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The Talk Show

304: ‘2020 Year in Review’, With Rene Ritchie

 

00:00:00   We don't have much to talk about,

00:00:01   just the whole year in review.

00:00:03   - Short show, like usual.

00:00:04   - Yeah.

00:00:05   (laughing)

00:00:06   I predict it'll be shorter than usual

00:00:08   because we're focused.

00:00:10   Lean, mean, we have an outline.

00:00:12   We have a focus.

00:00:14   But I forget, is this the third year in a row,

00:00:16   fourth year in a row?

00:00:17   - Something like that, yeah.

00:00:18   - It's a tradition at this point, that's for sure.

00:00:21   But let's look back, Apple's 2020 year in review.

00:00:27   Before we do, let's talk about some current events,

00:00:31   just to get 'em out of the way.

00:00:32   We can't do this show without mentioning

00:00:34   this Apple car thing.

00:00:36   - Yeah.

00:00:36   (laughing)

00:00:38   - Maybe some other stuff.

00:00:39   But anyway, what, two days ago, yesterday?

00:00:42   I have seriously, like one thing I have not anticipated

00:00:46   post-election is that the weird sense of time

00:00:49   is gonna get worse.

00:00:50   - Yeah, yes.

00:00:51   It's like that movie, that Christopher Nolan movie

00:00:56   where time gets slower and faster at the same time.

00:00:59   (laughing)

00:00:59   Not Inception, the other one.

00:01:01   - And not Tenet either.

00:01:03   - Interstellar, Interstellar.

00:01:04   - Yeah, yeah.

00:01:05   Have you seen Tenet, by the way?

00:01:09   - I tried.

00:01:10   I have this thing with Christopher Nolan movies

00:01:12   where I love the first 80%

00:01:14   and then he just never lands it for me.

00:01:16   So my favorite one is Memento

00:01:17   because he does the ending at the beginning.

00:01:19   - Ah.

00:01:20   Yeah, but what about The Prestige?

00:01:22   Everybody loves The Prestige.

00:01:23   - Yes, yeah, The Prestige is,

00:01:25   it's more classical for him, I think.

00:01:27   He doesn't try to do the weird ending thing.

00:01:30   - Yeah, I enjoyed it.

00:01:31   My son and I watched it two nights ago.

00:01:33   It is interesting, it is so interesting.

00:01:35   I do this thing with movies

00:01:37   and I've gotten really good at it

00:01:39   and maybe it's just a good luck, I don't know.

00:01:41   But I've really tried to stay spoiler free.

00:01:44   I've largely stopped watching trailers, period,

00:01:47   because it's like the movie industry has gotten,

00:01:50   even for like good movies,

00:01:51   they spoil the whole movie in the trailer.

00:01:56   It's the worst trend.

00:01:57   I mean, they must have some kind of metrics

00:01:59   that show that it gets people

00:02:00   to rent the movies or whatever,

00:02:03   but trailers spoil everything, in my opinion.

00:02:06   So I try to--

00:02:07   - There's this huge Zemeckis thing where he,

00:02:08   I believe it was Zemeckis,

00:02:09   where he believed that he should show everything

00:02:11   in the trailer because people like eating McDonald's.

00:02:14   They want to know what they're getting

00:02:15   and I just find that totally opposite

00:02:18   of what I want in a movie.

00:02:20   (laughing)

00:02:22   - Some people must like it.

00:02:24   I hate it.

00:02:24   I'm like, "Oh, why would they show that?

00:02:26   "Oh, terrible."

00:02:27   - And it's worse for me because I'm a dummy.

00:02:29   So I can watch a trailer and I don't realize things,

00:02:31   but I watch it with my podcast partner, Georgia,

00:02:33   and she has one of those Sherlock Holmes Mind Palace things

00:02:36   where she's like, "Oh, they're wearing this different outfit

00:02:38   "in this part of the trailer, so this person lived,

00:02:39   "this person died, and they obviously committed this crime

00:02:41   "and then she can't watch the movie."

00:02:42   - Yep, exactly, exactly.

00:02:44   Oh, anyway, the neat things.

00:02:46   So I bookmark.

00:02:47   I'm like, oh, I run into somebody says,

00:02:49   "Here's a review of this movie I know I don't want to watch."

00:02:52   And so I bookmark it for the future,

00:02:54   and then after I watch the movie,

00:02:56   I may not even remember that I did,

00:02:58   but I'll go to PitBoard and see if I,

00:03:00   hey, did I have any bookmarks for Tenet?

00:03:02   Oh, here I did, yeah, and I read a couple reviews.

00:03:04   And it was funny because multiple reviews of Tenet,

00:03:08   which originally came out back in August

00:03:10   in a very poorly considered manner in theaters,

00:03:14   multiple reviewers said the same thing,

00:03:19   which was that this movie can't really be spoiled

00:03:22   by talking about the plot.

00:03:24   And I know that sounds crazy,

00:03:26   but if you've seen the movie, you'll agree.

00:03:28   And multiple reviewers said that.

00:03:30   So I'm not even that worried about spoiling anything

00:03:32   here talking about Tenet.

00:03:34   It is, and it is sort of a fascinating idea

00:03:37   that you can make a plotted movie with a plot,

00:03:40   and it really can't be spoiled.

00:03:42   I'm glad I watched it.

00:03:44   I'm glad Christopher Nolan is out there making movies.

00:03:47   - Same.

00:03:48   - It is frustrating, and it is,

00:03:51   my analogy to my son is that it's sort of like

00:03:56   a very talented, extremely talented movie maker

00:04:02   who's so good at the art of cinema

00:04:04   that he's made a movie about one plus one equals three.

00:04:07   And it's very convincing because he's so good at it,

00:04:11   but you know it's not right.

00:04:12   But you can sit there, if you'd sit there

00:04:15   and try to tie yourself up in knots thinking about

00:04:18   the time travel aspect of Tenet,

00:04:21   it's never gonna, he's so good that you think like,

00:04:25   oh, if I think about this hard enough,

00:04:27   or maybe if I get out of some pen and paper

00:04:30   and start drawing this, it'll add up.

00:04:33   And it's like, no, no, don't hurt your brain.

00:04:37   - Did you ever watch Pitch Meeting on Screen Rant?

00:04:39   - Yes, yes, that's a great--

00:04:41   - The Pitch Meeting for Tenet was fantastic.

00:04:43   I like it when he makes fun of movies I don't like,

00:04:44   but I like it even more when he makes fun of movies I do like.

00:04:46   - All right, I gotta write this down for the show notes.

00:04:48   Pitch Meeting Tenet, I'll bet that he did a great job.

00:04:52   - Yeah, yeah, I don't wanna spoil that for you,

00:04:53   but it's terrific.

00:04:55   - But I'm still glad I watched it, that's the thing.

00:04:57   And I get it why some people, I don't know that,

00:05:00   I haven't seen anybody say,

00:05:01   this is my favorite Christopher Nolan movie.

00:05:03   I haven't seen that.

00:05:04   Maybe there's somebody who thinks it.

00:05:06   I've seen some people who I think are sort of,

00:05:09   they're a little angry about the pretension of it,

00:05:12   and it's like, I'm okay with it

00:05:14   because it's the pretension,

00:05:16   he's not like submitting it to the Nobel Committee

00:05:19   in physics to try to act like it does add up.

00:05:22   He's not saying one plus one actually equals three.

00:05:25   He's just made this movie like,

00:05:26   what if one plus one did equal three?

00:05:29   And it's kind of a neat movie.

00:05:30   So anyway--

00:05:31   - My thing with Nolan is that he violates

00:05:32   one of my favorite rules of storytelling,

00:05:34   which is if you put a gun on the mantle in act two,

00:05:36   you gotta shoot somebody before act four starts.

00:05:39   And movies like Inception, they're folding cities in half,

00:05:42   and someone says, don't do that.

00:05:44   You'll attract negative attention.

00:05:45   And so I think they're setting this up,

00:05:46   almost like when they tell Neo,

00:05:49   you don't have to worry about dodging bullets in the future.

00:05:51   And then you get to the end and they're being attacked

00:05:53   and nobody ever fold,

00:05:54   and I've been waiting the whole movie

00:05:55   for them to start folding cities,

00:05:57   which is like The Matrix at the end

00:05:58   if Neo doesn't start catching bullets.

00:06:00   I just feel what happened at the end of the movie.

00:06:02   - Oh. (laughs)

00:06:05   Yeah, he does it.

00:06:06   - It's like, you didn't give me what I wanted.

00:06:08   - Yeah.

00:06:09   Yeah, maybe.

00:06:10   Yeah, he's not, it's hard to say.

00:06:12   I'm glad he's out there, but you know.

00:06:13   - Me too, me too.

00:06:14   - Unsatisfying.

00:06:15   What I did afterwards is after watching,

00:06:19   as a palate cleanser for Tenet,

00:06:21   I watched Ocean's Eleven for like the 30th time.

00:06:26   Because in some ways,

00:06:29   that was the exact palate cleanser I needed,

00:06:32   where it's like, just give me something

00:06:33   where there's like some kind of complicated plot,

00:06:37   and it might be cockamamie and completely unrealistic,

00:06:40   but it does add up, right?

00:06:43   - Yes.

00:06:44   - You know.

00:06:45   - Yeah.

00:06:46   I watched the McTiernan movies afterwards.

00:06:47   I watched Hunt for October and Die Hard

00:06:50   and Predator, I think.

00:06:51   Because those are all very like, this is what's happening,

00:06:54   I'm setting this up and I'm delivering it to you.

00:06:57   - Yeah, McTiernan, oh man,

00:06:59   you know how I feel about Die Hard.

00:07:00   - They're way too simple for today.

00:07:02   I think today they confuse sophistication with complexity,

00:07:04   which is a problem, but they're very simple movies,

00:07:07   but they really pay off.

00:07:08   - Yeah, yeah, and again, I'm gonna spoil it.

00:07:10   If you haven't watched Die Hard,

00:07:12   then you shouldn't be listening to the podcast.

00:07:13   - No.

00:07:14   - But like, one of the great Chekhov's guns

00:07:18   of movie history, which is the whole,

00:07:21   that's the whole principle, if you see the gun

00:07:23   on the mantle, it has to go off,

00:07:25   is the movie opens with John as a nervous flyer

00:07:30   and the guy says, "Ah, here's what you do.

00:07:34   "As soon as you get to where you're going,

00:07:36   "take your shoes off and let your toes feel the carpet."

00:07:39   Which doesn't even make sense, I've never heard that.

00:07:43   I don't think that would help,

00:07:44   'cause it's not like you're on the airplane.

00:07:46   It's just an excuse to get him to take his shoes off,

00:07:48   but then it pays off.

00:07:50   It's like, wouldn't it be great if the protagonist

00:07:57   of the movie had to do the whole thing barefoot?

00:08:00   It'd be like, yeah, that'd be--

00:08:00   - And even like the watch, they set up the watch,

00:08:02   they set up every payoff they set up carefully

00:08:04   during the movie.

00:08:05   - You know the watch, there's a deleted scene for that.

00:08:08   Have you ever heard that?

00:08:10   - I think so, yeah.

00:08:11   Yeah, so there's a scene that they deleted

00:08:13   where the crew first, the grouper crew actually,

00:08:18   first gets in there and they're down in the basement

00:08:21   and they all have the same watch

00:08:23   and they're synchronizing their watches.

00:08:26   And they took it out because it was shot

00:08:31   in the parking lot underneath and when they shot it,

00:08:35   they hadn't yet figured out that the limo driver

00:08:38   was gonna stay down there.

00:08:40   And so it was like it introduced a minor continuity error

00:08:43   because later on they were like,

00:08:44   here, here's what we could do with the limo driver.

00:08:46   We could have the limo driver be underneath

00:08:48   in the parking lot all along.

00:08:50   And McTiernan was like, ah, that's brilliant.

00:08:52   But then he's like, ah, but what about that scene

00:08:54   we shot down there where there is no limo?

00:08:56   And they're like, ah, and they're like, well,

00:08:58   we could just, it's just synchronizing watches.

00:09:00   We could take it out.

00:09:01   And then the only thing that doesn't really add up afterwards

00:09:03   is the, hey, all these guys have the same watch,

00:09:06   but that would have had more of a payoff

00:09:08   if you've seen the deleted scene.

00:09:09   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:11   - Well, there we go, there's 15 minutes.

00:09:14   (laughing)

00:09:16   - We're going great.

00:09:18   - We're doing fantastic.

00:09:20   Apple Car.

00:09:21   So out of nowhere, Reuters yesterday.

00:09:25   - Well, it was before then.

00:09:26   So it was a couple days ago that,

00:09:28   I was, Economic Daily or something,

00:09:31   one of the Asian newspapers said that the Apple Car

00:09:33   was gonna come out in 2021 and nobody believed it.

00:09:37   And then Reuters followed up two days later saying,

00:09:40   it's 2024-ish.

00:09:41   - 20, I didn't see that there was one for 2021.

00:09:45   But so things that I know,

00:09:49   and I could say we collectively know,

00:09:51   we know that Project Titan is still a thing.

00:09:55   I don't even, I think that it's actually still called

00:09:57   Project Titan.

00:09:58   We know some of the people involved.

00:10:00   We know that Apple has a lot of people working on it.

00:10:06   - We know it has something to do with cars

00:10:09   and might just be autonomous driving systems, period.

00:10:12   And maybe they would work with a company.

00:10:15   Like maybe they would work with BMW or Toyota or Honda

00:10:19   or multiple, who knows.

00:10:21   Maybe they'll build their own car.

00:10:23   Maybe they're just building smarter Roombas

00:10:26   that will autonomously--

00:10:27   - Well, I think the first version,

00:10:28   like I think it's well known now that Johnny Ive

00:10:30   and the ID department made actual car designs

00:10:32   for the very first version under,

00:10:36   I'm blanking on his name before--

00:10:39   - Doug Field.

00:10:40   - No, before Doug Field,

00:10:41   Apple's Vice Senior Vice President of Hardware

00:10:43   that I, for some reason, embarrassingly,

00:10:45   the one that took over from Bob Mansfield

00:10:47   when Bob first left.

00:10:48   And I'm embarrassingly blanking on his name at the moment.

00:10:51   But he was running it and they had car designs

00:10:53   and they had a whole team ramp up.

00:10:55   And they took over a lot of guys from the iPhone team

00:10:58   and a lot of old iPhone engineers came back to it.

00:11:01   And then it moved over to Bob Mansfield

00:11:04   and they sort of started redoing everything.

00:11:06   And it sounded more abstract,

00:11:07   like it was doing a lot of computer vision

00:11:10   and environmental ingestion and AR and AI.

00:11:13   And now just before this report,

00:11:15   the story was that it got moved over to John G. and Andreas

00:11:19   machine learning artificial intelligence organization

00:11:22   and Mansfield was retired, retired again.

00:11:24   - Yeah. (laughs)

00:11:26   Well, we don't, you know,

00:11:28   I feel like now you're going into things we kinda know.

00:11:32   Right? - Yeah.

00:11:33   - We kinda know that there were prototypes

00:11:35   and how far along they were and there are rumors that,

00:11:38   - Dan Riccio, sorry, Dan Riccio.

00:11:43   - How much of it was going to be just a car

00:11:47   and how much was gonna be self-driving and what level

00:11:50   and when did they expect to ship?

00:11:51   And even if everything had gone exceedingly

00:11:55   according to plan, which obviously it didn't,

00:11:59   you know, it doesn't seem like it's possible at this point,

00:12:03   like that, let's say an initiative that was going strong

00:12:07   in 2015 or 2016 and maybe could have shipped a car by today,

00:12:12   by the end of 2020, that those cars would drive themselves.

00:12:16   That's, you know, my honest estimation,

00:12:19   and I know this is one of those like 640 kilobytes of memory

00:12:22   ought to be enough for everybody.

00:12:24   I don't think that you and I and most of the people

00:12:26   listening to this are ever gonna live to see

00:12:29   fully self-driving cars on the road.

00:12:32   - Yeah, I mean, the definition seems to keep moving

00:12:35   for what that is anyway.

00:12:36   - Right, I mean like, you know,

00:12:38   I'm talking full Knight Rider, talk to your Apple Watch car,

00:12:43   come get me, and the car just drives from wherever it is

00:12:46   and to wherever you are and,

00:12:48   - To Hopsing Laundry Mat,

00:12:49   - Right. - to your home after.

00:12:51   - Right, I mean, it's, you know,

00:12:53   I don't think we're gonna have it.

00:12:55   I'd love to see it happen, I don't think it will,

00:12:58   but anyway, it obviously wasn't gonna happen by now.

00:13:01   But anyway, the Reuters report says Apple's full steam ahead

00:13:04   that they're hoping to ship cars by 2024.

00:13:09   Maybe it'll be delayed 'til 2025,

00:13:11   and at this point, five, four, five years out,

00:13:14   it's like, yeah, no shit, it might be delayed to 2025.

00:13:18   Like if you have something that is like a thousand person,

00:13:23   I don't know if there's a thousand people working on

00:13:25   Project Titan, but maybe there are.

00:13:26   I know there's hundreds, you know,

00:13:28   but if you have hundreds of top engineers and AI talent

00:13:31   and mechanical engineers making the actual car,

00:13:35   working on something that optimistically you think

00:13:38   is still four years out, yeah, it might be five years out.

00:13:42   (laughs)

00:13:43   That line in the report just made me laugh.

00:13:45   - And what's like the 1.0 anyway?

00:13:47   Like what are the features that qualify

00:13:49   the minimum delightful, like the delightful product

00:13:51   that you're gonna ship?

00:13:52   - Right, but man, oh man, did that make people's ears

00:13:55   perk up, you know, 'cause it's like, ooh.

00:13:59   - Apple stock up, Tesla stock down,

00:14:00   I mean, that's how it works.

00:14:02   - Did that really happen?

00:14:03   I didn't even, but see, that's just crazy.

00:14:06   And it really is.

00:14:07   You know, I've been on the CNBC a couple times

00:14:12   the last couple months.

00:14:14   They asked if I would be on today to talk about the car,

00:14:16   and I had to politely decline,

00:14:19   'cause what the hell am I gonna say?

00:14:22   I'm like, I love, I wouldn't say I love it,

00:14:25   but I enjoy stretching myself on these CNBC appearances

00:14:29   to talk about things Apple has announced and are out,

00:14:33   and to give my thoughts and help people think about them

00:14:36   the way I think they should.

00:14:38   I don't mind coming on a podcast like this

00:14:41   and spouting off about this car I know nothing about,

00:14:43   but there is no way in hell that I wanna go on TV

00:14:47   and talk about a car that I don't know anything about,

00:14:51   because of exactly what you just had.

00:14:53   I don't wanna play any role in Apple stock going up

00:14:57   or Tesla stock going down or any of that nonsense.

00:15:00   I wanna stay as far away from that as possible,

00:15:03   'cause nobody knows.

00:15:05   I feel like, who knows?

00:15:08   Why would this report come out now?

00:15:11   I have no idea, but it was so strange to me, timing-wise.

00:15:15   - Yeah, especially Reuters, because that's not,

00:15:17   like that's not one of the usual rumor or leak channels.

00:15:20   That's, it's not even one of the business publications.

00:15:23   Like it wasn't a Bloomberg story.

00:15:24   It wasn't a Wall Street Journal story.

00:15:26   Reuters seems very specific.

00:15:28   - Yeah, and then you, right before,

00:15:30   it's a good thing we delayed recording until now,

00:15:33   but it looks like three hours ago,

00:15:35   Elon Musk tantalizing tweet says,

00:15:38   "During the darkest days of the Model 3 program,

00:15:41   "I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility

00:15:44   "of Apple acquiring Tesla for 1/10 of our current value.

00:15:48   "He refused to take the meeting."

00:15:50   - Yeah.

00:15:51   - And that's the whole, that's the whole tweet.

00:15:53   - Well, it was a response.

00:15:54   So the person who was responding to you

00:15:55   posted some pictures from the Reuters article,

00:15:57   and the Reuters article was playing up

00:15:58   some revolutionary battery technology from Apple

00:16:00   that I think if anybody took two minutes to research it,

00:16:03   would show that it wasn't revolutionary battery technology,

00:16:05   at least not as described,

00:16:07   and that seemed to trigger Elon Musk a little bit,

00:16:09   'cause he's saying, "We've been using these batteries

00:16:11   "for years on our mid-range cars."

00:16:13   (laughing)

00:16:14   - But it's another one of those, like,

00:16:18   I mean, Twitter is exceedingly good

00:16:20   at a Fermat's Last Theorem type tweet.

00:16:24   Like, that tweet demands so much more attention.

00:16:29   Really?

00:16:31   Like, did you really get in contact with Tim Cook?

00:16:33   Did he really not take the meeting?

00:16:35   - And I forget who pointed it out.

00:16:36   It might have been Neil Seibart that said

00:16:38   that this would have been last year, or 2018 or 2019,

00:16:43   when Project Titan was well underway already,

00:16:45   and Tesla doesn't seem to have any problems

00:16:48   that Apple would have been able to fix.

00:16:50   - It's one of those somewhere in the 999 nos

00:16:55   for every yes, right, is that Apple is not

00:17:00   a Berkshire Hathaway-style conglomerate that just owns,

00:17:05   like, in some sense, you can say,

00:17:08   well, clearly this was a mistake if it's all true, right?

00:17:12   And again, that's a big if, with Elon Musk

00:17:14   as the, let's say, unreliable narrator.

00:17:18   Not that he's a liar, just that you can't necessarily

00:17:22   take it as, there's a lot of ways to be

00:17:25   an unreliable narrator that don't involve lying.

00:17:27   - You don't know what his agenda is with a tweet.

00:17:29   - Right, and how sharp his memory is, you know.

00:17:33   - And it's also, it's his opinion of what happened.

00:17:37   - But if you just took that as the,

00:17:39   if you said, okay, if you looked into it

00:17:40   and it was all verifiably true, you could say,

00:17:43   well, then that's clearly a mistake.

00:17:44   Apple should have acquired Tesla for 1/10 the price

00:17:48   and held it until now, and now they could,

00:17:50   if they wanted to, spin it off and make 10 times.

00:17:55   But that's not Apple's business, right?

00:17:58   And, you know, and there was, you know,

00:18:03   a lot of people threw that out as a, like,

00:18:08   what was, I guess it was 2013 was sort of the low point

00:18:12   of the post Steve Jobs, hey, this is,

00:18:15   Tim Cook isn't cutting it, they need a product person,

00:18:17   they should acquire Tesla and let Elon Musk

00:18:20   take over the company, you know.

00:18:22   And in very broad strokes, you can see the thinking,

00:18:27   you know, that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are similar,

00:18:30   you know, they're founder/visionary people,

00:18:35   and you could say, well, Apple needs that sort of person,

00:18:38   but it's very different when you're not the founder

00:18:41   of the company, right, you know, like, you know,

00:18:43   Thomas Edison was one of those people.

00:18:45   I don't know that if you could reanimate Thomas Edison

00:18:48   from the grave that he would be a great CEO of Apple, right?

00:18:52   - And also, Steve Jobs, you know, he was maniacally focused

00:18:56   where Elon Musk has, Elon Musk is focused on Mars,

00:18:58   but that constitutes 10 different companies for him.

00:19:01   - Right, Elon, my point with these founders,

00:19:05   these unique visionaries, is that they all are

00:19:10   inherently the chiefs of the companies

00:19:14   they were meant to be the chiefs of

00:19:15   because that's why they created them, right?

00:19:18   - Yes, and the culture around them.

00:19:19   - Right, Jeff Bezos is obviously tremendously successful,

00:19:24   and Amazon is, for all of it, the things you complain about,

00:19:29   you know, there's certainly many things

00:19:31   you can take issue with, or even Zuckerberg, right,

00:19:34   a company that we can all agree there are a lot of things

00:19:36   we can complain about with Facebook.

00:19:39   Neither one of them would be good at all

00:19:42   as being the CEO of Apple, or of the other company, right?

00:19:45   You wouldn't want--

00:19:46   - Both of them have tried to make phones

00:19:47   with disastrous results over the years.

