00:00:00 ◼ ► I'm in big trouble, Rene. Oh no, what happened? Well, it's what could happen. We're starting.
00:00:07 ◼ ► Usually. I don't know if I've ever even said this. 316 episodes of the show. I'm not sure
00:00:11 ◼ ► I've ever said exactly when we've recorded the show, but I'll give it a day. We're recording
00:00:16 ◼ ► on Wednesday, June 23rd at 5 54 p.m. Eastern time. I gotta record dithering after this.
00:00:26 ◼ ► Oh, okay. But the Milwaukee Bucks have a playoff game at 8 30. So I gotta get this in under two
00:00:33 ◼ ► hours or dithering is gonna suffer a divorce. It's all over. Does anybody care about Milwaukee?
00:00:40 ◼ ► Honestly? A guy named Ben Thompson. Oh, come on. I'm not even sure Milwaukee has a team. Maybe he
00:00:48 ◼ ► made it up. He's smart enough he could get away with it. I know. He should have done what I did
00:00:51 ◼ ► and root for the Sixers who lost anyway. And of course, the further complication is that this is
00:01:00 ◼ ► my first post WWDC show other than my actual WWDC show with Federighi and Jaws. But it's the first
00:01:09 ◼ ► one where, you know, it's a first normal episode. So we've got a lot to cover. We can say things you
00:01:14 ◼ ► can't say in front of them. Let's start though with today's white paper from Apple, which I'm
00:01:24 ◼ ► calling their anti side loading white paper, and the the regulatory environment in which
00:01:32 ◼ ► they've crafted it and dropped it. I just published my piece, annotating it, I describe it.
00:01:40 ◼ ► Curious what you think of it. Yeah, I'm really conflicted about this whole issue because on
00:01:46 ◼ ► one, and I feel like this is a big problem for our industry, because the people commenting on this
00:01:50 ◼ ► stuff are largely really traditional computer users who come from really traditional computer
00:01:55 ◼ ► backgrounds. And to them, to us, everything should just be a computer. That's the expected behavior.
00:02:01 ◼ ► Apple makes a new device. Of course, it should work in every way, like every other device Apple
00:02:06 ◼ ► has ever made, not counting the iPod, but it should work like a Mac should work like an Apple
00:02:10 ◼ ► too. And we've talked about this before, but it was clear at the inception that Steve Jobs meant
00:02:16 ◼ ► for it to be what would be called now a console like it was meant to be an app console. And for
00:02:23 ◼ ► a lot of people in the world that is way better than a computer. And I'm afraid I like my inherent
00:02:29 ◼ ► prejudice where I would say just Gatekeeper it and have it done with would be like going to some kid
00:02:35 ◼ ► and saying no, no, no, you don't want an Xbox. You want a PC. You're gonna have to deal with some
00:02:39 ◼ ► malware. You have to deal with some ransomware. It's fine, but you can game on a PC. What do you
00:02:44 ◼ ► need this idiot Xbox thing for? Or you should sideload on your Xbox. I feel like there's a
00:02:48 ◼ ► lot of lack of empathy for non-computer nerds in this whole discussion. I think so too. I think
00:02:54 ◼ ► it's been that case all along, but I think it's coming to a head. It's coming to fruition. And
00:02:59 ◼ ► then it is it's it's so multifaceted because that's that's sort of the user perspective, right? On the
00:03:07 ◼ ► one hand, there are the users who like as I put it in my piece, basically just want to know what
00:03:15 ◼ ► you know, just allow side loading as an off by default, you know, pretty much like Android. And
00:03:20 ◼ ► in a way sort of I guess that's a sort of like how the Mac defaults now too. I actually forget
00:03:24 ◼ ► exactly what a factory fresh Mac defaults to, but I think it defaults to App Store only. The Mac
00:03:31 ◼ ► makes it really easy. Well, as easy as I think it should be to go in to security settings and say
00:03:39 ◼ ► only allow, you know, uncheck the checkbox for only allow apps from the App Store and whether or not
00:03:45 ◼ ► you allow unsigned apps, etc. Android hides it a bit. And it seems to move around between versions
00:03:52 ◼ ► of Android. Android settings I find not not impenetrable, but like shifting sand there.
00:04:00 ◼ ► Why not just do that, ship it by default, and then all of the iOS users, you know, most of them will
00:04:08 ◼ ► never change their defaults. And so they'll be just as protected and limited by every, you know,
00:04:13 ◼ ► everything coming through the App Store as they are today. And those of us who would like to
00:04:17 ◼ ► install apps from other sources, for whatever reason, can choose to do so at our own risk,
00:04:30 ◼ ► and then I'm on my own. It's my device, right? You put in your Konami code, and you do your business.
00:04:36 ◼ ► Right. I should probably add that to my I forgot that it's my device. But that it's true, right?
00:04:42 ◼ ► And I wrote that in my article, like, that's a good argument. It there's nothing or there's nothing wrong
00:04:47 ◼ ► with that argument. Except that it's incomplete. And it ignores to me, the downsides there, there
00:04:58 ◼ ► would be trade offs. You know, the Mac is an expert first computer that it tries to be as safe and
00:05:10 ◼ ► friendly and approachable as possible to non expert users. And there are 10s of millions of totally
00:05:18 ◼ ► non experts who use a Mac. My dad, yeah, 83 year old, he much prefers his there. But for him and
00:05:27 ◼ ► his my mom's iMac to using an iPad or something like he just likes it. He likes having a keyboard.
00:05:33 ◼ ► He likes the bigger screen. You know, and you know, he's got it set up and it works. It works
00:05:39 ◼ ► for that. And, but he, you know, he also knows, you know, there are always times in just over the last
00:05:44 ◼ ► 10 years, there were a lot of times where I'd get like a phone call and they'd be like, ah,
00:05:47 ◼ ► something's popped up says I need an Adobe Flash Player update, right? It was off. And it's like,
00:05:52 ◼ ► now to say no, I don't know where you got that. Say no, no, no, you don't. You don't need that.
00:05:57 ◼ ► There's all sorts of things you can do on a Mac and that typical users get into trouble with
00:06:02 ◼ ► non savvy, non technically savvy users get in trouble with. And the iPhone is an iOS writ large
00:06:10 ◼ ► and its family of of OSes that are really just derivatives of iOS, like iPad OS and watch OS and
00:06:18 ◼ ► tvOS are non savvy user first, you know, let's let's even though this is a full Unix computer
00:06:39 ◼ ► where you cannot mess it up by doing anything. And it in 14 years of experience now, this isn't
00:06:52 ◼ ► unveiled the iPhone SDK in 2007 and said it would have these limits have been proven to be right.
00:06:59 ◼ ► Users have thrived, the devices are the the most free of malware by any definition, right? Like
00:07:08 ◼ ► not just viruses, or apps that try to ransomware you or something like that, but just something you
00:07:15 ◼ ► just don't want period, right? Like, like that whole thing from a few months ago, about from
00:07:21 ◼ ► Lauren Brikter about Chrome is bad. That was yes, that there's some kind of mysterious keystone
00:07:26 ◼ ► right updater, right? It's, it's not malware in the sense that the Google Chrome engineers who
00:07:34 ◼ ► most or at least many of whom surely are Mac users themselves, right? Like Chrome is probably
00:07:40 ◼ ► in large part developed on Macs by Mac users at Google. They've got the best intentions. But they
00:07:47 ◼ ► have made a decision that because they they think they know better than the user Chrome updates by
00:07:55 ◼ ► itself invisibly in the background, and you don't really have an option to turn that off,
00:07:59 ◼ ► at least not one that I know of. And if there is, it is, you know, like a secret setting or
00:08:04 ◼ ► something like that. And it installs some kind of background agent in, you know, your home folder,
00:08:11 ◼ ► library, something something folder, and it runs every once in a while and checks if there's a new
00:08:16 ◼ ► version of Chrome, even if Chrome isn't running, and it doesn't pop up a dialog that says you want
00:08:20 ◼ ► to upload the new version of Chrome, it just uploads it. And their argument, which is not unreasonable,
00:08:25 ◼ ► is this way users are always up to date with the latest Chrome, which could have security and
00:08:32 ◼ ► performance improvements. And they don't have to do anything. Okay. But then the downside is that
00:08:38 ◼ ► effectively, when you install Chrome on your Mac, you're no longer really running Mac OS, you're
00:08:49 ◼ ► Yeah. And apparently it could cause problems. That's not possible. And again, that's a well-intentioned
00:08:55 ◼ ► developer making an extraordinarily popular Mac app. It's just not possible on iOS. And you can't
00:09:01 ◼ ► overstate how important that is to users. And again, in 14 years of experience, we've seen
00:09:07 ◼ ► users who were truly, I know this firsthand from my friends talking about their parents and
00:09:14 ◼ ► relatives, and I say this because my friends are actually all nerds and know how to do stuff,
00:09:24 ◼ ► they all typical Windows users eventually became afraid to install anything because installing
00:09:33 ◼ ► stuff under Windows machine eventually, you know, cause problems and you'd have to wipe it or really,
00:09:39 ◼ ► that's why most people, regular consumers, I know why they chose to buy a new computer is that their
00:09:44 ◼ ► old one just was like broke from, from even like just adware, like not even mounted where they get
00:09:49 ◼ ► like 19 different bars on their browsers and cookie redirected to whatever affiliate links and
00:09:54 ◼ ► browser hijacked. And there's just so many things that I would classify as annoyances, but when you
00:09:58 ◼ ► have 18 flies buzzing around your head, it's as bad as having, you know, like one, one piece of
00:10:04 ◼ ► malware, it just becomes so unpleasant. You don't want to do things. And that's been the repeated
00:10:10 ◼ ► experience with me and non tech savvy people. And I don't mean dumb. I think a lot of people say,
00:10:14 ◼ ► like, when we talk about non tech savvy people, we're talking down to them, we're thinking that
00:10:17 ◼ ► they're stupid and they're not, they can be geniuses who just don't happen to give a crap
00:10:22 ◼ ► about all the technical things that we do. They just use it as a tool. Like they're doing science
00:10:27 ◼ ► or medicine or law, and they need a tool that works and they don't have the time, the inclination
00:10:32 ◼ ► or the patience to deal with all this stuff that we do on a regular daily basis. And it feels like
00:10:45 ◼ ► they really only have iOS and Chrome OS. And it feels like just because we think it's sexy
00:10:50 ◼ ► hardware, we want to take it away from them and say, no, this is going to be our nerd box too.
