00:00:02 ◼ ► I am. I have sent you down so many rabbit holes and sent you after so many wild gooses.
00:00:14 ◼ ► You know, I was looking at the—speaking of keyboards, I have the Keychron K2 from a couple
00:00:23 ◼ ► years ago, and apparently there's a new K2, but you would think this is what gets me about these
00:00:28 ◼ ► damn keyboard companies. You would think if the name of your product is the Keychron, that's the
00:00:33 ◼ ► company, the K2, that's a fine name for a keyboard, whatever. But you would think if you update it,
00:00:41 ◼ ► it would become the K3 or the L2 or something. You know, upgrade the letter, upgrade the number,
00:00:51 ◼ ► Because there's also a K3 and a K4, like they're all the different sizes is what they do.
00:01:00 ◼ ► I do, I have the Q1 here. That is what I'm using right now. Mike Hurley made it for me on his
00:01:07 ◼ ► livestreams that he does where he does keyboard stuff. Because I got him into it a little bit,
00:01:15 ◼ ► But he made this for me and sent it to me, so I've got a new keyboard today that's pretty—it's
00:01:21 ◼ ► very weighty. They carved it out of aluminum, and it feels solid. I'm impressed by that.
00:01:26 ◼ ► So I was looking at the Q2, and I thought, "Well, I don't want it because it's not Bluetooth. And
00:01:41 ◼ ► And not through my encouragement. If anything, I would have encouraged him to get into programming
00:01:47 ◼ ► or something actually useful, not something expensive. Yeah, expensive and just uses a lot
00:01:53 ◼ ► of plastic. Right. But spent his own Christmas money to get one and to add to his keyboard
00:02:01 ◼ ► collection. And in addition, also bought a set of different switches. This is how into it he is.
00:02:09 ◼ ► So not just swapping out the keycaps, but swapping out the switches for some kind of—I think it's an
00:02:17 ◼ ► optical switch. I actually should have written it down, but I don't know. Yeah, the Q series from
00:02:21 ◼ ► Keychron, my understanding, talking to Mike especially, is that it's like a commercialized
00:02:28 ◼ ► version of what the hobbyists have been doing. So it's not as fancy as the hobbyist keyboards,
00:02:32 ◼ ► but it's more fancy than the K line. And so their idea is they're using their ability to mass
00:02:44 ◼ ► swapping switches and stuff like that. It's an interesting idea that the economics of the
00:02:49 ◼ ► keyboard market—actually, talking to Mike about how oftentimes you get in these group buys where
00:02:54 ◼ ► you're waiting for your keyboard or your keycaps for like six months or a year or a year and a half,
00:02:58 ◼ ► I think if you're Keychron and you're like, "Well, what if we could make something that's
00:03:01 ◼ ► kind of like that and have it in stock?" Like people could get it right now. And I think
00:03:07 ◼ ► that's their game there. But I do have one now. So yeah, it worked. And the big difference,
00:03:16 ◼ ► the Q2 has an aluminum base or some kind of metal base, and it makes all the difference in the world.
00:03:24 ◼ ► It's like you think like it's all about the switches, but it really is a—it's no wonder
00:03:31 ◼ ► that at one point in the company's history, Apple made absolutely wonderful mechanical keyboards.
00:03:36 ◼ ► And when they get it all together—now, even though they don't make mechanical keyboards
00:03:40 ◼ ► and haven't for decades—when they get their magic keyboards right, they are good keyboards.
00:03:46 ◼ ► It's a holistic whole, you know, the base and the weight and how the—I don't know what you call it,
00:03:53 ◼ ► the thing under—it's where the switches plug in, but if it gives a little, it gives everything a
00:03:58 ◼ ► better feel. And the Q2 is a wonderful-feeling keyboard. It really is. I mean, I think it's like
00:04:04 ◼ ► 160 bucks, so it should, but... Yeah, yeah, they're good. And then you could do stuff to them. That's
00:04:09 ◼ ► the thing. What Mike did is he like taped the back of the board and put in some filler, like
00:04:17 ◼ ► insulation, basically, to do some sound dampening. And then I tried it, and I thought it was a little
00:04:22 ◼ ► weird, and he said, "Well, let's take out some of the—" He walked me through opening it back up,
00:04:26 ◼ ► and we took out some of the insulation, and then I was like, "Oh, this sounds better now." And he's
00:04:29 ◼ ► like, "That's what you want is, you know, you can make all these adjustments to make it more resonant
00:04:34 ◼ ► or less resonant or whatever." So it's a rabbit hole people can go down. I was talking about this
00:04:40 ◼ ► on a walk with my wife the other day. We were walking the dog, and I said, "I care. I feel like
00:04:48 ◼ ► I'm the person who uses it for their job and so is interested. If you're a woodworker, you've got
00:04:55 ◼ ► tools that you care about more than the average person, whatever those tools might be, or think
00:05:01 ◼ ► of any profession. You've got tools that you care about more than the average person because you do
00:05:04 ◼ ► this for your living. But then there's the person who collects those tools, and that is a level that
00:05:09 ◼ ► I'm not interested in going into. So I care way more than the average person does about keyboards,
00:05:15 ◼ ► but I have not fallen down that rabbit hole that Mike fell down, and he's having a good time. So
00:05:20 ◼ ► it's great. It's just it doesn't interest me to get into that level of detail. I just want some
00:05:27 ◼ ► Yeah. You know, there is something there, you know, if you like the way your keyboard feels
00:05:32 ◼ ► and you're supposed to be pressing keys, you know, whatever your job is, writer, programmer,
00:05:50 ◼ ► That's why I have not a lot of patience for people who are like, "Oh, you guys talking about your
00:05:55 ◼ ► fiddly keyboards and all that?" It's like, well, it is literally how I make my living. I mean,
00:05:59 ◼ ► I guess microphones too. I have to worry about that. You and I both now have to worry about
00:06:03 ◼ ► microphones and things, but like keyboard, it's part of our identity and part of our profession,
00:06:13 ◼ ► but like you can totally obsess over it, and if you do that and it's fun for you, then great. But
00:06:25 ◼ ► and it makes a difference. I am more productive. And I know you talk about the Apple extended
00:06:30 ◼ ► keyboards that you've got, and you're going back to an old, old, old keyboard, but the point still
00:06:38 ◼ ► stands, which is it is the tool that you want to use. That's it. The other thing, it is funny,
00:06:44 ◼ ► though, as somebody, I keep saying we're going to move on, but it's funny because there was this
00:06:56 ◼ ► the market, but they were really obscure for a while. Like, it was like... The factory stopped
00:07:02 ◼ ► making, like, in that interregnum, like, Matias was one of the only companies that was really like
00:07:07 ◼ ► marketing mechanical keyboards for a long time, and they had the Alps switches that were like the
00:07:12 ◼ ► classic Mac switches, and they couldn't get them anymore because the factory shut down, and they're
00:07:20 ◼ ► like, "We don't..." And they ended up building their own switches, but there was like a year
00:07:23 ◼ ► where you couldn't buy their keyboards because they were like, "We can't. We can't make them."
00:07:27 ◼ ► And I think on the IBM keyboard front, people were making those buckling spring switches still too,
00:07:32 ◼ ► and like Rich Siegel, who writes BB Edit, that's his baby. That's what he does, is the buckling
00:07:38 ◼ ► spring thing, I believe, and he's a believer in that, and he's always been able to get those.
00:07:42 ◼ ► But you're right, there was this period where it was really thin, and I think it's because
00:07:47 ◼ ► a lot of those factories were just shutting down because nobody wanted those switches anymore,
00:07:51 ◼ ► and now there's been this renaissance where suddenly, "Oh, there is actually a market for fancy
00:08:01 ◼ ► Tom: I remember I had an internship in college, '96 or so, '95, '96, at a Windows software developer
00:08:15 ◼ ► I forget what the official name was, but he had, you know, he was to those IBM buckling spring
00:08:21 ◼ ► keyboards what I am to the extended keyboard too. Like, he kept two of them in his office at work,
00:08:31 ◼ ► Tom; Right. And he happened to be, like, the 10X engineer, and was particularly good at fixing bugs.
00:08:38 ◼ ► So, like, as we got near, like, a shipping thing, like, you just hear his office, you know. But it
00:08:43 ◼ ► was satisfying. You know, some people might be annoyed by that, but it was a nice, you know,
00:08:47 ◼ ► mid-'90s pre-cubicle farm everywhere. Everybody, including me, the intern, had an office. My office
00:08:54 ◼ ► was more like a closet, but I had a door, which felt, you know, very luxurious as a college
00:08:59 ◼ ► intern. But, like, hearing the noise coming out of his office, it was like, "Oh, he's fixing bugs."
00:09:31 ◼ ► Nat; At Duke, yeah. And he has an SE-30 in his office with a style writer, and it runs, and it
00:09:39 ◼ ► runs everything. And very impressive. And I've got a bunch of old Macs here, and I kept thinking,
00:09:46 ◼ ► "I've got to, like, I've got to do something with this. I want to run, like, I've got a
00:09:51 ◼ ► Power Mac G4 that will run OS 9 and then many early versions of OS 10, and I like having that
00:09:56 ◼ ► around. But I've got my wife's college computer, which was an original Mac upgraded to a plus
00:10:02 ◼ ► internally, and it's still sitting here. And the hard drive died, but the Mac still boots,
00:10:08 ◼ ► or at least it turns on and then asks for a floppy drive. And I have no 400K floppies laying around,
00:10:14 ◼ ► as it turns out. But there are, bless them, there are hobbyists, again, people who love this stuff,
00:10:21 ◼ ► who have essentially are using, like, Raspberry Pis and things like that, like, lots of really
00:10:26 ◼ ► modern, cool technology to build custom bridges to the old software. So the one I'm using is called
00:10:34 ◼ ► a floppy EMU, or M-U, probably, but it's spelled like EMU. And there's one, there are a couple of
00:10:40 ◼ ► them that do SCSI as well for somewhat more recent Macs than the earliest Macs. And they basically,
00:10:49 ◼ ► you put them together, you can have the fun version that you solder, or you can order one
00:10:53 ◼ ► pre-made, and you attach it to the back of an old Mac and you put in an SD card. And in fact,
00:10:59 ◼ ► this one, it's got a little screen and some buttons, so you actually click through on the
00:11:03 ◼ ► screen. This thing has more power than the Mac does, right? It probably has more pixels.
00:11:12 ◼ ► >> But you can click through and pick which disk image you want, and you're like, okay, system
00:11:16 ◼ ► two, 400K disk image, and the question mark suddenly turns into a happy Mac, and in you are,
00:11:23 ◼ ► and you're running that version, and then you shut down and it comes back up on the little screen,
00:11:29 ◼ ► and you can pick a different disk. And since, given the firmware of my wife's particular
00:11:34 ◼ ► computer, I actually was able to boot it into HD 20 mode, which was Apple's 20 megabyte hard drive
00:11:47 ◼ ► to load it up with software, like I got an SD card with some software already on it, but
00:11:53 ◼ ► it's all available on the internet, and there's a Mac emulator, a classic Mac emulator, that will
00:12:00 ◼ ► read those disk images and let you basically drag and drop stuff into it. And so my wife's first
00:12:06 ◼ ► message to me when I showed her this, I texted her at work, she said, "Well, but does it run Tetris?"
00:12:12 ◼ ► I didn't have Tetris on the disk image, so I had to go download Tetris and put it on, and then I sent
00:12:17 ◼ ► her a video of me playing Tetris with that original Mac, which is, it's great. So yeah,
00:12:22 ◼ ► it's just amazing that modern technology is so advanced now that all this stuff that was kind
00:12:27 ◼ ► of like so old that it was out of reach, like 400K floppies. Now it's like, yeah, you don't
00:12:32 ◼ ► really need a 400K floppy anymore. You just put an SD card on there that's got thousands of disks on
00:12:37 ◼ ► it if you wanted to. It's sort of like the end of, I actually haven't seen it in quite a long time,
00:12:43 ◼ ► but it's vaguely how I remember the end of Steven Spielberg's AI, where in the future, it's like the
00:12:50 ◼ ► robots we've created, they just exist to keep us going. And they're way more advanced than we ever
00:12:55 ◼ ► were, but they're just there to keep the world going. Yeah, and sort of like looking at this
00:13:01 ◼ ► lost robot as like, well, you know, we can do some emulation and keep them running and all that.
00:13:06 ◼ ► I love the ingenuity of it to take this old stuff and give it new life. And, you know, it's just
00:13:11 ◼ ► like video game emulators and all that. The idea that you have literally every, you can get a
00:13:19 ◼ ► platform and for multiple platforms. And it's all just in this little tiny box. Well, the Mac,
00:13:25 ◼ ► you can do that. The biggest problem I'm having right now is that Apple over the years has made
00:13:28 ◼ ► so many non-standard video out ports that I'm struggling finding ways to convert this so that
00:13:34 ◼ ► I can have these Macs that don't have their built-in display actually go on a screen somewhere.
