't like that guy.

00:52:53 ◼   ► Yeah, he's difficult.

00:52:56 ◼   ► Hi, kid. Hi, kid. He had a good piece, his weekly free...

00:53:00 ◼   ► He may take that to heart.

00:53:01 ◼   ► His weekly free for everyone Stratechery column this week was... I thought really...

00:53:07 ◼   ► It's always good, but I thought this one was particularly good.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:10 ◼   ► More or less arguing that... All right. One of the things that makes Apple very unique,

00:53:16 ◼   ► I'm going to try to summarize this very quickly, is that Apple doesn't have product divisions.

00:53:21 ◼   ► There's no Mac division. The logical way for a company that sells what Apple sells would be

00:53:26 ◼   ► be to have a Mac division, an iPhone division, probably a separate iPad division. Although

00:53:32 ◼   ► there's, you know, you could argue whether the iPad would be in the, in the iPhone division,

00:53:38 ◼   ► a new watch division, etc. And they don't. TV or accessories, TV, accessories division with TV

00:53:46 ◼   ► being the thing. And they don't. That's not how the company has been set up. It, that's the first

00:53:51 ◼   ► thing and probably the most important thing that Steve Jobs did when he came back in 1997

00:53:58 ◼   ► was dismantle that sort of thinking and put in what's best called—I mean, this is the

00:54:04 ◼   ► part where Ben can smart talk us because he actually knows the business school terminology.

00:54:12 ◼   ► I love when you ask me to talk about this. I'm like, "Seriously?" I'm the dummy on it.

00:54:18 ◼   ► I'm a pretty technical guy, but this side of... anyway.

00:54:21 ◼   ► He calls it functional versus divisional.

00:54:23 ◼   ► You just described divisional.

00:54:25 ◼   ► Apple works as a functional structure.

00:54:28 ◼   ► And, you know, there have been exceptions.

00:54:30 ◼   ► The iPod division was sort of an exception to this.

00:54:33 ◼   ► But they got rid of that.

00:54:36 ◼   ► Well, wait. Let's define why.

00:54:40 ◼   ► The iPod division was separate from that because it had its own OS

00:54:44 ◼   ► and its own manufacturing thrust.

00:54:48 ◼   ► Yeah, it made sense for it, and I think it

00:54:52 ◼   ► sort of evolved naturally, and it wasn't really seen as an exception, but

00:54:56 ◼   ► simply that it just made sense, especially in the early years.

00:55:00 ◼   ► And I don't think it's overstating it that

00:55:04 ◼   ► the decision to go with a

00:55:08 ◼   ► stripped down version of OS X as the

00:55:12 ◼   ► OS for the original iPhone instead of a muscled up version of the iPod OS or some other new

00:55:24 ◼   ► OS in the mindset of the iPod OS.

00:55:31 ◼   ► And in personal terms...

00:55:32 ◼   ► PIXO.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:55:34 ◼   ► What was it called?

00:55:35 ◼   ► PIXO.

00:55:36 ◼   ► PIXO?

00:55:37 ◼   ► P-I-X.

00:55:38 ◼   ► I thought it was...

00:55:39 ◼   ► It's either P-I-X-O or P-I-X-I-O.

00:55:40 ◼   ► I forget.

00:55:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:42 ◼   ► It was an embedded operating system, you know for that they'd license and heavily modified, right?

00:55:47 ◼   ► I think I'm being fair in describing that as a and including all of you know, the early iPods as

00:55:56 ◼   ► Evermore computer like electronic gadgets and then the other mindset

00:56:02 ◼   ► it is and it just

00:56:05 ◼   ► you know that the industry just had to wait until computers got small enough and cheap enough and and

00:56:11 ◼   ► and ran with low enough energy to make ever more gadget-like computers.

00:56:17 ◼   ► Right? The iPhone is a gadget-like Unix computer.

00:56:23 ◼   ► I mean, it really is. It's a much better Unix computer than most of the servers of the earlier part of our lives.

00:56:31 ◼   ► Well, going back to what we were talking about previously, when OS X first became a thing,

00:56:37 ◼   ► became a thing. People were all worried about, like, "Well, Unix writes out these massive

00:56:42 ◼   ► log files every night at midnight. You can't do that on a PC."

00:56:47 ◼   ► You know, a few years later,

00:56:52 ◼   ► it's appropriate to be using on a phone, because of a lot of the work that went into OS X and

00:56:57 ◼   ► sort of taming Unix back to be, I guess,

00:57:02 ◼   ► more focused or, you know, attributes.

00:57:07 ◼   ► - I remember at the Macworld where the original iPhone

00:57:10 ◼   ► was introduced, it was Macworld Expo January 2007,

00:57:14 ◼   ► and it's the biggest sensation of all sensations,

00:57:17 ◼   ► we don't have to go into that.

00:57:18 ◼   ► But then there was, you know,

00:57:19 ◼   ► the trade show was there afterwards.

00:57:20 ◼   ► And I think I was doing a live episode of the talk show.

00:57:25 ◼   ► I did it with Cable Sasser, Dan Benning.

00:57:32 ◼   ► - Cable? - Wasn't there, and so--

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Was Craig there too, or was it just cable?

00:57:36 ◼   ► - I think it was just cable that time.

00:57:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause you were in this glass booth, right?

00:57:42 ◼   ► - No, it was a different one.

00:57:43 ◼   ► We had an open, yeah, and we weren't in the glass booth,

00:57:46 ◼   ► and we had an audience of people.

00:57:48 ◼   ► It might've been after that one

00:57:51 ◼   ► where we did it in the glass booth, which was weird.

00:57:56 ◼   ► But we're out on the open show floor.

00:57:58 ◼   ► The acoustics are terrible.

00:58:00 ◼   ► I don't know where the audio is,

00:58:02 ◼   ► but it was just, we obviously knew what we wanted to talk about.

00:58:04 ◼   ► It just mean Cable Sasser talking about this amazing iPhone.

00:58:08 ◼   ► And I just remember Cable came up and we had, you know, I don't know,

00:58:11 ◼   ► 50, 100 people in front of us and Cable said, how many people,

00:58:14 ◼   ► how many of you guys are thinking you're going to buy one right away?

00:58:16 ◼   ► And everybody's hand just shot up, like just shot up.

00:58:19 ◼   ► I've never seen any product where every single person

00:58:23 ◼   ► just needed to have one right away. It was amazing. But anyway,

00:58:29 ◼   ► Just a small interjection.

00:58:31 ◼   ► I couldn't buy one in Canada.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I was there.

00:58:37 ◼   ► I saw one.

00:58:38 ◼   ► I bought it.

00:58:41 ◼   ► All I could do, and I've told the story before, but all I could do for like a long

00:58:46 ◼   ► time was slide to unlock to call 911.

00:58:49 ◼   ► That was it.

00:58:51 ◼   ► I spent a bunch of money on something so incredible.

00:58:54 ◼   ► Oh, but you could use it as an iPod touch.

00:58:55 ◼   ► The only thing I could do would be to call the police to arrest me for abusing a feature on my new phone.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And you could use it on Wi-Fi.

00:59:02 ◼   ► Not until after a jailbreak. Oh, that's right because that's right. I couldn't even jailbreak it at the time.

00:59:08 ◼   ► I'm telling you all I could do is slide that thing. I totally forgot about that that you had to unlock the

00:59:13 ◼   ► carrier unlock it. Yeah, you had to get it unlocked by AT&T before it would even work as a

00:59:20 ◼   ► iPod touch. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, so I finally I

00:59:24 ◼   ► I was, I...

00:59:25 ◼   ► Sly Dudlock. I would have bought one too. I would have done the same thing.

00:59:28 ◼   ► It was like me buying the Mac as soon as Jobs returned to the company.

00:59:33 ◼   ► Or like, Next got bought. I was like, "Okay, I'm in. Let's see what you got."

00:59:37 ◼   ► So, after the podcast, there was a friend at Apple who I'd known for a while.

00:59:41 ◼   ► Still there, so I can't say who, but somebody... And I knew that they...

00:59:46 ◼   ► He had disappeared for a while, you know, and just disappeared in terms of like,

00:59:52 ◼   ► he was obviously working on something that was all-consuming and

00:59:55 ◼   ► It turned out he was working on the you know, first version of it wasn't even called iOS yet

01:00:01 ◼   ► And you know even then even though he could reveal that yes, this is what I've been working on

01:00:08 ◼   ► He's you know, he's an Apple person. He still can't even off the record in private

01:00:11 ◼   ► Just you know, and you know just commiserating after the show wasn't miked or anything

01:00:16 ◼   ► But I had questions and he'd you know would Apple friends always let you ask questions

01:00:20 ◼   ► they just sometimes don't answer them. You just have to get used to that. And I asked him, I was

01:00:25 ◼   ► like, "Okay, so if it's running even the most stripped-down version of OS X conceivable,

01:00:31 ◼   ► just really, really lighter weight and really take a hatchet to all sorts of stuff that,

01:00:36 ◼   ► you know, the daemons and processes that run in the background." I was like, "That is going to

01:00:40 ◼   ► take forever to turn on compared to an iPod or like a regular cell phone." And he just looked

01:00:49 ◼   ► to me and smiled and he just said, "Yes," as though, "Yes, there's no way to avoid that,

01:00:55 ◼   ► but what if you don't have to turn it off all the time?"

01:01:00 ◼   ► >> Right.

01:01:01 ◼   ► >> And I was like, "Oh." And I realized, "Oh, that is interesting." And that whole story was

01:01:06 ◼   ► inspired by the way that most Unix machines were configured, that at the turn of midnight,

01:01:13 ◼   ► just start doing a spew a whole bunch of automated system cleanup and log files and all this

01:01:20 ◼   ► stuff and rotate on and do all this crazy stuff. And just because all the Unix machines

01:01:27 ◼   ► we knew today did that doesn't mean that a one that was built for consumers would have

01:01:31 ◼   ► to do that too. It's like you just step away and realize that that is a terrible assumption

01:01:36 ◼   ► to make.

01:01:37 ◼   ► And I always took that one step further in that

01:01:41 ◼   ► A,

01:01:45 ◼   ► they didn't give you swap space. Right.

01:01:49 ◼   ► Just to explain that, if you use more memory than

01:01:53 ◼   ► is available to you, typical Unix systems will try to make it

01:01:57 ◼   ► available to you by granting you disk space to swap out portions of

01:02:01 ◼   ► whatever you're working on.

01:02:05 ◼   ► instead it would tell you, "You're getting very close to the limit here."

01:02:10 ◼   ► And then there wasn't even three strikes.