00:10:55 ◼ ► And that just feels so inconsiderate sometimes. Right. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is
00:10:59 ◼ ► that the Mac and other, you know, PC type platforms like windows, Mac and windows and stuff
00:11:04 ◼ ► like that are expert first, typical user second, and iOS is typical user first, expert second.
00:11:12 ◼ ► And Apple is, and we'll get to this, they are expanding the power user type features on iOS
00:11:18 ◼ ► in truly wonderfully encouraging ways and at a pace that now seems like this is great. Like
00:11:27 ◼ ► shortcuts are a lot better in the new iOS 15 that's coming out than they were last year. And
00:11:32 ◼ ► last year's was a big improvement over the year before they got so much faster, and they can do
00:11:36 ◼ ► so much more. And, you know, hobbyist level users can build really interesting things with
00:11:45 ◼ ► shortcuts. And they can do things like starting last year, that whole trend, where non-technical
00:11:53 ◼ ► users on their iPhones and iPads, but especially iPhones, let's face it, were replacing their,
00:11:59 ◼ ► putting all their apps in the app library and then setting up shortcuts for each of the apps.
00:12:04 ◼ ► And then you can assign a custom icon to the shortcut and all it does is open the app. And
00:12:09 ◼ ► then all of a sudden you could give whatever app you want. You could have like a custom suite of
00:12:14 ◼ ► black and white icons for all of the apps that you use on your first screen. And, you know,
00:12:23 ◼ ► you could customize your wallpaper. I love that because it's exactly what got me into Mac
00:12:30 ◼ ► enthusiasm when I first got a Mac back, way back in, you know, like 1947 or whenever it was, when I
00:12:37 ◼ ► was a young, young man in college. But like, dicking around in ResEdit with tweaking the icons
00:12:50 ◼ ► Yes. Yeah. Same. Like my BB edit folder where the BB edit app was and all of its support files
00:12:57 ◼ ► was a folder icon with a little BB edit badge in the corner, not a regular folder icon. I loved
00:13:02 ◼ ► doing stuff like that. It's in it, you know, it's a great way to get into it, but still it's typical
00:13:10 ◼ ► user first, safety first, expert second. It's a flip-flop of the priorities of which users are the
00:13:17 ◼ ► most catered to and which one comes second. And some people just don't see that as a reasonable
00:13:23 ◼ ► choice. And even that is like far more than Steve Jobs or Scott Forestall ever intended. Like,
00:13:29 ◼ ► I think there's a mentality for some people at Apple that iOS 6 was the pinnacle of anything
00:13:34 ◼ ► that any normal user would ever need. And there was a lot of pressure not to do airdrop and not
00:13:39 ◼ ► to do any of the things that we take for granted as basic utility features now. And it's only
00:13:44 ◼ ► because Craig is nerdier and Apple has gotten more expansive with the iPhone and the iPad
00:13:48 ◼ ► that we're getting these features. But I agree with you, something like, you know, some sort of
00:13:54 ◼ ► theme kit to me is like a much higher priority in terms of what an average, and I don't use average
00:13:59 ◼ ► disparagingly at all, but what the vast majority of users would want than a lot of the things that
00:14:04 ◼ ► we're arguing about as minority opinions that we just consider to be majority because we have them.
00:14:39 ◼ ► up, I think starting today and were announced last week. It's there's fundamentally at the highest
00:14:46 ◼ ► level, I disagree with most, almost all of the things that they're trying to do. Even more
00:14:54 ◼ ► importantly, it's clear in the ones that I disagree with the most that that the legislators don't
00:15:02 ◼ ► Or they don't have the same, their priorities are not aligned with those of us who want to see some
00:15:14 ◼ ► Yeah, and like, Representative Jayapal, who's from Washington State, who I really liked last year,
00:15:31 ◼ ► hearing with Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, and I think Jack was the fourth? Yeah, I think
00:15:40 ◼ ► Jack, he's just Jack from Twitter. They offered very little, very few questions to Tim Cook,
00:15:59 ◼ ► but there was also in the run-up to the conference, there was reports that Tim Cook and Apple
00:16:06 ◼ ► sort of responded to the "we'd like you, before we force you to, we'd like you to come,"
00:16:11 ◼ ► a sort of "why are you bothering with us? We're not doing anything that's a violation of antitrust
00:16:17 ◼ ► laws." And the hearing came and went, and it was after it was over, and that was one that I watched
00:16:22 ◼ ► the whole thing. There was sort of a "why did they make Tim Cook do this?" They hardly asked him
00:16:27 ◼ ► anything. And Jayapal's questions to Amazon in particular were, I thought, really, really good.
00:16:34 ◼ ► And the bill that she's sponsoring is very much just going after Apple, and kind of curiously,
00:16:42 ◼ ► I think the company the second most—because her bill is pretty much trying to say that the first
00:16:50 ◼ ► party platform maker shouldn't be allowed—it should be legally prevented from advantaging itself
00:17:07 ◼ ► illegal, goes too far, and should be regulated by the government compared to, you know,
00:17:13 ◼ ► yes, it's undeniable there's got to be limits? But the idea that it should be on equal footing
00:17:21 ◼ ► is a complete lack of understanding of what it means to be the first party, right? That's why
00:17:27 ◼ ► we call them the first party. They come first. Nintendo can't make Mario. It's the world we
00:17:36 ◼ ► Well, you get to—you know, here's like a little example, a little example, but it's just one. And
00:17:41 ◼ ► just to call out a new feature announced at WWDC, but the iPad, iPadOS now has a feature called
00:17:46 ◼ ► Quick Note, where you can use your pencil or your finger to slide out from the lower right corner
00:17:53 ◼ ► and instantly make a new Quick Note. We're calling it in Apple Notes. And it integrates with Safari
00:18:08 ◼ ► you start a new Quick Note. It'll draw the URL from the current Safari page, pre-fill it in the
00:18:15 ◼ ► note, and if you annotate or quote like a certain section of the web page, when you go back to that
00:18:23 ◼ ► Quick Note, it'll note when it goes to the web page to go to that part of the page that you made
00:18:28 ◼ ► a note about. Cool feature. That would be illegal under Jai Appel's bill because it's not offered to
00:18:37 ◼ ► third-party note apps. That to me is ridiculous. I mean, that's what it means to be the first party.
00:18:45 ◼ ► You get the advantage. That whole thing was so interesting to me, and I watched it as well,
00:18:53 ◼ ► because it started off—and I'm blanking, you just said his name, but I'm blanking on the chairman's
00:19:02 ◼ ► "Do these big companies need to be broken apart? We're going to take evidence." And then nobody's
00:19:07 ◼ ► mentioned that at all for the entire length of the conference. The Republicans mostly focused on
00:19:12 ◼ ► conservative voices being suppressed as sort of theater, and you knew that because whenever they
00:19:16 ◼ ► broke character, they became these really efficient litigators who really asked good questions and
00:19:21 ◼ ► then went right back to their theater about conservative voices. And Democrats, who largely
00:19:25 ◼ ► talked about the behavior of the companies towards their competitors and their partners—and again,
00:19:31 ◼ ► you could see that was a lot of theater because, like you mentioned, when they got serious about
00:19:35 ◼ ► it, they became the real lawyers that they are. Everyone just seemed to break character and
00:19:39 ◼ ► occasionally be competent, but then go right back to their set theatrical patterns, which I found
00:19:43 ◼ ► astounding. And then at the end, he just said, "Okay, thank you for everything. It is clear to
00:19:47 ◼ ► me now these companies need to be broken up. Bang, gavel, we're done." And it just made such—it was
00:19:52 ◼ ► such a cognitive dissonance about the entire proceeding, and it seems to manifest itself now
00:19:57 ◼ ► in these bills. I do think, though, that—and this is hopefully comes across in my article—is that
00:20:06 ◼ ► in some ways, I feel like the bills are very misguided, but I also feel that a lot of this
00:20:12 ◼ ► is Apple's own fault. And it is—is it arrogance? Is it—I don't know. But there was a sense back
00:20:24 ◼ ► with the e-book case, which I think was around 2013, that Apple had the attitude that I still
00:20:54 ◼ ► when you're talking like 50%, is it 45%, is it 55%? But like, Kindle is clearly an e-book
00:21:09 ◼ ► And I think Apple headed into that case thinking, "Well, we're not—I don't know why we're even
00:21:14 ◼ ► going to court, but we pay all these lawyers, and that's why we have them. We'll be okay."
00:21:41 ◼ ► And it was weird, like in broad strokes, one of the things that the U.S. tends to look at
00:21:45 ◼ ► differently than the EU, like the EU seems to be all about competition, and the U.S. seems to be
00:21:48 ◼ ► mostly about, you know, lowest price for consumers. And Amazon was providing lower prices by dumping,
00:21:54 ◼ ► like by using it as a loss leader by dumping it, which is not healthy and not good for competition.
00:22:02 ◼ ► But they didn't look at the results that they wanted. And I find like both the DOJ and the EU
00:22:06 ◼ ► make this mistake, and the EU famously with browser ballots, their goal was to stop Internet
00:22:11 ◼ ► Explorer from taking over and to preserve these small market browsers like Fenris and, I forget,
00:22:17 ◼ ► Sleipnir, things like that. But what they ended up doing was destroying IE and allowing,
00:22:23 ◼ ► essentially, Chrome to become the dominant browser. But worse than that, they destroyed
00:22:32 ◼ ► They handed Google an effective, much larger monopoly over web browsing or much larger power
00:22:38 ◼ ► over web browsing than IE ever had because their focus was on what they thought was a problem and
00:22:44 ◼ ► not the solution that actually needed to be handled or what consumers needed as a solution.
00:22:49 ◼ ► >> I would argue that the EU decision where, you know, on first boot, Windows machines in the EU
00:23:07 ◼ ► and it's a bad experience for the user, and it's a pain in the ass that Microsoft didn't deserve.
00:23:12 ◼ ► But I would argue that that's not the reason IE dropped from relevance. I think IE eventually
00:23:19 ◼ ► got beaten fair and square by Firefox as a superior. Firefox built a browser for Windows,
00:23:26 ◼ ► or Mozilla built Firefox for Windows, and it was so much better that users switched on their own,
00:23:33 ◼ ► and companies had their employees switch on their own because they deemed it technically superior.