00:13:40 ◼ ► So that's, it's like when I was doing the Apple II thing a few years ago, trying to get all my old
00:13:45 ◼ ► discs imaged, you know, from high school and stuff. It was, the hardest part was finding a way to do a
00:13:51 ◼ ► composite video out. And that was a standard composite cable, but I did, I no longer had any
00:13:55 ◼ ► non-digital TVs. So it's a similar kind of problem where I'm trying to figure out, can I convert from
00:14:01 ◼ ► for the G4, it's like, can I convert from ADC? You can, you can find converters on eBay. They
00:14:08 ◼ ► cost like 50 bucks. And old Mac video out from like the two CI days, I'm not quite sure what I'm
00:14:18 ◼ ► the odds are that 20 years ago, right? You know, maybe probably roughly around when you and I first
00:14:22 ◼ ► met at least online that you, I would have convinced you that in 2022, you'd be talking
00:14:28 ◼ ► on my internet radio show about SCSI in the present tense. Very low. I wouldn't have believed it.
00:14:38 ◼ ► You probably would have guessed it was an emulation thing though. I was shocked that when I bought
00:14:42 ◼ ► this G4 on eBay that it has a SCSI card in it and I'm like, oh, I could actually just plug,
00:14:47 ◼ ► I've had a SCSI drive in my office at Macworld. And then I brought it home when I left Macworld
00:14:51 ◼ ► that somebody sent me, I was talking and I don't remember who it was. I was talking to somebody
00:14:56 ◼ ► about old Macs and, and he said, he said, I have a SCSI drive and I can't connect it to anything.
00:15:01 ◼ ► So I'm going to send it to you. And I'm like, okay. And he said, you can check it out. Just
00:15:05 ◼ ► tell me if there's anything on it. And it has sat for, I don't know, a decade at least. And I,
00:15:10 ◼ ► I finally, last week as I was doing all this kind of moving old Macs around, I attached it to a G4.
00:15:17 ◼ ► And it was empty. It had like just a folder that said, obviously he had erased it. So I was like,
00:15:23 ◼ ► well, whoever you are, don't worry about it. There's nothing on those disks. But, but let
00:15:28 ◼ ► me tell you the sense memory of plugging in a SCSI drive and a Terminator block on the back of
00:16:10 ◼ ► just buy new machines with big enough internal drives and get machines working and they'd stay
00:16:14 ◼ ► working. But if you work in like a print shop, you know, you, you wind up seeing a lot more stuff
00:16:19 ◼ ► come in, come and go. And boy, that was, it was, it was bad, but here we are emulating with,
00:16:26 ◼ ► with powerful computers, way more powerful. At some point when the iMac, uh, when some iMac
00:16:32 ◼ ► anniversary was coming up and I, I looked back at our old Mac world coverage of when the iMac came
00:16:36 ◼ ► out and the thing that really blew me away was the article we did about, about USB. And so much of it
00:16:43 ◼ ► was how USB is better than SCSI. And I looked at that and I was like, Oh no, I had, I'd forgotten,
00:16:51 ◼ ► like, you can't plug it in. You got to turn off your computer. If you move anything around
00:16:55 ◼ ► and it's gotta have, they have IDs and you have to have termination. And it was just, it was so bad,
00:17:02 ◼ ► but it was the, you had to do it because that's the only fast way to plug something into a Mac
00:17:07 ◼ ► back before USB happened. You, you, you kind of can't believe it was the way it worked,
00:17:11 ◼ ► even on the Mac that things were so external storage was so difficult that you did anything
00:17:19 ◼ ► wrong, you would turn on your Mac and it would just give you the question mark. And it'd be like,
00:17:23 ◼ ► I have no idea what you did to that SCSI chain, but it's a disaster and I'm not going to deal
00:17:27 ◼ ► with it. And you'd be like, what do I do? And then you'd have to like start unplugging,
00:17:35 ◼ ► and rebooting to hope that it would finally work. It was bad. Like SCSI, there are products called
00:17:46 ◼ ► literally you're just guessing because it could be anything. Well, you'd have two machines side
00:17:51 ◼ ► by side and you'd think that they're set up the same way and the one worked perfectly. And the
00:17:55 ◼ ► other one would boot up with the question mark and you'd be like, I don't get it. I don't even know
00:17:59 ◼ ► what's happening. And they're like, did you check the dip switches? And people were like, as soon as
00:18:05 ◼ ► you started talking to your colleagues about dip switches, you knew it was going to, curse words
00:18:08 ◼ ► were coming next because people would get angry. But the other thing too, I remember from the era
00:18:13 ◼ ► was somebody, there'd always be somebody who would be like, you don't need to turn it off. And they
00:18:19 ◼ ► would have, you know, like they would just plug in their external drive with the Mac on and it would
00:18:24 ◼ ► just work. And it's like, I wouldn't do that. And they'd be like, I've been doing it for months. And
00:18:29 ◼ ► then the drive goes belly up and it's like, yep, told you. Cause it would, you know, but it was,
00:18:36 ◼ ► have you seen Molt's t-shirt that he sells? John Molt's t-shirt with the Terminator logo on it,
00:18:40 ◼ ► but it's a picture of a Scuzzy Terminator. Very, very particular audience for that shirt,
00:18:46 ◼ ► but it makes me laugh. All right. I'll add it to the show notes. Friggin Molt's sells some,
00:18:52 ◼ ► sell some t-shirts. It's two great things from the nineties, Scuzzy and the Terminator.
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00:21:13 ◼ ► And I think I say the same thing every year, which is starting with just thank you. I thank you for
00:21:19 ◼ ► organizing this. If you didn't do it, I don't know who else would. I don't know who's better placed
00:21:24 ◼ ► in our little community to ask the people who you ask. And every, you know, it's not like the
00:21:32 ◼ ► same people you've been slowly, I think steadily increasing the number of people you poll, which
00:21:42 ◼ ► we're down a little bit in total voters, I think this year, but I, I, I am actually resolved for
00:21:47 ◼ ► next year to be a little more systematic about inviting new people. And my mailing list discipline
00:21:52 ◼ ► has been very poor, but I'm hoping to get better at that. Cause I'd like, I definitely would like to
00:21:57 ◼ ► make, you know, I miss people. There are people I invite and then I forget to invite again and stuff.
00:22:02 ◼ ► And I don't want to, I don't want to do that, but quite then the designer suggested the first two
00:22:07 ◼ ► months I was doing six colors. He said, I had this idea and I don't know who would do it. Would you
00:22:11 ◼ ► do it? And I was like, wow, that sounds like a lot of work, but all right, I'll do it. And so
00:22:15 ◼ ► credit to him for coming up with your initial idea. And yeah, it's fun. It's also kind of fun
00:22:21 ◼ ► because there's all these, you know, interesting opinions that everybody has about Apple. And yet
00:22:26 ◼ ► at the same time, I liked, I get to kind of hover above this one and just be like the curator of it.
00:22:31 ◼ ► And I think that's, that's kind of fun. Cause I, I write opinion pieces about Apple all the time,
00:22:35 ◼ ► but it's, it's fun for once to sort of like, literally, it's just like, well, what are they
00:22:39 ◼ ► going to say this year? I have no idea how people are feeling. And that's, I think the value of the
00:22:43 ◼ ► whole survey is more like, I don't think I'm proving anything so much as I'm taking the
00:22:48 ◼ ► temperature of the room. I'm trying to say like, how do people feel this year? And I occasionally
00:22:53 ◼ ► will get email from people who are like, I wish you would let it be an open poll. I wish you would
00:22:57 ◼ ► let the, you know, six colors members vote, all these sorts of things. The truth is I let my
00:23:03 ◼ ► readers vote the first year and their results were almost identical to the panel. And so I haven't
00:23:11 ◼ ► bothered going back yet because I just, I'm not sure it would make much difference. I think that
00:23:15 ◼ ► there is a, I think there is a vibe and I think this captures it and that that's what it's really
00:23:19 ◼ ► all about is sort of like, who's, what are we grumpy about this year? What are we happy about
00:23:22 ◼ ► this year? How has that changed in the last now like seven years? Cause I've got all that data.
00:23:27 ◼ ► Dave Asprey It's always interesting to me where I personally agree with the consensus and usually
00:23:33 ◼ ► like for example, the Mac, let's just say had a great year last year and a great year this year.
00:23:39 ◼ ► And duh, it's very obvious why, because the M1 Apple Silicon Mac started shipping at the end of
00:23:46 ◼ ► 2020 and they had a great 2021 with some new Macs and no surprise that they got high scores.
00:23:56 ◼ ► And it also always surprises me though, where I sort of disagree with the consensus or where
00:24:01 ◼ ► the consensus there, there does, you know, there's some areas where there doesn't seem to be a
00:24:04 ◼ ► consensus. We'll get to it. I feel like we can just go by category by category. I also feel
00:24:09 ◼ ► it warms my heart that you put the Mac first. I do feel, I feel you say you hover above it all,
00:24:24 ◼ ► David Yeah. Kay this year. Yeah. I mean, the Mac Mac is first in the survey and first in my heart.
00:24:29 ◼ ► And I decided to put it first this year, Karen Healy aforementioned suggested that I actually
00:24:34 ◼ ► sort my charts from from best to worst, which I think it was a good little sort of at a glance,
00:24:39 ◼ ► you can see sort of like what did best and what did worst, but in the sections, they are in my
00:24:45 ◼ ► order that I have always had them in and the Mac comes first in that. And, and yeah, that's my
00:24:51 ◼ ► little statement. And I will say for people who read it and wonder if there's a relevance to the
00:24:57 ◼ ► order in which people are quoted in the sections. I actually use BB edits, randomized lines feature
00:25:05 ◼ ► to randomize all of those. So you're not getting them like in the order in which they were entered
00:25:10 ◼ ► or something I realized or alphabetical or something like that. Exactly. And then sometimes
00:25:14 ◼ ► I will move blocks of them that are related around, but that mostly didn't happen this time.
00:25:24 ◼ ► in the Mac section. For example, there's a lot of hooray, Apple Silicon, and then there's the
00:25:28 ◼ ► we're unhappy about the software. And I kind of sorted those together a little bit, but mostly
00:25:32 ◼ ► I just keep that stuff random too, because I realized one year and you could go back and you
00:25:37 ◼ ► could probably figure it out. I think the people are literally listed in the order in which they
00:25:41 ◼ ► took the survey. That's not great. I should probably randomize that somehow. So I do that now.
00:25:46 ◼ ► Why is Gruber last? Yeah, you did it again this year. You were literally the last person
00:25:59 ◼ ► Well, yeah, I don't know if he was first this time, but he's usually right at the top. Yeah,
00:26:03 ◼ ► he does it. And then some people come in late because they write thousands of words about it.
00:26:12 ◼ ► There we go. Well, the Mac was first. Well, also, I just want to say, what the hell does
00:26:17 ◼ ► Kieran Healey know about the presentation of statistical data? But I know, right? He's just
00:26:22 ◼ ► a dilettante. He doesn't have any idea. It is interesting. So I guess that is an interesting
00:26:27 ◼ ► way to look at it is the in order Mac got the highest scores hardware reliability right behind,
00:26:34 ◼ ► as in general hardware across Apple's entire hardware lineup, then iPhone, then wearables,
00:26:42 ◼ ► then iPad. Watch being low is one where I disagree with the consensus, but we can keep going.
00:26:50 ◼ ► Services tied with watch, software quality lower, maybe sort of the trail end of the middle of the
00:26:56 ◼ ► pack. Environmental and social issues, which is nebulous, and I get it that you want to keep going.
00:27:09 ◼ ► when you started this, what people think of with environmental social impact is very different.
00:27:16 ◼ ► It's totally different. And that's sort of that question was meant to be as broad as possible,
00:27:23 ◼ ► because I figured, again, I was going to be able to detect sort of what people were thinking of,
00:27:28 ◼ ► whether it was, I think it was like a lot of factory conditions in China at some point,
00:27:33 ◼ ► but in other times it's been their commitment to green power and recycling their products.
00:27:39 ◼ ► For me, that's the category of Apple likes to talk about how it's a company that is also making the
00:27:45 ◼ ► world a better place. How does everybody feel they're doing? And beyond that, I just kind of
00:27:50 ◼ ► leave it to, it means what you want it to mean. I think that, well, and not to skip ahead, but I
00:27:55 ◼ ► think this year reading the comments, it's clear that a lot of people lumped in Apple employee
00:28:05 ◼ ► satisfaction, working conditions, controversy over work from home and maybe even retail, which
00:28:14 ◼ ► they are Apple employees. Is it a good time to be working retail anywhere? No. I mean, it's
00:28:24 ◼ ► sort of the, hopefully, hopefully the worst time we're ever going to see. And honestly,
00:28:31 ◼ ► and maybe it speaks to, I seldom use this word, but in this way, but it speaks to my privilege
00:28:39 ◼ ► that it really didn't occur to me to think about the controversies over Apple's employee relations
00:28:46 ◼ ► as part of that category, but they don't fit anywhere else. Clearly, if, if as a report card
00:28:52 ◼ ► voter, you would like to make your opinion known on those issues, that would be the category to
00:28:58 ◼ ► do it. And I think that the relatively low score reflects that 3.2. What do you, what's the-
00:29:04 ◼ ► Yeah. And again, it's a, it's like a, it is a Rorschach test. It is what, what you want it to
00:29:12 ◼ ► be. It's like, it's sort of like how you, how are you feeling about Apple as a force for good in the
00:29:16 ◼ ► world? Because that's not normally what you look at for your billion dollar companies. But, but
00:29:21 ◼ ► Apple, I feel like makes it, it's fair to ask because Apple talks about it. And so really,
00:29:27 ◼ ► I'm just saying, what do you think? And, and I think if everybody, if the issues with employment
00:29:35 ◼ ► and people working at Apple comes to the mind of enough people to affect the, that category, then
00:29:40 ◼ ► I guess that says something. Yeah. It's, you know, it's, it's interesting to note. And then the
00:29:45 ◼ ► bottom three, Apple TV, Developer Relations, and then last HomeKit, which overall as a ranking
00:29:58 ◼ ► the system works. That's a good, good panel. So starting with the Mac, A+ is the grade. This is,
00:30:10 ◼ ► I think I ask you this every year. I made it up. I think you say the same thing every year.