00:19:49   - Right, like, you know, I don't think any of these CEOs

00:19:53   would be good at taking over the other's company,

00:19:55   except maybe for Cook, who is not a founder, right?

00:20:00   Cook would be the one who you could say,

00:20:02   well, if he wanted to be the CEO of Amazon,

00:20:04   he'd probably be a lot better at being the CEO of Amazon

00:20:07   than Bezos would be as the CEO of Apple.

00:20:10   But they're just, you know, the companies are formed

00:20:12   in the creator's image, and Elon Musk is the CEO

00:20:16   of the companies he was meant to be in charge of, you know?

00:20:18   SpaceX is very Elon Musk-y.

00:20:21   - Yeah, and The Boring Company, and Tesla,

00:20:23   and Starlink is just so many,

00:20:26   but they all have that uniform goal.

00:20:28   And also, whenever I see this, I also wonder

00:20:30   what it would've been like if Steve Jobs

00:20:32   had a Twitter account.

00:20:33   - Oh, I don't think he ever would've been in,

00:20:37   I don't know.

00:20:38   It is an interesting, could he have gone--

00:20:42   - Sort of like midnight emailing Steve Jobs

00:20:44   had a Twitter account.

00:20:45   - Right, I don't know.

00:20:47   I mean, and Twitter was out by, you know, in 2006, 2007.

00:20:52   It just wasn't as much of a thing.

00:20:55   - Yeah.

00:20:56   - I don't know, I don't see him ever getting into tweeting.

00:21:00   - Yeah.

00:21:01   - I would see it more like, sort of like the way

00:21:03   Schiller and Cook tweet, you know,

00:21:06   and it's like when there's something new,

00:21:07   there's a tweet from the account.

00:21:09   And he might be interested enough to single,

00:21:11   you know, be the one who actually writes the tweet,

00:21:14   but it's not like, I wouldn't be like Elon Musk

00:21:17   making trouble in tweets.

00:21:19   - 'Cause back when I was on the other side of the fence,

00:21:21   like when I worked in marketing and we hired PR people,

00:21:23   one of our most stressful periods was whenever a CEO

00:21:26   got on an open mic.

00:21:27   That was just the potential for disaster.

00:21:29   And I remember like the, Eric Schmidt would do that,

00:21:31   and the co-CEOs of RIM would do that,

00:21:34   and he would just see the ghosting of the PR people

00:21:39   as they would try to stop it every time,

00:21:40   and it would go terribly every time.

00:21:43   And I don't know what happens at like Tesla or Facebook

00:21:45   when they let, you know, Elon or Mark on an open mic,

00:21:47   but Apple's got a much better apparatus for that.

00:21:51   - Yeah, they're much more disciplined.

00:21:53   That's very true. - Yes.

00:21:54   - Here, let me take a break before we go on

00:21:57   with the year in review and thank our first sponsor.

00:21:59   Let me, what a great company.

00:22:01   I love this app, Things.

00:22:03   T-H-I-N-G-S, Things.

00:22:06   The To Do Task Manager app that's been around now,

00:22:10   it's one of those apps that it's like,

00:22:12   I still think of it as a new app,

00:22:13   and it shows how old I'm getting maybe, 'cause it's not.

00:22:18   It's been around for a while.

00:22:19   Great, great app for all of Apple's platforms,

00:22:23   the Mac, for iOS, the phone, and iPad.

00:22:26   The idea behind Things, when you want to achieve a goal,

00:22:29   you gotta have a plan, and it is a great way

00:22:32   to organize it.

00:22:33   The idea is very simple.

00:22:35   They have projects.

00:22:36   You create projects for your goals.

00:22:38   You add steps in a project to help you reach your goal,

00:22:42   and you can schedule those tasks

00:22:45   for when you want to work on them

00:22:46   or when you need to work on them.

00:22:48   And then every morning when you wake up,

00:22:50   Things already has a list of to dos for the day.

00:22:53   You can just look right at today.

00:22:55   It tells you, based on everything you've already put

00:22:58   into Things, what you need to do today.

00:23:01   You can just spend a few minutes reviewing that list.

00:23:03   You can drag those to dos in the order you want to do them,

00:23:07   which to me is like, oh, that is like the one thing I need

00:23:11   in any to do type organization app

00:23:15   that I want to even try to use.

00:23:18   If I can't just drag them to reorder them,

00:23:20   I'm already like, ah, I'm out, 'cause that's how I think.

00:23:24   Things lets you do that,

00:23:25   and then you just get on with your day,

00:23:26   and it doesn't matter what device you're on.

00:23:28   Everything syncs through the cloud,

00:23:30   so whether you are on your Mac,

00:23:32   whether you're on your phone, you're on an iPad,

00:23:35   it's all there, and Things is beautiful,

00:23:39   and they have always integrated with the system

00:23:43   in a very cohesive way,

00:23:44   so like when stuff like Notification Center

00:23:48   and widgets and stuff like that,

00:23:52   it's like they're always right on top of it

00:23:54   as dedicated, focused.

00:23:56   Like the Apple platform isn't just one of the targets

00:24:00   for the Things system.

00:24:01   They are Apple developers, true and true.

00:24:04   That's the only place where Things exists,

00:24:05   and so they embrace all that stuff when it's new.

00:24:09   It is just a great app.

00:24:10   So what do you do to get Things to try it?

00:24:13   Download a free trial for your Mac,

00:24:16   fully native on the Apple M1 Macs, of course,

00:24:20   because like I said, they stay up to date

00:24:22   with all of the latest Apple technology

00:24:25   at culturedcode.com/things.

00:24:27   Just download it to your Mac, totally free to try,

00:24:30   great place to start, or go to the App Store

00:24:34   and just search for Things.

00:24:36   Could not be easier, T-H-I-N-G-S on the App Store,

00:24:40   and you will find Things.

00:24:43   There you go.

00:24:44   My thanks to Culturedcode for sponsoring the show

00:24:46   to promote Things, their terrific app.

00:24:49   All right, before we go to the year in review,

00:24:57   the other thing we should probably talk about

00:24:59   over the last week is the is Chrome bad?

00:25:03   - Yeah. (laughing)

00:25:05   - Our friend, the great Lauren Brikter surfaced.

00:25:09   And now Lauren Brikter, everybody has to introduce him

00:25:12   as creator of Tweety, Letterpress, the great app.

00:25:17   - He wrote the GL stack for the original iPhone,

00:25:19   as far as I can recall.

00:25:20   - Yeah, the literal, truly invented Polder refresh

00:25:24   as a mechanism, which is one of those things now

00:25:27   that is so part of the oxygen of touch-based systems

00:25:30   that it's hard to believe it had to be invented,

00:25:33   and it wasn't there from the beginning.

00:25:35   - He wrote UIKit for the Mac before Apple did,

00:25:38   and I believe he's probably written UIKit for OpenGL,

00:25:41   sorry, for WebGL already, knowing him.

00:25:43   - Well, he wrote a website called chromisbad.com,

00:25:47   and it got a lot of attention.

00:25:49   And it was funny because I wouldn't think

00:25:52   that Lauren's accomplishments are from that long ago

00:25:55   that people wouldn't remember,

00:25:56   but when it hit Hacker News, people were like,

00:25:57   "Who is this guy?" (laughing)

00:25:59   - Yeah. (laughing)

00:26:00   It's like when Tweety came out,

00:26:01   and people were like, "Who could write an app like this?

00:26:03   "Who is this person?" (laughing)

00:26:05   - But the gist of it was that Lauren had seen

00:26:08   a couple of Macs, like his wife's MacBook Pro

00:26:11   and some other Mac in their household

00:26:13   that had been having very strange performance problems

00:26:16   where everything was slow, scrolling was slow,

00:26:18   typing was slow, and nothing out of the ordinary

00:26:21   was listed as consuming resources in activity monitor.

00:26:25   It's just that one of the ways it would manifest

00:26:28   was that the Windows Server, which is part of the system,

00:26:33   would be taking up excessive CPU.

00:26:36   But there wasn't some app that you could say,

00:26:38   "Oh, and it's this part of Chrome."

00:26:41   Long story short, he deleted Chrome,

00:26:44   deleting all traces of Chrome, restarted,

00:26:48   and this fixed both of his machines.

00:26:51   He made this website, said, "I don't know what it's doing.

00:26:55   "Something that Chrome installs in the background

00:26:58   "is doing something, I don't know what it is,

00:27:01   "but it doesn't show up in activity monitor,

00:27:03   "and when you do these steps to delete

00:27:06   "all traces of Chrome and use a different browser,

00:27:10   "the problems go away."

00:27:12   And an awful lot of people are like,

00:27:16   "Holy crap, this fixed my Mac."

00:27:18   - Yes.

00:27:19   - Including you, right?

00:27:21   - Yeah, yeah, me, Ben Thompson, your partner on dithering.

00:27:25   - Yeah.

00:27:26   - Several people who are super smart.

00:27:27   And the thing was that Lauren suggested,

00:27:30   Google has this thing called Keystone,

00:27:31   which is their updater that originally came out

00:27:33   with Google Earth, and like 11 years ago,

00:27:35   Wired saw it and called it evil.

00:27:37   And they won't use the system updater,

00:27:39   they won't use Sparkle, they just have to do their own thing

00:27:42   because they want to continuously update Chrome

00:27:44   in the background.

00:27:45   And Lauren's theory was that Keystone

00:27:47   would try to start up, have a problem,

00:27:49   the process would never spawn an activity monitor,

00:27:52   but it would just churn Windows Server,

00:27:54   it would just thrash it until everything else stopped.

00:27:56   And then if you'd go in and not just delete Chrome,

00:27:58   but go through all your library files

00:28:01   and delete anything with Keystone in it,

00:28:03   this would stop happening.

00:28:04   And to their credit, the Chrome team

00:28:06   and the Chromium team jumped on this immediately,

00:28:08   they said they'd never heard of it,

00:28:09   but they're gonna look into it,

00:28:11   and they have a bug filed now,

00:28:12   and they're asking people for help and for documentation

00:28:15   and for use, like for test cases and all that stuff.

00:28:18   But it fixed my problem.

00:28:20   I work on Embargo the same way you do,

00:28:21   and I would have this problem,

00:28:23   Windows Server would ramp up and I wouldn't be able

00:28:25   to get Final Cut to let me finish editing my videos,

00:28:28   and it was incredibly stressful,

00:28:29   I wanted to throw my computer.

00:28:31   And I have not had that problem since.

00:28:33   Even uploading my videos,

00:28:35   like I know this is a complete post hoc ergo

00:28:37   propter hoc fallacy, but I used to have like failures

00:28:40   three or four times after uploading videos,

00:28:42   and I haven't had a single one yet.

00:28:44   So it really is night and day.

00:28:47   - I don't wanna go full John Suricusa rant here,

00:28:50   but he did it so beautifully on ATP recently,

00:28:54   but it's like this whole thing,

00:28:55   but yet it's so unsatisfying,

00:28:57   'cause we don't have a, oh, here's what's going on, right?

00:29:02   And we should.

00:29:08   I'm kind of shocked, and I haven't really written about it

00:29:11   on Daring Fireball, because my first thought

00:29:13   when the thing broke was, well, this isn't right.

00:29:17   And like, Lauren has since adjusted the text

00:29:21   of the Chrome is Bad webpage to--

00:29:23   - He was super angry when he wrote it.

00:29:25   - He was, and he had a thing that alleged

00:29:27   that the keystone was hiding itself from Activity Monitor,

00:29:32   which clearly-- - They called it malware.

00:29:35   - Well, there it's a little bit more of a judgment call,

00:29:38   but the hiding itself from Activity Monitor

00:29:41   is a serious allegation,

00:29:44   because it would require deliberate malfeasance

00:29:49   on the Chrome team's part to hide it,

00:29:52   and it implicitly alleges

00:29:55   that there's a gaping security hole in Mac OS

00:29:59   that allows for a background utility to hide itself.

00:30:05   - Well, I understand, because it would never have surfaced,

00:30:07   like it was thrashing Windows Server so badly

00:30:09   it never showed up.

00:30:10   If that wasn't a problem, it would have shown up

00:30:12   and he would have seen it, but he never saw it

00:30:13   because of the problem.

00:30:14   - Yeah, I don't think he lied,

00:30:15   and I don't think he, maybe it was a little sloppy,

00:30:20   but he didn't lie.

00:30:21   It's that he was trying to, what he was trying to say

00:30:24   is what we've just said on this show, me and you,

00:30:26   is that it's not that it hid itself in that malware sense.

00:30:30   It doesn't show up in Activity Monitor.

00:30:35   So hide was the wrong verb, to be sure.

00:30:37   But what's weird about this is that we,

00:30:40   clearly something is going on.

00:30:43   There is, something is going on here.

00:30:46   There's way too many people who have just erased

00:30:50   all traces of Chrome and had very similar problems vanish.

00:30:55   - Yes.

00:30:56   - You know, like Ben Thompson, really,

00:30:59   he spent months where he was dying

00:31:02   because he just was like, I should just,

00:31:03   he really would have bought a new computer,

00:31:06   but didn't only because he knew the M1 Macs were coming out,

00:31:10   and so it wasn't a good time to buy a computer,

00:31:11   and he chalked it up to Catalina.

00:31:13   But here we are weeks later,

00:31:15   and still nobody has put a finger on what it is.

00:31:18   But it seems like too many people have had,

00:31:22   it's so unsatisfying.

00:31:24   And I'm very surprised with the number of,

00:31:29   it seems prevalent, and clearly this is the thing

00:31:32   that didn't affect everybody, right?

00:31:35   And I think that's, you know, that should go without saying.

00:31:38   If every single person with Chrome on their Mac

00:31:40   had this problem, the Chrome team itself would have it,

00:31:44   and they'd fix it.

00:31:44   - Yes.

00:31:45   Well, that's the thing about, like,

00:31:46   modern software is so complicated

00:31:48   and depends so much on initial conditions,

00:31:50   settings, other programs you have installed.

00:31:52   Like this could be a pure Chromium issue,

00:31:54   Chrome issue, Keystone issue.

00:31:55   It could involve certain versions of macOS,

00:31:57   certain other utilities, or systems that you have,

00:32:00   or sorry, or tasks that you have running.

00:32:02   It could be a big complicated mess,

00:32:04   and just removing Chrome removes a little,

00:32:07   one part of that enough that everything starts moving again.

00:32:09   And that's really hard to fix.

00:32:11   But to Lauren's, one of Lauren's original points

00:32:14   is that Chrome doesn't have to update this way.

00:32:16   Google chooses to have it update this way,

00:32:18   but they could be using a standard updater

00:32:20   that allows you to consent to updates,

00:32:23   because this doesn't even ask your permission

00:32:25   to update Chrome.

00:32:26   It just does it in the background,

00:32:27   which is a service to some people,

00:32:28   but is anathema to other people.

00:32:30   - That to me is, that's the, me, my as yet unwritten

00:32:35   take on doing Fireball, is that the problem here isn't,

00:32:39   well, I would love to know what the actual

00:32:42   technical problem is, and hopefully there is one,

00:32:44   and we'll get to the bottom of it.

00:32:46   Well, there obviously is a problem.

00:32:50   And whether it's actually Chrome's fault,

00:32:52   or whether it could be that Chrome is only doing things

00:32:55   that they technically shouldn't cause this problem,

00:32:58   and the bug is in Windows Server itself,

00:33:02   getting tickled in a certain way that triggers this bug,

00:33:06   it could be that the bug is Apple's,

00:33:08   and it is in Windows Server,

00:33:10   and hopefully we'll figure out what that is.

00:33:12   Somebody's gotta figure it out, this is maddening.

00:33:14   Even though I'm personally not affected by it,

00:33:16   I'm like, huh, I've got Chrome,

00:33:18   and I'm sure most people who have Chrome haven't seen it.

00:33:21   - And I want to use Chrome, to be clear,

00:33:22   there's so many websites that work best with Chrome,

00:33:25   it would be better for me if I could use it.

00:33:27   - But this wouldn't be an issue if there is fault,

00:33:32   there is with certainty fault on Chrome's part,

00:33:35   and that's that their software update system

00:33:38   is, in my opinion, by design, disrespectful.

00:33:43   It's not the way things work on the Mac.

00:33:46   Even Apple's own software, like,

00:33:48   and as much as people want to,

00:33:50   some people want to say that Apple is sort of

00:33:52   like authoritarian, that they dictate to people,

00:33:57   that people are resistant to get into the Apple ecosystem

00:34:00   because Apple tells you how to do everything,

00:34:02   and they want you to update everything, and blah, blah, blah.

00:34:05   And it's like, Apple is actually extremely respectful

00:34:08   of your computer being yours,

00:34:11   and almost nothing that they do is mandatory.

00:34:17   I mean, there might be some very rarely invoked,

00:34:22   I mean, like, maybe once ever security things

00:34:25   that they can do remotely, you know,

00:34:28   like if they detect malware, they can push certain things

00:34:32   to stop a malware infection from spreading further,

00:34:39   but they almost never do that.

00:34:40   Like, OS updates, you have control over them,

00:34:44   and they do steer you when you set up a new device

00:34:48   through a process that encourages you

00:34:51   to turn on automatic updates,

00:34:53   and they do have automatic updates for iOS,

00:34:57   and for watchOS, and even MacOS,

00:34:59   that if you do allow it to happen,

00:35:02   and they do encourage you to turn it on,

00:35:04   tries to do things in an intelligent way

00:35:07   where like your phone will say,

00:35:08   okay, iOS 14.1 is out, and Apple has pushed it,

00:35:14   and you've got automatic updates on.

00:35:16   It'll download it while it's on WiFi during the day,

00:35:20   and will install itself and restart overnight

00:35:23   at like four in the morning,

00:35:25   so that you're never interrupted,

00:35:26   and you wake up, and your phone will say,

00:35:28   you're now running iOS 14, welcome to iOS 14.

00:35:32   But it's also very easy.

00:35:35   You don't have to like dig into the command line

00:35:38   and type a defaults thing to turn it off.

00:35:41   Like it's a nice, friendlier, big blue button

00:35:46   that says turn allow auto updates,

00:35:49   and it's sort of a less friendly not now underneath

00:35:54   to say not now, I'll do it manually.

00:35:57   But it's not hidden, right?

00:35:59   - Well, even on my Mac,

00:35:59   it's been trying to install Big Sur for a month,

00:36:01   and I just don't let it.

00:36:03   It needs me to push certain buttons to do the auto update.

00:36:06   It's downloaded it.

00:36:06   It's already, it keeps popping up saying,

00:36:08   hey, you have an update.

00:36:10   I ignore it, and I'm fine.

00:36:11   I'm not upgrading this machine.

00:36:12   It's this, and in fact, my, hey, this is an older machine.

00:36:16   I should be, I'm gonna wait a couple of months

00:36:18   before I update it, if ever.

00:36:20   Turns out that these old 2014 MacBook Pros

00:36:24   actually had a problem with Big Sur

00:36:26   where it was bricking them.

00:36:27   Like it wasn't even like, it was like,

00:36:29   you have to like take it in to get service to get out of it.

00:36:31   And it's like, well, that's why I don't update automatically.

00:36:34   So the only hitch is I do have a red,

00:36:37   I have a red badge for software updates.

00:36:40   - Yes.

00:36:41   - That's it.

00:36:43   But otherwise, I don't have to update it, you know?

00:36:46   And most Mac apps don't update automatically

00:36:51   in the background when the app's not running.

00:36:54   The app is running when you launch it

00:36:56   and you double click it,

00:36:57   and that's when most third party apps

00:36:59   that you don't get through the App Store update.

00:37:03   And they, you know, a lot of third party Mac apps

00:37:05   use the same framework called Sparkle.

00:37:07   - Yes.

00:37:08   - Everybody listening to this podcast has almost certainly

00:37:11   seen a Sparkle app.

00:37:13   It's, you know, and it just, there's an update available.

00:37:17   Do you wanna download it now?

00:37:18   You download it now, and then it downloads

00:37:20   and you click install, and then the app quits

00:37:23   and it launches itself again, and you've got the new version.

00:37:26   And it's all under your control.

00:37:27   And if you don't want it, you could not do it.

00:37:30   And you probably have a preference to say don't even check.

00:37:34   - Yep.

00:37:35   - And if you do use the App Store,

00:37:36   you can turn off auto updates in the App Store too

00:37:39   and install those manually, which is what I do

00:37:41   because I don't want my apps to install.

00:37:43   I'm volunteering to give myself the chore

00:37:47   of purposefully looking.

00:37:49   And that is the Macintosh way,

00:37:53   and that is inherited by iOS.

00:37:56   It's also the iOS way.

00:37:58   It should be, and I mean this in a sort of ethical sense,

00:38:03   it should be up to the user whether and when

00:38:07   they're updating and what the app is doing

00:38:10   in the background.

00:38:11   Like the flip side of it too is you should be in charge,

00:38:14   you should be in control of when your apps update

00:38:17   if you want to.

00:38:18   And on the flip side is when you drag,

00:38:21   when you're like I don't want this app anymore,

00:38:23   and you drag it to the trash on the Mac

00:38:26   or delete it from your home screen on iOS,

00:38:30   you should know that there's nothing left behind

00:38:33   that is doing anything.

00:38:34   Like are there preference files and stuff like that?

00:38:37   Well in some ways that's actually a feature

00:38:38   that those get left behind.

00:38:40   So if you reinstall it, your data is still there.

00:38:44   But in terms of the actual software that runs,

00:38:47   it shouldn't be there.

00:38:49   There should be nothing left behind.

00:38:51   And the way that Chrome is designed

00:38:53   where it installs like little invisible background agents

00:38:57   outside your applications folder and sets launch daemons

00:39:02   so that when you restart it runs,

00:39:05   you can delete chrome.app,

00:39:07   but when you restart your computer,

00:39:09   it's still running the software updater in background

00:39:13   once every 3,000 seconds or something like that.

00:39:16   - Yeah.

00:39:17   - That to me is wrong, it's wrong design,

00:39:22   and it's disrespectful and presumptuous.

00:39:25   It is them saying, it's the Chrome team saying,

00:39:28   "We know better than you how your Chrome should update.

00:39:33   "You're better off, we know you're better off

00:39:37   "always having your Chrome up to date,

00:39:40   "and so we're going to install this for you

00:39:42   "and have it happen automatically."

00:39:44   And if they didn't have that design,

00:39:46   no one would be throwing shade at them

00:39:48   for this Chrome is bad scandal.

00:39:51   - And I know some people immediately will say,

00:39:52   "Well Apple doesn't give you an on/off switch

00:39:53   "on your AirPods Max, so Apple's doing the same thing."

00:39:57   And I think the difference is just the intention.

00:40:00   Apple knows that for a lot of people,

00:40:02   these are a wireless product,

00:40:03   and if you forget to turn them off,

00:40:04   you'll drain your battery, it's a bad experience.

00:40:07   So they'd rather just use the accelerometer

00:40:08   to power them down for you,

00:40:10   and then when you put them back on, they just work.

00:40:12   So to me, it's not the system per se,

00:40:15   it's the intention and the consideration

00:40:17   behind it that matters.

00:40:19   - Yeah, so that's my take,

00:40:21   is that they should not have this design

00:40:23   for software update on the Mac.

00:40:24   I don't think they're going to reconsider,

00:40:28   but it's never made me comfortable.

00:40:31   I don't like it, and I also think

00:40:33   that they should document it,

00:40:34   if they're going to go this route.

00:40:36   They've decided purposefully,

00:40:39   it's not like Google is some small, tiny upstart

00:40:42   that doesn't have the resources to document how it works.

00:40:45   - Yeah, it's open source on Windows, right?

00:40:47   It's fully transparent on Windows, but not on Mac.

00:40:49   - Right, and there are other apps,

00:40:51   and let me just say this before I forget,

00:40:53   'cause I want to mention it.

00:40:55   So just to name one friend of the show,

00:40:57   our good friends at Rogue Amoeba,

00:41:00   who make audio software for the Mac,

00:41:02   everything from Audio Hijacked to Piezo to Sound Source.

