The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► So you, this is amazing, might as well open up with it.

00:00:02 ◼   ► There's, I'm reading Twitter last night and all of a sudden I'm thumbing through my Twitter

00:00:07 ◼   ► and there's a picture of you with Tim Cook at a Maple Leafs game.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I was as surprised as anybody.

00:00:16 ◼   ► How the hell did that happen?

00:00:19 ◼   ► So I didn't know.

00:00:21 ◼   ► I was just, like I thought there was going to be just some briefing.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Apple does a lot of these and you do them too.

00:00:26 ◼   ► they would announce something about Hour of Code, or they're going to do a French version,

00:00:31 ◼   ► or they're going to have Canadian-specific content or something. I had no idea. And then

00:00:36 ◼   ► I see the Globe and Mail says Tim Cook is in Canada for a code, and he just dropped

00:00:41 ◼   ► by. He does this. They don't announce it. I'm guessing for security reasons, but also

00:00:46 ◼   ► because it's Apple and it's all about surprise and delight. He just crashed the code session

00:00:50 ◼   ► at the Apple store. And people love that kind of stuff. And he did a couple of interviews

00:00:55 ◼   ► while he was there. And I'm like, "Oh, if I had known, I would have gone. I mean, it's

00:00:59 ◼   ► not that far. It would have been awesome." I'm like, "Oh, too bad." But then I was supposed

00:01:02 ◼   ► to do this meeting later. And then they were very quiet about it. And eventually I just

00:01:09 ◼   ► got a call saying, "Come here, do this, do that." And then, "Okay, Tim's here." And I

00:01:14 ◼   ► just like, "Okay, wow." And he was watching the Leafs game. He was sitting down there

00:01:19 ◼   ► with one of the Hockey Night in Canada announcers, former hockey player, just enjoying the show.

00:01:25 ◼   ► And then he came up and said hi to some of the Apple people there.

00:01:28 ◼   ► And then I was towards the back of the line, and then eventually I got a chance to say

00:01:32 ◼   ► hi to him as well.

00:01:38 ◼   ► That's amazing.

00:01:39 ◼   ► Who won the game?

00:01:40 ◼   ► The Maple Leafs did not win the game.

00:01:42 ◼   ► The team formerly known as the Quebec Nordique, which I think now use some weird name like

00:01:46 ◼   ► the Colorado Avalanche one.

00:01:48 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Americans take a lot of Canadian teams and make them super successful, so we're a little

00:01:54 ◼   ► bit bitter. All right. So it's a good thing. It's funny because I originally was going

00:02:01 ◼   ► to try to record this with you yesterday, which was Monday, the 22nd of January. And

00:02:09 ◼   ► instead we had to push it back till today, the 23rd. And in the meantime, he went to

00:02:13 ◼   ► a hockey game with Tim Cook and Apple. Can I say finally, I believe I'm the arbiter

00:02:22 ◼   ► of finalies, of appropriate finalies. And I'm going to give this a finally plus a

00:02:31 ◼   ► pending finally. They've finally announced that HomePod is coming out and what the schedule

00:02:38 ◼   ► is. Orders start this coming Friday, probably a few days after this episode lands, and it

00:02:47 ◼   ► start shipping two weeks after that on February the 9th and I guess it will be in retail stores

00:02:52 ◼   ► at the same time too. Presumably there will be reviews in between as we record and February 9th,

00:03:03 ◼   ► but I don't know anything about that yet. No, and we can't even draw upon AirPods because those,

00:03:09 ◼   ► I mean, they originally planned to get those out earlier and they seeded them and then they didn't

00:03:14 ◼   ► get it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was weird. Because we got

00:03:17 ◼   ► priest. It is funny. And I will come back to that. Because the

00:03:21 ◼   ► more we learn about home pod, the more it really does kind of

00:03:25 ◼   ► seem like AirPods as speakers. Yes, that's exactly the way I

00:03:32 ◼   ► would describe it. And it's similar even down to the fact of

00:03:36 ◼   ► being late. But one difference is that when AirPods were on the

00:03:43 ◼   ► the cusp of shipping a year ago. Did you get up the pre release

00:03:47 ◼   ► pair? I don't think that I think they were seated pretty

00:03:50 ◼   ► liberally. We got pre release air pods that, in my experience

00:03:58 ◼   ► using them was indistinguishable from the final ones, although I

00:04:01 ◼   ► think maybe, although I don't know if it was a hardware thing

00:04:05 ◼   ► or subsequent software things. As much as I loved them right

00:04:11 ◼   ► the first day with the prototypes, I have to say that now, a year later, I think they're

00:04:16 ◼   ► even more reliable than before. But they were very serious about those being prototypes.

00:04:25 ◼   ► And when they shipped the shipping ones, they wanted those prototypes back in the mail the

00:04:29 ◼   ► next day. It was the only review product I've ever gotten from Apple where there was any

00:04:35 ◼   ► hint of pressure of "send it back right now."

00:04:38 ◼   ► It's like I wondered if there was like, maybe it didn't use lithium ion, maybe it used kryptonite

00:04:42 ◼   ► as the battery just to make it work.

00:04:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:04:45 ◼   ► The demeanor was always Apple friendly.

00:04:48 ◼   ► It was always, it wasn't like they sent the Brute Squad, big angry people to come collect

00:04:56 ◼   ► them.

00:04:57 ◼   ► But it was, get them in the mail.

00:05:02 ◼   ► I have no idea why.

00:05:05 ◼   ► I think just in general, Apple is one of those companies that they don't want pre-release

00:05:08 ◼   ► stuff out there because you never know what's going to happen to it.

00:05:10 ◼   ► So, who knows what the difference is? I think that because these are a little bit less of

00:05:17 ◼   ► a justice, you know, there is some similarities to AirPods, but I don't think, I'm not surprised

00:05:23 ◼   ► that they didn't seed prototype HomePods outside the company.

00:05:27 ◼   ► Yeah. Although they did a huge seeding of prototype HomePods inside the company.

00:05:33 ◼   ► I have heard the same thing that it was pretty widespread internal seating amongst employees.

00:05:40 ◼   ► And you know, I guess we in geographies beyond what they've already announced.

00:05:44 ◼   ► Yeah. And I think that doesn't that go all the way back to the big on the eve of the

00:05:50 ◼   ► iPhone 10 and iPhone eight announcement the it was a HomePod firmware update that leaked

00:06:00 ◼   ► a bunch of details like the name iPhone with a capital X that we didn't know how to pronounce.

00:06:06 ◼   ► It was a HomePod release. And I guess the reason that that was even possibly on and

00:06:11 ◼   ► over the, you know, public to the world server was that they were already at the time, seated

00:06:17 ◼   ► widely within the company to people to use it on. Absolutely. Alright, so the that's

00:06:22 ◼   ► the dates, the price is the same. I don't think we learned much more about the functionality

00:06:29 ◼   ► from the updated product page. But my pending finally is that in some very small print,

00:06:40 ◼   ► not one of the headlines, the iPod or the HomePod announcement also included the news

00:06:46 ◼   ► that AirPlay 2 will be coming later this year. And what that means for HomePod early adopters

00:06:54 ◼   ► is that at least three of the promised features

00:06:59 ◼   ► will have to wait until Airplate 2 ships, those are.

00:07:04 ◼   ► First, the ability to buy two HomePods,

00:07:09 ◼   ► put them in the same room and have them coordinate

00:07:12 ◼   ► with each other to work in stereo,

00:07:16 ◼   ► which I believe they demoed that for us back at WWDC, right?

00:07:23 ◼   ► I'm not misremembering that.

00:07:24 ◼   ► I seem to recall.

00:07:24 ◼   ► - No, absolutely, they had two of them.

00:07:26 ◼   ► So I'm confused about the stereo part of this.

00:07:28 ◼   ► So, and maybe it's because I'm completely ignorant

00:07:30 ◼   ► about audio, but the way that it works

00:07:33 ◼   ► is it uses computational audio to sort of model the room

00:07:36 ◼   ► and then project sound into different parts of it.

00:07:38 ◼   ► So the way that you traditionally think about stereo

00:07:41 ◼   ► is if you want sound on the left,

00:07:41 ◼   ► you have to have a speaker on the left.

00:07:43 ◼   ► If you want sound on the right,

00:07:44 ◼   ► you have to have a speaker on the right

00:07:45 ◼   ► where this projects and bounces sound

00:07:47 ◼   ► to all different parts of it.

00:07:48 ◼   ► So the stereo thing doesn't seem to fit for me.

00:07:52 ◼   ► And I know Apple is using the word

00:07:53 ◼   ► And I just wonder, like originally my understanding was

00:07:56 ◼   ► you'd put more home pods to fill bigger areas that,

00:07:59 ◼   ► because it's a speaker, it's still got limited range.

00:08:01 ◼   ► And if you wanted a bigger room, you'd put two.

00:08:04 ◼   ► If you wanted an even bigger room, you'd put three.

00:08:06 ◼   ► But when we talk about stereo,

00:08:07 ◼   ► I just, I wonder maybe it's cleaner

00:08:09 ◼   ► because you don't have to do the bouncing

00:08:10 ◼   ► or the sort of trickery or the magic

00:08:13 ◼   ► to get the sound in different parts.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And you can more clearly isolate them.

00:08:16 ◼   ► So maybe it's a better stereo or surround experience

00:08:19 ◼   ► with multiple home pods.

00:08:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I that's actually interesting. And linguistically, I'd never thought I've I had the exact same

00:08:29 ◼   ► thought Renee and I'm wondering if it'll be possible if they say two but if if like you're

00:08:33 ◼   ► saying like, once airplane two comes out, could you get three or four to fill like a

00:08:38 ◼   ► sufficiently big?

00:08:40 ◼   ► I asked and they they just said like, if you really want to it should and I don't know

00:08:44 ◼   ► if this has changed or if I'm remembering it wrong. But my understanding was you could

00:08:47 ◼   ► put several of them in and it would just figure it out. But that most people would never need

00:08:50 ◼   ► to put that many in one room.

00:08:51 ◼   ► Right. And I do think it's, you know, again, it's often best to take Apple in its most

00:09:00 ◼   ► obvious way. The name is HomePod. So it's not, you know, these things aren't meant for

00:09:04 ◼   ► like a commercial, you know, a big commercial space that would be bigger than what someone

00:09:10 ◼   ► would typically consider a home.

00:09:11 ◼   ► StadiumPod.