00:30:17 ◼ ► I like the idea of the report card being like a, like a report card and not just a number that
00:30:24 ◼ ► says, oh, it's, it's 4.6 out of five. And so I have a, I have a little, in my numbers spreadsheet,
00:30:31 ◼ ► I actually have a little calculation field that does it. And so 4.6 to five is an A+, 4.3 to 4.5
00:30:37 ◼ ► is an A, 4 to 4.2 is an A-, 3.8 to 3.9 is a B+, and so on. I've got like a little map of, of what
00:30:45 ◼ ► they are. And I figured those out kind of over the first couple of years of the survey. And then since
00:30:52 ◼ ► then, I've just sort of stuck with them. And it's, again, it's shorthand. I wanted to figure out,
00:30:57 ◼ ► like, if you're in the, at least the American school system, like you know what an A is and a B
00:31:03 ◼ ► and a C. And when you get that D+, you're like, that's not so great. Home kit, it's not so good.
00:31:32 ◼ ► you know, video playing app, it's like, well, rate this video, what do you think? And it's like,
00:31:58 ◼ ► the zero to five star thing, or some, some places, some, some systems make you like the lowest score
00:32:05 ◼ ► you can give something is one star, you can't even leave a zero star review. And what does it mean?
00:32:09 ◼ ► Is four stars like a B? Or is it like an A and five stars is like, a plus, you know, like,
00:32:17 ◼ ► I've always thought of, with five stars, that four is very good. It's, it's like all star,
00:32:32 ◼ ► but a lot of people already just talking four to five stars, very different. They think, no, no,
00:32:37 ◼ ► A, B, C, D, E. Yeah, I have, I've had this conversation. Mike Hurley and I talked about
00:32:43 ◼ ► this on our podcast upgrade this week, that he was like, Jason, when will you give anything five? And
00:32:48 ◼ ► it's like, well, I was brought up at Mac user and then at Macworld that a five out of five
00:33:02 ◼ ► you know, my letterboxed movie ratings, where it's a five star system or my Goodreads book
00:33:07 ◼ ► reviews, where it's a five star system, I don't give a lot of fives because, but I do give,
00:33:13 ◼ ► you know, threes and fours. And the five is special. It's just really special. The other
00:33:20 ◼ ► thing you have to realize here too, from a statistical perspective is the, it's a, it's
00:33:24 ◼ ► an average of a bunch of people giving one to five ratings. So first off, there's no zero,
00:33:28 ◼ ► it's only one. So one is the floor and a five is the ceiling. And if you've got a 50, 60 people,
00:33:36 ◼ ► like unless they all agree, nothing's going to get five, right? There's always going to be somebody,
00:33:40 ◼ ► even in the best, even in this Mac category, you give something a five, other people give it a
00:33:44 ◼ ► four, the average comes down. And so really there is a ceiling. I consider 4.6, like, wow, I can't
00:33:52 ◼ ► believe so many people gave it a five out of five for it to be that high up. So that's an A+ in my
00:33:57 ◼ ► book. So yeah, my system, I think 3.3, it becomes a C. It's a little bit different because right,
00:34:04 ◼ ► there is no, there is no 1.0. Nobody's going to do a 1.0 average, right? That's impossible in a
00:34:10 ◼ ► survey like this. Right. Now with 53 respondents or however it was. Yeah. And they're all over
00:34:16 ◼ ► the place. So yeah, it's 53 people this year who answered the call. I'm not surprised that the Mac
00:34:22 ◼ ► got an A+. It is, and I think it's a combination of by any objective measure, the Apple Silicon Macs
00:34:29 ◼ ► are just excellent. I think that the only complaint you can reasonably have about them is that they
00:34:36 ◼ ► haven't gotten to all of them yet, right? We're still waiting for the, possibly just for another
00:34:43 ◼ ► month, the pro level Mac mini, the big iMacs, and then probably not until the end of the year, the
00:34:51 ◼ ► Mac Pros and whatever else. And they're, but the ones that are out, which cover at least 80% of
00:34:59 ◼ ► people's needs. I mean, let's, I think they're, they're excellent. They really are. They've fixed
00:35:05 ◼ ► the problems with the keyboards. The displays are great. It amused me that, I don't know if there
00:35:10 ◼ ► were more that you cut out. I think as far as I could tell, I've only highlighted one person who
00:35:15 ◼ ► commented about the notch on the MacBook Pros, Rob Griffiths. There was only only Rob Griffiths,
00:35:20 ◼ ► everybody's favorite curmudgeon, Rob Griffiths. And even that was in good humor. Even that was
00:35:25 ◼ ► indeed. He made a joke about it. It was fine. No, I think it's, you can't deny, and many of these,
00:35:33 ◼ ► one of the fun things about having all these people who think about Apple and they're sitting
00:35:36 ◼ ► down and they're thinking about it for the year is seeing how many people were just saying, look,
00:35:40 ◼ ► this is very impressive. I feel like the Mac is a priority at Apple again. And it came organically,
00:35:48 ◼ ► nobody sees anybody else's responses out. Like many people said, the Mac is a priority again.
00:35:59 ◼ ► The only, all the negativity I would say is on the software side. It is frustration with things like
00:36:05 ◼ ► shortcuts on the Mac being weird and not shipping broken, but not even calling it a beta, just saying
00:36:14 ◼ ► here it is. And I think an overall feeling, and I think Syracuse even mentioned this at one point,
00:36:19 ◼ ► like overall feeling that there are a lot of bugs that seem to just go unaddressed and there
00:36:24 ◼ ► are a lot of apps that seem to be untouched. And I absolutely agree with that. I think that the
00:36:29 ◼ ► untold story of Apple right now is on sort of across all aspects is how good they are at hardware
00:36:36 ◼ ► and how they're soft. It's covering up a lot, but not all of the issues it's got maintaining
00:36:43 ◼ ► its software that it's, and it's not just bugs, but it's bugs that don't get fixed for years.
00:36:50 ◼ ► And it's also apps that just feel like they have dust gathering on them and a company of Apple size.
00:36:57 ◼ ► I feel like they, it is incumbent upon them. Like if they're going to build an app, it's going to
00:37:01 ◼ ► scare all the other apps out of the platform, probably at least to a certain degree, they have
00:37:05 ◼ ► a responsibility to have that app be good, or it should not be there. And they don't seem to want
00:37:10 ◼ ► to invest the resources so that every single one of their apps is a team that is cranking on it
00:37:16 ◼ ► every year that is doing big updates for that app every year. Instead, some apps just kind of
00:37:21 ◼ ► don't change for a long time and it's not great. Like it's, and it pales in comparison to the
00:37:30 ◼ ► hardware, which is such a great story. So it is, and it's a long-term trend and I agree with it.
00:37:35 ◼ ► And it's different than talking about software quality overall. It's more about like having
00:37:42 ◼ ► just a certain standard and shortcuts. I don't, I, it shortcuts, I made a special note of it. I
00:37:49 ◼ ► don't know whether to be happy or sad about this shortcut situation for Mac, because in one sense,
00:37:55 ◼ ► the whole idea is great because the Mac automation story has been languishing for so long. And you
00:38:02 ◼ ► and I talk about it all the time because it's right square in the middle of our personal
00:38:06 ◼ ► interests. But AppleScript is one of, literally, again, we were just joking about SCSI. AppleScript
00:38:15 ◼ ► is software that started when SCSI was still a thing we used. Like that's how old of a technology
00:38:30 ◼ ► I think it was like, I think it was the early '90s version of something that was supposed to
00:38:37 ◼ ► - But, you know, think back like, oh man, just pick a year, like when the first iMacs came out,
00:38:44 ◼ ► and it's like, okay, they've announced this plan to reunify with Next. They're going to build a
00:38:48 ◼ ► next generation operating system. They've, you know, the management is actually, you know,
00:38:53 ◼ ► Steve Jobs might've still been the iCEO, but it seemed like solid competent management was in
00:39:00 ◼ ► place. You know, the ship was righted. Let's hope that they, you know, righted it in time,
00:39:05 ◼ ► was the general sense of Apple and the Mac at the time. You never in a million years would've
00:39:10 ◼ ► guessed that 25 years later, AppleScript was still in the system. It just wasn't never,
00:39:16 ◼ ► it was never that popular, by which I mean, it was popular enough that it's there and it
00:39:26 ◼ ► various transitions. - Why not OS X for sure, yeah. - People only loved it and continue to enjoy it
00:39:33 ◼ ► for what it allows them to do, not the way that it does it. And it's just really kind, you know,
00:39:41 ◼ ► and everybody knows it's, you know, Apple's interest hasn't been in it as much as it could
00:39:46 ◼ ► be, even though there have been some apps, like for example, one of the thing that I still,
00:39:51 ◼ ► I think it was a year ago, 'cause I think it was Big Sur when they did Mac messages as a Catalyst
00:39:58 ◼ ► app, but, you know, sort of cheated by using certain private APIs that public Catalyst apps
00:40:05 ◼ ► can't, but still the canonical proof that an app with a shared code base with its iOS brethren
00:40:13 ◼ ► using Catalyst could be a first-class Mac citizen, I really did not think that Message is
00:40:20 ◼ ► AppleScript dictionary was gonna make that. I was like, "Hey, this app looks good," and they've,
00:40:24 ◼ ► you know, it doesn't look squirrely in the way some of these Catalyst apps like the Mac home app
00:40:29 ◼ ► look, right? This looks like the Mac messages app. It's actually, this seems, you know, more,
00:40:35 ◼ ► this seems like a great idea. They've pulled it off. It's an engineering success story,
00:40:39 ◼ ► but come on, they're not gonna, AppleScript's not gonna make it. Guess what? The full messages
00:40:44 ◼ ► AppleScript dictionary that dates back to when it was iChat, which is actually a very good
00:40:49 ◼ ► AppleScript dictionary, made it. It's great. It's still there. So it's not like Apple's forgotten
00:40:55 ◼ ► AppleScript, but you know it's not the future, right? It doesn't feel like it. It's certainly
00:40:58 ◼ ► not going to iOS. Right. And it was really a drag when there was no idea what the future was,
00:41:04 ◼ ► and that's why shortcuts being on the Mac is a net good for the platform, and it's tricky,
00:41:15 ◼ ► you can be happy that shortcuts shipped on the Mac and unhappy with the details, and that's where we
00:41:21 ◼ ► are. Our colleague Dr. Drang, who writes about automation all the time, he just updated over
00:41:28 ◼ ► the weekend to Monterey, and he was like, "I know you guys said that it wasn't good, but I had no
00:41:35 ◼ ► idea," you know, because he's seeing it with fresh eyes for the first time, shortcuts on the Mac,
00:41:40 ◼ ► and he's like, "This is better than when they shipped it the first time?" I'm like, "Yeah,
00:41:44 ◼ ► it actually is. They fixed a bunch of stuff, but it is rough, and I'm so glad it's there,
00:41:49 ◼ ► and I use it now every day. I'm using shortcuts on the Mac. I'm so glad it's there, but I'm worried
00:41:58 ◼ ► about the fact that they got to the point where they shipped it the way they did, and my
00:42:02 ◼ ► understanding is they kind of had to make some decisions internally to get more people involved
00:42:16 ◼ ► How does that happen? I don't know. It comes back to that. I feel like Apple is killing it so much
00:42:25 ◼ ► on hardware, and then you look at the software and you're like, "Yeah, not really killing it.
00:42:28 ◼ ► It's not terrible." There was an era back in the '90s, like we were talking about earlier,
00:42:41 ◼ ► I'm so happy those days are behind us, and OS X, I use it all day without complaint, and it's fine,
00:42:48 ◼ ► but there are things that give me pause in Apple's stewardship of not just the platform,
00:42:59 ◼ ► Dave: Yeah. To name one just very specific example, it's a thing of people writing little
00:43:06 ◼ ► scripts or automator actions or now shortcuts, any kind of automation might want to do,
00:43:16 ◼ ► Obviously, on the command line, if you're just writing a shell script or a Perl script or a
00:43:24 ◼ ► Python script and it's just going to be something you run in the terminal, you just print whatever
00:43:29 ◼ ► it is at the end, you run your script, and then it prints to the terminal. It couldn't be easier.