01:02:14 ◼   ► The second strike was like, "Okay, you're dead. I'll just kill you. Your app will go away."

01:02:19 ◼   ► And that brought a new discipline to writing applications

01:02:24 ◼   ► that was foreign to the Unix world, where you

01:02:29 ◼   ► presumed that you had, if not complete control,

01:02:34 ◼   ► at least you could marshal the system into doing exactly what you wanted.

01:02:41 ◼   ► Right, especially once we got to the point where disk space was, if not

01:02:48 ◼   ► infinite, was at least compared to RAM infinite. Once we started measuring

01:02:55 ◼   ► hard disks in hundreds of gigabytes at least, maybe even the early, maybe even

01:03:00 ◼   ► like 40, 80 gigabyte sizes compared to RAM,

01:03:04 ◼   ► that's just humongous.

01:03:06 ◼   ► And therefore Unix's game of we'll just pretend RAM

01:03:10 ◼   ► is infinite and write out what you're using to disk

01:03:14 ◼   ► and move from disk back into actual RAM,

01:03:16 ◼   ► what we need on the fly could work.

01:03:18 ◼   ► But that's exactly why in layman's terms in,

01:03:21 ◼   ► I mean, and this just doesn't happen anymore

01:03:23 ◼   ► if you have SSDs and it probably doesn't happen anymore

01:03:25 ◼   ► just because you don't really,

01:03:26 ◼   ► most of us don't need swap or at least don't need much.

01:03:30 ◼   ► But in the days of spinning hard drives and low amounts of RAM, when your system started

01:03:34 ◼   ► to slow down and you'd hear your hard drive or feel it going all the time, that's exactly

01:03:38 ◼   ► why.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Because it was constantly shuffling back and forth.

01:03:41 ◼   ► Like it was a visual thing.

01:03:43 ◼   ► I'm kind of glad we did that memory lane thing at the top of the show, because it gives a

01:03:47 ◼   ► lot more context to this kind of stuff.

01:03:49 ◼   ► Well, the other philosophical aspect of traditional Unix is that a process that starts running

01:03:56 ◼   ► will run until it process the process itself decides, okay, I'm done. And now I'm leaving.

01:04:02 ◼   ► And you could have bugs that would crash the thing. You as a user could take personal interaction and

01:04:09 ◼   ► kill the process manually like the, you know, force quit it. But the system itself would do whatever

01:04:15 ◼   ► it takes to make sure that bugs aside and user action aside, you will run forever if you want to

01:04:23 ◼   ► run forever. And iOS, like you said, said you need to be ready to die in a moment's

01:04:28 ◼   ► notice. Right. Traditional Unix operating systems bend over backwards in service of

01:04:35 ◼   ► the applications that they're running. iOS bends over backwards for the user.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Right. And for the interactivity. And so the idea as a proper iOS developer is if you have

01:04:49 ◼   ► any data that needs to be saved, you need to save it constantly and at all times.

01:04:54 ◼   ► At any time it changes, save it. Any time it changes, save it automatically.

01:04:59 ◼   ► Because you might be killed at any moment and that's fair game. You may be

01:05:03 ◼   ► killed and then the user may come back to your app and you're expected to be in

01:05:07 ◼   ► the same spot. To pretend like nothing had happened. Yeah, I mean the home

01:05:11 ◼   ► button used to just kill you. Yeah, every time, automatically. As soon as they hit the

01:05:14 ◼   ► home button, whatever was running was... Yeah, and I love that discipline. I really do.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Like in the time it took for the animation to go back to the home screen, you were expected to be completely cleaned up.

01:05:27 ◼   ► Yeah, you would cut the boot.

01:05:30 ◼   ► But so anyway, that decision, that fateful decision to go the cut down version of OS X root,

01:05:36 ◼   ► effectively squeezed Tony Fadell out the door and sort of brought an end to that functional arrangement.

01:05:42 ◼   ► And then in 2011...

01:05:44 ◼   ► No, that would be a divisional arrangement.

01:05:46 ◼   ► Yeah, the divisional arrangement, I'm sorry. And then, you're correct. And then in 2011, with the Scott Forstall ouster, it really ended it because effectively, I think it's fair to say that Scott Forstall ran an iOS division within Apple.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Maybe that's a little too glib, but it's, you know, Forstall...

01:06:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know how to... maybe.

01:06:14 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:06:15 ◼   ► You know, and there were obviously some parts that were shared between OSs, but they tended

01:06:20 ◼   ► to filter back and forth years later, right?

01:06:23 ◼   ► And there was even an event the one time where they made that the theme of the event.

01:06:26 ◼   ► It was called like the Back to the Mac.

01:06:28 ◼   ► Back to the Mac.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Back to the Mac.

01:06:30 ◼   ► And it was, look, we created a bunch of these cool technologies for iOS in the last few

01:06:35 ◼   ► years and it actually, these things would make sense on OS X and so we've taken them

01:06:39 ◼   ► back to the Mac.

01:06:42 ◼   ► opposed to today's I would say extremely functionally aligned Apple where Craig

01:06:54 ◼   ► Federighi's team in charge of software is in charge of software and yes there's

01:06:59 ◼   ► some divisions and it seems like the watch OS team is sort of off on its own

01:07:05 ◼   ► but I don't think in a contentious way it's just in a they have to put their

01:07:10 ◼   ► heads down. No, I don't think it's contentious. I just think it's early days. Right. Yeah,

01:07:15 ◼   ► exactly. I think it makes sense for early days, that you sort of get to go off. I think

01:07:18 ◼   ► you could probably say that Apple TV is kind of in the same boat, but Apple TV is, I believe,

01:07:25 ◼   ► under Eddie, Kia. I think so, but I don't, I'm not entirely sure. I'm pretty sure.

01:07:34 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I'll bet you're right. And so Ben Thompson's argument is

01:07:48 ◼   ► that this works great for devices. Apple has proven that it works great and it

01:07:52 ◼   ► explains Apple's conti... you know, I wouldn't... anything can end because it

01:07:58 ◼   ► all depends on actual execution. They have to... it's easy so long as you keep

01:08:03 ◼   ► making great products. And that's actually a very, you know, the keep making great products

01:08:08 ◼   ► is difficult in and of itself. But if you do, it's easy to keep them popular and to

01:08:13 ◼   ► keep the integration between things that makes Apple stuff so, you know, famously fun and

01:08:23 ◼   ► easy and attractive to use.

01:08:26 ◼   ► Yeah. In some ways, I do think that it's folly to associate the success of one company with the prominence of one kind of model.

01:08:42 ◼   ► Whether one company succeeds or fails has a lot more to do with other factors other than their particular model.

01:08:53 ◼   ► Like, you can't-- I don't think you can look at any functional company and be like, "Well, they're bound to be like Apple."

01:08:59 ◼   ► Because that's not the truth. Similarly, I don't think you can say that any company that follows a division, organizational pattern,

01:09:10 ◼   ► is going to become like DuPont, which is his example.

01:09:16 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Ben's example is that—I think it's pretty interesting—is to compare Apple today to

01:09:27 ◼   ► DuPont from like 100 years ago.

01:09:30 ◼   ► Post World War I.

01:09:32 ◼   ► DuPont became huge by building one, doing one thing, which was making gunpowder.

01:09:37 ◼   ► And then—

01:09:38 ◼   ► Turns out in World War I, that was popular.

01:09:43 ◼   ► And then, post-war, they realized that gunpowder was, at a technical level, very similar to

01:09:48 ◼   ► making paint.

01:09:50 ◼   ► And a lot of stuff needed to be repainted because of World War I.

01:09:54 ◼   ► And so they decided to...

01:09:56 ◼   ► What seemed like a natural area of growth for the DuPont company was to expand into

01:10:00 ◼   ► making paint.

01:10:01 ◼   ► And yet, somehow, they ended up losing tons of money on the paint business because of...

01:10:07 ◼   ► Even though it was similar to manufacture, the market was entirely different.

01:10:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:10:12 ◼   ► selling gunpowder they would sell to massive buyers.

01:10:15 ◼   ► Like, well, I mean, obviously the military.

01:10:18 ◼   ► Yeah, effectively I think most of the bullets.

01:10:20 ◼   ► Buy a lot of bullets, you know.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Selling paint, you'd be selling to Ma and Pa that are trying to like

01:10:25 ◼   ► paint their house or their small business kind of thing.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Very different marketing, very different packaging,

01:10:32 ◼   ► very different distribution schemes.

01:10:34 ◼   ► Right, and they ended up having to switch.

01:10:37 ◼   ► And so they switched to a divisional.

01:10:40 ◼   ► Divisional.

01:10:41 ◼   ► Right, so there's a paint division and a gunpowder division in it and it worked out.

01:10:44 ◼   ► And then that became the model for big corporations ever since.

01:10:52 ◼   ► And now Apple is seen as the exception as opposed to a hundred years ago where Apple's functional arrangement would have seemed more natural.

01:11:00 ◼   ► So the question is, should Apple services be split out into divisional?

01:11:07 ◼   ► This is where this is the point of whole point of Ben's thing is that this works great for Apple with devices

01:11:12 ◼   ► It is not working out well for them with services and Apple themselves that are executives on the quarterly call like three months ago

01:11:20 ◼   ► emphasized their efforts into

01:11:23 ◼   ► Services and it's Ben's argument is that they should they should split services out into a separate division

01:11:31 ◼   ► Even account, you know, you even do a separate profit and loss for that division

01:11:35 ◼   ► And--

01:11:37 ◼   ► - Not even, I think, well, he equivalates on that

01:11:41 ◼   ► a little bit, but, equivocates, I should say.

01:11:45 ◼   ► But separate profit and loss would allow them to track

01:11:49 ◼   ► the progress of the services division

01:11:54 ◼   ► separately from the product division.

01:11:57 ◼   ► - I can see, I'm not entirely convinced that he's right,

01:12:00 ◼   ► but I can definitely see that--

01:12:01 ◼   ► - Me neither.

01:12:02 ◼   ► - I see that he might be, and the difference is

01:12:04 ◼   ► that I think, and I think he makes this point too,

01:12:09 ◼   ► but that the traditional divisional nature

01:12:13 ◼   ► is what creates intercompany political conflict

01:12:17 ◼   ► that blocks, it often leads to this is why a company

01:12:22 ◼   ► never tends to disrupt itself.

01:12:27 ◼   ► That if Apple had a culture like that,

01:12:30 ◼   ► then the iPhone, they never would have even debated

01:12:34 ◼   ► whether it was the iPod division that would make the iPhone,

01:12:36 ◼   ► because of course they did because the iPod

01:12:38 ◼   ► was the new hot thing at Apple at the time.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And then the iPod division might have made,

01:12:43 ◼   ► designed an iPhone that was designed to make sure

01:12:46 ◼   ► that it didn't keep people from wanting to still buy an iPod.