00:23:54 ◼ ► That's the thing that I think the legislatures don't get, is that how fast tech works and how,
00:24:01 ◼ ► you know, Windows still has probably about the same market share. I mean, I know Macs are selling
00:24:06 ◼ ► better than ever, but the overall market share of PCs, if you define PCs as things running Windows,
00:24:14 ◼ ► Mac, and Linux, is as strong as it ever was. But nobody talks of Microsoft in the terms that they
00:24:21 ◼ ► did circa 1996, '97, because the world shifted, right? Competition really works. I'm not trying
00:24:31 ◼ ► to be a capitalism fundamentalist here, but it really does work, and tech moves so fast,
00:24:48 ◼ ► where you see it happen not just once in your lifetime, but several times in your lifetime,
00:24:54 ◼ ► right? I'm only 48 years old, and it's happened several times, that the general gist of who is
00:25:02 ◼ ► on top—I mean, most of the companies who are now on top, the ones who are in the New York Times is
00:25:09 ◼ ► big tech cabal. Facebook didn't exist, Google didn't exist when I was in college, and I'm only
00:25:17 ◼ ► 48 years old, they didn't even exist. Mark Zuckerberg was probably like three years old.
00:25:28 ◼ ► You know, IBM, is IBM a terror of the industry, a menace that everybody has to deal with? No,
00:25:33 ◼ ► when's the last time you really even thought about IBM? You know, it can happen fast. I mean,
00:25:40 ◼ ► in 1995, I think, Sun Microsystems was on the cusp of just purchasing Apple. And, oh, it was,
00:25:51 ◼ ► as a Mac user at the time, it was like, "Oh, I hope that doesn't happen, because that's
00:26:02 ◼ ► Right. This stuff moves fast. Does that mean that no regulation ever should happen? Of course not.
00:26:25 ◼ ► No, it's also the same. It also seems like these days, they choose a company as a target and then
00:26:29 ◼ ► want to specifically try to, like, whether it's bans on TikTok or bans on app bundling with Apple,
00:26:36 ◼ ► they choose a company as a target and try to write legislation to the solution that they
00:27:06 ◼ ► and Tile and Facebook have issues with Apple's app tracking transparency. So, there are smaller
00:27:13 ◼ ► companies like Spotify and Tile who are complaining about having to go against Apple Music and
00:27:19 ◼ ► AirTags and the whole Find My network being— You know, what Tile wants is to be able to
00:27:37 ◼ ► right? They could install some sort of system extension that keeps it running in the background
00:27:42 ◼ ► and listens as a background agent and does stuff like that. Could there be a phone, you know? And
00:27:50 ◼ ► I guess one of the frustrations the power user type users have is that there is no phone that
00:27:56 ◼ ► really gives them— There's certainly no Apple phone that gives them that level of, "Yes, I trust
00:28:04 ◼ ► myself to only install stuff, but I want to install stuff that runs in the background all the time."
00:28:10 ◼ ► Right? So, like, I know the iPad is not a direct competitor to the Mac, but it sort of is, you know,
00:28:16 ◼ ► if you consider that most Macs are MacBooks, the iPad is sort of an alternative to a MacBook,
00:28:22 ◼ ► and Apple offers both. If you want only the iPad safety rails, you could just use iPad,
00:28:31 ◼ ► And that's intentional. That's very deliberate on their side, like that Steve wanted to make—
00:28:43 ◼ ► I understand why there's not. I mean, I don't think it would be a good business decision.
00:28:54 ◼ ► and the Mac phones had all the capabilities, like sort of you, the user, can just install whatever
00:29:01 ◼ ► you want, and it can be installed not just as an app in a sandbox, you can install non-sandboxed
00:29:06 ◼ ► apps that, you know, have crazy wild permissions, because you could do cool things, right?
00:29:11 ◼ ► No doubt about it. There are totally cool ideas that you cannot develop— No developer can offer
00:29:18 ◼ ► for iOS because they're not at Apple. Only Apple can do system-level stuff. That sucks.
00:29:24 ◼ ► And just to your point earlier about Tile, like, Tile— one of the things that's interesting to
00:29:31 ◼ ► sure-locking them. They go right out in Moriarty Apple. Like, they make Fantastical and Pcalc and
00:29:37 ◼ ► Halide and all these apps that are just way better than Apple's apps. And I'm not saying that to be
00:29:41 ◼ ► condescending or to dismiss, you know, the platform advantage Apple has, but you can see a world where
00:29:46 ◼ ► Tile says, "Okay, we're using the Find My API that Apple provides on iPhone, and we're doing something
00:29:51 ◼ ► Apple can't. We're using our own network on Android or Google's network on Android so that
00:29:55 ◼ ► if you have a cross-device family, you can buy a tile and use it with everything. You don't have to
00:29:59 ◼ ► worry about being stuck in Apple's ecosystem." And you could look at, like, Clubhouse saying,
00:30:04 ◼ ► you know, "We made this wonderful app, and now Spotify has green room, and they have this huge
00:30:08 ◼ ► platform advantage, and they're using it to suppress us." So I honestly don't see a difference
00:30:14 ◼ ► trillion-dollar tyrant, and it makes all of these debates seem much more self-serving to me than I
00:30:19 ◼ ► think the companies actually realize. And the other thing, I just think that the legislation
00:30:26 ◼ ► totally gets the consumer perspective wrong. And I know, I forget his name, the Apple guy who they
00:30:33 ◼ ► sent instead of Tim Cook in the run-up to the lawsuit. But remember there was a guy, I'm not
00:30:41 ◼ ► gonna, I'm sorry, I hope he doesn't listen to the show. But they sent him, and I don't think he did
00:30:49 ◼ ► very well in front of the Senate committee he was testifying, and I think that's partly where some
00:30:55 ◼ ► of this is coming from now. But one of the things that he'd said, repeated, that I do think was true
00:31:02 ◼ ► was that what the implication of the questions of "Why are you doing this? This is bad," is that
00:31:09 ◼ ► you're describing features that our customers love. This is what they love about the iPhone.
00:31:13 ◼ ► They love that they cannot mess it up. They love that they can't install anything that runs the
00:31:18 ◼ ► battery down in the background without their knowledge. They love that the private, they love
00:31:23 ◼ ► the new privacy controls that are in their hands and not developer hands. And I think that they
00:31:34 ◼ ► misunderstand that, I really do. I really think it's true that the iPhone has succeeded not
00:31:45 ◼ ► And, you know, Kyle and Dear, was that the one? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay, good. Now you can listen
00:31:53 ◼ ► to the show again. I, it's it and I feel like that argument fell on deaf ears, even though
00:32:02 ◼ ► the Occam's razor argument is that, yes, it has made it wildly popular. And the iPhone didn't drop
00:32:13 ◼ ► into the world and 100 million people bought it. It was like, "We'd like to sell 10 million in the
00:32:20 ◼ ► first, by the end of the next year," or something like that. If we get 1%, we'll be happy. Right.
00:32:24 ◼ ► We'll get in a world where it was unlike all other phones and it looked different. And even for users
00:32:32 ◼ ► who really wanted to use their phone for email and messaging, it was the whole thing about the
00:32:37 ◼ ► keyboard. Like, this is ridiculous. Nobody, you know, Steve Ballmer laughing that doesn't even
00:32:41 ◼ ► have a keyboard and it costs 600 bucks. And anybody who's serious about doing messaging
00:32:46 ◼ ► on their phone wants a keyboard because, of course, you know, that's what succeeded in the
00:32:51 ◼ ► past, the BlackBerry. And again, look at it. Where's BlackBerry now? Right? It changes.
00:33:04 ◼ ► we look at it, like traditional computer people look at that, look at those things as bugs,
00:33:11 ◼ ► Absolutely. They really do. And I know, I know, "anecdata is not data," but I have so much
00:33:20 ◼ ► "anecdata" from people. Like, I remember I have a friend who I worked with at Barebone Software
00:33:35 ◼ ► And he was telling me about his father-in-law. And he said, "His father-in-law," I forget what
00:33:41 ◼ ► he did. Maybe he was an accountant or something like that. But he said, "He's Cracker Jack smart.
00:33:46 ◼ ► He's super smart. Always a Windows user and always had just one of those Windows users who had a bad,
00:33:54 ◼ ► you know, bad perception of Apple. Just thought Apple wasn't for him. It was for other type of
00:34:05 ◼ ► you know, never installed additional software. He thought, you know, the only way—this is how I
00:34:10 ◼ ► keep my computer going—is I just, you know, use the software that comes on it, install the least
00:34:16 ◼ ► possible software. Like, here's the accounting package I use, you know, to run my accounting
00:34:20 ◼ ► business." And that's it. Retired, got an iPad. And he said, "You cannot believe what he's doing
00:34:28 ◼ ► on it. He's making movies, editing at this large digital photo library. He's become like a
00:34:40 ◼ ► because he realizes and can feel. Yeah, you have like—it's not like, "Oh, Apple says it's safe."
00:34:49 ◼ ► It's like you have this perception in the iPad/iPhone experience. You can feel it's safe.
00:34:54 ◼ ► Yeah. You know it's safe. You've experienced that it's safe. It's like that you can be a nerd and
00:35:00 ◼ ► roll your eyes at that and say, "Nope, they're just suckers for the marketing," or whatever.
00:35:04 ◼ ► But it's true. There's something ineffable about the design that lets you feel that this is safe
00:35:10 ◼ ► and that there's nothing going on mysterious in the background, and that when you delete an app
00:35:15 ◼ ► in jiggle mode, the app and all of its traces are gone. That's it. You didn't like this game?
00:35:21 ◼ ► You delete it, it's gone. And there's nothing in the background that's going to pop up in a month
00:35:25 ◼ ► and say, "Hey, do you want to re-download me? I'm still available in the App Store." It won't happen.
00:35:33 ◼ ► It's so true. I have several direct and extended family members who are doctorate-level education,
00:35:41 ◼ ► and they just always felt stupid using a computer. It didn't make sense to them. It was too finicky,
00:35:53 ◼ ► My mom has an iMac. Other people in my family have MacBooks. They don't use them. They use iPads now
00:35:59 ◼ ► because that, to them, is the first computer that makes sense. Right. And it's just—and
00:36:05 ◼ ► I thought Apple's white paper raised a very key point about that argument to go back a few minutes
00:36:12 ◼ ► about, "Well, look, if you don't want to sideload, just never turn it on." But if that's there,
00:36:26 ◼ ► users who don't really know what they're getting into or don't want to get into it might have to,
00:36:30 ◼ ► like if you're using your own iPad at school, and the school says, "We want you to install
00:36:35 ◼ ► this proctoring software," but the proctoring software is not in the App Store because it's
00:36:41 ◼ ► doing stuff that the App Store doesn't allow, surveillance-wise. What do you do if you're
00:36:48 ◼ ► a student? What do you do if you're taking the SAT or the LSAT or something like that on your iPad,
00:36:54 ◼ ► and you can either do it and install it and turn on sideloading, or you don't get to take the test?