00:43:34 ◼ ► It's literally how computers worked when you and I were little kids. You just print statements,
00:43:40 ◼ ► you print stuff, and then it shows up. Well, what do you do in a graphical environment? Well,
00:43:45 ◼ ► you display a dialogue, right? And AppleScript has had this weird thing where, with the Big Sur
00:43:53 ◼ ► redesign, the display alert command looks modern and display dialogue looks a little bit more
00:44:00 ◼ ► old-fashioned, but because Big Sur went to these... I mean, this has been true for 10 years, where
00:44:07 ◼ ► display alert looked more modern than display dialogue, even though they kind of do the same
00:44:12 ◼ ► thing. They're just different amounts of contents in the alert. But with Big Sur, they switched
00:44:20 ◼ ► where display alert looks iOS style. It's the easiest thing I can say. It looks like an iOS
00:44:28 ◼ ► dialogue. And you don't have to be a scripter to know this. You can see it when you try to close
00:44:32 ◼ ► an unsaved document now. You get this dialogue box that is vertical rather than horizontal,
00:44:40 ◼ ► even though Macs all have horizontal screens. And the reason iOS alerts are vertical is because
00:44:47 ◼ ► phones have vertical screens. But there's this weird split in AppleScript where you have these
00:44:53 ◼ ► two commands that do something very similar. They used to look kind of the same. Now they look
00:44:57 ◼ ► very, very different. And you can argue which one looks better, but Shortcuts was like, "Well, hold
00:45:03 ◼ ► my beer, because I'm going to show you a way to show a dialogue that doesn't look right at all.
00:45:09 ◼ ► It doesn't look old." It doesn't look new, doesn't look from iOS. It just looks like wrong.
00:45:16 ◼ ► It doesn't look like old Mac. It doesn't look like Windows. It doesn't look like... Looking like iOS
00:45:26 ◼ ► might have been understandable, and it would be like, "Well, now we have a third style of dialogue."
00:45:30 ◼ ► And I have a bunch of shortcuts that display dialogues with results. And the ones on iOS,
00:45:39 ◼ ► they make me feel very clever and like, "Hey, this is just a little shortcut I whipped up in
00:45:46 ◼ ► a couple of minutes." Well, what I think is a couple minutes, of course, was two hours of
00:45:51 ◼ ► fine-tuning and a wasted afternoon, but I count it as a success. But when I run it, and it looks
00:45:58 ◼ ► like the type of cool-looking modern iOS 15 alert that a real app might show, I feel like I'm making
00:46:09 ◼ ► real software, and this looks really cool. And then you do it on Shortcuts on a Mac, and it looks
00:46:14 ◼ ► like... I don't know who thought this was right. And I think the answer is it was somebody who
00:46:21 ◼ ► didn't really see the details of what Mac stuff needed to look like. And it really does feel like
00:46:28 ◼ ► if you gave somebody no reference to what the Mac looks like. They could remember what the Mac looks
00:46:34 ◼ ► like, but they had no reference, and you asked them to make a dialogue box. They would come up
00:46:39 ◼ ► with this, and I think that's basically what happened. And I didn't even mention something
00:46:46 ◼ ► that I only have discovered in the last week or so is also they would have an OK or a default button
00:46:53 ◼ ► in those dialogues. And if you press Return, it doesn't do anything. And if you press Command
00:46:57 ◼ ► Return, it didn't do anything, which is sort of the, "Okay, Return, you're entering text in a box.
00:47:03 ◼ ► Okay, so you have to do Command Return." And I discovered last week that it was wired to Function
00:47:10 ◼ ► Return, which is not a Mac thing at all. My understanding is that in... I can actually confirm
00:47:18 ◼ ► it. In the betas of 12.3, it actually is Command Return, so it follows the Mac spec. But again,
00:47:24 ◼ ► it's one of those things of like, "Who thought of that?" And they remember, "I know there needs to be
00:47:29 ◼ ► a keyboard shortcut, right? But I'm not allowed to look and see what it is. So how about Function
00:47:36 ◼ ► Return or Globe Return? Let's do that. Surely that will be the answer." And it's like, "No,
00:47:41 ◼ ► there's a standard. It's Command Return. You should have just done that." But they did it.
00:47:48 ◼ ► a much faster trajectory of getting better in interim macOS updates than any app I've seen in
00:47:56 ◼ ► years in macOS. They are clearly really aware that it wasn't good enough, and they're making
00:48:03 ◼ ► progress, which is great because the alternative is what? We wait a year for it to get better?
00:48:26 ◼ ► And it wasn't just like, "Oh God, Federighi decided to announce shortcuts in the keynote."
00:48:46 ◼ ► I guess the thing that bothers me about it though, and is a worrisome canary in the coal mine,
00:48:51 ◼ ► is that I think famously, even though Apple has published human interface guidelines from as long
00:48:59 ◼ ► as I can remember, I mean, way back they started publishing them, many of the best UI designers and
00:49:07 ◼ ► developer/designers, like a James Thompson type person who just works on their own and does their
00:49:15 ◼ ► own design. I know so many people who'd be like, "You know, I've never read The Hic." And you know,
00:49:20 ◼ ► it's a lot like a dictionary to a writer, what The Hic was to a UI designer, where, okay, they have
00:49:29 ◼ ► it, and if they really do get stuck, like, "Huh, that's a really good question. How do you show
00:49:34 ◼ ► three-way state in a checkbox? Hmm. All right, I'll go look it up in The Hic and actually look
00:49:41 ◼ ► something up." It's like looking up a word, you know, or a thesaurus, like, what's a different
00:49:45 ◼ ► word for this? And the reason was that people learned to become Mac UI designers by using the
00:49:55 ◼ ► Mac, and that you just sort of pick it up. It's like the way that as a kid, you don't really have
00:50:02 ◼ ► to be taught how to speak, you just, as a baby, you just grow up in the house and you just pick
00:50:07 ◼ ► up the language from your parents. Or if it's a bilingual family, you pick up both languages.
00:50:11 ◼ ► Like, it's just amazing. You just pick it up and you learn how to speak these languages. And
00:50:16 ◼ ► you could often point to some apps from Apple and say, "This is a great app from Apple," or,
00:50:28 ◼ ► think about every single thing about this and how they did this user interface and copy that,
00:50:39 ◼ ► "Well, that's not the best work from Apple," but you wouldn't be wrong by following Apple's lead,
00:50:54 ◼ ► - And it just feels like there's more and more cases lately where it's like, "Huh, I don't know,
00:50:59 ◼ ► it just doesn't seem like what Apple's doing is sort of the gold standard of the platform."
00:51:04 ◼ ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's it. And maybe those days have passed and I don't want to get
00:51:13 ◼ ► too fussy. I think that oftentimes when we talk about, we invoke the HIG and things like that,
00:51:17 ◼ ► people are like, "Yeah, you know, it's a little like invoking English grammar and spelling."
00:51:21 ◼ ► Like, things change, things drift. I get it. I get it. Apple is a leader in a way that the
00:51:28 ◼ ► English language has no leaders. It's more like that French group that says, "This is not a French
00:51:32 ◼ ► word. You can't use it anymore." Apple could be doing that or they could just sort of abandon it.
00:51:36 ◼ ► And there is a platform transition going on. Like with Catalyst and SwiftUI, I wonder sometimes,
00:51:42 ◼ ► I'm not trying to make excuses for them because nobody is more frustrated than me about how bad
00:51:48 ◼ ► Apple Mail is. If you use Apple Mail, that's great. I hate Apple Mail and I think that it
00:51:54 ◼ ► hasn't really changed much in 15 or 20 years and it's wildly inefficient. And every time I use it,
00:51:59 ◼ ► I hate it more and I abandon it as quickly as I can. And I feel like if there was ever an app
00:52:05 ◼ ► that needed to be reinvented by Apple for modern usage, it's something like Apple Mail. But my
00:52:11 ◼ ► point here is I would almost understand if one of the things that Apple really is doing is saying,
00:52:17 ◼ ► "Hey, guys, we're trying not to make a lot of software changes at the moment because we're
00:52:21 ◼ ► really dragging everything over into this new world with SwiftUI where we can develop all these
00:52:28 ◼ ► apps one time and deploy them on all our platforms. And so we really don't want to put a lot of effort
00:52:33 ◼ ► into them in the meantime." And I get that, but at the same time, it's like, "How many years are
00:52:39 ◼ ► going to go by where your apps don't get updates and you roll out shortcuts and your own apps don't
00:52:44 ◼ ► support it properly?" And I can understand it to a certain extent because it is true. They are
00:52:57 ◼ ► I still need to use it today. It's sort of maybe like the software equivalent of trying to get from
00:53:05 ◼ ► building Intel-based Macs to Apple Silicon Macs, and they wound up with some really spotty years
00:53:13 ◼ ► that made people question, "What the heck are you doing?" But it's like, "Well, we're trying to move
00:53:18 ◼ ► everything to this new system and we don't want to..." There, I think it's a little bit more product
00:53:23 ◼ ► marketing spite where they didn't want to necessarily put this great new edge-to-edge display
00:53:30 ◼ ► on the Intel, the last generation. They probably could have done that with the last Intel MacBook
00:53:34 ◼ ► Pros. And it's like, "Let's save this more impressive edge-to-edge display for when we have
00:53:40 ◼ ► Apple Silicon." Software is a little bit different because it's like when they make a new MacBook Pro,
00:53:46 ◼ ► it really is a new MacBook Pro, and software just sort of accretes. But in broad strokes,
00:53:55 ◼ ► I feel like that's sort of where they are, and hopefully, right? That they're like, "Well,
00:53:59 ◼ ► we don't want to redo mail now or something else now." Yeah, if I'm being optimistic, that's my
00:54:06 ◼ ► hope is that some of this stuff is on hold because they're really trying to prioritize moving the
00:54:10 ◼ ► frameworks far enough along that they can be in a place where they can roll out new versions of
00:54:14 ◼ ► their apps and it goes everywhere. But I'm feeling it in terms of the maintenance of the existing
00:54:21 ◼ ► platform. And I always say, this is back when I used to review loads of software for Macworld back
00:54:27 ◼ ► in the day, that just because you did a lot of work under the hood on this new version of your app,
00:54:33 ◼ ► if your users can't see it, they don't care. They literally, they don't care because they're just
00:54:39 ◼ ► there to do their job every day. And that's sort of how I feel about this. It's like, I understand
00:54:43 ◼ ► there's a huge amount of effort going on beneath the surface in Apple's software group for things
00:54:48 ◼ ► like SwiftUI and moving all these apps over and adapting apps from iOS for the Mac. I get it,
00:54:54 ◼ ► but at the end of the day, I can understand that and still, I'm a user sitting at my desk
00:55:03 ◼ ► To tie up the Mac segment, I will say that that brings to mind a point that I saw through the
00:55:10 ◼ ► comments on the Mac in the report card, which is either implicit a lot of the time or explicit
00:55:18 ◼ ► praise for the ease of the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon. And this is where Apple
00:55:25 ◼ ► has just been fantastic for so many years on, and we can get in developer relations later and how it
00:55:33 ◼ ► relates to the App Store. But in so many ways, every single app I use, the last one, the last
00:55:39 ◼ ► laggard was Dropbox to go native for Apple Silicon. But even there, I didn't really notice
00:55:45 ◼ ► that it was an Intel thing. And going back to the... The PowerPC to Intel was pretty smooth.
00:55:53 ◼ ► Each of these, they have enough institutional memory, and a lot of times, and you and I
00:56:00 ◼ ► know some people who've been at Apple through all of these transitions. It's not just institutional
00:56:05 ◼ ► memory, it's actually people who've been there. They're getting better at it. But this one was
00:56:10 ◼ ► so seamless. I remember thinking that the Intel one, the PowerPC to Intel was so much smoother
00:56:16 ◼ ► than 68K to PowerPC. And part of that is just the simple fact that in the 68K era, it was so long
00:56:24 ◼ ► ago and computers were so slow that so much of it was written in assembly language, or the compiler
00:56:31 ◼ ► literally was only a 68K compiler. And now you've got... Even if you had written your app in C or
00:56:37 ◼ ► Pascal, now you have to switch to a new compiler and the compiler says your code doesn't compile.
00:57:00 ◼ ► What about some new features? Yeah, exactly. It's a remarkable transition. And the speed of
00:57:13 ◼ ► yeah, the PowerPC transition from 68K, you really could tell you were running a translated app. It
00:57:18 ◼ ► was slower and Intel was better. It was amazing that it worked, but it was slow. It felt me.
00:57:27 ◼ ► Yeah, and the Intel transition was better, but this one is seamless. And yes, I don't know whether
00:57:32 ◼ ► it was here or somewhere, but I made a comment about... I wrote a Mac World column, I think it
00:57:36 ◼ ► was, and I talked about how Apple's really good at processor transitions and it's been through
00:57:42 ◼ ► multiple Mac processor transitions. And then I decided to throw in a line where I said, "Granted,
00:57:48 ◼ ► probably the people involved are not the same." And I actually got a message from somebody who
00:57:53 ◼ ► was like, "I actually worked on all of those." I'm like, "Oh my God. Okay. I apologize. We don't
00:57:59 ◼ ► think about it, but there are people at Apple who have been there through all of this and have done
00:58:03 ◼ ► this." And certainly institutionally, Apple has gotten really good at it. And this transition,
00:58:08 ◼ ► in part because the Apple Silicon stuff is so good, but also for some other reasons, was flawless.