00:41:07   Their software, which does very complex,

00:41:12   at the high end, like with Audio Hijack,

00:41:14   needs stuff that runs outside.

00:41:21   It can't just be done as a simple app,

00:41:23   to do the sort of audio processing

00:41:25   where you're grabbing audio from another application

00:41:27   and filtering it into this.

00:41:29   Like the whole point of the app

00:41:30   is that they're doing things that are outside

00:41:34   the capabilities of a simple app that you double click.

00:41:39   And so they have very copious instructions and installers

00:41:42   to help you do this as best they can

00:41:45   to make it as friction-free as possible.

00:41:47   - And they are so considerate, their installers.

00:41:49   I was gonna bring them up

00:41:50   because they are just above and beyond.

00:41:52   They've thought through every sort of convenience

00:41:54   that you could imagine for those installers.

00:41:55   - Right, so they need to have an installer

00:41:59   and they need to be running something

00:42:01   in addition to a double clickable app.

00:42:04   And they explain it all.

00:42:06   They make it as easy as possible.

00:42:08   They tell you what they're doing.

00:42:10   They tell you what they've done.

00:42:11   They tell you what needs to be updated,

00:42:13   when it needs to be updated.

00:42:16   And if you ever decide, I'm out, I don't want this anymore,

00:42:19   they make it completely easy to uninstall all of it.

00:42:23   And then it's like they were never even there.

00:42:26   And Chrome doesn't need to be running

00:42:31   in the background like that.

00:42:32   It doesn't need to have launch agents

00:42:34   and they don't document it

00:42:35   and they don't make it easy to uninstall it.

00:42:38   Very disrespectful.

00:42:40   Anyway, you're in review.

00:42:44   Here we go.

00:42:45   - What a year.

00:42:49   I was looking back, so I made an outline.

00:42:51   And the funny part is, the pre-pandemic part of 2020,

00:42:56   Apple did nothing.

00:42:58   I was like, so--

00:43:00   - I mean, they did stuff,

00:43:01   but there was no consumer-- - Right.

00:43:03   (laughs)

00:43:05   So I do see, what did happen in that?

00:43:08   So January 'til the beginning of March,

00:43:11   I forgot about Richard Plepler coming from HBO.

00:43:15   - Yeah.

00:43:18   - Yeah, I guess that's interesting.

00:43:20   And it does sort of tie in to,

00:43:23   I know Ben and I have talked about this

00:43:24   on Dithering quite a bit.

00:43:26   And MG Siegler, one of my highlights of the year

00:43:30   on this podcast was MG's idea that Apple TV+

00:43:35   is the new HBO, which is like, oh, come on, that's too.

00:43:38   And it's like, wait, maybe.

00:43:40   Like, it actually kind of is.

00:43:42   I'm a fan of Apple TV+,

00:43:46   but even for me, that was a bit too far.

00:43:48   And then I was like, no, now that I think about it,

00:43:50   I think maybe.

00:43:52   'Cause it's both the fact that Apple TV+

00:43:54   is a little more careful, and it's like,

00:43:55   we're not gonna have the most shows,

00:43:57   but we're gonna try for the best shows.

00:43:59   And combined with Time Warner doing everything

00:44:02   in their power to dilute the HBO brand.

00:44:06   So maybe.

00:44:07   - Christina Warren, who's been on the show before,

00:44:11   brilliant, also said it's like NBC at its heights.

00:44:13   And they have the comedies,

00:44:15   but they also have the dramas,

00:44:17   and they have the edgier stuff like LA Law.

00:44:19   It's almost like a classic TV channel program.

00:44:22   - Maybe, yeah, I don't know.

00:44:23   But really, there wasn't much going on,

00:44:26   nothing consumer-facing.

00:44:28   And then I recall, I forget if it was in March

00:44:34   or if it was the end of February,

00:44:36   but I had Federico Vittucci on the show,

00:44:38   and it was when Italy was like the hotspot

00:44:42   in outside China in the world.

00:44:45   And I don't regret it.

00:44:49   It's not like I'm embarrassed by my take,

00:44:51   but it was very decidedly,

00:44:54   hey, how weird is it that Italy got hit hard

00:44:57   by this bug like this?

00:44:58   Good luck, I hope everything works out for everybody.

00:45:01   But it was definitely an assumption

00:45:05   that did not hold up very well,

00:45:06   that Italy was an outlier,

00:45:09   and did not take long for that to be shown

00:45:14   as a pretty bad assumption.

00:45:18   Like you've noted here that in that time period,

00:45:22   Apple's ended trips to China and started closing stores.

00:45:25   I forget, when did they start closing stores

00:45:27   because of COVID?

00:45:29   - I think it was starting in February

00:45:30   and then moving into March.

00:45:32   And I know Michael Stiebler on 9to5Mac

00:45:34   has been really good at pointing this out,

00:45:36   but Apple has one of the best COVID response teams,

00:45:40   I think, anywhere.

00:45:41   You can almost always see by the Apple Store closings

00:45:43   what the actual cities should be doing and aren't doing,

00:45:46   because they open up and close down on really good data

00:45:49   with really good timing.

00:45:51   And I think we should all just be following his tracker

00:45:53   because it would give us much better information

00:45:55   than any government has been giving us.

00:45:56   - Yeah, and I think it's as simple

00:46:00   as that they are striking the very correct balance

00:46:05   between, yes, we would like to be open

00:46:10   because we would like to be selling stuff

00:46:12   and we would like for our employees to be doing their thing

00:46:17   and we want our customers.

00:46:19   Everybody's happy when we're selling stuff if it's safe,

00:46:23   but if it's not safe, we don't want anybody

00:46:25   doing anything risky that they shouldn't do.

00:46:32   What is the correct balance between wanting to be open

00:46:36   but also wanting to do the right thing?

00:46:38   And I think Apple has sort of struck it.

00:46:40   I think Josh Centers at Tidbits has called it,

00:46:43   he's talked about that too,

00:46:45   that it's sort of like the Apple Store index,

00:46:47   that where Apple stores are open is a really good indication

00:46:52   of where things are spiraling out of control.

00:46:54   - Yes, yeah.

00:46:56   - In hindsight, for the year,

00:46:59   like ways that this year went off the rails,

00:47:02   it didn't take too long into the end of April

00:47:06   where before it started sinking in

00:47:08   that this might be the whole year.

00:47:10   I mean, but I didn't anticipate,

00:47:15   even if that was the case,

00:47:18   if this whole thing had gone like it did really badly,

00:47:23   that there would be so much back and forth, right?

00:47:27   And if we just take Apple stores as the index,

00:47:29   that they'd be opening and then closing

00:47:32   and then opening and closing

00:47:34   and waves spreading around the country

00:47:38   and around the world and North America,

00:47:40   it just didn't anticipate,

00:47:43   I really just did not anticipate how it would ebb and flow.

00:47:47   - Yeah, well, I think the culture clash

00:47:50   with a lot of Western countries was not anticipated.

00:47:53   They just the way that we would handle it.

00:47:55   I think a lot of people just assumed

00:47:57   that we would be the best in the world

00:47:59   at handling everything and it would not be a problem

00:48:01   and we would be helping those poor other countries

00:48:04   get through their troubles

00:48:05   and it just turned out completely opposite.

00:48:07   - Yeah, it's really strange, but it was--

00:48:10   - Like we were anticipating a March Apple event.

00:48:12   I think all of us thought that there would be,

00:48:15   as usual, a March Apple event.

00:48:17   We'd all go to Cupertino or wherever they chose to hold it

00:48:20   and we would see a bunch of products and announcements

00:48:22   and it would be business as usual for the year.

00:48:24   - Yeah, and well, and the other thing too,

00:48:26   they clearly affected Apple.

00:48:29   I mean, they've said this.

00:48:30   We don't have to be insiders to know it.

00:48:32   They've talked about it publicly,

00:48:35   but the way that it hit China,

00:48:38   it literally, like an engine seasoning up,

00:48:45   it just totally shut down the entire supply chain.

00:48:48   I mean, just shut it down.

00:48:50   - And also their ability to go there

00:48:51   'cause usually they are doing pre-production.

00:48:53   They work well ahead of a lot of products

00:48:55   and they're doing pre-production

00:48:56   and that involves a ton of Apple people going to China,

00:48:58   being there on the floor, checking prototypes,

00:49:00   doing feedback, monitoring quality,

00:49:02   doing, it's a very, well, we talked about this before too,

00:49:05   right, like Apple books out entire airline flights

00:49:08   routinely to the biggest customers

00:49:09   and that all just stopped.

00:49:10   - Right, right, like however many employees

00:49:14   in normal times are shuttling back and forth

00:49:17   between SFO and China, it's, you know,

00:49:21   it was that they, after standing order

00:49:25   of 50 business class seats a day or something like that.

00:49:28   - Yeah, it was some ridiculous number that you doubled it

00:49:31   up still, like ridiculous number.

00:49:32   - Right, and it was like on United or something,

00:49:35   I think it was United, but, and then somebody--

00:49:38   - Yeah, someone photographed it at one point

00:49:41   and posted it and Apple had it taken down.

00:49:42   - Right, well it was like, no, it was, yeah,

00:49:43   it was like a United internal sales presentation.

00:49:46   - Yes.

00:49:47   - Some poor soul at United didn't realize

00:49:52   that Apple considered that confidential.

00:49:54   - Yeah.

00:49:56   - But like somebody pointed out to me, they're like,

00:49:58   in addition to like, when I expressed my,

00:50:01   okay, I guess I believe it, but if you do the math,

00:50:03   that's just an enormous number of seats in the plane.

00:50:08   And yes, they don't necessarily aren't doing it every day

00:50:11   and if they have all 50 and they're like,

00:50:12   well, we only have 10 people going to China today,

00:50:15   they, I guess, release those seats

00:50:17   and, you know, the United customers can,

00:50:20   maybe you get, you're very lucky,

00:50:22   you get a free upgrade from coach to business class,

00:50:26   you know, for a trans-Pacific flight,

00:50:29   I mean, what a delight that would be.

00:50:31   But so it doesn't mean they have 50 people doing it

00:50:34   every day, but they're certainly close enough

00:50:36   that they keep the standing order.

00:50:37   But the thing that was the real eye-opener for me

00:50:39   was that somebody pointed out, like, that's just United.

00:50:42   Like, you know, the people who, you know,

00:50:44   some people prefer it 'cause they wanna get the points,

00:50:46   but other people who, you know, prefer comfort

00:50:50   fly other airlines.

00:50:52   - Yeah.

00:50:53   - Like the Asian airlines and you get a better,

00:50:56   you get a better experience.

00:50:57   They're like, and, you know, and they have the discretion

00:51:00   not to have leaked how many seats Apple has on those points.

00:51:03   Well, anyway, all those flights weren't even taking off,

00:51:07   let alone being filled with Apple employees.

00:51:10   - Yeah.

00:51:11   - And in hindsight, so again, speaking now,

00:51:14   me and you speaking in December, Apple made it work.

00:51:18   I mean, this is, has been, I don't know what, if anything,

00:51:23   in theory, Apple wanted to ship in 2020 and didn't,

00:51:27   but, you know, like, let's say like this,

00:51:29   the tiles project, right?

00:51:30   Like, I don't know, there's a couple of,

00:51:32   what else is rumored?

00:51:34   The tiles thing and the headphones.

00:51:36   - I mean, the AirPods Max were one of those things

00:51:38   we didn't think that they were gonna ship

00:51:39   and they still got them out. - They still got them out.

00:51:42   - Yeah.

00:51:42   - Damn if they didn't make it work.

00:51:44   I mean, it's really, really quite remarkable, but.

00:51:48   - They updated almost everything.

00:51:51   What do you think the March event would have been?

00:51:53   So what they did is they had a remote press briefing

00:51:57   on March 17th and I don't think, I'm 99% sure,

00:52:02   I just looked at my notes before the show,

00:52:04   that this wasn't something, it was only press only

00:52:07   who got to watch it.

00:52:08   It wasn't streamed.

00:52:09   - Yes.

00:52:11   Yeah, they hadn't got that.

00:52:12   I think it would have been almost identical

00:52:14   to the 2016 March event where they announced the iPhone SE

00:52:17   and back then the 9.7 inch iPad Pro

00:52:19   and it would have just been the second iPhone SE

00:52:22   and the new A12Z iPad Pro.

00:52:24   - Yeah, so what they did announce on March 17th

00:52:26   was updated MacBook Airs where the real,

00:52:30   there was some kind of Intel 10th generation,

00:52:33   blah, blah, blah and it was like.

00:52:35   - Ice lake, yeah.

00:52:36   - But it was really, it gets the good keyboard

00:52:39   that had just come out a year ago,

00:52:41   as you and I speak right now,

00:52:43   a year ago in the 16 inch MacBook Pro.

00:52:46   - Yes.

00:52:47   - And it was like in March, they were like,

00:52:49   okay, you know the good keyboard,

00:52:50   now it's in the MacBook Air

00:52:52   and they could have stopped right there.

00:52:54   The iPad Pros got updated

00:52:57   which in one of the weirdest updates for the iPad ever,

00:53:02   right, 'cause it was like,

00:53:05   they've never done this before instead of,

00:53:07   they didn't go to it, they skipped the whole A13 generation

00:53:11   and went from the A12X to the A12Z

00:53:15   and the A12Z really was just enabling

00:53:19   the eighth GPU core, right?

00:53:23   - Yeah, it was higher bin

00:53:24   because their yields were good enough

00:53:25   that they didn't have to worry about

00:53:27   you know, the expense of those chips.

00:53:29   But it also, I wonder if they were just so busy with M1

00:53:33   and the A14 that they didn't have time

00:53:36   to make the A13X and they still wanted to get LIDAR

00:53:40   out on the market as early as possible.

00:53:42   - I guess that's the thinking.

00:53:44   If I had to guess as what my theory is,

00:53:48   is that yeah, that they,

00:53:50   the A12Z or X was so good

00:53:55   that they could easily not ship an A13X

00:53:59   and iPads, iPad Pros are, nobody's gonna say,

00:54:04   oh, this is starting to feel pokey.

00:54:06   - Yes.

00:54:07   - It was a simple, the move from the X to the Z

00:54:12   going from seven cores where if you take out your microscope

00:54:16   and look, there's eight cores, but only seven were enabled

00:54:18   was clearly a binning issue, right?

00:54:21   Where they just got better at making them

00:54:23   and like, yeah, we can just guarantee all eight of them

00:54:25   were are good to go.

00:54:27   And the real big hardware change

00:54:29   was going from a tiny little like old,

00:54:33   just single lens camera to a bigger square.

00:54:37   Okay, now it's a whole camera system with LIDAR.

00:54:42   Which again, why though?

00:54:44   Like that's my takeaway now lo these 10 months later

00:54:49   is why, why care about getting LIDAR out for the iPad Pro?

00:54:55   Like I still don't see what the advantage,

00:54:58   what the point of that was.

00:54:59   - I just think it's them,

00:55:02   'cause it was gonna come to the iPhone

00:55:03   and it still is, you and I've heard rumors for years

00:55:05   about a much better camera app

00:55:07   that tied into the whole AR system

00:55:09   and it still hasn't come out.

00:55:10   And that was the rumor,

00:55:12   because the iPad Pro was so strange for other reasons,

00:55:15   like the camera team didn't enable portrait mode,

00:55:18   even though it has LIDAR.

00:55:19   So if you hit the portrait mode button

00:55:21   and you're using the rear cameras,

00:55:22   it actually flips around

00:55:23   and switches to the true depth camera front facing,

00:55:26   which is a really weird experience.

00:55:28   It just felt like they wanted to get this iPad out.

00:55:30   They didn't have time to do everything.

00:55:32   So they just shipped it, which is really super odd.

00:55:35   But my only guess is that they need to get this technology

00:55:38   out so that we're all, developers especially,

00:55:41   but we're all using this stuff far enough advanced

00:55:44   that they can get it into the iPhone

00:55:46   and then into whatever wearable products

00:55:48   they're thinking about for next year.

00:55:50   - I guess it's just hard for me to see it.

00:55:55   And it's like, maybe there's a market in AR software

00:55:58   for iOS and for the phone that I'm just not seeing.

00:56:01   Like I know that you can get like the Ikea app

00:56:03   and drop a Kerfloggen chair in the middle of your living room

00:56:08   and see what it looks like.

00:56:11   And I've played with that and there's some cool stuff,

00:56:14   but maybe people are using that more than I think.

00:56:17   Like I've-- - I don't think so.

00:56:18   Like I don't think they needed to ship this.

00:56:19   Like honestly, I don't think we would have noticed

00:56:21   if they hadn't updated the iPad Pro

00:56:22   because the Magic Keyboard, which was the biggest deal,

00:56:25   and the cursor support worked with the A12X version

00:56:29   as well. - Right, right.

00:56:30   To me, the more interesting use of LiDAR

00:56:34   as we know it now in these devices

00:56:37   is just as an extra aid for the regular camera system.

00:56:42   Which is what the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max do.

00:56:47   Is that they will-- - And the iPad does not do.

00:56:50   - Right, that they'll use LiDAR in low light situations

00:56:55   to help with autofocus.

00:56:57   And they only need it in low light

00:56:59   because when it's not low light,

00:57:01   the regular camera lens needs no help.

00:57:03   It autofocuses so fast that the LiDAR's too crude to help.

00:57:08   It's like, yeah, just pitch in when it's dark

00:57:11   and that's good enough.

00:57:13   But the iPad doesn't do that.

00:57:16   And I did ask, I remember, not that I'm,

00:57:20   it was all that, (laughs)

00:57:23   not that it wasn't an obvious question,

00:57:25   but I remember in an off the,

00:57:27   talking with people at Apple off the record

00:57:29   being briefed on the iPad, I asked about,

00:57:32   well, does this LiDAR sensor in the iPad Pro

00:57:35   help with autofocus with the regular camera?

00:57:38   And the answer was, well, that's an interesting idea,

00:57:41   but no. (laughs)

00:57:43   - And I assumed that meant it was coming this fall,

00:57:45   but it didn't come this fall either.

00:57:46   - Right.

00:57:48   That's an interesting idea is always,

00:57:51   that's like the best you ever get from them. (laughs)

00:57:54   - Yeah, yes. - It usually means,

00:57:56   it usually means, mm, I'd like to say something, but I can't.

00:58:01   And I guess it's not coming to these iPad Pros.

00:58:05   - Which I don't get because if they've built it now

00:58:06   for the iPhone and they're still like,

00:58:08   iPad OS and iOS are still synonymous systems.

00:58:13   I was surprised they didn't update the camera app

00:58:14   in iPad OS 14 to just do all this.

00:58:17   - Or at least like in 14.1 or 14.2

00:58:21   because there's always,

00:58:22   we're starting to see a pattern now

00:58:25   where the 14 or whatever the new integer is,

00:58:29   .0 is very specifically cut off in August for the phones,

00:58:34   for the new phones.

00:58:38   And it's the .1 update that is really the .0,

00:58:43   or what we used to think of as a .0.

00:58:47   It's like the .0s are somewhere between beta and real.

00:58:52   And in fact, going back to our Chrome talk a couple

00:58:55   of minutes ago, Apple doesn't even push the 14.0

00:59:00   or 13.0s to people as like an automatic update.

00:59:04   Like there's this weird internal criterion

00:59:08   that they don't want to talk about

00:59:10   as to when they decide to push the,

00:59:14   okay, yeah, here's your red badge for upgrade,

00:59:18   get the new version of the OS.

00:59:20   And the .0s usually aren't it.

00:59:23   - I just assume it's the emoji update.

00:59:25   That's the thing everyone cares about.

00:59:27   - You know that that's true.

00:59:28   When they really want you to update,

00:59:31   when they're like, yeah, this is rock solid.

00:59:33   This is actually pushing this update out

00:59:36   is going to cut down on our tech support

00:59:39   and Genius Bar appointments, not increase them.

00:59:42   That's when they're like,

00:59:43   and here's a bunch of new emoji.

00:59:45   - Here's a new emoji, yeah.

00:59:47   - So I know it wasn't much else from that though.

00:59:50   I don't really have much to say.

00:59:51   I have nothing to say about the MacBook Air,

00:59:53   that the Intel one, other than that,

00:59:55   the keyboard was better.

00:59:57   I can say one-

01:00:00   - It was trash, but the keyboard was better.

01:00:02   - One year later, the return of scissor key switches

01:00:06   in the keyboards has to be considered a triumph.

01:00:09   We now no longer talk about bad MacBook keyboards,

01:00:13   except as a very faint memory of the-

01:00:17   - It's a faint and painful memory.

01:00:18   - Right.

01:00:20   April 15th, the iPhone SE 2 came out, second generation.

01:00:25   I can only presume that if,

01:00:27   that the plan was to announce that all at one March event,

01:00:31   that it would have been the iPhone SE,

01:00:34   the tweaked iPad Pro's and the MacBook.

01:00:39   And it just wasn't because of COVID.

01:00:43   That's what I think.

01:00:44   - And the odd thing to me is that they had

01:00:46   really well-produced videos for the iPad Pro.

01:00:48   They had Craig Federighi showing off the keyboard

01:00:51   and the cursor, and they had a video with developers

01:00:54   showing off different parts of AR,

01:00:55   and there was nothing for the iPhone SE.

01:00:57   Like, as far as I can tell, no Apple presentation at all.

01:01:00   - Well, I guess we should talk about that.

01:01:02   I guess that the bigger part of the March announcement

01:01:04   wasn't really the iPad Pros, but the Magic Keyboard.

01:01:07   And the Magic Keyboard, what makes it magic,

01:01:12   it is a nice device.

01:01:14   I really like it.

01:01:15   It's one of my- - Me too.

01:01:16   - It would be one of my top picks of the year

01:01:18   as an Apple product, but it's not just the keyboard itself,

01:01:23   it's the iPad OS update that enabled

01:01:27   a real mouse cursor system, system-wide,

01:01:32   which was like 13.3 or something like that.

01:01:36   - Yeah, they didn't even wait for 14.0.

01:01:39   - Right, they just released it, and it just worked.

01:01:43   Apps had to be updated to really support it,

01:01:47   but even with doing nothing, it was still pretty usable.

01:01:50   Like, it just clicks, equals a touch,

01:01:53   and all of a sudden, you and I,

01:01:56   we could just interrupt people right here,

01:02:00   tell people, you can listen to me and Rene argue

01:02:05   about touch screen Macs, and if iPads can add mouse support

01:02:10   without messing things up,

01:02:12   why can't Macs add touch screens the same way?

01:02:16   You need a whole 38 minutes of us talking about it,

01:02:19   and you can go see it on Rene's YouTube channel,

01:02:22   'cause there it is.

01:02:23   - That's terrific, but the thing that I thought

01:02:27   was super fun about this was,

01:02:29   because it leaked, people found it in the firmware,

01:02:31   and everyone just assumed it was such a big change,

01:02:33   it would have to be iOS 14.

01:02:36   - Yeah, definitely, yeah.

01:02:37   The rumors just all jumped to the conclusion

01:02:41   that it was iOS 14, and they were just like,

01:02:43   "Nope, right here in the middle of March."

01:02:47   With a new keyboard, they just shipped it.

01:02:49   - Right, and it's great, it really is.

01:02:51   I use my iPad so much more than I ever did before.

01:02:55   It is my kitchen laptop.

01:02:58   I go days at a time without taking my iPad

01:03:01   off the Magic Keyboard.

01:03:03   It was neat because I had the trackpad

01:03:06   and external keyboard support,

01:03:08   I mean, the external keyboard worked before,

01:03:10   but without a trackpad, it was always,

01:03:12   it's just amazing how much more useful it is.

01:03:15   Like, when your hands are on the keyboard

01:03:17   to have a trackpad right there

01:03:19   and not have to reach and touch the screen.

01:03:21   But the Magic Keyboard is so good at it.

01:03:26   And in a way where they didn't cripple

01:03:29   the support for just using an external trackpad

01:03:35   or Bluetooth keyboard to get you,

01:03:38   like, the only good way to use it

01:03:41   is to buy this $170 Magic Keyboard or whatever.

01:03:44   How much is a Magic Keyboard?

