00:00:00 ◼ ► I guess it's a tradition. I don't know how many years now we've been doing the year in review
00:00:06 ◼ ► Forever. Forever. It feels everything feels like forever now. Right? It's like we're at the end of
00:00:30 ◼ ► It's just speaking with Dieter Bone and I was like, you guys aren't going are you? And he's
00:00:35 ◼ ► like, Oh, no, we canceled first. Like they were like, but like, they didn't announce it early,
00:00:41 ◼ ► because they wanted to, you know, tell all their partners and stuff. But you know, they saw this
00:00:45 ◼ ► coming a while ago. But it is kind of sad because I feel like six months ago, CES was looking like,
00:00:52 ◼ ► hey, this, you know, this all might work out. I don't blame them for trying. I wouldn't want
00:01:03 ◼ ► If you just want to sit in your room at Aria and eat steak for a week, you can get the best deal.
00:01:22 ◼ ► fully vaxxed, my family vaxxed, everybody boosted. But you don't have to be particularly
00:01:29 ◼ ► worried or fearful of it to put your finger in the air, see which way the wind is blowing and say,
00:01:41 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah, and it's not just that. I mean, like, we did not get our booster shot
00:01:45 ◼ ► shit together at all. So we're locked down again, which is what it is. But there's just so many
00:01:50 ◼ ► people who are out and so many resources that are stretched thin, that there's no buffer for anything.
00:01:55 ◼ ► Like there's just nothing else that can go wrong for any of these events and their emergency staff.
00:02:05 ◼ ► **Robert Stauffer** Yeah, I don't want to do a whole COVID segment here. But I feel very strongly
00:02:09 ◼ ► that counting cases is no longer the way to go. It's a it's a it's an interesting number. It should
00:02:14 ◼ ► be one of the statistics, but people are so much more willing to get tested and testing. Yes, even
00:02:21 ◼ ► though home test kits are extremely I don't know about up there, but here there it's you can't get
00:02:26 ◼ ► them, which sucks. And it's a huge own goal, you know, that we sort of put all of our all of our
00:02:35 ◼ ► chips on vaccines, you know, the testing should have been up there. But home tests don't count
00:02:41 ◼ ► towards the test numbers anyway, right? Like so in other words, when local governments or whatever
00:02:46 ◼ ► governments report, you know, case numbers that doesn't include home tests anyway. But cases isn't
00:02:52 ◼ ► what to test or isn't what to look at. It's hospitalizations and deaths, of course. And you
00:02:58 ◼ ► look at the hospitals and around here, it is really getting worrisomely full. And there's other places
00:03:03 ◼ ► where it's stuffed to the gills. And to me, that's that's, you know, I mean, it's just common sense.
00:03:07 ◼ ► If the hospitals are full, we don't have room for more people to get sick. So take it. And
00:03:13 ◼ ► any kind of sick. That's the thing. It's like, right. It's like, don't go out and get hit by
00:03:15 ◼ ► a car either. Because like, it's gonna be real hard to get a bed. Right. Again, I don't want to
00:03:18 ◼ ► do a whole COVID segment. But it's super, super frustrating for people who are vaccinated and have
00:03:23 ◼ ► done everything right. And have some other any other kind of illness or accident, you know, you
00:03:29 ◼ ► slip and fall and need emergency room care for your ankle or something like that. And the whole
00:03:45 ◼ ► Dave Tilley I think it was Josh centers from tidbits, who pegged this, you know, year ago,
00:03:50 ◼ ► you know, sometime at 20 in that great blur of 2020, that Apple Store closings were a reasonable
00:03:56 ◼ ► metric for what's going on, because Apple is, you know, I don't know if you've heard this, but,
00:04:01 ◼ ► you know, they're a very successful company at making money. And they're logistically apt.
00:04:07 ◼ ► Right. Right. So Apple Store closures have been a pretty good barometer for what's going on,
00:04:13 ◼ ► because they want to have the stores open, because they want to make money. They want to make money,
00:04:19 ◼ ► and they want to sell things to people. But they're also, I think, you know, and I know that
00:04:24 ◼ ► there's a lot of complaints about the overall retail employment satisfaction in Apple retail,
00:04:33 ◼ ► but overall, they're, I think they've done a pretty good job at not trying to keep stores open
00:04:38 ◼ ► when they shouldn't be open for COVID throughout this whole thing. And yeah, there's an awful lot
00:04:43 ◼ ► of store closures. So good luck to everybody. Stay safe. Have your New Year's inside alone.
00:04:52 ◼ ► What could be better for New Year's Eve? Anyway, what we do every year, Renee and I, we go through
00:05:08 ◼ ► became senior vice president of hardware. Dan Riccio took over VR and AR, I guess hardware,
00:05:23 ◼ ► major product has to have a senior vice president level owner, like, you know, like Jeff Williams
00:05:28 ◼ ► famously owns the Apple Watch, even though Kevin Lynch makes the software and there's hardware
00:05:33 ◼ ► leads and all those, but there has to be someone on the executive team that owns it. And it was Dan
00:05:40 ◼ ► Riccio was one of the owners, like he owns a ton of stuff, because just he's good at it. And he ships
00:05:44 ◼ ► iPhones every year on the year, which is one of the biggest achievements in consumer electronics.
00:05:49 ◼ ► But they wanted him to focus on this. So John Ternus, who's also terrific, and has been taken
00:05:53 ◼ ► over the iPhone, and he's been announcing, you've seen him on stage now for the iPad Pro for the M1
00:05:58 ◼ ► Max, he's now doing the big hardware job. And Dan is focusing on VR, which to me is just one of those
00:06:08 ◼ ► Yeah, it seems well, it seems like to clarify what you just said, which I agree with, but it seems
00:06:13 ◼ ► like what Apple really does is for new products, they put somebody in charge of. So Ternus is in
00:06:21 ◼ ► charge of quote unquote, hardware, but that more or less means like existing hardware platforms that
00:06:27 ◼ ► have sort of stabilized, right? You know, Mac, iPad, iPhone, those sort of things. And, you know,
00:06:36 ◼ ► in the same way that when watch was a new initiative, Jeff Williams was in charge of it.
00:06:41 ◼ ► And now it, Riccio is in charge. Do we know that, though? I mean, that he's in charge of AR/VR? Did
00:06:48 ◼ ► they say that? I don't think Apple said that. I think that's just been widely reported, because
00:06:52 ◼ ► he didn't leave Apple. It's sort of like when, when they, like, John G and Andrea now, he's taken
00:06:59 ◼ ► over Titan, you know, it was previously Mansfield had come back for it famously. And those are just
00:07:08 ◼ ► Right. But it's any in as far as we know, and you know, German is our, our, our people into
00:07:15 ◼ ► Apple's internal structures. Riccio has not gone to project Titan. And therefore, it's sort of like,
00:07:27 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And it's it does feel like we're getting we're getting closer to that this year.
00:07:31 ◼ ► Like when you look at competing products, they're more, they're more reaching that part where Apple
00:07:36 ◼ ► doesn't really like the early adopter phase. They were like, when they start just becoming bridging
00:07:41 ◼ ► over to mainstream adoption. And that seems when you look at what's selling over this year,
00:07:45 ◼ ► especially things like Facebook's quest to how popular those things are becoming that it's,
00:07:59 ◼ ► I think it was CNBC said that the number one app in Apple's App Store the day after Christmas was
00:08:06 ◼ ► the Oculus app, you know, implying that enough people got with what's now called the quest to
00:08:13 ◼ ► right? Yeah, is that right? The quest to is what used to be called the Oculus enough people got it
00:08:19 ◼ ► for Christmas that downloads of the iOS app to whatever with it promoted the app to number one,
00:08:26 ◼ ► I don't think it's a big number, though. It is just something to be said for the fact that it is
00:08:31 ◼ ► the end of 2021. And you still cannot go into a store and find a PlayStation five, or a GPU or an
00:08:36 ◼ ► Xbox Series X. And Facebook is just flooding the market with, I think, pretty much at cost quest.
00:08:41 ◼ ► So it's a huge distortion field. But but people are starting to look at them as like mainstream
00:08:45 ◼ ► products. Jonas got a PS five for Christmas, and he's been very, very happy with it ever since he's
00:08:53 ◼ ► up there playing it now. But my wife took care of procuring it. She's much better at such things
00:08:59 ◼ ► than me because, well, she's she really is good at finding things that are hard to get. And she's
00:09:05 ◼ ► not a procrastinator like me. But I asked her, I was like, how did you you know what you have to
00:09:09 ◼ ► pay? How'd you get this? She's like, don't ask. Yes. I was like, all right, fine. You have to
00:09:14 ◼ ► either invest a lot of money or a lot of time into getting PlayStation five at this point. Still,
00:09:18 ◼ ► same with a GPU. Have you seen one? Have you played with a PS five? I have not. I have not.
00:09:24 ◼ ► I've seen the Xbox. And I've managed to get I managed to get a GPU and actually get one of the
00:09:28 ◼ ► new Nvidia cards by buying a whole entire pre built computer. The only way I could get one
00:09:33 ◼ ► without paying exorbitant prices for it. Yeah, Jonas and I have been talking about that and
00:09:37 ◼ ► looking at it. And yeah, he said the same thing that you got it, you kind of got to get a whole
00:09:41 ◼ ► computer. And yes, might be worth it. Then the neatest thing I am not a gamer. It's, it's I
00:09:48 ◼ ► don't anticipate really playing PS five much, but I am fascinated by it. I like I like the design.
00:09:54 ◼ ► It is a sort of a big box. But the thing that fascinates me are the controllers. They're
00:10:00 ◼ ► effectively they're standalone devices. And with, you know, they're standalone computers, right?
00:10:06 ◼ ► It is sort of it, the overall arc of everything has been going towards everything is becoming
00:10:12 ◼ ► its own computer, right? And in the same way that like your AirPods are each standalone computers.
00:10:19 ◼ ► Yeah, the maybe this was true for the PS four controllers to some degree. I don't think so,
00:10:28 ◼ ► Yeah. And the very neatest thing that they do is the trigger buttons have a lot of pull,
00:10:35 ◼ ► there's a lot of distance that you can pull them in. And when they're connected, the software can
00:10:42 ◼ ► give them dynamic resistance. So like you can press them and it's like pressing a gas pedal
00:10:49 ◼ ► where you get more resistance, the more you press, or it could be something like at a certain point,
00:10:56 ◼ ► you get some resistance. And then when you push past it, it's like a burst, you know, you feel
00:11:01 ◼ ► like this tremendous haptic feedback. It's long story short, it is the most interesting haptic
00:11:13 ◼ ► announced 3d touch, Nintendo announced the those demos where they were showing the wiimotes. Maybe
00:11:19 ◼ ► it wasn't the wiimotes. Maybe it was already the switch controllers, pouring like making it feel
00:11:23 ◼ ► like you're pouring ice into a glass. And there was this whole optimism around tactile interfaces
00:11:28 ◼ ► that sort of just disappeared until somebody started demonstrating these controllers. Yeah.
00:11:33 ◼ ► Yeah. Jonas has the new Spider Man game and said it's awesome for the web shooters because it's it
00:11:38 ◼ ► once you get used to it. He said it's really, really cool where a tiny pole is a short web
00:11:43 ◼ ► and a long pole is long web, but you get this haptic feedback that makes it feel like you don't
00:12:02 ◼ ► oh, yeah, matrix demo they made. Yeah, that starts to make me interested in that next generation of
00:12:06 ◼ ► John Greenewald Oh, absolutely. But I also think that that demo gets to sort of my takeaway with
00:12:14 ◼ ► Unity's purchase of Weta Digital, which is the confluence of real time graphics and scenery being
00:12:24 ◼ ► produced by game engines, and movie special effects, which obviously take a long time. And I
00:12:32 ◼ ► know, you know, it's not exactly the same thing in that movies are always going to press the limit.
00:12:37 ◼ ► And because they can do things not in real time, but you could obviously do the final render and
00:12:45 ◼ ► take, you know, however long you want to render every frame, but it's getting to the point where
00:12:50 ◼ ► you could do, well, let's just fill this in for now, in real time and do incredibly dynamic stuff.
00:13:00 ◼ ► Jared: Famously, ILM is the volume, I think they use for The Mandalorian and other shows where it's
00:13:09 ◼ ► I forget what the small one's called, Walnut or something, where you can just do it around
00:13:11 ◼ ► somebody's head. And that mixes real time with classical special effects. And that just needs
00:13:21 ◼ ► the way photography has evolved, right? Like, just, you know, in the film era, you'd take pictures,
00:13:27 ◼ ► hope they were exposed properly, you know, just take them into a dark room and develop them and
00:13:34 ◼ ► see what they looked like and hope they were the best. And now, you know, in the digital era,
00:13:38 ◼ ► everybody can see their photos as you go. It's the same sort of thing with VFX and this sort of
00:13:45 ◼ ► thing where you, you know, if you can do anything in real time, as you do it, you just get it's like
00:13:51 ◼ ► you're, you can play with it live and say, Oh, why don't we, you know, change the focal length
00:13:55 ◼ ► on this? Why don't we, instead of swooping the camera in, why don't we do something more subtle
00:14:04 ◼ ► Jared Ranere Yeah, even apples, you know, Apple, because of their silicon can do so much real time
00:14:08 ◼ ► in the camera that nobody else can do. And now that we have basically effectively ProRes on those
00:14:13 ◼ ► camera systems, you can fix almost any problem and cinematic mode lets you change the focal point
00:14:19 ◼ ► while you're doing it after you're doing it. It's an unbelievable shift in technology that I think
00:14:26 ◼ ► we don't appreciate always because it happens so step by step. We went from like portrait mode to
00:14:30 ◼ ► cinematic mode, and it's going to get better. But it's a huge shift from what you said, like just
00:14:35 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And that is a good example. You know, Apple's insistence, the camera team's insistence
00:14:39 ◼ ► that whatever they do, they do live in the viewfinder. It sort of speaks to the mentality
00:14:50 ◼ ► Yeah, or like the, what did I forget the app, I'm blanking on the app, the app they publish
00:14:54 ◼ ► separately that lets you swap out backgrounds. It is unbelievable what you can do in that app. Now,
00:14:59 ◼ ► you can replace whole backgrounds with interactive dynamic settings and augmented reality. And it
00:15:20 ◼ ► going back to our previous statement that we're now, you know, in the midst of another COVID surge,
00:15:25 ◼ ► worth the effort. It wasn't like, hey, little too late. Everything's coming up sunny. So it's why
00:15:31 ◼ ► even bother shipping. But iOS 14.5 in February shipped with what has become quite literally,
00:15:38 ◼ ► I mean this sincerely, my very favorite Apple Watch feature, which is that you can unlock
00:15:43 ◼ ► your phone, your iPhone, while wearing an Apple Watch while you're wearing a face mask.
00:15:52 ◼ ► because and a lot of people just said, Well, why can't you do this to begin with, but they originally
00:15:56 ◼ ► set it up so that the iPhone unlocks the Apple Watch, because they figured entering your passcode
00:16:01 ◼ ► on a watch would be annoying. And so making it do both is a huge security problem, because there are
00:16:07 ◼ ► so many intrusions that could happen when you don't have this known state of one unlocks the other
00:16:11 ◼ ► suddenly they go bi directionally. And they were smart because they made it incredibly dependent
00:16:15 ◼ ► on very specific conditions. And they also did things like if if it unlocks, but then it moves
00:16:20 ◼ ► far enough away, as though someone's trying to steal it, it'll just automatically relock. So
00:16:24 ◼ ► there was a huge amount of things they had to think through. But like you, it's almost transparent to
00:16:28 ◼ ► me at this point. It really is. And, you know, it now that we're back, I mean, for months now,
00:16:43 ◼ ► store. So we're, you know, our Philadelphia lifted our citywide mask mandate. And it was so nice,
00:16:49 ◼ ► especially in the hot weather. I mean, but we never lost ours. We've had ours for almost now.
00:16:53 ◼ ► We had we had no masks for a while. And the COVID rate was ridiculously low. And it all seemed well
00:16:59 ◼ ► advised. And now we're back to masks. And I actually went out just the other day because I
00:17:06 ◼ ► didn't think I was going to run any errands. I was wearing one of my mechanical watches and forgot to
00:17:11 ◼ ► put my Apple Watch on before I left to get some groceries. And I didn't need to use my phone much.
00:17:18 ◼ ► I was listening to podcasts. So you know, you can do all of that from from the lock screen. But I
00:17:24 ◼ ► wanted to do something. And I was like, Oh, my God, I forgot what a huge pain in the ass this was
00:17:29 ◼ ► for like an entire year. And I mean, it is my single very favorite feature of Apple Watch.
00:17:43 ◼ ► stroke that I'm about to say, but it to me, it's always good when there's good new features for a
00:17:50 ◼ ► platform that were never envisioned when the platform was created. Right? Like the Mac was
00:17:56 ◼ ► not created with entirely revolutionizing the publishing and desktop publishing industries.
00:18:04 ◼ ► But the fact that it did was a sign of the strength of the platform. Like Apple Watch was
00:18:08 ◼ ► not created with, hey, in case there's ever a pandemic, and everybody has to wear a face mask
00:18:13 ◼ ► whenever they're out in public indoors. It would be cool if you could use the watch as an
00:18:24 ◼ ► Jared Ranere: the whole security works off having three point like it needs both eyes and the nose
00:18:28 ◼ ► to get sufficient facial geometry to actually authenticate you it'd be like only getting the
00:18:33 ◼ ► top part of your fingerprint, it just doesn't have enough information to securely understand that it's
00:18:37 ◼ ► you. So now when you're attempting to face ID, it sees it can't get the other part of geometry. So
00:18:43 ◼ ► it throws over to the watch. And if the watch is there, it verifies and comes back. So it maintains
00:18:47 ◼ ► a good level of security while giving you back a good amount of convenience, which is always that
00:18:51 ◼ ► huge war between the two. Overall, it still is poorly timed for the face ID era that two years
00:19:00 ◼ ► of the face ID era have been during the COVID and the face masking, right. So we had the iPhone 10
00:19:06 ◼ ► year, the 10 s year, the iPhone beginning of the 11 11 that was late 2019 12. So four years, about
00:19:20 ◼ ► two of the four years have been face mask era. And it also sucks to say, Well, the answer is to buy a
00:19:26 ◼ ► $400 digital watch, right on top of your this iPhone SE instead of an iPhone, right, you know,
00:19:33 ◼ ► but it's, you know, it's unfortunate, and it's but it's it really has made a tremendous, tremendous
00:19:40 ◼ ► difference in just daily hassle. It really makes it as invisible as face ID. I think Apple doesn't
00:19:46 ◼ ► parts been there, like a lot of companies parts been their phones, like they just put it together
00:19:49 ◼ ► over what they have at hand, and they ship it as a new model. And Apple doesn't do that every phone
00:19:53 ◼ ► they make is two or three years of effort. So the phones that they've been putting out these last
00:19:58 ◼ ► two years, they were completely planned before this whole like, I know rumors make it sound like
00:20:03 ◼ ► Apple still making up their mind about everything the day before it ships, but doesn't work that way
00:20:06 ◼ ► at all. They were committed to all of these products years ago, and we're not going to see the
00:20:11 ◼ ► post COVID Apple for another year or so. Yeah. And you know, let's fingers crossed, knock on wood,
00:20:17 ◼ ► it's hope that COVID really does sort of fade away. I don't think it's going to disappear. But
00:20:21 ◼ ► let's say it fades away and becomes sort of a background part of our lives. This is a good
00:20:25 ◼ ► feature going forward anyway, because I have at least one regular df reader who is I believe he's
00:20:32 ◼ ► a surgeon, but he definitely works in a hospital. And he, you know, has been a thoughtful emailer
00:20:37 ◼ ► to me over the years. And when the iPhone 10 first came out, wrote me a really nice email and said,
00:20:42 ◼ ► "This really sucks for me because I spend an awful lot of my day with a surgical mask on and I cannot
00:20:48 ◼ ► unlock my phone." I'm pretty sure he can wear a watch. Probably can't wear a watch while he's
00:20:52 ◼ ► in surgery, but there's a lot of the day where he can, you know, there are a lot of medical
00:20:56 ◼ ► professionals who even when before COVID and let's say after COVID fades into the background,
00:21:05 ◼ ► Yeah, well, you know, my dream is that they just get their crap together and they have enough from
00:21:10 ◼ ► voice identification, facial geometry, touch identification, gait analysis, that they can just
00:21:15 ◼ ► keep our phone unlocked if they're fairly certain it's us. And then only challenges. So they really,
00:21:18 ◼ ► I'm tired of being forced to activate my own phone, John, that should be the phone's job.