00:58:15 ◼ ► And it's so easy to just accept it and say it's invisible and it doesn't matter. And it does
00:58:23 ◼ ► deserve, and I'm glad the panelists said it, it does deserve essentially applause because it could
00:58:29 ◼ ► have been much harder, right? Going from Intel chips to Apple-designed chips that were really
00:58:35 ◼ ► originally designed for phones and have it be like, "Is the Mac going to even make it?" And the
00:58:40 ◼ ► answer is the Mac didn't even just make it across, but it's like, they're way better off now and they
00:58:47 ◼ ► deserve credit. And so those high scores in the Mac the last two years of the report card
00:58:51 ◼ ► absolutely deserved. And for those of us who went through those doldrums where the laptops
00:58:57 ◼ ► were kind of bad and they seem to not have a plan for the Mac, what a turnaround. It's taken five
00:59:04 ◼ ► years, but it has gone from being an afterthought to being one of the shining jewels in Apple's
00:59:11 ◼ ► crown now. JS And not just for enthusiasts, like, "Oh, people who understand the difference between
00:59:18 ◼ ► Intel and Apple Silicon binaries." Like, just everybody. And the Mac, it's important because,
00:59:24 ◼ ► and as much as the iPhone and even iPad have really grown the number of people who use Apple
00:59:30 ◼ ► computers, just as talk phone and iPad and Mac, the Mac is bigger and more popular than ever. And
00:59:37 ◼ ► an awful lot, you know, probably a majority of people use it in a very consumer-y sort of way.
01:00:34 ◼ ► I was just saying that software stays forever and it accretes, but it's like the Rosetta layers tend
01:00:39 ◼ ► to disappear after a couple of years and it'll happen. And that's how you know you did a good job
01:00:44 ◼ ► and what a weird position to be in. You know, here's this thing. I made this amazing technology.
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01:02:29 ◼ ► remote.com/thetalkshow and use that promo code "thetalkshow." That's remote, just remote.com,
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01:02:45 ◼ ► Remote to manage and pay their international teams, whether you want to hire one person or
01:02:56 ◼ ► code "thetalkshow" and you'll get a discount. Next on the list after the Mac was the iPhone.
01:03:06 ◼ ► - Little upstart product. - Little upstart pro... Little bit more up and down from year to year than you would think.
01:03:15 ◼ ► It's, you know, and I know that the scores are... Are they... Is the up and down regulated between...
01:03:21 ◼ ► Yeah, it looks like it is. - I think it's a... Literally, people get excited when there's new
01:03:28 ◼ ► stuff. It's just like the sales figures. I think people get excited when there's a new looking phone
01:03:33 ◼ ► and get a little bit bored when it's the same and you see it in sales and you see it on the iPhone.
01:03:39 ◼ ► The iPhone goes kind of up and down and up and down and up and down and so last year it was up
01:03:44 ◼ ► because the iPhone 12 was new and the iPhone 13 didn't look any different and I... Part of me thinks,
01:03:50 ◼ ► of course it doesn't. They don't do a new look every year, but I think people want to give Apple
01:03:54 ◼ ► credit when they do a new look and when they don't, they don't want to, so they don't. - So I...
01:04:01 ◼ ► You know, I'll skip ahead. I'll say that I had the same feeling about the watch and I feel like
01:04:07 ◼ ► people say with the Series 7 like, "Ah, it's, you know, it's okay. The screen's bigger," but it's
01:04:11 ◼ ► like, "Well..." - I totally disagree about that one too. Like, I bought a Series 7 and I think it's so
01:04:17 ◼ ► much better than my Series 5 was, so I'm very happy with it. - And I wonder, though, too, how much of it...
01:04:25 ◼ ► And I even mentioned in my comment that you quoted that I didn't expect to buy a Series 7, but then
01:04:31 ◼ ► after reviewing a Series 7, I was like, "Oh, I gotta... I can't go back. I really need this."
01:04:36 ◼ ► But I feel like some of it... If you don't see it and people are less likely... I mean, I know
01:04:44 ◼ ► COVID restrictions are easing and stores are open, but I still think people pop into their local Apple
01:04:49 ◼ ► store, even if you have a local Apple store. Let's say you live close enough where there's my nearby
01:04:53 ◼ ► Apple store. It's, you know, common sense, you know. People are just going out less, right? It's, you know,
01:05:00 ◼ ► a little bit less likely to see it in person. And maybe because the overall, like, the difference
01:05:07 ◼ ► between, like, Series 5, Series 6, and a Series 7, to me, it seems like something you wouldn't really
01:05:13 ◼ ► notice on somebody at another table in a restaurant, right? They're close enough where you kind of have
01:05:19 ◼ ► to get close to see how much bigger the screen is, you know? Like, you could tell it's not the old
01:05:23 ◼ ► Series 3 watch, but I don't know which one it is. It doesn't jump out at you. And I feel like, you
01:05:29 ◼ ► know, obviously iPhone 13 has that factor with the iPhone 12. I mean, it's, you know, the camera's
01:05:35 ◼ ► improved. Battery life is a big improvement. That was my comment that you included, that the factoid
01:05:43 ◼ ► that the 13 mini gets longer battery life by everybody's tests that I saw, and I saw a bunch
01:05:49 ◼ ► of reviews that pitted them against each other, then the full-size, mid-size iPhone 12 from last
01:05:55 ◼ ► year. That's amazing. And that, to me, battery life and camera improvements, I think that was Nick
01:06:01 ◼ ► Heer's comment, too, that if they just keep doing battery life and camera improvements year over
01:06:06 ◼ ► year for a while, that's fine with me, because those are the two things that are most, affect
01:06:12 ◼ ► the most people in the biggest ways. Yeah, it's true. And I, as somebody who went from a 12 mini
01:06:17 ◼ ► to a 13 mini, you can tell. Oh my gosh. Battery life is so much better. That, to me, would be,
01:06:23 ◼ ► like, a normal non-enthusiast who buys a new phone every four years, because the mini, it was, oh,
01:06:31 ◼ ► it's such a nice size. And the 12 mini was like, well, I'm glad I'm locked in for the year, because
01:06:37 ◼ ► I need to plug in my phone again. The 13 mini gets much better battery life. And I think a couple
01:06:43 ◼ ► people commented in their comments on their report card, like, 13 mini is really nice. It'd be a shame
01:06:48 ◼ ► if it's true that they're not going to keep making these mini-size phones, as the rumors suggest.
01:06:53 ◼ ► I know. I can't vote them down for that this year, but I can be disappointed next year.
01:06:58 ◼ ► One star. No mini. One star. No mini. Boo. I've highlighted a comment from James Thompson,
01:07:10 ◼ ► which gets to a point I made earlier about Apple and internal employees. As with the Mac,
01:07:14 ◼ ► this is James Thompson, Drag Thing and Peacock. Well, Drag Thing, of course. Drag Thing is,
01:07:44 ◼ ► that the pandemic has really hit hard in the past year. I don't know if it's true or not.
01:07:49 ◼ ► I don't know. Maybe? This is, to me, an open question. Somewhere else in the report card,
01:07:58 ◼ ► probably in the societal, environmental area, Glenn was adamant about, "Hey," spousing a view
01:08:06 ◼ ► that I've heard from many people that, "Hey, the last two years, almost everybody working on Apple
01:08:12 ◼ ► software has been working from home, and they're still doing great. So why is the company insisting
01:08:18 ◼ ► on so many such—going back to normal, which for Apple meant working in the office in Cupertino or
01:08:25 ◼ ► wherever you were?" I think it's an open question whether it's affected their software. I've spoken
01:08:46 ◼ ► we're friends, but disagree and say, "I feel more productive at work. I'm not getting interrupted.
01:08:57 ◼ ► And I've spoken to other people who've said it's a nightmare, that our meetings are a mess.
01:09:04 ◼ ► And Apple, the meetings thing is interesting. And I know some people just hate meetings. I know
01:09:09 ◼ ► people who work at Apple who hate meetings. But Apple has a very—my understanding, as someone
01:09:15 ◼ ► who's never worked there, but knowing a lot of people who do, they take their meeting culture
01:09:19 ◼ ► very seriously. And it's a company where time is valued and the canard, the trope of, "Oh my God,
01:09:31 ◼ ► you work in a big corporation and you spend all day in meetings and it's a waste of time."
01:09:36 ◼ ► And that Apple doesn't typically work like that. And I'm sure that they're so big now. I'm sure
01:09:41 ◼ ► there's exceptions. It's all good teams and bad teams meeting-wise. But if everybody has to meet
01:09:48 ◼ ► over Zoom, everybody knows what Zoom meetings are like. And it's possibly problematic. So that's why
01:09:54 ◼ ► I highlighted James's comment that, I don't know, is there something that's—is there an overall—is
01:10:01 ◼ ► hardware getting ahead of software because hardware has to be in person and hardware—you
01:10:06 ◼ ► just know—there's certain aspects of hardware that are just binary. Yes or no, does this machine
01:10:12 ◼ ► feel solid? Does the hinge feel good? Yes or no? Is the keys durable? If we set up a robot to type
01:10:18 ◼ ► 20 million words on this keyboard, do the keys still work? Software is a lot more on the liberal
01:10:33 ◼ ► Yeah, we don't know—the thing is, we don't know what they wanted to do this last couple of years,
01:10:39 ◼ ► right? We can't see what they didn't do and what they didn't release. And I think what James—at
01:10:44 ◼ ► least the way I read James's comment—is it does feel like maybe they have taken their foot off the
01:10:50 ◼ ► gas a little bit in terms of OS feature ambition on iOS and Mac in the last year or two, and that
01:10:59 ◼ ► may be pandemic-related or it may not be. Also, I think your anecdotes point to the truth of this,
01:11:06 ◼ ► which is, I think it's different groups and different people work differently. And my hope
01:11:13 ◼ ► is that over time, what shakes out at Apple is an understanding that there's some stuff and there
01:11:20 ◼ ► are also some people who need to be—it needs to be done with more of an in-person approach,
01:11:26 ◼ ► and there's other stuff that doesn't. And I think that the challenge is that Apple has a default
01:11:32 ◼ ► culture of everybody needs to be here, and there are cases where everybody does need to be there.
01:11:39 ◼ ► There are probably ones where everybody doesn't. And when you're in a very expensive place in the
01:11:44 ◼ ► world, you're going to probably have to deal with hiring people who are not going to move
01:11:50 ◼ ► to Cupertino if you want the best people. And so they're going to have to deal with this.
01:11:55 ◼ ► But I also think that it's true that some people, it's a nightmare. I have no doubt that some people
01:12:02 ◼ ► work way worse in that scenario. It's a little like you and me, right? I would not recommend
01:12:07 ◼ ► working for yourself in your own house to everyone. You have to be motivated and focused and have
01:12:50 ◼ ► I have a piece I'm working on for Daring Fireball. I don't want to go into it because it's not a
01:12:55 ◼ ► spoiler per se, but I made a comparison a couple weeks ago to a story that came out that Facebook
01:13:02 ◼ ► had scrapped an internal homegrown OS for their VR goggles in favor of just staying with what they
01:13:10 ◼ ► already had, which was sort of their own fork of Android. And I had compared it to the proto-iFones
01:13:18 ◼ ► where there were two parallel tracks where there was sort of a, "Well, let's do like a Linux
01:13:24 ◼ ► embedded system that's more like an iPod type thing and let's grow up the iPod or let's shrink
01:13:31 ◼ ► down the Mac." And my follow-up is basically that I think it was a bad comparison because this
01:13:39 ◼ ► Facebook thing clearly was on parallel tracks for a very long time. And they had like, I think they
01:13:45 ◼ ► said they were like 300 people working on this, the version of the OS that got scrapped. And a
01:13:50 ◼ ► senior executive left and blah, blah, blah. The thing that revisiting the early days of the iPhone
01:13:57 ◼ ► brings back to me is how shockingly fast Apple put it together, right? That's the thing, is that
01:14:04 ◼ ► talking to people from Apple, many of them who are actually still there, kind sources, reliving some
01:14:12 ◼ ► of that, they more or less built what we know as the first iPhone OS in 2006. Like in one year,
01:14:19 ◼ ► they built it. And yes, there were parts that they inherited, developer stuff and the similarities
01:14:28 ◼ ► between UIKit and AppKit and stuff. Because they had some good bones in the OS and frameworks and
01:14:36 ◼ ► patterns that they could follow. But still, it was just a remarkable pace. And I do kind of feel like
01:14:43 ◼ ► maybe I'm too forgiving at times as a critic/pundit of, "Well, you don't have to upset the Apple
01:14:51 ◼ ► card every single year and blow us away." Right? And maybe there's something right about having
01:14:58 ◼ ► the pundit commentary class press Apple critically to do more wow year over year. That's where I was
01:15:07 ◼ ► going. Yeah, I think you're right in the sense too that we can internalize the idea that, well,
01:15:17 ◼ ► you know, they're not going to do it every year. And they're not going to do it every year for a
01:15:19 ◼ ► lot of reasons, including just the cost and the amount of effort that goes into it. And as you
01:15:24 ◼ ► have pointed out many times, iteration is kind of Apple's thing. And they really seem to like this
01:15:28 ◼ ► model where they do the outside change, but then they've got a couple other years of iterative
01:15:32 ◼ ► internal changes coming, and then they flip the outside change again. But the truth is, it's hard
01:15:38 ◼ ► to hold it against somebody to say, "I'm disappointed that there wasn't a new thing this year," even if
01:15:43 ◼ ► they understand it. Because if you look at sales, the sales bear it out generally too. The years
01:15:47 ◼ ► that they make the big outside change, the sales go up too. People like it too. So I think, although
01:15:53 ◼ ► it may not be realistic to want it, I think it's also not unrealistic to be less excited about a
01:16:02 ◼ ► year where there isn't as much obvious forward movement, if that makes any sense. Yeah. Other
01:16:10 ◼ ► iPhone stuff, the cinematic mode, a couple of people commented that it's a lot of promotion
01:16:18 ◼ ► about it, but I don't use it. There's a quote from Benjamin Mayo, "Cinematic mode was a bit of
01:16:23 ◼ ► a letdown and currently sits in gimmick territory." But then, as soon as he wrote it, I was highlighting
01:16:28 ◼ ► it with my Apple Pencil, and then his next sentence covers what I was going to say, "It's
01:16:32 ◼ ► easy to spot the fakeness like early years of portrait mode, still photography," which is
01:16:38 ◼ ► exactly what I was going to say. So hats off to Benjamin for making his own comment. I like the
01:16:45 ◼ ► cinematic mode. I don't use it. I haven't used it a lot since finishing my reviews. But again,
01:16:52 ◼ ► I haven't gone that many places. I haven't been on vacation since last summer, so where would I
01:16:58 ◼ ► shoot video? I kind of feel like I think it's an interesting direction for video to go. It is
01:17:03 ◼ ► definitely very analogous. It is to video what portrait mode is to still. And I think with
01:17:12 ◼ ► portrait, the first year of portrait looked really weird. People looked best if they didn't have
01:17:19 ◼ ► eyeglasses and had a bald head or a hat because hair and eyeglasses didn't really make the bokeh
01:17:28 ◼ ► border very well. But they've gotten a lot better at that, and I feel like they drew a good line for
01:17:35 ◼ ► "This is the year we should ship this cinematic mode. It's good enough to ship, and we'll keep
01:17:40 ◼ ► making it better." Obviously, Apple feels that regular people just think it's cool and that
01:17:46 ◼ ► it's the rest of us who have a little more discerning eye who can spot all of the things
01:17:50 ◼ ► that are wrong with it. And I say that because Apple has made cinematic mode the centerpiece
01:17:55 ◼ ► of several ads. They have ads with the two guys in the car talking to each other, the two cops,
01:18:00 ◼ ► and it is shot in cinematic mode. And I was talking to my wife about it, and she's like,
01:18:07 ◼ ► "It looks fine. Whatever." And I said, "I think it looks terrible. I can see everything that's
01:18:15 ◼ ► wrong with it. Every weird thing that should be in focus, it isn't." And it drives me crazy. I hate
01:18:21 ◼ ► that ad because it bothers me so much at how bad it looks and that Apple put it on TV. But look,
01:18:27 ◼ ► Apple wouldn't have put it on TV if Apple thought that it made them look bad. And so it's me. I have
01:18:33 ◼ ► to say, it's me. I am overthinking this and that most people don't care. And I do think that's true.