01:12:49 ◼   ► And just go forward a little bit more.

01:12:53 ◼   ► Then if there was an iPhone division

01:12:56 ◼   ► and Steve Jobs wanted to make a tablet,

01:13:00 ◼   ► they would have been political resistance

01:13:03 ◼   ► within the company of what if these tablets make people not buy as many

01:13:07 ◼   ► iPhones and so on and so forth or the Mac in particular would say no way what

01:13:12 ◼   ► a you know the MacBook MacBooks are the heart and soul and the only part of our

01:13:17 ◼   ► business it's growing and clearly this tablet which you guys you want to even

01:13:22 ◼   ► make a keyboard for is something that's going to how could it not how could

01:13:27 ◼   ► every one of these that you sell for only $750 not mean that someone's less likely to

01:13:34 ◼   ► buy one of our things for $1500.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Well, I mean, just look at the new smaller iPad Pro with the just, whatever, a couple

01:13:44 ◼   ► of days ago updated MacBook.

01:13:46 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:47 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:52 ◼   ► They're very much seem to be in the same spectrum to me.

01:13:54 ◼   ► without question. I mean, it's, you know, and it's which one you prefer, but it's in

01:13:58 ◼   ► a, in a, in a divisional. And I, you know, I know enough about Apple in time, you know,

01:14:04 ◼   ► and I have enough friends who work there and you do too, that I'm not arguing that Apple

01:14:08 ◼   ► is a company without internal politics and without grumbling between people who work

01:14:13 ◼   ► on this and people who work on that. Or people who, even if what they're working on isn't,

01:14:20 ◼   ► isn't even in conflict with each other. But a lot of times the most astute critics of

01:14:24 ◼   ► things within Apple that are subpar are other people at Apple who work on

01:14:28 ◼   ► something else who the whole point the whole reason they work at Apple and have

01:14:32 ◼   ► a career at Apple is they tend to be very talented people with very high

01:14:35 ◼   ► standards for how stuff works that they get the Apple way I'd even remove the

01:14:40 ◼   ► the provision that they work on something else yeah I honestly thank

01:14:45 ◼   ► people that work at Apple or their own worst critics that's a that's a

01:14:48 ◼   ► fantastic point that is which is true honestly kind of what makes them right

01:14:52 ◼   ► a great company. That's kind of the key.

01:14:55 ◼   ► Right. And that sometimes when you talk to people at Apple, the people who I think are

01:14:58 ◼   ► the best and the people who are like, "Oh, of course you're successful at Apple," are

01:15:02 ◼   ► the people who—you're exactly right. They are the ones who know all the things that

01:15:06 ◼   ► suck about the thing that they work on. And you say like, "Hey, the new body color is

01:15:10 ◼   ► really great." And they'll be like, "Thanks, but I mean, come on." And then they know

01:15:13 ◼   ► everything that's wrong with it. And it's like, "Oh, yeah, of course you work at Apple."

01:15:16 ◼   ► And the people who want to brag about the stuff that they work on, you're like, "You're

01:15:19 ◼   ► not gonna last long yeah you know I mean we're talking you know and you and I I

01:15:26 ◼   ► think we were probably there together but talking to people who worked on

01:15:28 ◼   ► early iPhones and telling them how awesome the touch interaction is and

01:15:32 ◼   ► then they're like oh my god I can get it to go look if I do this and this it's

01:15:35 ◼   ► way below 60 frames per second like they knew all the paths to get to to do

01:15:40 ◼   ► something that would make scrolling or whatever drop beneath 60 frames per

01:15:44 ◼   ► second and they're like that's this dog shit you know you just built them well

01:15:48 ◼   ► they're always by the time it ships they're on to the next thing right

01:15:51 ◼   ► exactly but that's exactly why they keep getting better year over year is that

01:15:54 ◼   ► they're disgusted by the it's it's just as a I don't know as a broader metaphor

01:16:01 ◼   ► do you cook ever yeah sometimes I cook a few things okay so you know when you

01:16:06 ◼   ► cook and then you like, okay, whatever that burger

01:16:10 ◼   ► didn't turn out as well.

01:16:11 ◼   ► Okay.

01:16:12 ◼   ► Sorry.

01:16:13 ◼   ► But whatever, when you cook something and then

01:16:15 ◼   ► you're, you're eating it and you're always, for

01:16:19 ◼   ► me at least, I'm the harshest critic.

01:16:21 ◼   ► I'm like, ah, it didn't work out so well.

01:16:22 ◼   ► Oh, I could have left this a little bit more.

01:16:24 ◼   ► These could be a little bit more tender.

01:16:26 ◼   ► And everybody else is like, would you shut up

01:16:28 ◼   ► and stop being a dick?

01:16:28 ◼   ► Because I'm trying to enjoy the, you know, the

01:16:31 ◼   ► meal and I'm always like, yeah, maybe next time

01:16:35 ◼   ► I'll do this and that's just because that's the way of my words and I think at Apple with software or hardware

01:16:41 ◼   ► I think that's what you're thinking. It's like kid that came out of the oven pretty good

01:16:45 ◼   ► I'm happy

01:16:48 ◼   ► Glad that shipped now

01:16:50 ◼   ► You know, how do I improve on that? That's absolutely I mean Amy does most of the cooking here and that's absolutely how she is

01:16:57 ◼   ► She's way way. She's her own heart's critic

01:17:00 ◼   ► No

01:17:00 ◼   ► And it's it just shows you if you're a good person a good worker who's focused on improving the product

01:17:05 ◼   ► That's the way your mindset has to be and if you're a sort of self-centered person who's more worried about your own career or just just

01:17:13 ◼   ► the way other people perceive you because you you're you're

01:17:17 ◼   ► You know

01:17:18 ◼   ► You have like an inferiority complex or something like that that then you're gonna you're gonna want to

01:17:24 ◼   ► Make people think that whatever you've done is awesome and perfect and you know and laugh at the competition and stuff like that

01:17:33 ◼   ► You can still laugh at the company. Well, yeah, sometimes they suck but you know what I'm you know what I'm I totally know

01:17:38 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, it's like this

01:17:40 ◼   ► There's a difference between laughing at them and discounting them

01:17:43 ◼   ► Yeah, you still I still sometimes meet people at Apple who and I'm exaggerating but in some degree

01:17:49 ◼   ► Seem to buy into the we're Apple. Whatever we do is going to be the best, you know sort of

01:17:55 ◼   ► Thinking that the exceptionalism of Apple is just that's just the rules of the game are whatever Apple makes is excellent

01:18:02 ◼   ► Just because it's Apple. No, that's not by fear. That's played heard and I'm

01:18:06 ◼   ► Exaggerating that you know putting it in words like that

01:18:10 ◼   ► but there's a certain mindset that you buy into that even a little bit and it's

01:18:14 ◼   ► To me, it's a very dangerous way of thinking and it's a natural trap to fall into but the best people

01:18:19 ◼   ► Don't have that mindset

01:18:26 ◼   ► Let me interrupt the show breaking news to do to do to do to do the thing

01:18:30 ◼   ► I was talking about the Ethernet old school not Ethernet except before Ethernet local talk

01:18:36 ◼   ► But it did work over Ethernet ether talk to

01:18:38 ◼   ► Ether talk was like local talk over Ethernet, but that was expensive. We couldn't do that in the dorm

01:18:44 ◼   ► Anyway, the name of the app was broadcast

01:18:46 ◼   ► It was awesome it was awesome

01:18:51 ◼   ► Just put four words in a hat and guess that one

01:18:56 ◼   ► - Broadcast, oh my god. - That's a good name.

01:18:57 ◼   ► That's a great name.

01:18:59 ◼   ► - I will see, I will do my best to find a link

01:19:01 ◼   ► for the show notes that shows it.

01:19:04 ◼   ► - So, what do you think about this service restructuring?

01:19:11 ◼   ► - Well, I can kind of see it.

01:19:13 ◼   ► - So in a follow-up piece that is,

01:19:15 ◼   ► I don't think it's public.

01:19:18 ◼   ► - No, it was on his subscriber-only newsletter,

01:19:23 ◼   ► which we should-- - Maybe you should ask him

01:19:24 ◼   ► to just make that public.

01:19:26 ◼   ► Given all the time--

01:19:26 ◼   ► - He's done it a few times, he really has.

01:19:28 ◼   ► I've asked him and he's been like, "Yeah, whatever."

01:19:30 ◼   ► - And now it's like a week old.

01:19:31 ◼   ► I'll see what I can do.

01:19:32 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:19:33 ◼   ► He clarifies some of his points.

01:19:37 ◼   ► He gets a lot more detail into his thinking.

01:19:42 ◼   ► And also acknowledges some of the,

01:19:48 ◼   ► some trepidation, I should say,

01:19:53 ◼   ► about switching services into its own division,

01:19:58 ◼   ► but does bring out the point that Apple Retail

01:20:02 ◼   ► was run as its own division for a long time.

01:20:06 ◼   ► - Right.

01:20:07 ◼   ► - Because running a retail division

01:20:09 ◼   ► is fundamentally different than running

01:20:12 ◼   ► hardware or software organization.

01:20:15 ◼   ► Is that not true for services too?

01:20:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, I almost think that the online services

01:20:22 ◼   ► are very closely analogous to these stores,

01:20:25 ◼   ► where the services are just glue

01:20:29 ◼   ► that is there to make the devices better.

01:20:33 ◼   ► The devices are still the fundamental business

01:20:36 ◼   ► of the company, and the services are just a,

01:20:39 ◼   ► the stores are just a way to get more of the devices sold,

01:20:43 ◼   ► and the services are just a way

01:20:45 ◼   ► to make the devices better once you own them.

01:20:48 ◼   ► It's like what the stores are

01:20:49 ◼   ► before you have the new Apple device in your hand,

01:20:52 ◼   ► the services are to what you do with it

01:20:55 ◼   ► after you've opened it and started using it.

01:20:57 ◼   ► - Well, okay, so here's where I,

01:21:02 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm even playing devil's advocate,

01:21:05 ◼   ► but I'm gonna come at this from a different aspect.

01:21:09 ◼   ► The stores, I mean, okay, saying the stores

01:21:16 ◼   ► were just a way to push Mac products, okay.

01:21:19 ◼   ► Fine. But are the services just a way to push the devices?

01:21:24 ◼   ► Or are they a thing unto themselves? Which is what Apple has kind of been saying.

01:21:30 ◼   ► But I think though that the... all of it is in further serving the Apple brand as a whole. Right?