00:21:27 ◼ ► you know, over the last two years been working on just letting Face ID work while you wear a mask,
00:21:33 ◼ ► right? Because yeah, as a, just without getting, I have no idea how Face ID actually works other
00:21:41 ◼ ► than the very, very basics, right? Like I certainly don't understand the engineering of it at all. I'm
00:21:46 ◼ ► sure it's quite complicated, you know, and it's been out for five years. We, everybody seems to
00:21:51 ◼ ► still treat it as probably more secure than Touch ID. So they've done a good job. But just
00:21:59 ◼ ► as a reasonable ballpark idea, if a human being can recognize another human being while they're
00:22:08 ◼ ► wearing a mask, like if I can tell, "Hey, that's my wife, Amy, while she's wearing a mask." In
00:22:17 ◼ ► Yeah, they're all Lois Lane though. You put on a pair of glasses and suddenly they can't tell you
00:22:20 ◼ ► Superman. So in theory, Face ID could just work on its own with a mask. It's just that the
00:22:26 ◼ ► implementations and I think right down to the sensors, I think it's not just software, but down
00:22:31 ◼ ► to hardware are based on seeing everything from your eyes to the mouth, you know, if not the chin
00:22:39 ◼ ► and the shape of your chin and stuff like that. So it would take a rejiggering, but it's probably not
00:22:45 ◼ ► at this point. I don't think it would be a wasted effort. I really don't. No, it's just, it's getting
00:22:49 ◼ ► enough data. It's having enough points of a fingerprint. It's getting enough points of facial
00:22:53 ◼ ► geometry that the adversarial, because the whole thing is you don't want to let people in who
00:22:57 ◼ ► aren't you, but you don't want to stop you from getting in. And the way adversarial neural networks
00:23:02 ◼ ► work is you basically have like a Batman network that is in charge of protecting the device. And
00:23:07 ◼ ► you have a Joker network that's in charge of penetrating the device. And that trains the Batman
00:23:12 ◼ ► algorithm to better and better defend it. And your face can change and it allows for a large amount
00:23:17 ◼ ► of change and it keeps updating the data points over time. But once you start covering a large
00:23:22 ◼ ► portion of your head, there's just not enough data. It's like having half a fingerprint. So they'd
00:23:27 ◼ ► have to sort of figure out another way to get enough data that it'd be secure enough to keep
00:23:31 ◼ ► people out. Otherwise the same people would be like, okay, now it's fraternal twins as well as
00:23:34 ◼ ► identical twins that can get into it. And then it's all a problem. Right. But they did, you know,
00:23:37 ◼ ► and then when they first announced it, they said things like, hey, sometimes you wear glasses,
00:23:40 ◼ ► sometimes you don't, you might have a beard, you might shave your beard, you might grow a beard,
00:23:45 ◼ ► etc. and so forth. And they anticipated those things. It'd be interesting if face masks
00:23:52 ◼ ► Yeah. Because I also think, again, even in the optimistic scenario where COVID fades into the
00:23:58 ◼ ► background, one thing I think has permanently changed here in the West is the sort of stigma,
00:24:04 ◼ ► not even sort of, the actual stigma that we have had against public face mask wearing pre-COVID.
00:24:11 ◼ ► I think that's forever gone. I think even if in the ideal situation where COVID literally just
00:24:16 ◼ ► fades away over the next two, three years, I think we've forever broken that stigma and that when
00:24:22 ◼ ► cold and flu season hits, people will go out and whether it's to protect themselves or because they
00:24:29 ◼ ► feel like they have a sniffle or something like that, that will be more like Japan and other parts
00:24:34 ◼ ► of Asia where that's, it's just perfectly natural to see people wearing face masks, you know,
00:24:38 ◼ ► medical face masks in public. So it's, whatever Apple can do in that regard, I don't think would
00:24:44 ◼ ► be wasted even in the optimistic scenario where COVID fades away. Well, I mean, like everyone who
00:24:50 ◼ ► goes to events gets sick the week afterwards. That's like a known thing. It wasn't COVID,
00:24:54 ◼ ► but it was something. You know, knock on wood, that has never happened to me. In all the years
00:24:59 ◼ ► I've been doing it, I never once came home from like a Macworld Expo or WWDC and caught something.
00:25:05 ◼ ► And it's not that I never get sick or never get a cold. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's,
00:25:11 ◼ ► it could just be dumb luck. I don't know. But I know a lot of people that happens to a lot of
00:25:19 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, like a tradition for some people. But I don't know, it's never happened to me. But again,
00:25:24 ◼ ► knock on wood that, you know, won't happen in the future. All right, on to March. The HomePod was
00:25:33 ◼ ► Pete; So, they canceled the full-size HomePod and said, "We're going to focus on the HomePod Mini."
00:25:39 ◼ ► The HomePod Mini does seem to be selling well. I saw some sales estimates last week from somebody
00:25:44 ◼ ► that it's, you know, among the best-selling home speaker talk to the dingus devices. And it is a
00:25:52 ◼ ► good device. It's a good device for the price and it sounds good for the price. But it sounds
00:26:05 ◼ ► there are major significant features that only are supported on HomePod. Like, you cannot,
00:26:11 ◼ ► you know, I have a pair of HomePods, I have more full-size HomePods than, you know, a surprising
00:26:18 ◼ ► number of them. I think we have six. I have two in my office, two in the kitchen, and two on our TV.
00:26:31 ◼ ► And, you know, I'm sure there are audio files who might have complaints. It's not, you know,
00:26:36 ◼ ► you could certainly do a lot better. But for us and for how loud we can get it without disturbing
00:26:42 ◼ ► other people in the house, we never get, you know, never need to go past around 70% volume
00:26:56 ◼ ► Pete; Well, but I mean, I know what it's like to actually have like, I've been in rooms with
00:27:06 ◼ ► Pete; But I really like it. But you can't do that with the iPad or HomePod minis. And even if you
00:27:11 ◼ ► could, like, so the feature isn't even supported. And even if you could, I believe it's still not
00:27:24 ◼ ► Pete; So that's really weird that they have this great support for using a pair of HomePods as
00:27:30 ◼ ► Apple TV output and have even added features that let you use them as the audio output for your TV,
00:27:38 ◼ ► even when you're using another source, like an HDMI source. So like, you could be playing your
00:27:49 ◼ ► Pete; But you, you know, now they're canceled. You can't get them. I mean, what a weird
00:27:55 ◼ ► failure on Apple's part. And I put in my notes that to me, it's more expensive, it's a more
00:28:02 ◼ ► expensive product than you even think as a $350 or $399 and you, you know, while they were on sale,
00:28:08 ◼ ► you could sometimes find them on sale for like 300 bucks. But to me, one HomePod was never the
00:28:14 ◼ ► product. The real product has always been a pair. And that's why I have pairs of them in every room
00:28:19 ◼ ► where I have them. And that it's sort of like a single HomePod is really a half of a set of
00:28:30 ◼ ► Pete; The failure of this product is so curious to me, because I really think it's a terrific
00:28:35 ◼ ► product. And usually, for any company, but Apple in particular, because they usually don't fail
00:28:41 ◼ ► through lack of marketing effort or advertising panache. It's usually, you know, an Apple product
00:28:49 ◼ ► that does not succeed is because there's something, you know, it's actually not that great a product.
00:28:57 ◼ ► ground though, where like, like with the iPod HiFi, where there are people who will spend,
00:29:01 ◼ ► again, millions of dollars on audio equipment. But there's also people who think that any
00:29:05 ◼ ► amount of money is too much for audio equipment. And Apple spent so long, like, I believe it was
00:29:09 ◼ ► five years developing the HomePod way before the Amazon, you know, smart speakers and the Google
00:29:14 ◼ ► smart speakers came on the market. And they just wanted this, they just wanted to solve this
00:29:18 ◼ ► problem. They make all these audio products, they have iPods, they have iTunes, Apple Music,
00:29:22 ◼ ► all these things. And most people don't have good sound in most of the rooms in their house.
00:29:26 ◼ ► And they wanted you to literally be able to just drop a box anywhere in the room and it would sound
00:29:30 ◼ ► great throughout the entire room, no matter where you were standing in the room. And because it
00:29:34 ◼ ► didn't have a screen, they just thought, okay, we'll just have Siri be the control. And while
00:29:38 ◼ ► they were getting all that together, all these smart speakers came out, and the entire market
00:29:42 ◼ ► shifted to a commodity, mostly assistant based thing, which this wasn't, but was suddenly being
00:29:47 ◼ ► classified and pitted against. And at that price point, it wasn't like high enough to really attract,
00:29:53 ◼ ► you know, like Mac Pro level customer interest, and it wasn't low enough to attract like the
00:29:58 ◼ ► iPod level interest and it kind of, I'm just surprised they canceled it so quickly, because
00:30:06 ◼ ► Right. I guess that's what I'm most surprised by that they canceled it. Why not just keep
00:30:11 ◼ ► selling it? And I guess that we don't know. But it seems like there was a story at some point
00:30:18 ◼ ► during the year that somebody figured out that even when you were after they were canceled,
00:30:22 ◼ ► and people were buying like the last ones available, you could do some, I don't know if
00:30:27 ◼ ► it was serial number tracking or just copyright date on the box, but that they were all effectively
00:30:32 ◼ ► from the initial batch that they, you know, manufactured a batch and sold them until they
00:30:38 ◼ ► were out, but they weren't still making them maybe that they had made them all in an initial run or
00:30:44 ◼ ► something like, you know, close to that. And when they were done selling them, they were done selling
00:30:53 ◼ ► Yeah. And the other weird thing about Apple audio in general, I think you pointed this out for the
00:30:57 ◼ ► original AirPods is that Apple doesn't sell them for an exorbitant amount of margin. And,
00:31:02 ◼ ► but people look at them and say, they don't sound the value of the price. Like they don't sound as
00:31:07 ◼ ► good as $150 wired headphones or a $500 wired speaker, but that's because like the there's
00:31:14 ◼ ► Apple chipsets in there. There's there are sensors in there. There's a whole bunch of computational
00:31:20 ◼ ► stuff that you're paying for that has nothing to do with the audio really, but does inflate the
00:31:24 ◼ ► bill of goods. So even Apple selling them at cost is still way more than if they had no smart stuff
00:31:29 ◼ ► in them at all. Yeah. I don't know. So here's, I don't know. I don't know what they could be
00:31:33 ◼ ► replacing them with. They don't tend to change product names. I mean, it's not like after they
00:31:38 ◼ ► discontinued it, they were going to rename the HomePod mini HomePod and say, that's the new
00:31:44 ◼ ► HomePod, what we used to call the HomePod mini, but it is weird. It still is weird that they have
00:31:48 ◼ ► a HomePod mini and there's no HomePod regular. I mean, which I hope, you know, and maybe it's
00:31:54 ◼ ► just wishful thinking means that something else is coming and that they feel like they've figured out,
00:32:00 ◼ ► you know, I guess it's price. I don't know. You know, that if they can, can they make something
00:32:05 ◼ ► that's HomePod quality sound and features for $200 a speaker? I don't know. Yeah. There's like,
00:32:13 ◼ ► there's like three rumors. I think one is a HomePod 2.0. That's exactly that the other is a
00:32:17 ◼ ► HomePod with like a screen that would do that center stage technology so that you could have
00:32:23 ◼ ► calls on it very easily for the kitchen. And then a HomePod Apple TV hybrid that would be basically
00:32:27 ◼ ► like a big soundbar that you could have a whole home theater set up on. And I want all of these
00:32:32 ◼ ► things, Jon. Well, let's see. We've got a whole year ahead of us. There was a, in March still,
00:32:39 ◼ ► there was the Intel goes long ad, which is where Intel hired a former Apple spokesperson,
00:32:47 ◼ ► Justin Long, who was the IMA Mac to do some cringy. I think that's, I think that's being
00:32:54 ◼ ► generous even. Yes. Yeah. And a point, my point to put this on the list isn't so much to make fun
00:33:01 ◼ ► of the ads, but as where else to speak about the general transition from Intel to Apple Silicon.
00:33:09 ◼ ► It almost feels like they're so bad. There had to be like an executive at Intel that was really
00:33:14 ◼ ► angry and they were only made to make that executive feel better. That's the only way I
00:33:18 ◼ ► can explain these ads. Yeah, I think so. Or, or as somebody said at the time when I was writing about
00:33:25 ◼ ► them, that the target for the ad wasn't consumers. The target for those ads were OEMs who make PCs,
00:33:33 ◼ ► you know, that it was like Intel's sort of given a little. That's the thing. So these were like
00:33:39 ◼ ► such like just from a pure marketing point of view, these were incredibly bad ads because
00:33:47 ◼ ► which is Intel not only saying we're Pepsi now no longer Coke. Like they were completely seeding
00:33:53 ◼ ► top of the market mind share to Apple, but they were also saying that they were a commodity whose
00:34:07 ◼ ► processors as well. It was like the worst self-own I've ever seen in a, in an Intel marketing
00:34:12 ◼ ► campaign. It has been interesting watching the sort of sentiment sink in over the year,
00:34:28 ◼ ► there was a widespread, well, there can't be that great because they're just cell phone processors.
00:34:33 ◼ ► Yes. Right. And then they came out and everybody who actually tested it with their eyes open was
00:34:40 ◼ ► like these blow away the state of the art in comparable laptop PCs. And watching the rest of
00:34:49 ◼ ► the sort of PC half of the media industry sort of come to grips with this has been satisfying.
00:34:59 ◼ ► Yeah. It's like, it was like watching Android get, sort of understand that what was happening
00:35:06 ◼ ► Because one of the things I've always felt, you know, literally always, I mean, going back to the
00:35:12 ◼ ► nineties, even when the Mac and Apple were in trouble that design wise, Mac OS was always the
00:35:18 ◼ ► superior operating system to windows, but obviously that's subjective and a point of taste. Whereas
00:35:25 ◼ ► the actual performance of these chips and certainly their performance per watt is objective
00:35:32 ◼ ► and it is objectively, you know, years ahead of where the x86 platform is and likely will be.
00:35:40 ◼ ► And so it doesn't, it's not subjective. There's no taste to be accounted for. If what you want to do
00:36:16 ◼ ► you had to buy sun hardware or a Silicon graphics or companies like that. But those were
00:36:22 ◼ ► 15, $20,000 Unix workstations in 1990 something dollars, right? It, it, it terms of the consumers,
00:36:34 ◼ ► Jared Ranere: No, it's only analogous to smartphones where if you wanted the performance
00:36:38 ◼ ► of Apple Silicon, you have to get the whole package. And now if you want the performance
00:36:45 ◼ ► All right. All right. Let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. It's our good friends at
00:36:50 ◼ ► Linode. Oh, boy, do I love Linode. Linode is where I host Daring Fireball. I would host there,
00:37:03 ◼ ► Thank you. But that's it. We're done. I'm not moving Daring Fireball anywhere. I could not be
00:37:07 ◼ ► happier. It's really great. Go to Linode.com/thetalkshow. And you can see why Linode has
00:37:14 ◼ ► been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and Trust Radius. They have
00:37:20 ◼ ► award winning support offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to every level
00:37:27 ◼ ► of user. This isn't just something you get when you get like a big money, high level account,
00:37:33 ◼ ► you get like a one of their nano accounts for like five or $10 a month, you can still get real human
00:37:38 ◼ ► being on support all day, any day, you want to do it on New Year's Eve, somebody's going to be there.
00:37:43 ◼ ► And they just have such great ease of use and setup. It is clear why developers have been
00:37:48 ◼ ► trusting Linode for projects both big and small since 2003. You can deploy your entire application
00:37:55 ◼ ► stack with their one click app marketplace. Or if you want, you can build it all from scratch
00:38:02 ◼ ► the old fashioned way and manage everything yourself with supported centralized tools like
00:38:07 ◼ ► Terraform. They have the best price performance value for all compute instances, including GPUs,
00:38:13 ◼ ► as well as block storage, Kubernetes and their upcoming bare metal release. They make cloud
00:38:19 ◼ ► computing fast, simple and affordable. Visit linode.com slash the talk show, create a free
00:38:26 ◼ ► account using your Google or GitHub account or just use your email address. But by visiting
00:38:32 ◼ ► linode.com slash the talk show to start you get $100 in free credit 100 bucks. My thanks to Linode
00:38:39 ◼ ► for hosting my site and for sponsoring the show. We got to keep going to your kept going. April
00:38:46 ◼ ► now April is where Apple got busy. They had the spring loaded event where they announced,
00:38:52 ◼ ► let's see air tags, they add new features for Apple podcasts. We might as well put the hardware
00:39:04 ◼ ► Pete Turner>> Yeah, we got a purple iPhone, which then disappeared, right? So it was only like
00:39:12 ◼ ► purple was not among the colors in the fall. So it was sort of a six month thing. Air tags, I guess
00:39:19 ◼ ► here's as fine a place as any to talk about, right? Where there's a bit of a pushback now where the
00:39:26 ◼ ► sort of FUD is coming out that they're being used to track people and it's reasonable, right? Like,
00:39:31 ◼ ► I don't say that with too big of a pair of dick quotes around it. It is reasonable for people to
00:39:38 ◼ ► say, "Hey, can this be used for bad purposes?" Maliciously, yeah. My understanding, because this
00:39:45 ◼ ► was a product that had been rumored for quite a while before it came out. And I don't think I'm
00:39:51 ◼ ► alone in thinking this, that the product was finished before, hardware wise, before Apple
00:39:57 ◼ ► was ready to announce it. And I think part of it was that they were still working through all of
00:40:03 ◼ ► the, as you said before, like threat scenarios, right? Like in sort of imagining how could this
00:40:09 ◼ ► be abused and what can we do to prevent that sort of thinking. But there's some stories now about
00:40:16 ◼ ► people using them to track cars they intend to steal. I think there was a story last week about
00:40:23 ◼ ► somebody who bought like a used car and then found a tracker in the wheel well, which somebody was
00:40:30 ◼ ► speculating. I think it was Benedict Evans that maybe the idea is that the car dealers put them in
00:40:36 ◼ ► and for whatever reason and forgot to take it out. But it seems like just a handful. It doesn't
00:40:44 ◼ ► really seem like anything has actually gone wrong with them other than a few anecdotes,
00:40:50 ◼ ► but it doesn't seem like there's any sort of widespread reason to be fearful of the existence
00:40:56 ◼ ► of air tags on the market. Yeah, it's interesting because whenever Apple enters a new market,
00:41:02 ◼ ► people suddenly find all these problems with the market. And that's because Apple attracts so much
00:41:05 ◼ ► attention to that market. I mean, there were tiles for years. Samsung announced their tracker before
00:41:11 ◼ ► Apple did. And none of those have anything as far as I can tell anything at all that will help you
00:41:17 ◼ ► with stalker or tracking prevention. You know, there's just none of that. You just buy them and
00:41:21 ◼ ► use them. But nobody notices because those products don't make a lot of noise. But Apple is always big,
00:41:26 ◼ ► big headlines. And I think that's great. I think Apple should be subject to tons of scrutiny.