00:09:12 ◼   ► Right. But it is interesting. I've always thought of stereo, the word stereo, like you

00:09:18 ◼   ► just said, like just left and right. Literally left, not just two, but left and right. But

00:09:25 ◼   ► now that I think about it as like a word nerd, the root isn't like duo or something. It's

00:09:33 ◼   ► not duophonic. And so I'm looking up stereo here. And the dictionary word, the first one

00:09:39 ◼   ► is sound that is directed through two or more speakers so that it seems to surround the

00:09:44 ◼   ► the listener and come from more than one source stereophonic sound. But if you scroll down

00:09:49 ◼   ► to just the prefix "stereo" as a combining form, this makes more sense. "Relating to

00:09:57 ◼   ► solid forms having three dimensions stereography." So I think in theory you could have more than

00:10:03 ◼   ► two and it would just figure it out. And I think even when you do have only two, I think

00:10:06 ◼   ► be a lot less about left and right and a lot more about how best to make it sound like

00:10:15 ◼   ► the music is coming from as many sources as possible.

00:10:17 ◼   ► Right, better making that 3D model for the room.

00:10:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that makes sense.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I think thinking of it as 3D makes more sense as to how the two will coordinate than

00:10:28 ◼   ► left-right.

00:10:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:30 ◼   ► Right?

00:10:31 ◼   ► And it's almost like left-right literally is just two-dimensional, whereas it's really

00:10:34 ◼   ► more about three-dimensional.

00:10:36 ◼   ► And I seem to recall that from the demo.

00:10:38 ◼   ► I mean, what I recall, I mean, and you know, this is, geez, what was that like eight months

00:10:43 ◼   ► ago?

00:10:44 ◼   ► Yeah, June 2017.

00:10:46 ◼   ► I remember that it sounded good.

00:10:47 ◼   ► And almost most of the demo was here's a song, we'll play it on the on one, you know, the

00:10:53 ◼   ► single home pod, then we'll play it on the, what was it a Sonos thing?

00:10:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and then we'll play it on the little set of Amazon tin cans.

00:11:02 ◼   ► Well, the Amazon thing really came off looking bad in that demo.

00:11:06 ◼   ► I was in with, as much as I don't know music, but I was in with Dalrymple, which was hugely

00:11:11 ◼   ► informative for me because he is, I don't know what the right, but he is like almost

00:11:16 ◼   ► angry about the quality of his music.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And they showed us, they played normal songs and they played some live recordings.

00:11:24 ◼   ► And as little as I know or appreciate sound, I have Sonos at home.

00:11:28 ◼   ► I've had it for years.

00:11:29 ◼   ► I'm all in on Sonos.

00:11:30 ◼   ► It was way better than Sonos for almost all the songs.

00:11:33 ◼   ► I think one of it, it sounded about as good as Sonos,

00:11:35 ◼   ► but the live stuff and some of the other stuff,

00:11:37 ◼   ► it sounded just as good.

00:11:38 ◼   ► And it totally, rightfully so,

00:11:40 ◼   ► because the Amazon really was a speaker second

00:11:42 ◼   ► and a voice assistant first,

00:11:44 ◼   ► but it totally embarrassed the Echo.

00:11:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm an interesting contrast to Jim

00:11:48 ◼   ► because I'm, not that I don't care about audio,

00:11:52 ◼   ► but I really just, I just don't think I have good ears

00:11:55 ◼   ► for it, you know, and I'm not musical at all.

00:11:58 ◼   ► I like music, you know, certain types of music.

00:12:02 ◼   ► But it's a much more, as opposed to like my opinions

00:12:07 ◼   ► on let's say a TV, you know, the way a TV set looks.

00:12:10 ◼   ► I have very strong opinions about every regard.

00:12:13 ◼   ► - Exactly, yeah.

00:12:15 ◼   ► - But as a casual music fan,

00:12:18 ◼   ► I would have to look back at my notes,

00:12:19 ◼   ► but as I recall, that was my take exactly.

00:12:21 ◼   ► There was one song where I didn't feel like I could

00:12:24 ◼   ► Pepsi Challenge and prefer the HomePod over Sonos.

00:12:29 ◼   ► I would have called it a draw, but every other one,

00:12:31 ◼   ► I felt confident that even as a, as you would say, a punter,

00:12:35 ◼   ► that I thought the HomePod sounded better.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And anyway, at the end of the demo, then,

00:12:43 ◼   ► it was like, here's the one more thing of the little demo.

00:12:45 ◼   ► I think it was always with,

00:12:46 ◼   ► it was like groups of like four and five at a time

00:12:49 ◼   ► in a sort of living room size space.

00:12:53 ◼   ► I was going to say Moscone, but of course it's not called Moscone. What's that place

00:12:56 ◼   ► called?

00:12:57 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino San Jose.

00:12:58 ◼   ► Jon Scieszka The San Jose.

00:12:59 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino The San Jose.

00:13:00 ◼   ► Jon Scieszka The San Jose mouthful convention center.

00:13:01 ◼   ► There was, you know, typically, it's just the Apple formula. It's like, here's the one

00:13:08 ◼   ► more thing. If you have a second one, you can do this. And it was like, here's what

00:13:12 ◼   ► the song sounds like with one home pod and sounded pretty good. And I remember when the

00:13:16 ◼   ► second one kicked in, it did sound better. And it did sound fuller.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Fuller. Yeah.

00:13:22 ◼   ► That's what I remember, the noticing the difference with Sonos. And again, I've used Sonos for

00:13:27 ◼   ► years. I have a ton of their stuff. It just sounded richer and deeper and more like, like

00:13:33 ◼   ► more of an emotional experience. And then when the second one came on, it was just written,

00:13:38 ◼   ► just even better. It was just fuller.

00:13:40 ◼   ► Yeah. It's like I know, it's like somehow I know when I come into, you know, somebody's

00:13:46 ◼   ► house and they're playing music or movies or something and or you're in a bar or something

00:13:52 ◼   ► and you hear it. There's a certain part of me that can detect, "Hey, this is a serious

00:13:56 ◼   ► sound system." I can't explain why. I can't tell you what it is. I can just tell somebody

00:14:02 ◼   ► put some money into this thing. And that's absolutely what it sounded like with the two

00:14:09 ◼   ► HomePods.

00:14:10 ◼   ► Yeah, totally. It's like when you go in and you hear someone listening to a sound bar

00:14:14 ◼   ► as opposed to hear them listening to a 5.1 or 7.1 surround system that's been properly

00:14:18 ◼   ► set up.

00:14:21 ◼   ► Still though, lots and lots of unanswered questions about HomePod, in my opinion, which

00:14:30 ◼   ► I hope we'll get before it ships, but which I don't think we're going to get before pre-orders

00:14:37 ◼   ► open, which leads to the interesting dilemma, probably for an awful lot of people who are

00:14:43 ◼   ► listening to us on this show of do you wait until you find out more before you spend $350

00:14:51 ◼   ► on this thing or do you buy in advance hoping that the answers will either be good or do

00:15:03 ◼   ► you take your chances that maybe if you wait until you do get the answers that it won't

00:15:09 ◼   ► be backordered for four months or something like that, right? Because that's the dance

00:15:13 ◼   ► you have to play.

00:15:14 ◼   ► I was just joking about that on Twitter. It seems like every time Apple announces something,

00:15:18 ◼   ► Twitter starts saying how stupid Apple is and how stupid the product is. And then when

00:15:21 ◼   ► they ship it, Twitter starts talking about how stupid it is that they can't order it

00:15:24 ◼   ► immediately.

00:15:25 ◼   ► Yes.

00:15:26 ◼   ► Like that's like the seventh stage of the Twitter.

00:15:28 ◼   ► You never know. And Apple, you know, talking about things like, "Hey, this is going to

00:15:32 ◼   ► be in short supply," isn't really what people who know talk about even off the record. But

00:15:39 ◼   ► But my gut feeling is that it may not be back ordered, like, certainly not like AirPods

00:15:47 ◼   ► were for most of the year last year.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Well, it's so restricted, like AirPods were an international product.

00:15:52 ◼   ► This is only launching in the US, Australia and the UK right now.

00:15:55 ◼   ► And then sometime this spring in France and Germany.

00:15:58 ◼   ► So it's a much smaller market for them to service.

00:15:59 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing that I have heard, and I suspect you've probably heard similar

00:16:05 ◼   ► is that the hardware was way ahead of the software on this.

00:16:09 ◼   ► And that, I think if it weren't for software,

00:16:13 ◼   ► this would have shipped as promised in calendar year 2017.

00:16:18 ◼   ► - Totally, and people immediately blame Siri,

00:16:20 ◼   ► but SiriKit shipped for the Apple TV last,

00:16:23 ◼   ► sorry, for the HomePod last fall.

00:16:26 ◼   ► AirPlay 2 is still not fully out.

00:16:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it, you know, so certainly

00:16:31 ◼   ► the development of AirPlay 2 is one factor,

00:16:35 ◼   ► because they were originally planning to, you know,

00:16:39 ◼   ► features that were advertised as this is gonna be

00:16:41 ◼   ► in this thing by the end of the year

00:16:43 ◼   ► were based on AirPlay 2.

00:16:45 ◼   ► So given that AirPlay 2 still isn't out,

00:16:47 ◼   ► the delay, you know, whatever's the delay of AirPlay 2

00:16:51 ◼   ► is certainly one reason.

00:16:52 ◼   ► I suspect that there are others, I don't know,

00:16:55 ◼   ► just some things, I don't know anything else specific.

00:16:57 ◼   ► But I heard multiple times though

00:16:59 ◼   ► that it's the software, not the hardware.

00:17:02 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:17:03 ◼   ► And I've heard multiple times too

00:17:04 ◼   ► that it's not, I mean, there is a legitimate complaint

00:17:07 ◼   ► to be made that Siri, I mean, we could back up a little bit.

00:17:09 ◼   ► Apple's been working on this for years.

00:17:11 ◼   ► And when I look at an Apple product,

00:17:13 ◼   ► I try to figure out what problem is Apple

00:17:15 ◼   ► trying to solve with this.

00:17:16 ◼   ► And it looked, at least I think to Apple,

00:17:19 ◼   ► it looked like we don't have a solution for you.

00:17:21 ◼   ► You have all this Apple Music stuff,

00:17:23 ◼   ► you have, and you just can't drop something in.

00:17:25 ◼   ► And it's sort of what the iPod Hi-Fi

00:17:27 ◼   ► was trying to solve as well.

00:17:28 ◼   ► And we wanna give people a way to just buy something

00:17:31 ◼   ► that's Apple designed, and that is incredibly simple

00:17:34 ◼   ► to just drop into your room and it sounds really, really great.

00:17:38 ◼   ► And it's easy to set up, as easy as AirPods--

00:17:40 ◼   ► AirPods shipped earlier-- as easy as AirPods to ship up,

00:17:42 ◼   ► we have that technology.

00:17:44 ◼   ► And we've done computational photography.

00:17:46 ◼   ► We can do computational audio.

00:17:49 ◼   ► And in that light, the Siri stuff is secondary.