01:21:39 ◼   ► Because that's why the stores are nice. Right?

01:21:42 ◼   ► the nicest stores, some of the nicest stores I've ever seen that sell any products anywhere,

01:21:47 ◼   ► and that that they're famously... Don't go full Trump on this, but...

01:21:51 ◼   ► They are! They are. I'm just joking.

01:21:54 ◼   ► And they're very anti-Trumpian in their design. Yes.

01:21:57 ◼   ► They're not ornate. They're the opposite.

01:22:00 ◼   ► They are, you know, architecturally very minimalist.

01:22:03 ◼   ► You know, but that famously, you know, that the earlier stores,

01:22:10 ◼   ► I don't think they use the same material anymore, but they got a special kind of limestone from Italy that Steve Jobs had seen while

01:22:16 ◼   ► traveling in Europe and

01:22:18 ◼   ► All sorts of crazy stuff that they do to make every detail right and it's not like hey

01:22:22 ◼   ► Let's there's no sense of cheaping out in the stores

01:22:25 ◼   ► And I think that the services should be the same way where it's not like well

01:22:28 ◼   ► This is just an afterthought to help that I think they should they should be thought of as these things that are first-class

01:22:33 ◼   ► Parts of the Apple brand and the Apple, you know customer experience

01:22:40 ◼   ► Okay, so what are the surfaces? Can you name them right then?

01:22:43 ◼   ► That sounded like I'm challenging you. I know. I'm honestly

01:22:49 ◼   ► I'm like, okay, what are they?

01:22:52 ◼   ► Well, the one area one area where I disagree with Ben and we do it on the podcast occasionally is

01:22:57 ◼   ► He has a lower opinion of Apple's online services than I do

01:23:01 ◼   ► I actually think Apple's online services are a lot better than they get credit for and I think in many cases

01:23:08 ◼   ► Many cases suffer from just the notion, the basic notion that people believe Apple makes great devices and crummy services.

01:23:17 ◼   ► And by starting with that framework in their mind, they're a lot more likely to focus on the negative aspects of Apple services.

01:23:25 ◼   ► And then secondly, some of them suffer from a bad first impression.

01:23:30 ◼   ► And Maps is a great example of that, where a lot of people, some people, and real world usage, Apple Maps is off the charts.

01:23:37 ◼   ► off the charts. It's way by far and away the most popular map service for iPhone

01:23:43 ◼   ► and iOS users. And part of that is just by nature of being pre-installed, but

01:23:49 ◼   ► secondarily it's gotten a lot better. And am I arguing that is it is as good as

01:23:54 ◼   ► Google Maps? No, but I don't I don't use Google Maps anymore just because I never

01:24:01 ◼   ► I never you know that that whole like I'll keep the app installed because if

01:24:05 ◼   ► If Apple Maps lets me down, I'll use Google Maps.

01:24:08 ◼   ► That hasn't happened to me in forever, at least since the transit came to New York and Apple Maps.

01:24:13 ◼   ► And I think, inarguably, anybody who looked at Apple Maps,

01:24:17 ◼   ► just the general state of how much is mapped and how much detail, it's much improved.

01:24:22 ◼   ► So I'm not as down on services overall. I mean, Maps is just one example.

01:24:27 ◼   ► But anything like that. Maps, iMessage, iCloud.

01:24:32 ◼   ► - Well, wait, so let's take iMessage as a service.

01:24:37 ◼   ► The value proposition of iMessage

01:24:43 ◼   ► is that it's encrypted end-to-end.

01:24:45 ◼   ► - And it works across all your devices.

01:24:49 ◼   ► I mean, that's a huge value. - All your iOS devices.

01:24:51 ◼   ► - Oh, and your Mac.

01:24:52 ◼   ► - Okay, all your Apple devices.

01:24:55 ◼   ► How do you ensure that that is true?

01:24:58 ◼   ► Like, how do you put that into a web browser?

01:25:01 ◼   ► I don't think they should.

01:25:03 ◼   ► I wouldn't.

01:25:04 ◼   ► - Okay, so that limits the value of the service

01:25:06 ◼   ► to only Apple devices.

01:25:07 ◼   ► - Right.

01:25:08 ◼   ► - That's what I'm saying.

01:25:08 ◼   ► - I see.

01:25:09 ◼   ► - Like how do you break out services

01:25:11 ◼   ► apart from the devices that they support?

01:25:13 ◼   ► - Right, I see what you mean.

01:25:14 ◼   ► You're saying--

01:25:15 ◼   ► - You know, like how do you make a division

01:25:16 ◼   ► that is all about, so Microsoft did it

01:25:18 ◼   ► and you were on board for it with Azure,

01:25:23 ◼   ► where they could just be like, you know what,

01:25:26 ◼   ► screw Windows and Office,

01:25:27 ◼   ► we're just gonna make an awesome service.

01:25:29 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:25:31 ◼   ► than what Apple can do with the services that they currently run because they seem

01:25:38 ◼   ► quite integrated with the devices or at least the notion that they have a trusted endpoint.

01:25:47 ◼   ► And it kind of conflicts if you're going to start saying, "Hey," and you report your own profit and loss,

01:25:53 ◼   ► and you're not allowed to expand to Windows or Android or the web.

01:25:59 ◼   ► aren't you cutting your...

01:26:03 ◼   ► Well, that becomes a strategy tax.

01:26:05 ◼   ► You're cutting them off at the knees. You're saying, "We're going to count. We want you to be as profitable as you can,

01:26:09 ◼   ► but we're setting rules that will prevent you from being as profitable as you could be,

01:26:13 ◼   ► just as an independent entity." Because we think it serves the company's

01:26:17 ◼   ► interests overall.

01:26:19 ◼   ► Right. And I don't think they faced that

01:26:23 ◼   ► with retail. Because it couldn't.

01:26:27 ◼   ► couldn't really conflict with their...

01:26:30 ◼   ► Yeah, there weren't any rules, there weren't any strategy tax type rules imposed upon the

01:26:36 ◼   ► Apple Store that held them back.

01:26:39 ◼   ► For example, I'm sure that if Ron Johnson back in the day had said to Steve Jobs, "Hey,

01:26:46 ◼   ► some of these people are coming in and they want to buy Windows laptops too.

01:26:50 ◼   ► Can we sell some Dell Windows, Dell laptops on a table across from the PowerBooks?"

01:26:55 ◼   ► Jobs would have said, "You're fired."

01:26:57 ◼   ► But he wouldn't have done that, though.

01:26:59 ◼   ► That actually wouldn't have actually helped the Apple stores make more money.

01:27:04 ◼   ► In theory, you could see how turning it into more of a Best Buy, where they sell anything and everything,

01:27:10 ◼   ► defeats the whole purpose, which was to focus that by putting all the Apple stuff together and showing that it was different,

01:27:17 ◼   ► actually made it more likely that they would sell them.

01:27:19 ◼   ► But they did sell accessories that were not Apple.

01:27:22 ◼   ► Some of them even competed with Apple stuff, like headphones.

01:27:26 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. They still do.

01:27:30 ◼   ► Yeah, they still do. They bought Beats, which is the biggest one.

01:27:35 ◼   ► But they don't impose a rule on them that you can only sell Apple stuff like headphones.

01:27:40 ◼   ► You can't sell a book that... What was the book that Jobs got yanked?

01:27:45 ◼   ► Oh, that was one a long time ago. I forget which one.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Yeah. That was funny.

01:27:50 ◼   ► [laughs]

01:27:55 ◼   ► I honestly admire the capriciousness of that kind of stuff.

01:28:01 ◼   ► Did they use to sell books? Is that...?

01:28:04 ◼   ► I don't know. But, I mean, you remember the story. I'm sure you wrote about it.

01:28:08 ◼   ► Right. I do remember. I mean, it wasn't even that long ago, but I remember when they used to sell tons and tons of box software.

01:28:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah

01:28:19 ◼   ► Well some of her friends like Omni and you know Shipley like delicious master had some stuff. Oh, yeah

01:28:26 ◼   ► We're definitely know people who I think BP edit was still on in boxes at the time. Oh, yeah. Yeah

01:28:31 ◼   ► I'm Karen fact, I know that BB at it at some point was still in a box and when it was in a box

01:28:37 ◼   ► It was in the Apple stores

01:28:38 ◼   ► It's crazy. That's box software is a heard. I

01:28:43 ◼   ► I mean people hit the App Store. Wow.

01:28:45 ◼   ► The 30% you lose on the App Store is nothing compared to what you lost in box software.

01:28:52 ◼   ► I mean we could do a whole show about it, but it's... and you know it from the games too.

01:28:56 ◼   ► I mean it was exactly the same, probably even worse, because there was more money involved.

01:29:02 ◼   ► But it... I mean you're literally buying spots to be like,

01:29:07 ◼   ► "How much money is it gonna cost us to have it at foot level?"

01:29:11 ◼   ► Part of the reason that like not even eye level like foot level. It's a protection racket. It was yeah, it was like, okay

01:29:18 ◼   ► We'll take it but we're only we're gonna put it on the bottom shelf, which was like ankle level

01:29:22 ◼   ► well, you gotta talk them into taking it right like dinners and like

01:29:26 ◼   ► Like just flirty girls like the whole day was

01:29:32 ◼   ► It's a nightmare. It's a night like talking to sales dudes. It's like not cool

01:29:40 ◼   ► So I'm glad all of that aspect is gone. But at the same time, it's still not great in terms of actually getting the way the app stores are working.

01:29:50 ◼   ► I don't want my box at the ankle level well, then you have to pay.

01:29:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:58 ◼   ► And it was exactly why apps were so expensive.

01:30:01 ◼   ► It's full on, not a joke.

01:30:02 ◼   ► It had to be expensive.

01:30:03 ◼   ► no way to sell like even a relatively small app that you knew would appeal to

01:30:08 ◼   ► like consumers and that you'd want to be like a consumer friendly price there was

01:30:11 ◼   ► no way to like price it accordingly because so much money came off the top

01:30:15 ◼   ► that you had to charge like $75 at just as a starting point if not more I don't

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01:32:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. Back to whether or not I agree with Ben. I don't know. It makes a good case.

01:32:38 ◼   ► Maybe the answer is sort of a half and half, and I don't know. Maybe that's stupid.

01:32:43 ◼   ► Maybe I'm trying to have it both ways. But maybe I would say not so much the profit and loss aspect of it.

01:32:51 ◼   ► And again, iMessage is another example.

01:32:53 ◼   ► How are they supposed to make money money on iMessage?

01:32:55 ◼   ► There's no money.