00:41:30 ◼ ► I do wish that everyone would hold all these companies that can potentially cause as much
00:41:34 ◼ ► harm to the same level of scrutiny, but it is what it is. And this again is nothing that people who
00:41:40 ◼ ► are in surveillance care about at all because they've been able to get $50 real GPS trackers
00:41:46 ◼ ► off Amazon and previously off Radio Shack in places for years. But what this does is it attracts
00:41:51 ◼ ► a whole bunch of people who'd never thought of it before. And they're like, "Oh, I guess previously
00:41:55 ◼ ► I would have dropped a GPS tracker or I would have thrown a cheap iPhone SE into somebody's bag or
00:42:00 ◼ ► car and tracked them that way. But now I can get a four pack for a hundred bucks and I can just do
00:42:04 ◼ ► it." And I wouldn't have encouraged them before. So there's a level of the worst, like the dumbest
00:42:09 ◼ ► possible criminal element getting involved in it. But they've got all these things. Like, it's like,
00:42:14 ◼ ► anytime I get in my car, it chirps. Like it audibly chirps every single time I get in my car.
00:42:18 ◼ ► It's annoying, but like, I'm like, that's great because somebody else may not know there's a
00:42:22 ◼ ► tracker in there. So I think we always have to balance that these things are tools. Tools can
00:42:28 ◼ ► help us do wonderful things. They can also be horribly misused. How much value is there to these
00:42:37 ◼ ► Pete: And there's a sort of inevitability, right? Like, you know, there was, just go back to
00:42:42 ◼ ► cameras. There was certainly, and still is, you know, I think Joanna and I talked about this on
00:42:47 ◼ ► my show last week, that the growing number of cameras everywhere is certainly reason to be
00:42:53 ◼ ► concerned, but not, or worried, you know, or skeptical, you know, and to think about it and
00:43:01 ◼ ► to know where they are. But it's not like there's anything, we're not putting this genie back in the
00:43:05 ◼ ► bottle, right? Well, there were articles about camera phones in changing rooms for a long time
00:43:10 ◼ ► when they first came out. You know, I thought about it last week, too. I don't think I mentioned
00:43:15 ◼ ► it with Joanna, but I thought about it with, you know, having a teenage son. There's so many things
00:43:28 ◼ ► Pete; No one will ever know about. And you'd have to be a complete moron to do any of them today
00:43:34 ◼ ► because it would be caught on camera. Jared; Why are you limping away from the science lab,
00:43:43 ◼ ► You know, nothing that I think I would have gone to prison for, but, you know, things that—
00:43:59 ◼ ► Pete; I have a couple and, you know, I haven't, but it's part of the whole COVID second season
00:44:07 ◼ ► that we just haven't, I don't go many places, you know, and so, I don't know yet. You know,
00:44:14 ◼ ► I have one in my briefcase/laptop, over the shoulder laptop bag. We took two trips over
00:44:19 ◼ ► the summer while things were looking up and so I had a night, you know, an air tag in my bag.
00:44:24 ◼ ► But, you know, two vacations where it's like I took the bag to the airport, put it on a plane,
00:44:36 ◼ ► then took it home and that's it. And otherwise, my laptop bag hasn't left my house since March of 2020,
00:44:44 ◼ ► you know, two times. So, I'm glad there's an air tag in there, but it hasn't really, you know.
00:44:50 ◼ ► Jared; I think that was part of the reason that Apple didn't rush to get them out because they
00:44:54 ◼ ► knew they were releasing them under conditions that were less than ideal to show their value.
00:44:58 ◼ ► Jared; Like you, I didn't use cellular data for months. I didn't, I forgot what my credit card
00:45:03 ◼ ► pin was. And I have no idea where my gear bag was for a whole year. I had to end up actually using
00:45:09 ◼ ► an air tag recently to find the damn thing in my own house because it was in a closet I'd forgotten
00:45:13 ◼ ► about. Pete; Right. And it's like, I can't, you know, the things I still lose aren't really
00:45:19 ◼ ► practical for air tags. I have a pair of shoes. We went out to a nice dinner here on Christmas Eve
00:45:26 ◼ ► and I wanted to wear a pair of shoes that I'm not sure if I've worn since March of 2020.
00:45:32 ◼ ► Pete; And it's like, and they weren't in my closet and I'm like, I know I put these somewhere
00:45:36 ◼ ► dumb. Where the hell did I put them? Well, I don't know. I didn't have air tags in them. You can't
00:45:40 ◼ ► put air tags in shoes. So, I had to hunt around and I figured out they were in the coat closet
00:45:45 ◼ ► by the front door for some crazy reason. But yeah, I feel like air tags are one of those things that
00:45:50 ◼ ► we kind of have to really wait for COVID to subside whenever that's going to be to really
00:45:56 ◼ ► Jared; Because I am the person who'd like get up from the restaurant at CES and walk away and
00:46:00 ◼ ► forget about my bag. I'm going to have to go running back and hope that it's still there.
00:46:03 ◼ ► And I was looking really, I was looking really forward to actually having not have to worry
00:46:06 ◼ ► about that anymore. But like you said, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't seen 20 feet in.
00:46:16 ◼ ► Jared; Which goes off with my cars in the garage. Like, I go upstairs from the garage and my car's
00:46:24 ◼ ► Jared; I have in my wallet, well, I'm going to tell everybody now, now they're going to know how
00:46:28 ◼ ► to pull them out. But I don't care. They're in my car, my wallet, my gear bag, extra set of keys.
00:46:34 ◼ ► And I forget where the last one is probably on something done, like duct tape to my Apple TV
00:46:44 ◼ ► Pete; What else? There was the, also announced at this event was the changes to Apple podcasts
00:46:58 ◼ ► I forget what other changes were there. But as far as I can tell, the subscribing to podcasts
00:47:05 ◼ ► through Apple podcasts, it does not seem to be a big thing yet, if it ever will be, but maybe
00:47:15 ◼ ► Jared; I think it's just fundamentally different. Like, when, because podcasts are so distributed
00:47:21 ◼ ► for good and for bad, like, podcast discovery is really hard because they're not on the same
00:47:25 ◼ ► platform, but it means that you can use your podcast client of choice and people had to
00:47:30 ◼ ► wrestle with, you know, I want to listen to Horace DeGueux's podcast, but I don't like using
00:47:34 ◼ ► Apple podcasts. So what am I going to do? Or maybe like you and Ben, you know, they want to listen
00:47:39 ◼ ► to you and then is there a version on Apple podcasts? Can we get it that way? What if I have
00:47:44 ◼ ► an Android phone as well? Then what do I like? I think it creates, it's creator economy through
00:47:50 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, and it, it's like the App Store works because if you really want to have an app and you
00:47:57 ◼ ► want to monetize it, it's the only way. And if you want to have a podcast that is monetized through
00:48:04 ◼ ► subscriptions, it's not the only way. And what if you use another way, spoiler upcoming,
00:48:16 ◼ ► upcoming sponsor read, but if you use memberful or something like that, or, you know, like Ben has,
00:48:24 ◼ ► I was going to say Ben and I, but I, I haven't done any part of it, but Ben has built this system
00:48:29 ◼ ► for Stortecory called Passport, which we also use for dithering. And you just do it all through the
00:48:36 ◼ ► web. All we do is pay Stripe, you know, like three or just under 3%. And there's a, you sign into our
00:48:45 ◼ ► website and if you want to subscribe in any podcast player, including Apple podcasts, it's one link
00:48:52 ◼ ► away once you're signed in as a paid subscriber, there's, there's really no reason for us to use
00:49:05 ◼ ► it would be a no brainer, but they don't. And it is where I have a ton. I do look at my analytics
00:49:11 ◼ ► through Libsyn for the show and by far and away, the two clients that really matter the most for
00:49:17 ◼ ► this show are Apple podcasts, but Apple podcasts is in second place. For me, it's Overcast is
00:49:23 ◼ ► number one. I forget, it might be like 60/40 or something like that. Or among those two 60/40,
00:49:36 ◼ ► in any client. And so it just seems like a weird thing to want to lock into. It's, you know, I
00:49:42 ◼ ► don't blame Apple for trying, but it's, it just seems like there's a lot of yada, yada, yada in
00:49:48 ◼ ► the middle of the conception of why, why is this an appealing platform for a subscription based
00:49:55 ◼ ► podcast to use? Right? There's just, you got it. There's, there's some dot, dot, dot in the middle
00:50:00 ◼ ► that Apple hasn't filled in. And maybe for some categories, their, their share is so phenomenal.
00:50:06 ◼ ► Like maybe it's 90% of home improvement podcasts. I have no idea. Yeah, I don't know. And then maybe
00:50:11 ◼ ► it might make more sense, but for tech, it is so distributed. And then you have like Pocket Casts
00:50:15 ◼ ► on for people who use Android primarily. It's extra work. It ends up being at least as far as
00:50:20 ◼ ► I can tell. Yeah. And you know, for us with dithering, it just doesn't seem like there's any
00:50:25 ◼ ► reason to use it. It would just complicate things unnecessarily because people who use Apple podcasts
00:50:31 ◼ ► can subscribe as is pretty easily, maybe not quite as easily as doing it in the app, but you know,
00:50:39 ◼ ► pretty close to it if, if, if you'd know how to use a web browser, which, you know, it's,
00:50:43 ◼ ► it doesn't seem like a big ask. Yeah. And your audience is tech savvy. It's almost opted in
00:50:48 ◼ ► tech savvy audience. Well, and that's true. I mean, I think that overcast numbers speak to that,
00:50:53 ◼ ► right? That it's, it's not that overcast is hard to use, but the fact that you even know what
00:51:05 ◼ ► may was another big month. We could start, I guess, with the hardware that was announced in April,
00:51:10 ◼ ► 24 inch M1 IMAX. Yeah. Yeah. I thought the most interesting thing about those is that they sort
00:51:18 ◼ ► of redefined the way people thought about M1 because previously they were only looking at
00:51:22 ◼ ► its efficiency in terms of battery life. And I don't think people realize that that efficiency
00:51:26 ◼ ► also taught also defines the design that you can make for the enclosure. Apple had to literally
00:51:31 ◼ ► have these bulbous behinds on the back of IMAX for years. And I still don't think right now,
00:51:37 ◼ ► like if you took Alder Lake, it would even fit properly in the standard IMAX enclosure. I know
00:51:42 ◼ ► Dave 2D's video, he couldn't get the thing without water cooling into a mini tower. So just the
00:51:46 ◼ ► prospect that Apple would have with that next generation of Intel chips that were like using
00:51:51 ◼ ► excessive voltage to try to catch up with AMD, it wouldn't fit in there. And because they're using
00:51:55 ◼ ► Apple chips, they could make this entirely new, really flat, flat IMAX design. Yeah. I, I still
00:52:02 ◼ ► think, and you know, because at the time that the M that the, and this is the first designed around
00:52:09 ◼ ► the M1 Mac, right. Which is kind of a neat thing, right? It's cause the, the M1 MacBook Air and
00:52:16 ◼ ► MacBook Pros that shipped in November last year, were all literally the same enclosures as the
00:52:24 ◼ ► Intel ones, which was a strategic thing Apple did to sort of keep the project as secret as possible.
00:52:31 ◼ ► I mean, everybody, including Intel kind of knew that Apple was moving towards moving the Mac to
00:52:44 ◼ ► was the year where they were going to pull the trigger and do it. They wanted to keep it secret
00:52:48 ◼ ► as long as possible. And they therefore kept the hardware right down to the camera, the keyboard,
00:52:58 ◼ ► everything exactly the same. So the first, what can we design around the M1 that we could not do
00:53:05 ◼ ► with Intel? The 24 inch iMac was the first example of that. I mean, and the 24 inch iMac is so crazy
00:53:12 ◼ ► thin and perfect, perfectly rectilinear with no bulb, no, not even like a pimple on the back.
00:53:25 ◼ ► I mean the Core Y from the old MacBook Air, but I don't think it would even power the display.
00:53:28 ◼ ► Right. Right. And, and both fit in there without melting it and satisfy, just merely satisfy as
00:53:38 ◼ ► opposed to completely please them, make them ecstatic over the moon with the performance,
00:53:49 ◼ ► No. I mean that chipset took the MacBook Air from something that barely functioned to something that
00:53:54 ◼ ► was industry leading. And it's the same thing with the iMac. I also think Apple's bandwidth to push
00:53:59 ◼ ► out complete new iMac, sorry, new Mac redesigns is limited. Like we got two this year, and I think
00:54:06 ◼ ► that'll be sort of their pace and they'll stagger using the same containers with creating new designs
00:54:12 ◼ ► every couple of years from now on, just because it seems to take them a long time to get those
00:54:15 ◼ ► things done. It's as good a point to speculate about the future as possible. I mean, it does seem
00:54:23 ◼ ► like they're on a weird cadence, right? Where the easiest product to understand cadence wise is the
00:54:30 ◼ ► iPhone. It is completely annual. And the one year where it wasn't annual was the 4S where they
00:54:38 ◼ ► switched from a June release around WWDC or weeks afterwards to a fall release, which, as far as I
00:54:55 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah. Sadly coincided with Steve Jobs' death, you know, and sort of put a pall over,
00:55:11 ◼ ► come September, there will be an event or October, you know, if something happens and it gets delayed,
00:55:16 ◼ ► you know, mid-September, early October, every single year, there's a new line of iPhones with
00:55:23 ◼ ► a new line of silicon. And that's the way it goes. The Mac schedule, let's see how it works out in
00:55:30 ◼ ► the long run. But, you know, for example, at this point, everything clearly is not annual because we
00:55:36 ◼ ► did not get updates to the MacBook Air or the low-end MacBook Pro or the Mac Mini. All the
00:55:42 ◼ ► stuff that came out in November of last year is still unchanged, you know, it is what it is,
00:55:56 ◼ ► and I know you've been all over it, you know, on your YouTube channel. It seems like it may not be,
00:56:02 ◼ ► you know, even the same calendar. I don't know that we're going to have to wait until November
00:56:12 ◼ ► - Yeah. Well, the extended versions of the Apple, so like the original A series, like they did,
00:56:18 ◼ ► it was very strange. Like they had A5X, A6X, no A7X, A8X, A9X, A10X, no A11X, A12X, A12Z,
00:56:27 ◼ ► no A13X, and then A14X ended up being M1. So that stuff was like on an 18 month, I think, sort of a
00:56:34 ◼ ► average pace. So we might get the same thing here where they're still going to have a new A series
00:56:40 ◼ ► chip every year, every iPhone, but then when they choose to make the new M series chips might vary
00:57:07 ◼ ► And you come out with the regular M1 and then the M1 Pro and M1 Max, which are in very,
00:57:19 ◼ ► very high level lay person's terms, a couple of M1s put together. Obviously you can't do a couple of
00:57:29 ◼ ► them put together simultaneous with the original release. It obviously takes longer and those pro
00:57:36 ◼ ► level versions of the same generation are going to always come out later. So my guess is this spring,
00:57:42 ◼ ► pretty much when we saw the 24 inch iMac last year, we'll see the pro level, whether they call
00:57:51 ◼ ► it iMac Pro or I'm guessing they will, that they'll just say iMac is a 24 inch product with the
00:57:58 ◼ ► regular M1. And then the next one will have the regular M2 and the iMac Pro will be something with
00:58:05 ◼ ► like the M1 Pro and M1 Max that we just got last month or two months ago with the new 14 inch and
00:58:15 ◼ ► 16 inch MacBook Pros. And the really cool thing is because the thermals are so good, they could put
00:58:20 ◼ ► dual M1 Maxes in the highest end model and it would still be drawing less power than the Intel chip.
00:58:26 ◼ ► Yeah. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they do. So with the regular 24 inch iMac,
00:58:37 ◼ ► but effectively it's pretty much just the same chip that's in the other, the original M1 MacBooks
00:58:44 ◼ ► and Mac mini. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not quite the same with the 27 inch, which I'm
00:58:53 ◼ ► guessing 27 inch at this point, even though I thought maybe they'd go to 30 inch, but let's
00:59:02 ◼ ► I wouldn't be surprised if it's not the exact same and limited to exactly what's in the 16 and 14
00:59:17 ◼ ► I think it's just dual M1 Max and the iMac and quad M1 Max and the Mac Pro. And then it's just
00:59:25 ◼ ► Yeah. And somebody had a thing the other day where every product, I think it was a YouTube,
00:59:30 ◼ ► I don't know what it was, but every single product in the world now either has Pro Plus or Max in its
00:59:37 ◼ ► name. And I get it, it's sort of a trend and maybe Apple is sort of spearheading the trend. They've
00:59:44 ◼ ► certainly been on top of the word Pro for decades, but the word Max, M-A-X, as a podcaster is so
01:00:14 ◼ ► as much of a problem on YouTube, although on YouTube you can always put titles up, right?
01:00:41 ◼ ► That's all they do. They just pseudo-random blob, that's the password, that's the product name.
01:00:44 ◼ ► Yeah. So that's my guess is that pretty much around the time we saw the 24-inch regular
01:00:58 ◼ ► What else came out last year? The M1, and we also got our hands on these in May after being
01:01:17 ◼ ► Expectational Debt is they saw Tim Cook take a chip from a Mac and put it in an iPad. And there's
01:01:22 ◼ ► this contingent of iPad owners who have always loved the hardware but wanted it to be a Mac.
01:01:27 ◼ ► And they thought when that chip was moving over, they were getting Mac OS essentially on an iPad.
01:01:32 ◼ ► And it was never going to be that, but for a minute they were like just so excited and then
01:01:37 ◼ ► they realized it's still an iPad of course. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what it is that they
01:01:52 ◼ ► whatever chip iPad Pro. But they're great. And if you're iPad first, it certainly is a great product.
01:02:03 ◼ ► I love it for the screen. I have my MacBook Pro now and it has a mini LED HDR display. And I use
01:02:09 ◼ ► the iPad Pro inside car and I can edit videos. I don't release videos in HDR yet, but I love
01:02:14 ◼ ► to play around with it. And I have like full display HDR on one panel. I'm editing next
01:02:18 ◼ ► to another panel and it's the best thing in the world. It would have cost me tens of thousands
01:02:22 ◼ ► of dollars in the past. Yeah. It's a beautiful display. Center stage is a really neat feature.