01:03:46   I think it's--

01:03:47   - I just wanna call it $300, I don't remember exactly,

01:03:49   but it's incredibly expensive.

01:03:50   - It's very expensive.

01:03:52   But they've made just regular,

01:03:56   if you just use a Bluetooth mouse or a Magic trackpad

01:04:01   from a Mac that you have laying around

01:04:03   and whatever third-party keyboard you want,

01:04:06   they've made it as good as it could be

01:04:08   with Bluetooth and iPad, you know,

01:04:11   but the thing that I've gone back and forth

01:04:14   over the months of 2020 trying, you know,

01:04:18   using mechanical keyboards and stuff with my iPad

01:04:22   and going back to the Magic Keyboard,

01:04:23   the thing that is so, that truly is the magic part of it

01:04:26   is that you never have to pair and unpair it, right?

01:04:29   Like, when I'm using a Magic trackpad,

01:04:33   just the standalone trackpad and a keyboard,

01:04:36   I might like the keyboard better

01:04:37   'cause it's a clicky mechanical keyboard,

01:04:39   but I pick my iPad up and I go off

01:04:44   and it's still connected, right?

01:04:45   And here's where it's like you want, in theory,

01:04:48   you want Bluetooth to have as good a range as possible,

01:04:52   but it's like the better Bluetooth's range is,

01:04:54   the more likely it is that I've wandered several rooms

01:04:57   apart from my kitchen and I tap on something

01:05:00   to type a URL or something and I can't,

01:05:04   I don't have an on-screen keyboard, why is it,

01:05:06   oh, it still thinks it's connected to the Bluetooth keyboard.

01:05:09   - Yeah.

01:05:10   - And that's how my mind thinks.

01:05:12   It's like you still think you're connected

01:05:14   and it's like, no, I am connected,

01:05:16   that's why there's no on-screen keyboard

01:05:18   and I gotta go up to Control Center

01:05:20   and turn on airplane mode, give it a second,

01:05:23   turn off airplane mode and then it all works.

01:05:27   It always takes me out of it,

01:05:28   whereas when I'm using the actual Magic Keyboard accessory,

01:05:32   as soon as I take the iPad off the keyboard,

01:05:35   the iPad instantly knows, okay,

01:05:37   now I'll give you the on-screen keyboard

01:05:40   and it never interrupts your flow.

01:05:42   It is-- - It's like a dock,

01:05:43   it's like two states and I think Federighi

01:05:45   shows that off right in that initial video

01:05:47   where you come, you slap it down, it's docked,

01:05:49   it's your keyboard, you pick it up, you walk away,

01:05:52   it's undocked, it's no longer your keyboard.

01:05:54   - It is a terrific experience, it really is,

01:05:57   it is so very strange, it is in fact $300.

01:06:02   - Yes.

01:06:04   - I think that the 13-inch one is an extra 30 bucks, right?

01:06:09   It's like $329?

01:06:10   It doesn't seem right, does that seem right to you

01:06:15   that you have to pay more for the bigger one?

01:06:18   - I guess big means more, I don't know.

01:06:20   - But it's like you get-- - In your inventory psyche.

01:06:21   - You get the same number of keys, you know?

01:06:25   - Yeah, they're just cramped closer together on the 11.

01:06:28   - It does seem weird, oh, it's $350,

01:06:30   so it's $299 for the 11-inch and $350 for the 12.9-inch.

01:06:35   That doesn't seem right to me, but either way,

01:06:38   it is a premium price.

01:06:39   I have to say though, if you really want to use your iPad

01:06:43   as a laptop, it's worth it, it is.

01:06:46   - Yes.

01:06:47   - And as the year has gone on,

01:06:49   I see that as money well spent,

01:06:51   and this is for me a person who still,

01:06:54   even now that I'm more in love with using the iPad

01:06:56   than ever before, easily still the first Apple platform

01:07:00   I would ditch from my life if somebody came to me

01:07:03   in some kind of bizarre, sicko, hostage situation

01:07:08   and said, "You have to get rid of one of your Apple devices

01:07:10   "and never use it again."

01:07:11   The iPad would still be the first one I would get rid of.

01:07:14   - In a bizarre Christopher Nolan movie,

01:07:15   if you were forced to choose, the iPad would go first.

01:07:18   - Right.

01:07:19   Tenet 2.

01:07:23   - Yeah.

01:07:24   - It's really, what a successful product.

01:07:28   And as the months have gone on,

01:07:30   I'm only more keenly aware of how very nice it is.

01:07:34   I don't have much more to say about it though.

01:07:38   - No, I think it was a terrific,

01:07:39   really good start to the year.

01:07:40   - Yeah.

01:07:41   Next up would be,

01:07:43   I don't think there was anything else, still WWDC.

01:07:47   - Yeah.

01:07:48   - And so there's the run-up where it was like,

01:07:51   I forget when they announced it,

01:07:52   but they pulled the trigger pretty early and just said,

01:07:54   "You know what, we're not gonna have,

01:07:56   "we're gonna, you know."

01:07:57   About as early as they usually ever announced WWDC

01:08:00   and they just said,

01:08:01   "You know, we're gonna do it all virtual this year."

01:08:04   - And people weren't sure

01:08:06   because Google just flat out canceled IO.

01:08:08   - Right, and Facebook was going,

01:08:12   Facebook like wavered on their developer conference.

01:08:14   - On F8, yeah.

01:08:15   - Yeah, and then they were like, "Ah, forget it.

01:08:17   "I don't know, we're not gonna have it."

01:08:19   - Microsoft did a virtual one,

01:08:21   but it was very different than what WWDC ended up being.

01:08:23   - Yeah.

01:08:24   WWDC, in hindsight,

01:08:27   it's really kind of remarkable

01:08:31   that it was only three weeks later

01:08:37   than it probably would have been

01:08:38   if it had been held for real.

01:08:40   And how high the production values were

01:08:44   and how popular it was, how well received.

01:08:47   I mean, it was so well received

01:08:50   that I would say there's more people

01:08:54   that I observed who said,

01:08:57   "I hope that this is what they do every year

01:08:59   "than the other way around."

01:09:02   - And developers were angry at Apple going into WWDC

01:09:05   because of all the things with Hey and with,

01:09:07   I forget the account that got canceled.

01:09:09   So there was a lot of developer relations

01:09:13   sort of a fix-up to be doing,

01:09:15   but it seemed like when WWDC hit,

01:09:17   a lot of that got put aside.

01:09:19   - Yeah, it was a remarkably successful WWDC,

01:09:22   even with the complete inversion

01:09:26   of it being a real-world, traditional,

01:09:30   multi-thousand attendee conference

01:09:32   in a big convention center,

01:09:34   to being completely virtual.

01:09:37   It was very well received.

01:09:39   And content-wise, all sorts of stuff

01:09:44   that I think was also very, very well received.

01:09:46   It was a very good year for Apple's platforms.

01:09:49   - And they kept the fun part.

01:09:51   When the different engineers and program managers

01:09:54   showed up to do their sessions,

01:09:55   they all had different sort of Easter eggs

01:09:57   on the desks and in the background,

01:09:59   and different sort of fun things in it.

01:10:01   And perennial friend of the show,

01:10:03   Serenity Caldwell, did these daily wrap-ups

01:10:05   from the evangelism team on what happened every day.

01:10:08   - They were so good and so tight.

01:10:11   It was like, today's news in 60 seconds or 90 seconds,

01:10:15   or some unbelievably short period of time.

01:10:19   I was like, I know her.

01:10:20   She used to be at my show.

01:10:22   Yes, this is really good.

01:10:24   And it was like a virtual Serenity Memoji.

01:10:27   - Memoji, yeah.

01:10:28   - Yeah, and it was like, that looks like her.

01:10:30   - Yep, and they all had that.

01:10:31   All the engineers, all the program managers

01:10:33   had their little Memoji with the computer

01:10:34   and the stickers and everything.

01:10:36   - I think that, I think that,

01:10:40   I don't know, I honestly don't,

01:10:44   I could see this going either way.

01:10:45   Like, is this, COVID aside,

01:10:48   I mean, 2021, I think that is probably

01:10:51   going to be virtual again,

01:10:52   because I don't see, they might as well plan for it.

01:10:56   And it's not that it seems like madness

01:11:00   to plan on having a real world,

01:11:02   5,000 person convention in June,

01:11:04   but it just seems so ill,

01:11:05   it just seems like unlikely to be advisable, right?

01:11:08   Like, late May rolls around and COVID really is so,

01:11:13   you know, if it's really just like,

01:11:17   what's the most optimistic, realistic scenario

01:11:19   for late May around the world?

01:11:21   Imagine that in your mind,

01:11:23   there's not much, hotspots are down,

01:11:24   vaccinations have largely helped mitigate this.

01:11:29   I still don't think you want to put 5,000 people

01:11:33   from around the world in a convention center together, right?

01:11:37   And it's like, vaccines aren't a guarantee, right?

01:11:40   It's like, you know, that's not the way they work.

01:11:43   - And that's if enough people take them,

01:11:44   which, you know, we still don't know

01:11:46   what the supply and the take.

01:11:47   I think optimistically, we've heard maybe by the summer,

01:11:49   things will be better.

01:11:50   So maybe the September events are being thought of

01:11:53   either way, but I can't imagine

01:11:54   they're thinking about that for June.

01:11:56   - Yeah, so I would have to guess that WWDC 2021

01:12:00   is almost certainly going to be a virtual event

01:12:03   like last year's, and will, you know,

01:12:07   but let's flash forward another year, like, let's, you know,

01:12:11   and I think it's very realistic to think that by June 2022,

01:12:14   COVID is past tense, and we were like, ooh, remember that.

01:12:18   Is WWDC permanently a virtual event?

01:12:22   I don't know how to predict on that

01:12:24   because I could see it both ways.

01:12:26   I think there's aspects of the in-person experience

01:12:29   that are irreplaceable.

01:12:31   From my personal perspective in the media

01:12:34   and getting to talk to people in person,

01:12:38   I mean, I'll still talk to Apple people in person.

01:12:40   They'll still have press events.

01:12:42   The keynote may well involve, be more like a traditional,

01:12:45   in a virtual post-COVID world,

01:12:48   might be exactly like the iPhone events

01:12:50   where the only people who attend in person are the media,

01:12:54   right, and it's at the Steve Jobs Theater

01:12:57   and, you know, with 300 or 400 people

01:13:00   instead of 5,000 people.

01:13:02   So that aspect of it, I'm sure, will still be, you know,

01:13:08   replicated post-COVID.

01:13:10   It's the fact that there's so many people

01:13:12   in the developer community who I know

01:13:15   and both at a personal level but at a professional level

01:13:20   where I hear things and I learn things, you know.

01:13:24   There's certain aspects of real-world interaction

01:13:27   and trust that don't happen without being real,

01:13:30   and I would miss that.

01:13:32   - I still remember when iOS 7 was announced,

01:13:34   me, you, Guy English, Lorne Briktor,

01:13:36   and a couple, you know, GPU-savvy friends

01:13:39   standing in a bar trying to figure out

01:13:40   how they were injecting all the transparency

01:13:42   and Gaussian blur into the system,

01:13:44   and you just can't do that virtually.

01:13:46   - I do remember that, yeah.

01:13:48   My guesses were pretty bad, but yeah,

01:13:51   I see in Lorne and Guy try to figure that out.

01:13:53   It was pretty good, yeah, and watching Lorne, like,

01:13:55   move his thumb up and down just to--

01:13:57   - Yes. - Yeah, I don't know.

01:13:59   What do you think?

01:13:59   What's your gut feeling on the long, you know,

01:14:01   what Apple's thinking about this?

01:14:04   - I think, well, and I say think, but I also mean hope

01:14:07   because, you know, someone newly indie,

01:14:09   the idea of having, you know, I still have no idea

01:14:11   how to save or spend on any of this travel stuff myself

01:14:13   'cause I don't have a giant media company

01:14:14   paying for everything anymore,

01:14:17   but I think a hybrid model,

01:14:18   just given how good the production value was,

01:14:21   like, I went back and looked at some previous events,

01:14:23   and the stage experience is great,

01:14:25   but it doesn't look as visually stunning

01:14:27   as what they did this year,

01:14:29   and I'm sure we'll get into how they progressed

01:14:30   and got better and better at the events over time,

01:14:33   but they really started upping the ante

01:14:35   on how you could do these sorts of things

01:14:37   as stream-only events,

01:14:39   and I think for the consumer stuff,

01:14:41   it still makes a lot of sense to present that,

01:14:43   and for developers, because 5,000 isn't, you know,

01:14:45   out of the millions of Apple developers,

01:14:47   the amount they can reach through a virtual event

01:14:49   is just significantly higher,

01:14:52   that I wouldn't be surprised if they have a hybrid model

01:14:54   where people do come gather for things

01:14:57   that they really need to, like,

01:14:58   for brand new products that require hands-on

01:15:01   or they want to give you, like, a tour

01:15:03   of the audio facility or eventually,

01:15:04   maybe an AR facility or something.

01:15:06   I think that'll make sense to do in person,

01:15:08   but I think as much as possible,

01:15:10   if they can project this sort of stuff to the world,

01:15:13   it just invites everyone in

01:15:15   to, like, a really first-class experience.

01:15:17   - I feel like with the keynote,

01:15:20   or let's say keynotes, plural,

01:15:23   because, you know, the iPhone event is always a keynote

01:15:26   and the Apple Watch event this year,

01:15:28   which was separate from the iPhone, et cetera,

01:15:30   the keynotes, I think, are different.

01:15:33   I mean, they clearly are different,

01:15:35   but I don't know that I, even as somebody

01:15:38   whose job it is to be tuned into them,

01:15:40   I wouldn't say that they're better or worse.

01:15:43   They're just very different.

01:15:45   - They're like plays versus movies or TV shows.

01:15:47   - Right, and yeah, and I think Apple,

01:15:52   I think Apple really likes the production value playfulness

01:15:56   of these virtual ones and the control it gives them,

01:16:00   and I'm sure it's a little bit of a breather for them

01:16:02   that they're not live, and so nothing can, you know--

01:16:05   - Their face ID can't go wrong.

01:16:07   - Right, and they can, you know, like,

01:16:09   they go to, you know, if it's a Monday morning keynote,

01:16:12   they go to bed Sunday night, and they know it's already,

01:16:15   you know, somebody's just gonna hit the play button,

01:16:17   and it streams, and they've got

01:16:20   the streaming stuff down cold, right?

01:16:22   I mean, they sleep more soundly the night before a keynote

01:16:26   than they did when it's live,

01:16:29   but I do think Apple genuinely, truly appreciates

01:16:34   the intangible benefit of an enthusiastic live audience,

01:16:40   and that there's, not just for the people in the room,

01:16:46   which again is limited to 5,000 out of, you know,

01:16:49   an intended audience of, you know, I don't know,

01:16:51   millions, really, but that it gives an energy

01:16:54   to the presentation, even to the people

01:16:56   who are watching from home, you know?

01:16:58   - Craig's jokes are just night and day

01:17:00   when that audience is there to react to them.

01:17:02   (laughing)

01:17:03   - Right, they had to switch to like a romance shot,

01:17:07   you know, of him opening up the MacBook to get it back.

01:17:10   - Or just the crack marketing team stuff.

01:17:12   - Right, it just doesn't, it's different,

01:17:15   but I feel like the actual sessions for WWDC,

01:17:18   which is actually the meat of the conference

01:17:21   as a developer conference, right,

01:17:23   were clearly night and day way better this year

01:17:28   without an audience, without being on stage,

01:17:32   because it's just more, they were meant

01:17:36   to be watched remotely on a, you know,

01:17:39   you're watching in the developer app on your Mac

01:17:42   or on your iPad or on your Apple TV or whatever,

01:17:44   but that's how they were shot,

01:17:47   as opposed to when they're delivered live

01:17:50   and it's for the people in the audience in the room

01:17:54   and the slides.

01:17:56   It's not that they were bad that way,

01:17:58   but they're just clearly better this way

01:18:00   and as the fact that they're all delivered

01:18:05   by the actual engineers who work on these technologies,

01:18:10   right, if it's like, you know, what's new in core text,

01:18:14   you know, and you're talking about

01:18:15   all these great new features for right to left languages

01:18:19   and stuff like that, the person who is delivering the session

01:18:24   is the person who's just spent a year

01:18:26   or maybe two years or three years working on it

01:18:29   and they know it and they're excited about it

01:18:31   and now they're getting to deliver it

01:18:33   and they always, it always amazes me

01:18:36   how well they do every year, you know,

01:18:38   because it's not their job.

01:18:39   Their job, 51 weeks of the year,

01:18:41   is being the super nerd on whatever it is

01:18:45   they're the super nerd about in Apple's platforms

01:18:49   and in one week of the year, they're presenting

01:18:52   and I know it takes more than a week.

01:18:53   I actually, that takes away from how long I know

01:18:55   they put into the sessions, you know,

01:18:57   but for a few weeks a year,

01:18:58   they're doing this to do one session.

01:19:00   It's more comfortable, I think, clearly,

01:19:05   however awkward it is for an engineer

01:19:07   to suddenly be in a pristine Apple staged room

01:19:12   where they held all these sessions with a camera crew.

01:19:15   - It's probably easier than code review.

01:19:18   - Well, maybe, but it takes away

01:19:22   the stage fright aspect of it though, right?

01:19:24   Like where you're not in front of an audience

01:19:27   of hundreds of people in a blackened,

01:19:32   stage-lit, theater-lit conference room, right?

01:19:37   - Yeah.

01:19:38   - Everybody, I mean, I do my live show once a year.

01:19:41   I mean, I speak publicly a little bit more frequently

01:19:46   than most people and it makes me nervous as hell

01:19:50   every single time.

01:19:52   I mean, it just takes away one thing

01:19:56   that they're not suited at and it's just a better format.

01:19:59   So I mean, the sessions, I honestly didn't see one comment

01:20:04   from anybody that wasn't along the lines of,

01:20:07   oh my God, the sessions are so much better this year.

01:20:09   They're just more comfortable, it's just easier to edit

01:20:14   and cut between screenshots and video of the screen,

01:20:18   of the technology being shown off and the speaker.

01:20:23   And it was delightful and it felt like it was,

01:20:26   you got so much more of a sense of the presenters.

01:20:31   - Did you get any feedback on this?

01:20:32   The only thing I didn't hear about

01:20:33   and didn't follow up on is the labs

01:20:35   because those, I know they tried to do the best they could

01:20:38   virtually, but that was such a hallway filled with people,

01:20:41   talking and interacting with the engineers,

01:20:44   showing them their apps back and forth.

01:20:46   And I'm guessing that all just transpired

01:20:48   over WebEx this year.

01:20:50   - Yeah, I didn't--

01:20:50   - But it must feel different than being live.

01:20:53   - I didn't really hear much about that, yay or nay.

01:20:56   It has-- - Yeah, me either.

01:20:57   - Yeah, I can't help but think that there's,

01:21:00   that part of what's missing from that lab experience is,

01:21:05   it can't be replicated over WebEx, right?

01:21:10   - Yeah.

01:21:10   - It, you just always, and again, it's not,

01:21:14   it sounds shady that they're trying to cover their ass

01:21:17   and that's not what I'm alleging,

01:21:19   that there are things that if you can grab the ear

01:21:23   of somebody who works on core audio for your audio app

01:21:28   and show them the bug right there,

01:21:30   you might get them to say something

01:21:32   that they wouldn't put in writing in a radar.

01:21:35   And again, it's not because what it was

01:21:38   is something that would get them in trouble

01:21:41   if they put it in writing.

01:21:42   It's just, it's like I said about just human interaction

01:21:46   and trust, you just get something and they might say,

01:21:48   ah, you know what, I know, how are you doing this?

01:21:52   Are you doing this with blah, blah, blah?

01:21:54   And it's like, yes, that's exactly what I'm doing.

01:21:56   It's like, ah.

01:21:57   - There's a lack of formality and intermediation

01:21:59   that just occurs in person.

01:22:01   I think, and they might say, ah,

01:22:02   I think there might be a bug there.

01:22:04   I'm sorry, do you have a radar?

01:22:06   Yes, here's my radars.

01:22:07   Okay, I'm gonna take a note of this.

01:22:09   I will look at them, but in the meantime,

01:22:11   if you do it this other way,

01:22:13   I think you might have a workaround.

01:22:14   And you just hear stories that come out

01:22:16   of lab interactions like that

01:22:18   that I bet are less effective.

01:22:21   Is it a reason to hold 5,000 attendee WWDC in San Jose?

01:22:26   I don't know.

01:22:27   - Yeah, no, I don't know either.

01:22:30   But you know, it's like someone going up and saying,

01:22:31   yeah, I've made your framework cry and here's how.

01:22:34   - Yeah.

01:22:35   (laughing)

01:22:36   All right, let me take a break,

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01:24:44   - So we buried the lead on this entire WWDC thing, Jon.

01:24:49   - Which was?

01:24:50   - Apple Silicon.

01:24:51   (Jon laughs)

01:24:53   - I don't know, I don't know, when do we talk about it?

01:24:55   Do we talk about it at WWDC or do we talk about it

01:24:58   at the end of the year as the last thing of the year?

01:25:00   I mean, it's--

01:25:01   - Well, they at least announced it,

01:25:02   and the best thing about that is we didn't have to put up

01:25:04   with rumors about Apple Silicon anymore.

01:25:06   - Right.

01:25:07   It was, it turned out much like I thought,

01:25:12   which was that performance was going to be really stunning.

01:25:19   Like, and I was like, am I mistreating?

01:25:22   I actually, I don't do this a lot,

01:25:23   but I went back and watched the WWDC keynote again,

01:25:27   leading up to the actual M1 announcement

01:25:29   to watch Johnny Cerucci's part again,

01:25:32   'cause I was like, when I watched that,

01:25:34   it seemed to me like he was saying,

01:25:36   I would love to tell you more, but we're building,

01:25:39   and I think I was right.

01:25:42   Like, he said was, look, we started with iPhone chips,

01:25:45   and I guess the iPad, you know, iPhone and iPad.

01:25:47   And then he said, we took what we knew about those

01:25:51   and we shrunk it to make Apple Watch.

01:25:55   - Yeah.

01:25:56   - And now we're doing the opposite.

01:25:57   We're going bigger to make this for Mac,

01:26:00   whereas opposed to we're just gonna put A13

01:26:04   and A14 chips in Macs.

01:26:06   - He said a family of SOCs.

01:26:07   - Right, and like the closest he got to saying

01:26:12   what they wanted, what they were going to do

01:26:14   was to say that we make these chips to suit the devices.

01:26:19   And in the same way that the A series chips

01:26:22   would be too big, too hot, too battery,

01:26:25   and overkill for use in a watch,

01:26:28   they're not good enough as is for use in the Mac.

01:26:33   I mean, and that's not to say they're bad,

01:26:34   they're just not meant for it, right?

01:26:36   They don't have, they're not meant

01:26:37   for high-capacity storage.

01:26:39   - Yeah, no, for sure.

01:26:42   I think the key thing, though,

01:26:44   well, first it was great to see Cerucci.

01:26:45   I think it's the first time we've seen him

01:26:47   in an Apple presentation.

01:26:48   But the thing that I thought was so interesting

01:26:51   was that it showed that Apple had been building

01:26:53   this scalable architecture,

01:26:55   because a lot of companies make one-off chips.

01:26:58   Like Qualcomm makes a chip for the phones,

01:27:00   and then they've been rehashing old phone chips for watches,

01:27:03   and that never took off.

01:27:04   And Apple's been very good about not becoming

01:27:07   like an Intel, like a merchant silicon provider

01:27:09   who has to see all these different companies

01:27:11   and make unique chips for all these different needs,

01:27:14   because that's really inefficient,

01:27:16   and I didn't want Apple to become

01:27:17   an internal silicon merchant

01:27:19   that had a bunch of different clients,

01:27:21   competing clients within Apple.