00:17:52 ◼   ► AirPods are controlled through Siri.

00:17:53 ◼   ► And they can access the vast catalog of Siri things.

00:17:56 ◼   ► But that's a convenience.

00:17:57 ◼   ► It's the best way to interface with that product.

00:18:00 ◼   ► And HomePod is the same.

00:18:02 ◼   ► It can do Siri stuff.

00:18:03 ◼   ► It's controlled with Siri and you might as well use it to control home kit and to do those things

00:18:08 ◼   ► But it really it really was an audio solution

00:18:11 ◼   ► It really was a speaker that Apple spent a lot of time and put an incredible amount of technology into making a

00:18:16 ◼   ► Lot of people have been asking me today

00:18:19 ◼   ► What do I think the reason is for the software delay

00:18:25 ◼   ► What's the reason and I I don't know I don't have any inside information on anything specifically other than obviously

00:18:31 ◼   ► Airplay 2 is taking on but why is it airplay 2 taking longer? I

00:18:35 ◼   ► That's the nature of software. I mean software projects often take

00:18:41 ◼   ► longer sometimes a lot longer than you thought they would even when what you thought they would you

00:18:48 ◼   ► Multiplied by 2x because you think well, here's how long I think it'll take

00:18:53 ◼   ► I'll multiply it by 2 because it always takes me twice as long as I think and you still come up short

00:18:58 ◼   ► It's just the best way to describe it without like well

00:19:02 ◼   ► I think the best way to describe it is let's say you wanted to ship the

00:19:04 ◼   ► iPad the iMac Pro and you put that to that t2 chip in and in the process of setting up t2 you realize that there

00:19:11 ◼   ► was a

00:19:13 ◼   ► web of

00:19:14 ◼   ► authentication stuff that had been built up over the years but had some architectural issues that you really that you'd never taken the time to

00:19:21 ◼   ► Go back and fix but we're now

00:19:23 ◼   ► Problematic to get that product to ship now that did not happen with the eye with the iMac Pro

00:19:28 ◼   ► We did get you know, the ridiculous root blank stuff that surfaced but nothing to stop the product

00:19:34 ◼   ► And I think this is similar to in making airplay - they hit some things that that were just long

00:19:39 ◼   ► Long existing issues in the code that they never needed to address before and in order to make this work

00:19:44 ◼   ► They had to go back and address them and they've addressed to the point where it functions now

00:19:49 ◼   ► But it's not at the point yet where all those features are available

00:19:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and either going back to fix things that you didn't think would be so hard to fix or solving problems that you didn't

00:19:59 ◼   ► And you know that some step along the way was a lot harder

00:20:02 ◼   ► Than you thought it was going to be or some step along the way of solving this new problem

00:20:07 ◼   ► You you go down a dead end and have to go back because it actually doesn't work. I mean, that's

00:20:13 ◼   ► software is like

00:20:17 ◼   ► It's a lot like writing and to me it's always often very similar to the idea

00:20:22 ◼   ► You know that it's like being a lawmaker, you know

00:20:26 ◼   ► Like trying to you know, when you when lawmakers write laws

00:20:30 ◼   ► They hopefully should take take their time and write them in a way that it's very clear

00:20:36 ◼   ► What is and is not against the law?

00:20:39 ◼   ► But if you think like you've got you know

00:20:44 ◼   ► we've got here's an mpeg3 audio file and

00:20:48 ◼   ► We want it to go through this speaker

00:20:52 ◼   ► over the air in a certain way over a certain protocol and have certain things happen to analyze the music and

00:21:00 ◼   ► Then come out of these tweeters in this base in this way, you know, yeah

00:21:06 ◼   ► That's not fully thought out that's just an outline and as you fill that in

00:21:13 ◼   ► to actually make it completely thought out, that's the actual programming, right?

00:21:18 ◼   ► It's never actually fully thought out until the programming is complete.

00:21:23 ◼   ► And so you never know when you're going from the plan for the software to the actual software

00:21:29 ◼   ► where you're going to hit a point that is

00:21:31 ◼   ► way tougher, trickier, takes longer than you thought it would.

00:21:35 ◼   ► Yeah, and the requirements, like we've all experienced issues with airplay and with core audio that are

00:21:42 ◼   ► mildly annoying when you're just trying to project your video or record something, but

00:21:48 ◼   ► there would be absolute deal breakers if the product had to be rock solid, reliable streaming

00:21:52 ◼   ► audio all the time. And that just can't ship that way. Like you've got to go back and fix

00:21:55 ◼   ► all that stuff.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, I'm not making excuses for them. It does look bad. That's something that they

00:22:02 ◼   ► were promised that they promised to ship by the end of 2017 in June. Now in January is

00:22:09 ◼   ► later 2018. I mean, it could be pushing up for all we know, it could be pushing up against

00:22:15 ◼   ► WWDC again. I would guess that it's better than shipping it because if they shipped in

00:22:23 ◼   ► that didn't work, that would be even worse. Right? That's what I don't get. Like, I'm

00:22:27 ◼   ► not saying Apple comes out. I'm not making excuses for them. I'm just explaining what

00:22:31 ◼   ► I tried to explain what the situation is. And you know, you could say that, you know,

00:22:39 ◼   ► You can be mad at them if you want and you can say that this is a worrisome sign that

00:22:43 ◼   ► maybe the company is slipping. It's not like it used to be even though I can name

00:22:48 ◼   ► a long list of products that shipped late. I was just pointing out earlier this week

00:22:53 ◼   ► on an article I wrote that this wouldn't have happened under Steve Jobs' crowd. Steve

00:22:59 ◼   ► Jobs was there when the white iPhone 4 shipped 10 months late. It was almost a full year

00:23:06 ◼   ► after the black version shipped, which I remember distinctly because my wife was like, "You

00:23:11 ◼   ► know what?

00:23:12 ◼   ► I'm going to get the white one."

00:23:13 ◼   ► No, I had the same experience.

00:23:16 ◼   ► We should make a name for this law, but whenever someone says Steve Jobs would never, almost

00:23:21 ◼   ► certainly he did at some point or was involved in the decision-making process that led to

00:23:25 ◼   ► the product you think Steve would never have let Apple make.

00:23:28 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a lot like there's always a Trump tweet for whatever.

00:23:31 ◼   ► Like with this government shutdown that we had here in the US last weekend, there were

00:23:35 ◼   ► all these, the last time that the US federal government shut down, Trump was on TV and

00:23:41 ◼   ► on Twitter reiterating one message, which is that no matter what, the government shutdown

00:23:48 ◼   ► is always the fault of the president.

00:23:50 ◼   ► Yeah. No, I mean, it's absolutely true. And I would just rather people stop making that

00:23:57 ◼   ► argument because you never look good in hindsight.

00:24:00 ◼   ► But anyway, it is what it is.

00:24:03 ◼   ► But the interesting dilemma, as you alluded to, is you wish that there were no delay.

00:24:08 ◼   ► You wish everything was all ready and the thing had shipped before Christmas and AirPlay

00:24:12 ◼   ► 2 is bug-free and solves all the AirPlay problems.

00:24:16 ◼   ► But that didn't happen.

00:24:17 ◼   ► Well, it would have been better for Apple because the competitive market is much different

00:24:21 ◼   ► now than it was.

00:24:22 ◼   ► When Apple first announced it, there were no products, as far as I can remember, that

00:24:28 ◼   ► were doing multi-personal assistance.

00:24:29 ◼   ► that would do voice ID and try to figure out different people.

00:24:32 ◼   ► There was no Google Home Max.

00:24:34 ◼   ► There was no product that really had a good speaker attached

00:24:36 ◼   ► to a good assistant.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And in the months since the products have been delayed,

00:24:40 ◼   ► Google put that service online.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Amazon put that service online.

00:24:43 ◼   ► They're both producing better speakers now.

00:24:44 ◼   ► So Apple's entering a market much later

00:24:47 ◼   ► with a much earlier product than they would have liked.

00:24:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:50 ◼   ► So given where they are as of late December 2017,

00:24:55 ◼   ► with hardware that is apparently ready to go

00:24:57 ◼   ► and software that could be made ready to go

00:25:02 ◼   ► modulo AirPlay 2, therefore missing some features

00:25:05 ◼   ► in the meantime.

00:25:06 ◼   ► What do you do if it's your decision to make the call?

00:25:09 ◼   ► Do you make the whole product wait until AirPlay 2's ready,

00:25:13 ◼   ► or do you ship what you have and crack the whips

00:25:17 ◼   ► on the AirPlay 2 team to get it out as soon as you can?

00:25:20 ◼   ► I think I--

00:25:21 ◼   ► - I don't think that team has slept since before Christmas.

00:25:23 ◼   ► - I think I would have made, if it was up to me,

00:25:25 ◼   ► I would have made the same decision Apple has made

00:25:27 ◼   ► and ship it now. I mean, we'll see once I get the product. I mean, you know, maybe the

00:25:30 ◼   ► thing's a disaster, but you know, assuming that it's everything that they are saying

00:25:34 ◼   ► it will do right out of the box on day one works. I think it's worth shipping. I think,

00:25:40 ◼   ► you know, I think there's a benefit to shipping both hardware and software for an indie one

00:25:45 ◼   ► person creative shop or the world's most profitable corporation. Shipping is, you know, it's good

00:25:53 ◼   ► and waiting for perfection can lead you to very long delays.

00:25:58 ◼   ► You can't ship a product that doesn't

00:26:00 ◼   ► perform its basic function, which

00:26:02 ◼   ► I think was why Apple delayed it to begin with.

00:26:04 ◼   ► It's got to be rock solid in terms of being a speaker.

00:26:07 ◼   ► Once that happens, if it's missing

00:26:08 ◼   ► a few of the more advanced features, it's not ideal,

00:26:11 ◼   ► but you can ship it and get it in people's hands.

00:26:14 ◼   ► And that's one of the things with Apple.

00:26:16 ◼   ► Johnny Ives said this, that they don't really

00:26:18 ◼   ► believe they understand their own products

00:26:19 ◼   ► until they get them to the hands of the customers,

00:26:21 ◼   ► because often the reaction to them

00:26:23 ◼   ► Informs where Apple takes them and this gets that into people's hands it there

00:26:26 ◼   ► They're late to market but they're not as late as they would be if they kept it

00:26:29 ◼   ► Off market until airplay 2 is finished. So I think it's it's the best situation they can do right now

00:26:34 ◼   ► Boy, is that isn't the best example of that ever the Apple watch where yeah

00:26:39 ◼   ► It's so there's so much more clarity in Apple's direction of it

00:26:44 ◼   ► Starting a year after it came out

00:26:47 ◼   ► You know focusing it on notifications and fitness

00:26:52 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know reliability, I mean there's some of the stuff like the fact that the first one was so slow

00:26:58 ◼   ► Well, duh everybody. I mean Apple knew that I mean

00:27:00 ◼   ► Honestly, it's probably the only product I've ever seen in history where I you know during the product briefings

00:27:08 ◼   ► I was I was they apologized for how slow it was

00:27:12 ◼   ► Yeah, and I was operating at the thermal limits of that casing at the time, right?