00:37:01 ◼ ► Who's going to say no to that? What if you're in— Tim Epic says you need to get Fortnite
00:37:06 ◼ ► by sideloading, and then you're trying to find out which version of Fortnite is safe because
00:37:10 ◼ ► a bunch of malware people have that, which is exactly what happened on Android when they did
00:37:13 ◼ ► that. A bunch of malware versions have also been put out there. Yeah, Apple cited a bunch of cases
00:37:18 ◼ ► in the footnotes. I didn't get into that in my article, but their footnotes are actually pretty
00:37:21 ◼ ► fascinating. There's a lot of cases that would have been good, daring, Fireball Father, to be honest,
00:37:28 ◼ ► that I had not heard of, of fake games and stuff like that, or pirated versions of games.
00:37:34 ◼ ► I guess the more common scam, though, is just the fake version of the game. You tell somebody that
00:37:40 ◼ ► it's Candy Crush and you can install it for free over here, and you get it and it's not Candy
00:37:45 ◼ ► Crush, it's something else. Or if you install these five apps, we'll give you money towards
00:37:49 ◼ ► this. They do that now, even with non-fake apps, they try to use Android. The whole thing is just...
00:37:53 ◼ ► Yeah, the other one that was eye-opening to me was the ransomware angle, which again is not just
00:37:59 ◼ ► presented by Apple as a hypothetical, but is footnoted with actual examples, where there are
00:38:09 ◼ ► filters or something like that. Something that the purpose of the app—because Android has the
00:38:14 ◼ ► similar things as iOS, where you have to give the app permission to access your photos, and you say,
00:38:19 ◼ ► "Well, yeah, that's why I got the app, so it can access my photos," and as soon as it has access to
00:38:23 ◼ ► your photos, the app says, "You need to pay $10 through a credit card right now, or I'm going to
00:38:32 ◼ ► delete all the photos from your phone." And you've already given it the permission to have access to
00:38:37 ◼ ► your photos. People can say that's your fault or your choice or you're dumbing it down, but right
00:38:43 ◼ ► now people have the choice to get a platform that makes it really, really difficult to do all those
00:38:48 ◼ ► things, where their level of fear, of stress, of anxiety is very low because the platform itself
00:38:53 ◼ ► protects them against that. But you can also choose a different platform. Like right now,
00:38:57 ◼ ► you have the choice between iOS and Android, and on some level, this is taking away that choice.
00:39:02 ◼ ► It's whether you believe the choice should be on the platform level, like you should have a choice
00:39:05 ◼ ► on every platform to do it, or whether it's okay to have one platform that allows it and one that
00:39:10 ◼ ► doesn't, and you get to choose between those things the way you get to choose between an Xbox and a
00:39:15 ◼ ► gaming PC, for example. They don't have to be the same. Very true. Before I take a sponsor break,
00:39:22 ◼ ► let me just take this break to do a total footnote. And I'm bringing up my friend Steve, who told me
00:39:27 ◼ ► that story about his father-in-law at WWDC 2012 or 13. I remember that while we were talking,
00:39:34 ◼ ► I was like, "Where are you going?" And he told me he was going to a security session, and I was like,
00:39:38 ◼ ► "I'll go. That sounds interesting." And I went, and it was a session on security. And back then,
00:39:44 ◼ ► I think Apple's largely gotten away with the Q&As, but they were still doing post-session Q&As.
00:39:55 ◼ ► it's at that point where it's like, once a Q&A starts, you start putting your stuff back in
00:39:58 ◼ ► your backpack, and you're like, "I think I'm done." You know, the Q&As were never that good.
00:40:08 ◼ ► passwords are terrible for most users. They use the same ones over and over. They forget the ones
00:40:18 ◼ ► they have if they are secure. And they're open to scamming in a bunch of ways, where you can
00:40:26 ◼ ► prompt for a password and the user can put their password in, but it's not—you're giving it to an
00:40:32 ◼ ► adversary, and now they've got the password to your account. Are you—is Apple looking at anything
00:40:47 ◼ ► for a very long beat. And then he looked up and he said, "Yes." And that was it. That was the
00:40:59 ◼ ► whole answer. And it was so—and Steve and I looked at it, we're like, "Oh, that's interesting,"
00:41:14 ◼ ► "Should I say more?" He was thinking, "Should I even say yes, or should I just give the—we don't
00:41:20 ◼ ► really, you know, we don't talk about future product plans." And look at where we are now,
00:41:26 ◼ ► you know, with so many features. Because that's the other thing he might have been thinking about.
00:41:31 ◼ ► He might have been thinking about how many "Let's move beyond entering a password manually" features
00:41:39 ◼ ► Apple had, how many of those calls were in the fire already at the time that we've now seen.
00:41:47 ◼ ► All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor, it's our good friends at LinkedIn.
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00:42:57 ◼ ► All right, the flip side of this before we move on to WWDC stuff is, to me, the conflict of interest
00:43:13 ◼ ► that Jai Pal's bill is going to pass. I really don't. I honestly wonder—she's clearly so smart.
00:43:19 ◼ ► I honestly wonder if she's not playing the heel in some way by putting this bill out there as a stake
00:43:25 ◼ ► in the ground. That's Ben Thompson's argument that it's sort of an anchoring strategy. And then it
00:43:39 ◼ ► were the only bills, they would seem drastic. But Apple has gotten into this situation,
00:43:47 ◼ ► I think almost entirely, by pursuing a maximization strategy on App Store revenue from third-party
00:43:56 ◼ ► developers. And maybe maximizing is a bit of an overstatement because it's not like they've—I
00:44:04 ◼ ► mean, they emphasize this too. They emphasize that the rates for developers have only ever come down
00:44:10 ◼ ► from 30% in terms of offering the 15% for the second and subsequent years of a subscription
00:44:18 ◼ ► and the new small business program for developers with under a million dollars in revenue who can
00:44:23 ◼ ► get 15% across the board. They've only ever come down. But there's also a counterargument that
00:44:29 ◼ ► raising the rates to 40% or 50/50 might blow up in their face. It's the total calculus of tax rates.
00:44:43 ◼ ► You can't just tax everybody 99% and have your government sit on all the money because if you
00:44:48 ◼ ► tax people at 99%, they're not going to work. There's a sweet spot in there. But it's true,
00:44:54 ◼ ► though, that—I think it's undeniably true and to me, best exemplified by these rules against
00:45:02 ◼ ► allowing apps to send users to the web to sign up. So, okay, Netflix, though long in the App Store
00:45:11 ◼ ► and forever will have tens of—probably tens of millions of users who are paying for Netflix
00:45:18 ◼ ► through their app, the App Store, because it used to be available, but they've pulled it several
00:45:22 ◼ ► years ago because they got sick of the 85/15 split they had with Apple. So now, if you're somebody
00:45:29 ◼ ► who never signed up for Netflix or you had it and you canceled and you get the app from iOS or TVOS
00:45:39 ◼ ► or iPadOS, there's no way to sign up in the app. It doesn't tell you what to do because they're not
00:45:46 ◼ ► allowed to. They're not allowed to say, "Go to Netflix.com to sign up to create your Netflix
00:45:51 ◼ ► account." They're not allowed to even say that. And Apple going after companies like this story
00:45:58 ◼ ► last week or two with a small company called FanHouse, which is actually a really cool name
00:46:05 ◼ ► for what they're doing. It's sort of basically only fans but PG-rated, maybe R-rated, I don't
00:46:13 ◼ ► know, but definitely not X-rated. But they were doing a thing where—so, you know, I presume people
00:46:23 ◼ ► have heard of only fans, but basically it's a thing where you could pay to subscribe to a creator
00:46:43 ◼ ► Only fans didn't start that way either. It was a bunch of—the big stars on only fans were soccer players in Europe.
00:46:55 ◼ ► Let's say you're a famous soccer star and you could set up a page and people could pay. It's sort of
00:47:01 ◼ ► along the lines of Cameo, too, where you can just pay and you could get DMs with your favorite
00:47:09 ◼ ► soccer player or basketball player or something like that, or whatever kind of micro-celebrity
00:47:14 ◼ ► you might be. And they were sending—they did have a subscribe button in their iOS app, and then you'd
00:47:25 ◼ ► hit the button and it would, I believe, jump you over to Safari, or maybe it was presenting a web
00:47:32 ◼ ► view in the app, and then they would take your credit card information in the app or maybe over
00:47:37 ◼ ► in Safari. But either way, there was a button. And Apple said to them, "You have three months
00:47:42 ◼ ► to implement true in-app purchases for this." But the numbers don't work out for their market.
00:47:50 ◼ ► They only take 10%. So let's say it costs 10 bucks to get a FaceTime chat with somebody.
00:47:59 ◼ ► They only charge 10%. Nine dollars goes to the user, the creator. Ten dollars went to FanHouse.
00:48:08 ◼ ► So where's the 30% come from? So their only option to comply would be to give Apple the
00:48:14 ◼ ► 30% off the top, and you run into this situation where the numbers that Apple would be getting
00:48:22 ◼ ► compared to the creator leaving FanHouse or Cameo or whoever else is doing similar things with these
00:48:29 ◼ ► creator apps, which is a huge thing. It's like the category of 2021. It just seems disproportionate.
00:48:36 ◼ ► Yeah, same thing with the Twitter's new service, that they put out the numbers that Apple is getting
00:48:40 ◼ ► compared to them, and it's ridiculous. And all they want to do, you know, and the Hey app from
00:48:47 ◼ ► last summer best exemplifies it, because the Hey thing wasn't about them taking credit cards in
00:48:53 ◼ ► their app. The whole time, they didn't even have a button or a URL that said, "Go to hey.com and sign
00:49:00 ◼ ► up there." All they had was an app, and they assumed that they would get enough users on their
00:49:06 ◼ ► own to sign up on the web first and then get the app. They weren't even worried about the app being
00:49:12 ◼ ► the source of discovery. The app would be something users would get because they're already fans of
00:49:17 ◼ ► Basecamp or they heard of Hey and its features otherwise, and they're confident in their own
00:49:23 ◼ ► ability to get signups. They just wanted to have an app in the App Store that was based on the idea
00:49:30 ◼ ► that it only worked if you already had an account from the web at hey.com. And Apple's response was,
00:49:36 ◼ ► "You need to implement in-app purchasing so that users can sign up in the app." That's exactly the
00:49:42 ◼ ► mentality. That's what I'm calling maximalization of App Store revenue and revenue growth from
00:49:50 ◼ ► third-party developers. If they weren't doing that, I don't think they'd be in this hot water.