01:32:56 ◼   ► - Right. - You know.

01:32:57 ◼   ► But if compared to these other chat services

01:33:00 ◼   ► like WhatsApp and WeChat and stuff like that,

01:33:04 ◼   ► I think if you broke iMessage,

01:33:05 ◼   ► I mean, they can't strategically,

01:33:07 ◼   ► there is no way to break it out,

01:33:08 ◼   ► but just in terms of daily active users,

01:33:10 ◼   ► which is like this measurement term

01:33:12 ◼   ► that investors love to hear, at least at the moment,

01:33:15 ◼   ► iMessage is worth billions.

01:33:17 ◼   ► But there's no real way that they have a plan to make money.

01:33:20 ◼   ► They're not gonna start shooting ads through iMessage.

01:33:23 ◼   ► - I think, if anything, iMessage is one of the most obvious

01:33:28 ◼   ► sort of counterarguments to breaking services out

01:33:37 ◼   ► from the rest of the company.

01:33:40 ◼   ► In that getting that blue balloon is awesome.

01:33:46 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:33:48 ◼   ► And iMessage being part of the iPhone experience is huge.

01:33:53 ◼   ► And so in his first piece, Ben argues that people buy iPhones for the software and hardware.

01:34:02 ◼   ► And I agree.

01:34:03 ◼   ► But iMessage is a big thing for me.

01:34:06 ◼   ► It really is.

01:34:07 ◼   ► I remember texting you back in the day, and it would cost us 75 cents a text.

01:34:13 ◼   ► Right, because we were crossing the international border.

01:34:15 ◼   ► We were crossing the international border talking about Mad Men or whatever.

01:34:20 ◼   ► And that racked up pretty quick.

01:34:25 ◼   ► And I like you, but I don't like you that much.

01:34:28 ◼   ► That's a dollar.

01:34:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:32 ◼   ► But yeah, no, iMessage fixed that.

01:34:34 ◼   ► So that's great.

01:34:37 ◼   ► And yeah, sure, WhatsApp could and a bunch of other stuff.

01:34:38 ◼   ► But I think iMessage is one of those things that ties closely to iOS or Apple devices.

01:34:41 ◼   ► that ties closely to iOS or Apple devices that are used for better integration of services

01:34:52 ◼   ► with Apple products.

01:34:54 ◼   ► The whole thing about preferring blue bubbles to green bubbles, even if you take cost aside,

01:34:58 ◼   ► even if it's US to US and so you know that it's out of your free bucket, is obviously

01:35:05 ◼   ► subjective it bothers some people because it's sort of a if not classism

01:35:11 ◼   ► it is some sort of a tribalism yeah tribal I was about to say tribe

01:35:18 ◼   ► mentality so same thing tribalism which it just is innately offensive or maybe

01:35:25 ◼   ► offensive is too strong a word but people object to it and for good reason

01:35:28 ◼   ► right that human beings have this natural instinct to be tribal and it's

01:35:33 ◼   ► It's that sort of thinking that leads, if you take it to the extreme, to intolerance,

01:35:39 ◼   ► if not outright, racism, bigotry of what you want, what have you.

01:35:45 ◼   ► That you really have to be conscious of it all the way up to the top level and that therefore

01:35:48 ◼   ► it's just unsavory.

01:35:49 ◼   ► And I get that.

01:35:50 ◼   ► I really do.

01:35:51 ◼   ► I joke about the blue bubbles and green bubbles sometimes.

01:35:53 ◼   ► But I get it when there's people who really push back on that.

01:35:58 ◼   ► I do get it.

01:35:59 ◼   ► I honestly don't think that was an intentional design decision in order to ostracize anybody.

01:36:06 ◼   ► No, I don't think so either.

01:36:07 ◼   ► I think it was like, "Okay, these ones are costing money and these ones aren't."

01:36:09 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think it was worth knowing, you know, who had them.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:14 ◼   ► But there's an interesting objective version, you know, not subjective but objective advantage

01:36:21 ◼   ► to it, at least one, which is that you know that the emoji you send are going to look

01:36:30 ◼   ► the same.

01:36:31 ◼   ► I just saw an article this week.

01:36:32 ◼   ► I didn't link to it.

01:36:33 ◼   ► I don't know why I didn't link to it from "Daring Fireball," but there was an article

01:36:35 ◼   ► that somebody did a study that showed that people interpret emoji from different platforms

01:36:42 ◼   ► differently and that certain code points like, you know, it's like face with, you know, grinning

01:36:47 ◼   ► teeth and it has a different emotional effect based on the iOS version of it compared to

01:36:54 ◼   ► the Android or Twitter.

01:36:56 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:57 ◼   ► And just subtle cues and it just…

01:36:59 ◼   ► Because each render that…

01:37:01 ◼   ► I don't know if everybody knows, but what you see on your screen is not what somebody

01:37:06 ◼   ► else sees on their screen.

01:37:08 ◼   ► And a face with grinning teeth on your screen may look…

01:37:13 ◼   ► I don't know this, but let's say with two buck teeth on the other screen.

01:37:20 ◼   ► So it looks like you're just having a wide smile on your screen,

01:37:25 ◼   ► but you look like you're sending a hick, a stereotypical hick emoticon

01:37:33 ◼   ► to the other person on the other screen.

01:37:34 ◼   ► And when you're dealing with a particularly dense communication stream

01:37:43 ◼   ► emoticons that becomes problematic right right users and I don't know that maybe

01:37:48 ◼   ► people don't worry about it or I do a little bit because I find I always you

01:37:53 ◼   ► know I mean it's shocker given my career I really it pains me to think that I'm

01:37:59 ◼   ► not commute you know people aren't understanding what I'm trying to

01:38:02 ◼   ► communicate as clearly as possible and have you ever you given into emoticons

01:38:08 ◼   ► in chat? I don't think we do it. No, I've never did. An emoji have saved me from it.

01:38:15 ◼   ► I've never really was a big user of like the ASCII art, you know, smiley faces. I

01:38:20 ◼   ► mean, I'm not gonna say I never sent them, but I've just found them to be too

01:38:26 ◼   ► silly, so I didn't. And yeah, I think I use them with my... I use emoji, though. I use

01:38:31 ◼   ► emoji now. You know, I'm not gonna say like a teenager, but I, you know, use it

01:38:35 ◼   ► quite a bit. I use it more in Slack than anywhere else. Yeah. I use them on Twitter now. Sometimes

01:38:41 ◼   ► I'll, you know, I give a lot of thumbs up on Twitter. Oh yeah? Yeah, because it's, I

01:38:46 ◼   ► find it to be exceptionally efficient, you know. Yeah. That's one, there's one that across

01:38:51 ◼   ► the board nobody's going to misinterpret. It doesn't matter how you draw it, a thumbs

01:38:54 ◼   ► up or a thumbs down. Yeah, it's not like a sailboat. It's like, what do you mean? Yeah,

01:38:59 ◼   ► I find it to be... it's a great addition to our...

01:39:04 ◼   ► you know, it's... obviously I thought it was silly at first, because I'm a curmudgeon,

01:39:09 ◼   ► but once I opened my mind to it, I really thought, "This is great, this is a great improvement."

01:39:12 ◼   ► And so much better than ASCII art, you know, colon...

01:39:16 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah. - colon, caraprance...

01:39:17 ◼   ► - That's garbage. - Yeah.

01:39:19 ◼   ► I mean, if I'm writing something, there's no way I'm going to use that.

01:39:22 ◼   ► If I'm reacting to something, I feel better about it.

01:39:26 ◼   ► I don't know if I've ever spoken about this.

01:39:27 ◼   ► In recent years, I have spoken to, I think you would know, you're a close enough reader

01:39:31 ◼   ► to know that in my writing, I don't really use a lot of exclamation marks.

01:39:34 ◼   ► No, very, yeah.

01:39:36 ◼   ► But in email...

01:39:37 ◼   ► Count them on two hands.

01:39:39 ◼   ► In email, I use them a lot.

01:39:40 ◼   ► I use what I consider to be the friendly exclamation mark.

01:39:46 ◼   ► And here's a perfect example.

01:39:50 ◼   ► And it's a very common example is people often send me typo reports.

01:39:54 ◼   ► I've spelled a word wrong or I've made a little markdown error error in the post where I

01:40:00 ◼   ► Used the wrong parenthesis or I missed miss something and you see you know

01:40:04 ◼   ► Like a raw URL that's clearly supposed to be a hyperlink and people will email me or Twitter me, you know

01:40:10 ◼   ► And say hey, you got a typo. Well a lot of people it's it's you know, I think everybody knows this it consider

01:40:17 ◼   ► Correcting someone's spelling or punctuation on the internet to be a faux pas that you're you the person pointing out

01:40:22 ◼   ► the error are the jerk because you're pointing out you know, I

01:40:27 ◼   ► love it. I would rather have 100 people tell me about a spelling

01:40:31 ◼   ► error, I made on during fireball than to have it go uncorrected,

01:40:33 ◼   ► because everybody thinks it's, you know, either either thinks,

01:40:37 ◼   ► I'm sure someone else told him, or I don't want to be the jerk

01:40:41 ◼   ► to tell to tell john that he has an error. So and I try to I

01:40:45 ◼   ► can't I'd sometimes sometimes and if I post and then go make

01:40:48 ◼   ► coffee or go run an errand and it's the error is up for an

01:40:51 ◼   ► I get a lot of them and it's almost it's like I can't be bothered to thank everybody

01:40:56 ◼   ► But if I fix it right away, I try to thank everybody and I'll often write fixed comma

01:41:02 ◼   ► Thanks and put an exclamation mark after the thanks because to me that reads as very friendly and unambiguously

01:41:09 ◼   ► What do I mean by fixed comma? Thanks exclamation point to me?