00:27:15 ◼   ► We're sorry. That's so slow

00:27:20 ◼   ► But that's really true for Apple watch

00:27:22 ◼   ► All right. Let's take a break. But when we come back I want to talk about

00:27:26 ◼   ► HomePod versus in the competitive landscape, which you just alluded to about what and especially the post June

00:27:33 ◼   ► Competitive landscape which really is different

00:27:36 ◼   ► But first

00:27:40 ◼   ► Do you know what's a fun thing to do on the internet I'll tell you what's a fun thing to do on the internet is

00:27:46 ◼   ► buy a mattress

00:27:47 ◼   ► Casper is a company who makes products

00:27:51 ◼   ► that are cleverly designed to mimic human curves,

00:27:56 ◼   ► providing supportive comfort for all kinds of bodies.

00:27:59 ◼   ► And they make it so easy to buy a mattress

00:28:03 ◼   ► or any of their other sleeping products.

00:28:05 ◼   ► Look, you spend one third of your life sleeping,

00:28:09 ◼   ► so you should be comfortable.

00:28:11 ◼   ► It really is, getting a nice bed and a comfortable mattress

00:28:15 ◼   ► is money so well spent, really is.

00:28:18 ◼   ► The experts at Casper, they work tirelessly

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00:28:39 ◼   ► regulates your body temperature through the night.

00:28:42 ◼   ► And they have over 20,000 reviews

00:28:44 ◼   ► and an average of 4.8 stars across Casper, Amazon, and Google.

00:28:50 ◼   ► Maybe you say, "Well, maybe on their own site, you can't really take that." You can't fake

00:28:53 ◼   ► those Amazon reviews, really. It really is a popular product. I know a lot of people

00:28:59 ◼   ► who've bought them. They advertise on a bunch of podcasts. Like I said upfront, it's a gimmick

00:29:05 ◼   ► now. It's almost like a joke buying mattresses on the internet, but it's a real deal. It

00:29:10 ◼   ► really is. They now offer two other types of mattresses, the wave and the essential.

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00:29:42 ◼   ► completely satisfied. I've gotten a couple of them. I've they've been sponsoring the

00:29:45 ◼   ► show for so long. I've gotten a couple of emails from people who said, you know what?

00:29:49 ◼   ► I listened to your show. I bought a Casper. I actually didn't like it. Uh, and the one

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00:30:04 ◼   ► They were like, "So that's a mattress?"

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00:30:57 ◼   ► I've been using Casper for years. I absolutely adore it.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Competitive landscape. So I can think of two things in this regard. One, and you alluded

00:31:08 ◼   ► to this, the audio quality of some of the competing products has gotten better since

00:31:14 ◼   ► June. Two, and I think this is the more important one, is that the competing products, which

00:31:26 ◼   ► I think it's safe to say are primarily from Google and Amazon, right? It's Google and

00:31:30 ◼   ► Amazon. Microsoft has Cortana speakers, but they're not a thing really. I never hear anybody

00:31:35 ◼   ► talking about it. The other ones, the Google and Amazon ones are sort of assistant first

00:31:43 ◼   ► audio quality second. And I always say this is like maybe one of the top three themes

00:31:48 ◼   ► of my entire body of work is that the order of your priorities matters tremendously. Like

00:31:56 ◼   ► Like it's not enough to say that you want something, you know, we want it to be well-designed

00:32:04 ◼   ► and high quality.

00:32:08 ◼   ► If you want it to be high quality and well-designed, you might end up with a different product

00:32:12 ◼   ► just by taking those two things and putting them in a different order, right?

00:32:16 ◼   ► Like you might, you know, if the highest quality like durability is more important than the

00:32:21 ◼   ► elegance of the design, you might end up with something that's a little thicker, uses different

00:32:26 ◼   ► materials, etc. Even though those are two priorities that might go hand in hand in many

00:32:31 ◼   ► ways, a subtle difference in order makes a difference.

00:32:36 ◼   ► Absolutely. And for some people, the people that Apple chooses not to compete in usually

00:32:40 ◼   ► is the people for whom the low price is the most important feature.

00:32:45 ◼   ► Right. And that certainly is going to be true in this regard because one of the most, right

00:32:51 ◼   ► off the top you can't miss it. The difference is that these other devices are sort of hovering

00:32:56 ◼   ► around the $150 range. Amazon has the little pucks that give them away with some things

00:33:05 ◼   ► I think.

00:33:06 ◼   ► They're going to start paying you soon to take them.

00:33:07 ◼   ► Right. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah.

00:33:09 ◼   ► You said this so well with the AirPods. People complained about the price there too because

00:33:14 ◼   ► they were comparing them to traditional headphones or traditional Bluetooth headphones or headphones

00:33:19 ◼   ► that they thought sounded better, but it was not at all about the sound. It was about the

00:33:22 ◼   ► technology from the W1 chip to the sensors. That was expensive components. And if Apple

00:33:28 ◼   ► could have charged less for it, I think they would have because that was not a product

00:33:32 ◼   ► they wanted to make margin on. That was a product they wanted to create market for.

00:33:37 ◼   ► I'm just imagining, I've suddenly imagined a, a idiocracy like near future where Amazon

00:33:48 ◼   ► has flooded the world with free Echo pucks with free offers and everywhere you go, you

00:33:54 ◼   ► goddamn things are like, would you like some paper towels?

00:33:57 ◼   ► Hey, you want more?

00:33:58 ◼   ► Can you turn on my lights?

00:34:00 ◼   ► Sure.

00:34:01 ◼   ► We can turn on your lights.

00:34:02 ◼   ► We could also order you three more and have you, would you like a coupon for your morning

00:34:04 ◼   ► coffee?

00:34:06 ◼   ► Do you need more trash bags?

00:34:09 ◼   ► No, I mean, so that's the other thing here,

00:34:11 ◼   ► is that privacy and security are also a feature.

00:34:14 ◼   ► I know a lot of people just kind of lump all these products

00:34:17 ◼   ► together.

00:34:18 ◼   ► And I've said this before.

00:34:19 ◼   ► I really don't want a Google speaker or an Amazon speaker

00:34:24 ◼   ► in my house.

00:34:24 ◼   ► And famously, every year, I buy whatever the new Nexus

00:34:27 ◼   ► or the new Pixel is.

00:34:29 ◼   ► And I still can't use Google Assistant,

00:34:30 ◼   ► because the first thing it does is say,

00:34:32 ◼   ► can we monitor all your app and web activity?

00:34:35 ◼   ► and I say no and it says, well,

00:34:36 ◼   ► then you can't use Google Assistant.

00:34:38 ◼   ► And that's a lie.

00:34:39 ◼   ► I could absolutely use it.

00:34:40 ◼   ► They don't need that to give me basic,

00:34:41 ◼   ► like to say, turn on my lights or something,

00:34:43 ◼   ► but that's the deal.

00:34:44 ◼   ► Like they don't want you to pay with money.

00:34:45 ◼   ► They don't want you to pay with time.

00:34:47 ◼   ► They want you to pay with attention and with data.

00:34:49 ◼   ► And I would rather not.

00:34:51 ◼   ► And with Apple, yes, in some ways it's similar,

00:34:55 ◼   ► but the way Apple treats my data

00:34:58 ◼   ► and the way that it runs its business

00:35:01 ◼   ► makes me feel more secure

00:35:02 ◼   ► in having an Apple speaker in my house.

00:35:04 ◼   ► and I'm willing, if I am paying a premium,

00:35:07 ◼   ► I wanna see everything about it before I say that,

00:35:09 ◼   ► but even assuming I am paying a premium,

00:35:11 ◼   ► to go back to your point about the order of priorities,

00:35:13 ◼   ► that's a high level priority for me.

00:35:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it seems to me very clear,

00:35:18 ◼   ► and we'll see, I could be wrong,

00:35:20 ◼   ► but it seems very clear that the number one priority

00:35:23 ◼   ► of HomePod, at least this first one,

00:35:25 ◼   ► is to make awesome sounding audio.

00:35:29 ◼   ► And having clever stuff happen through Siri

00:35:34 ◼   ► is obviously on the list.

00:35:36 ◼   ► I mean, and there's obviously a deliberate choice

00:35:39 ◼   ► to make Siri the interface to interacting with the device.

00:35:43 ◼   ► I mean, there's other things I guess we'll find out,

00:35:47 ◼   ► but there's plus minus physical buttons for volume.

00:35:49 ◼   ► But for the most part, you're intended--

00:35:50 ◼   ► - But I think it was a different thought process.

00:35:51 ◼   ► Like it wasn't how do we put Siri in your living room?

00:35:53 ◼   ► It's we're putting this in your living room,

00:35:54 ◼   ► what's the best way to control it?

00:35:56 ◼   ► - Exactly, right.

00:35:57 ◼   ► And that makes it a fundamentally different product.

00:35:59 ◼   ► And I can't help but think that even if it is successful, meaning not successful necessarily

00:36:06 ◼   ► in the market, but successful insofar as that if the product they ship is what they wanted

00:36:13 ◼   ► to ship, that it might wind up being deeply misunderstood in the initial reviews because

00:36:21 ◼   ► it's going to be compared to Alexa and the Google thing.

00:36:25 ◼   ► and there'll be, you know, my Alexa can do these 30 different things, you know, and,

00:36:32 ◼   ► you know, the HomePod only does two of them, and, you know, cons and then pros, HomePod

00:36:40 ◼   ► sounds more, sounds better. I combine two of my items at once. Sounds better, but then

00:36:48 ◼   ► another con costs double the price or two and a half times the price. So why would I

00:36:54 ◼   ► pay, you know, conclusion, why would I pay three times as much

00:36:57 ◼   ► for a device that only does one third of the things even though

00:37:00 ◼   ► it sounds better? Whereas the knock that happens all the time,

00:37:04 ◼   ► right, I can't help but guess that that's going to be the

00:37:07 ◼   ► summary of a lot of reviews. And it might actually be the

00:37:10 ◼   ► sentiment of a lot of people reading a lot of these reviews,

00:37:13 ◼   ► if what you're looking for is a intelligent AI assistant to talk

00:37:20 ◼   ► to and control stuff in your house. Whereas if what you

00:37:24 ◼   ► you really want is awesome sounding music coming in the world where is your music coming

00:37:33 ◼   ► from is the cloud, you might get a totally different answer. And it also on the issue

00:37:39 ◼   ► of price, in the world of people who want really, really high quality, or I'll just

00:37:47 ◼   ► read it. I don't want to say it better. A guy I know, Joe Saplensky, you were in this

00:37:55 ◼   ► thread on Twitter, but he had a good tweet. Here's his tweet. "I'm not saying HomePod

00:37:59 ◼   ► is a guaranteed success. Far from it. I'm just saying there's a much bigger, more established

00:38:04 ◼   ► market for great sounding home stereo equipment than there is for 'smart home appliances'

00:38:10 ◼   ► and in that world, $350 is a steal." Now, Joe's a musician.