00:49:58 ◼ ► There'd still be—there's always malcontents, and Tile would still be upset about not being able to
00:50:03 ◼ ► have system-level software like Find My, and Spotify would still be upset about whatever
00:50:08 ◼ ► they had to pay versus Apple Music. And Epic would want their own store. That would all continue.
00:50:23 ◼ ► because originally when they had in-app purchases, apps couldn't be free. If you were free, you had
00:50:29 ◼ ► to stay free. You couldn't use in-app purchase. Only paid apps could. And then they changed that,
00:50:34 ◼ ► and they said that free apps could use in-app purchases, but you couldn't make external payments
00:50:38 ◼ ► because their great fear back then when they flipped the switch was that every app was going
00:50:43 ◼ ► to just move all payments outside the App Store, and Apple would be left holding the bag for all
00:50:48 ◼ ► these free apps that then were all being monetized on the web, that all of the economy would move
00:50:53 ◼ ► outside the App Store. And the revenues were nowhere nearly as big back then, so that was a
00:50:57 ◼ ► big concern for them. But over the years, everything grew. And then more recently, Apple made the
00:51:02 ◼ ► statement that they were going to—I forget what it was—double their services revenue in the span
00:51:06 ◼ ► of so many years, and the App Store has always been the biggest driver of services revenue.
00:51:11 ◼ ► So it seems like they did everything they possibly could to juice App Store revenues, so they could
00:51:16 ◼ ► juice services revenues, so they could make that number. But then they didn't say anything again.
00:51:21 ◼ ► I thought that was a big sign. Like, they didn't immediately say, "And we're going to double it
00:51:28 ◼ ► maybe they've learned something, and they're going to go in, and in the face of all these potential
00:51:33 ◼ ► obstacles and ill will, they'll say, 'Okay, now, you know, the App Store is performing way beyond
00:51:39 ◼ ► our wildest dreams.'" Steve said he would have been super happy if it operated just slightly above
00:51:43 ◼ ► break-even, and now it's this powerhouse, and we're going to return some of that value to all of you
00:51:48 ◼ ► that helped us build it. It would have been a perfect opportunity, but same thing when they saw
00:51:53 ◼ ► that value wasn't leaving the App Store that some people would pay for convenience. Same thing when
00:51:58 ◼ ► once they'd made those numbers for Wall Street with the services, they did nothing. They left
00:52:02 ◼ ► the status quo. Even with that famous, now, Phil Schiller letter, they just left the status quo,
00:52:07 ◼ ► and that I don't understand, because that was just such an obvious missile just rearing straight at
00:52:13 ◼ ► them. Yeah, the Schiller, I wrote about that just before WWDC, I think literally the morning of WWDC,
00:52:19 ◼ ► and it's just striking, and I'm not surprised that it exists because I know Phil Schiller well
00:52:26 ◼ ► enough to know that he would think of things like this, and I know that he thinks he sees the value
00:52:33 ◼ ► in the brand as something that you can't put a dollar price on. And, you know, again, it's like,
00:52:41 ◼ ► look at the iPod, right? I do think some of the mistakes that Apple made in hindsight were
00:52:47 ◼ ► coming from the iPod, where everything was either a song or a TV show or a movie that you pay,
00:52:58 ◼ ► you know, a dollar or you pay $10 for the movie, and Apple keeps 30% and the producer of the song,
00:53:07 ◼ ► the artist, you know, the publisher of the song or the studio behind the movie gets 70%,
00:53:12 ◼ ► and that's a much better cut than they got in the old days in retail selling discs or tapes,
00:53:18 ◼ ► and it works out for everybody, and you know the rules up front and it's purchased and there's no
00:53:24 ◼ ► concept of subscriptions or in-app purchases or something like that. And there's only one middle
00:53:28 ◼ ► person, there's no two middle people, which often exists in the App Store now. Right, and I think,
00:53:32 ◼ ► you know, they looked at the App Store the same way that, you know, you'd buy these apps for a
00:53:37 ◼ ► dollar or five dollars or ten dollars. I mean, it's kind of funny when you look at the first App Store
00:53:42 ◼ ► the announcement of the App Store, how with the prices they were put up in their hypothetical,
00:53:47 ◼ ► you know, here's like an example of what it looked like, and you know, it was based on their concept
00:53:56 ◼ ► You'd make an app and if you wanted it to be a paid app, you'd sell it for 20 bucks or 30 bucks
00:54:01 ◼ ► or 40 bucks or, you know, ridiculous prices like $50 for an application. That's what they cost
00:54:07 ◼ ► before the iPhone, like when I bought a stupid sticky notes app for the Palm OS, it was like 50
00:54:11 ◼ ► bucks. I know, I remember buying apps for the Palm OS. They were definitely similarly priced to the
00:54:18 ◼ ► Mac. It wasn't just like, oh, it's a tiny device in your pocket, so the price should be tiny too.
00:54:22 ◼ ► It was, no, this is what third-party independent software costs, whatever the platform,
00:54:32 ◼ ► But the Schiller idea of it, just the basic idea that he tossed out there, do we think 70/30 is
00:54:39 ◼ ► going to last forever? And if not, why don't we just, you know, why don't we pick a number like
00:54:44 ◼ ► a billion dollar a year run rate and, you know, once we reach it, you know, we could lower the
00:54:50 ◼ ► rate to keep it at a billion as it grows to 25/75, 20/80, 85/15. I think if they had done that,
00:54:59 ◼ ► they'd be at, they'd still be so much higher than a billion dollars a year run rate because I think
00:55:05 ◼ ► the other funny thing looking at these emails from the Epic trial is how much more popular the
00:55:10 ◼ ► iPhone and App Store both are than even their internal wildest dreams, right? It's, you know,
00:55:18 ◼ ► like you even just said that Steve Jobs, when they announced the original iPhone, he was like,
00:55:21 ◼ ► we're shooting for 1% market fare. We think that'd be great, you know, we'll take the, you know,
00:55:26 ◼ ► premium 1% market share. It's ridiculous how successful it's been. But they don't, the other
00:55:33 ◼ ► thing is with iPods, they didn't need the money from iTunes, they needed the money from the iPods.
00:55:39 ◼ ► They made the primary business of the company was selling iPods, in the music business, was selling
00:55:47 ◼ ► iPods. And their secondary business was a great music store in a then great desktop music collection
00:55:57 ◼ ► app for your MP3 files. And, you know, that was just icing on the cake, but it was primarily
00:56:05 ◼ ► all about making money on iPod. And their iPhone business still is, and will remain primarily about
00:56:13 ◼ ► selling people $5, $6, $7, $800, $1,100, $1,200 iPhones at a decent margin. That's a great business
00:56:24 ◼ ► for them. Well, that's the, that is the craziest thing. I've said this before, or at least I've
00:56:30 ◼ ► written it. I think I said it on dithering, but the craziest thing about this to me is I don't
00:56:34 ◼ ► recall any company in my lifetime or that I could think of in historical terms, who got into serious
00:56:41 ◼ ► antitrust trouble over a side hustle. Yes, it is always the main business. Like, it's not like
00:56:50 ◼ ► AT&T got broken up because they had the exclusive rights to Unix at the time. No, it was about the
00:56:58 ◼ ► friggin' phone business and the crazy $2 a minute rates they charge for a call that went across
00:57:05 ◼ ► state lines. It wasn't friggin' Unix. It's crazy that they're in hot water. And, you know, it's
00:57:13 ◼ ► somewhat serious. I mean, the bills are being driven. And there's also, no matter what happens,
00:57:18 ◼ ► even if all of these bills die in Congress and nothing really comes out of the EU regulators,
00:57:32 ◼ ► Right, right. And that's the other factor is that the resentment among developers over Apple's,
00:57:39 ◼ ► to them, to third-party developers, seeming greed over maximizing app store revenue is so pervasive
00:57:56 ◼ ► like you said, from the iPod, where they were the middle person. They would aggregate all these apps
00:58:00 ◼ ► and sell them, taking 30% from the paid apps. But then we started getting all these secondary
00:58:05 ◼ ► aggregators. Like Spotify just aggregates a bunch of music, takes their percentage and then passes
00:58:09 ◼ ► it on. Amazon aggregates a bunch of eBooks or a bunch of comic books and takes their percentage
00:58:14 ◼ ► and passes it on. But these models don't support multiple middle people. You can't have Amazon
00:58:19 ◼ ► taking 30% to aggregate the books and then Apple taking 30% to aggregate the apps. There's just not
00:58:24 ◼ ► enough percent. And no one's really willing to give that percentage up. And they're also not
00:58:30 ◼ ► willing enough to care about the user experience, which is so weird for Apple because they're almost
00:58:34 ◼ ► always user experience first. And it's been this problem for over, or at least for a decade.
00:58:39 ◼ ► And that again, to me is perplexing. I understand how we got here. I don't understand how we haven't
00:58:44 ◼ ► gotten out of here yet. Yeah, so I downloaded FanHouse last night, because I finally dug into
00:58:49 ◼ ► it. And FanHouse, the app is largely, clearly from the way I can just feel, it's largely a bunch of
00:58:58 ◼ ► web views. It's, in my opinion, not a great iOS app. But you know, it's, you know, you're, you know,
00:59:04 ◼ ► you can build an app that way. And so okay, but because it's a web view, they could do things
00:59:08 ◼ ► remotely. And they took out that subscribe button. And so if you download, at least as of this
00:59:13 ◼ ► recording, the FanHouse iOS app, if you're a new user, you can sign up and I scored at Gruber,
00:59:20 ◼ ► you know, just in case, who knows, I guess I could use it. It's always good to have my username.
00:59:24 ◼ ► But I was like, well, let me see what it looks like to subscribe to somebody in the app. What's
00:59:29 ◼ ► going to happen? And I found somebody and you can find their user profile. It's like looking at like
00:59:34 ◼ ► @ReneeRitchie in Twitter. And what do you expect to see near the top, you expect to see a button
00:59:41 ◼ ► that says follow or subscribe, right? Well, there's no button. And it's like, how do I follow somebody?