01:02:26 ◼ ► It's probably the biggest, hmm. I wonder why they didn't do that with the new M1 Pro and Macs,
01:02:36 ◼ ► MacBook Pros. But I believe it's simply that there's no room for the camera that can be so
01:02:43 ◼ ► super wide angle in the really thin MacBook lids. I really think it comes down to camera hardware,
01:02:49 ◼ ► not some kind of marketing spite that you have to buy an iPad just to get center stage.
01:02:54 ◼ ► And I'm sure we'll get there. Like a lot of the stuff Apple starts off with a couple tests
01:03:02 ◼ ► But it is, it's one of those features that sounds too good to be true. And in practice,
01:03:11 ◼ ► is that usually when we've used it, the iPad is in a magic keyboard case and is therefore in
01:03:19 ◼ ► landscape. And therefore the camera's not at the top center. It's in the middle of the display
01:03:26 ◼ ► to the left. And I don't know what the answer to that is. I don't know that Apple is really ready
01:03:32 ◼ ► to say that the canonical orientation for an iPad is no longer up and down, but left and right.
01:03:44 ◼ ► because they put the smart connector now on the bottom. Like if you're holding it in landscape,
01:03:49 ◼ ► the smart connector now is on the bottom. The Apple pencil charges on the top, and both of
01:03:53 ◼ ► those take up the physical space you'd need to put the camera there. So it's tough, but it should be,
01:03:59 ◼ ► if 2020 and 2020 junior taught us anything, it's that that's the way people are using them.
01:04:06 ◼ ► hopefully, you know, they're aware of it as anybody else. It is a great like zoom device.
01:04:11 ◼ ► We've used it, you know, all of our school meetings. I mean, Jonas is in school this year,
01:04:16 ◼ ► but all the parent stuff is all via zoom. And we just use iPads for that. And it's, you know,
01:04:23 ◼ ► it's nice to actually look good in the in the footage, as opposed to using an old Mac from the
01:04:29 ◼ ► Intel era. It is funny, too. I just we were just watching the news yesterday. We don't watch a lot
01:04:36 ◼ ► of TV news, but something was up and we were watching something and I had an interview with
01:04:39 ◼ ► a local hospital official. And I was like, Oh, I know he's using an old MacBook, I can tell I
01:04:45 ◼ ► could just tell by the bluish tint, everything about it. I was like, I know it's not just a cheap
01:04:50 ◼ ► webcam. It was like that is absolutely the telltale look of Intel era MacBook of some sort.
01:04:56 ◼ ► And it's like, there used to be a time when you could not get on TV looking like that, you know,
01:05:06 ◼ ► with camera quality like that they would just send a crew to your house and actually have a real
01:05:09 ◼ ► camera. Yeah, they have you to find everything but the iOS, I saw the iPhone and the iPad cameras are
01:05:15 ◼ ► really good now except for the orientation. And the MacBook Pro cameras are and the iMac cameras
01:05:20 ◼ ► are really, really good. Yeah, especially because of the orientation. So I think we're beginning to
01:05:24 ◼ ► Apple TV 4k and a new God, you know, who's, uh, you know, angels singing a new remote control,
01:05:32 ◼ ► which I still love. I'm still very, very happy with. I don't have much to say about it. I mean,
01:05:40 ◼ ► are you used to the new place of the Siri or do you? Are you still like me pressing play pause
01:05:43 ◼ ► every once in a while to activate Siri? No, I've totally gotten used to Siri. Okay, my problem is
01:05:49 ◼ ► the power button. And I mentioned this on the show, I think when Ben Thompson was on a few weeks
01:05:54 ◼ ► ago, where my long standing and occasionally mentioned gripe that I could use the Apple TV
01:06:00 ◼ ► power to power everything off by holding power, but could not turn it on was solved with a setting
01:06:08 ◼ ► on my LG TV, go into settings on the LG and you go in and there's something, something and you can
01:06:14 ◼ ► turn on whatever the name of the feature is. I don't know why it wasn't on the by default. It's
01:06:19 ◼ ► nuts to me. But there's something you had, I had to turn on, on the LG TV. And now I can use the
01:06:25 ◼ ► power button on the Siri remote to turn everything on. And even if the HDMI was set to the switch or
01:06:40 ◼ ► Jared: Mine works like 19 out of 20 times. So, yeah, it won't turn on the TV or it won't turn
01:06:44 ◼ ► off the TV. You know, at the time we have the same thing and every single, like the 5% of
01:06:48 ◼ ► times when it doesn't work, it's always Amy, never me, which I wish were the other way around.
01:06:58 ◼ ► Justin No, my problem with the remote is that once I've turned it on, when I first turn it on,
01:07:04 ◼ ► and I use that sort of hidden button, not hidden, but it's sort of meant to be disguised and out of
01:07:10 ◼ ► the way, that power button on the upper right, I suddenly, my brain thinks that's the upper right
01:07:17 ◼ ► button. And then I use that button as the home button instead of the, you know, the actual home
01:07:24 ◼ ► button on the Siri remote, like to just leave whatever app I'm in to go back to the Apple TV
01:07:30 ◼ ► home screen, I hit the power button. And it says, "Oh, you have to press this to turn everything off."
01:07:35 ◼ ► And I'm like, "I don't want to turn everything off." And I'm like, "Oh, it's like something in
01:07:39 ◼ ► my brain just and then I have to, you know, think about it, actually think about it. No,
01:07:50 ◼ ► Jared I don't know, I solve that by using the play pause button to turn things on. I don't
01:07:56 ◼ ► almost never use the power button. But only that button works to turn it on. Like you can't press
01:08:01 ◼ ► any button to turn it on. It's only that one in the middle. And if you forget that and press
01:08:07 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, but overall, I could not be happier with the remote. I love it. I even love it just
01:08:12 ◼ ► as a little thing to hold in my hand. It feels cool, it has a nice weight, it is just a-
01:08:19 ◼ ► Pete It is a very nice object in hand, could not be happier with it. I still feel like they could
01:08:24 ◼ ► have done a better job with the spin thing on the circle, you know, and I know that this was
01:08:31 ◼ ► something that was a source of confusion because it works in some places and then in other places,
01:08:36 ◼ ► it doesn't, but it does register the touch. So if you run your finger in a circle, instead of going
01:08:43 ◼ ► like down, down, down, down, down, down, down in the list, it goes like down, down, down, up,
01:08:50 ◼ ► Jared Well, I mean, like, one of the problems with the Apple TV, like, in my belief is that Apple is
01:08:54 ◼ ► not stringent enough about how things are implemented. And so you have a range of behaviors
01:08:59 ◼ ► across apps, not even including those really shitty, lazy OpenGL apps that Amazon and others
01:09:03 ◼ ► insist on using, but like some of them, you'll press menu and you're thrown right out of the,
01:09:09 ◼ ► I would say the word you did, but then I'll get yelled at by your entire audience, you get thrown
01:09:12 ◼ ► right out of the app. Others, you press menu and you get like, given this little thing saying,
01:09:15 ◼ ► "Do you want to see more episodes? Do you want to continue this episode? Here's information on the
01:09:19 ◼ ► episode." Others, like in YouTube, sometimes pressing that button will clear whatever pop up
01:09:24 ◼ ► is on the screen. In other apps, even if there is a pop up on the screen, throws you out the app
01:09:33 ◼ ► before and after Christmas, a bunch of Christmas movies, and we were looking, and one night we
01:09:38 ◼ ► didn't have anything to watch. We didn't know what to watch and we were surfing around and I said,
01:09:42 ◼ ► "So we look at Amazon Prime and Amy, not even Jonas, but Amy said, 'I hate Amazon Prime,' and
01:09:48 ◼ ► I said, 'Why?' And she says, 'It just looks so junky.'" And I was like, "You know what? There's
01:09:51 ◼ ► a reason we got married." Like, she's not usually one to complain about stuff like that. But even she
01:09:56 ◼ ► thinks their interface just looks like, you know, it's hot garbage. It doesn't look like you're in
01:10:07 ◼ ► Jared Polin Netflix has a whole team making their app. There's no excuse for Amazon to just
01:10:16 ◼ ► they've got some good stuff that is exclusive. I watched some stuff there, but man, the app is
01:10:20 ◼ ► always like, Jesus, nothing is animated. Everything's ugly. It's even a bad font. It's really bad.
01:10:27 ◼ ► Jared Polin So did you leave it on 60 frames per second? Because that's one of the big deals
01:10:31 ◼ ► about the new Apple TV is that you could put it on 60 frames per second. Or did you revert it back
01:10:35 ◼ ► down to like 30 or 24? Pete I haven't touched anything. I don't think anything plays at 60
01:10:39 ◼ ► frames per second. At least if I, you know, if I've watched it, I would notice if it was. I don't
01:10:44 ◼ ► think I've seen it. I don't think it works. Jared Polin I had to turn it off. Like, it looks
01:10:47 ◼ ► motion smooth to me. Like, I would go to the Disney+ app, but I'd watch some of the Marvel movies.
01:10:51 ◼ ► And I know, like, I know people are saying that it's not, but to me, it still looks motion smooth,
01:11:10 ◼ ► Pete I mean, this was obviously a year long saga. There was stuff before the courtroom. There was,
01:11:32 ◼ ► And it seems like everybody's sort of, anybody with any sort of informed opinion during the
01:11:39 ◼ ► courtroom is sort of like, looks like Apple's in good grounds here. But it was sort of a bad…
01:11:46 ◼ ► Pete It was a bad look for Apple, though, you know, and I still say that Tim Cook's testimony
01:11:51 ◼ ► in particular came across pretty poorly, in my opinion. Not terribly, but just sort of,
01:12:04 ◼ ► Jared Polin Yeah, I can see that. Like, what's weird, though, is that he plainly, he plainly
01:12:08 ◼ ► said during his testimony that if the court decided that there could be transactions outside the App
01:12:13 ◼ ► Store, it would be onerous for Apple to collect their percentage of those transactions outside
01:12:17 ◼ ► the App Store. And then, flash forward a few months, people are shocked to discover that
01:12:22 ◼ ► Google and Apple are going to do this, even though they said plainly that that was their intent the
01:12:26 ◼ ► whole time. I think the coverage was, one of my problems was the coverage was completely subpar,
01:12:31 ◼ ► in most cases. Some people did a really good job. But also, to me, at the very beginning,
01:12:36 ◼ ► I was interested because it looked like Epic was going to try to make a case for, you know,
01:12:40 ◼ ► actually for the users and for developers and things that could be better. But the minute they
01:12:44 ◼ ► sued Google as well, and then when they put out their filing, and you paged all the way down and
01:12:48 ◼ ► saw what they really wanted was their own App Store so that they could be the ones collecting
01:12:52 ◼ ► this commission, regardless of the amount, it ended up becoming like, oh, you're opening a new
01:13:01 ◼ ► Pete Lienberg Well, it's not just that they wanted their own App Store, it's that they wanted their
01:13:05 ◼ ► own friction free App Store. Meaning, meaning you are a Joe or Jane customer and you've purchased
01:13:14 ◼ ► a new phone, and you've gone right down the line with all the defaults and Epic wanted you and
01:13:23 ◼ ► still, I guess, wants you to somehow be able to install the entire Epic App Store as easily as you
01:13:30 ◼ ► Pete Lienberg As easily as you install any other app right now, as opposed to, and I have an
01:13:37 ◼ ► Android phone, you know, I have a pixel four. You know, and I did it, I installed the Epic App Store,
01:13:45 ◼ ► you know, when this was new. I honestly think for people who want to be able to side load and want
01:14:01 ◼ ► Google has designed for it is extremely reasonable and appropriate. And the things they warn you about
01:14:08 ◼ ► and the way they phrase their warning are completely appropriate. They're not overly scary.
01:14:17 ◼ ► Pete Lienberg They're true. And they, well, they hate it because in practice, people don't use it.
01:14:23 ◼ ► Jared Ranerelle In practice, people don't do stuff like that. We talked about this before, but
01:14:31 ◼ ► Does choice mean that every platform has to offer you a choice between a managed experience and a
01:14:37 ◼ ► completely freeform experience? Or can one platform offer you a managed experience and another platform
01:14:42 ◼ ► offer you the option for a freeform experience. And people have very different opinions on this,
01:14:47 ◼ ► and very different privileges when it comes to this. But I think that's still like console model
01:14:53 ◼ ► versus open compute model. And whether that has to be per platform or whether it can be across
01:14:58 ◼ ► Pete Lienberg Yeah, I think that that what the epic Apple, my look back at it, and the way I
01:15:05 ◼ ► think I'll view it in hindsight is, as it becomes old news as years go on, and I think back to 2021
01:15:18 ◼ ► and it looks like they're going to win the last remaining thing on appeal. And the other thing,
01:15:24 ◼ ► the thing about letting users, you know, collecting their email address, if they choose to give it to
01:15:31 ◼ ► you is something they should have given in any way. And Apple's response to it is sure, fine,
01:15:35 ◼ ► right? Like we will just concede that point that we're not even going to fight it. But the last
01:15:40 ◼ ► remaining point is on this in app payment thing. And what exactly it means. And it certainly looks
01:15:47 ◼ ► like based on the what we've seen so far that that Judge Gonzalez Rogers overreached by trying to
01:15:55 ◼ ► apply California law to something that it wasn't. But if there's a downside for Apple in it, it's
01:16:03 ◼ ► that it exposed the sort of raw nerves of resentment that have grown up in the developer.
01:16:11 ◼ ► Jared: That's a great way to put it. Right? It's, and that resentment was there. It wasn't
01:16:19 ◼ ► because if Epic hadn't had, you know, in the alternate universe, where the only difference
01:16:24 ◼ ► is that Epic never, never chose to make this fight, and Fortnite is just in the app store,
01:16:30 ◼ ► like it was a year ago, or two years ago, that resentment would still be there. It's that this,
01:16:38 ◼ ► the this case and people's reactions to it, exposed it, it picked up the stone, and we can see the
01:16:51 ◼ ► Ben: Yeah, there's there's two sides to that, I think, because like, you see some developers
01:16:55 ◼ ► push back on that, as well, like, they're never a Unimind. And it's not just a monoculture.
01:17:00 ◼ ► So you see some people saying, sideloading would be great. Others saying it's going to increase
01:17:04 ◼ ► piracy. You see some people saying 30% is ridiculous. Others say, well, yes, but I used
01:17:09 ◼ ► to pay for all of this and all the different tax filings around the world. And so there is,
01:17:13 ◼ ► I don't think, I think by and large, the negative sentiment gets overreported, the positive sentiment
01:17:17 ◼ ► gets underreported. But I do think the biggest thing, my takeaway from this is that Apple has
01:17:22 ◼ ► not done a very good job in being proactive about this. And in the past that suited them well,
01:17:27 ◼ ► because it's been very slow regulation. The stuff that the EU does, things that the Department of
01:17:35 ◼ ► Justice does, it's all been very slow, but it seems like it's coming to a head. And now we've
01:17:40 ◼ ► got correct cases in Korea and Japan. And I forget which other country it was one of one of the
01:17:44 ◼ ► Eastern European countries, the US now as well. And these, they are not tech savvy, you only have
01:17:51 ◼ ► to look at the cookie regulations, the privacy, GDPR regulations, they are onerous to the point
01:17:57 ◼ ► of being destructive to the people that they're pretending to protect. And I think it would be
01:18:02 ◼ ► sad if Apple wasn't proactive enough in terms of getting ahead of these issues that they left it
01:18:07 ◼ ► up to being, like, again, I go back to the browser ballot, they forced Microsoft to protect browsers,
01:18:14 ◼ ► they forced Microsoft to put this ballot up so that Fenris and Slepnir wouldn't be overwhelmed
01:18:18 ◼ ► by the market. And the result is everything is chromium now. So I just, I don't want to leave
01:18:24 ◼ ► it to these people. So I wish Apple would be more proactive about it. I agree. Let's take a break
01:18:28 ◼ ► here. And let's thank the sponsor who I spoiled a couple minutes ago, Memberful, great company,
01:18:34 ◼ ► though, sorry for spoiling the fact that they're our second sponsor, you can monetize your passion
01:18:40 ◼ ► with membership with Memberful. Memberful allows you to build a sustainable recurring revenue.
01:18:46 ◼ ► And it is the easiest way. This is true, it is absolutely the easiest way to sell memberships
01:18:52 ◼ ► to your audience. And it is used by some of the biggest creators on the web. Our friends at Six
01:18:57 ◼ ► Colors like Jason Snow uses it all of the subscription podcasts at relay.fm. You've probably
01:19:04 ◼ ► got at least one Memberful membership right now. If you're listening to me talk to you, I have a
01:19:09 ◼ ► bunch of them couldn't be an easier thing to deal with. And as a creative person who wants to
01:19:14 ◼ ► actually be the creator with the memberships, it gives you everything you need to run it, you get
01:19:19 ◼ ► your own branding, it's your branding, not Memberful's that people see. You can offer gift
01:19:24 ◼ ► subscriptions, Apple Pay, free trials, private podcasts, which is what I mentioned, and they make
01:19:31 ◼ ► that easy, and tons more. Just about anything you'd want to offer to your members, Memberful helps you
01:19:36 ◼ ► do it. And you have full control and ownership of your audience, your brand, and your membership.
01:19:42 ◼ ► If anything happens down the road where you'd like to move away from Memberful, you take your
01:19:47 ◼ ► audience, your subscription list with you, no questions asked, that's how confident they are
01:19:52 ◼ ► that you're going to want to stay with them. And they have a world-class support team that is ready
01:19:56 ◼ ► to help you simplify your memberships and grow your revenue. They win when you win. That's it.
01:20:01 ◼ ► It is win-win for everybody. Your members are happy if they're getting content that they like
01:20:08 ◼ ► to pay for. You're happy because you're making money and monetizing it. And Memberful only makes
01:20:13 ◼ ► money when you make money. So it's win-win-win. It really is no corniness implied by saying that.
01:20:20 ◼ ► And you can get started for free with no credit card required. Just go to memberful.com/talkshow,
01:20:35 ◼ ► All right. Moving on. June WWDC. What do we talk about for WWDC? I guess we talk about the event.
01:20:44 ◼ ► The virtual stuff was better this year. I thought they did a better job in emulating the lab
01:20:52 ◼ ► Yeah. I'm starting to get down though, because I'm starting to think maybe it's not going to happen
01:20:58 ◼ ► again this year. I mean, who knows? It's very hard to predict, but they're obviously going to have to
01:21:04 ◼ ► make a decision long before June. Yeah. Especially because it's not on campus. They have to actually
01:21:11 ◼ ► get facilities for it. Yeah. And I do think, I don't think it is the fact that you and I
01:21:20 ◼ ► are Apple-centric in our coverage of the industry. I almost think it's objective, not subjective,
01:21:30 ◼ ► that Apple has done a better job with these virtual-only product announcement events than
01:21:35 ◼ ► anybody else. And the recent Facebook one where they changed the name to Meta was certainly higher
01:21:53 ◼ ► Well, and they obviously spent a lot on some kind of, I presume, green screen sort of environments
01:21:59 ◼ ► that he was walking around in. It was so odd though, because the big joke is that he's data
01:22:04 ◼ ► from Star Trek. And the first thing he did was walk into like pale blue lighting where he looked
01:22:08 ◼ ► completely robotic. Which must have been self-referential. It was a good show. Apple's very
01:22:16 ◼ ► good at this. I've always thought that this, you can tell it most clearly to me with like a daily
01:22:22 ◼ ► comic strip. It's always so interesting to me, has been since I was a little kid. And the one I
01:22:29 ◼ ► remember was finding out my elementary school library had, I don't know if it was the complete
01:22:35 ◼ ► Peanuts library, but they had dozens and dozens of Charles Schulz's Peanuts books dating back to the
01:22:44 ◼ ► early days in like the, I think the late 1950s. And I always loved that. It was one of my favorite
01:22:50 ◼ ► comic strips. And I remember when I read the early ones, it was like my little emoji head,
01:22:57 ◼ ► little poof, a smoke came off my head. It was like, "Whoa, all the characters look different.