01:18:39 ◼ ► I think it needs to be better. I think they need to shoot it at a higher quality because right now
01:18:43 ◼ ► I think it's limited to 1080. But they'll get there. And either they're completely delusional
01:18:49 ◼ ► and the emperor has no clothes or they decided, most people are going to look at this ad and go,
01:19:02 ◼ ► it's where I usually watch football games because why else am I not skipping the commercials? It's
01:19:09 ◼ ► because I'm watching live. And I remember thinking, "Ooh, I want..." I could see that once I picked up
01:19:15 ◼ ► that it was a commercial about cinematic mode, I was like, "I wonder if they shot this with
01:19:20 ◼ ► cinematic mode." And then the focus racked again to the black detective who was in the driver's
01:19:27 ◼ ► seat. And I was like, "Well, the focus isn't quite right on half of his face." And I was like,
01:19:32 ◼ ► "So they definitely did." But it's because I was watching it on my big 65-inch TV. And it defeats
01:19:41 ◼ ► the point of, "Oh, well, cinematic mode and portrait mode, the details don't matter because
01:19:45 ◼ ► people just look at the pictures and the videos on their phones." And it's like, "No, Apple's
01:19:54 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it's very brave of them. And I think that I'm inclined to believe it's because
01:19:59 ◼ ► most people don't notice the stuff that we notice. And I think us holding them to a higher standard
01:20:04 ◼ ► is good and saying this stuff needs to be better because once you notice it, it's really hard not
01:20:09 ◼ ► to notice it after then. But just because it could be a lot better, it doesn't mean it's not fun.
01:20:15 ◼ ► And in my review, I said much the same thing, right? Which is, it's fun. It looks cool. It's
01:20:19 ◼ ► like, "Oh my God, now I've got the fuzzy background and the sharp foreground. Like, I'm using a long
01:20:24 ◼ ► lens except it's just with my iPhone." Like, it is fun. And you know what? If it's really bad, you
01:20:33 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, and it is amazing too that you can just, after shooting, turn it off and just go,
01:20:39 ◼ ► yeah, and just get the full depth of field that the camera was taking in. And so, like, if you shot
01:20:46 ◼ ► this amazing thing and it's, you know, you've captured, you know, the first alien to land on
01:20:52 ◼ ► earth and you've shot it with cinematic mode on your iPhone and CNN wants to give you all this
01:20:56 ◼ ► money for it. And it's like, "Oh, the alien's out of focus." Well, you could just turn off cinematic
01:21:00 ◼ ► mode and now your footage, you know, you can make all the money from CNN and whoever else wants to
01:21:05 ◼ ► bid on your footage. So it doesn't, you know, it doesn't hurt you to shoot it, to try shooting it.
01:21:11 ◼ ► Yeah. What else with iPhone? I don't know that I have much more. Time to move on to iPad?
01:21:27 ◼ ► But slowly decreasing over time. 2017 was up at 4.1. What happened in 2017 that it shot up? I
01:21:52 ◼ ► This is the one category. And again, there's a couple of comments I have highlighted. Here's
01:22:16 ◼ ► the iPad Pro back. I thought that was such an interesting sentiment. And I feel like the way
01:22:27 ◼ ► they're still unhappy with multitasking on iPad. And I feel like putting it on the hardware is an
01:22:35 ◼ ► interesting way of doing it. Because at first we were like, this Magic Keyboard two years ago,
01:22:40 ◼ ► this is amazing. It was like, I think it was like two years ago next month when it came out.
01:22:43 ◼ ► And out of the blue mid-year, not when we were expecting something like a major OS feature like
01:22:50 ◼ ► mouse cursor support and full trackpad support and command tabbing and all this stuff. This is great.
01:23:02 ◼ ► Yeah. I think the truth is, and this is, I think we talked about it last year, Apple chose to
01:23:12 ◼ ► brand the new iPad Pro as an M1. And I thought that was a really interesting choice because they
01:23:19 ◼ ► could have fibbed, right? They could have said, well, this is actually the A14X, even if it was
01:23:27 ◼ ► literally the M1. They could have put it in the context of an iPad chip and they instead decided
01:23:33 ◼ ► to say, no, this is the same chip that's in the MacBook Air. It's the same. And I like,
01:23:39 ◼ ► they decided that the goodwill of everybody about Apple Silicon was something they wanted to
01:23:44 ◼ ► rub off on the iPad Pro. And I think that that is a great decision, but it also calls into question
01:23:51 ◼ ► the software on the iPad Pro because it's the same hardware theoretically underneath. And yet
01:23:56 ◼ ► you can do so much less on the iPad in iPadOS than you can on the Mac and MacOS. And it has led to
01:24:04 ◼ ► a frustration, a continued, but now intensified frustration in the slow pace of iPadOS updates.
01:24:17 ◼ ► who per our last conversation about the Mac, have now sort of said, oh, actually the Mac is
01:24:24 ◼ ► riding high and this new M1 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro gives me much more of what I want and are sort
01:24:31 ◼ ► of like off the iPad a little bit. David Sparks had an amazing quote in there, which is basically
01:24:36 ◼ ► like, I have just come to accept that Apple doesn't view this thing as a replacement for the Mac,
01:24:47 ◼ ► paraphrasing him, but he's like, I've been much happier since I just accepted it. And I think
01:24:51 ◼ ► that there is some truth to that, at least so far in terms of looking at the evidence of where the
01:24:56 ◼ ► iPad is. And I think I love my iPad. I still use it all the time. I think it's in a nice place.
01:25:02 ◼ ► I think there is so much more potential, but does Apple at this point want to unleash the iPad and
01:25:09 ◼ ► turn it into something that is even more Mac-like or is it kind of okay with it where it is in the
01:25:16 ◼ ► ecosystem? And I don't know, I could go either way on that. I want them to keep pushing it at
01:25:23 ◼ ► the high end because they've shown now they can differentiate and you can have a low-end iPad and
01:25:27 ◼ ► an iPad Air and an iPad Pro and you can sell them all and people use them in very different ways and
01:25:32 ◼ ► it's okay. But I am not convinced that Apple thinks it's worth it for them to push that hard up at the
01:25:39 ◼ ► high end with more Mac-like features. And even though they've got the Mac chip in there, like,
01:25:43 ◼ ► we all know it could run Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro. We all know it could, but Apple has just
01:25:50 ◼ ► never released those apps even though they've got a thing called the iPad Pro. With the M1,
01:25:55 ◼ ► it's like there's no disputing it now. It should be as fast as a MacBook Air. So now what's the
01:26:03 ◼ ► excuse? And I think everybody's just sort of like, "All right, I guess Apple's just…" I sensed a
01:26:08 ◼ ► little bit of defeatism where they're just sort of like, "Okay, I guess Apple's just never going to
01:26:12 ◼ ► do this, so maybe we should just give up." Yeah, Marco's comment, "iPadOS's efforts to add powerful
01:26:18 ◼ ► features without ruining its simplicity have always left me wanting both far more and far less.
01:26:24 ◼ ► I'm starting to think that such a balance cannot be struck." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's a good
01:26:33 ◼ ► way to put it. Man, that's a sharp comment, Marco." And then he says, "But if it could be,
01:26:36 ◼ ► it would probably require far more effort than Apple is currently investing." And I think that's,
01:26:42 ◼ ► yeah, and it's like, because why bother really if you kind of have a concept floating around and
01:26:49 ◼ ► there's a plan inside Apple of, "Well, we could do this, and here's an hour-long thing of what we
01:26:57 ◼ ► could do to take iPadOS into more Mac territory." And then like a ballpark estimate of how much work
01:27:05 ◼ ► it would be and how much time and who would take off other products. Why bother? We already have
01:27:09 ◼ ► the Mac. You know, it's— Especially if our vision of the future of our software platforms is a
01:27:15 ◼ ► unified software platform that runs everywhere, then if the app that you write that runs on the
01:27:21 ◼ ► iPad when it's in a tablet configuration runs on a Mac on a big screen and works just as well,
01:27:26 ◼ ► do you need an iPad that runs on a big screen? Do you really need these extra usage modes of the
01:27:32 ◼ ► iPad if the world you're going to is a world where the Mac is going to be able to run that same
01:27:37 ◼ ► software, right? And I think that that's what they plan is that in the long run, Apple soft—
01:27:43 ◼ ► The Mac will run like legacy Mac software, fine, but like all other software for Apple's platforms
01:27:48 ◼ ► will just be, you know, everywhere. It'll be everywhere. And instead of having the iPad be
01:27:54 ◼ ► like a lifeboat where it's like, "How do we get to the future if the Mac is dead?" The Mac's not
01:28:00 ◼ ► dead now, so what is the iPad for? And like somebody asked me— I was a big proponent of
01:28:07 ◼ ► the idea of Apple trying to do an iOS laptop at some point, which, you know, the Magic Keyboard
01:28:11 ◼ ► sort of will make its laptop-ish, right? I'm totally off of that now because I look at it and
01:28:16 ◼ ► I think, "Well, why?" Like, you've got an M1 MacBook Air that will run apps from the App Store. Like,
01:28:22 ◼ ► you're basically there. It doesn't do touch, but you're so close. So is Apple— and it's not that
01:28:28 ◼ ► it wouldn't be fun. It's like, is Apple going to put in the work to do that? Or is Apple going to
01:28:33 ◼ ► be like, "You know what? That adds a lot of complexity. It's going to be a lot of work.
01:28:37 ◼ ► It might even undercut our lower-end iPads a little bit. Maybe not." And I think as a big
01:28:43 ◼ ► proponent of the iPad, that's kind of what I'm feeling right now is I need Apple to give me a
01:28:48 ◼ ► sign. Otherwise, I'm just going to kind of assume that the iPad is going to be what it's going to be.
01:28:53 ◼ ► You can't magically do it all. And that's why Marco's comment really resonated with me. It's
01:28:57 ◼ ► like, you can't be both less and more. And so you kind of have to pick and choose where you're going
01:29:04 ◼ ► to put these three platforms— iPhone, iPad, Mac. And yes, the one thing that is very obvious is that
01:29:12 ◼ ► Apple is doing it in a way that even a casual observer of the company could see that they're
01:29:20 ◼ ► a company that makes all three of these products. And there's a role for all three. Whereas if they
01:29:28 ◼ ► did not make Macs— I know that's a very hard idea for someone like me and you to imagine. But
01:29:37 ◼ ► if they didn't, if they really only started from the iPod and then made the iPhone, and the iPhone
01:29:44 ◼ ► and iPad were exactly like we know them, but the Mac wasn't there, yeah, I think that they would
01:29:50 ◼ ► grow the iPad in ways to take share away from Windows laptops, you know. But they have the Mac.