01:27:22   And instead, we get like an A13

01:27:25   that goes into the iPhone 11,

01:27:27   and then that core architecture goes into the S6

01:27:30   for the Apple Watch, and then the A14 goes into the iPhone,

01:27:33   and the equivalent of an A14X

01:27:35   with a bunch of extra Mac IP goes into the Mac.

01:27:38   And that whole idea of building an architecture

01:27:40   over several years that could scale that dramatically,

01:27:43   I think is a really, really smart investment

01:27:45   on Apple's part.

01:27:46   - Incredibly so.

01:27:48   I mean, it's just, and now we see it.

01:27:49   I mean, we still can't, even here we are a month later,

01:27:52   and we still can't stop raving about it.

01:27:55   - But they promised a two-year transition,

01:27:57   which I also thought was interesting.

01:27:58   It was so similar to what Steve Jobs promised

01:28:00   with the PowerPC to Intel.

01:28:01   - Right, and how much of that is under promising

01:28:03   and over delivering and giving themselves leeway,

01:28:06   and how much is it really going to be two years?

01:28:09   Like, do they really know?

01:28:10   I don't know.

01:28:11   - Well, they did give us an iMac since then

01:28:13   that was on Intel, so.

01:28:14   - Right, well, you're skipping ahead to August.

01:28:17   - Oh, sorry.

01:28:18   - The least interesting update of the year.

01:28:20   - Yeah.

01:28:21   - What else is there to say about the M1?

01:28:25   Or at least from WWDC's perspective.

01:28:27   I guess the thing that I would say is,

01:28:29   and I don't think they did this to purposefully sandbag it.

01:28:33   I just think, I think that the one thing

01:28:38   that colored the actual hands-on,

01:28:42   oh my god, you've got to see one of these M1 Macs

01:28:45   astounded jaw-dropping reviews,

01:28:49   was that the developer kits didn't really offer that hint.

01:28:54   Right, the developer kits running on the,

01:28:58   what were they, A12Zs?

01:28:59   - A12Z, yeah.

01:29:00   - Just like the iPad Pros.

01:29:03   Or fine computers, the developer kits are Mac Mini,

01:29:06   look, they don't call them Mac Minis, I don't believe,

01:29:09   but they're Mac Mini look-alike developer kits

01:29:12   with an A12Z inside.

01:29:14   - And extra RAM.

01:29:15   - And extra RAM, and they're fine, and I don't have one.

01:29:19   Did you get one?

01:29:19   You didn't get one, did you?

01:29:20   - No.

01:29:21   - I didn't get one either, 'cause it just, I asked.

01:29:23   I think I talked to Panzorino about this,

01:29:25   but like, you know, most people in the press

01:29:30   wouldn't even think about it.

01:29:31   It's not a product, you know,

01:29:32   but I am a developer too, sort of.

01:29:34   I don't really have an app that I would use this for.

01:29:36   It would be more, and I, you know,

01:29:39   when I asked people at Apple, should I order one,

01:29:43   their answer was very accurate.

01:29:45   They're like, nah, don't bother,

01:29:47   'cause it's not indicative of what you're going.

01:29:49   It's not gonna give you a heads up on anything.

01:29:51   You're not gonna have a leg up on what this is gonna be like.

01:29:55   I was like, okay, 'cause it's less for me to deal with.

01:29:59   And the last thing, honestly, the way it turned out,

01:30:01   the last thing I would've needed in the second half of 2020

01:30:04   is more Apple hardware to set up, install, and run,

01:30:09   and test, and observe.

01:30:10   But the fact is that those dev kits don't really,

01:30:15   they're not astounding.

01:30:16   I mean, they're sort of like peers to the Intel iMacs

01:30:20   that are Mac minis that we know,

01:30:21   and if anything, there's some bugs and some shortcomings

01:30:24   and some things that aren't that great.

01:30:26   They're probably worse overall.

01:30:27   - One thing that was interesting is that they ran

01:30:30   the Microsoft stuff under emulation

01:30:32   better than Microsoft was running it

01:30:33   on their own Qualcomm hardware.

01:30:38   You mean like with the Surface hardware?

01:30:40   - The dev kit, yeah.

01:30:41   Well, Windows X, I think, I forget what they're calling it,

01:30:43   Windows 10 for ARM on Windows X hardware

01:30:46   was running better on emulation.

01:30:48   (laughing)

01:30:50   On the dev kit.

01:30:51   - That's very, it's just,

01:30:54   even which dev kits I'm saying aren't even that good

01:30:58   compared to the M1, which is really,

01:31:01   it shows you how big a leg up.

01:31:02   But it really did, and it is different

01:31:05   from the Intel transition,

01:31:07   where the Intel transition, they gave out these dev kits

01:31:09   that were running in these hollowed out shells of Mac Pros

01:31:13   with like just a generic Intel PC inside,

01:31:18   and they flew.

01:31:20   They were like, oh, wow, Mac OS X already,

01:31:24   like the OS itself, which had been compiling for x86

01:31:27   all along in a secret lab, flew right from the start.

01:31:32   And just going to these generic Intel developer level

01:31:37   hardware machines, it was like,

01:31:39   all the developers I know were like,

01:31:41   we have work to do, there's lots of assumptions,

01:31:42   and the apps need to be improved, blah, blah, blah.

01:31:44   But basically, they were very, very fast.

01:31:47   This Intel transition is going to be high performance.

01:31:50   Whereas that wasn't indicative

01:31:52   from the developer kits this year.

01:31:54   And then when the M1s did ship,

01:31:56   and the performance was holy shit,

01:31:59   everybody was like, where did this come from?

01:32:03   And color that with, and again,

01:32:05   I'm skipping ahead to the M1 part of this show,

01:32:07   but color that with the, everybody wanted to sort of say,

01:32:12   okay, we know x86 performance on PCs,

01:32:16   because that's what everybody's been using,

01:32:18   even on a Mac now for 15 years.

01:32:21   And we know what ARM performance for PC class notebooks is,

01:32:25   because Windows has been shipping on ARM for a while,

01:32:30   and it's kind of cruddy, how good could this be?

01:32:33   And it's like, no, no, you're thinking about it wrong.

01:32:37   But anyway, we can hold that for later.

01:32:38   The other thing to talk about,

01:32:40   if we're gonna look back at the summer,

01:32:41   is what you alluded to.

01:32:42   It started a little bit with the hay fiasco

01:32:45   the week before WWDC,

01:32:49   then sort of rolls over to what was the news in July.

01:32:53   It was the antitrust hearing in front of the House,

01:32:56   in Congress, where Tim Cook was there.

01:32:59   And to me, it's not that the hearing itself

01:33:04   was all that worth revisiting,

01:33:06   it's the, that's a moment where you could say,

01:33:10   look, the US, we know the EU was looking at Apple,

01:33:15   along with the other big five tech companies.

01:33:18   It's not a Trump thing, it's not a Biden thing.

01:33:26   There is sort of bipartisan,

01:33:27   it's one of the weird issues in the entire country,

01:33:31   where there's sort of bipartisan consensus

01:33:34   that it needs to be looked at.

01:33:37   There was a weird partisan slant

01:33:40   on which aspects of which companies

01:33:43   are deserving of scrutiny,

01:33:45   but there's general consensus on both parties

01:33:48   that, hey, we need to look at this.

01:33:50   And with Apple, it's the App Store.

01:33:53   - The thing that was instructive to me

01:33:54   is that we had them gavel it in fairly normally.

01:33:58   The Democrats went after the way

01:34:00   that the companies treated their partners

01:34:02   and their competitors.

01:34:04   The Republicans largely went after this idea

01:34:06   of conservative bias,

01:34:08   which seemed like a lot of stagecraft,

01:34:10   because at the end, they just gaveled it off saying,

01:34:12   you know, antitrust breakup.

01:34:14   So it sounded like they had an agenda

01:34:15   that was completely different than the talking points.

01:34:17   But the CEOs themselves, Mark Zuckerberg

01:34:20   was just all up in everybody's face the whole time.

01:34:22   Jeff Bezos did the mute button thing

01:34:24   and acted like he never understood how Amazon was run.

01:34:27   Tim Cook wore clothing like Amy from Brooklyn Nine-Nine,

01:34:30   where it was just zero contrast,

01:34:32   and they actually forgot he was there for about 45 minutes.

01:34:35   And Sundar Pichai just got nailed

01:34:37   left and right by everybody.

01:34:39   - Yeah, that would be my summary of it too.

01:34:41   Tim Cook is, I wrote recently,

01:34:50   I forget what it was even in reference to,

01:34:52   I went during Fireball, but oh no,

01:34:53   it was his terrific podcast interview with Alex,

01:34:57   Outdoor, Outdoors, I forget if it's singular or plural.

01:35:01   But where he seemed more himself

01:35:05   and a little bit less guarded.

01:35:07   He's very-- - He talked like he talks

01:35:09   in real life, which was really nice to hear.

01:35:10   - He's very, very cautious in his public speaking.

01:35:15   And it has served him very well.

01:35:20   He's been involved, how many things can you,

01:35:24   how many times have we ever thought,

01:35:26   oh, Tim Cook's really put his foot in his mouth this time.

01:35:30   Never, really?

01:35:31   - Well, even angry Tim Cook, when he got upset

01:35:34   and said, I don't give a damn about the ROI

01:35:36   when it comes to accessibility and the environment,

01:35:38   was like, fiery Tim Cook, and I was all there for that.

01:35:40   - The bloody, he called it bloody.

01:35:43   - Yeah, the bloody ROI. - The bloody ROI.

01:35:45   Which, you know, I--

01:35:46   - That's like the most revved up I've seen him.

01:35:48   - Yeah, I wasn't aware that that was,

01:35:50   that the mild curse words from England

01:35:55   are popular in Alabama, but--

01:35:57   - Yes. - It makes me realize

01:35:58   that he almost said, my feeling was that he almost said

01:36:01   a different word, grasped onto bloody

01:36:04   and quickly ran through the algorithm,

01:36:08   and it was like, even in your hot-blooded anger,

01:36:10   it's like, that's fine, and used it.

01:36:14   Yeah, you don't see that very often.

01:36:15   But his, you know, and it's funny, you know,

01:36:18   in the alternate world where Steve Jobs hadn't gotten sick,

01:36:21   and was he, would he still be the CEO?

01:36:23   I mean, there's, you know, we could do a whole show

01:36:25   on what would be going on, but in a world

01:36:28   where Tim Cook is the one, or Steve Jobs is the one

01:36:30   testifying at that hearing, I don't think he wants

01:36:34   to be there. - No.

01:36:36   He was so a little patient for them.

01:36:38   - I think in theory, in that world, or, you know,

01:36:41   whether you wanna say, what if Steve Jobs

01:36:43   was still alive now, or if you wanna say,

01:36:45   what if this hearing had happened 10 years ago,

01:36:47   whichever way you wanna spin it, I think that Apple

01:36:50   would have wanted Tim Cook to be the one testifying

01:36:52   either way, but they, you know, for the publicity angle,

01:36:57   I don't think that would have flown, you know,

01:36:59   like, I think Bezos in particular didn't really wanna do it,

01:37:03   but that they really wanted the CEOs, you know.

01:37:08   - Well, I think, though, if Tim Cook had become CEO,

01:37:10   and Steve Jobs had become the executive chairman,

01:37:12   and just stayed in that position for a long time,

01:37:14   it would have been similar to Google,

01:37:15   where Sundar Pichai showed up, and not Larry and Sergey.

01:37:18   - Right, and I think so, too, and you could say,

01:37:19   well, what do you want, he's the CEO, he is the, you know,

01:37:22   he's taken over, you know, he is in charge

01:37:25   of the company now, so I think that that's possible.

01:37:28   I just don't see Steve Jobs as being so on message, like,

01:37:33   you know, he couldn't bite his tongue,

01:37:37   and you saw with Bezos a bit, like, Bezos was the one

01:37:41   of the four who, and he never said anything

01:37:43   that was scandalous, but there was the one, like,

01:37:47   the one moment where he was like,

01:37:51   do I need to explain to you how business works, negotiation?

01:37:54   It was like somebody, you know, the question was something

01:37:57   along the lines of, well, it might have even been with Apple,

01:38:00   maybe, you know, with the whole issue where Apple,

01:38:03   with Amazon Prime, and getting it on Apple TV,

01:38:07   but it was something with, like, you know,

01:38:11   you guys were holding back on Amazon Prime streaming video,

01:38:14   and this other company, whether it was Apple,

01:38:16   or it doesn't even matter, but they had this other thing,

01:38:18   and then when they gave you the thing,

01:38:20   you gave them the access to the Prime,

01:38:23   and Bezos was just like, yeah, that's negotiation,

01:38:25   like, do I need to explain this to you,

01:38:27   that this is how you do business?

01:38:30   Like, you have something?

01:38:30   - Yeah, you and Ben covered that really well

01:38:32   on dithering when it was happening.

01:38:33   - You have something that I want,

01:38:34   and I have something that you want,

01:38:36   and then we just sort of, you know, nudge each other

01:38:38   until we're both equally dissatisfied

01:38:41   with the deal, and then we walk away.

01:38:43   And it, you know, and he wasn't, you know, again,

01:38:47   there was no scandal about it,

01:38:48   it wasn't like Bezos humiliates, you know,

01:38:50   Congress person in front of the hearing,

01:38:53   but you could see his mind, he was thinking about it.

01:38:56   - Yeah. - He was like,

01:38:57   I can't believe I'm answering this question.

01:39:00   - He's like, I have more disposable income

01:39:01   than your country is worth right now,

01:39:02   I could buy you, but I don't have the time.

01:39:04   - But it's, you know, it, my point,

01:39:09   bringing it up for the year in review,

01:39:10   is that we're not done with this yet, right?

01:39:12   Like, I don't know where this goes, I do think that--

01:39:17   - Well, we've seen Facebook,

01:39:18   and Facebook has already been charged,

01:39:20   and Google, I think, three or four times now.

01:39:23   - At least. - In the last couple weeks.

01:39:24   - Who knows what's happened

01:39:25   while we've been recording, René?

01:39:28   There might be up to five antitrust suits.

01:39:30   - Yeah, and they even got charged with the 30% and not Apple,

01:39:34   it's like it's a whole weird world.

01:39:35   - Yeah, it's, you know, but Apple's got less of a deal

01:39:40   - They've got less to lose,

01:39:41   I think that they've got less that's controversial.

01:39:44   I don't think, I think it's a lot harder

01:39:48   to accuse them of having a monopoly to abuse,

01:39:51   like you really have to kinda bend over backward,

01:39:54   and again, there's like the lowercase m monopoly

01:39:58   of you just have a very strong business

01:40:01   with a dominant position in the industry and the marketplace,

01:40:05   in which case you say, yes, Apple has a dominant position

01:40:08   in the mobile smartphone marketplace.

01:40:10   - Especially in the US, not so much in Europe,

01:40:12   especially in the US.

01:40:13   - And even globally, they certainly have a monopoly

01:40:16   of profit on selling cell phones.

01:40:19   - Yes.

01:40:20   - A greater than 50% share of profit,

01:40:22   but that turns out not to be like a legally defined thing,

01:40:26   like having a, you know, if you don't sell over 50%

01:40:31   of the actual units, that's not a monopoly.

01:40:34   And it's all--

01:40:36   - And I mean, the fashion industry should be disassembled

01:40:37   if profit is the consideration.

01:40:39   - Right, it's, but again--

01:40:42   - Or the makeup industry.

01:40:43   - A lot of this isn't about the letter of the law,

01:40:45   but the politics of it, you know,

01:40:47   and the politics is, you know, it's hard to predict.

01:40:52   And the policy--

01:40:54   - The thing that concerns me is that the EU has shown

01:40:56   like their willingness to, for example,

01:40:59   investigate IE's dominance until Chrome becomes

01:41:01   the dominant web browser and there's no rendering engines

01:41:04   left, so like the results of their actions, I think,

01:41:06   are unclear even to them.

01:41:08   - Well, and with the EU, and in some ways,

01:41:13   my stance is that the EU's heart is in the right place

01:41:17   and that they are very consumer focused,

01:41:20   but it doesn't necessarily come out of the legislation.

01:41:24   I mean, all of these cookie banners that you have

01:41:27   to click through on websites all the time

01:41:31   to comply with, what's the law, the--

01:41:33   - Yeah, and the GDPR.

01:41:36   - Yeah, that hasn't really improved the,

01:41:40   the way it manifests itself is it's made things worse.

01:41:44   It's given you all these stupid things to click through.

01:41:46   Like that's not--

01:41:47   - Or it's removed American websites from Europe

01:41:50   and just can't afford or won't,

01:41:52   don't have the resources to comply with the regulation.

01:41:53   - Right, to comply, you know.

01:41:55   So, you know, there's a definite fear that they'll,

01:41:58   with good interests at heart, will mandate things

01:42:02   that do not make the experience better for actual users.

01:42:07   We shall see, but it, you know--

01:42:09   - And then Facebook's response has been

01:42:10   just to throw everybody else they possibly can

01:42:12   into the fire in front of them.

01:42:13   (laughing)

01:42:16   - It is, you know, like Google, it, you know,

01:42:20   Ben and I have talked about this a lot,

01:42:21   like Google is more exposed in more ways

01:42:24   and has probably done more of a classic abuse of,

01:42:29   you know, using their dominance in web search to benefit,

01:42:34   you know, their clear monopoly in web search

01:42:36   to benefit their other businesses

01:42:38   is a classic illegal bundling.

01:42:40   But the real villain here is Facebook.

01:42:43   Like everybody sort of agrees.

01:42:44   - Yeah, I have this analogy that's terrible,

01:42:46   but I keep trying to make it work,

01:42:47   and that is that Apple is a fine dining restaurant

01:42:49   where you come in, you pay a premium,

01:42:51   you tend to get really good meals,

01:42:53   then you pay your check and you leave.

01:42:55   Google, you come in, you get a free lobster dinner,

01:42:58   but then they expect you to put out.

01:42:59   They just think that the lobster is so good,

01:43:01   you'll be willing at the end.

01:43:03   Amazon is like the ultimate Uber Eats experience

01:43:07   where you just pay them

01:43:08   and they deliver anything you want to you.

01:43:10   And Facebook will let you come in and graze

01:43:13   as much as you want for free,

01:43:14   but you have to be naked and be willing

01:43:16   to let them probe you.

01:43:17   (laughing)

01:43:19   And that's the different experiences they're all providing.

01:43:21   - It's gonna be interesting to see how it turns out.

01:43:24   You can see Apple, and you know, again,

01:43:28   this might be the way the system works,

01:43:30   you know, that the political pressure comes down

01:43:33   and Apple makes changes.

01:43:35   You know, like, would we have this small developer program

01:43:38   at the end of 2020 if it wasn't for the serious

01:43:43   federal eyeballing of Apple's control over the App Store

01:43:48   and the App Store economy?

01:43:50   - Yeah, and the new dispute mechanism

01:43:52   and several of the other changes they've been making lately.

01:43:54   - Right, I'm gonna say no,

01:43:56   or at least we wouldn't have all of them.

01:43:58   And even if they were in the works,

01:44:00   I mean, it's hard to say, you know,

01:44:01   it's hard to deny that it certainly looks like

01:44:04   there's a cause and effect of,

01:44:06   there's antitrust regulatory pressure on this,

01:44:10   and Apple has made very clear moves in very real ways.

01:44:14   Like the small developer program,

01:44:16   I know that a lot of people looked at it and are like,

01:44:18   well, you know, all these, there's a handful of companies,

01:44:21   you know, these big game companies,

01:44:23   and they make way more than a million dollars,

01:44:25   and it has nothing to do with it.

01:44:27   But there are so many developers,

01:44:29   like it's not just PR spin,

01:44:30   there's an awful lot of developers who are like,

01:44:32   no, this is a huge deal.

01:44:34   The difference for us is that we could hire

01:44:39   an entire new engineer with the money

01:44:42   that will be saving between 15 to 30%.

01:44:45   - And it's also like, the App Store,

01:44:47   the original model as conceived by Steve Jobs

01:44:49   and the team is 10 years old,

01:44:50   and it deserves to be reconsidered.

01:44:53   But also I think, you know,

01:44:54   Apple made this promise to investors

01:44:55   that they double services income by 2020,

01:44:59   and the App Store is a big part of services revenue,

01:45:02   and they made that goal.

01:45:03   And I think it was very telling,

01:45:04   they didn't promise to do it again,

01:45:06   because that cut off a lot of flexibility

01:45:08   they had around the App Store, I think,

01:45:10   until that happened, and now they have a lot more.

01:45:13   At least they don't have the expectation

01:45:15   around it that they used to have.

01:45:16   - Well, and that brings me to my last issue

01:45:19   on this whole summer of,

01:45:21   and you know, second half of 2020,

01:45:24   antitrust regulatory pressure,

01:45:25   is the Apple angle on it.

01:45:28   The other thing in addition to the App Store

01:45:29   is the deal with Google to make Google search

01:45:33   the default for Safari,

01:45:35   which I know isn't quite a pay for play thing.

01:45:38   It's not like, okay, you pay us X billion,

01:45:42   and Google search remains the default search in Google.

01:45:47   It somehow is--

01:45:50   - It's like an affiliate fee or referral fee.

01:45:52   - Right, it's accounted for by how many searches

01:45:56   actually go through Google from the Safari field.

01:46:00   - It was a startling amount of,

01:46:01   I did not expect it to be anywhere nearly as high

01:46:04   as the amount of traffic they delivered to Google.

01:46:06   - Right, and it's, you know,

01:46:07   they still haven't released the money yet, right?

01:46:09   It's like the deal is still secret,

01:46:12   and there's something that came out from like,

01:46:13   we know the number from a legal,

01:46:16   like the, bizarrely, it came out of the Google

01:46:20   Oracle lawsuit over Java,

01:46:24   and it was, I don't know how many billion dollars,

01:46:26   but it was like back in 2014.

01:46:28   Goldman Sachs has estimated it at like 18 million,

01:46:33   I think, for 2020, or maybe that's the estimate

01:46:36   for upcoming for 2021.

01:46:38   But it's reasonable to assume that Goldman's estimate

01:46:42   is at least in the ballpark,

01:46:44   and it's somewhere on the order of at least 10 billion,

01:46:49   probably closer to 20 billion.

01:46:52   You know, call it 15 billion,

01:46:54   say Goldman's off by a few billion,

01:46:57   you know, what's a billion here and a billion there?

01:46:59   But $15 billion a year is a significant portion of Apple's,

01:47:04   and this is where I'm going with this,

01:47:06   is Apple puts that under services.

01:47:09   And it's like the dark matter,

01:47:12   the iceberg, the part of the iceberg under the water

01:47:15   for Apple's services revenue is this thing

01:47:19   that people don't think of as an Apple service.

01:47:21   People think of Apple services as these things

01:47:23   with brand names.

01:47:25   You know, Apple TV Plus, and the new Apple One bundle,

01:47:30   and Apple News, and the Apple Arcade,

01:47:33   and you know, all these new things

01:47:35   that they've been coming out with,

01:47:36   which are Apple's, and Fitness Plus, and blah, blah, blah.

01:47:39   And it's like, oh yeah, and the biggest moneymaker

01:47:40   is the fact that Google is the default search engine

01:47:43   in Safari.

01:47:45   - Yeah, it's pure profit.

01:47:46   - It's, well, pure profit, except that they do,

01:47:49   it is this weird feather in the Safari team's cap, right?

01:47:54   Like, you don't think of Safari and WebKit

01:47:56   as being this big moneymaker for Apple, right?

01:47:59   You think of it like,

01:48:00   like does the Finder team make money for Apple?

01:48:03   No, they're--

01:48:04   - It was famously Firefox's almost entire income

01:48:06   was the same sort of Google search placement forever,

01:48:10   or for years.

01:48:11   - But I think you can directly make the argument

01:48:12   that Safari is one of the most profitable software endeavors

01:48:17   on the planet, because it keeps people,

01:48:20   you know, and it's not like,

01:48:23   they're not doing anything nefarious,

01:48:24   they're not trying to make you search Google

01:48:28   more than you would otherwise.

01:48:29   And if anything, they've added more features

01:48:32   that when you type in the URL field,

01:48:36   that some things get answered without going through Google.