00:38:14 ◼   ► - You literally spend as much money as you have on audio.

00:38:17 ◼   ► There is no upper limit.

00:38:18 ◼   ► - Right.

00:38:20 ◼   ► You know, Joe's a musician.

00:38:21 ◼   ► He's in a band with a friend of the show,

00:38:24 ◼   ► former Vesper colleague, Dave Whiskus, you know.

00:38:27 ◼   ► So he's a musician.

00:38:27 ◼   ► He's like Dalrymple, you know, he's obviously,

00:38:30 ◼   ► you know, serious musician.

00:38:31 ◼   ► You care about the music.

00:38:32 ◼   ► But it really is true that in the world

00:38:34 ◼   ► of digital assistants, 350 sounds like Apple is coming in

00:38:38 ◼   ► at an insanely high price.

00:38:39 ◼   ► And in the world of high-end home audio,

00:38:42 ◼   ► It is insanely low.

00:38:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's absolutely true.

00:38:47 ◼   ► You can spend, if you have millions of dollars,

00:38:49 ◼   ► you can spend millions of dollars on home audio.

00:38:51 ◼   ► There is literally no upper limit.

00:38:54 ◼   ► And we've all bought good speakers over the years.

00:38:56 ◼   ► Some people, again, they'll go

00:38:57 ◼   ► and they'll get the box of speakers

00:38:58 ◼   ► and that's fine for them.

00:38:59 ◼   ► It's whatever Costco or Walmart

00:39:01 ◼   ► or whatever is offering in a box.

00:39:02 ◼   ► Other people will carefully select every speaker

00:39:05 ◼   ► and you'll get the best amplifier

00:39:06 ◼   ► because they care about this stuff.

00:39:08 ◼   ► But again, I think what Apple is also solving here is

00:39:11 ◼   ► I want better audio in my house and I don't really want to fuss with wires, I don't want

00:39:16 ◼   ► to fuss with all these things and I just want to drop it in.

00:39:19 ◼   ► And Sonos was the first way of doing that.

00:39:21 ◼   ► Sonos still has a good product.

00:39:23 ◼   ► They have the Sonos One now, talk about new market, new competitors.

00:39:25 ◼   ► They have the Sonos One now which builds in Alexa and I think it'll do Siri bridging and

00:39:30 ◼   ► probably do Cortana so that Cortana and Alexa can talk to each other and leave you alone.

00:39:36 ◼   ► But that's the solution is I'm in on the Apple ecosystem, I have an iPhone, I subscribe to

00:39:40 ◼   ► Apple Music and I just want something in my house that takes care of all this for me."

00:39:44 ◼   ► And that's the job you're hiring it to do.

00:39:48 ◼   ► We've got the Alexa thing that echoed Dingus in the kitchen. And we haven't hooked up to

00:39:58 ◼   ► some lights and some window shades. The window shades are the main thing that I use it for.

00:40:07 ◼   ► Which ones did you get? Because I just ordered some.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Uh, Lytros? I don't know if that's…

00:40:12 ◼   ► Yeah, the Lutron?

00:40:13 ◼   ► Lutron, Lutron. That's it.

00:40:14 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the one I just ordered. Serena.

00:40:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I like the shades, but I still… honestly, I used the buttons on the remote control as

00:40:24 ◼   ► much as I use the Alexa interface so far. But Amy's in the kitchen more than me. She

00:40:31 ◼   ► She plays music on it.

00:40:33 ◼   ► I think it sounds like shit.

00:40:34 ◼   ► I really do.

00:40:36 ◼   ► And I don't know, in a kitchen where it's bouncing off tiles, it might even be more

00:40:40 ◼   ► hard.

00:40:41 ◼   ► So I'm really, really—I mean, that's the first place where, when I get my hands on

00:40:44 ◼   ► a HomePod, I'm putting it in the kitchen first, because that's where we would use it more.

00:40:51 ◼   ► And since it doesn't work with two yet, the living room might have to wait for AirPlay

00:40:56 ◼   ► 2.

00:40:57 ◼   ► Really, all she does is she plays music on it and she sets timers.

00:41:02 ◼   ► She does like using it to set timers because it's hands-free and that's while cooking.

00:41:08 ◼   ► But it does drive her mad.

00:41:09 ◼   ► And I have to say, as somebody who cares about the little things, for all the praise that

00:41:14 ◼   ► the thing gets, I think that some of the things that it does are so goddamn stupid, it's ridiculous.

00:41:19 ◼   ► So if you have a timer going and you check, you're like, "Hey, Dingus, how much time is

00:41:23 ◼   ► left on my timer?"

00:41:25 ◼   ► It takes forever to get the answer.

00:41:27 ◼   ► You have four minutes, 30 seconds remaining on your 10-minute timer.

00:41:34 ◼   ► It's so stupid.

00:41:36 ◼   ► Who would program it that way?

00:41:37 ◼   ► If you understand the question as clearly as she understands the question, how much

00:41:41 ◼   ► time is left, just say four minutes, 30 seconds and say it a little faster.

00:41:46 ◼   ► Ben de la Torre

00:41:48 ◼   ► People get mad when I say this, but it's an incredibly new, incredibly nascent market

00:41:52 ◼   ► and there is no real leader yet.

00:41:54 ◼   ► the core technology itself is not fully baked.

00:41:57 ◼   ► Like if Amy's in the kitchen and she says,

00:42:00 ◼   ► I want a scotch or something,

00:42:01 ◼   ► it'll get better at understanding that she wants scotch,

00:42:04 ◼   ► but it doesn't get better at knowing

00:42:05 ◼   ► that Amy prefers scotch as a drink.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Like its context is very shallow, very super,

00:42:10 ◼   ► all of the assistants, very, it also,

00:42:12 ◼   ► right now it responds, like it'll,

00:42:14 ◼   ► like you'll say lower the shades

00:42:15 ◼   ► and it'll lower the shades.

00:42:17 ◼   ► And if you put it on a timer or something,

00:42:19 ◼   ► it'll do it programmatically,

00:42:21 ◼   ► but it doesn't understand that when you wake up

00:42:24 ◼   ► When you pick up your phone, it should automatically raise the shades or turn on the shower because

00:42:27 ◼   ► that's what you do after you read Twitter in the morning.

00:42:30 ◼   ► They still don't have a deep understanding of us.

00:42:33 ◼   ► It feels like it's a fresh enough area where there's not a lot of depth yet.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah.

00:42:38 ◼   ► There's some stuff about HomePod that I think is – I'm not dissing Alexa and saying

00:42:49 ◼   ► it's series coming out of the box, you know, to fix this and be like the iPhone, what the

00:42:54 ◼   ► iPhone was to smartphones for these smart agents. I think it's clearly, absolutely,

00:42:59 ◼   ► this year not going to be that. It might be a great music device, but it is absolutely

00:43:04 ◼   ► not going to be the, you know, the HAL 9000 in your home that we ultimately want.

00:43:12 ◼   ► The consensus I've heard from, you know, mutual friends who've been using it for a long time

00:43:16 ◼   ► is that the music experience is phenomenal and Siri for music has been, it's almost like

00:43:21 ◼   ► a completely new Siri for music, but Siri is still limited, as you just answered me,

00:43:26 ◼   ► but Siri is still incredibly limited. So don't go in expecting it to be. And this isn't like,

00:43:30 ◼   ► it'll do the HomeKit stuff because you, again, it's like Apple, we might as well include

00:43:33 ◼   ► HomeKit. But it really is music first. And it's interesting too, because they had Siri

00:43:39 ◼   ► Kit out for this. So it'll do things like, it'll work with Notes apps, it'll work with

00:43:43 ◼   ► to-do apps like OmniFocus and things.

00:43:46 ◼   ► And it'll work with--

00:43:47 ◼   ► I forget what the third one is.

00:43:48 ◼   ► There's a third-- oh, it'll--

00:43:50 ◼   ► there's a third thing that SiriKit will work through.

00:43:52 ◼   ► There's no SiriKit for music.

00:43:53 ◼   ► So if you use Spotify instead of Apple Music, you're stuck.

00:43:57 ◼   ► But the architecture that Apple is building--

00:43:59 ◼   ► and Brian Romilly, who does all the Voice First stuff,

00:44:02 ◼   ► pointed this out to me--

00:44:03 ◼   ► Amazon is ahead in terms of integration,

00:44:05 ◼   ► but they've sort of painted themselves

00:44:07 ◼   ► into a corner because of the system that they use.

00:44:10 ◼   ► It doesn't handle differences in grammatical structure

00:44:12 ◼   ► well and also it doesn't handle as far as he explained it. Like if you got in on the

00:44:17 ◼   ► ground floor and you were pizza, like you were the first developer to make a pizza integration,

00:44:23 ◼   ► what happens when Pizza Hut or Domino's come on? And then like some guy already owns pizza.

00:44:27 ◼   ► Like it's not clear how well it's going to scale. Where Apple is very, very slow with

00:44:30 ◼   ► this stuff and they should have absolutely had more integrations out, more serial kit

00:44:34 ◼   ► domains out sooner. They've built a system that will allow many people who speak very

00:44:39 ◼   ► differently in different languages and in some cases even multiple languages to

00:44:42 ◼   ► interface with it and they're building it in a way that it'll scale as they

00:44:46 ◼   ► start rolling out more and more of those domains. Yeah and the other thing I don't

00:44:50 ◼   ► think that this is official I don't think that they're they're saying this

00:44:54 ◼   ► yet but what I have heard is that you know for like the integration with

00:45:00 ◼   ► things like your notes and reminders and there's third-party integration like

00:45:07 ◼   ► like they're already saying like the app,

00:45:08 ◼   ► the great, great to-do list app things,

00:45:12 ◼   ► I guess is already on board with a Siri kit extension.

00:45:16 ◼   ► If you want to use stuff like that,

00:45:19 ◼   ► it only works with one Apple ID.

00:45:23 ◼   ► Like, so you've got to hook up your HomePod

00:45:25 ◼   ► and maybe it's me.

00:45:27 ◼   ► - Most messages, sorry, that's the third one.

00:45:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, messages.

00:45:29 ◼   ► And they've got, I think they got WhatsApp on board.

00:45:31 ◼   ► So it's not just Apple messages.