01:29:57 ◼ ► And so that's not who they are. And in the same way, if they didn't have the iPad, if they had
01:30:03 ◼ ► never figured out how to make touchscreen things, maybe the Mac would have a touchscreen and there'd
01:30:08 ◼ ► be a MacBook model with a detachable— you could unsnap the display part like a lot of Windows
01:30:16 ◼ ► 2-in-1s do, you know, like along the lines of the way the iPad works with the Magic Keyboard,
01:30:27 ◼ ► You don't have to be a cynic to say that they want to make them distinctive. But I think that's
01:30:33 ◼ ► where we're left and that those of us who are into it enough and really would like— even if you don't
01:30:40 ◼ ► see the exact design for how the iPad could be better, you can feel the ways that it could be
01:30:44 ◼ ► better. And it's like, "Ah, I just feel like this." And I do think— I think you made a very
01:30:49 ◼ ► keen point that by calling it the M1, boy, it just raised people's expectations for how
01:30:55 ◼ ► many things they could do. Yeah, and I— don't get me wrong, I feel like the iPad and some of
01:31:01 ◼ ► the multitasking changes that they made in the latest iPadOS update get them on the door of doing
01:31:09 ◼ ► windowing on iPadOS, basically. I can see— all the pieces are there, I think. I really think
01:31:15 ◼ ► they could— if Apple makes like an external display that they could say, "And if you plug
01:31:19 ◼ ► an iPad into it and a keyboard and mouse, it just works," right? And instead of using full screen,
01:31:26 ◼ ► you were going to do windowing or tiling or something like that. Like, I think they totally
01:31:36 ◼ ► do they want to? Do they want to open up that can of worms at all? They're taking baby steps
01:31:42 ◼ ► here and there, but I don't think there's a rush to fill a lot of these ecological niches with the
01:31:48 ◼ ► iPad like there maybe was a few years ago, just because— partially because their focus has been
01:31:54 ◼ ► on the Mac, but also because the results on the Mac have been so strong. And, you know, again,
01:31:59 ◼ ► don't get me wrong, I really like my iPad apps. I'll also point out Universal Control, which is now
01:32:10 ◼ ► we haven't seen it, and by the time I posted the survey, we'd seen it, so I took some of those
01:32:14 ◼ ► comments out. But, like, Universal Control, one of the things that I love about it is that
01:32:19 ◼ ► when you move your mouse over and now you're on the iPad, you're running iPad apps, and it works
01:32:24 ◼ ► like you're using a Magic Keyboard. It works exactly like you'd expect if you used iPadOS
01:32:29 ◼ ► in that way, and it's almost like Apple saying, you know, "Yes, the iPad is good as an iPad,
01:32:35 ◼ ► and if you want to run it from your keyboard and your trackpad, you can," and it works great as its
01:32:40 ◼ ► own thing, but is that as far as they're willing to go? And, again, it's not as if I think that
01:32:47 ◼ ► they're not technically close to being able to do more, but they have to show the will, right?
01:32:52 ◼ ► They'd have to show the will to embrace bigger screens, which means probably windowing, and they
01:32:57 ◼ ► would have to have the will to embrace, honestly, embarking on a software project to bring some of
01:33:04 ◼ ► those Pro apps to, like, really put a stake in the ground and say, "Yes, you can edit video on the
01:33:09 ◼ ► iPad using Final Cut Pro," and I realize that's probably a huge job, but, like, the fact that we
01:33:14 ◼ ► haven't seen it in all these years suggests to me that Apple's like, "Meh, maybe we don't actually
01:33:18 ◼ ► want to do that." They're very proud of the video editing apps that are in the App Store,
01:33:29 ◼ ► Michael: Yeah, to LumaFusion and Ferrite and stuff like that, but as for themselves, they're like,
01:33:42 ◼ ► Dave It does tie into... Pro apps come up a lot. The one that hits me a lot, and I've mentioned
01:33:53 ◼ ► the iPad forward. They really have addressed a lot of my biggest complaints from three,
01:34:03 ◼ ► wrote at length, "Got a lot off my chest." But I still feel lucky that the iPad, to me,
01:34:23 ◼ ► One example, I think Stephen Trout Smith and I have talked about this offline, but it just
01:34:30 ◼ ► seems weird to me, really weird from a philosophical perspective, that they've added...
01:34:37 ◼ ► When you have a Magic keyboard or any keyboard attached to your iPad, and you hold down the
01:34:49 ◼ ► iPad version of a menu bar, and it's organized in a similar way, like File and Edit, and
01:34:55 ◼ ► OmniOutliner will say Outline, and they show you the keyboard commands that you can use,
01:35:06 ◼ ► keyboard attached, you don't get that. There's no affordance to bring up, "Give me that menu
01:35:23 ◼ ► system-wide option to, in certain apps that have this, make a little thing, like the little
02:21:43 ◼ ► for me and you as pundits, because we're going to be able to keep talking about it. - I love listening to you and Ben talk about it on Dithering. I did that on my run today, in fact. I was listening to you guys talk about that,
02:21:53 ◼ ► stream from my Apple Watch, and it's, yeah, it is the absolutist strategy, right, that they seem to have, which is, like, we're just not going to give an inch, and you keep wondering, like, guys, if you don't give an inch, they're going to really come down hard on you. And I keep asking myself, like, what do they know that they think is going to save them in the end?
02:22:14 ◼ ► But it's the collateral damage, too, of just, like, I remember when Apple was on the ropes, and the only thing that kept it alive was that it had users and developers that were going to
02:22:23 ◼ ► commit to staying on the platform. And Apple acts now like they're made men, right, like they're never going to need any help from anybody ever. And the problem is that, I don't know, I don't think you should live like that, because everybody's got their ups and downs.
02:22:37 ◼ ► And if Apple's down again, are the developers going to be there who are willing to sort of stand up for Apple after how they've been treated? I don't know, it's just, maybe they'll never be down, and maybe it's all, you know, just about the money.
02:22:57 ◼ ► It's, I feel like they're in trouble because, and I know it often gets, Tim Cook gets slagged as being too financially motivated, right? That all he, you know, he's not a product person, he never claims to be a product person, but therefore all he sees is what can be expressed in a spreadsheet.
02:23:15 ◼ ► But in some ways, I really do feel like part of that has to be true with this App Store stuff, and that some of the value they could have gotten out of loosening this stuff, even if they didn't feel they had to, like, we don't legally have to change to 75/25, just across the board, instead of 70/30, we'll go to 75/20.
02:23:37 ◼ ► I keep mentioning that chiller email from like 10 years ago, but I'll never stop, it's one of my favorite things that came out of the Epic lawsuit, where he was like, "Hey, do we think 70/30 is going to last forever, or should we, once we get to like a billion a year, maybe we'll go to 75/25, and if it keeps growing, eventually 80/20?"
02:23:57 ◼ ► I'm just saying, you know, and it's like, I think he literally said, "I'm just saying," you know, something to think about.
02:24:01 ◼ ► And somebody said, "Are you kidding? We're just going to take all the money." And yeah, you know, they're going to get to a point, potentially, where there are laws moving through Congress that are going to just dramatically, potentially dramatically transform their business in bad ways.
02:24:15 ◼ ► And no amount of lobbying is going to be able to turn that. And you think about how much money they would have had to forgo to maybe like take the heat off, so that there wasn't enough political will.
02:24:26 ◼ ► And maybe somebody inside Apple would say, "There's nothing we could have done that would have reduced this to the point where we wouldn't have been legislated against."
02:24:32 ◼ ► But they've made no, as far as I can tell, other than that, the small business program, they have made no other moves to mitigate in any way.
02:24:44 ◼ ► And in fact, most of their moves lately are, "We will honor the letter of the law, but we are never going to honor the spirit of the law in what they're doing, because we're just going to try to slow play this thing as much as we can."
02:24:55 ◼ ► And the result is that people like James Thompson say, you know, they have a "You should be grateful we're letting you make software for our platform's attitude."
02:25:04 ◼ ► And it's really demoralizing. And what's tough about this is James also points out, Apple, in developer relations, traditional developer relations, actually have been doing a really good job.
02:25:14 ◼ ► The virtual WWDCs have been good, they're virtual, like, they're tech talks, they're virtual lab sessions during WWDC, they have made huge strides in a difficult environment to get developers more information, and not just the developers who are lucky enough to come to San Jose every year.
02:25:36 ◼ ► And like, all of that would normally rocket it up the charts, like there are things happening in the developer group and the evangelism group that are so good, but they are entirely eclipsed by Apple then going into court and saying, you know, that developers are lucky to be on our platform.
02:25:53 ◼ ► It's undeniable, and I'm sure Tim Cook, if we could patch him in and finish the show with the three of us, he'd certainly agree, and he would mean it, that there are things you can't put a dollar value on, but I honestly feel that Apple is undervaluing those things, and developer relations is one of those things.
02:26:11 ◼ ► And it's like, if you're the best player on the team, pick a sport, you know, Tom Brady, you know, whoever, and you've just thrown four touchdowns in an NFL playoff game, it's like, he's gonna say, I want to thank my offensive line, I want to thank, you know, and say, you know, you, you, you, when you're up, when you're up, it's, it's to your benefit to, to, you know, to be generous to the people.
02:26:42 ◼ ► If you are generous to the people you don't need to be generous to because you're riding high, right?
02:26:47 ◼ ► And that's the guy who, the guy who's a jerk to all those people, when he stumbles and falls, guess what? Nobody's gonna help him up.
02:26:56 ◼ ► Even if Apple is right that they don't need third party developers as much as third party developers think they do, they should go the other way and praise third party developers writing for Apple platforms every step of the way, even if it's more than they think is, is due.
02:27:12 ◼ ► And it's, it would do no harm to them. And there's a dollar value to that. You know, like, I, what is the Apple logo worth?
02:27:20 ◼ ► You can't put a dollar sign on it, right? Like if, if the Sultan of Brunei came to Tim Cook and said, I would like to buy the rights to the Apple logo for $500 billion.
02:27:33 ◼ ► It's, it's a constrained example, but he, he wouldn't sell it, right? It's, it's, there is no price tag for it. You know, and if you say, if he named a number and he said, well, you tell me what the number is. He'd say it's not for sale.
02:27:44 ◼ ► Developer relations are on that, on that gradient, right? Where you can't really, there is no way to perfectly assess a dollar value for it, but there, whatever it is worth, it's worth something.
02:27:56 ◼ ► It's not a dollar amount and it's, it's going downhill. And I feel like this report card, year over year, now that we have years of it under the belt, it, it's evidence that it is getting worse.
02:28:09 ◼ ► Yeah. And I, sometimes I have people pop into my mentions on Twitter saying, well, what, what is a fair price then? If it's not 30, is it 20? Is it 50? It's like, well, it's already 15 for a lot of the smaller developers.
02:28:20 ◼ ► And I really do believe there's a contention at Apple who says, look, everybody's talking about 30%, but like 30% is all the big players. Like it's the big players who get 30%.
02:28:30 ◼ ► Now everybody else is getting 15%. And if you've got a subscription for more than a year, it's 15%. So we're really just soaking kind of the big game players who are driving huge amounts of revenue through our in-app purchase system.
02:28:41 ◼ ► And we think that that is that class of a transaction. We should scoop more money out of it because it's just huge amounts of money passing through.
02:28:50 ◼ ► And, and that it's a less sympathetic audience, right? It's a less sympathetic group. It's like, oh, the poor game developers who are getting people to buy gems in app.
02:29:01 ◼ ► Like it, that would be another case you could make, but, but there are, what, what really blows me away.
02:29:08 ◼ ► I know we're, we're saying a lot of the same things here, which is like, you can't know how much lobbying are you going to have to spend to get the Senate to kill this bill that's going to require everybody to have access to, to their own apps.
02:29:19 ◼ ► Uh, their own app stores on your platform. Like it, there's no way, even if you could spend the money for lobbyists to get the bill killed, and maybe you could, because that's sometimes that's how politics works.
02:29:30 ◼ ► I bet you it's more money than you could have just given away to invest in things that would make people feel better about you.
02:29:38 ◼ ► And it's not like there aren't advantages to having a more open app store environment that might come out of it. But like, if I'm from Apple's perspective, I want to keep as much control as I can.
02:29:49 ◼ ► What do I have to give up? The thing that you and Ben have talked about a little bit, and then I know Marco has talked about on his podcast is this idea too, that Apple could put a lot more effort into.
02:30:01 ◼ ► Putting its money where its mouth is and in terms of the app store being patrolled and the scam apps being removed and it being a more, uh, uh, you know, policed environment and make people feel like they're earning their, their money.
02:30:16 ◼ ► But they haven't done that either. Right? Like there, there are lots of PR gestures that they could probably make to say, see, we really do care.
02:30:23 ◼ ► And they aren't making a lot of them and I don't understand it. Um, and it's, and it's really frustrating. And I start to think I've kind of come around in the same way of saying, would it be the worst thing if most people just use the app store, but it does mean that somebody can sell like a, uh, an emulator and it could just run on my iPhone if I wanted to.