01:41:13 ◼   ► It's I don't know. It's just maybe the way I read that exclamation point. It's fixed and a genuine. Thanks

01:41:19 ◼   ► Whereas if I wrote fixed comma thanks period I can see how that would be misinterpreted

01:41:24 ◼   ► Naughty as yes as dry. Yeah, thanks

01:41:28 ◼   ► Yeah, thanks. Thanks. I think I think you only ever send me fixed

01:41:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't give you that. I don't care. You know, you don't give me

01:41:36 ◼   ► But I don't need it I find and I and and years ago, I mean, I don't know how many years ago

01:41:46 ◼   ► I started doing that but it was uncomfortable with it because I'm so uncomfortable with exclamation part points to be to be

01:41:54 ◼   ► To me a false sense of familiarity and friendliness, you know and and to me and for example in marketing materials

01:42:02 ◼   ► Almost every single exclamation mark that's used in any marketing material is terrible

01:42:08 ◼   ► It's a terrible and it means that whoever is is is right doing the copywriting is full of shit

01:42:13 ◼   ► it is is it is exactly why some people think the word marketing is a dirty word

01:42:18 ◼   ► and all good brands you know with good marketing either never use exclamation

01:42:24 ◼   ► marks or almost never and when they do there's some kind of good argument for

01:42:29 ◼   ► it right but find me an ad from BMW with an exclamation mark in it find me an ad

01:42:33 ◼   ► from Apple with an exclamation mark in it it's nearly impossible so anybody out

01:42:37 ◼   ► there and it's a oh and it's also a rookie mistake it's a mistake that

01:42:41 ◼   ► that someone makes doing their own marketing when they're not used to doing marketing,

01:42:45 ◼   ► because they think that they're infusing the material with enthusiasm when what they're

01:42:50 ◼   ► really infusing it with is bullshit.

01:42:52 ◼   ► An error of desperation, I'd say.

01:42:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:58 ◼   ► Because they could say something completely accurate.

01:43:00 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:01 ◼   ► But when you put an exclamation mark, it's like you're trying to really call something

01:43:05 ◼   ► out.

01:43:06 ◼   ► with you in casual communication, especially

01:43:10 ◼   ► these days, you know, it's just a friendly way

01:43:15 ◼   ► of being like, oh, thanks.

01:43:16 ◼   ► Like it, it.

01:43:17 ◼   ► Long story short though.

01:43:19 ◼   ► Think of it, I mean, it's, it's a modifier.

01:43:22 ◼   ► If you're reading an outline out loud, it's

01:43:25 ◼   ► a modifier on the way that that sound should

01:43:30 ◼   ► be, right?

01:43:31 ◼   ► Like it goes up.

01:43:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:43:33 ◼   ► Oh, thanks.

01:43:34 ◼   ► Oh, thanks.

01:43:35 ◼   ► Yes.

01:43:36 ◼   ► Different things.

01:43:37 ◼   ► And as I do more podcasts, or I don't really do a lot of podcasts, plural, but as I podcast more and more,

01:43:43 ◼   ► I've grown lazy in my writing. Not lazy, but I've grown to appreciate the fact that I can use inflection on a podcast in a way

01:43:51 ◼   ► that takes a lot more mental effort and prose to be unambiguous about whether you're being sarcastic or not.

01:44:00 ◼   ► Or something.

01:44:01 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you need to set it up.

01:44:03 ◼   ► Also, I think it doesn't help you...

01:44:07 ◼   ► OK, that's a bad way to start a sentence.

01:44:09 ◼   ► But it doesn't help you that a lot of your—in your linked list, it's like one-word retorts, basically.

01:44:19 ◼   ► So if you then write with brevity, it's read in the same voice as these one-word retorts

01:44:27 ◼   ► that you use in middle-end class.

01:44:29 ◼   ► Hmm. Yeah.

01:44:32 ◼   ► I've used emoji on Daring Fireball a few times too, just like twice though.

01:44:36 ◼   ► Have you? I missed that.

01:44:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:44:39 ◼   ► I haven't seen that. What side is that? I don't know.

01:44:42 ◼   ► I need to look into it. There is some sort of...

01:44:45 ◼   ► Not that I would use it frequently, but part of what makes me unlikely to use it frequently

01:44:50 ◼   ► is the whole issue of...

01:44:52 ◼   ► The rendering.

01:44:53 ◼   ► and not even being able to control the long-term rendering on Apple and iOS devices.

01:44:57 ◼   ► Who knows if and when they're ever going to redraw some of the clips.

01:45:00 ◼   ► Yeah, Happy Face could be at Swastika like next week and you have no control.

01:45:05 ◼   ► Right. I'm trying to see. I just sent you a link to this Verde story on the study that shows people interpreting emoji differently.

01:45:16 ◼   ► It's the one with grinning teeth is a really good one, because it's on all the other platforms,

01:45:20 ◼   ► And I don't know exactly which what the name of the it's grinning face with smiling eyes

01:45:25 ◼   ► Yeah, and apples glyph makes it look like somebody who is oh, man

01:45:31 ◼   ► You see it's not a smile and it's almost like you've just said the wrong thing

01:45:38 ◼   ► Right, right like like the look you would give if you just mentioned somebody's son or like their mother

01:45:46 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, how's your mother?" and then, like, you know, all of a sudden you remember that their mother died recently.

01:45:51 ◼   ► Yes.

01:45:52 ◼   ► Or something like that. The sort of grin you would make in that situation.

01:45:56 ◼   ► Like a seething like, "Sorry about that."

01:45:58 ◼   ► Whereas the Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Google ones are all unambiguously a toothy smile.

01:46:05 ◼   ► You know, it's all happy. They're all happy. Perfect example.

01:46:10 ◼   ► And so there is, there's a value to iMessage in the fact that you, and maybe people don't think about it consciously,

01:46:15 ◼   ► but you know what the other person's going to see.

01:46:20 ◼   ► Well, wait. Doesn't that mean that our message should normalize to what these other guys are doing?

01:46:31 ◼   ► Personally, I prefer the Apple logo. I think it looks better.

01:46:34 ◼   ► And it's useful. It's useful in a way that I don't think that there's another...

01:46:37 ◼   ► It is useful, but does it match the grinning face with smiling eyes?

01:46:43 ◼   ► Well, the other thing is, but even with the other ones, this study assigned, you know,

01:46:49 ◼   ► polled people on whether they think this is a negative connotation or positive connotation

01:46:52 ◼   ► of the glyph, even among the other ones, there's a fairly wide variety.

01:46:56 ◼   ► They're all positive and Apple's is negative.

01:46:58 ◼   ► Oh, they're grouped way closer together, dude.

01:47:01 ◼   ► But there's a difference.

01:47:02 ◼   ► Like, the difference between Microsoft and Google is over a point on a five-point scale.

01:47:06 ◼   ► I agree that there's a definite...

01:47:08 ◼   ► Oh my god, are you... come on, dude.

01:47:10 ◼   ► No, no, no.

01:47:11 ◼   ► There's a four point difference between Microsoft and Apple in the negative direction.

01:47:16 ◼   ► No, no, I'm not trying to argue that on the case of this particular one that Apple is

01:47:20 ◼   ► not an outlier.

01:47:21 ◼   ► Right.

01:47:22 ◼   ► No, I'm not arguing that.

01:47:24 ◼   ► But I'm saying though, even not counting Apple, it's interesting to me that the ones who agree

01:47:31 ◼   ► on the basic sense of it still have a different...

01:47:34 ◼   ► Oh, sure.

01:47:37 ◼   ► And I think for most of the emoji that that's probably the case.

01:47:40 ◼   ► I don't think any, you know, I think most of them, there is no outlier, but that there's still a...

01:47:47 ◼   ► I agree. The other thing is context.

01:47:53 ◼   ► Emoji very seldomly makes sense without any words around them, right?

01:47:59 ◼   ► Or at least context of in a conversation.

01:48:02 ◼   ► So while you could look at like, I don't know what this tested.

01:48:06 ◼   ► It was like, "Okay, what do you think about each one of these emoji?"

01:48:09 ◼   ► You could feel totally different given.

01:48:12 ◼   ► The researchers surveyed online respondents on how they interpreted the emoji's sentiment,

01:48:17 ◼   ► rating it on a scale from negative five, strongly negative, to plus five, strongly positive.

01:48:21 ◼   ► I have, you know what, I'll tell you what, I don't think I've ever used this apple emoji.

01:48:29 ◼   ► Our friend of the show, Paul Kefasis, he likes to use that emoji.

01:48:34 ◼   ► As being...

01:48:37 ◼   ► As a person who is an observer of the uncomfortable aspects of life.

01:48:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:46 ◼   ► Right?

01:48:47 ◼   ► Uncomfortable is what that says.

01:48:49 ◼   ► Right. He likes to document sort of the weird on his one-foot tsunami.

01:48:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:56 ◼   ► In personal correspondence, he will often…

01:48:59 ◼   ► That's one person I know who has sent me that emoji.

01:49:04 ◼   ► but getting faced with smiling eyes is the name of that emoji do you think

01:49:13 ◼   ► Apple has accurately rendered that notion no I think not although so I

01:49:19 ◼   ► well they like the but although uncomfortable I'm totally into yeah I

01:49:24 ◼   ► think the problem with it is that it doesn't what it's not the eyes it's the

01:49:29 ◼   ► grin because to me a grin I mean yeah maybe I'm wrong but to me a grin

01:49:34 ◼   ► implies a smile, that a grin is a subset of a smile, whereas that is absolutely

01:49:39 ◼   ► not a smile. No, that's like a... that's a drawn teeth kind of thing. Yeah, a tooth sock. It's like...

01:49:44 ◼   ► it should be... like, the name of that emoji should be "embarrassed tooth sock."

01:49:49 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. Which I really... I firmly believe is a perfectly valid emoji to

01:49:57 ◼   ► have. Yeah. And that's a great representation of it. Yeah, here's the

01:50:02 ◼   ► of definite dictionary definition of grin it is a smile broadly especially in

01:50:07 ◼   ► an unrestrained manner with the mouth open Dennis appears the example Dennis

01:50:12 ◼   ► appeared grinning used cheerfully as a noun it is a broad smile so yeah

01:50:19 ◼   ► definitely I think I think that the grinning teeth is inaccurately rendered

01:50:25 ◼   ► but now it's too late or is it I don't know because if they change it then all

01:50:30 ◼   ► All sorts of things, all sorts of ways that it's already been used are changed in meaning.

01:50:35 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]

01:50:38 ◼   ► >> Depends who you're talking to, and that's the problem, right?

01:50:40 ◼   ► >> Right.

01:50:41 ◼   ► >> Emoji are words that when I send them to you change meaning.

01:50:46 ◼   ► >> Right.

01:50:47 ◼   ► Boy, this show's really, I love it.

01:50:49 ◼   ► >> This show's like all over the place.

01:50:50 ◼   ► >> I love it, but it's nowhere near.

01:50:52 ◼   ► >> This is nowhere near the list of stuff.

01:50:54 ◼   ► >> We're getting into linguistics, I love it.

01:50:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and that is sort of the... there is an advantage there to the old-school ASCII emoticon artwork, where it's a little bit...

01:51:04 ◼   ► It's a little bit more defined.

01:51:06 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:07 ◼   ► Like, your semicolon might look different than my semicolon, but I still get... I know of stupid Winky when I see it.

01:51:14 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:15 ◼   ► I don't even know how it got here.

01:51:21 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:51:23 ◼   ► So...