00:45:33 ◼   ► it's messaging apps can get into this.

00:45:37 ◼   ► But there's not, you know,

00:45:39 ◼   ► clearly the way that this should work,

00:45:43 ◼   ► I'm not saying it should,

00:45:45 ◼   ► given the state of technology in 2018,

00:45:47 ◼   ► but certainly should ultimately,

00:45:51 ◼   ► and sooner rather than later,

00:45:53 ◼   ► is your device should recognize who you are.

00:45:56 ◼   ► I've said this before, talking about this.

00:45:58 ◼   ► You know, whether it's just voice alone

00:46:01 ◼   ► combination of camera and voice, but there's absolutely no doubt. I mean, and you know,

00:46:06 ◼   ► the tech is there if photos can identify your friends and family in your photos,

00:46:13 ◼   ► the device could use the same machine learning algorithms to notice that it's you who are talking

00:46:20 ◼   ► right and the same. Just think about this, there's no reason that computers shouldn't be ultimately

00:46:25 ◼   ► computers combined with hardware shouldn't be as good as we are of, you know, recognizing who just

00:46:31 ◼   ► said something. Right? When you're at the…

00:46:33 ◼   ► That's totally true. Right now, they're personal assistants and they need to be multi-personal

00:46:37 ◼   ► assistants. And again, another problem with Apple delaying is that in the meantime, Amazon

00:46:41 ◼   ► has pushed out multi-user, multi-voice, and Google has more recently pushed out multi-user,

00:46:46 ◼   ► multi-voice. And Nuance for years has been doing voice ID to the level that I think banking

00:46:52 ◼   ► apps trust it now as a form of biometric authentication. So this stuff all worked. And Apple has been

00:46:57 ◼   ► working on it as far as I know, but it's not shipped yet.

00:47:00 ◼   ► So clearly this should work where if you've configured the HomePod in your house with your Apple ID and

00:47:07 ◼   ► somebody else in your family has also done that and one of you says

00:47:13 ◼   ► You know, hey dingus remind me tomorrow when I get to work to

00:47:19 ◼   ► Pay Bob the five dollars I own

00:47:22 ◼   ► It knows who said that right in the same way that when you're you you and I and a bunch of friends go out to

00:47:29 ◼   ► dinner and somebody says, "Hey, can you pass me the salt?" that you don't say, "Okay,

00:47:34 ◼   ► who wants the salt?" You just give it to the person who said it.

00:47:38 ◼   ► If you say, "Hey, Dingus, read me my messages," or Amy says, "Hey, Dingus, read me my messages,"

00:47:43 ◼   ► they should supply the appropriate messages to the right person.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Right. And conversely, and I'm curious how this is going to work in the 1.0 version of

00:47:53 ◼   ► home play, is that if you come over to my house and I've got it set up for my thing

00:47:58 ◼   ► and you say, "Hey, Dingus, play my messages," what's it going to do? I honestly don't

00:48:05 ◼   ► even know. I have no idea on or off the record how the hell that's going to work.

00:48:09 ◼   ► Because you don't want it to say, "Hey, is that idiot still coming over to your house?

00:48:12 ◼   ► I can't believe it."

00:48:13 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a real disaster.

00:48:16 ◼   ► Well, you know, there are several things like they haven't said anything about it working

00:48:20 ◼   ► with Apple TV yet, but it is an AirPlay endpoint, so you'll be able to select it from your

00:48:24 ◼   ► or Apple TV as an AirPlay speaker and do that,

00:48:26 ◼   ► but there's no sort of special Apple magic there.

00:48:29 ◼   ► And it's got Bluetooth 5.0,

00:48:31 ◼   ► and it'll do speaker phone for iPhone,

00:48:33 ◼   ► but Apple's not surfacing like A2DP,

00:48:35 ◼   ► or I forget what the new one, the new initials are,

00:48:37 ◼   ► so it'll work as a Bluetooth endpoint for other devices.

00:48:40 ◼   ► So just a lot of stuff that just seems like

00:48:42 ◼   ► it's not full yet, not finished yet.

00:48:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, and because it is an AirPlay speaker,

00:48:50 ◼   ► you can just use peer-to-peer AirPlay

00:48:53 ◼   ► like you can with any other AirPlay device.

00:48:55 ◼   ► So right out of the box, if you wanna play your podcasts,

00:48:58 ◼   ► even if your preferred podcast app

00:49:01 ◼   ► isn't magically able to just interface through the thing,

00:49:06 ◼   ► you can just go from your phone,

00:49:07 ◼   ► select it as your AirPlay target,

00:49:09 ◼   ► and hit play and control it through your phone.

00:49:11 ◼   ► So you will be able to use it as a speaker to play podcasts.

00:49:13 ◼   ► It's just clearly the way this device is meant to be used

00:49:16 ◼   ► is to tell Siri to play your podcasts.

00:49:22 ◼   ► And this is the part that sometimes is vexing about Apple.

00:49:25 ◼   ► And I think the last example was the Apple TV,

00:49:27 ◼   ► where it took years and still felt not fully baked

00:49:30 ◼   ► when the new version came out.

00:49:31 ◼   ► And this Apple's been working on for years

00:49:33 ◼   ► and still feels not fully baked.

00:49:35 ◼   ► And yeah, there's always resource constraints,

00:49:37 ◼   ► and they're working on multiple products and stuff.

00:49:39 ◼   ► But it's clear they sort of know what it should do.

00:49:41 ◼   ► Like they knew what Apple TV does.

00:49:42 ◼   ► And Apple TV now, is it two years

00:49:44 ◼   ► after the new version came out,

00:49:46 ◼   ► it's got almost everything that was glaringly missing

00:49:49 ◼   ► from when they first launched it.

00:49:50 ◼   ► But it's just getting that stuff ready

00:49:52 ◼   ► so that it's there when the product ships, it seems to be a challenge.

00:49:57 ◼   ► I guess the last point here is that Apple is playing it up as being meant for Apple

00:50:02 ◼   ► Music. But I think I saw something that you can use it without an Apple Music subscription

00:50:10 ◼   ► and it will play music that you have purchased from iTunes. But I'm wondering what it will

00:50:15 ◼   ► do like if you have… will it play anything that you possibly have that is in the cloud?

00:50:24 ◼   ► So with the… it is all so confusing to me, but I still think that… let's say I have

00:50:31 ◼   ► a CD that has music on it that's never been in iTunes in the store. It's an old bootleg

00:50:37 ◼   ► CD of something. And I've ripped… years ago, ripped it into iTunes and I have iTunes

00:50:42 ◼   ► match so that it's in my account and when I get a new computer and sign into it, those

00:50:49 ◼   ► songs from that disk are available to me, even though they're not in the iTunes store.

00:50:53 ◼   ► Will those songs be available to me through HomePod?

00:50:56 ◼   ► So that was unclear to me too because we have like, again, Down

00:50:56 ◼   ► See, that was unclear to me too because we have like, again, Down

00:51:10 ◼   ► It sounded to me, because again, the language wasn't--

00:51:12 ◼   ► at least I didn't understand the language that well.

00:51:14 ◼   ► So I'm wondering if it's just whatever

00:51:16 ◼   ► is in your iCloud music library, because that sort of supplanted

00:51:20 ◼   ► iTunes match, and it includes Apple Music if you have it,

00:51:22 ◼   ► and iTunes match.

00:51:23 ◼   ► Yeah, so I guess that's what I'm thinking.

00:51:25 ◼   ► Not iTunes match, but just iTunes Music Library.

00:51:27 ◼   ► And I'm hoping-- god, I'm really hoping that that's what it is,

00:51:31 ◼   ► because boy, that would just seem--

00:51:34 ◼   ► I don't see how you could excuse it otherwise, right?

00:51:36 ◼   ► I mean, this is--

00:51:37 ◼   ► iTunes is a thing that Apple's been building since 2001.

00:51:42 ◼   ► It's all in their court.

00:51:43 ◼   ► There's nobody else to blame if that doesn't work.

00:51:46 ◼   ► Right?

00:51:47 ◼   ► Well, there's two areas here of pain.

00:51:50 ◼   ► One's going to be the people like Jim or like Andy and Akko who have these vast collections

00:51:54 ◼   ► of music that they've carefully ripped and cataloged and really love to hear.

00:51:58 ◼   ► And then there's a whole new generation of people that just don't even remember what

00:52:01 ◼   ► a CD is, but maybe they're all in on Spotify and not on Apple Music and their pain is going

00:52:06 ◼   ► be that yes, I can airplay it, but oh god, it would be nice to have native support for

00:52:10 ◼   ► this already.

00:52:11 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:13 ◼   ► It's like two edges of the spectrum.

00:52:14 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:15 ◼   ► My version of the nine versions of the Ozzy song is my collection of live Rolling Stones

00:52:21 ◼   ► performances from the '70s and very early '80s, where the set lists are, I don't

00:52:26 ◼   ► know, usually about 60% overlap from each tour to tour.

00:52:31 ◼   ► So there's, I don't know.

00:52:33 ◼   ► least eight different versions of Happy from Exile on Main Street.

00:52:39 ◼   ► And the new version is if Taylor Swift drops on Spotify instead of Apple Music Day One,

00:52:44 ◼   ► they'll be shook if it's not available to them.

00:52:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:48 ◼   ► Or really, with those live albums, it's great to just listen to them in order as a

00:52:53 ◼   ► concert.

00:52:54 ◼   ► But I don't think maybe they've made them available, but I'm pretty sure they were

00:52:58 ◼   ► never on Apple Music.

00:52:59 ◼   ► It's like the Stones were selling them directly and for a while they were selling them through

00:53:04 ◼   ► Google or something.

00:53:05 ◼   ► I forget how I got them.

00:53:08 ◼   ► But apparently the Siri stuff is, like for music, they've done an incredible amount

00:53:11 ◼   ► of work to make it far more robust and nuanced and capable.

00:53:15 ◼   ► And it'll be interesting to see what sort—like again, it's only music and that sucks.

00:53:19 ◼   ► I wish it was everything, but it'd be good to see what sort of the future of Siri holds

00:53:22 ◼   ► as they roll that same new system out over other domains.

00:53:27 ◼   ► Anyway, let's take a break and I'm going to thank our next sponsor. It's our good friends

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00:53:57 ◼   ► Here's the names of their sizes. They're very hard to understand. The carry-on, the

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00:54:47 ◼   ► You got to go down like a slope to get there.

00:54:49 ◼   ► It actually goes downhill.

00:54:51 ◼   ► The damn thing, the wheels are so good that it actually, if you let go of it, the suitcase

00:54:55 ◼   ► is just going to take off.

00:54:57 ◼   ► It's so smooth.

00:54:58 ◼   ► It's really, really—that's my favorite thing about the whole thing.