00:59:47 ◼ ► And I'm like scrolling around, I swear to God, I use the app for 10 straight minutes thinking I was
00:59:52 ◼ ► losing my mind. Maybe I'm getting old. I don't understand these kids apps today. Yes. And I went
00:59:58 ◼ ► to the help in the app, and it doesn't say anything. And then eventually, like, maybe 15
01:00:03 ◼ ► minutes in, I went to their website and their website, you go to website, hit help. And it says,
01:00:07 ◼ ► how do I follow somebody and it says you cannot follow somebody in from the app, you have to go
01:00:12 ◼ ► follow them on the website, and then you'll see them in the app. That's a change they've made in
01:00:17 ◼ ► the last week or so since Apple tried to crack down on them in it. But yet, even after doing so
01:00:24 ◼ ► Apple, the only concession they got was that they were their grace period to continue not offering
01:00:30 ◼ ► in app purchases through the end of the year. It gets to your point about user experience. What
01:00:35 ◼ ► Apple, Apple's squeezing FanHouse to try to get them to use in app purchase for these fan base
01:00:43 ◼ ► subscriptions, whatever you want to call that this creator type thing, forced FanHouse to make an app
01:00:51 ◼ ► that doesn't let you that you're supposed to follow people in where the app doesn't let you
01:00:56 ◼ ► follow people, right? Download Netflix, good luck figuring out how to sign up. I wrote a piece years
01:01:02 ◼ ► ago where Netflix does have a phone number and I called the phone number. You remember this piece?
01:01:13 ◼ ► I don't have an account. How do I sign up?" And they were ready for it. Yeah, you go to
01:01:18 ◼ ► net, go to your computer or you could do it on your phone too. Go to Netflix.com in your
01:01:24 ◼ ► web browser and you can sign up there. And they were ready for it. But how many companies have,
01:01:33 ◼ ► in the internet age from an app. It's like signing up for a magazine in 1978. You know,
01:01:46 ◼ ► Right. Call now to subscribe to Sports Illustrated. It's ridiculous. But how can a small
01:01:53 ◼ ► developer compete with that if there is an official exemption for a phone number that's
01:01:59 ◼ ► allowed to do? But it's a terrible experience. It truly is. And they don't need to have every
01:02:05 ◼ ► dollar. So what? And even if internally Apple thinks that they should be using in-app purchase
01:02:11 ◼ ► and they should be making more than they would be in a world where they significantly lessen
01:02:23 ◼ ► goods consumed on the phone. Even if internally Apple truly believes—and I think they do,
01:02:52 ◼ ► the benefits—Apple would get something. They would get better publicity, better developer relations,
01:03:01 ◼ ► Better user experience, all reasons to sell more iPhones and iPads, and they would get this
01:03:15 ◼ ► Or at the very least have a much more defensible position in the face of anyone trying to broadly
01:03:21 ◼ ► I just don't see it, especially given the trends. And I know all things come to an end.
01:03:33 ◼ ► Model T Fords anymore. Well, although I guess they still are buying Ford cars, so who knows?
01:03:39 ◼ ► I don't think in the 1980s, people thought the Macintosh would be a thriving 4 million units per
01:03:48 ◼ ► quarter business in the year 2021. So who knows? Maybe phones will still be a huge thing 40, 50,
01:03:55 ◼ ► 60 years from now, like cars are for Ford. I realize my Ford example is actually counter
01:04:00 ◼ ► to what I'm arguing. But Ford still is in the business of selling their cars for a profit,
01:04:06 ◼ ► right? And yeah, you probably do. I do see stories about people getting nickel and dimed and
01:04:23 ◼ ► Like Samsung phones have ads on the on the lock screen or the home screen. I just bought
01:04:32 ◼ ► Right. It's like there used to be that there were no electronics on the dashboard, and your radio
01:04:37 ◼ ► was literally completely analog. It was a little stick behind a piece of Plexiglas that you moved,
01:04:43 ◼ ► and you set your favorites with literal radio buttons to punch in your favorite stations.
01:04:48 ◼ ► And then we got these little low-res LCD, black and white digital things for the radio station.
01:04:55 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, that's cool." And then everything gets modernized, and all of a sudden,
01:05:06 ◼ ► that's a cool thing to put in your dashboard. I feel like I'm in the future. It's a spaceship."
01:05:21 ◼ ► Anyway, all right. Let's move on to WWDC after this. I'm going to tell you about our next
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01:07:22 ◼ ► from Product Marketing about Apple Watch and WatchOS. And as soon as I saw her on YouTube,
01:07:29 ◼ ► I was like, "She? I know. Have I met her?" And that's the weird thing about being in the media
01:07:40 ◼ ► my favorite thing about your video is how much you cut in mid-sentence to callbacks from previous
01:07:50 ◼ ► keynotes, referring to old features. And she was the person who did the—to me, still arguably the
01:07:59 ◼ ► greatest demo I've ever—maybe the only one that rivals Phil Schiller's jump from 20 feet high
01:08:19 ◼ ► A paddleboard in the middle of a lake, live, during a live event, talking to the audience
01:08:34 ◼ ► that it sounded pretty good, and that the watch was waterproof. Although I guess she didn't
01:08:40 ◼ ► prove that. She did not fall. But anyway. No, but it was a risk she was willing to take.
01:08:46 ◼ ► But it was so great the way you sliced that in. You mentioned it, but then you cut to it,
01:08:52 ◼ ► and it's like, "Ah, man, that was great." I love the way you cut that stuff in. How much time did
01:08:57 ◼ ► that—you cut that whole thing yourself, right? You do all your own editing? Yeah, yeah. I mean,
01:09:02 ◼ ► for good or for ill, I just love the editing process, so I try to learn as much as I can.
01:09:06 ◼ ► I just thought it would be important because, you know, a lot of us know all the players involved,
01:09:10 ◼ ► but you might have seen them before and not recognize them immediately. So if I can give
01:09:13 ◼ ► you something memorable like that paddleboard scene or Kevin dancing, if I can do that early on,
01:09:21 ◼ ► You put it even in the title of the video, that it has to work in two seconds. I thought
01:09:28 ◼ ► it was a very open interview, and I thought that that bit from Kevin Lynch about how they sort of
01:09:35 ◼ ► had a "come to Jesus" moment where it's like, we should really focus on getting everything a user
01:09:44 ◼ ► really would want to do, or almost everything, to be something they can accomplish on the watch
01:09:50 ◼ ► in two seconds or less. And that's a tremendous challenge because relative to a—relative even
01:09:57 ◼ ► to a phone, it has a tiny screen. It has two sources of input, really, or three maybe if you
01:10:07 ◼ ► count the side button. There's a side button you can click, there's a crown you can either click
01:10:13 ◼ ► or scroll, and then there's a touch screen, and that's it. And they even took away some controls
01:10:20 ◼ ► because they've taken away the force touch type thing to go in the name of who knows why, but
01:10:28 ◼ ► there's very little input, very little screen. Discoverability is a good reason. Well, I think
01:10:39 ◼ ► we could put that to better use. I thought that was really interesting, and I think it does show.
01:10:48 ◼ ► There's a real sense and there's a real continuity of watchOS from watchOS 1 through watchOS 8 is
01:10:59 ◼ ► what was announced last week or are we up to watchOS 9? It's 8 now, right? No, I think it's 8,
01:11:03 ◼ ► yeah. There's a direct continuity of where it's never—it's the platform that I guess has gone the
01:11:11 ◼ ► longest in Apple history without a sort of paint job, right? Like eight years after the Mac would
01:11:21 ◼ ► be 1992, well, System 7 was pretty significantly different than System 6 and earlier. Maybe,
01:11:30 ◼ ► arguably, the Mac was still, you know, watchOS is still chasing the Mac before the Mac really got a
01:11:36 ◼ ► thorough rethink with Mac OS 8 visually. It's a very continuous line, and what I took away from
01:11:47 ◼ ► that interview is how clarifying Apple's internal vision of the watch is. Yeah, I agree. I think
01:11:54 ◼ ► there's like there's way more constraints on what you can do on a watch, and they've been much more
01:11:58 ◼ ► systematic about it. Like they dropped things like glances, they made alternative—like you don't
01:12:03 ◼ ► have to deal with the home screen anymore, you can just have that list of apps. So they slowly
01:12:09 ◼ ► but steadily evolved it, but nothing—I don't think it's as big as even a phone and you can have that
01:12:15 ◼ ► much—it's much more driven by the needs of the smallness of the screen. I'm not saying this at
01:12:21 ◼ ► all very well. But they have a vision for what it's good for and what it can be better for,
01:12:29 ◼ ► going forward. And I don't think it's their fault. I think that the gold watches, the edition ones
01:12:40 ◼ ► that cost $20,000, were a disaster. And I know everybody knows that internally there was a lot of
01:12:53 ◼ ► they definitely had a few ideas at first that didn't pan out, like using it as a main reason
01:13:01 ◼ ► to get one, sending your heartbeats to loved ones and stuff, which I didn't think was ridiculous.
01:13:37 ◼ ► being a—this is where that two-second thing comes in. It's like, "Okay, you got a text message,
01:13:47 ◼ ► And they've been slowly adding back just better versions. Originally, they had these five pillars
01:13:52 ◼ ► that I think that they said, "This is the value that the Apple Watch is going to give you." And
01:13:56 ◼ ► it was health, but it was also remote control. It was also identity and authentication and payments
01:14:01 ◼ ► and communications. And it was too much for a year-one product. It just went over—it confused
01:14:08 ◼ ► people. Instead of making them more interested, it disqualified them instead of qualifying them in.
01:14:12 ◼ ► And then they focused down on the health and fitness aspects. And that made a lot of sense
01:14:17 ◼ ► to people because it was something above and beyond what an iPhone could do. It was demonstrable,
01:14:22 ◼ ► added value. But now, slowly but surely, they're adding back interesting communication methods.
01:14:27 ◼ ► And now, with things like the whole ID system for driver's licenses, but also for schools and
01:14:32 ◼ ► things like that, they're adding back the identification and better remote control with
01:14:36 ◼ ► HomeKit. So I think they're building it back up to what the original vision was. They just had to
01:14:48 ◼ ► like using your watch to open your hotel door. And I know Disney World—I don't know if Disneyland is,
01:14:55 ◼ ► but I know Disney World is—you can use your Apple Watch instead of a MagicBand to go around the park
01:15:06 ◼ ► go in there. Those are super compelling features. But the other one—and I forgot about it, you know,
01:15:15 ◼ ► because WWDC was so packed this year. I couldn't keep all of the features I wanted to note in head.