01:23:02 ◼ ► This looks so weird." And every single comic strip starts like that. Even, you know, I think what
01:23:10 ◼ ► most people would consider the best comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes, the very early ones
01:23:18 ◼ ► - [Peter] Bloom County, Garfield, Doonesbury, the early Doonesbury's look so different.
01:23:24 ◼ ► And the way it goes is they, you know, the artist sort of is working out their personal style and
01:23:30 ◼ ► the characters look, and then they sort of, then they hone in on this is it. And then like for
01:23:40 ◼ ► and Doonesbury are good examples that have run for decades. And like, you know, like late '80s,
01:23:49 ◼ ► Doonesbury doesn't really look much different than Doonesbury today, but '70s Doonesbury looks crazy.
01:23:55 ◼ ► TV shows are like that too. But the first season of Seinfeld is very, very weird in hindsight.
01:24:10 ◼ ► remote shows, virtual shows are going to look and feel like very early, and they've stuck to it.
01:24:18 ◼ ► I think they've gotten better at it, but there's not like, I think if you went back, I guess the
01:24:23 ◼ ► first one would be last 2020s WWDC. I think if you rewatched it, and I, you know, you and I,
01:24:32 ◼ ► I know you probably more than me because you're always fishing for B-roll, right? Right? So you've
01:24:39 ◼ ► probably actually watched it. You've probably watched it more than me. - [Lyle] I watched it
01:24:43 ◼ ► today. - But they kind of defined a style and a look and right from the get-go, really,
01:25:04 ◼ ► - But it's the same like drone shots, crane moves, zips. And what's funny is you looked
01:25:09 ◼ ► at the early other companies trying to figure this out, and they mostly, they tried to just
01:25:13 ◼ ► film the stage. They did a stage show with no audience and filmed it, or they had people
01:25:41 ◼ ► And Pro is in the dark, you know, like, so 2020, Jaws, he wasn't outdoors, but he was in a dark
01:25:50 ◼ ► room with a spotlight talking about the iPhone 12 Pro. And then this year he was outside Apple
01:25:59 ◼ ► Park at night, though, you know, like, I think inside- - That's a really canny observation,
01:26:06 ◼ ► - Yeah, Pro is dark or night. And I think even last year when Jaws was inside on some sort of
01:26:14 ◼ ► sound stage to do the announcement, they did, when they did the transition where they show,
01:26:19 ◼ ► you know, they do some kind of drone, whether it's actual drone footage, I think usually it is,
01:26:25 ◼ ► or some kind of 3D visual effect. It is nighttime though. They established that it is nighttime at
01:26:34 ◼ ► Apple Park. And now here's Jaws to talk about the iPhone, whatever Pro. Yeah, Pro is dark, regular
01:26:41 ◼ ► is bright and sunny. - I love that attention to detail because it permeates everything from the
01:26:56 ◼ ► - I don't really have much to add. I think you're right. And from what I've heard that they did a
01:27:00 ◼ ► better job with preparation for the labs and say what you want about Apple's developer relations.
01:27:07 ◼ ► And we mentioned the consternation over the App Store, et cetera. They really do want to knock
01:27:12 ◼ ► it out of the park with the labs during WWDC. I mean, it's, you know, from the top down, including
01:27:18 ◼ ► right down to the people responsible for the frameworks who actually run these labs and you
01:27:22 ◼ ► get to ask questions. It is something they want to do a good job of and really needed to be invented
01:27:33 ◼ ► other companies similar to Apple have hundreds of evangelists. Apple still has a very tiny evangelist
01:27:39 ◼ ► team and they do amazing, amazing work every WWDC. - Yeah, yeah, they really do. And they want to.
01:27:46 ◼ ► - They gave Serenity a choice of hats on the YouTube videos this year, which I thought was nice.
01:28:11 ◼ ► but she was very, very good because she speaks faster than I do. She was very good at keeping me
01:28:20 ◼ ► Apple stole Serenity. We have no fast talkers left. - I guess now, June, July, there wasn't really any
01:28:27 ◼ ► news in July. Might as well just, let's just use up July to talk about the great 2021 Safari tab saga.
01:28:49 ◼ ► - Yeah. You know, the best thing to do is not to make a mistake, but the second best thing to do
01:28:55 ◼ ► is recognize mistakes and correct them even if it means backing completely out. The Safari tabs thing,
01:29:02 ◼ ► it is alarming because I still don't really get how anybody thought it should have, the designs
01:29:09 ◼ ► that were unveiled at WWDC should have shipped on either platform. And the platform, the UI critiques
01:29:22 ◼ ► - We did videos about it. So we don't have to rehash what the problems with those designs were
01:29:28 ◼ ► specifically. To me, it's worrisome that they shipped. And I don't want to blame it on remote
01:29:34 ◼ ► work and COVID and that if they'd been in person, that this would have been more successfully,
01:29:41 ◼ ► the right side of the argument would have won out in person. I don't know that that's true.
01:29:51 ◼ ► was announced in a year and after a year of no in-person collaboration. I don't know. But
01:30:00 ◼ ► whoever it was, whatever people were pushing for that design, it's very questionable whether they
01:30:07 ◼ ► should be in the positions where they are, in my opinion. - Well, it's a fake simplicity. It's
01:30:13 ◼ ► a scarcity in place of actual simplicity. It's making complexity just to have fewer things,
01:30:18 ◼ ► which is like an inverse of the principle. But the weirdest thing to me was watching it go public.
01:30:24 ◼ ► And the public never even got the worst versions of those. That was saved for the betas. But
01:30:29 ◼ ► watching it go public and seeing celebrities interact about it on Twitter, like seeing a
01:30:38 ◼ ► celebrity going, "Oh, they moved it to the bottom." And then a bunch of people say, "No,
01:30:40 ◼ ► no, no. You can move it back." And then this whole discussion around what the hell did Apple
01:30:44 ◼ ► do to their browser. - It was one of the first things. There's another one where I'll drag my
01:30:50 ◼ ► wife into it where when she first turned on her iPhone 13 Pro and hadn't been following along
01:30:58 ◼ ► and completed the upgrade and there it is, now here's all your stuff. And she just turned to me
01:31:04 ◼ ► with safari. And she was like, "What the hell is going on with safari?" And I hadn't said to
01:31:16 ◼ ► - Did you revert to the top? Did you use the setting to put the safari search bar back?
01:31:29 ◼ ► I think I wrote about this. I hope I did. I saw some people mention that it's weird and shows that
01:31:35 ◼ ► maybe Apple's losing its touch because they don't offer options like that. Apple just says, "Here's
01:31:40 ◼ ► the way it is." And so offering you the option to have it at the top or bottom is un-Apple-like.
01:31:44 ◼ ► And I would say the opposite. I would say where putting it at the top or bottom offers you the
01:31:50 ◼ ► same functionality and the same set of buttons, it's just you want it at the top or bottom,
01:31:55 ◼ ► is very Apple-like, right? And it really goes back to Mac OS X 10.0 in 2002, 2001. When the hell was
01:32:06 ◼ ► that? 2002, whenever it was. Or even going back earlier to next step before Mac OS X or Mac OS
01:32:14 ◼ ► IX had lots of options to move some things around. You can move the control strip to wherever the
01:32:18 ◼ ► hell you wanted it. Some of those... In a way that in AppKit Mac apps, there's any true Mac style Mac
01:32:27 ◼ ► app has the ability to completely customize the toolbar, right? And put whatever, all sorts of
01:32:38 ◼ ► Configuration options for stuff like that is very Apple-like. It was the two totally different
01:33:02 ◼ ► **Beserat Debebe:** And nobody was complaining about tabs. It really felt like something that
01:33:17 ◼ ► Apple has long said repeatedly in many times. They don't really talk too much in detail about what
01:33:23 ◼ ► they're thinking, but they do... It comes across as anodyne when you're familiar with them and
01:33:29 ◼ ► their statements, like the recent wallpaper feature of Evans Hanke and Alan Dye's design team.
01:33:36 ◼ ► You could read that and if you're in tune to Apple like we are and lots of people who listen to this
01:33:42 ◼ ► show are, you could read that and say, "Well, I didn't really learn anything. Everything they
01:33:46 ◼ ► said in there, I sort of already knew." I certainly thought that personally, and I was way more
01:33:52 ◼ ► interested in the photographs because that was unprecedented and really kind of neat. I mentioned
01:33:57 ◼ ► on Daring Fireball how neat it was to see the actual personal iPhones of the people on the
01:34:03 ◼ ► design team, a dozen of them who were in a meeting and how many of them used cases, how many of them
01:34:09 ◼ ► had the wallet attachment, which was really surprising to me. And I actually spoke to someone
01:34:14 ◼ ► who's familiar with the situation and said, "Yeah, actually the wallet really is pretty popular with
01:34:19 ◼ ► that team." And somebody who verified, "Yeah, that was actually their real notebooks and personal
01:34:26 ◼ ► iPhones that wasn't staged." I mean, they were obviously aware a photographer was in the room,
01:34:29 ◼ ► but I thought that was pretty neat. But the Safari thing, I don't know. And there is something,
01:34:37 ◼ ► I get wanting, having the itch for new, right? And that new excites a certain part of your,
01:34:54 ◼ ► And I know that when I was younger, that part of my brain was way more active than it is now that
01:35:01 ◼ ► I'm older. And that's why, like in the nineties, I was totally all in on utilities for the classic
01:35:09 ◼ ► Mac OS that let you completely reskin the whole OS. There was the iron extension. There was one
01:35:22 ◼ ► folder tab style windows. And then there was, I forget what it was called, where you had all,
01:35:28 ◼ ► you know, just an unlimited number of themes you could download and just completely reskin the
01:35:32 ◼ ► whole OS. Oh, I was into that. And I customized my icons and customized everything that you could
01:35:38 ◼ ► customize and thought it was cool. And people, you know, younger people, I think especially,
01:35:43 ◼ ► are doing that now on iOS with the weird, not weird, but sort of convoluted compared to how
01:35:50 ◼ ► easy it could be in theory, if you could just install like an icon pack, but, you know,
01:35:56 ◼ ► using shortcuts to open apps and then you can put a custom icon on the shortcut. So therefore,
01:36:01 ◼ ► effectively, it's like giving the app a custom icon. I totally get it. And I think that where
01:36:07 ◼ ► I'm going is that I think the people who claim to like the new Safari designs exactly as Apple showed
01:36:15 ◼ ► them in June. And I, you know, I certainly given how much time I spent writing about Safari on both
01:36:21 ◼ ► iOS and Mac, I heard from them. But, and I honestly, you know, tried to give it as open
01:36:27 ◼ ► mind as I could. But all I could really hear when I really thought about it is I like this because
01:36:32 ◼ ► it's new and novel. And… Jared: Yeah, or aesthetic. Like there were some people who just like,
01:36:39 ◼ ► Steven: It looked clean. It was sort of a, I like this and it is sort of a design is how it looks
01:36:58 ◼ ► complaining. Right? And you can get the condensed look on the Mac if you really want it. It's in
01:37:05 ◼ ► there in preferences. You just don't hear anybody talking about it though. The people who defended
01:37:10 ◼ ► it, defended it in my opinion. And in hindsight, it shows in a very shallow way. Whereas those of
01:37:17 ◼ ► us who really criticized it were criticizing it in a very deep way. Jared And see, I don't mind
01:37:22 ◼ ► if Apple experiments because like, I always go back to the 2015 MacBook. It gave us both the
01:37:28 ◼ ► Force Touch trackpad and the butterfly keyboard. Butterfly keyboard was bad. Force Touch trackpad
01:37:37 ◼ ► Steven Right. And I do think that part of that delay in that era was that Apple was sort of
01:37:43 ◼ ► internally on the Mac. And I think, you know, the Mac is the one that suffered the longest on a
01:37:48 ◼ ► couple of products, you know, bad keyboards on all the MacBooks and non-retina MacBook Air for way
01:37:56 ◼ ► too long. I really think that they were caught between knowing that they were going to move away
01:38:01 ◼ ► from Intel, but not really being sure what, when the trigger could be pulled. And wanting to save
01:38:09 ◼ ► good stuff for the post Apple Silicon era. Anyway, all's well that ends well Safari tabs.
01:38:17 ◼ ► Sanity did prevail, thankfully. It is, was very strange and felt like way too close of a call.
01:38:24 ◼ ► Because I really don't know if they would have shipped it as they intended early in the summer.
01:38:29 ◼ ► I really think I would switch to another browser and I don't know what browser that would be.
01:38:34 ◼ ► Steven Yeah, same. Because I like I gave it a shot. I used it as was for the entire beta period.
01:38:42 ◼ ► And I was still making mistakes every day. And I shouldn't even have to think about how my
01:38:46 ◼ ► browser works. Yeah, it's the end they've done. It's just so it must be so frustrating for some
01:38:51 ◼ ► people inside Apple, because they've done such a good job, especially on the phone of designing
01:38:57 ◼ ► one of the best iOS apps on the platform period Safari and, and again, not even getting into any
01:39:07 ◼ ► of the political arguments about Apple's refusal to allow alternate rendering engines, which is a
01:39:13 ◼ ► web platform thing we won't get into. But just as a user interface, it's just really, really good and
01:39:19 ◼ ► useful. And it's an amazing team, like the Webkin Safari team is one of the best teams in the world,
01:39:24 ◼ ► not even at Apple, but one of the best teams in the world, right? In two different ways, right?
01:39:38 ◼ ► no matter what the engine was, is rendering the actual content, you know, does a great job. And it
01:39:44 ◼ ► was all just sort of thrown away for something that somebody thought looked cool and cleaner,
01:39:49 ◼ ► some and certainly looked cleaner and more minimal. Yeah, very strange. All right, moving on,
01:39:55 ◼ ► we've got August, the only thing I have for August was that, that that's when Apple announced their
01:40:00 ◼ ► child safety initiatives. Yeah. Which, you know, it's interesting to me, because like this,
01:40:06 ◼ ► this shows the dichotomy of Apple sometimes, because this and I'm blanking on what the other
01:40:10 ◼ ► one was, but there's, there are several times where Apple puts together what is objectively
01:40:16 ◼ ► like a completely solid engineering solution. Like if you're going to design something that
01:40:22 ◼ ► has to achieve these goals, this is the best way to engineer it. But there is a complete disconnect
01:40:28 ◼ ► from how emotionally people are going to react to it because we're not entirely rational
01:40:32 ◼ ► engineering people. Right. And they got, I think they, you know, it's safe to say they got more
01:40:38 ◼ ► pushback than they were probably expecting. And a lot of it, most of it, you know, some of it is
01:40:45 ◼ ► philosophical and I get it, which is, hey, this is my device and nothing should be going on, on my
01:40:53 ◼ ► device, on device that is going to wind up reporting me to the authorities. You know, I get…
01:41:00 ◼ ► Nothing should be exfiltrated without my permission. I get that. I do, except that they
01:41:06 ◼ ► were only wanting to do this, that the CSAM fingerprinting against the known database from
01:41:15 ◼ ► the national child safety, whatever the organization is. If you're using iCloud photos for sync. So,
01:41:23 ◼ ► yeah, I get it that it's on device. I'm sympathetic to that argument, but it wasn't like
01:41:29 ◼ ► everybody who uses iOS 15 is going to have this happen, whether you use it or not. It's just sort
01:41:35 ◼ ► of like the agreement of using our photo sync service and cloud-based storage is that you're
01:41:43 ◼ ► going, your image, the images are going to be matched, the fingerprints of those images are
01:41:47 ◼ ► going to be matched against this known database. And if you are uncomfortable with that or don't
01:41:52 ◼ ► like it, then you know, you should opt out of iCloud photos. I think the difference was because
01:41:57 ◼ ► like everybody does this and that's a horrible thing to say, but everybody does do this, but like
01:42:00 ◼ ► Google and Facebook and they all do it on the cloud. So if you turn them off, it's completely
01:42:05 ◼ ► gone where when you turn apples off, the code is still there. It's inert, but the code is still
01:42:09 ◼ ► there. And I think on a philosophical level, it was a privacy solution, but it defended people
01:42:14 ◼ ► on a sanctity level. Right. That's a good way to put it. Right. And if you close your eyes and
01:42:18 ◼ ► didn't know which where, where the matching against the fingerprints was going on, you wouldn't be able
01:42:24 ◼ ► to tell whether iCloud, you know, Apple solution is doing the fingerprinting matching on device
01:42:31 ◼ ► and Google and Facebook and others are doing it on the server side. The end results should be the same
01:42:46 ◼ ► take like that private relay implementation, have the stuff put onto a separate private server,
01:42:52 ◼ ► have it checked there and then move to Apple. That way it's not happening on your device. That way,
01:42:56 ◼ ► Apple still has zero knowledge. And then hopefully everyone can go back to living in peace and harmony.
01:43:00 ◼ ► Yeah. I don't think that's going to, I don't think it's going to work though. Cause I really,
01:43:03 ◼ ► and again, I have no inside knowledge of this and I probably among all the teams at Apple,
01:43:09 ◼ ► the security team is almost certainly one of the tightest lipped, you know, so it's not going to
01:43:14 ◼ ► leak even through a little birdie, but just looking at what Apple wants to happen in the direction of
01:43:21 ◼ ► things going, I still think that this whole thing is sort of being motivated by a desire to move
01:43:29 ◼ ► eventually all of iCloud to end to end encryption. And in that case, some sort of middleman server,
01:43:46 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. Like when you look at the legacy contacts, the retrieval,
01:43:52 ◼ ► cause some of the problems, the problem Apple faced initially with iCloud was that most people
01:43:58 ◼ ► losing data is way more common than having data stolen. And people were locking themselves out
01:44:02 ◼ ► of all this early two factor authentication stuff. It was one of Apple's biggest support problems.
01:44:06 ◼ ► People would just lose their keys and Apple couldn't help you recover. And that is not a
01:44:10 ◼ ► good enough answer. So they had to make it so that your backups were fail safe instead of fail secure.
01:44:15 ◼ ► But that means that they're subject to subpoena. So now Apple is setting up, like you said,
01:44:19 ◼ ► these things where they don't have to worry about actionable material. You can get like,
01:44:25 ◼ ► you can assign a contact so that if you lose access to it, Apple can still send something
01:44:29 ◼ ► to somebody else. Doesn't have to be them who has access to it. And then they can start locking down
01:44:33 ◼ ► the rest of the backups. Right. I, and I really do think that that's where they're going. And I
01:44:38 ◼ ► really, I know you and I have talked about this, you know, but it re you and I both have sources
01:44:44 ◼ ► who work in Apple retail who very, you know, it's nonstop over the years that is a constant problem
01:44:49 ◼ ► of people who forget their password. Can't get their stuff, their phone, you know, they left it
01:44:54 ◼ ► in a cab and now it's gone. And that's where all their photos were, but they don't know their
01:45:02 ◼ ► and being able to say, I trust this other person or these two people completely, I trust them.