01:51:25 ◼   ► Oh, we're talking about iMessage and services and whether they should be broken apart.

01:51:29 ◼   ► And so we get to ask...

01:51:31 ◼   ► I also wonder...

01:51:33 ◼   ► You got that to one specific emoticon.

01:51:35 ◼   ► As I...

01:51:37 ◼   ► As I wonder about the...

01:51:43 ◼   ► That's actually... The one we're talking about... I'm looking at the study now. I should not...

01:51:47 ◼   ► I'll link to this study in the show notes. I promise. I'm copying and pasting it now.

01:51:51 ◼   ► They have examples of the ones with the biggest deltas. The grinning teeth one is

01:51:56 ◼   ► not only as Apple and Outlier as the emoji, that particular the distance from

01:52:01 ◼   ► which that there's no other emoji that they studied that has a spread like that.

01:52:07 ◼   ► It just means something different. Yeah it's actually and I think concentrating

01:52:11 ◼   ► on that one in particular actually you lose the general context of the study

01:52:16 ◼   ► which is that even with the ones where they're generally all compliant with the

01:52:20 ◼   ► description, people have a different interpretation of what they mean, or at least the sentiment

01:52:26 ◼   ► of being positive or negative.

01:52:27 ◼   ► Right, which I think is a super interesting point.

01:52:32 ◼   ► I think diverged – and it's not a knock, but whatever – depict the most illustrative

01:52:38 ◼   ► point.

01:52:40 ◼   ► Because it's easiest to write about.

01:52:41 ◼   ► Well, yeah, we'll look at that.

01:52:44 ◼   ► That's clearly an outlier.

01:52:46 ◼   ► And that makes you want to learn more about it.

01:52:50 ◼   ► So it's really not a knock on them, but it really illustrates that people on different

01:52:55 ◼   ► platforms will see different things.

01:52:58 ◼   ► Ben Thompson, if he's listening, if he does listen to this show, he's probably screaming

01:53:02 ◼   ► at us that we're not talking about stickers.

01:53:06 ◼   ► Ben's a big fan and studier of the chat services, the ones that are cross-platform, like WhatsApp

01:53:11 ◼   ► and WeChat.

01:53:14 ◼   ► things have these things called stickers which are like emoji but they're custom

01:53:18 ◼   ► to the service and it's just sending an image like an emoji and you know maybe

01:53:25 ◼   ► around a holiday they'll come out with like a whole set of them about Christmas

01:53:28 ◼   ► so instead of just like an emoji you've got like Santa Claus on a Christmas tree

01:53:31 ◼   ► you can have a whole set of stickers all about Christmas or whatever or the world

01:53:35 ◼   ► I was so down on that.

01:53:37 ◼   ► But you know what?

01:53:43 ◼   ► I talked to him over Slack, and sometimes I don't even care to actually respond to

01:53:49 ◼   ► him, but I'll do one of those reaction emoji.

01:53:51 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:53:52 ◼   ► And I'm like, "Oh, Ben, you kind of got me on this sticker stuff."

01:54:01 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:54:03 ◼   ► The more I talk about it with you, the more I'm starting to disagree with him.

01:54:07 ◼   ► I wonder...

01:54:08 ◼   ► Disagree with him?

01:54:09 ◼   ► Oh, you should get him on the show, because he's a smart cookie.

01:54:11 ◼   ► He's never done this show, has he?

01:54:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:54:14 ◼   ► What are you talking about?

01:54:16 ◼   ► Is he?

01:54:18 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure he's in this show.

01:54:19 ◼   ► Well, let me look at the archives.

01:54:21 ◼   ► You don't remember talking to Ben?

01:54:26 ◼   ► It's like three times at least, dude.

01:54:31 ◼   ► Alright, ten times.

01:54:35 ◼   ► Ten times? No, maybe it's five.

01:54:39 ◼   ► I just searched for Thompson on the page and it'll show up twice for each one

01:54:43 ◼   ► because I'll mention them in the title and the...

01:54:47 ◼   ► So it's five. You know what, he's never doing it again.

01:54:51 ◼   ► I'll tell you that much right now. I didn't actually forget. He's been on twice since August

01:54:55 ◼   ► of last year. He's probably on more often than I am.

01:54:59 ◼   ► Probably. And four times in the last year.

01:55:02 ◼   ► [laughs]

01:55:04 ◼   ► What about Apple Music? Isn't Apple Music already sort of a standalone...

01:55:10 ◼   ► Oh, man.

01:55:12 ◼   ► And they have to sort of do profit and loss on that. I mean, they know how many subscribers they

01:55:17 ◼   ► are, and they know how much they're paying, you know. Whether they actually count it and

01:55:22 ◼   ► hold it accountable and have goals for it, and you're getting fired if you don't meet this

01:55:28 ◼   ► the way some people would, some companies would in their divisions. Surely they know exactly

01:55:33 ◼   ► how much Apple Music is making and how much it's costing and therefore they know whether it's

01:55:38 ◼   ► profitable or not and they know what the delta is month to month. I mean and we know it because

01:55:43 ◼   ► they leak things like the number of customers, you know, subscribers. It's very, very competitive.

01:55:50 ◼   ► I honestly like... So getting back to the press tax, Ben's basic argument is that whatever gets measured gets fixed.

01:56:00 ◼   ► There's no way they don't know if Apple Music is making or losing money.

01:56:05 ◼   ► And it's not that they say that they don't have profit and loss in the company.

01:56:14 ◼   ► It's that they report one level of profit and loss.

01:56:19 ◼   ► which is a very different thing.

01:56:21 ◼   ► I don't think that means internally that they don't worry about this kind of stuff.

01:56:26 ◼   ► I messaged me...

01:56:29 ◼   ► So they expanded what? iCloud Drive storage.

01:56:33 ◼   ► Yes.

01:56:34 ◼   ► There's no way they did that without considering profit and loss. No way.

01:56:37 ◼   ► Well, of course not, because they charge for that.

01:56:39 ◼   ► Right.

01:56:40 ◼   ► In fact...

01:56:41 ◼   ► Clearly, they've got some numbers.

01:56:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and in fact, I'm telling you, the more I talk about it, the more...

01:56:47 ◼   ► It's a great piece, but I still—the more I talk about it, the more I think I disagree.

01:56:52 ◼   ► That that's—I totally agree that he has—he's identified a problem. I don't think his proposed solution is right.

01:56:59 ◼   ► Because, to me, iCloud drives another example where they don't do profit and loss across, you know, the way other companies do.

01:57:07 ◼   ► But you would never guess that by the way they charge for iCloud storage. Right?

01:57:13 ◼   ► Based on the way that that they charge for iCloud storage you would think the opposite you would think this is a company where somebody

01:57:19 ◼   ► In the iCloud division has a gun to their head that they're supposed to make a lot of money on this

01:57:23 ◼   ► Yeah, because they charge more than anybody

01:57:27 ◼   ► Yeah

01:57:29 ◼   ► For what penny and there's another one to iCloud Drive to me works amazingly. Well, I

01:57:36 ◼   ► Honestly in my experience and I know somebody out there is gonna disagree and think that I'm smoking

01:57:42 ◼   ► Apple dope or something, but I find that it is up to Dropbox quality, which is

01:57:49 ◼   ► invisible that I never if I'm editing, you know apps that I know use that use iCloud Drive like

01:57:56 ◼   ► You know, I have a couple of important numbers spreadsheet

01:57:59 ◼   ► At this point when I save stuff in numbers

01:58:03 ◼   ► I know that it's there and I can go to a different Mac or a different device and it's gonna be there. It's just there

01:58:10 ◼   ► That's not I still use Dropbox because I use it in different ways and Dropbox is more is a lot easier to use as a

01:58:15 ◼   ► sort of junk drawer where you just put anything and everything and have it go everywhere and

01:58:20 ◼   ► iCloud Drive to me still works best in the mindset of

01:58:24 ◼   ► Hey the documents for numbers you go to numbers, you know, it's not really I don't really even though you can put arbitrary files

01:58:32 ◼   ► And they're your iCloud Drive now. I still use Dropbox for that but just in terms of having the sync work just

01:58:38 ◼   ► invisibly instant nearly instantaneously

01:58:40 ◼   ► It's up there

01:58:42 ◼   ► I think they get a bad rap for for problems that they had in the past and people either

01:58:47 ◼   ► aren't giving it a fair look in with open eyes now or

01:58:50 ◼   ► They're just too set in our mindset that apples, you know that anything related to iCloud sucks

01:58:56 ◼   ► But what they charge for it, I think is it's almost crazy compared to what other people charge for storage. I think the storage rates are

01:59:04 ◼   ► extrovertent

01:59:06 ◼   ► The functionality seems to be really pretty solid at this point.

01:59:11 ◼   ► I just can't believe that they couldn't charge a lot less than they should and if anything they should be because you know

01:59:22 ◼   ► It's really only meant to be used on expensive Apple devices that have high profit margins

01:59:27 ◼   ► It seems to me like iCloud Drive storage per gigabyte ought to be less than the competition not more than the competition because like

01:59:34 ◼   ► Dropbox just to name one example all the money they're making is for people

01:59:37 ◼   ► paying for Dropbox storage they don't sell $800 cell phones that with 40%

01:59:42 ◼   ► profit margins that they can get other revenue from all they have is the

01:59:46 ◼   ► storage whereas this is just one little thing so there's an example where I

01:59:50 ◼   ► don't know I don't know how to do it they can make more money I guess I don't

01:59:56 ◼   ► disagree with you but I mean you know if they've run the scenarios and they make

02:00:03 ◼   ► Apple can make more money, you say.

02:00:04 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

02:00:05 ◼   ► If Apple can make more money and they run the projected scenarios.

02:00:09 ◼   ► Right.

02:00:10 ◼   ► And Molson and I often run it.

02:00:11 ◼   ► For some reason Molson, in particular, and I, when he's on the show, always run into

02:00:14 ◼   ► this where we end up talking ourselves into spending Tim Cook's money.

02:00:17 ◼   ► Really?

02:00:18 ◼   ► And I totally realize…

02:00:19 ◼   ► Which is an easy and awesome thing to do because it's fun.

02:00:23 ◼   ► Right.

02:00:24 ◼   ► But I totally realize that the way you become the world's most profitable company is that

02:00:29 ◼   ► you know, cut your losses and you, you know, you sweat the details.

02:00:34 ◼   ► You make money.

02:00:35 ◼   ► You don't piss money away here and there and that all sorts of ideas that we have involve

02:00:38 ◼   ► Apple pissing a little extra money away here and there and then, you know, piss a little

02:00:43 ◼   ► away here and there and then all of a sudden you're not the world's most profitable company.