01:15:23 ◼ ► And the one that your video reminded me of was the fall detection. Or not fall detection, the
01:15:30 ◼ ► fall prediction, right? It's sort of like—the fall detection, which I think was two years ago,
01:15:45 ◼ ► and doesn't get up. The watch could detect it and notify somebody who you've set as an emergency
01:15:53 ◼ ► contact or put something on your wrist so that all you have to—if you could just tap the button on
01:15:59 ◼ ► your wrist, you can get help. This new feature is about predicting, "Hey, your gate seems unsteady
01:16:09 ◼ ► and matches the profile of a gate of somebody who's about to, you know, maybe you're lightheaded,"
01:16:15 ◼ ► whatever the reasons that people take a fall. And let's face it, this is a feature largely about
01:16:21 ◼ ► older people. It was such a fascinating feature. I really would never have thought about buying
01:16:26 ◼ ► my parents an Apple Watch before, but now it's—honestly, that seems like a reason to do it.
01:16:31 ◼ ► I know they might be resistant because they're sort of like, "I don't want a new thing," you know.
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01:18:08 ◼ ► cook there, René. Good morning. That was pretty good. The other thing is I had an interview
01:18:16 ◼ ► too. I had Mr. Craig Federighi and Mr. Jaws back again. Remote, once again, me in Philadelphia,
01:18:26 ◼ ► them in California. I'm wondering what you think of it. I'm glad to have them both. I'd
01:18:34 ◼ ► rather have both than just have one. But remote, I don't know. I find the three-way interview,
01:18:46 ◼ ► doing it remote, to be very difficult. They don't make as much fun of each other remotely
01:19:32 ◼ ► no rules about what you could talk about within those constraints. Not the state of Apple
01:19:37 ◼ ► or anything outside. Can't go back and bitch about the touch bar or something like that.
01:19:55 ◼ ► a day before, it makes intuitive sense that it should be that way because everybody who's
01:19:59 ◼ ► in the audience is all still jazzed up from the keynote and stuff like that. Anyway, what
01:20:04 ◼ ► I'm trying to say is it's clear that Federighi is the star, and he's great at it. And Jaws
01:20:12 ◼ ► is there to back him up. He's playing rhythm guitar. Also, this year there was no hardware,
01:20:27 ◼ ► is hardware, you get to ask Jaws all sorts of interesting questions about iMac Pros and
01:20:31 ◼ ► Mac Pros and Apple Silicon, which you couldn't do this year. Right. And if I were to do an
01:20:44 ◼ ► going to come out this fall, I think clearly Jaws would be playing lead guitar to continue
01:20:51 ◼ ► the analogy. But that said, on stage, it's easier and comes more naturally to me to think
01:21:10 ◼ ► to Jaws. And even though in general, we had a pretty good low latency connection for everything.
01:21:20 ◼ ► Jaws was, I think, a little bit behind latency-wise. Just a little. But we had very little crosstalk
01:21:28 ◼ ► that had to be edited out, and it went pretty well technically. But I still find it very
01:21:34 ◼ ► hard to pay attention to both of them. Even though without the crosstalk, only one's talking
01:21:43 ◼ ► what about Jaws? Wait, and what was I thinking?" I don't know. What did you think about that?
01:21:57 ◼ ► the other person wants to add their two cents in to what the first person just answered.
01:22:01 ◼ ► So it's a much dafter juggling act, I think. And you've got like, "Oh, sorry." But then
01:22:23 ◼ ► Yeah, it's tough. Your show looked great, too. Do you know how they recorded their sides?
01:22:35 ◼ ► Yeah, that's what we did. And I know, again, I mentioned it explicitly up front on my show
01:22:46 ◼ ► seriously, all three of us were on iPhones." And no, Jaws and Federighi are not using green
01:22:52 ◼ ► screens. That's actually what it looks like at that time of day in that part of the ring
01:22:59 ◼ ► With Smart HDR 3 because it can expose both the foreground and the background, which you
01:23:11 ◼ ► COVID reasons, not for disingenuous purposes. But no, that's actually what it looks like
01:23:20 ◼ ► Yeah, they did a really good job. I was worried they might give me HDR footage at first and
01:23:39 ◼ ► No, I like the way that you got the explanations out of them on the new features or Craig especially
01:23:54 ◼ ► But also features engineers have been waiting forever because they personally want to implement
01:24:13 ◼ ► we want to make, but it was really clear that this was the features that they felt like
01:24:18 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it's just, it cannot be coincidence that FaceTime and the screen sharing, what's
01:24:49 ◼ ► for an entire year, over a year, clearly brought to a head, "Shit, we should not have kept
01:24:55 ◼ ► these ideas on the back burner. FaceTime, we should have had FaceTime be better by now."
01:25:02 ◼ ► I don't think I asked about, because I always run out of time and I have more questions
01:25:07 ◼ ► than time. I don't think I asked about FaceTime for Android, right? Which is really FaceTime
01:25:22 ◼ ► going to want to talk about why they do things. Other than that, we think this is a good feature
01:25:26 ◼ ► that people will like. But I think the implication of, I don't know that FaceTime for the web,
01:26:12 ◼ ► ...one of the most famous software companies in the world. That was an opportunity they
01:26:17 ◼ ► let slip away. And I think that now that they have this, FaceTime is something that can
01:26:37 ◼ ► your doctor was going to have remote visits. I had my annual checkup last year remote because
01:26:44 ◼ ► I couldn't go to the doctor because our doctor's office wasn't allowed to open. And it was
01:26:50 ◼ ► on Zoom because she couldn't use FaceTime because she doesn't know that all of her patients
01:26:54 ◼ ► have iPhones because they don't all have iPhones, right? I mean, that's just the fact. I don't
01:27:13 ◼ ► use it, but they could. And changing features like the grid view and having multiple people
01:27:18 ◼ ► in a FaceTime that actually is usable and makes sense rather than looks cool in a demo,
01:27:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and I wonder how much of that was also the desire to create those links, to be able
01:27:33 ◼ ► to schedule FaceTime calls, having to have some sort of web interface because you don't
01:27:38 ◼ ► know when or where someone's going to be required to pick up one of those things. And it's a
01:27:44 ◼ ► weird sort of a thing because Steve Jobs famously announced that it's going to be open sourced.
01:27:49 ◼ ► And the project team was standing there going, "What? Wait, why? How?" And then they got sued
01:27:54 ◼ ► and they got sued and re-sued and over-sued and they've been litigating it for 10 years
01:28:10 ◼ ► they had such an enormous lead and this doesn't quite feel like catch up because they're really
01:28:14 ◼ ► not there the way that even like a Skype or especially not a Zoom is, but it's nice that
01:28:29 ◼ ► One of my favorite moments in my interview was when Federighi went all the way back to,
01:28:34 ◼ ► you know, he was talking about Apple's historic roots supporting privacy, but that in the
01:28:38 ◼ ► old days, your data was on a floppy disk and the floppy disk you'd like just put in your
01:28:42 ◼ ► shirt pocket, but you had it, it was in your control. And I enjoyed that because I thought
01:28:49 ◼ ► that the, you know, it was clear that he meant it. Like it, it's like, I know his, you know,
01:28:59 ◼ ► vice president for software engineering, but the privacy features is more than just like
01:29:07 ◼ ► a dictum from above, like, okay, software chief, all of our software has to be as private
01:29:17 ◼ ► software has to comply with all of these local rules. Like when you're in Belarus, you know,
01:29:32 ◼ ► to direct my teams to implement and, you know, have done in time. It means something to him.
01:29:45 ◼ ► anybody in a public statement for a big company says is bullshit. But I, I think it's palpable
01:29:53 ◼ ► that with Federighi and Jaws, that the privacy stuff, it really does mean something to them.
01:30:00 ◼ ► And you can argue that there are competitive aspects to their, to this stance that they've
01:30:06 ◼ ► taken that are really about taking ad money from Facebook for apps and stuff like that.
01:30:30 ◼ ► involving their privacy team in the entire, they call it privacy by design, but they actually
01:30:41 ◼ ► what, what are the points of failure in our current privacy model and how can we fix those
01:30:51 ◼ ► not, not a VPN IP hiding service and iCloud Plus, all those things, but all the features
01:30:57 ◼ ► are rolling out the same way all those features are accessible from day one. They're also
01:31:06 ◼ ► that is such a massive expenditure and realignment of engineering resources that you can't
01:31:20 ◼ ► It was interesting to me at the end, because I feel like I don't think there's any question
01:31:26 ◼ ► about it and I'm not just trying to be self-deprecating. I have trouble ending these interviews because
01:31:45 ◼ ► final question. I thought it was a good question and I thought their interest, their answers
01:31:55 ◼ ► the general growing sentiment of developer discontent, third-party developer discontent.
01:32:32 ◼ ► than the keynote, it's all for developers. And I get it. And that is true. And I really
01:32:46 ◼ ► bullshit, but I also think though that because they mean it, what we on the outside who perceive
01:32:54 ◼ ► the discontent and who agree with many of the points of third-party developer discontent
01:33:00 ◼ ► need to deal with the fact that Apple doesn't see it that way. And that they, you know,
01:33:12 ◼ ► developers. Like some of our favorite developers work for Craig now. And he has a front row
01:33:17 ◼ ► seat to a lot of their sentiments and a lot of the way they express things and a lot of
01:33:25 ◼ ► are the more business focused teams, because the App Store is nominally under Phil now.
01:33:37 ◼ ► infrastructure around there. But a lot of them came, you know, even from like our world,
01:33:41 ◼ ► like from bloggers or from people in Apple editorial, and they have a lot of really good
01:33:45 ◼ ► relationships with developers, but that's not everybody. And I think they have two points
01:33:50 ◼ ► of view. One is that we're always told we're wrong and we always just fight our way through
01:34:03 ◼ ► and they sometimes, Apple sometimes thinks that you only get the noisiest 10% on Twitter.
01:34:09 ◼ ► And there's probably a 90% people who aren't mad at them, who just aren't complaining on
01:34:12 ◼ ► Twitter. And that is sometimes going to be true, but it also leaves you open to an even
01:34:19 ◼ ► Well said. All right, let me take a break here. Thank our third and final sponsor, Memberful.