01:48:39   You know, like if you start--

01:48:40   - They're abstracted away by the Apple knowledge base.

01:48:42   - Right, and you know, things like sports scores,

01:48:44   or the weather, or something like that

01:48:45   don't even go to Google.

01:48:46   So if Apple really wanted to throw as much traffic

01:48:50   through this deal as they wanted to,

01:48:51   it actually would work differently,

01:48:53   but it's very, very profitable.

01:48:54   But it is very much in the bull's eye of the regulators

01:48:59   looking at this as something that is actually illegal.

01:49:04   - And if it just came, I'm skipping ahead,

01:49:06   but it just came out this week

01:49:07   that Google also had a Blue Jedi deal,

01:49:10   code name Blue Jedi deal with Facebook.

01:49:12   Turns out it wasn't R2 or 3P, it was Blue Jedi.

01:49:15   And where they had a deal with advertising

01:49:18   and Facebook as well.

01:49:20   - Ah, huh, I thought it was--

01:49:23   - Four letter word, Jedi.

01:49:25   - Jedi, hmm.

01:49:27   Well, I lost that bet.

01:49:28   Good thing I didn't put money on that.

01:49:30   But anyway, long story short,

01:49:33   I think that Apple is looking at,

01:49:35   and I'm sure they have to be realistically looking at,

01:49:37   we might need to cancel this deal, you know?

01:49:40   - Yeah.

01:49:41   - Like we might have to, you know,

01:49:43   this money might be going away,

01:49:45   and it's a huge chunk of their services.

01:49:47   And I think that's a big reason

01:49:49   why they're not making any promises

01:49:50   about future services revenue.

01:49:52   And they've built up their own services,

01:49:55   the ones you think of as Apple services,

01:49:57   to all be good businesses, and it is doing, you know,

01:50:01   their services division would be fine

01:50:03   if the Google money went away,

01:50:06   but it would take a huge hit.

01:50:07   - Yeah.

01:50:09   - And people, you know, investors who are looking at it

01:50:11   would need to understand, well, this, you know,

01:50:13   this has been taken away by regulators.

01:50:16   - And my understanding is despite, you know,

01:50:19   we're making complaints about magic keyboard costs,

01:50:21   but my understanding is that Apple's hardware margins

01:50:22   are significantly down from what they were years ago,

01:50:25   and services is making that look normal

01:50:27   because of how high services margins are.

01:50:30   - Well, and again, I'm not a financial analyst,

01:50:32   but it's like, you know, as long as you assume

01:50:35   that Apple isn't committing perjury,

01:50:37   or whatever the crime is of submitting false information

01:50:42   on their quarterly reports, I guess perjury is wrong,

01:50:46   but-- - SEC violations.

01:50:47   - Yeah, securities fraud, right?

01:50:49   I guess that would be classified as securities fraud.

01:50:52   Their margins are, they're more regular

01:50:57   than a $5,000 watch, you know, like 38.7% margin,

01:51:03   39%, you know, high 38 decimals to 39%,

01:51:12   every single quarter, quarter after quarter.

01:51:14   - But that used to be mostly hardware profit,

01:51:17   and now there is a significant amount of services revenue,

01:51:19   and it hasn't gone up, which indicates

01:51:21   that hardware margins are not up at all.

01:51:23   - So if the margins on services are higher than hardware,

01:51:26   which they have to be-- - Like 60%, yeah.

01:51:29   - And the company's margins are exactly the same,

01:51:33   that means the margins on hardware have gone down.

01:51:35   And I know people find that hard to believe,

01:51:38   they're like, but wait, aren't they selling

01:51:39   $1,300 cell phones now?

01:51:40   And it's like, yeah, but their $1,300 cell phones

01:51:42   are actually packing an enormous amount of,

01:51:45   and again, they're not selling them at a loss,

01:51:47   they're not breaking even on an iPhone 12 Pro Max,

01:51:50   but they really-- - They're putting

01:51:52   more expensive parts in.

01:51:53   - They really are very expensive devices.

01:51:57   And again, poor, poor Apple, you know,

01:51:59   maybe their margins, you know, here we are,

01:52:02   oh my God, their margins on iPhones

01:52:04   might be down to like the low 30s.

01:52:06   Oh, you know, it's all good.

01:52:11   They're not going into the red,

01:52:13   but it's definitely something to look at if, you know.

01:52:15   And you're always asking for a bit of luck

01:52:20   if you're hoping that investors pay attention

01:52:22   to the details, you know.

01:52:24   It's like, for example, should Tesla's stock

01:52:28   have taken a hit on Apple car rumors this week?

01:52:31   No, it should not have. - No, no.

01:52:33   - It did, so it's very possible that something,

01:52:37   you know, there could be some kind of like,

01:52:39   hey, this agreement between Apple and Google

01:52:42   for default search is over,

01:52:43   there's no more money changing hands,

01:52:46   and Apple services takes like a 15 to $20 billion annual hit.

01:52:50   Anybody who's not paying attention might see the news

01:52:53   as Apple services is in the tank, and you know,

01:52:56   there goes, there goes the stock.

01:52:59   Yeah, what else we got?

01:53:02   We got the whole second half of the year.

01:53:03   I don't know how we're gonna--

01:53:04   - Can I make fun of Epic and Fortnite quickly?

01:53:06   - Yeah, I think we got to before the summer's over.

01:53:08   - Yeah, so this was interesting to me

01:53:10   because in the beginning, I liked what Epic was doing.

01:53:13   Like, it seemed really well calculated.

01:53:15   They made this Epic drop where they said

01:53:18   that they were gonna stop paying Google and Apple

01:53:20   the 30% that they were demanding,

01:53:22   that they were gonna put in their own

01:53:23   payment processing system, you know,

01:53:26   in violation of the terms of services,

01:53:28   and then Apple and Google removed them from the stores,

01:53:31   and Epic sued Apple, and I thought, you know,

01:53:34   they've really got this plan, they've got everything going.

01:53:36   Then they sued Google too, even though Google

01:53:39   allows you to sideload, and I started thinking,

01:53:41   what are they doing?

01:53:44   And then not to fast forward too far ahead,

01:53:45   but they got to the point where a judge said,

01:53:47   okay, let's put everything into,

01:53:50   you know, we'll put all the profits into,

01:53:53   you know, a special fund, and at the end of the case,

01:53:56   we'll figure out who they go to,

01:53:57   and that would mean that everyone

01:53:58   could keep playing Fortnite on iOS,

01:54:00   everyone would still be happy, and Epic said no.

01:54:03   And at that point, I'm like,

01:54:04   this really wasn't that well planned, was it?

01:54:06   - Yeah, I'm not sure, you know,

01:54:08   and you know, there was a lot of fireworks at the beginning

01:54:13   with the surprise move of Epic that they had,

01:54:18   effectively, you know, and I don't mean this

01:54:20   in the malware sense, but it just,

01:54:22   in the allegorical sense, a Trojan horse

01:54:24   built into an app, a version of the app

01:54:26   that had already gotten approved,

01:54:28   and they could flip a switch remotely, you know.

01:54:30   Have the app take payments.

01:54:32   I don't know what they really want, you know,

01:54:38   like, I'm sure they would just take it

01:54:40   if the legal system said, yes, Epic,

01:54:44   you get everything you're demanding right now,

01:54:46   Apple has to, has, you know, 12 months

01:54:49   to enable third-party app stores on iOS,

01:54:55   and the Epic app store, game store is legally mandated

01:55:00   to be one of the ones that's approved.

01:55:02   You know, I'm sure Epic would say, yeah, sure,

01:55:04   oh my God, I can't believe that worked, right?

01:55:07   That's great.

01:55:08   But they know that's not gonna happen.

01:55:09   It's not gonna happen like that.

01:55:11   Like, what do they really want?

01:55:12   I don't know, and you're right, I think,

01:55:15   that the judge's offer of let's just go back,

01:55:20   run, you know, comply with the rules,

01:55:24   and all of the money from Epic's apps,

01:55:29   which is primarily Fortnite, would go into escrow,

01:55:33   and we'll, you know, when the lawsuits are finally settled,

01:55:37   you know, then we'll figure out what to do with it.

01:55:39   The fact that they were like, no, we'll just stay out,

01:55:42   you know, and I guess some people think

01:55:44   that that's just them sticking to the principle,

01:55:47   that, you know, that they lose the moral high ground,

01:55:50   the principle high ground of we're the ones

01:55:53   standing up to Apple on this.

01:55:56   But I don't know, it doesn't play,

01:56:00   it didn't seem like that to me when it was fresh,

01:56:02   and now that we're at the end of the year,

01:56:04   and it's sort of settled in as old news,

01:56:07   it just feels spiteful, right?

01:56:09   Like, does it seem to you, I mean, again--

01:56:11   - No, yeah, I think it goes back

01:56:13   to what we were talking about with founders

01:56:15   are different than CEOs, and Tim Sweeney seems

01:56:17   to be acting like a hyper-aggressive founder,

01:56:20   and not a CEO who would probably have

01:56:22   the best interests of his Epic Unreal Engine customers,

01:56:26   you know, and their shared iOS customers,

01:56:29   and a much higher priority than him trying to,

01:56:32   I got the whole vibe from them,

01:56:34   it's like they didn't wanna take the,

01:56:36   like the App Store foot off any developer's neck,

01:56:39   they wanted to make enough room

01:56:40   to put their foot down as well,

01:56:42   and that's a whole different sort of vibe

01:56:44   than I think most people were expecting.

01:56:46   - See, I don't get that.

01:56:48   Like, I don't feel like they want to be the new,

01:56:52   you know, we've got your foot on your throat,

01:56:54   I just feel like if there's,

01:56:56   the most innocuous explanation I can think of is

01:57:01   that like, Tim Sweeney and Epic really,

01:57:05   literally don't see anything problematic

01:57:08   with the state of like, Windows PCs,

01:57:12   and the way software is installed and works on it, like--

01:57:16   - But they're very, on Windows they were very interesting,

01:57:18   because they went after Steam hard,

01:57:23   like they signed exclusive deals,

01:57:25   and they would give discounts if you had the,

01:57:28   if you used the Fortnite engine on their game store,

01:57:30   and yes, they charge less of a percentage,

01:57:32   but they still charge a percentage,

01:57:34   and they had a bunch of scandals

01:57:35   where they were taking stuff that was created

01:57:38   by people on the Fortnite platform,

01:57:40   and just not sharing any revenue from it at all,

01:57:43   like different dances and emotes,

01:57:44   and the things that have, Ben explains it so well,

01:57:46   like zero marginal cost to them,

01:57:49   pure profit and just keeping all of it,

01:57:51   so it seemed like they were, I said this before,

01:57:53   I know there are huge problems on the App Store,

01:57:55   and a lot of things that need to be fixed,

01:57:57   but this was just not the Batman

01:57:59   that anybody wanted or needed in this case.

01:58:01   - No, and you know, and again,

01:58:03   it could easily devolve into an hour-long discussion,

01:58:06   but my take of describing iOS as an app console,

01:58:11   which was probably, it somehow inadvertently,

01:58:16   my biggest controversy of the year.

01:58:18   - It's exactly what Steve Jobs announced today.

01:58:20   From the beginning, it was announced as a console.

01:58:23   - The problem with it, clearly in hindsight,

01:58:25   I know I've talked about it before,

01:58:26   but clearly, it's just traditional linguistic problem

01:58:31   where some people literally really believe

01:58:35   that the word console implies games,

01:58:38   that if it's not for playing games,

01:58:41   it's not a console, period,

01:58:43   whereas that's why I'm calling it an app console.

01:58:45   It's like a game console, but instead of games,

01:58:47   it's any kind of app, but it's exactly--

01:58:49   - And that doesn't mean it's right.

01:58:50   It doesn't mean it should be a console today,

01:58:52   it just means that it was designed

01:58:54   and it was run like a console.

01:58:54   - Right, and it's like,

01:58:56   I tried to explain it as best I could,

01:59:00   and there's some people who are like,

01:59:01   "Lol, you think it's like PlayStation.

01:59:03   "You think iPhone's like PlayStation?

01:59:04   "People put their lives in their iPhone."

01:59:06   And it's like, no, no, I see what you're saying,

01:59:08   that your iPhone is like where you live

01:59:11   your entire online life, your business

01:59:13   and your socialization, and all of this is there,

01:59:16   and it's way more important to you than your PlayStation.

01:59:19   - And some of the reason for that is because of the safety

01:59:21   that's created by having it run as a console

01:59:24   and not as an open computing environment.

01:59:25   I mean, that cuts both ways as well.

01:59:26   - But it's like, that's the basic idea,

01:59:29   and having Epic be the one to fight it out

01:59:31   and have them say, "Oh yeah, we're totally cool though

01:59:33   "with Xbox and Nintendo and PlayStation,"

01:59:36   really undercuts the argument.

01:59:40   And the judge has been very clear about this.

01:59:44   - Yeah, she's brilliant.

01:59:45   - Yeah, she really is.

01:59:46   - She saw through all of BS by everybody.

01:59:48   - Yeah, and I remember the one part where she was like

01:59:50   grilling them on this, "Why are you holding Android and iOS

01:59:55   "to this entirely different standard

01:59:58   "from the game consoles?"

01:59:59   And they're like, "Well, you can't play your Xbox on a bus."

02:00:02   And she immediately was like,

02:00:03   "You can play your Nintendo Switch."

02:00:05   And it was like, "I'll just sit down now."

02:00:08   - Yes, yeah, she was like, "Are you gonna do better

02:00:10   "on the second part of this hearing?"

02:00:12   It's like, "I don't even know."

02:00:13   Like, you said the quiet part out loud.

02:00:14   - Yeah, I don't know.

02:00:15   I wonder, I don't know what 2021 has in store

02:00:18   for the Epic Apple lawsuit, but I just, I don't know.

02:00:21   I don't think anything's gonna come of it, to be honest.

02:00:25   - If this was a cadre of, like,

02:00:27   we probably had a lot of the people, like Spotify,

02:00:29   that are teaming up, and now Facebook has filed

02:00:32   in support of Epic, these are a cadre of billionaires

02:00:36   who are super angry at the trillionaire.

02:00:39   And I would much rather prefer this be a group

02:00:42   of independent app developers who know what they want

02:00:45   and need litigating this than people who are worried

02:00:48   about which of their Ferraris they're driving out

02:00:50   on the highway paid for by trillion dollar companies again.

02:00:53   - And, you know, just to tie it back to something

02:00:56   from the early part of the show, it's like,

02:00:58   think about like with Chrome on macOS.

02:01:02   Like, on macOS, it is the idiom,

02:01:05   it is the culture, it's the expectation

02:01:09   that when you install a web browser

02:01:12   in your applications folder, if you want to uninstall it,

02:01:15   you just drag it to the trash, and then it's all gone

02:01:17   and there's no software running.

02:01:19   But it turns out that's just the culture

02:01:21   and there's no technical requirement,

02:01:23   and so Chrome takes advantage of this

02:01:25   and has like this background software updating agent

02:01:28   that stays installed if you just trash googlechrome.app.

02:01:34   On iOS, that literally can't happen.

02:01:37   I'm not saying that somebody can't happen

02:01:39   in a way that somebody couldn't find a security exploit,

02:01:41   but any app that could install something that remains

02:01:45   even after you delete the app is doing so

02:01:47   by literally exploiting a security vulnerability,

02:01:51   and if Apple found out about it,

02:01:52   they would close the vulnerability

02:01:54   and cancel the developer's developer account.

02:01:59   It's not like you as a developer are asked to be nice

02:02:04   and when your app is deleted, there's nothing left of it.

02:02:08   You have no choice, and that is a huge benefit.

02:02:12   And to me, the whole Epic thing comes down to,

02:02:15   not Epic particularly, but Epic's argument

02:02:17   over this isn't right, that Apple controls the App Store

02:02:22   this way is completely missing,

02:02:25   that that's a tremendous benefit.

02:02:28   It's got trade-offs, right?

02:02:30   'Cause sometimes you want your rogue Amoebas

02:02:32   to be able to do stuff, and rogue Amoeba

02:02:34   can't do rogue Amoeba stuff on iOS

02:02:37   because apps on iOS can't do that.

02:02:40   Again, to circle back to an example from earlier on this show

02:02:44   rogue Amoeba's a perfect example

02:02:45   of what we lose with the control.

02:02:48   You gain some, you lose some,

02:02:50   and it ultimately is sort of Apple's argument

02:02:54   for why some of our computing devices

02:02:57   like iPhones and iPads work this way,

02:02:59   and why the Mac works this other way.

02:03:02   Here's our platform where you are

02:03:03   allowed to shoot your foot.

02:03:05   - There's this huge problem, I think,

02:03:07   a lot of, especially in like Twitter and internet culture

02:03:09   in general doesn't like multiple truths,

02:03:10   but quite often we have these situations

02:03:12   where there are multiple truths,

02:03:14   like people deserve choice, and does that mean

02:03:16   that you should have the choice of running

02:03:17   whatever you want on your iPhone,

02:03:19   or does that mean that consumers should have the choice

02:03:21   of a managed environment with the iPhone

02:03:23   versus an unmanaged one with Android,

02:03:25   and are you taking away consumer choice

02:03:27   if you turn the iPhone into a non-managed environment?

02:03:31   It's like this whole thing where there's 90% of,

02:03:34   90% of the things that Apple does really benefit

02:03:36   mainstream consumers, but really irk the nerds.

02:03:39   The nerds have all the traditional computers,

02:03:40   but they still want the stuff that Apple makes

02:03:42   because it's really nice, but then they want to change it

02:03:45   and make it more nerd-like, which is a disservice often

02:03:48   to the 90% of the mainstream customers.

02:03:50   And even in this case, like I really,

02:03:52   I'm sympathetic to the idea that Apple

02:03:54   should allow sideloading, because that way,

02:03:56   theoretically, if VPNs are banned in China,

02:03:58   or TikTok is banned in the US,

02:04:00   that doesn't stop people from loading them up,

02:04:03   but practically, the servers behind the VPNs

02:04:05   and behind TikTok would be cut off,

02:04:07   and so the app wouldn't really help you,

02:04:09   and it would just be an extra vector

02:04:11   for getting on the machine.

02:04:12   And I don't know what the right answer is,

02:04:14   I just know that if you're talking about it

02:04:15   in black and white terms, you probably haven't thought

02:04:17   about it deeply.

02:04:18   - Right, well, or just look at what's come out

02:04:20   with Facebook, you know, and if Facebook

02:04:22   could encourage users to sideload Facebook.app,

02:04:25   then Facebook.app sideloaded could get away

02:04:28   with whatever it can get away with,

02:04:30   and wouldn't have to--

02:04:31   - Or their VPN that they were putting out there

02:04:33   that monitored us. - Right, right!

02:04:33   Which they've literally, it's not just like speculation,

02:04:37   have been shown, and like Australia is taking them,

02:04:40   you know, to court over, that they used to spy

02:04:43   on their users, and because they were spying,

02:04:46   using it to spy on all of what they did on their phones,

02:04:49   used it as competitive information to say, yeah,

02:04:52   hey, this WhatsApp thing is both A, really popular,

02:04:55   and growing really fast, we should buy it for $20 billion.

02:04:59   We've got the data from the users of our VPN spyware.

02:05:03   You know, and if that's, there's--

02:05:05   - And when Apple blocked it, they abused

02:05:08   the enterprise certificate to let people load it.

02:05:09   - Right, so we know what they would do

02:05:11   if they could do sideloading, 'cause they've showed us.

02:05:13   And, you know, yes.

02:05:15   - They've told us who they are.

02:05:16   - And it's, you know, and you could say,

02:05:17   well, hey, the Mac's okay, and I agree,

02:05:19   it wouldn't be the end of the world,

02:05:20   but it's like, you have to admit,

02:05:23   even if you think that the trade-offs would be worth it,

02:05:26   that there are trade-offs, you know.

02:05:28   - Yeah, yeah, like you could argue

02:05:30   that the App Store is phenomenally successful,

02:05:32   and therefore should change, but you could also argue

02:05:34   that maybe those changes would have prevented

02:05:35   the App Store from being more successful

02:05:36   than the Google Play Store is, in terms of

02:05:39   developer revenue, for example.

02:05:40   Nothing is an evacue.

02:05:41   - We gotta pick up the pace here.

02:05:42   I'm gonna take a break and thank our third

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02:07:50   All right, long story, let's just cut out

02:07:52   the iMac from August, forget it.

02:07:54   Gone.

02:07:56   - I mean, nothing happened in the fall anyway, right?

02:07:57   - Yeah, nothing else.

02:07:58   No, but I think we, I don't think we're doing short,

02:08:01   I mean, you know, this stuff is fresher in memory,

02:08:03   we've talked about the hardware,

02:08:08   but the announcements, you know, so let's go through.

02:08:10   First one was the iPad Air and the Apple Watch Series 6

02:08:15   and Apple Watch.

02:08:16   - Can I just give you credit for a second here,

02:08:17   because you had a really good explanation

02:08:20   for how Apple was staging these events,

02:08:21   because a lot of people were saying,

02:08:22   oh, there's no way they won't do the iPhone,

02:08:24   there's no way they won't do the iPhone

02:08:25   with the Apple Watch, there's no way

02:08:28   they'll do more than one event,

02:08:29   there's no way they'll do three events,

02:08:31   and you explained it early on as sort of Apple

02:08:33   arranging their fall TV schedule.

02:08:36   - Yeah, I think it really stands up,

02:08:38   and I think the one, everybody was like,

02:08:40   well, they gotta be done now,

02:08:41   what are they gonna do with this Mac?

02:08:43   They said there was a Mac,

02:08:43   I was like, they'll just do another episode of the show.

02:08:46   - Yeah, yeah.

02:08:46   - Yeah, it's sort of like, you know,

02:08:48   and like, if you're familiar with like 60 Minutes, right,

02:08:52   like the news show, you know,

02:08:54   they might have three segments of roughly 20 minutes,

02:08:57   you know, for the hour-long show,

02:08:59   but the segments are clearly produced in a way where like,

02:09:03   oh, the segment we're doing on the profile

02:09:06   of Jeff Bezos is taking longer than we thought,

02:09:10   we'll use this other, you know,

02:09:11   if they're not meant to go together.

02:09:13   And I think these events were like that,

02:09:16   they're like, okay, we'll do, you know,

02:09:18   we'll do 40 minutes about the iPad and the 8th generation.

02:09:22   - Which didn't even ship until after

02:09:23   they announced the iPhone.

02:09:24   - Right, which was weird, you know,

02:09:26   but the phones aren't ready,

02:09:28   but if it would have been ready,

02:09:29   they would have been, they could have put it in

02:09:31   as part of the show. - Yeah.

02:09:32   - And you know, and it's funny,

02:09:35   it's a good show and it has that flavor,

02:09:39   like it's like, oh, another episode of the Apple event show.

02:09:42   And you know, you're cruising around the Apple Park

02:09:47   and the spaceship and you know,

02:09:50   it feels like a TV show.

02:09:54   - And it just got better episode,

02:09:55   like they did that really cool shot of zooming in

02:09:57   from Jeff Williams' watch coming out

02:10:01   and then they did all those different transitions

02:10:02   and the drone shots.

02:10:05   It felt like the same show,

02:10:06   but they kept getting better and better at making it.

02:10:08   - Yeah, the other thing I would say,

02:10:09   and who knows, maybe if they keep this up

02:10:11   and this is how they do shows going forward,

02:10:14   we'll look back at the ones from 2020

02:10:16   and see them as crude.

02:10:18   You know, I always think like whenever you buy

02:10:20   like the omnibus edition of a comic strip,

02:10:24   like Calvin and Hobbes or the early--

02:10:27   - The Bloom Counties.

02:10:28   - Yeah, or the Peanut strips, you know.

02:10:30   - Yeah.

02:10:31   - And you look at the first,

02:10:32   especially Peanuts in particular,

02:10:33   because the Peanuts ones evolved over like a decade,

02:10:37   but they were like ones from like the '50s,

02:10:39   like for 10 years where all of the characters look weird.

02:10:42   You're like, man.