01:45:10 ◼ ► That's how much I trust them, you know, like a spouse type situation. Or if for an older person,
01:45:16 ◼ ► like my parents that they trust me, they could list both me and my sister, you know, as, as
01:45:21 ◼ ► trusted people who could help them do this. And then it ties in with the legacy contact thing too,
01:45:26 ◼ ► for, you know, when they die. But I do think that that's where Apple's going. And I kind of feel
01:45:33 ◼ ► like what they regret is not having had the foresight way back when to engineer iCloud,
01:45:41 ◼ ► if they could do it all over again, I'm, I'm quite sure of it, that they would engineer iCloud to do
01:45:47 ◼ ► everything other than email and end encrypted all along. And email being the exception, because
01:45:53 ◼ ► that's the nature of the IMAP and SMTP protocols is that it can't be end to end encrypted.
01:46:01 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, well, that's, and it's still the protocol isn't end to end encrypted, right? Like,
01:46:05 ◼ ► you can use something like PGP to get strong encryption for your email, but stuff like the
01:46:11 ◼ ► email headers, even with PGP, the email headers aren't, you know, the subject line is still out
01:46:16 ◼ ► there in the open, the recipients are still out there in the open. It's just the nature of email.
01:46:21 ◼ ► So, you know, this is not even get into it, this is put an asterisk next to email. But I know this
01:46:26 ◼ ► for a fact, having spoken to multiple people who were involved with it, that I message that was
01:46:30 ◼ ► part of the, you know, like day one, let's build our own messaging thing to sort of replace SMS,
01:46:36 ◼ ► day one on the whiteboard, end to end encryption for everything. Let's, let's engineer this in a
01:46:43 ◼ ► way so that if law enforcement says we would like to have this, we can't get it. We can't, we can
01:46:48 ◼ ► just say we can't give it to you. Right now, and that is true for iMessage, the big escape hatch
01:46:54 ◼ ► right now is iCloud backup, because iCloud backup is not end to end encrypted. And so, like when the
01:47:01 ◼ ► FBI goes to Apple with a warrant and says we would like so and so's, you know, iMessages for this
01:47:09 ◼ ► warrant and here are the reasons and Apple looks at the warrant and says, okay, that's good. They,
01:47:14 ◼ ► they give them, they can give them and have to now because of the warrant, their iCloud backup and
01:47:18 ◼ ► the iCloud backup contains their iMessages. So, it's not that the FBI has access to iMessage,
01:47:24 ◼ ► they can't, it's end to end encrypted, but iCloud backup, which contains iMessage content, isn't,
01:47:32 ◼ ► Jared: And you can turn it off, but again, for most people, they care more about losing their
01:47:38 ◼ ► David: Right. And this is one of those things that Apple is so good at having their eye on the long
01:47:42 ◼ ► game, you know, and Apple Pay is a perfect example of this where there is no way Apple Pay was going
01:47:47 ◼ ► to be an overnight success. It just, it's just not the way things work, right? But it's a slow,
01:47:53 ◼ ► steady, incremental, more and more places accept it, more and more people will get comfortable
01:47:58 ◼ ► using it. There, it's a long game. The, moving all of iCloud to end in encryption, if that's really
01:48:04 ◼ ► their plan, and I really hope it is, is like a 10-year thing because you've got to wait,
01:48:08 ◼ ► you know, all right, I'm an early adopter. Let's say they do it for iOS 16 next year. I don't know,
01:48:15 ◼ ► that's to say optimistically. And I upgrade to iOS 16 right away. Well, anybody who I'm sending
01:48:20 ◼ ► iMessages to who's still on iOS 15 and is still backing up their stuff that way is still using
01:48:26 ◼ ► the iOS 15 iCloud backups. You've got to wait for everybody to get to the new thing so that everybody,
01:48:47 ◼ ► There's an optimistic scenario where maybe right now, because I think it's mostly political,
01:48:52 ◼ ► and I know people hate politics, but I think it's about political cover where they can say,
01:49:00 ◼ ► let's say they move iCloud photos to end-to-end encryption and law enforcement and politicians
01:49:11 ◼ ► And this, you know, it's insidious, it's more widespread, you know, it is a serious problem.
01:49:17 ◼ ► It's a serious problem around the world. That and terrorism or whatever, everyone brings up all the
01:49:20 ◼ ► time. Right. But the CSAMs and Apple could say with the fingerprinting thing, well, here's what
01:49:25 ◼ ► we're doing about it. We're checking all these things before we do it. If it had gone without
01:49:30 ◼ ► any protest at all, and they hadn't delayed it, whatever. That's, I think that's why they're
01:49:35 ◼ ► doing is for political cover to allow end-to-end encryption for the overwhelming majority of users
01:49:42 ◼ ► who are, have no involvement with CSAM material at all. The current state though is maybe, you know,
01:49:49 ◼ ► not so bad where they're, you know, and I know that they updated their child safety webpage
01:49:55 ◼ ► last week or the week before to remove mention of that, of the fingerprinting stuff and only talk
01:50:02 ◼ ► about the stuff that's actually shipping now in iOS 15.2 or .1? Where are we up to? I forget. I
01:50:09 ◼ ► don't even know the… 15.3. Are we up to… I'm on the beta. Well, whatever. I'm on the head.
01:50:14 ◼ ► But the other features, the one like for opt-in feature for kids in an iCloud family account to
01:50:21 ◼ ► have the parents turn on a thing to let the kid get warned if they are sending or receiving
01:50:26 ◼ ► messages that machine learning identifies as being sexually inappropriate. They adapted that to
01:50:34 ◼ ► complaints very, in a very good way where they took off the feature that would, you know, that
01:50:39 ◼ ► would optionally allow parents to be notified whenever it happens instead. It's all about the
01:50:44 ◼ ► kids for their safety because they might be in a dangerous situation at home. It's opt-in
01:50:51 ◼ ► nobody gets it turned on by default for their kids. But if you're worried about it and you
01:50:58 ◼ ► The other feature that they updated and released and I think was completely uncontroversial
01:51:05 ◼ ► was updating Siri's ability to help you if you're having some, you know, different types of
01:51:12 ◼ ► crises. Like if you're, feel like you're being abused and need help and that sort of thing and
01:51:19 ◼ ► give you contact information, you know, don't try to get your help from Siri, but Siri will
01:51:24 ◼ ► tell you here, contact this organization and they'll get you help. Uncontroversial, that's
01:51:29 ◼ ► shipped. And that's… And I'm just spitballing, sorry. Well, that's what, that's the, it's a
01:51:34 ◼ ► very Apple-like thing to do, to update the page to talk about here's what's shipping and not talk
01:51:38 ◼ ► about what might still be coming. But when the press, people in the media asked, they did not
01:51:43 ◼ ► say we've abandoned that. It's just in limbo. No, and they're a very, like, again, they're a
01:51:50 ◼ ► very focused company and their job is to solve these problems. And I'm just spitballing here
01:51:55 ◼ ► because you have anything that you can think of on a podcast or a YouTube video, Apple's had the
01:52:00 ◼ ► money and time to prototype, but there could also be like, just to a sway, I'm trying to think about
01:52:04 ◼ ► what people's complaints are and to assuage them. It could be that there's a regular version of
01:52:09 ◼ ► photos and an online version of photos. And if you opt into iCloud photos, it downloads the
01:52:13 ◼ ► online version. If you opt out, it downloads the regular version. And then you don't have that
01:52:16 ◼ ► code on your, if having that code on your device is a problem for you and you worry about it being
01:52:21 ◼ ► abused or any of a number of things, you have like the inert version or you have the active version.
01:52:26 ◼ ► And then there's nothing really to complain about because you're having the choice there.
01:52:29 ◼ ► Yeah. Anyway, my hope is that maybe by running this CSAM fingerprinting up the flagpole,
01:52:44 ◼ ► back to the, we're, we're going back to the drawing board with it, but we've thought about it.
01:52:55 ◼ ► Right. It's a Schrodinger feature and it could stay there for a while, you know, until people,
01:53:00 ◼ ► it just, you know, maybe end to end encryption for photos ships and, you know, anybody who says,
01:53:06 ◼ ► hey, but what about a CSAM material? Apple can say, you know, we've told you, you know,
01:53:22 ◼ ► op-eds even in the New York Times from esteemed people whose feedback we value and we're still
01:53:28 ◼ ► considering it. And maybe, you know, because it's neither canceled nor shipping, it can sort of stay
01:53:33 ◼ ► in that state forever and serve their needs politically while also not triggering anything
01:53:41 ◼ ► that actual privacy advocates and people concerned about the feature being abused or being buggy or
01:53:51 ◼ ► And I don't want to derail us, but Apple is also navigating a climate where you have a lot of
01:53:55 ◼ ► countries, not just China demanding data repatriation, not wanting their citizens' data
01:53:59 ◼ ► stored on US or other servers. You have a bunch of countries, including Australia trying to
01:54:03 ◼ ► propose laws against encryption, just trying to make everything open. So Apple has to navigate
01:54:09 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's the, it probably will never stop, but the politician's wish is for a
01:54:25 ◼ ► All right. On to September and Apple is back at it big month. Their big annual event went off
01:54:32 ◼ ► and they announced all of the iPhones 13, the new iPad mini iOS 15 and watch OS 8 shipped
01:54:45 ◼ ► Let's start with the Lynch thing. The Lynch thing is interesting because, and I've mentioned this
01:54:52 ◼ ► a couple of times in recent weeks, but there's a big difference. You know, Apple's supposed
01:54:58 ◼ ► to upcoming new platforms are, well, maybe three, but there's AR and VR, which are very different
01:55:05 ◼ ► things. If you really think about, you know, VR where it's goggles that obstruct your view,
01:55:11 ◼ ► if they're off, you know, and there's rumors that they're going to have cameras so you could see
01:55:15 ◼ ► through, but that's, that's not the same as actually seeing as opposed to mixed reality.
01:55:20 ◼ ► Right. As opposed to plans to make actual regular eyeglasses that you see through with, you know,
01:55:25 ◼ ► possibly corrective lenses, if you need them, that would project, you know, or some sort of user
01:55:31 ◼ ► interface in your field of vision. But let's just say, I can describe it like for people who aren't
01:55:37 ◼ ► sure what all it means is like, think of the Apple VR headset as a personal Apple TV, where it's
01:55:41 ◼ ► really immersive and you have the same like Apple fitness, TV shows, video games, all like all that
01:55:47 ◼ ► kind of content, music concerts, and then think of the glasses, like an Apple watch that's on your
01:55:52 ◼ ► face instead of your wrist. And it's all about convenient notifications layered on top of reality.
01:55:56 ◼ ► Right. That's a good way to put it. But let's say that's one product, AR/VR, and then there's
01:56:01 ◼ ► Titan OS, the autonomous car slash whatever else might be autonomous. Titan has been through,
01:56:08 ◼ ► has been tumultuous. And that's just what we know on the outside. Lord only knows what people on the
01:56:13 ◼ ► inside have seen, but just knowing what we've known from the outside, you know, we've, you know,
01:56:34 ◼ ► I think that there's a couple of aspects to this. Number one, he's done a terrific job with watch
01:56:41 ◼ ► OS. Watch OS has been regular. It has been improved steadily, but I also think it's a sign
01:56:49 ◼ ► of, you know, watch OS is mature, right? I'm not saying that it's done, you know, in the same way
01:56:55 ◼ ► the Mac, which started in 1984 is not done and is still having new releases and there's new features,
01:57:01 ◼ ► but it's, it is cemented as what it is. Right. And it's incremental here, henceforth. Right. And if
01:57:10 ◼ ► Kevin Lynch has proven himself to be a successful manager and executive of a nascent platform that
01:57:21 ◼ ► is completely liquid and isn't cemented yet and really needs to be bootstrapped from nothing to a
01:57:29 ◼ ► shipping project, it seems like that's, this is the time for him to move because, well,
01:57:34 ◼ ► Jared; It's so interesting too, because like, I don't know if it's a one-to-one thing, but
01:57:37 ◼ ► the previous big hire at Titan was Dan Dodge, who was CEO of QNX, which was like a real-time
01:57:43 ◼ ► operating system. And that seemed very like foundational to what this had to be, where Kevin's
01:57:49 ◼ ► got this amazing talent for taking incredibly complicated things like health technologies,
01:57:53 ◼ ► fitness technologies, communication technologies, and making them incredibly easy to understand and
01:57:58 ◼ ► glance at in like a watch in very small amounts of time. And that seems like a much higher level,
01:58:03 ◼ ► much more human part of the software experience. Yeah. And it's a, you know, it's a famous Steve
01:58:08 ◼ ► Jobs axiom, but real artists ship. And Kevin Lynch during his stint at Apple so far has proven
01:58:15 ◼ ► himself to be a real artist in that regard. And Titan seemingly could use a little bit of that.
01:58:22 ◼ ► So I tend to think that it is, you know, and I know that ostensibly, WatchOS is still under
01:58:32 ◼ ► Lynch's in the hierarchy too. But I can't help but think that it's not a 50/50 thing for his attention.
01:58:38 ◼ ► You know, that… Well, Evan Dahl took over the health component. He has a little bit less on
01:58:42 ◼ ► his plate, but they're all over, over. Their plates are all very full. Right. Which is not
01:58:46 ◼ ► a minor part of the watch software efforts. Right. It's a major, major part. So I think that's
01:58:53 ◼ ► interesting. iPhone's 13, iPad mini. iPad mini, I don't have much to say. It's nice. I'm glad
01:58:59 ◼ ► it's still there. It's a fascinating product. Going back to what we were talking about with the
01:59:03 ◼ ► Mac, you know, the timeline for iPad mini updates has always been multi-year. It has never been even
01:59:11 ◼ ► close to an annual product. It's like, you know… No, it's, yeah, even less than the iPad Air.
01:59:15 ◼ ► Right. Not saying something. Right. It's like, you know, even if it's perfectly on time and
01:59:18 ◼ ► didn't miss, is shipped right on schedule, it's like an every three or four year thing.
01:59:29 ◼ ► Yeah. Two and a half years. I wouldn't be surprised if this one lasts more than two years,
01:59:33 ◼ ► honestly. What more do you want? It's great. The only controversial thing was that they moved the
01:59:36 ◼ ► display drivers to the side and that made it, when you looked in portrait orientation, you could see
01:59:40 ◼ ► the refresh rate scrolling more than you could on previous versions. Yeah, but people seem to have
01:59:45 ◼ ► piped down about that. I defer to my son whose eyes are both young and excellent and he's
01:59:53 ◼ ► very, very picky about frame rates and stuff like that. And even he was like, "Eh, I see it. Yeah,
02:00:01 ◼ ► but it's all right." You know, and you kind of have to do it on purpose. It is interesting
02:00:05 ◼ ► and it is true and it speaks to Apple's high standards for displays and scrolling and stuff
02:00:10 ◼ ► that none of their other products or very few of their products have anything even close to that
02:00:15 ◼ ► sort of… Well, if you put them under a high-speed camera, they all do it. That's the thing. That's
02:00:20 ◼ ► how displays work. It's just this one people could catch on faster. Right. And it was perceptible to
02:00:26 ◼ ► at least some people's naked eyes, but not mine. The iPhone's 13. I don't have a lot to say.
02:00:32 ◼ ► Tremendous battery life. Tremendous battery life. I will say that. I forgot to charge mine. And it's
02:00:36 ◼ ► on two. I was like, "Why is my iPhone at 30%?" And I realized I hadn't charged it in two days.
02:00:39 ◼ ► It really is true. And it's interesting. There was… I'll tie in a… What are we up to? The A15?
02:00:48 ◼ ► There was… I don't want to throw the guy under the bus and I forget his name, but somebody who's
02:00:52 ◼ ► a purported chip expert right after the keynote had a very widely circulated medium post saying
02:00:59 ◼ ► that Apple's run out of steam on silicon and the brain drain from employees who've left to other
02:01:06 ◼ ► companies. It's obviously… I mean, no surprise that Apple silicon engineers are in demand given
02:01:15 ◼ ► the tremendous success that they've had. But that now this is the year where it's caught up to them.
02:01:20 ◼ ► And now they've got flat performance year over year because they're not bright. Based on the
02:01:26 ◼ ► proof being that they didn't brag about year over year performance improvements and only brag during
02:01:32 ◼ ► the keynote about performance against their unnamed competitors on the Android side. But
02:01:37 ◼ ► turns out A15 is pretty much in line performance wise with the increases we've seen in previous
02:01:43 ◼ ► years. But even with that… It turns out when AnandTech gets their hands on it and does an
02:01:59 ◼ ► clearly the main thrust of the A15 was battery life improvement. I mean, it's the most dramatic
02:02:08 ◼ ► difference, right? And to me, just say this, and we can even move on is the fact that the iPhone
02:02:23 ◼ ► Jared: The only thing I'd like to add is like, there was two things that bothered me. One was
02:02:27 ◼ ► the glee in which people jumped onto that, you know, narrative. Like even people in the Apple
02:02:32 ◼ ► community were like, "Haha, this is the end of the road for Apple," which was really a weird look
02:02:36 ◼ ► for me. But also, like when you actually look at the industry, Qualcomm just announced famously,
02:02:41 ◼ ► they have these junkets every year where they fly everybody to Hawaii and announce their processors
02:02:46 ◼ ► for the next year. Those processors still aren't great IP. Like compared to what Apple's doing,
02:02:50 ◼ ► they're still two years behind. And that's with the people from Nuvia that they say, like there
02:02:56 ◼ ► was no brain drain from Apple. That's a complete narrative fabrication. Some people left, but that's
02:03:00 ◼ ► a incredibly deep bench on Apple Silicon team. That didn't help Qualcomm. And they're still
02:03:05 ◼ ► saying, well, maybe they need to do more of it, like inject more of that. Like, it's not provable
02:03:10 ◼ ► either way. And that just makes the entire story that much more galling to me to begin with.
02:03:14 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, it's always, you know, be careful. Be careful whenever you read an article that
02:03:21 ◼ ► is telling you what you want to hear. Right? You should always second, you know, take a step back.
02:03:26 ◼ ► Jared. Or look at the numbers. Like, I think what part of the bigger problem is that it's really
02:03:30 ◼ ► hard. Like I call it a benchmark LARP. But people are pretending to do benchmarks. It's really hard.
02:03:36 ◼ ► Like it takes the best expert that Anantech, a lot of incredible hand coding to get even the
02:03:41 ◼ ► surface level stuff that they admit that they get. And most people don't know what's hitting
02:03:45 ◼ ► an efficiency core versus a performance core. Like the efficiency cores are 30% faster this year.
02:03:50 ◼ ► And the performance cores are way more efficient. The graphics cores are phenomenally faster,
02:03:55 ◼ ► but people don't know when they're hitting a graphics core or a rendering engine. And they
02:04:06 ◼ ► Pete: Another good year for the camera team. And I moved, I spent 2020 with my, for the first time
02:04:15 ◼ ► ever, did not buy a top of the line iPhone. I bought the iPhone 12 regular. And because,
02:04:21 ◼ ► you know, and I was correct, I probably wouldn't really need the camera much. And that what I was
02:04:25 ◼ ► missing was of course the 2X camera that the iPhone 12 Pro had. And I bought it mainly for
02:04:30 ◼ ► how the device felt. And, you know, again, it's that privilege of having them all to review and
02:04:35 ◼ ► spend time with and not just talk, you know, feel for five minutes while it's tethered to a table
02:04:41 ◼ ► in an Apple store. This year though, the camera stuff was overwhelming and I bought the 13 Pro.