00:55:04 ◼   ► Even just clever little things like a removable washable laundry bag that snaps into place,

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00:55:13 ◼   ► living out of the suitcase while you're on your trip.

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00:55:23 ◼   ► anything that's powered by a USB cord. It's got like a 20,000 mega amp battery. You don't

00:55:29 ◼   ► have to really charge the suitcase very often. I go months without charging it. Months. I

00:55:34 ◼   ► only charge it like, I don't know, maybe like once or twice a year. You almost never have

00:55:39 ◼   ► to remember to do it, but then anytime you sit down at the airport, just plug in a lightning

00:55:43 ◼   ► cable and you can sit there and charge your phone, which is to me always a huge deal at

00:55:49 ◼   ► the airport because my phone is always super low because you get a shitty signal and there's

00:55:54 ◼   ► thousands of other people all on their phones. And because you're at the airport, you're

00:55:58 ◼   ► on your phone all day. Really, it's just a tremendously convenient thing. Anyway, they

00:56:05 ◼   ► have a lifetime warranty. If anything breaks, they will fix it, replace it for free. Really

00:56:11 ◼   ► just great stuff. I really encourage you to go check it out. They too have a hundred day

00:56:17 ◼   ► trial. Live it, vibe with it, travel with it, Instagram it, take pictures, and if at any point

00:56:24 ◼   ► you don't decide that you like it, return it for a full refund, no questions asked. They have free

00:56:30 ◼   ► shipping on any away order within the contiguous US. Sorry, Alaska. Carry-on sizes that are

00:56:38 ◼   ► compliant with all major US airlines while maximizing the amount that you can pack. They

00:56:45 ◼   ► also have retail stores now in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Beautiful, beautiful Austin, Texas. Really, I love my product. I can't remember the last

00:56:56 ◼   ► time I traveled anywhere without it. It's just great. I really recommend it personally.

00:57:03 ◼   ► I would recommend it even if they stopped sponsoring the show. That's how much I like

00:57:06 ◼   ► ticket. For $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com/talkshow, awaytravel.com/talkshow, and use promo "talkshow"

00:57:18 ◼   ► during checkout and you'll save $20. $20 off awaytravel.com/talkshow. My thanks to them.

00:57:27 ◼   ► You can buy suitcases on the internet now, too. You know that, Rene.

00:57:30 ◼   ► Rene

00:57:30 ◼   ► You buy almost anything. It's an amazing time. We live in I just moved and I don't think I bought anything a traditional store

00:57:36 ◼   ► You may be some furniture, but almost everything else I bought I always if it was online. Yeah, I

00:57:41 ◼   ► Buy so much stuff online. It has occasionally occurred to me where it's like how the hell does retail even stay in business?

00:57:48 ◼   ► Like anything? Yeah, even though sometimes I do like to go and I there are things I like to buy in person

00:57:54 ◼   ► But there it there are other things that you used to buy at the stores where I occasionally

00:58:00 ◼   ► I occasionally go for an in-person retail experience where since I don't buy any of

00:58:05 ◼   ► those other things there, I don't know. I just wonder what the heck is going on. It's

00:58:10 ◼   ► very strange.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Yeah. It's the same thing like the app store. If I know exactly what I want, I will go online

00:58:16 ◼   ► and buy it. But if I'm just bored or I need to get something for somebody and I don't

00:58:21 ◼   ► know what I want, I find it easier to just walk through a mall and look at things and

00:58:24 ◼   ► get ideas.

00:58:25 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's still probably my favorite thing about actual physical retail shopping

00:58:30 ◼   ► is still the serendipity of encountering something that I didn't even know I wanted and saying,

00:58:34 ◼   ► "Ooh, that looks interesting. I'll get that." Whereas online, I'm usually Target, not shopping

00:58:39 ◼   ► at Target, but I'm targeting a specific product. Anything else on HomePod? I think we've pretty

00:58:49 ◼   ► much wrapped that up until we get our hands on the damn things.

00:58:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I just encourage again, I just encourage people if you're gonna try it out,

00:58:56 ◼   ► go to an app. If you haven't, you know, wait, look at the reviews, but then go try it out

00:58:59 ◼   ► because yelling about it before you've tried. Here's a good question. Here's a good question.

00:59:04 ◼   ► I'm really curious how they sell this in the REIT speaking of retail, how they say what

00:59:11 ◼   ► a segue, I should have a podcast. How is how I've been thinking about this ever since June,

00:59:18 ◼   ► the hell are they going to sell these things in a retail store?

00:59:23 ◼   ► We had those questions…

00:59:24 ◼   ► I was wondering that about AirPod because that seemed like the hardest thing because

00:59:26 ◼   ► how do you convince people about what an AirPod is because you can't just have a lineup

00:59:31 ◼   ► of them on little strings?

00:59:32 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:59:33 ◼   ► At the very least though with AirPods, once they're in a customer's ears to demo,

00:59:38 ◼   ► they're not blaring music in the store.

00:59:41 ◼   ► And the Apple stores are big rectangular spaces that are not really, again, usually stuffed

00:59:51 ◼   ► full of about 100 people, which isn't really at least much like my home.

01:00:00 ◼   ► Right?

01:00:01 ◼   ► I know.

01:00:03 ◼   ► They had the Sonos stands for a while where they had like the section of the wall that

01:00:06 ◼   ► was Sonos-branded and had like a bunch of Sonos speakers on it.

01:00:10 ◼   ► They've had Beats speakers set up with the Pill and other things and they've had Airplay

01:00:14 ◼   ► speakers set up for a while.

01:00:17 ◼   ► I don't think they ever really demoed them loudly, if at all.

01:00:21 ◼   ► I really wonder.

01:00:23 ◼   ► I'm really curious how they're going to do this in the retail stores.

01:00:26 ◼   ► Maybe they won't.

01:00:27 ◼   ► When someone asked me on Twitter, I forget who the name was, but will HomePod technology

01:00:31 ◼   ► filter down to the Beats line the way that AirPod technology did?

01:00:34 ◼   ► Will you be able to buy a Beats version?

01:00:36 ◼   ► If you really like the Beats Pill as a mobile speaker, for example, will you be able to

01:00:39 ◼   ► that with some form of this integration stuff into it?

01:00:43 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:00:46 ◼   ► Like maybe there's room underneath that $350 price tag for a Beats version. It's

01:00:51 ◼   ► not as slick as the Apple version, but we'll recognize a HomePod there and

01:00:55 ◼   ► mesh its audio with it if you have it in the same room, but then

01:00:57 ◼   ► you can take it with you and it'll give you like the Beats version.

01:01:01 ◼   ► I remember like in the late 90s in the CD era,

01:01:05 ◼   ► maybe mid to late 90s, where record stores

01:01:08 ◼   ► started setting up things where like when new releases would come out, they would have

01:01:12 ◼   ► headphone stations where you'd go to like station two and they would have like a poster

01:01:20 ◼   ► up with here's the ten albums set up here and you could pick from one of ten CDs and

01:01:26 ◼   ► listen to it with some pretty good headphones right there in the store. And that felt so

01:01:31 ◼   ► futuristic. It was like, wow, imagine this is so amazing. You can listen to a new album

01:01:36 ◼   ► them, as long as you want, of your choice, right here before you buy it.

01:01:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and I'm pretty sure Apple had those, you know, when they started selling headphones,

01:01:47 ◼   ► especially with the, I don't know about the Beats stuff, but they had headphone sections

01:01:51 ◼   ► as well, where you could try them out.

01:01:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:01:55 ◼   ► Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see.

01:01:59 ◼   ► Anything else?

01:02:00 ◼   ► I don't think so.

01:02:01 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:02:02 ◼   ► Pun.

01:02:03 ◼   ► No.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Not until we get it.

01:02:05 ◼   ► I guess in the news, I've been on hiatus for a holiday hiatus after the Star Wars Holiday

01:02:11 ◼   ► Spectacular.

01:02:15 ◼   ► So I've missed a couple of weeks here.

01:02:18 ◼   ► And I think the whole, in terms of news, I'm not going to try to cover everything.

01:02:23 ◼   ► It's not really a cover everything show.

01:02:25 ◼   ► But the HomePod Specter, not HomePod, Jesus, Meltdown Specter thing, it sort of happened

01:02:34 ◼   ► while the whole, I haven't really had a show in the meantime.

01:02:38 ◼   ► Boy, what a nightmare this whole thing is.

01:02:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, two critical vulnerabilities that date back to 1995

01:02:44 ◼   ► for Intel chipsets and quite a ways back for ARM

01:02:48 ◼   ► and AMD chipsets.

01:02:50 ◼   ► And there's three vulnerabilities,

01:02:52 ◼   ► one meltdown, two Spectre vulnerabilities.

01:02:54 ◼   ► The meltdown one, Apple has patched for Mac OS now,

01:02:59 ◼   ► going back two or three versions, I think as of today,

01:03:02 ◼   ► They patched it in iOS 11.

01:03:04 ◼   ► And Spectre, Apple smartly decided

01:03:07 ◼   ► not to use Intel's microcode, which is great,

01:03:09 ◼   ► because Intel yesterday said, oh, whoops,

01:03:12 ◼   ► we're messing up older machines.

01:03:13 ◼   ► Please don't use this.

01:03:15 ◼   ► Apple only patched it in WebKit and Safari,

01:03:17 ◼   ► which is where the JavaScript exploits could live.

01:03:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it really does seem like the experts,

01:03:27 ◼   ► they've got a handle on, ooh, that's pretty clever.

01:03:30 ◼   ► and they kind of get the gist of how the exploit could work,

01:03:35 ◼   ► but the understanding of how to fix it in a bulletproof way

01:03:40 ◼   ► without sacrificing all of the performance advantages

01:03:45 ◼   ► of speculative branching,

01:03:49 ◼   ► it doesn't seem like anybody really

01:03:50 ◼   ► has a full grasp on this yet.

01:03:52 ◼   ► - And the mitigations only address known attacks.

01:03:55 ◼   ► So if there are other attack possibilities discovered,

01:03:59 ◼   ► they'll have to add more mitigations for them.

01:04:01 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:04:02 ◼   ► - Like they're not actually fixing the fault,

01:04:03 ◼   ► they're stopping people from attacking those faults

01:04:06 ◼   ► in known ways.

01:04:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I have a friend who has a couple of web servers

01:04:12 ◼   ► in production and it just seems like,

01:04:17 ◼   ► you know, and they've been updated to, you know,

01:04:21 ◼   ► with fixes to address this,

01:04:22 ◼   ► but then ever since they were updated,

01:04:24 ◼   ► they are occasionally just dropping off the internet.

01:04:29 ◼   ► and need to be removed.