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01:36:16 ◼ ► So can I ask you a quick question then on what I thought was one of the most interesting
01:36:21 ◼ ► So, no new hardware. And there were some people hyping new hardware. I was certainly really
01:36:26 ◼ ► hyped for new hardware because a new 16-inch MacBook Pro is, I need to have it in my life
01:36:33 ◼ ► as soon as possible. But there was such a huge, expectational debt for it. And we ended
01:36:45 ◼ ► was also the one-year anniversary of announcing Apple Silicon. So it didn't seem wild to me
01:36:50 ◼ ► that they would take advantage of that and show off the next big step in Apple Silicon.
01:36:54 ◼ ► But ultimately, it was one of those software-only shows. And I felt like that expectational
01:36:59 ◼ ► debt, people were upset by two things. By that, and also some people really did, despite
01:37:06 ◼ ► all logic and reason, believe that putting an M1 chip in an iPad meant Mac OS was coming
01:37:19 ◼ ► I didn't see that. I saw the number of people who were predicting or actually saying they
01:37:26 ◼ ► had sources claiming that hardware was coming. Specifically, I guess the pro-level 16-inch
01:37:34 ◼ ► MacBook Pro and the pro-level 13-inch, or I guess maybe 14-inch MacBook Pro to separate
01:37:47 ◼ ► interesting though that people thought putting the M1 in the iPad meant the Mac OS was coming
01:38:02 ◼ ► That was my least favorite part of the keynote, by the way. So I will answer your questions,
01:38:12 ◼ ► Mission Impossible guy going into steel, that was my least favorite part of the keynote.
01:38:16 ◼ ► I like having fun, and I like the things they do. I liked, for example, the James Bond-themed
01:38:44 ◼ ► the Tim Cook thing was flat, because there was nothing funny about it. Even if you take
01:39:06 ◼ ► Yeah, Tom Cruise had to break into the CIA and go down on a drop line and steal the knock
01:39:46 ◼ ► know about the rumors. I have no idea where the people who claim to have sources who said
01:40:06 ◼ ► I think the expectation-wise thing is driven in part by the fact that the M1 has been so
01:40:20 ◼ ► are just enormous successes, universally hailed. The iMac had just come out. They're clearly
01:40:26 ◼ ► still firing. The iMac at least showed that they still have tremendous momentum on releasing
01:40:49 ◼ ► models, which were all physically identical, including the cameras to their Intel predecessors.
01:41:05 ◼ ► really nice computers. It's the, "Yeah, this is Apple flexing its muscles by not having
01:41:22 ◼ ► So of course they're going to keep the momentum going, and the—you know, the Mac Pro, I
01:41:31 ◼ ► the hardest thing to build for the smallest audience, even though the prices will be high.
01:41:38 ◼ ► But at least for the pro-level MacBooks, I could see why people would think it's possible.
01:41:52 ◼ ► segment about the two new MacBook Pros, or even just one of the two MacBook Pros, right?
01:42:10 ◼ ► said it was going to be a two-year transition. But clearly, now that they didn't come out
01:42:16 ◼ ► at WWDC, my expectation is that they will not come out until the fall. I mean, I don't—
01:42:29 ◼ ► whole schedule might have all been pushed back a month by COVID. Yeah, I guess, ideally,
01:43:05 ◼ ► because an M1X would basically be adding more GPU cores and more CPU cores to the M1 to
01:43:12 ◼ ► get better multi-core performance and better GPU performance. GPU performance always goes
01:43:18 ◼ ► up with more cores, because everything GPU-related is multithreaded. Whereas—and this is where,
01:43:25 ◼ ► to me, we've run out of time, where, sure, adding more cores, CPU cores, to an M1X would
01:43:34 ◼ ► make these Macs faster for some things, you know, like Xcode and certain things. But there's
01:43:42 ◼ ► an awful lot of stuff, even on the Mac, that remains single-threaded bound, right? JavaScript,
01:43:49 ◼ ► famously. And it would be weird for Apple to have an August event for these M1X MacBook
01:43:59 ◼ ► Pros, and then two months later release new MacBook Airs and consumer-grade 13-inch MacBook
01:44:21 ◼ ► and the consumer performance, like where the famous—I would just say the iMac Pro, which
01:45:14 ◼ ► been updating iPad Pros as frequently as iPhones. They've been doing it sort of every 18
01:45:19 ◼ ► months. So there was an A12X and Z, but there was no A13X. So the iPads were behind the
01:45:26 ◼ ► iPhone in single-core operations until the M1 version came out, and they've been willing
01:45:33 ◼ ► to let them have better multi-core performance at the expense of single-core. So I wonder
01:45:37 ◼ ► if they'd be willing—I don't think they'd be willing to do that with a Mac, but I wonder
01:46:01 ◼ ► literally annual, except for one shift where they went from June releases to the September/October
01:46:07 ◼ ► releases. But that was—from everything I've suspected and sort of known, that was a strategic
01:46:21 ◼ ► But I tend to think that they might keep—if they can keep the M series on an annual cycle.
01:46:33 ◼ ► it and other products haven't is, I think, primarily driven by the fact that it's their
01:46:46 ◼ ► theory, I think they would like to have other products updated annually. If they could,
01:46:54 ◼ ► Yeah. So anyway, my best guess at this point, completely uninformed by any sources, is that
01:47:35 ◼ ► Apple operates. It makes no sense. The closest I could think of something Apple might do
01:47:43 ◼ ► would be to have some kind of Mac in an iPad app type thing, where your device still runs
01:48:07 ◼ ► they think about things. They don't think about the OS and the device as being interchangeable
01:48:13 ◼ ► parts that you could just do something like that. And quite frankly, the Mac, as we know
01:48:23 ◼ ► expect to rotate. And obviously, they could just announce APIs and say, "All of a sudden,
01:48:33 ◼ ► And you'll get a notification. But, you know, and I've said this all along, that all of
01:48:38 ◼ ► these controls aren't meant for touch. They're all too close to each other. And you could
01:48:43 ◼ ► either have a bad touch experience with controls that are too small and too close to each other,
01:48:54 ◼ ► to use touch or aren't using touch and are using a mouse pointer on the Mac. It's designed
01:49:32 ◼ ► an hour ago about how iOS feels safe and secure when you're installing apps. It's ineffable
01:49:49 ◼ ► the multitasking now feels solid and knowable. You know, like how you could get up in the
01:49:55 ◼ ► middle of the night without your glasses on and your bedroom's dark and get to the bathroom
01:49:59 ◼ ► because you know where everything is, right? And all of a sudden you're in a hotel room
01:50:20 ◼ ► way that the old-style iPad multitasking never became familiar to me, never made sense, never
01:50:33 ◼ ► by doing the thing that everybody—not everybody, but some people were saying that just make
01:50:49 ◼ ► is that it's predictable and it's considerate. And before, like even people whose job it
01:50:54 ◼ ► was to use an iPad, you would see them messing up on launching multitasking because you'd
01:50:59 ◼ ► touch that icon in the dock and maybe it would go into jiggle mode. Maybe you'd pull it
01:51:08 ◼ ► you'd want to pull it off the dock and you'd pull it into multitasking. And there was just
01:51:11 ◼ ► no way, like it was beyond the realm of human reason that you'd get it exactly right all
01:51:16 ◼ ► the time. It was just completely overloaded. There were so many conflicts, so many collisions,
01:51:22 ◼ ► and that little change of putting that button there, of making it obvious, of just conceding
01:51:27 ◼ ► that you needed that affordance changed my entire feeling about it as well. Because now
01:51:36 ◼ ► what I want it to do, and I can trust that it's going to do only that. And it's just—it's
01:51:49 ◼ ► I'll tell you this. I, for example, watched a couple of videos the last few days. I was
01:51:56 ◼ ► catching up. I had to catch up on yours. That's where I watched you and Kevin Lynch and Deidre.
01:52:21 ◼ ► because I want to take notes on René's video?" It just really felt way more like a "get
01:52:40 ◼ ► the arrow keys to move around the home screen, and you get a TVS-o-style selection around
01:52:50 ◼ ► have worked before. It's, to me, inexcusable that they added keyboard support but didn't
01:53:00 ◼ ► A lot of the last two years of iPad OS have felt like run out of time. They have all these
01:53:10 ◼ ► And this year, given the focus and also how much time they can save now by making things
01:53:17 ◼ ► with things like SwiftUI that work on iPhone and iPad and don't require massive amounts
01:53:34 ◼ ► been right all along that SwiftUI is the future of Apple UI design and that Catalyst is some
01:53:41 ◼ ► kind of weird political stopgap that I still don't quite understand why it exists. Because
01:54:12 ◼ ► said actually, but it was clear that he meant it was AppKit. I think he even maybe used
01:54:28 ◼ ► the alert is hideously ugly and incredibly wrong for the Mac. Hopefully that'll get—hopefully
01:54:33 ◼ ► that gets fixed before it ships. But that's pretty much it for my high-level takeaways.
01:54:51 ◼ ► I think that there's things they can do in terms of the speed and cadence and information
01:55:04 ◼ ► just some of the presentations are so well done in this new environment that I hope they
01:55:25 ◼ ► segments of things done. Like maybe, you know, Craig will come out or Tim will come out and
01:56:01 ◼ ► the labs? But does it change the way they do keynotes forever, even when they have 5,000
01:56:10 ◼ ► people packed into the convention center or a thousand of us packed into the Steve Jobs
01:56:15 ◼ ► theater? Does it change the percentage of stage presentation versus pre-recorded material?
01:56:58 ◼ ► some because they understand though that there's a certain percentage who—lottery aside,
01:57:09 ◼ ► other personal reasons there might be. I thought it was interesting that in my show, they both
01:57:36 ◼ ► they'd definitely still invite lots of press. So I would still be out there anyway, and
01:57:47 ◼ ► in-person conference going by. My money is on the in-person conference again, with maybe
01:57:52 ◼ ► their keynotes are forever more brief segments on stage and longer segments that are pre-recorded.
01:58:13 ◼ ► Nobody mentioned it, but I did notice. I did notice I was East Coast, one button undone,
01:58:25 ◼ ► All right. That is a tight show, René. That might be the shortest show you and I have ever
01:58:32 ◼ ► I think we covered a lot of it. Anyway, I'm going to send you to youtube.com/RenéRitchie,