02:04:47 ◼ ► I will say this several months in now of daily iPhone 13 in my pocket, my opinion on the hand
02:04:54 ◼ ► feel of these devices remains unchanged. I really don't like it. I don't like the feel of the
02:05:00 ◼ ► stainless steel band. I think that the buttons feel too sharp. I feel the steel band overall
02:05:06 ◼ ► is a little slippy and I do not like the frosted matte back because it is slippery. It is, has no
02:05:15 ◼ ► grip, no tack at all. I would pay extra to get an iPhone 13 Pro with the camera, with the aluminum
02:05:24 ◼ ► body and glossy glass back of the regular iPhone 13, which isn't sticky but has the tackiness,
02:05:32 ◼ ► like I've often said, of like a clean basketball court and that, you know, your fingers, you know,
02:05:38 ◼ ► grip it the way that sneakers, clean sneakers on a clean basketball court make the squeak,
02:05:43 ◼ ► you know, and you get traction. I find it. So, this is the first time in all the years of iPhone
02:05:49 ◼ ► where I use a case on a daily basis simply because I really, and I just tried it last week at like
02:05:56 ◼ ► Christmas, like let me try going caseless again, which I would like to do. I'm not even going
02:06:01 ◼ ► many places with the COVID stuff. I'm not like locked in, but I'm not going many places. I don't
02:06:06 ◼ ► need to protect it. I just find it unpleasant in my hand. I really do. It's my biggest disappointment
02:06:12 ◼ ► with it. And my biggest hope for next year is that the pros go to, you know, there's rumors they
02:06:18 ◼ ► might go to titanium. That would be great. I love the feel of titanium. But also that sandwich again,
02:06:23 ◼ ► like the iPhone 4, which would be nicer. Yeah. I find it looks better but feels worse. Like if
02:06:29 ◼ ► I just look at it, it looks phenomenal. The design, again, is one of those retro designs,
02:06:33 ◼ ► but it doesn't feel great. And the other issue I have is I love that they have this new ceramic
02:06:38 ◼ ► shield glass because I drop it all the time and it's never once broken or cracked on me. Like,
02:06:43 ◼ ► I drop it all the time. But the reason I drop it all the time is because it's so slippery. It
02:06:47 ◼ ► falls off everything. Like it's not Pixel 6 slippery. That falls off flat tables. I don't
02:06:52 ◼ ► know how it does it, but it does. This still falls off almost everything. And the way that
02:06:57 ◼ ► chemically treated glass and ceramics work is the better the shatter resistance, the worse the
02:07:04 ◼ ► scratch resistance because one is hardness and one is toughness. It's like, I'm going to get this
02:07:08 ◼ ► wrong, but it's like you can scratch a hammer with a diamond, but you can smash a diamond with a
02:07:11 ◼ ► hammer. And I would love if Apple would make a way tackier phone that didn't fall as much because then
02:07:17 ◼ ► they wouldn't need as much shatter resistance and they could increase the scratch resistance again
02:07:22 ◼ ► because I also scratch them all the time. Pete: Yeah. So, that's my big wish for 14 is,
02:07:26 ◼ ► yes, I would like to go caseless. I would like to be pleasant in my hand, which includes both
02:07:32 ◼ ► not feeling too sharp or glossy and having a back that, you know, my hands have some tack on to as
02:07:39 ◼ ► opposed to this crazy matte finish, which does look nice, but is for a flat surface, just not good,
02:07:49 ◼ ► in my opinion. I have one other beef and I know everyone's going to yell USB-C. I don't care.
02:07:53 ◼ ► USB-C is just a plug. I'm happy with lightning as a plug, but it's still USB two speeds. Like
02:07:59 ◼ ► the letters are the plug shape. The numbers are the data transfer rate. And we have ProRes video
02:08:04 ◼ ► on which is six gigs a minute. And I shoot ProRes video and I've got to use USB two speeds in 2021
02:08:10 ◼ ► to pull that off. And I can't believe Apple made a chip that is so good at recording every frame
02:08:15 ◼ ► of ProRes video, a storage controller that can record it all, but not an IO system that will let
02:08:20 ◼ ► me transfer it off even over like lightning 2.0 or whatever at USB three speeds or faster.
02:08:30 ◼ ► I do shoot 4k and I shoot the, and who knows if it'll be remote this year, but two years in a row,
02:08:36 ◼ ► my remote interview with Apple executives and we want to get it in editing as soon as possible and
02:08:43 ◼ ► getting 90 minutes of 4k footage off the phone is really, really bad. So again, let's talk,
02:08:52 ◼ ► it's not the technology, USB-C and stick it on the phone. It's let's solve the problem. The problem
02:08:59 ◼ ► is you've made these cameras that shoot incredibly great video, but that video is humongous,
02:09:06 ◼ ► including ProRes, which is super humongous. And you've made this thing, which is amazing.
02:09:13 ◼ ► Truly. It's amazing that you could shoot ProRes video on these things and it looks good.
02:09:22 ◼ ► Pete But you've got to, you know, there's anybody who's shooting ProRes for a good reason,
02:09:28 ◼ ► as opposed to just stumbled into and wonders what the preference is. But if you're shooting
02:09:32 ◼ ► it for a good reason, you want to get it off the phone. All right. That's got to be high on the
02:09:38 ◼ ► list. They have to know this. They have to know this, hopefully. Well, there's that rumored like
02:09:42 ◼ ► 80 gigabit per second wireless transfer speed, but have that land the same year as ProRes.
02:09:51 ◼ ► Should we talk, I guess, iOS 15 and watch OS 8? I mean, we might as well, they shipped in September,
02:10:00 ◼ ► Pete Yeah, absolutely. It's really, and I, every once in a while, I run into a spot in a certain
02:10:06 ◼ ► app or something where it doesn't work and I'm like, what the hell, app name, you know, let's get
02:10:12 ◼ ► with the program. Jared But that video of the kids using their iPhone to steal the kids' notes in
02:10:15 ◼ ► front of them at school is just perfect. Pete Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. It's really terrific.
02:10:18 ◼ ► I don't really have much to say about iOS 15. It's a solid release. I think, I know Joanna had
02:10:26 ◼ ► in her newsletter, not her column recently, had a thing commenting about Apple's dot releases. And
02:10:32 ◼ ► she wasn't complaining about it, but just observing that the, you know, in recent years,
02:10:36 ◼ ► the new way of being an iPhone user is that throughout the year, you get software updates
02:10:42 ◼ ► and some of them introduce new features so that, you know, it's not just a once a year thing where
02:10:46 ◼ ► you figure out if you really want to stay on top and you've got to figure out where and how to use
02:10:52 ◼ ► new features throughout the year. I think that Apple has found its footing and its pace on this
02:11:08 ◼ ► not that they've given up, ideally they'd like to have as many tent pole features that get announced
02:11:14 ◼ ► at WWDC ship in September in the dot O of the new big release as possible, but that they're
02:11:21 ◼ ► just completely rational about looking at the state of where these features are and letting
02:11:30 ◼ ► them ship when they are. And, you know, it's certainly an art form to look at those features
02:11:36 ◼ ► in May while they're planning WWDC and figure out, well, this definitely won't be available
02:11:44 ◼ ► in September, but we should be able to ship this in, you know, let's say February and being right
02:11:51 ◼ ► about it, you know, like they, you know, I don't think they've missed anything. I don't think
02:11:55 ◼ ► they've had like X is coming announced at WWDC and gone a whole calendar year without it.
02:12:02 ◼ ► No, like, usually, well, a couple of quick things. One is this has always happened, like,
02:12:07 ◼ ► but previously it was easier to digest because Steve would come out and announce the new iPod
02:12:11 ◼ ► touch and there'd be a couple updates associated with that, which would go into the point one.
02:12:19 ◼ ► that would go into the dot two or dot three. So just, they never spoke about them until they
02:12:23 ◼ ► were ready to go into those point releases. But some really big things have gone into the point
02:12:27 ◼ ► releases all along. And the other thing is, I think it's just how Apple has been managing this.
02:12:33 ◼ ► Like the, they used to have bigger lists because there was so much more to do. Now the lists are a
02:12:38 ◼ ► little bit slower and you get to the point where you have things like universal control, which
02:12:41 ◼ ► isn't going to ship. And I think we ran into this with a HomePod too, is that there are fundamental
02:12:47 ◼ ► problems with core technologies that are just old, like the original AirPlay and Core Audio
02:12:51 ◼ ► turned out they couldn't handle the HomePod. So Apple had to go back and rewrite, make AirPlay 2,
02:12:56 ◼ ► redo a bunch of core technologies just to support the HomePod. And I think a lot of the stuff now is
02:13:01 ◼ ► they're going back and repaying technical debt and it's making shipping those features take longer
02:13:05 ◼ ► than they originally anticipated it would. I agree with that. I think that, I think they're on a
02:13:10 ◼ ► really good, they're, they're in a good place annual schedule wise on these features. I really
02:13:16 ◼ ► do think so. October, I'm ready to move on October. We actually got our hands on hardware, Apple Watch
02:13:21 ◼ ► Series 7. I don't have a lot to add. I'll put links in the show notes to my review and your
02:13:27 ◼ ► review on your YouTube channel. The weirdest thing was that flat edge design that leaked. That's
02:13:31 ◼ ► probably like next year's. I think you said SE, someone else said that's going to be the, the rest,
02:13:37 ◼ ► not the rustic model, the, the, the expedition model, the action model, right? The, the action
02:13:43 ◼ ► model. Yeah. Extreme model. And they just leaked a year early. No, I think I stand by my prediction.
02:13:48 ◼ ► It's a, and again, no little birdies whatsoever. I think that that's the new SE because I think
02:13:55 ◼ ► Apple wants the SE to look different than the flagship model. And I think it is easier to
02:14:02 ◼ ► communicate to customers that this is the entry priced model or the lower tier if it looks distinct
02:14:15 ◼ ► like that. I don't think it would look bad if that flat thing ships, but it does not look as good,
02:14:20 ◼ ► you know, and there are no, there's, there's just no way they're going to abandon this. And I know,
02:14:24 ◼ ► and again, there's that the people who wanted it to ship and were disappointed that it shipped and
02:14:29 ◼ ► really latched on to the people who were saying that the, the actual series seven that we have
02:14:36 ◼ ► was like a last minute scrap, you know, that doesn't happen. No. Well, and it doesn't make
02:14:42 ◼ ► any sense that, that the, that they couldn't make an aluminum chassis with flat sides and had to
02:14:48 ◼ ► abandon it, but they could make the screen bigger and go closer to the edges and reduce the bezels.
02:14:53 ◼ ► And the impact resistance. Right. And impact resistance, like that's the hard thing. They
02:14:58 ◼ ► could put it in whatever shape case they wanted to, you know, I just think it's a branding thing
02:15:04 ◼ ► or a product marketing thing, whatever you want to call it. And that they, by making the SE look
02:15:08 ◼ ► different, it would establish the SE as its own thing at a lower price. You know, sort of exactly
02:15:16 ◼ ► the way that the non-pro iPhones look different. They aluminum looks, does not look shiny. It looks
02:15:24 ◼ ► matte and you know, the back was a 249 iPad. Like it's visually distinct, visually distinct in a way
02:15:30 ◼ ► that the current iPhone SE is not, even though it doesn't have the big display like the series seven.
02:15:43 ◼ ► I owned a series five, which I really, really, I jumped on because I really wanted the always
02:15:49 ◼ ► on display skipped series six because the real, the main thing I saw on the series six was that
02:15:54 ◼ ► the always on part was brighter and I didn't care about paying for that. And I planned on skipping
02:16:00 ◼ ► this year's too, but living with the review unit for two weeks, I really got used to the bigger
02:16:05 ◼ ► display and the battery life. Again, the other thing with this watch, it's very much in line
02:16:12 ◼ ► with the iPhone 13, the battery life is much larger. I can forget to charge my Apple watch
02:16:21 ◼ ► And the always on is much brighter. I find I use that a lot. Like I'm looking at it right now and
02:16:26 ◼ ► I can see it just by glancing down. I couldn't. I did too. And I took off after like two weeks with
02:16:30 ◼ ► the review unit, I went back to my series five and I was like, this thing is the battery's dying all
02:16:35 ◼ ► the time. It's just dead. Exactly the same thing. And it's not bad. Yeah. And the series and my
02:16:40 ◼ ► series five didn't have like a depleted battery. It's the same battery, you know, maybe it's like
02:16:45 ◼ ► at 95% or 93% or something like that, but it's effectively the same day-to-day battery life I
02:16:50 ◼ ► was getting up until I started reviewing the series seven. But once I got a taste of the series seven,
02:16:55 ◼ ► I was like, ah, now I got to place an order for a series seven. So I got the series seven,
02:16:59 ◼ ► very happy with it. Same. Exactly the same. What was the other one? What else do we have?
02:17:04 ◼ ► The MacBook pros. Oh, I forgot. How could I forget the MacBook pros? Holy hell do I love
02:17:10 ◼ ► my, my M one max MacBook pro. Oh my same. Yeah. I don't, again, there's three things about it that
02:17:19 ◼ ► really like sold it for me. One is that it's just fast. Like I press render on a video.
02:17:23 ◼ ► I go to get coffee and it's done so fast that I sometimes think I forgot to press render,
02:17:28 ◼ ► which is like, it is so much faster. The other thing though, the two things that surprised me,
02:17:33 ◼ ► one is like an iPad is just instant. Previously I would like drag a special effect. It would,
02:17:38 ◼ ► it would snowball, it would, it would beach ball. And I'd have to do that every time. Now I live a
02:17:42 ◼ ► life almost entirely without beach ball. So it doesn't just save me minutes. It saves me seconds
02:17:47 ◼ ► within every minute. And the last thing that surprised me was because it's got separate
02:17:52 ◼ ► rendering engines on my old Intel MacBook, I would press render and then I could barely use Safari
02:17:57 ◼ ► because everything was being done on the CPU, like much less Photoshop. Now I press render. It's all
02:18:02 ◼ ► offloaded to those engines. And I have like another whole Mac that I can use to do anything
02:18:18 ◼ ► John Greenewald It's really phenomenal. I swear, I know it's the placebo effect. I know it. Well,
02:18:23 ◼ ► I don't know. I could be wrong, but I'm 98% sure it is the placebo effect. But I swear to God,
02:18:37 ◼ ► John Greenewald It looks better. I do wish, I wish that they would just anodize the whole thing black
02:18:43 ◼ ► like that. I would love to have a black MacBook Pro, just black as black as the well of that
02:18:51 ◼ ► John Greenewald Yeah, Matt black all the things. But man, I do love typing on that thing. I do love
02:18:58 ◼ ► the display. The notch, total non issue. I was done with that notch. I think I said this recently,
02:19:04 ◼ ► too, on another episode. But I was way I think maybe with Joanna, but I took me way longer to
02:19:10 ◼ ► get used to the notch on the iPhone 10 than the notch on the the MacBook. Yeah, honestly,
02:19:21 ◼ ► like leaked the night before, or two nights before it was one of those things that leaked really,
02:19:27 ◼ ► really late that there you know, there was going to be a notch and I thought that way that's the
02:19:32 ◼ ► dumbest thing I ever heard that would be stupid on the Mac. And it's like, you know what the menu bar
02:19:37 ◼ ► is actually kind of a good spot. And as long as the software has some sort of intelligence to move
02:19:41 ◼ ► if if something is going to run into it, move it to the other side. It the Mac interface with that
02:19:48 ◼ ► iconic, literally, I will not literally, is it literal? I don't know. I'm gonna say it's
02:19:54 ◼ ► literally iconic, because there are some icons up there in the menu bar. But yeah, but the menu bar
02:19:59 ◼ ► is has been at least a figuratively iconic part of Mac interface right from 1984 onwards. Yeah,
02:20:09 ◼ ► it is very different from Windows where there is no menu bar at the top of the screen, their menus
02:20:14 ◼ ► are in the windows. It's an it's a good place to do something like that, in the same way that the
02:20:21 ◼ ► top of the iPhone screen is sort of a good place to put something like that, you know, like where
02:20:25 ◼ ► the iPhone really suffers with the notch is when you go to landscape to watch a video or something
02:20:34 ◼ ► Jared: But in both cases, like, I think people forget that it's extra screen real estate,
02:20:38 ◼ ► like, if it was still a forehead, we wouldn't have that. Right. So it's just extra space that they
02:20:42 ◼ ► can shove status into. It seems, you know, a couple months in, there's no surprises that have come up
02:20:50 ◼ ► with these new MacBook Pros. They are every bit as good as we thought they were when we reviewed
02:20:56 ◼ ► them one weekend. It is sort of thrilling to see Apple putting the pedal to the metal on and
02:21:05 ◼ ► literally applying their absolute best and brightest effort to the Mac and the Mac hardware.