02:10:43   - Even Garfield, he's horrific in the first few.

02:10:45   - Yeah, Garfield, early, you know,

02:10:47   in my opinion, probably the best of the best

02:10:51   is Bill Watterson in Calvin and Hobbes.

02:10:53   He's just the best written,

02:10:54   it's just the pinnacle of the art form.

02:10:56   I mean, most people seem to agree.

02:10:58   And he's also probably the best illustrator.

02:11:01   He's just amazing.

02:11:02   - Yes.

02:11:03   - And he would really show off and do like one of the--

02:11:05   - Like the Spaceman Spiff, yeah.

02:11:06   - Or the dinosaur ones,

02:11:07   or Spaceman Spiff versus the dinosaurs.

02:11:10   It's like, oh my God, he's like super amazing, talented.

02:11:14   The first year of Calvin and Hobbes,

02:11:16   they look a little weird, you know.

02:11:18   They have to, it takes a while to get your legs

02:11:20   underneath you and figure out who these characters are

02:11:23   and what the style is.

02:11:24   It's like that with most TV shows too,

02:11:27   like the first season of a show

02:11:29   often just looks weird in hindsight,

02:11:31   'cause they haven't quite figured it out.

02:11:33   I don't know.

02:11:34   - If I look at a video from older than a month,

02:11:35   I can't believe how terrible it looked.

02:11:37   (laughing)

02:11:38   - Well, you know.

02:11:39   But I don't know.

02:11:42   I feel like Apple somehow, maybe it's hiring talent.

02:11:46   If you throw enough money at it and you're discerning

02:11:48   and you hire the right people, they got it.

02:11:50   But that September event, again,

02:11:55   I don't think we need to spend much time on it.

02:11:58   Series 6 Apple Watch, not really that different.

02:12:01   It adds the blood oxygen sensor.

02:12:04   If anything, I almost feel like it was badly timed

02:12:08   because blood oxygen levels are a COVID thing.

02:12:13   And clearly, that's not why the 2020 Apple Watch has it,

02:12:18   but that's how people think, right?

02:12:21   - Same with the hand washing.

02:12:22   - Yeah, well, hand washing,

02:12:24   they did probably squeeze in for that.

02:12:26   Like, I don't think there would be a hand washing feature

02:12:27   if it wasn't for COVID, do you?

02:12:29   - No, no, for sure.

02:12:30   No, I mean, one interview they said that it wasn't

02:12:32   because of that, the other interview they said it was.

02:12:34   So I think it probably had to have been.

02:12:37   - But it doesn't require a special sensor, right?

02:12:40   It's not like they have a hand wash sensor.

02:12:42   They're just using the accelerometer and the microphone

02:12:45   and a bunch of other things to create a--

02:12:46   - Every time I make pasta and I'm sizzling onions

02:12:48   and turning the salt thing, it starts counting down

02:12:50   for my hand wash.

02:12:52   - I had to turn the feature off.

02:12:53   I found it too patronizing.

02:12:57   - Yeah, it's patronizing.

02:12:58   It's like, ah, come on.

02:12:59   And it's like, you know, if I come in from outside, yes,

02:13:04   I'm gonna wash my hands for 20 seconds and it's fine.

02:13:08   If I go to the bathroom,

02:13:09   I'm gonna wash my hands for 20 seconds.

02:13:10   There's times though where I wash my hands,

02:13:11   I really am just rinsing them.

02:13:13   And then it's like, hey, why'd you stop?

02:13:15   - Like when you're in the kitchen.

02:13:16   - What was this, a quick rinse?

02:13:17   And it's like, yeah, I'm done tapping my watch

02:13:19   to tell you what was going on here.

02:13:22   - You're not my dad.

02:13:22   - Right, and before my watch could tell me

02:13:24   if it was 20 seconds,

02:13:25   I'm pretty sure I was thoroughly washing my hands.

02:13:29   Trust me, I was paranoid.

02:13:31   You know, we're all germaphones.

02:13:32   - Same.

02:13:33   - Yes.

02:13:34   But you know, it's just a talkier for the Apple Watch.

02:13:40   - Yeah, yeah.

02:13:42   And the SE was interesting in that it wasn't as low cost

02:13:45   as the Apple Watch 3 was the previous year,

02:13:48   but it was less expensive,

02:13:50   but it was missing like my favorite feature,

02:13:51   which is the always on.

02:13:52   - Yeah, but I kind of feel like

02:13:55   that's very purposeful.

02:13:56   Like, we don't know what they're gonna do with it,

02:13:58   but one thing that I think is part of

02:14:01   when Apple uses the SE name

02:14:05   is that it's meant to last for a few years.

02:14:09   Like, so the first iPhone SE was sold for years.

02:14:12   I believe this one is going to be sold

02:14:14   for quite a few years, right?

02:14:16   And so they--

02:14:17   - Like a four-year cycle?

02:14:18   - At least, you know,

02:14:20   or at least until people stop buying it, you know?

02:14:23   How long will people who are averse

02:14:26   to technological change?

02:14:28   Like my mom, my mom just got the new iPhone SE

02:14:32   a couple weeks ago 'cause she needed a new iPhone.

02:14:34   Her battery was really gone.

02:14:36   And she, there was nothing,

02:14:37   literally nothing I could do or say

02:14:39   to get her to want to try Face ID.

02:14:42   Where I haven't seen her all year,

02:14:44   I couldn't talk her through it in person.

02:14:46   She's like, "I just want one just like my old phone."

02:14:48   I was like, "You know what?

02:14:48   "Okay, you're happy."

02:14:50   You know, it was like meant for her.

02:14:51   She wants a button and she wants to use her thumb.

02:14:54   And there it is.

02:14:56   And for years to come, now Apple has the iPhone SE too

02:14:59   that they can sell to those people.

02:15:01   I kind of feel like that's what the Apple Watch SE

02:15:04   is going to be.

02:15:05   Like, 'cause right now with the iPhone,

02:15:09   or the Apple Watch Series 3 as that 199 cheapest watch,

02:15:14   it sticks out because it doesn't look like the other watches

02:15:19   and they have to still do the goofy thing

02:15:21   where they're like, "Sure, this is a 42 millimeter,

02:15:24   "or a 40 millimeter strap,

02:15:26   "but it also fits the 38 millimeter iPhone

02:15:28   "or Apple Watch 3."

02:15:29   It sticks out.

02:15:32   Whereas if it goes as I expect,

02:15:35   and next year they stop selling the Series 3

02:15:39   and the SE becomes the 199 Apple Watch,

02:15:42   they all look the same,

02:15:43   they all have the new widths for the lugs,

02:15:46   and it all makes a lot more sense.

02:15:49   And then maybe the SE stays for another year after that,

02:15:52   and it's only $179 or something like that.

02:15:57   - Yeah, for sure.

02:15:58   - But I feel like missing the always on display is,

02:16:02   and I'm sure it is actual cost saving,

02:16:04   but it is a way that it is permanently, easily,

02:16:09   here's a reason why you might wanna spend an extra $100.

02:16:12   Right? - Yeah.

02:16:15   Yeah, it's like missing the modern design

02:16:16   on the current iPhone SE.

02:16:18   - Yeah, it just is this thing,

02:16:19   and you can be shown very clearly right there in the store.

02:16:24   Look, on this one, when you move your watch away,

02:16:26   it just goes black.

02:16:27   On this one, it stays on all the time.

02:16:29   - Still tells the time, like a watch.

02:16:31   - iPad Air, eh, nice.

02:16:36   You know, I feel like I'm,

02:16:38   as we rush through the second half of the year,

02:16:42   I'm blowing off a very nice iPad upgrade,

02:16:46   and very, you know, the iPad Pro, as we know it,

02:16:51   is now a lower cost iPad for more people at a lower price,

02:16:56   and it works with the Magic Keyboard.

02:16:58   We've already said nice things about--

02:17:00   - Touch ID instead of Face ID,

02:17:02   so again, it's easily differentiated.

02:17:03   - Right.

02:17:05   You know, but what are you gonna say about it?

02:17:07   It's not new, you know?

02:17:09   - It got A14 technically first,

02:17:11   but didn't really ship with it first,

02:17:13   but they did the segment on it.

02:17:14   - Right, which was weird, and I still would love to know.

02:17:18   I don't know.

02:17:19   I don't know if you asked around.

02:17:20   I don't know, but like, did they really hold it back

02:17:25   just to wait for the iPhone, or did they just like,

02:17:28   well, we'll pre-announce it?

02:17:30   Like, I kind of have the feeling,

02:17:32   and my honest belief is if they wanted to,

02:17:35   they could have released the iPad Air earlier, and didn't.

02:17:39   - Yeah, I still go back to your theory,

02:17:41   where they had all these sort of Post-It notes

02:17:43   with the different products in,

02:17:44   and they just had to arrange them

02:17:45   to fit three different events,

02:17:47   and they didn't want to announce the iPhones early,

02:17:50   because they're in the habit of announcing the iPhones,

02:17:52   and at least some of them ship within that 10-day window,

02:17:56   so they couldn't do the iPhones in September.

02:17:58   They were gonna do the Apple Watch anyway,

02:18:00   and the iPad Air just fit in there,

02:18:01   and there's much less pressure,

02:18:03   much less time sensitivity, at least,

02:18:05   so I think if they could have shipped it earlier,

02:18:07   they would have.

02:18:08   They probably just didn't have everything ramped up

02:18:09   because of all the manufacturing overhead from COVID.

02:18:13   - Yeah, they announced the Apple One bundle,

02:18:16   even though it was forthcoming,

02:18:18   and Fitness Plus included amongst it.

02:18:22   In a very, what to me was a strange segment.

02:18:25   It was only like, it was seriously like 90 seconds.

02:18:28   It was like this big thing that we thought

02:18:31   was gonna be a major segment of the show,

02:18:33   if it got announced, and instead it was like,

02:18:36   hey, we're coming up with this bundle.

02:18:38   Seems like we should have announced a year ago,

02:18:40   but we've got it this time, and it is a good deal,

02:18:43   and that's it, gone.

02:18:46   - Yeah, and in the US,

02:18:47   it doesn't include subscription hardware,

02:18:49   which is already a thing that they do,

02:18:50   which I think was-- - Right, right.

02:18:52   - Or AppleCare, which I think would have been

02:18:54   the bigger parts of the deal.

02:18:56   - Well, and I wonder, too, to tie it in

02:18:59   with the regulatory scrutiny that they're under, right?

02:19:02   Like there's something,

02:19:03   is that because they don't want to do that?

02:19:06   Is that because they-- - Yeah, or bundling,

02:19:08   they're worried about. - Right,

02:19:09   that they haven't gotten to it yet,

02:19:10   or is it because they're just worried

02:19:13   that they don't want, that they would face

02:19:16   some kind of regulatory scrutiny over,

02:19:18   oh, you're taking-- - Why does Apple Music come,

02:19:20   but not Spotify? - Right, you're taking

02:19:22   your hardware, successful hardware platform,

02:19:25   and using it as a way, as a cudgel,

02:19:27   a competitive cudgel to sell these services, you know?

02:19:31   - Yeah, yeah. - Because surely,

02:19:33   and that would be the thing,

02:19:34   is just make it a monthly payment,

02:19:36   and it includes a new iPhone every two years.

02:19:39   - Yeah, that's sort of what everybody wants,

02:19:41   but I think you're right. - Yeah.

02:19:42   - I was surprised, though, that Fitness Plus was,

02:19:44   I thought it was gonna be good,

02:19:46   just because the production value looks so high,

02:19:47   and it turned out to be better than I thought it would be.

02:19:50   - Everybody, that seems to be the consensus on it, right?

02:19:52   I mean, the consensus is that it is, you know,

02:19:57   people oddly, to me, oddly complain

02:20:01   that it requires an Apple Watch.

02:20:05   You can do it without it, it just,

02:20:06   I think it loses everything special about it

02:20:08   if you don't have the Apple Watch.

02:20:09   - Right, but everybody, you know,

02:20:12   I don't know, it's like people still seem to be surprised

02:20:15   that Apple is good at the content thing, right?

02:20:18   It's like, and again, it's like,

02:20:20   first impressions matter so much,

02:20:22   and it's like, Carpool Karaoke was like,

02:20:24   their first original content, and it, you know,

02:20:27   it was Carpool Karaoke. - And that app show,

02:20:29   forget what the app show was called.

02:20:30   - Right, it's called Planet of Apps.

02:20:31   - Planet of the Apps, right.

02:20:33   And it turns out those two shows are in no way indicative

02:20:38   of what Apple original content for Apple TV+ would be like,

02:20:44   but they set expectations so low,

02:20:47   and I still feel like they haven't recovered, you know,

02:20:50   that people still haven't gotten it through their heads

02:20:53   that no, this is seriously like,

02:20:55   you can argue that it still is not as good as HBO,

02:20:59   but it's like in the ballpark, right?

02:21:01   Like Ted Lasso is-- - Ted Lasso, yes.

02:21:03   It could be one of the best shows of the year.

02:21:04   Could easily win best show of the year.

02:21:06   - You know, really, really might,

02:21:07   and you know, the morning show,

02:21:10   deservedly of great acclaim and won a bunch of Emmys.

02:21:13   You know, it's not all Planet of the Apps.

02:21:19   It really isn't. - No.

02:21:20   - And I feel like Fitness+, in a way,

02:21:24   I know that this is a little bit diminishing,

02:21:26   'cause I know that they've got this interactive stuff

02:21:28   where you see your live metrics from your watch

02:21:31   on screen as you're doing it, but it is--

02:21:34   - And the burn bar.

02:21:35   - It is sort of, it's like a modern day version of,

02:21:39   okay, we have the Apple TV+ channel

02:21:41   where we show mostly fictional dramas like Ted Lasso

02:21:45   and the morning show and stuff like that,

02:21:48   and now we have a fitness channel, right?

02:21:51   It's like, you know, Fox has the regular Fox,

02:21:56   and then they have Fox Sports, right?

02:21:58   And that's where they show nothing but college basketball,

02:22:01   and hockey, and sports news, and stuff like that.

02:22:05   Well, now it's sort of like Fitness+

02:22:06   is the new second channel of Apple original content,

02:22:09   and it's just exclusively dedicated to these fitness shows.

02:22:13   - Yeah. - But that it's--

02:22:15   - It does sort of push forward that thing

02:22:16   that Tim Cook said at the beginning of the year

02:22:18   that was sort of, I don't know if it was controversial

02:22:19   at the time, but when he was doing that interview

02:22:22   with Kramer and said that he thinks that looking back,

02:22:24   Apple will be best known for being a health provider.

02:22:29   - Yeah, it's very serious endeavor, you know?

02:22:32   And I really do think they take it too.

02:22:37   I mean, that's not how I think of Apple,

02:22:39   but I believe Tim Cook, right?

02:22:41   Like, I believe that he thinks that way, you know?

02:22:44   It is unusual, I don't know.

02:22:48   Again, I don't say it's a bad idea,

02:22:51   but I'm not as surprised as some people seem to be

02:22:55   that Fitness+ is as well regarded as it is.

02:22:58   - Yeah, no, I'm really enjoying it,

02:23:00   and again, I thought I would,

02:23:01   and I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would.

02:23:04   - And very much personality-based, right?

02:23:06   Like, it's, you know, it is not like reality TV

02:23:10   in so far as the most shows that people consider reality TV

02:23:14   are about like gossipy type stuff,

02:23:17   and it's the opposite where it's all sort of G-rated,

02:23:20   but it is like reality TV where it's very personality-driven

02:23:25   that these people are like, they're the same sort of

02:23:28   personalities and diverse backgrounds,

02:23:33   but all young and attractive.

02:23:35   - Well, they have like, they have a 60-year-old,

02:23:39   one of them is a 60-year-old trainer,

02:23:40   and they're all super engaging.

02:23:42   - Yeah, but that's also sort of like reality TV, right?

02:23:45   Where there's always like some old,

02:23:47   just like an old guy on Survivor, right?

02:23:49   - Yes.

02:23:50   - You know, 'cause it is, and they are,

02:23:54   you know, it's all what Apple says on the tin, you know?

02:23:57   They want everybody to feel welcome,

02:23:59   and if you are like a serious spin cyclist

02:24:04   who's been doing it for years,

02:24:05   and you're, you know, you spin at a truly expert level,

02:24:10   there are classes for you,

02:24:12   and if you've never gotten on a spin bike in your life,

02:24:15   this is a great way to get started,

02:24:16   and you should feel just as welcome.

02:24:19   And again, I feel like that's been Apple's approach to,

02:24:23   you know, the what business does Apple have

02:24:25   doing this aspect of it is, to me,

02:24:27   that's sort of been Apple's approach to computers, right?

02:24:29   Like, that we can, we truly believe we can make a computer

02:24:34   that is good for somebody

02:24:36   who doesn't know anything about computers,

02:24:38   and also that the same machine

02:24:41   could be a great computer for a programmer.

02:24:44   - Yeah, yeah, they can make a computer that,

02:24:48   for everyone who has always felt alienated

02:24:50   and inaccessible to normal computers.

02:24:52   - Right, it's, you know.

02:24:53   - Or intimidated, yeah.

02:24:54   - It's the computer for the rest of us

02:24:56   was the slogan for the Mac,

02:24:57   and it's like the fitness class for the rest of us,

02:24:59   but it also includes--

02:25:00   - And they have like the sign language little bits in there,

02:25:02   and they do every, you know, and it's just really,

02:25:04   and they have people doing crossovers

02:25:06   with the other trainers,

02:25:07   so you always see people you know,

02:25:08   and it's really well thought out.

02:25:10   - Yeah.

02:25:11   Next event, October 13th, a high-speed event,

02:25:14   HomePod mini, all of the iPhones and MagSafe.

02:25:18   - The word 5G more than I've ever heard it

02:25:20   in my life before, since.

02:25:21   - 5G, 5G, 5G.

02:25:23   - 5G, yeah.

02:25:25   - And believe it or not,

02:25:26   the HomePod mini doesn't even support 5G.

02:25:29   - No.

02:25:30   - There's no way, we can't just go into detail on this.

02:25:33   What are your high-level takeaways

02:25:35   now that we're months out from the iPhone 12 event?

02:25:38   What's your takeaway on the iPhone 12 lineup?

02:25:40   - I think it's really good.

02:25:43   I think it showed Apple expanding,

02:25:45   like if you think they originally had one iPhone,

02:25:46   and now they're up to four iPhones,

02:25:48   five if you include the iPhone SE.

02:25:50   I think the iPhone mini was an interesting experiment,

02:25:52   because the original SE was both smaller and less expensive,

02:25:55   and now we have a separate iPhone that's less expensive,

02:25:58   and a separate iPhone that's smaller,

02:26:00   and that sort of lets Apple start testing segmentation,

02:26:03   because whenever any market gets big,

02:26:05   like the car market, you have to start segmenting,

02:26:07   or you just stall growth.

02:26:09   So I think, and again, now the,

02:26:10   I know some people hate this,

02:26:11   but the Max model now has more features

02:26:13   than the regular Pro.

02:26:14   But that again is part of that segmentation.

02:26:17   So I think it's a very successful product.

02:26:21   I think the 5G thing is still not,

02:26:23   it's not ready for prime time, but they had to do it.

02:26:26   And I think it was good they kept the pricing

02:26:28   on the Pros the same, even if because of OLED and 5G

02:26:31   and all of that, the pricing on the regular ones went up,

02:26:34   and I hope that's sort of a temporary thing.

02:26:37   - I like the, I still haven't ordered a new iPhone.

02:26:42   I'm about to, I'm just waiting now for Christmas to be over,

02:26:45   'cause it's for me, so I don't need it for Christmas.

02:26:47   So I'll just wait and won't add to the holiday shipping.

02:26:50   But I'm gonna get the regular iPhone 12.

02:26:54   Not the mini. - Oh, interesting.

02:26:56   - For me, it was like I, the first--

02:26:58   - I thought you'd go mini.

02:27:00   - It was very close.

02:27:01   That's what it came down to for me.

02:27:03   And it was the hardest decision.

02:27:05   Most years, it's like, oh, I do see the appeal of this,

02:27:08   but I want this.

02:27:09   Like last year, it was easy.

02:27:10   I wanted the regular 11 Pro.

02:27:12   Max is too big.

02:27:14   And last year, the Max didn't even have any extra features.

02:27:16   It was just big.

02:27:18   - Every designer I know went mini.

02:27:20   I think it really appeals to designer culture.

02:27:22   - Yeah, this year was the toughest,

02:27:24   'cause all four were appealing, right?

02:27:26   Like the one that would fit with the phone I bought

02:27:29   every single year previously would be the 11 Pro,

02:27:32   that, you know, the roughly regular size

02:27:35   with the best possible camera.

02:27:37   And honestly, it's just like,

02:27:39   I just don't like the feel of it as much.

02:27:41   I don't think it's bad.

02:27:42   I just love the feel of the regular 12 better,

02:27:46   and I'm kind of over the 2X camera.

02:27:50   Not that I, you know, if they just would add that camera

02:27:53   to the regular aluminum 12, I'd like it better.

02:27:56   But I'm willing to live without it,

02:27:57   and I kind of feel like, look,

02:27:59   for at least the next few months,

02:28:00   I'm not going anywhere anyway,

02:28:01   so if I do get a new phone,

02:28:03   I don't really need the best possible camera.

02:28:05   So the Max, but it was the most tempting,

02:28:08   the biggest phone has ever been,

02:28:09   because the camera's better

02:28:11   than the big one ever has been, but I just can't.

02:28:13   It's not for me, you know.

02:28:16   - So I had the same, I had the opposite problem

02:28:17   where I was torn between the iPhone 12 Pro

02:28:20   because I love the telephoto and the iPhone 12 Pro Max,

02:28:24   which is just too big, and I ended up going with the Max

02:28:27   because I really wanted that camera.

02:28:29   And the 65 millimeter was interesting.

02:28:31   I really wanted 4K 60 Dolby Vision

02:28:35   because I use it for B-roll for my videos,

02:28:37   and the ability to do 60 frames per second

02:28:39   means I can use it for slow-mo,

02:28:41   which is really important for me.

02:28:43   And then when I saw Sebastian DeWitt's article

02:28:46   on what that sensor is really capable of

02:28:49   once you get some of the computational stuff

02:28:51   that's auto-correcting everything out of the way,

02:28:53   and especially with ProRAW, I was just sold,

02:28:55   and I said I'm gonna live with this tiny tablet

02:28:58   just to have that camera.

02:28:59   - So that's where you went, you went Pro Max?

02:29:00   - Yeah, I ordered the Pro Max, yeah.

02:29:02   - See, I see the appeal of it,

02:29:04   and it's the most appealing the biggest phone

02:29:06   has ever been to me, but I still, I don't want it.

02:29:10   I mean, it's just not for me.

02:29:11   But all four were appealing to me,

02:29:14   and it's like, all right, I cut off all the pros.

02:29:17   All right, I'm gonna give,

02:29:19   just move away from the 2X lens,

02:29:20   even though I do love it, and I will miss it.

02:29:24   Then it just came down to the regular 12

02:29:25   and the 12 mini, and it was close.

02:29:28   And you know, my eyes, as a 48-year-old,

02:29:34   it's close, but it's like my eyes have gotten better

02:29:37   in the last few years, just long story short,

02:29:40   but it's actually better than it was just a few years ago.

02:29:42   And I do see it fine, but it's not the greatest.

02:29:47   And to me, the thing that really pushes it over the edge

02:29:50   is like when I'm wearing glasses,

02:29:53   or I don't have my glasses on, and I'm holding it up,

02:29:56   and it's like when I'm using it as a camera,

02:29:59   it's like I have progressives,

02:30:00   so if I'm holding it down to read, I can see it better.

02:30:02   But if I'm holding it up to take a picture,

02:30:04   then I don't see it as well,

02:30:06   and being a little bigger makes it better.

02:30:08   And then typing, it really does, you know, guess what?

02:30:12   It's nicer to type on a slightly bigger on-screen keyboard.

02:30:15   But it was the closest, it was so close.

02:30:17   And I feel like--

02:30:18   - I was like the Max or the Mini.