02:00:46 ◼   ► Well because ultimately, so the argument is that they should make iCloud storage cheaper

02:00:55 ◼   ► Despite the fact that we don't know how many,

02:00:57 ◼   ► like what the percentages of iOS device owners

02:01:02 ◼   ► or Apple device owners are that subscribe to it,

02:01:06 ◼   ► they should make it cheaper in order to make them happier.

02:01:10 ◼   ► But we've already got a CUSTSAT number of like 98.

02:01:16 ◼   ► Like maybe when that drops to like 89,

02:01:22 ◼   ► maybe that's when you're like, okay,

02:01:24 ◼   ► I almost think that Apple should know better than to trust the customer set because people... I do too

02:01:29 ◼   ► And I actually think they do. People maybe don't have high enough expectations yet

02:01:34 ◼   ► They don't expect to have infinite storage online

02:01:37 ◼   ► And so therefore they don't judge Apple by that and therefore they say I'm completely satisfied with my iPhone

02:01:42 ◼   ► Even though they only have five gigabytes of storage in their iCloud account

02:01:45 ◼   ► Whereas I think Apple knows better than that and it even it just comes back to my hour ago story about being

02:01:51 ◼   ► appalled when the guys just threw a handful of card catalog things up in the air like data loss data loss I

02:01:56 ◼   ► Just breaks my heart knowing that there are people who don't can't put their entire photo library in their iCloud account because there

02:02:04 ◼   ► They only take the free iCloud storage. Like I really really think that

02:02:08 ◼   ► It I don't want to quite say there's a moral obligation

02:02:12 ◼   ► But on some spectrum it is on some spectrum being in favor of avoiding data loss at all costs is a moral issue

02:02:18 ◼   ► and and I really wish that more and more people would be able to you know

02:02:23 ◼   ► reasonably serve their and save their entire photo and video library to their

02:02:27 ◼   ► iCloud account because otherwise if they lose or break their phone they might

02:02:31 ◼   ► lose lose photos and videos permanently I don't disagree with you and about that

02:02:38 ◼   ► at all. What that costs, I don't know. But, I mean, there's always local backups.

02:02:49 ◼   ► You have a people content.

02:02:51 ◼   ► I know, I know. But not to get all capitalist on it, because I'm Canadian, so we should probably just nationalize every company.

02:03:04 ◼   ► But doesn't the fact that they can make money on it, you know, like if people need this kind of protection, it's effectively insurance, right?

02:03:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:03:25 ◼   ► Can Apple not be in the insurance of your business?

02:03:29 ◼   ► business I I think the best thing that Ben wrote in that piece was that the

02:03:34 ◼   ► Draper quote was his name Draper or am I thinking of madman the guy that the management guy you said you

02:03:40 ◼   ► You what what you measure it is what gets improved?

02:03:43 ◼   ► That's the key

02:03:47 ◼   ► You might as well have said it

02:03:50 ◼   ► That's the don't you if you would never say that he would say the exact opposite I

02:03:59 ◼   ► But I think that what Apple needs is better and more rigid measurements of their services.

02:04:07 ◼   ► They should, and higher standards for them.

02:04:10 ◼   ► I see fewer and fewer times that I see any kind of out of sync iMessages.

02:04:15 ◼   ► I use iMessage all the time. I use it across a bunch of devices.

02:04:19 ◼   ► And in my use, it is excellent. And in getting better, there's another one of those things where I just feel like,

02:04:25 ◼   ► Don't judge it by how it used to be, but it's really gotten good at when I'm at my Mac.

02:04:30 ◼   ► The iMessage aren't going off on my other devices because it sees that I'm active on my Mac.

02:04:36 ◼   ► And texts that I've sent from my phone all day, if they're on iMessage, when I get to my Mac,

02:04:41 ◼   ► they're waiting for me if I want to get back to it.

02:04:44 ◼   ► But it's still not perfect. I just had an interaction with someone the other day, and I don't know why.

02:04:50 ◼   ► know why but my text to this guy only go to my phone or from him they only go to

02:04:57 ◼   ► my phone at least and they don't go to my my Mac and I don't know why they're

02:05:01 ◼   ► blue and it seems like both devices are set up with the same phone number and

02:05:07 ◼   ► the same Apple ID and whether he's sending it to my phone number or my

02:05:11 ◼   ► Apple ID email address I don't know but everybody else's are synced between so

02:05:17 ◼   ► So just, you know, 99 instead of 99.9% of messages syncing properly between devices,

02:05:25 ◼   ► you know, maybe make it 99.99, you know, but measure it, you know, there's there ought

02:05:29 ◼   ► to be a good I do always opt into the send Apple diagnostic stuff.

02:05:34 ◼   ► So they, they're, hopefully they're measuring and they can they see that there's a glitch,

02:05:39 ◼   ► you know.

02:05:41 ◼   ► But that to me is the bottom line, not that it should be about dollars and cents and profit

02:05:45 ◼   ► loss, but that they should pick better metrics and improve these services to those levels.

02:05:49 ◼   ► What do you perceive as the services that Apple has that need the most work?

02:05:56 ◼   ► I cloud sync has actually got better.

02:06:05 ◼   ► Do you think it's good enough?

02:06:07 ◼   ► As somebody who ships Mac software that saves to the cloud.

02:06:12 ◼   ► This is your app Napkin.

02:06:14 ◼   ► Yes, Napkin. We had some early reports where they were like, the files would clobber themselves when they were synced over the net. That was bad. But things have worked out better.

02:06:28 ◼   ► Notes is actually a really great app. And I'm sorry to say that because I know you...

02:06:36 ◼   ► No, I don't disagree at all. I mean, that's, you know...

02:06:40 ◼   ► Well, you know, I don't want to tell you on your show that...

02:06:44 ◼   ► Yeah, the new version of Notes is great.

02:06:46 ◼   ► The version of Notes that debuted last fall with iOS 9 and the new version of Mac OS, El Capitan,

02:06:54 ◼   ► because the old version of Notes only synced through IMAP and it was a terrible hack

02:07:00 ◼   ► and acted like a terrible hack and was unreliable and the new one uses CloudKit, I think, right?

02:07:06 ◼   ► I'm 99% sure that it's dogfooding CloudKit.

02:07:10 ◼   ► which is not files in a file system like iCloud Drive.

02:07:14 ◼   ► It is... I'm not quite sure what the word is, but it's...

02:07:19 ◼   ► Asynchronous abstracted object permanence, I guess?

02:07:23 ◼   ► Yes, that's a good way to say it.

02:07:25 ◼   ► Well, it's a bunch of words. It's gobbledygook, really, but I mean, you know.

02:07:30 ◼   ► But it's an API that developers seem to like, and it seems to work the way it's supposed to,

02:07:36 ◼   ► which is, you know, exactly what a service should be.

02:07:40 ◼   ► change your pace. Right. That it's, you know, it is it's a good API or a good

02:07:45 ◼   ► enough API and it's reliable. So and it works at in the within the timeframe

02:07:50 ◼   ► that you would hope that it would work where the note that you just pecked out

02:07:55 ◼   ► and paste it on your Mac you pick up your phone and go and it's it's there on

02:07:59 ◼   ► your phone. So it's you know it's a good example. iTunes and Apple music are...

02:08:06 ◼   ► They're a mess. I mean, I don't even understand iTunes anymore. You had Eddie

02:08:18 ◼   ► on the show recently and he was like, "Well, when you go to the Music tab, all

02:08:23 ◼   ► you see is the music." And it's like, that's not the problem.

02:08:26 ◼   ► Right. If I play an album that I own through Apple Music, I can click on the

02:08:32 ◼   ► album art and click on a song on it and it'll start playing and then if I try to

02:08:38 ◼   ► navigate to find like to play what's next and I click on an album that

02:08:42 ◼   ► happens to have been included through my Apple music subscription the song will

02:08:47 ◼   ► stop so I can't I can't go and add it to up next I don't whatever reason I don't

02:08:58 ◼   ► know though how many that counts I agree that there are problems there and I

02:09:00 ◼   ► I find Apple Music to be confusing.

02:09:03 ◼   ► I don't understand it and I'm a very technical person.

02:09:06 ◼   ► It triggers the "maybe I'm a dummy" thing that I think makes me a good designer

02:09:12 ◼   ► and a good critic of design because I'm...

02:09:15 ◼   ► Oh, I know I'm a dummy. But I'm also technical.

02:09:18 ◼   ► I'm unable to understand overly complex interfaces and therefore I think I'm good at explaining why.

02:09:26 ◼   ► It just is over the line of, "This doesn't seem to explain itself."

02:09:32 ◼   ► I can start to understand the rules, but they're arbitrary and based on technical limitations rather than, like, interaction limitations.

02:09:40 ◼   ► I don't know that that counts as being bad at services, though. I feel that it's more of a sign of being tolerant of insufficient user interface design.

02:09:50 ◼   ► Well, the client expression of that service is suboptimal.

02:09:57 ◼   ► By and large, I'm actually not that down on Apple services, per se.

02:10:07 ◼   ► But I also don't think I rely on them as much as many other people do.

02:10:17 ◼   ► Like a lot of people do collaborative document sharing over Google or calendar sharing.

02:10:26 ◼   ► I don't have to do that.

02:10:30 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm exposed so much to the negative sides of maybe where Apple is not

02:10:40 ◼   ► quite at the forefront.

02:10:42 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing, too, that plays into this and I often think about, and I don't

02:10:47 ◼   ► know how much of it is a problem or not is that Apple is in a position where

02:10:52 ◼   ► they benefit from the services of others you know so if there's collaborative

02:10:57 ◼   ► aspects to Google Docs that you know Apple's pages or whatever else can't

02:11:05 ◼   ► provide the fact is that you can get the full benefit of that while using an

02:11:09 ◼   ► Apple product because Google Docs has you know iOS apps and and web a web

02:11:16 ◼   ► version that runs in, you know, anywhere. And I think that's true for a lot of

02:11:20 ◼   ► services, you know, it's, you know, that they've got the problem for Apple was

02:11:27 ◼   ► back in the early, to cycle back to two hours ago in the show, the problem was

02:11:31 ◼   ► back in the old days when Apple was so much smaller that the stuff, all this

02:11:35 ◼   ► stuff didn't work on Apple stuff. I mean most famously, the best

02:11:39 ◼   ► example I can think of was that at first Napster was a Windows only thing.

02:11:44 ◼   ► And there's this amazing thing that was a sensation that lit the entire world on fire and

02:11:49 ◼   ► Mac users were left out at first and then it was like we had like third-party clients that just used the Napster API