02:21:16 ◼ ► You know, it's, you know, for all the doom and gloom over, hey, I don't know, guys, I think
02:21:22 ◼ ► Apple's I think Apple's abandoning the Mac. I think they're just going to stick iOS on everything
02:21:31 ◼ ► Jared: Well, I know like you did your annual interview with JAWS and Craig. And I got to
02:21:37 ◼ ► talk to Tim Millett, the vice president of silicon, and the head of Mac product marketing. Later after
02:21:44 ◼ ► these shipped, Tom Boger, sorry, and the amount of love that was just seeping out of every pore of
02:21:51 ◼ ► their being for the Mac. And you could see how happy they were with like both the silicon engines
02:21:56 ◼ ► that they built, but also with the resurgence of the Mac product line. They were literally beaming,
02:22:01 ◼ ► which like you used to see that at WWDC sometimes depending what they're going to announce,
02:22:15 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah, he really is. But it's, and he really, you know, who knows, you know, he's,
02:22:20 ◼ ► you know, anybody could get promoted elsewhere or move somewhere else. But his passion for the Mac
02:22:26 ◼ ► is palpable, you know, and you know, whether it's officially and on the record or unofficially and
02:22:35 ◼ ► off the record behind the scenes, it's serious. I remember, he was the guy I asked him, I asked
02:22:48 ◼ ► Pete; And he seemed tempted to let me. He said, you know, it could hold your weight. He goes,
02:22:55 ◼ ► I don't know that we should do it here though. Jared; No, that's the pro, the pro workflows team
02:23:04 ◼ ► because there's not much more that Apple did this year. The Mac OS 12 Monterey shipped,
02:23:10 ◼ ► I would say, pretty successful, a lot like iOS 15. It's not that they, it's not that they didn't do
02:23:17 ◼ ► anything. It's not like, there's not some new features that are cool. But it's sort of steady
02:23:22 ◼ ► as she goes, right? It's, you know, Jared; It's just universal control. We're waiting for it,
02:23:28 ◼ ► that's obviously next, you know, early next year thing, hopefully. But otherwise, you know,
02:23:34 ◼ ► for me, upgrading to Mac OS 12 was, other than taking longer, because when you cross that
02:23:40 ◼ ► integer boundary of OS updates, you have, it's like a serious update that turns the screen black
02:23:47 ◼ ► for a while and gives you a minutes long thing that you don't get when going from 12.1 to 12.2
02:23:54 ◼ ► or something like that. But the end result for me day to day as a user felt much more like going to
02:24:04 ◼ ► 11.7 or something like that. It doesn't, there's nothing, nothing got broken either software wise
02:24:18 ◼ ► I know that that doesn't sell stuff. And I know that those of us who really clamor, you know,
02:24:29 ◼ ► who announced it, but the 10.6 Mountain Lion, where they even chose a name going from lion to
02:24:36 ◼ ► mountain lion that, you know, and no new features. And meanwhile, there were major new features like
02:24:49 ◼ ► Pete; Right, but Snow Leopard, no, it was Snow Leopard was 10.6, right? I know the number,
02:24:55 ◼ ► I confuse the names, but 10.6 was the one where they even had a slide that just like dropped with
02:25:00 ◼ ► a cloud of dust, no new features and… Jared; Yeah, cool, because Steve was upset that there
02:25:04 ◼ ► weren't a lot of new features to announce. He's like, "Oh, yeah, we're just gonna do no features,
02:25:07 ◼ ► that's even better." Pete; But it was like raucous applause from the WWDC audience. And I know the
02:25:13 ◼ ► WWDC in-person audience is obviously different from the, the, the mainstream, you know, people,
02:25:22 ◼ ► you know, developers who are willing to spend $5,000 for a week to, to, you know, to be there
02:25:30 ◼ ► is a different crowd, but it was raucous applause because, and I know that that's not, you know,
02:25:35 ◼ ► you can't make commercials like that. You know what I mean? There's no way to put a commercial
02:25:41 ◼ ► during football games on Sunday afternoon that says, you know, Mac OS 12, no new features,
02:25:47 ◼ ► lots of bug fixes, you know, that the commercial, that commercial doesn't write itself quite the
02:25:52 ◼ ► opposite. But, you know, it's what we want, right? You know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
02:25:57 ◼ ► I will say I still haven't turned it off. The one feature that annoys me on the Mac is Quick Note,
02:26:04 ◼ ► because for whatever reason, I've got stuff in my lower right corner, I go down there and then
02:26:09 ◼ ► every, I've never once wanted to make a quick note on my Mac. And that stupid little window
02:26:16 ◼ ► keeps popping up. Yeah, I see. I don't do it on the Mac at all. I do it on the iPad all the time,
02:26:20 ◼ ► never use it on the Mac. The thing for me is like, the notifications are still way too persistent.
02:26:25 ◼ ► Like they come in, they stay around way too long. They don't like a guest that won't leave.
02:26:29 ◼ ► Yeah, that's enough. And then the whole thing comes over again every time. Yeah. And I if
02:26:33 ◼ ► there's anything that was surprising to me that didn't get like a real UI, a back to the drawing
02:26:39 ◼ ► board, it was the big sir Mac OS 11 notifications. There's there's all sorts of wonky stuff in the UI
02:26:46 ◼ ► where like, the regions that you can click on to click on things don't correspond to the actual
02:26:53 ◼ ► things you see on screen. You know, some of the I think some of them are smaller, and some of them
02:26:57 ◼ ► are bigger and things that just should not happen. Like on time delays. Yeah, it's just weird and
02:27:03 ◼ ► does not it feels unfinished, but shipped. And then in Mac OS 12, they didn't really seem to
02:27:10 ◼ ► address it. So hopefully that's on the list for Mac OS 13. I don't have much more to say about
02:27:16 ◼ ► that, though. Shortcut shipped. That's that's a big deal for those of us who are enthusiasts.
02:27:21 ◼ ► Speaking of bad UI, I really thought from well, I'm not surprised. And but but what they showed
02:27:31 ◼ ► in June and the first beta, just simple things like when you tell a shortcut to just show an
02:27:36 ◼ ► alert with some text, the alert is not a Mac alert. And you can you can complain about the
02:27:43 ◼ ► big sir style alerts and say they the actual proper alerts in Big Sur look too much like iOS,
02:27:51 ◼ ► and it's not appropriate for the Mac. And I don't like the design. But that's not even what you get
02:27:55 ◼ ► with shortcuts, you get this weird little shortcut thing that really, really, if you just showed it
02:28:01 ◼ ► to somebody and didn't tell them what it was, they would guess that it was like, some sort of
02:28:07 ◼ ► Linux to Mac trans programming platform thing. And yeah, some kind of cross platform thing and
02:28:17 ◼ ► that whoever decided what it would look like for the Mac wasn't even a Mac user. And just,
02:28:21 ◼ ► you know, there's a button, you know, there's an OK button in the bottom right that says OK, but
02:28:26 ◼ ► nothing about the layout of this actually looks Mac like. And I think, you know, I know, you know,
02:28:33 ◼ ► I'm far from an expert on shortcuts, although I've gotten more into them than I had before.
02:28:38 ◼ ► You know, I'm no Federico. But yeah, or Rosemary Orchard, you know, and they but they've said this
02:28:45 ◼ ► at length to like, I think long story short, the problem is shortcuts was the whether they
02:28:53 ◼ ► volunteered or not, they were the, the let's dog food Swift UI group. And Swift UI is not still not
02:29:03 ◼ ► up to the to the task of being what they wanted to be. But they had gone too far and they'd rewrote
02:29:10 ◼ ► everything in Swift UI. And that's what we got. But that's why the like the I think that's why
02:29:16 ◼ ► like the alerts don't look standard because the standard alerts aren't in Swift UI. They're in
02:29:21 ◼ ► AppKit or UI kit. And they like made their own and Swift UI and did not did not do a great job of it.
02:29:30 ◼ ► So there's lots of lots of room for improvement there with shortcuts. But it was announced in a
02:29:35 ◼ ► good way where they said this will be a transition from automator to shortcuts and automator is,
02:29:42 ◼ ► you know, still there. So you know, it's, you know, let's see where they go in a year, hopefully,
02:29:48 ◼ ► you know, make some improvements. I would still like to see them do something where you could
02:29:51 ◼ ► do automator steps with a language, you know, and that language could be some sort of cut down
02:30:05 ◼ ► some things that are just, Oh, man, it would be so much easier to just write a few lines of
02:30:10 ◼ ► actual code, if you can write code. And that to me is the one thing automator got right. That's
02:30:16 ◼ ► shortcuts doesn't is that automator fundamentally is the same sort of idea where you drag and drop
02:30:22 ◼ ► these sort of pre made steps and do the pre programming visually by connecting these things
02:30:31 ◼ ► in a visual way without writing code. But if there's ever a time when you need to use code,
02:30:37 ◼ ► you can always just add an automator step that calls any scripting language that Mac OS 10
02:30:42 ◼ ► supports Apple script, or bash or pearl or Python, or Ruby, I think anything that comes with Mac OS
02:31:00 ◼ ► Jared Ranere just want nodal editors, they just want a nodal editor, you can pack anything into
02:31:03 ◼ ► John Greenewald And then the only thing else I have, there was nothing in December, I don't
02:31:09 ◼ ► think Apple really had any news in December, other than some of the epic stuff that we talked about
02:31:13 ◼ ► before. But in November, Craig Federighi went to Lisbon, Portugal, and spoke at the web summit
02:31:20 ◼ ► against sideloading. I thought that was interesting. We talked about sideloading earlier,
02:31:25 ◼ ► we don't have to get into the argument. I do think he makes a compelling argument about having
02:31:31 ◼ ► a choice between, you know, if legislators around the world say, legally, all platforms must allow
02:31:39 ◼ ► sideloading, then somebody who does not want to even use a platform where it's an option,
02:31:48 ◼ ► Jared Ranere It's like you said, Jonas has a PS5, if you wanted a gaming PC, you could have that,
02:32:04 ◼ ► John Greenewald But the PS, I'll tell you what, even he said the PS5 was so much easier to set up.
02:32:08 ◼ ► Jared Ranere Yeah, that's, that's, that's the benefit. Like there are pros and cons to both.
02:32:12 ◼ ► I think a lot of times nerds think that there's only cons to the other approach and there's not,
02:32:15 ◼ ► because they're, I recently asked what people wanted to see in iOS 16 on Twitter, and 95% of
02:32:22 ◼ ► the answers I got were for features that only apply to 5% of the market. And that's the distortion
02:32:26 ◼ ► lens of tech Twitter or tech YouTube is that we really are outliers. We're minorities who think
02:32:31 ◼ ► that we're the majority and we are not. And it, I do think, and I think Federighi's argument,
02:32:41 ◼ ► in November was largely on the same point, but I feel like they've really honed it down. And I
02:32:46 ◼ ► think as a talk with Federighi as the person delivering it, it really came across even better.
02:32:52 ◼ ► But it really is true that the nerd argument is, hey, if you don't want it, don't turn it on,
02:32:58 ◼ ► right? Which is how the Mac works, right? The Mac by default ships a fresh Mac with factory settings,
02:33:05 ◼ ► doesn't allow you to install apps from outside the App Store. You have to authenticate as an
02:33:09 ◼ ► admin user and then check a checkbox in the security system prefs panel, and then you can
02:33:15 ◼ ► install them, you know, whatever apps you want. And that's great for the Mac, because that's the
02:33:20 ◼ ► way the Mac was designed. But that's exactly what so many people want for iPadOS and iOS.
02:33:26 ◼ ► And the just leave it checked if that's what you want argument. The hole in that argument is that
02:33:33 ◼ ► people, some organizations and needs will require you to disable it. And one of the examples that I
02:33:41 ◼ ► like to go to are these school proctoring software things where kids taking tests, and it's all come
02:33:49 ◼ ► up over the last two years because of kids who were taking school remotely because of COVID.
02:33:53 ◼ ► It's awful software. It's truly awful software. And it does terrible things like try to follow
02:34:00 ◼ ► the kids eyes where they're looking. And what do you do, though, if, you know, if, if, if iPhone,
02:34:07 ◼ ► if iOS were forced to allow sideloading, and your employer required you to install something that
02:34:15 ◼ ► turned off the protections, what do you do? You know, it's or government like the same privacy
02:34:21 ◼ ► advocates who are so against any of the CSAM scanning governments are going to force people
02:34:25 ◼ ► to put they already tried to do that on the DNS level, right? And kids who are going to want game
02:34:29 ◼ ► emulators, they're good like Nintendo's, they're not going to care. There's one thing, you know,
02:34:33 ◼ ► and look at what Facebook tried to do with the current rules in place where they tried to,
02:34:38 ◼ ► you know, overuse the enterprise certificate to get teenagers to install a VPN software.
02:34:48 ◼ ► Yeah, that Nova, yeah, that the entire point of which was to allow Facebook to track every single
02:34:55 ◼ ► thing they did over the network on their phones to see what what's useful, you know, which is
02:35:00 ◼ ► famously how they figured out that WhatsApp was so much more popular than it seemingly was valued at.
02:35:06 ◼ ► And, you know, will you know, they were like, we should we should definitely buy this, this is not
02:35:11 ◼ ► overpriced. This is look at the data we have from tracking what people actually do on their phones,
02:35:16 ◼ ► it's incredibly popular and growing. That's what they did before sideloading was allowed, you know,
02:35:21 ◼ ► and that if, if this like, sort of easy sideloading with no friction, and just check a box
02:35:28 ◼ ► thing were available, you know, what happens when Facebook starts telling all of their users, hey,
02:35:35 ◼ ► if you switch from this, you're using the App Store version of Facebook, if you switch to
02:35:40 ◼ ► Facebook's version of Facebook, will give you X, Y, and Z, you know, and people who don't know any
02:35:46 ◼ ► better do it. And, you know, next thing you know, your phone's on 23 metaverse credits.
02:35:51 ◼ ► Michael sigh on his great web blog had a link. I haven't linked to it on during fireball yet,
02:35:56 ◼ ► but I've been meaning to had a link the other day. I think it was a writer or Sarah No,
02:36:01 ◼ ► wasn't I right or somebody was talking about it, but somebody had a support thing about it. But
02:36:06 ◼ ► you've heard of Grammarly Grammarly is much popular. I say, if you install this is true,
02:36:11 ◼ ► if you install Grammarly on your Mac, they write a preference setting that disables the systems
02:36:19 ◼ ► spell checking system wide, not just for like the Grammarly app, but any app because Grammarly is
02:36:30 ◼ ► supposed to work in any app. And then you say, I don't like Grammarly. And then you drag it to the
02:36:35 ◼ ► trash and you think you're done with it. But the preference setting is still there. And now you
02:36:38 ◼ ► don't have the system spelling checking in any app. Well, that's that is so patently offensive.
02:36:45 ◼ ► It's ridiculous. But it's possible on the Mac, right? It's impossible. Grammarly for iOS,
02:37:00 ◼ ► a lot of problems. Right, right. And we never really got to the bottom of that, right? That
02:37:05 ◼ ► was still sort of a, it's still sort of a, you know, there's a lot of smoke, but we still never
02:37:10 ◼ ► found the fire of how come people were having this bizarre, you know, 30% CPU usage just in
02:37:17 ◼ ► the background with Chrome even quit. And then you uninstall Chrome completely and the problem
02:37:23 ◼ ► goes away. Yet nobody's figured out what the hell was going on. It's just kind of weird because
02:37:27 ◼ ► there were some big brains on the problem. But again, but you can't have a Keystone installer,
02:37:32 ◼ ► right? You cannot do it. There's no way to do it. You can't be asked to check a box so that you can
02:37:38 ◼ ► allow it. It's just not there. That's a feature. And on the Mac, the fact that you can is a feature.
02:37:44 ◼ ► That is why they are different platforms. You know, and there's so few like the thing is like,
02:37:49 ◼ ► I understand like there's big nerd love for all of these platforms, but there's so few really
02:37:53 ◼ ► mainstream friendly platforms. There's basically iOS and Chrome and yet we covered them. So we want
02:38:02 ◼ ► to the 90% of the market that really just wants something that's simple and easy to use. And
02:38:06 ◼ ► they've, we've got everything else. We've got windows, we've got Android, we've got Mac iOS,
02:38:09 ◼ ► we've got Linux. We've already got all this stuff. Anything else, Renee? It feels like the only big
02:38:16 ◼ ► thing that I liked at the end of the year was Apple suing NSO group. Facebook also famously
02:38:21 ◼ ► tried to use to get it. Yeah, that is sort of a nice cherry on the top of the new year. Let's hope,
02:38:27 ◼ ► wish them success. And boy, the more we learn about the NSO group, the worse they look,
02:38:33 ◼ ► number one, the fact that that story that came out a week or two ago that Netanyahu was using it as
02:38:47 ◼ ► Boy, that's just awful. And then the details of how their Pegasus exploit actually worked,
02:38:59 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a PDF with a .gif file extension and the PDF contains some sort of
02:39:08 ◼ ► obscure late 90s image format that was originally designed for fax machines, but that has a single
02:39:17 ◼ ► pass parser just reading from the beginning to the end of the file, but the nature of the file format
02:39:22 ◼ ► allowed an entire Turing complete computer, an emulated computer system to be built inside of it
02:39:32 ◼ ► is so crazy complicated and as a… forgetting how they used it out in the world, just the fact that
02:39:41 ◼ ► they pulled it off is sort of a, you know, hats off to you, clap, clap, clap, this is a magnificent
02:39:49 ◼ ► accomplishment, but also, you know, completely used for some of the worst purposes imaginable.
02:39:58 ◼ ► So here's hoping, you know, and it does seem bad. I mean, and Apple's lawsuit is not like perfunctory,
02:40:05 ◼ ► you know, like sometimes they say, you know, like, "Oh, you know, you got to file, you know,
02:40:10 ◼ ► protect a trade." You got to defend your copyright. You got to defend your copyright and you file like
02:40:13 ◼ ► a perfunctory, you know, cease and desist or what do they call it on YouTube? The, like with the
02:40:19 ◼ ► music. The DMCA. Yeah, DMCA files. And this is not like perfunctory and like somebody low down
02:40:26 ◼ ► an Apple legal, like, "Oh, I guess, you know, I, you know, just to, you know, just to tie things
02:40:32 ◼ ► off for the Friday, I'll just, busy work, I'll just file this lawsuit against NSO Group." No,
02:40:36 ◼ ► they are mad. I mean, they are really mad. And Apple, you're just not used to seeing Apple
02:40:44 ◼ ► be mad, right? They're just, this is not their brand, but they are furious, they are furious
02:40:50 ◼ ► about this. And I really do think the intent of their lawsuit is to sue NSO Group out of
02:40:57 ◼ ► existence. Yep. Good riddance. Yeah, good riddance. Let's wish them luck. And this is one,
02:41:02 ◼ ► this is also one of those cases too, where Apple obviously has detractors, people who disagree with
02:41:09 ◼ ► their philosophies, people who, you know, just don't like their style. They don't like the
02:41:14 ◼ ► control. I haven't seen anybody who's like rooting against Apple in this case. Yes. Everyone's like,
02:41:20 ◼ ► "Go, go, go." So, yeah, that was a nice thing to end the year on. It was very nice. And I feel
02:41:26 ◼ ► like they're on good ground. I mean, I don't know, you know, what the, I don't know how it's going
02:41:34 ◼ ► to turn out. I won't predict it as an Israeli company. What does that mean? What kind of
02:41:39 ◼ ► liability do they have? But— They can make the company toxic. I mean, just like through the
02:41:42 ◼ ► lawsuit, they can make the company absolutely toxic. Right. Well, and the other thing too,
02:41:45 ◼ ► that really, I don't know that it helps the lawsuit, but the other thing too is that the US
02:41:50 ◼ ► federal government is also really, really pissed. Like, you know, like the State Department, you
02:41:57 ◼ ► know, and the fact that actual state, US State Department employees had this deployed against
02:42:02 ◼ ► them. You know, and at one level, if it was like, I don't know, the Chinese or the Russians or
02:42:06 ◼ ► somebody who we have an adversarial relationship with internationally, it would be one thing.
02:42:17 ◼ ► ostensible allies, Israel, is I think the thing that takes this to a different level of pissed off.
02:42:35 ◼ ► I was on your video page just to go back and get for the show notes and find your reviews of some
02:42:40 ◼ ► of the recent products. And I'm like, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, just to get to like the
02:42:48 ◼ ► Yeah, no, it's a lot. I hit 300,000 subscribers right before coming on the show too, which was
02:43:17 ◼ ► My thanks to our sponsors. We had, oh, did I do a third sponsor? I don't know that I did.
02:43:37 ◼ ► Squarespace is the all in one website platform. You could build anything you want, a store,
02:43:41 ◼ ► a catalog, a shopping site. You could host a podcast. You could host a blog, anything you need.
02:43:48 ◼ ► You could do it at Squarespace. They've got great technical support. It is so easy to use.
02:43:54 ◼ ► You do it all in a browser. It is WYSIWYG. It is a great place to send your non-technical friends
02:44:08 ◼ ► start at squarespace.com/talkshow. You get 30 days free. There's no watermark on the site during the
02:44:16 ◼ ► 30-day free trial. It just looks exactly like it would if you were a paying customer. When the
02:44:20 ◼ ► 30 days are up, you pay. And if you start with that same URL, squarespace.com/talkshow and use
02:44:26 ◼ ► that code talk show, when you pay, you save 10% off your first purchase and you can do it for up
02:44:36 ◼ ► Easily my number one sponsor for the year. My thanks to them for still being here. I'll also