02:30:20   That was the thing with me,

02:30:21   is I discounted the ones in the middle,

02:30:22   and the Mini was just so appealing.

02:30:24   And I think for people who the iPhone

02:30:26   isn't a primary computer, the Mini is so much win,

02:30:29   and the Max, if it is your primary computer,

02:30:32   is so much win at the same time.

02:30:33   - But it was close.

02:30:34   But the winner for me this year is the regular iPhone 12.

02:30:37   It's like the combination of weight,

02:30:39   and a big difference to me with the 12

02:30:42   versus the 12 Pro is the weight, in addition to feel.

02:30:45   Like, I just love the feel better,

02:30:47   but part of the feel is the weight,

02:30:49   and it's like, ah, but man.

02:30:51   - That was so interesting to me,

02:30:52   because every year, I always have people tell me

02:30:54   Apple should just double the battery,

02:30:55   and I'm like, you know how heavy that is?

02:30:57   Like, it's got a bunch of other problems.

02:30:58   Like, it's not RF transparent, it increases the heat,

02:31:00   but it's heavy, and they're like,

02:31:01   oh, I can just hold up a phone.

02:31:03   And then all these people can look at the Pro

02:31:04   like that's too heavy.

02:31:06   Like, yes.

02:31:07   It turns out that a light phone is part of usability,

02:31:09   because you can play games,

02:31:10   and watch videos, and read books longer.

02:31:13   - MagSafe, what's your takeaway on MagSafe now,

02:31:15   a couple months in?

02:31:17   - I'm optimistic and disappointed at the same time.

02:31:20   Like, I think the idea is great,

02:31:22   and I think especially if Apple's gonna go portless

02:31:24   in the future, MagSafe is a really good way

02:31:26   to sort of ease us into that thing,

02:31:28   but I'm still super salty about the loss

02:31:30   of the charger in the box.

02:31:32   But especially that both chargers,

02:31:35   the MagSafe and the MagSafe Duo,

02:31:36   do not come with the AC adapter in the box,

02:31:40   to me, is just ridiculous.

02:31:41   - Well, and the Duo in particular, 'cause it's $130.

02:31:45   It's a $130 charging mat that doesn't come

02:31:47   with an AC adapter, it's ridiculous.

02:31:49   - Well, it was clearly made for a year

02:31:51   when they thought travel was gonna be a huge thing,

02:31:53   and for people who had a huge Apple affinity,

02:31:55   were not price-conscious,

02:31:56   and just wanted something really convenient

02:31:57   to fold up and carry with them when traveling,

02:32:00   but we did not get that year.

02:32:01   - But even then, it should come with the AC adapter,

02:32:03   if it's $130, it's ridiculous.

02:32:05   - Absolutely, absolutely.

02:32:07   - Probably my biggest thumbs down of the year

02:32:09   for all of Apple products is the Duo charger,

02:32:11   'cause I don't think it's that great.

02:32:12   I feel like it feels chintzy.

02:32:14   If it costs 50 bucks, then I'd say, oh, sure,

02:32:17   go buy one and put it in your travel bag,

02:32:19   but at $130--

02:32:20   - And it's cumbersome.

02:32:21   - Yeah, it's very cumbersome.

02:32:23   They made the watch side way more cumbersome

02:32:25   than any other watch charger,

02:32:27   because they put a big magnet around it

02:32:29   that doesn't do anything except keep it closed

02:32:32   when you cinch it up,

02:32:33   and it doesn't come with the AC adapter,

02:32:35   have I mentioned that?

02:32:36   It's ridiculous.

02:32:38   - And the wallet, I'm sort of mixed feelings on.

02:32:40   Peter McKinnon turned me around a little bit on it,

02:32:41   because he's a leather maker,

02:32:43   and he went through how well-made it is,

02:32:45   and how it doesn't always fall off

02:32:47   if you treat it like that sort of leather wallet,

02:32:50   but I'm still someone who needs more than two cards,

02:32:52   so I think it's got, again, it's one of these products

02:32:54   that Apple has put out that appeals to a very small part

02:32:57   of a very highly invested Apple ecosystem owner.

02:32:59   - Yeah, and I kind of feel like they're,

02:33:01   you know, it's like here's their very opinionated

02:33:03   take on a wallet, where you only have two or three cards,

02:33:06   and you don't need your Apple card, of course,

02:33:07   because your Apple card can just live on your phone,

02:33:10   so there's, you know, that's why you can get away with,

02:33:12   it's like, ah, but I need a gym card

02:33:13   and a driver's license in there.

02:33:15   - Yeah, my license, my medical card.

02:33:16   - And it's like you're already over the limit,

02:33:18   but it's like, well, here's how, you know,

02:33:20   at least other companies can take it apart

02:33:22   and figure out how to make an adapter that fits on it.

02:33:25   - And some of the Belkin stuff is good.

02:33:27   That's why I'm optimistic about it.

02:33:29   Some of the stuff that we see coming out is really good.

02:33:32   - I think iOS 14 has been a terrific update,

02:33:37   and I don't know, you know,

02:33:40   again, we could do a whole hour

02:33:43   on what's great about iOS 14.

02:33:45   To me, the big win is the widgets,

02:33:48   and I feel like Apple really nailed it.

02:33:50   I feel like the way that people are happy

02:33:53   to futz around and make widgets,

02:33:55   and that Widgetsmith is a smash hit,

02:33:57   and it became a TikTok thing,

02:33:59   and people just love customizing their home screen,

02:34:02   and the way that shortcuts can double,

02:34:05   as you could just make a shortcut that opens an app,

02:34:07   and therefore you can put any app icon you want on it,

02:34:10   and it's a quick little easily understood hack

02:34:13   to make custom icons for any app you want,

02:34:17   and then you can hide the actual app in your app library

02:34:20   and have this super minimalist thing.

02:34:23   I haven't really gone, that's not for me anymore,

02:34:26   but that's the sort of thing I loved doing

02:34:29   with my Mac in the early '90s.

02:34:31   I loved making custom icons and customizing all of that,

02:34:35   and so it's exactly the same mindset

02:34:38   of doing custom apps, icons, and customizing my desktop.

02:34:43   I remember when you only had a desktop pattern

02:34:47   on system seven, and you couldn't have a whole picture

02:34:52   on the background, but there were third-party utilities

02:34:54   that would let you do it,

02:34:55   and of course I did because it looked so much cooler,

02:34:58   and it's like I totally get that mindset,

02:35:00   and I think it is so awesome that I was 14,

02:35:04   has given that level of enthusiasm

02:35:07   to younger people today who,

02:35:12   the phone is the main computer, and it is--

02:35:16   - And they're improving it, like the latest beta

02:35:18   stops you having to do the whole round trip

02:35:19   through shortcuts each time.

02:35:21   - Right, right, and it's not just for the app launching.

02:35:24   They've actually, that's the other thing,

02:35:26   if I want to go the other way and put on my old man hat,

02:35:29   shortcuts has taken a huge step up

02:35:33   at being a sort of serious automation tool,

02:35:37   like in a way that I was very skeptical

02:35:40   it would ever keep getting better, but it is,

02:35:43   and it's gotten a lot faster.

02:35:45   There are a lot of stupid things that's like,

02:35:48   why is this slow to just make a list of these 10 things

02:35:51   and show a thing, and it's like, why does it take forever?

02:35:53   It's like, now it runs as fast as you think it can,

02:35:56   and why does this bounce me over to the shortcuts app

02:35:58   if it's just gonna show a dialog?

02:36:00   Now it doesn't, it just runs right there,

02:36:03   and you can make little programs.

02:36:05   You can be, and to me, that ability to be

02:36:09   like your own designer who can make the phone

02:36:11   look exactly the way you want

02:36:13   as it gets you into user interface design

02:36:18   in a way that shortcuts can let you be a programmer

02:36:21   and make a little program that does some stupid thing

02:36:23   just for you that makes you happy

02:36:25   is a great way to get you into programming.

02:36:28   And so to me, the two best things about iOS 14

02:36:31   are the shortcuts improvements and the widgets,

02:36:36   which let people-- - It's so good.

02:36:37   I don't know if I'm talking to Federico Vittucci,

02:36:39   Rosemary Orchard, or Matthew Casanelli anymore,

02:36:41   or their shortcuts.

02:36:42   They could have set up a shortcut

02:36:43   just to handle our conversations.

02:36:45   - And it makes me so happy that Apple

02:36:46   has taken a keen interest in this

02:36:49   and that they're listening, you know,

02:36:51   they see people's enthusiasm for it

02:36:53   and jumped on it, like you said,

02:36:54   to make it so that the, you know,

02:36:57   everybody was afraid when everybody customized

02:36:59   these shortcuts that Apple was gonna take it away.

02:37:02   - Yeah, just snatch it. - Right, and be like,

02:37:04   "Oh, we didn't think that you would use these shortcuts

02:37:07   "to launch an app just to make custom icons

02:37:09   "for Instagram or whatever, so we're gonna disable that."

02:37:13   And instead, they made it better

02:37:15   and fixed everybody's complaint

02:37:16   that it boomeranged you through the shortcuts app,

02:37:19   and it's like, ah, they're encouraging

02:37:21   this level of tinkering.

02:37:22   I think that's great.

02:37:24   - And my thing is, as much as Siri's Assistant

02:37:27   is still a frustratingly inconsistent experience,

02:37:29   the on-device intelligence has been great.

02:37:31   Like, I just replaced most of my home screen

02:37:33   with those Siri-selected app widgets,

02:37:35   and almost every time, an app I want

02:37:37   is always right there waiting for me,

02:37:39   and I never have to move home pages anymore.

02:37:41   - The one for me, and it's on-device, clearly,

02:37:45   'cause Apple's been very clear

02:37:47   that the Photos library management stuff happens on-device,

02:37:51   and on the Mac, going back to earlier in the show,

02:37:54   in Activity Monitor, you can see Photos library

02:37:56   running in the background sometimes.

02:37:59   I don't have a lot of widgets that I use.

02:38:01   I have a weather widget from Weatherline,

02:38:02   which is a great third-party app,

02:38:04   and their widgets, by the way, have really gotten,

02:38:07   they started out great, but now they're even better,

02:38:09   where they have, in that same little tiny widget,

02:38:11   they have your next three hours,

02:38:14   and then the next three days.

02:38:15   Side-by-side, oh, Weatherline's a great weather app.

02:38:17   - Yeah, it's so good.

02:38:18   - The built-in Photos widget, and I mean this sincerely,

02:38:22   and I don't think I'm a sappy person

02:38:24   who's prone to purple prose, it's life-changing.

02:38:28   I just have this little, wide, two-by-four widget

02:38:32   at the top of my second home screen

02:38:34   with the built-in Photos widget,

02:38:36   and it just, every day, shows me an old photo

02:38:40   from 10 to 15 years ago,

02:38:43   and they're the most amazing pics you could imagine,

02:38:46   and it's like, it's just a--

02:38:48   - So mine is a mixed blessing,

02:38:50   because I get the exact same thing,

02:38:51   like I'll get pictures of my Godkids

02:38:53   that just melt my heart, and then I'll get a picture

02:38:56   from one of the events that you and I were at

02:38:58   that we can't go to this year,

02:38:59   and I feel like it's trolling me.

02:39:01   - It's really been great for me, seeing family,

02:39:03   and it just, the machine learning on it is clearly driven,

02:39:08   'cause I'll go open it up,

02:39:10   and the ones that they picked to show in the widget

02:39:12   are invariably the better pictures, you know?

02:39:14   - Yes, and I just share them, like, right away.

02:39:17   I never used to share photos like that,

02:39:18   but it'll show me a photo from three years ago,

02:39:20   and I immediately message, send,

02:39:21   and people are like, "Oh, it's so cute."

02:39:22   - And when it shows me ones from the longest ago

02:39:25   that are in my library, where my son is now,

02:39:29   he's about to turn 17, believe it or not.

02:39:32   - Wow. (laughs)

02:39:33   - I was shooting 35-millimeter film until he was,

02:39:37   I forget how old, but like,

02:39:38   the first two to three years of his life,

02:39:41   most of my photos of him as a baby

02:39:44   were shot with a 35-millimeter film camera,

02:39:46   and I scanned the negatives.

02:39:48   And it's probably a stupid thing, but I just kept them all.

02:39:52   So if I shot 36 images, and you know,

02:39:56   maybe, you know, 18 of them were worth keeping,

02:40:00   I just kept the other 18,

02:40:01   even if they were like the back of somebody's head.

02:40:03   'Cause it's like, to me, it's like,

02:40:04   "Well, I paid to get the film developed, I'm gonna keep it."

02:40:07   Whereas if it was a digital photo,

02:40:08   I'd be like, "Gup, delete, delete, delete."

02:40:11   The photos widget never shows me those images.

02:40:14   And it's not just which ones I've like,

02:40:17   hearted in the photos app.

02:40:19   It just has the machine learning to know that,

02:40:23   "Oh, that's a bad picture."

02:40:25   - Yeah, that whole on-device intelligence group

02:40:28   just killed it this year.

02:40:29   They did such good work,

02:40:30   and it goes through the entire system.

02:40:32   - I've talked to a few people who've said the same thing

02:40:34   about the photos widget, and it's like,

02:40:36   I didn't expect,

02:40:38   I expected it to be something that I would delete.

02:40:40   I was like, "I don't know why they're showing me this

02:40:41   by default." - Yeah, same.

02:40:42   - If you did delete it and didn't give it a chance,

02:40:44   that would be like my tip of the week,

02:40:46   would be put the photos widget

02:40:47   back on your second home screen and give it a chance,

02:40:50   and just spend a week or two and just look at the photos.

02:40:54   It surfaces for you.

02:40:56   It's really amazing.

02:40:58   - Yeah, I actually graduated it to my first home screen,

02:41:01   and I have it in the stack, and every once in a while,

02:41:04   it just comes up, and every time, it's fantastic.

02:41:06   - All right, we're propping up on the legal limit

02:41:09   for a podcast length.

02:41:10   - Okay.

02:41:12   - So we're gonna have to cut--

02:41:13   - One more thing?

02:41:14   - One more thing.

02:41:15   Was there anything else that Apple released this year?

02:41:18   I can't remember at this point.

02:41:20   - Just the HomePod Mini,

02:41:22   but I think it's the HomePod Mini at this point.

02:41:24   - The M1 Max, we've talked about it the most recently.

02:41:27   I don't feel bad cutting it short.

02:41:29   It's, to me, the most amazing thing

02:41:32   that Apple's done in years, hardware-wise.

02:41:35   - Yes. - It is a home--

02:41:36   - And not just Apple.

02:41:37   I'd say it's one of the best things in processors

02:41:38   in the last decade.

02:41:39   - Right, it really is.

02:41:40   It's like a reaffirmation in the belief

02:41:44   that computers can keep getting better, right?

02:41:47   It used to be axiomatic, and then it's like

02:41:50   it stopped happening, and we just sort of got beaten

02:41:53   into submission, and it's like, ah, yeah,

02:41:55   I guess computers don't really get better,

02:41:57   and when they do--

02:41:59   - Well, it was like the core.

02:42:00   Like, when Intel came out with core, it was a revolution.

02:42:02   For what, like, they were in the tank, it was a revolution,

02:42:04   and it just changed everything.

02:42:05   I feel like M1 just changes everything,

02:42:08   not just at their high performance.

02:42:09   The high performance is almost like incidental

02:42:12   to the design philosophy that resulted in M1,

02:42:14   but just using a Mac, everything is as instantaneous

02:42:17   as using an iPad, and the quality of life is, to me,

02:42:20   even as impressive as the battery life that we're getting.

02:42:23   - Right, because you know you're doing so much more, right?

02:42:25   And it's like that it's unlike the iPad

02:42:28   where you know apps aren't getting frozen in the background.

02:42:32   - Or jettisoned every three minutes.

02:42:33   - Right, yeah, exactly.

02:42:36   That you are actually getting virtual memory in it,

02:42:40   swapping memory to the SSD, and you can't even tell,

02:42:43   because it's like the performance of getting it back

02:42:46   off the SSD is so fast that it's faster than the RAM

02:42:51   on computers that we're used to.

02:42:52   It's like, it's just really amazing.

02:42:56   I don't know, and--

02:42:59   - It makes you happy.

02:43:00   Like, it makes me smile using the Mac.

02:43:02   And I have not seen a beach ball.

02:43:05   It's like if someone had made a trailer for the movie

02:43:07   and they would say like, imagine, imagine a world

02:43:10   without beach balls, it would be beautiful.

02:43:13   I've totally bought into that.

02:43:14   I've not found a way to beach ball it yet.

02:43:15   - I did once, I forget what I did.

02:43:17   And I was like, I should write this down.

02:43:19   And I can't remember--

02:43:20   - It's probably an Electron app.

02:43:22   - Well, and it's, you know, in terms of ending this show

02:43:25   and ending our look back at Apple's 2020.

02:43:28   Well, they did release the HomePod, or not the HomePod,

02:43:33   the AirPods Mac.

02:43:34   - AirPods Mac.

02:43:35   - Forget 'em, you know.

02:43:36   We don't have time for that.

02:43:39   - No, I like on their AirPods Pro for your over here.

02:43:43   - Yeah, but do I really, it's just--

02:43:46   - The case is funny, but that's a whole other show.

02:43:48   - The case is actually, it really is baffling.

02:43:52   The more I think about it,

02:43:54   and now that they've sort of settled in,

02:43:56   and when you really look at the case

02:43:58   and you can see how it's just sort of a origami project,

02:44:02   you know, that it's--

02:44:03   - Yes.

02:44:04   - If you cut off a piece of this cover from an iPad case,

02:44:08   it's like if we just took this rubber

02:44:10   and cut it like this, you could fold it.

02:44:12   And it's like if--

02:44:12   - It's like chaps, it's like putting chaps on an,

02:44:15   like there's holes in the bum area,

02:44:16   like it's just so strange.

02:44:18   - If it was like a college design student's thesis project,

02:44:22   like here's how you could make a headphone pouch

02:44:27   out of a single piece of leather or rubber,

02:44:32   and you would save material because it's all one piece

02:44:35   and you'd only have to attach it here and here,

02:44:38   it would be like A plus.

02:44:39   This is an A plus student project, this is genius.

02:44:42   - But the cutout doesn't line up with the lightning port,

02:44:44   which is something that I would just drag Samsung for.

02:44:47   I did for years.

02:44:48   - So I figured it out.

02:44:48   It does line up with the headphone port

02:44:52   if you tuck the steel arms all the way up into the headband.

02:44:55   - Oh, okay.

02:44:58   - Well, but who wants to do that?

02:45:00   If--

02:45:01   - No, I don't.

02:45:01   - The comfortable size for the headphone

02:45:03   is with the stems an inch down,

02:45:05   aren't you going to leave them there?

02:45:07   Like that, it's almost worse.

02:45:09   Like I know people are dunking on them

02:45:11   because the lightning port doesn't line up with the notch.

02:45:14   Can you believe we're gonna go longer on the iPad,

02:45:16   the AirPods pouch than the M1 Macs?

02:45:19   But here we are.

02:45:21   No, but I know everybody's dunking on them rightfully

02:45:23   because the lightning port doesn't line up with the notch

02:45:26   for the lightning port,

02:45:28   but it does if you tuck the bars in.

02:45:30   - But that's worse.

02:45:31   - But the bars being sort of stiff and resistant

02:45:35   and holding their position

02:45:36   is literally one of the top selling points they mention

02:45:40   about the device.

02:45:41   So they're like, one of the great things about this device

02:45:44   is that these stems don't have notches

02:45:47   and have this premium feel and they hold their place.

02:45:50   And then once you have it sized in place

02:45:53   and it'll hold its position,

02:45:55   the lightning port will never line up with the notch again.

02:45:59   - It would have been more Apple to me

02:46:01   if there was no case.

02:46:01   Like that would have made more Apple sense

02:46:03   and people would have dragged them for that as well,

02:46:05   but I would have at least said, well, that's Apple.

02:46:06   - Right, it would have.

02:46:08   Nothing is better than something bad

02:46:12   from the Apple mindset.

02:46:13   It's better to have no touch at all on,

02:46:16   you knew I was gonna go here,

02:46:18   better to have no touch at all on the MacBooks

02:46:21   than to have bad touch, right?

02:46:24   That's the Apple mindset.

02:46:26   So I actually agree with you.

02:46:28   I think it would be better.

02:46:29   And I honestly believe, I really do wonder,

02:46:32   the number has to be greater than zero.

02:46:35   At least one person out there

02:46:37   is going to throw away the pouch

02:46:40   thinking it was the packaging.

02:46:42   - Yes, yes.

02:46:43   - I guarantee you, it is so close to--

02:46:46   - David Pogue's wife is gonna throw it away.

02:46:47   - It is so close to being really premium packaging

02:46:52   that you throw away, not a really crappy pouch

02:46:55   that somebody is gonna mistake it for it.

02:46:58   It's so bizarre.

02:46:59   - 100%.

02:47:00   - All right, there we go.

02:47:03   Year in review, wrapped up under the legal three hour limit.

02:47:06   René, everybody, I enjoyed being on your show

02:47:10   a couple times this year, but the most recent one--

02:47:12   - Well, thank you.

02:47:13   - I swear to God, not joking.

02:47:15   I'm gonna put it in the show notes.

02:47:16   We had such a great time talking about touch screens

02:47:20   and whether or not they should or will ever come to the Mac.

02:47:23   I will put a link to the show.

02:47:26   Your whole show, though, is over there on the YouTube,

02:47:28   youtube.com/reneritchie.

02:47:31   Very easy to remember.

02:47:32   Thank you for making it just your name.

02:47:35   Oh, anything else you wanna promote?

02:47:38   What else you wanna promote?

02:47:40   - No, that's it, and I did start a new podcast

02:47:42   with Georgia Dow called Apple Talk

02:47:44   where she talks about the psychology

02:47:45   behind all the technology, and I just try to shut up

02:47:47   and learn all I can.

02:47:48   - And everybody, the best way to find that, I'm sure,

02:47:50   is to go to your favorite podcast app

02:47:51   and just search for Apple Talk.

02:47:53   - Yep, or youtube.com/appletalkshow

02:47:56   'cause Apple Talk was taken.

02:47:57   - But then you can, wait, wait, youtube.com/--

02:48:01   - Apple Talk Show, all one word.

02:48:03   - Oh, Apple Talk Show.

02:48:04   Oh, now you're stepping on my toes here.

02:48:07   - I didn't mean to.

02:48:08   I was trying to get Apple Talk,

02:48:09   and YouTube made it so difficult,

02:48:11   and I'm still trying to pull some strings

02:48:13   and see if I can get it shortened.

02:48:13   - Do you know who the talk show Twitter account,

02:48:17   it's all, it's actually died down

02:48:20   'cause I feel like everybody who makes the mistake

02:48:21   has maybe learned, but the mistake people make

02:48:24   is I get people talking to the talk TV show,

02:48:29   which is like a morning gossip TV show,

02:48:34   and it's definitely a different audience.

02:48:37   (laughs)

02:48:38   - Apple Talk was a Serenity Caldwell idea

02:48:40   'cause she's brilliant at naming,

02:48:41   and she was kind enough to let us use it.

02:48:43   - Well, people can check it out.

02:48:45   I will thank our three sponsors today,

02:48:48   Things from Cultured Code, the great task manager

02:48:52   for Mac and iOS, Linode, which is a great web hosting service

02:48:57   that I use for Daring Fireball,

02:49:00   and of course, Squarespace, where you can host

02:49:02   and build a website with stuff like podcasts,

02:49:05   podcasting, and store, online store,

02:49:08   and everything else you wanna do at Squarespace,

02:49:11   so my thanks for that.

02:49:12   Renee, have a good holiday season,

02:49:16   and I almost can guarantee,

02:49:18   I feel like we can't do worse.

02:49:19   You're gonna have, I'm gonna wish you a better 2021

02:49:22   than you had a 2020.

02:49:23   - Oh, thank you.

02:49:25   Likewise, and happy holidays to you and yours.

02:49:26   (laughs)