02:30:42 ◼ ► And, uh, and there's a little bit of competition so that Apple actually has to kind of keep itself honest. Cause I agree. I think alternate app stores are never going to be much of a thing and alternate in app purchase methods wouldn't, I think Apple would probably compete with them and win on usability, but wouldn't it be nice for Apple to actually have to try?
02:31:02 ◼ ► Cause it does feel like they're not trying. And it's, it wouldn't it be nice if they were trying in a way that just had few, you know, not more and more people saying, yeah, I actually, I think I've come around on this. I think mandatory, you know, the, the, the government should mandate side loading on these platforms.
02:31:17 ◼ ► It's, it sounds so it's, it's a bad idea, but that seems to be not side loading in and of itself. It's the government mandating it, which I think is a bad idea. It's the government coming in and saying you can't, or, or even you, we're going to limit how much money you can take out of the platform you built, which I, I hate that idea, but Apple has sort of led with their behavior, led themselves down this path to where this might be a thing.
02:31:41 ◼ ► Although I will throw this out here and I'm going to write a piece about this. So while we're promoting things that we're going to write in the future, I'll, I'll throw this in there, which is, I do wonder if the app store would be way better.
02:31:49 ◼ ► If it didn't, if it wasn't the only source of software on iOS. And I say that because I wonder if it would free Apple to be more draconian in what it rejects and say, that's not for us.
02:32:05 ◼ ► And it'd be more like a publisher and say, you know, we're not just release that yourself. We're not going to put it on the app store. And, and if the app store might end up being like way cleaner.
02:32:16 ◼ ► And I do wonder sometimes if the reason there's so much crap on the app store is because Apple is erring on the side of letting things on, because if they kill it, it's completely dead and bad PR for them and all of that.
02:32:28 ◼ ► Whereas if they're not the only game in town, they'll be like, ah, you didn't get into the app store kid, try again next time, but you can always go over across the street and sell it there and see if anybody buys it.
02:32:43 ◼ ► But I had that thought today that maybe the app store would be more emboldened to just kick things out of the app store and not allow classes of apps in if it wasn't the only game in town.
02:32:54 ◼ ► Because right now that is a lot of pressure, right? Like if you kill something, it's dead. And so they're inclined to work with the developers and, and maybe they wouldn't have to do that. Like with a Mac app store, I guess.
02:33:04 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, I know it came up with some of these wordle clones, you know, but, but some of the ones that weren't ripoffs, not ones that were taking the name or trying to steal the logo, but just like, oh, it's, it's like wordle, but has a different name.
02:33:18 ◼ ► And some of them, you know, once it came to light, Apple was like rejecting their updates because they don't want copycat apps.
02:33:24 ◼ ► And it's like, you know, if they could just distribute it on their own, then Apple could say, you know, we don't want anything even vaguely like wordle.
02:33:30 ◼ ► We, you know, and, but then your, you know, your work isn't flushed down the toilet because the other thing too, and there is a financial angle to it.
02:33:38 ◼ ► And I don't know if it's more money or less, but it seems like a better longterm strategy and what Apple to me is clearly squandering with their Goodwill with third party developers is to encourage third party developers, large and small, to build Apple specific apps.
02:33:57 ◼ ► You know, and, and just fully embrace the Apple platform and instead of building something that's cross platform, fully embrace it and put your engineering resources into using the iCloud stuff for storage.
02:34:13 ◼ ► Right. And you could do like, if I had to, if we had to do Vesper all over again, instead of do we couldn't use iCloud at the time, it wasn't, wasn't even close to being good enough.
02:34:22 ◼ ► If we were, if I were to make a notes app now it would use iCloud to use and then, and then the privacy story is we, we, we can't see your notes.
02:34:32 ◼ ► But I think more and more at this point, if, if developers and somebody who was going to do like a small startup or an indie software house said, I'm going to build entirely on Apple's platforms, people would say you're nuts.
02:34:47 ◼ ► And the danger of app store rejection, I firmly believe this, and again, it's a thing that we can never measure, but the danger of app store rejection is not just that, um, I can't install, you know, I can't go somewhere and just click a button and install dolphin on my iPad and play Nintendo Wii games.
02:35:07 ◼ ► It's also how many apps that even that might have been accepted, never got built for Apple's platforms.
02:35:17 ◼ ► Or for iOS out of the fear that if Apple felt that it was not good for some reason, it could never be seen by all that work is completely wasted because there's no other way onto the platform.
02:35:33 ◼ ► And like, that's sort of what I mean by the freeing aspect of it is that's the, that's where the app store is today.
02:35:44 ◼ ► And Apple doesn't want to have competing app stores inside loading and I get it and I get why they don't want that.
02:35:50 ◼ ► But at the same time, I think it's actually bad for the platform that they don't that, that there's no release valve for somebody who is even wants to be in the app store.
02:36:03 ◼ ► But like hanging over at the idea that if they say no, you, you can't shop it elsewhere.
02:36:15 ◼ ► I think we have missed out on some amazing apps that might've even changed the world in some way or some part of the world that never made it because the risk was too great.
02:36:24 ◼ ► And the truth is, yeah, there's Android, but, uh, most of the great apps in the smartphone era have flowered on iOS and then gone to Android.
02:36:43 ◼ ► And if the idea, if the idea for the app, I don't have a specific idea of mine, but if it integrates with blank kit and this other kit and something else that all parlay on the iOS platform, then it is, that's where I was going is that it is a financial benefit to Apple where Apple can say, Hey, you should get an iPhone because we've got all look at all this great exclusive software that you can get.
02:37:09 ◼ ► And I really, it's, it's hard not to see that they, they just lose that lose that forest for the tree of nope.
02:37:19 ◼ ► Let's not forget the Mac app store dynamic a little bit, and I know Mac app store is a little bit of a joke, although it's gotten better, but like, it's not, it's not the center of attention that the app store is.
02:37:31 ◼ ► I don't think that the, if iOS had multiple app stores and sideloading was allowed, it would, that the iOS app store would become the Mac app store.
02:37:38 ◼ ► I don't think that that's true, but a thing that you have seen on the Mac app store is Apple go to developers of successful apps that are outside the Mac app store and said, what do we have to do to get you in the Mac app store?
02:37:54 ◼ ► And that's the other piece that I think maybe that, that the, that the exclusivity of the app store has, has missed on the platform is if somebody makes something and Apple's like, we'll pass.
02:38:15 ◼ ► We need to change our entitlements in order to let this in because it, now that I've seen it, I realized that we made a mistake here.
02:38:26 ◼ ► And, and, and it just, it's from all we see from the outside, Apple doesn't even acknowledge that it is, that it could be happening.
02:38:34 ◼ ► And so again, it's just, it's an opportunity cost and it's part of the, this is such a meaty topic.
02:38:39 ◼ ► And, and I do think that there's benefit potentially in, in, in things that could be potentially catastrophic for Apple.
02:38:47 ◼ ► I fear that the legislation, and I know Ben Thompson feels this way a lot, is the legislation will be badly written and it will actually become bad for consumers.
02:38:55 ◼ ► Just like the ebook thing with Apple was actually bad for consumers because it actually, they were going to lower prices and the prices went up.
02:39:05 ◼ ► There is some opportunity there, but I'll just come back to the fact that I'm a little bit still baffled that Apple hasn't been more aggressive in trying to get the heat off of them.
02:39:15 ◼ ► They're acting like they know something we don't know, and that they're never going to get their business model changed because of this.
02:39:22 ◼ ► And, um, I, I did not expect us to get this far down the path with them still thinking that.
02:39:28 ◼ ► Maybe they've got something in their back pocket, but I, I, I'm concerned that they don't and that they're going to end up with a much stricter punishment than they could have, that they would have gotten if they had played nice and been nice to everybody and said, no, no, no, you just misunderstand us.
02:39:47 ◼ ► And for a company that is supposedly on the cusp of releasing VR headset that they presumably want third-party developers to write really cool native apps for, it just seems to me like the overall enthusiasm of people who aren't currently with an Apple at apple.com employee email address to write software for a new Apple device is night and day different than when the iPhone came out in 2007.
02:40:21 ◼ ► Yeah. And, and look, there's always going to be the argument. I'm sure this is the argument that a lot of people will make when that platform gets announced is there's money to be made.
02:40:29 ◼ ► People will do it because there's money to be made and even apple taking its percentage. It's okay because there's money to be made and that will motivate people.
02:40:44 ◼ ► However, if you're apple, there is apple cares about money, but apple also is proud of the art of its platforms and the, the way its platforms look.
02:40:54 ◼ ► And if you've spent a few years turning off the like small but creative geniuses who write your software and making them less inclined to embrace your new platform because you've treated them, they perceive you as treating them badly.
02:41:11 ◼ ► Then what you're going to get is a lot of mercenary stuff from big companies and well-financed people who are like money, money, we can make money on this, but you're going to miss the stuff that although it doesn't make you as much money.
02:41:23 ◼ ► It's kind of what you put in the ads and what makes you proud and what makes you show off, like, look at the amazing things that are done here.
02:41:30 ◼ ► I really believe that that's the value that the indie developer and the small artistic developer and the people who do things because they really care about apples platforms and, and they want to make good stuff.
02:41:40 ◼ ► Like they, they aren't as big financially as some game that's charging people in at purchases for gems, but they are like what apple wants to think of its platforms as being it's like self image.
02:41:52 ◼ ► And if you alienate those people, then the stuff you're going to get on your new platform is not going to be so great.
02:41:59 ◼ ► It's going to make money, but it's not going to have maybe some heart and soul that, that make you feel like if you're apple make you feel proud of the platform you've built.
02:42:17 ◼ ► It's, it's sort of like Steve Jobs's intersection of the technology and liberal liberal arts.
02:42:29 ◼ ► And if that's, who's dry, if that's the motivation that's driving interest in your platform, it is, it's just, you're going to miss out on the liberal arts part of it.
02:42:38 ◼ ► And really the technology part, because the, you know, it's, it, you know, that's enough.
02:42:45 ◼ ► And I'm not, I'm not, yeah, I'm not saying that there aren't good apps that are going to be made by companies that are making a financial calculus on something like a VR headset.
02:42:52 ◼ ► I guess what I'm saying is I think that there is this extra level that you get when you've also got a whole bunch of people who just are really, they love the platforms and they're committed to being an apple platforms developer, and they're going to bring their next big idea to you.
02:43:06 ◼ ► And if they're not as inspired the software and in that app store, the VR app store or whatever it is, is not going to be as inspired.
02:43:15 ◼ ► And, um, I think that that is a, that is a loss that is maybe not as financial, but is, is makes the platform seem lesser and that's bad financially.
02:43:26 ◼ ► Yeah. And the further you get from a generic platform, like let's say, I mean, the web is sort of the lingua franca.
02:43:35 ◼ ► It's the, you know, it's the one place where everybody can go and write software and it runs in a big rectangle and it can run on your phone and run anywhere else.
02:43:42 ◼ ► And you get to something like the watch and it's like, well, what does it take for the maker of your favorite podcast app to make a really good watch app?
02:43:50 ◼ ► Well, whatever it is that it takes is all extremely, completely specific to developing a component to run on apple watch.
02:43:59 ◼ ► You can't use it anywhere else, right? There's no, you can't even use it on competing smart watch platforms, right?
02:44:08 ◼ ► The VR headset is going to be like that, I think, I mean, obviously there's games that you could cross plat, you know, but anything else that you're supposed to do in this VR platform,
02:44:17 ◼ ► and I cannot believe that apple is going to make a VR headset that is only about games.
02:44:22 ◼ ► It's going to be very specific to apple's headset and you want developers who are committed to, all right, we'll, we'll commit to doing this effort that is only applicable to your platform.
02:44:35 ◼ ► leaving aside the hurt feelings, there is the take a leap with us thing, right? And, and again, maybe there are some companies that are interested in the money in a future apple platform,
02:44:46 ◼ ► but they're hesitating about it, whether this VR platform is really going to go or not. And what pushes them over the edge is yeah, but it's apple like, yeah, we've had positive things with apple in the past.
02:44:56 ◼ ► Let's do it. Maybe even a little irrationally, let's jump in because this is exciting because it's a new apple platform.
02:45:04 ◼ ► And, you know, if you're in a place where everybody looks at it and it's like, nah, I'll pass. I'll see how it goes.
02:45:09 ◼ ► Your platform is lesser because of it. And that's, I know this is all touchy feely intangible stuff, but it's like, I firmly believe there are benefits to apple having good relationships with developers that are not just financial transaction based,
02:45:22 ◼ ► but that there is a component that is we're partners. We trust each other. I want to do business with you.
02:45:28 ◼ ► I will follow you where you're going because we've had such good times together. And that part is what you blow out. If you treat them badly,
02:45:38 ◼ ► couldn't say it better myself, Jason, thank you for joining me. Uh, what do we want to mention? We've got a upgrade. You can, you're a podcaster, Mike Hurley.
02:45:47 ◼ ► You've got upgrade at relay FM, the six colors.com for all the writing and links to all the podcasts.
02:45:53 ◼ ► The incomparable.com has a bunch of pop culture podcasts that I do with a bunch of other people. Those are the, I think those are the big ones.