01:04:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, there was an epic,

01:04:32 ◼   ► one of the epic games was saying

01:04:34 ◼   ► that they were getting a horrendous,

01:04:35 ◼   ► and not only a performance hit,

01:04:36 ◼   ► but because they had to use more processing power,

01:04:40 ◼   ► an electrical hit too, like the power consumption

01:04:42 ◼   ► was going way up to make up for it.

01:04:44 ◼   ► - Right, like the fixes for this are,

01:04:47 ◼   ► this is so low, it really almost couldn't get lower

01:04:51 ◼   ► in the chain, you know, as they say, on the silicon,

01:04:56 ◼   ► you know, getting close to the silicon.

01:04:57 ◼   ► This is pretty close to the silicon.

01:04:59 ◼   ► Boy, what a nightmare.

01:05:03 ◼   ► It does seem--

01:05:04 ◼   ► You have to do page isolation, which adds overhead, basically,

01:05:07 ◼   ► to prevent it from accessing kernel memory.

01:05:09 ◼   ► It seems as though Apple's products have come out

01:05:12 ◼   ► of this fairly well in terms of-- I mean,

01:05:15 ◼   ► who knows if they've actually fixed what they're hoping to fix.

01:05:18 ◼   ► And they're being sued anyway.

01:05:21 ◼   ► Oh, over this?

01:05:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, yeah, they're being sued over Meltdown Inspector

01:05:26 ◼   ► already because of course they're being scored. I don't know that they could be sued over like

01:05:31 ◼   ► the Tim Cook rooting for the wrong team at the hockey game last night at this point.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Absolutely. But yeah, no, they, I mean, they, they were, they, they patched the stuff as fast

01:05:44 ◼   ► as they could prudently. They didn't sort of deploy any microcode that turned out to be,

01:05:49 ◼   ► I think Linus Torval called it garbage. He was quite upset with Intel. And it seemed like Intel

01:05:55 ◼   ► has been an ass-covering mode rather than fixing mode throughout most of this.

01:05:58 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah, and it's surprising because Linus Torvalds usually is very diplomatic. It doesn't

01:06:10 ◼   ► really speak his mind very often like that. No, not at all.

01:06:13 ◼   ► No, but it does seem as though Apple has come out of this pretty well. If they've fixed

01:06:17 ◼   ► what they think that they've fixed, it doesn't seem like computers have suddenly taken a

01:06:22 ◼   ► a 25% performance hit or anything like that.

01:06:25 ◼   ► But boy--

01:06:26 ◼   ► No, it's workload dependent.

01:06:27 ◼   ► And I think they announced that there was almost--

01:06:29 ◼   ► like again, it depends if you're doing a lot of systems calls

01:06:31 ◼   ► and what you're doing on a computer.

01:06:34 ◼   ► But for most, I think most common tasks,

01:06:36 ◼   ► there's almost no performance hit.

01:06:37 ◼   ► And I think a 2.5% performance hit

01:06:39 ◼   ► for some of the Spectre stuff on one of three Safari benchmarks.

01:06:43 ◼   ► Right, the system cost of it.

01:06:45 ◼   ► In layman's terms, I think I understand it.

01:06:48 ◼   ► But the idea is that if the kernel is always running--

01:06:52 ◼   ► well, the kernel is always running,

01:06:53 ◼   ► and the kernel has access to all memory, including

01:06:56 ◼   ► lots of stuff that individual processes should not

01:06:59 ◼   ► have access to, that a process running in user space

01:07:05 ◼   ► could take advantage of the speculative processing

01:07:08 ◼   ► and trick the kernel into going down a certain branch

01:07:11 ◼   ► that it shouldn't have permission-wise.

01:07:14 ◼   ► And by the time the permission check happens,

01:07:19 ◼   ► and you say, oh, I got to back out of that.

01:07:21 ◼   ► But as the processor backs out of that,

01:07:25 ◼   ► that memory that wasn't supposed to have been accessed

01:07:27 ◼   ► is in a cache, perhaps, that the user land software could,

01:07:34 ◼   ► through very clever ways that doesn't really matter how.

01:07:37 ◼   ► And I couldn't explain it because I don't understand it.

01:07:39 ◼   ► But because it's in the cache, which is accessible,

01:07:41 ◼   ► could test it and figure it out and backwards, you know, back out of it what was actually

01:07:48 ◼   ► in that protected memory.

01:07:50 ◼   ► The best description I heard, I forget who it was from, but that meltdown is like a mugging

01:07:54 ◼   ► and Spectre is like a Jedi mind trick.

01:07:58 ◼   ► That's pretty good.

01:07:59 ◼   ► I like that.

01:08:00 ◼   ► But yeah, and it's bad for deployments like Amazon's or Google's because you could

01:08:05 ◼   ► go through one virtual machine into the actual machine or into other virtual machines.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:08:10 ◼   ► Well, all sorts of hosting services that are virtualized.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Shared hosting, like traditional old shared hosting

01:08:16 ◼   ► where you're just running those processes,

01:08:18 ◼   ► or even virtualized processes, you know, servers,

01:08:21 ◼   ► which is how a lot of most, I think, you know,

01:08:24 ◼   ► sort of modern way to do shared hosting

01:08:26 ◼   ► is where everybody gets their own version of the OS,

01:08:30 ◼   ► typically Linux.

01:08:31 ◼   ► But because it's really running on the same machine,

01:08:36 ◼   ► this can be exploited.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And that is sort of, you know, it's, I don't know,

01:08:41 ◼   ► you could use all sorts of analogies,

01:08:43 ◼   ► but it is sort of like breaking a hole in the matrix.

01:08:46 ◼   ► You know, like, you know,

01:08:47 ◼   ► when you're running in a virtualized server,

01:08:49 ◼   ► it's supposed to be like the matrix where the software

01:08:52 ◼   ► isn't supposed to realize it isn't running

01:08:54 ◼   ► on its own machine entirely.

01:08:57 ◼   ► It's supposed to, you know,

01:08:58 ◼   ► think that it's, this is the real universe.

01:09:01 ◼   ► I didn't know I was in a simulated universe

01:09:03 ◼   ► within a larger universe.

01:09:05 ◼   ► and this just pokes a hole right through it, which is really kind of—it breaks a lot

01:09:11 ◼   ► of assumptions.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Anyway, it's kind of fascinating stuff.

01:09:14 ◼   ► Good to know that there doesn't seem to have been any widespread exploits that have

01:09:18 ◼   ► come out of it yet.

01:09:19 ◼   ► But then in the back of everybody's mind, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist

01:09:23 ◼   ► to wonder whether organizations like the NSA and others around the world have perhaps known

01:09:31 ◼   ► about this for a long time.

01:09:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, people were wondering because what happened--

01:09:38 ◼   ► Google's Project Zero discovered this.

01:09:41 ◼   ► And then in rapid succession, the University of Graz--

01:09:43 ◼   ► and I forget who the third group was-- discovered it as well.

01:09:46 ◼   ► But it wasn't like it was there for 20 or so years.

01:09:50 ◼   ► And then suddenly it was discovered.

01:09:52 ◼   ► There was a Kaiser, which was page isolation, was proposed.

01:09:55 ◼   ► And people were like, oh, we don't need that.

01:09:57 ◼   ► Thanks.

01:09:57 ◼   ► It's a cute idea, but we don't need it.

01:09:59 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden, they were like, yeah,

01:10:01 ◼   ► that project? Can we start fast-tracking it?" And it made people more curious. They started

01:10:04 ◼   ► investigating along similar lines. Right. I saw that story. It was like people who were briefed

01:10:11 ◼   ► on it were trying to propose this thing that nobody thought was solving a problem that everybody

01:10:17 ◼   ► thought didn't exist. And then they realized, "Well, wait, why are they pushing this ahead?

01:10:22 ◼   ► Why is it getting?" And they're like, "Well, this is a performance hit. Why would you really be,

01:10:25 ◼   ► you really want it that badly? Okay, what are we missing here?" Which was super interesting.

01:10:31 ◼   ► I'm trying to think, what else in the last month of news is…

01:10:36 ◼   ► There was something yesterday, or was it the day before that I just thought, and I absolutely

01:10:40 ◼   ► do not want to pick on anybody, but I was reading Business Insider and there was a story

01:10:44 ◼   ► about how the Apple Store was such a hellish experience.

01:10:46 ◼   ► I don't know if you saw it.

01:10:47 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

01:10:49 ◼   ► So this reporter dropped their iPhone twice, and the first time the screen cracked, the

01:10:56 ◼   ► second time apart, fell out of the screen.

01:10:58 ◼   ► So they took it to the Apple store and they did not have an appointment and they went

01:11:01 ◼   ► from one employee to another and they said they'd fit them in and they would replace

01:11:05 ◼   ► it within two hours.

01:11:06 ◼   ► So you went to a popular Apple store, no appointment.

01:11:10 ◼   ► It was a little bit late to be fixed.

01:11:11 ◼   ► It was like, I think it took four hours instead of two hours, but they got their phone back

01:11:15 ◼   ► that same day.

01:11:16 ◼   ► And they traveled to CES and the phone stopped working.

01:11:20 ◼   ► And at no point in the story does it say, "Well, I dropped it twice.

01:11:24 ◼   ► Maybe that caused more damage than I originally assumed."

01:11:26 ◼   ► It was like Apple must have destroyed it when they repaired it.

01:11:29 ◼   ► So they went back to another Apple store, another really busy Apple store, again didn't

01:11:34 ◼   ► have an appointment, managed to get an appointment, came back and they were really upset there

01:11:39 ◼   ► were no lines.

01:11:40 ◼   ► And that's a fair complaint.

01:11:41 ◼   ► Some people prefer waiting in lines and just milling about.

01:11:44 ◼   ► Apple seems to think people like milling about.

01:11:46 ◼   ► Some people prefer lines.

01:11:47 ◼   ► But then they got a replacement iPhone.

01:11:49 ◼   ► The iPhone got swapped out with a refurb and they left seethingly angry about what a hellacious

01:11:55 ◼   ► experience this was.

01:11:56 ◼   ► And by no means do I want to say that. I don't want to say that experience isn't, you know,

01:11:59 ◼   ► they're not entitled to their opinion. They absolutely are. But for me, you know, I, if

01:12:04 ◼   ► I went in, did not have an appointment, got my screen repaired, went back in, didn't have

01:12:08 ◼   ► an appointment, got a new iPhone or a replacement iPhone at least, I think that was pretty great

01:12:13 ◼   ► service.

01:12:14 ◼   ► >> Yeah, I don't get that. I'll have to put a link to it in the show notes.

01:12:17 ◼   ► >> And there was also this part about like the Google Pixel. They used that as a replacement

01:12:21 ◼   ► phone while they were in SES and how great that was. And I have a Google Pixel phone.

01:12:26 ◼   ► phone. If I dropped it twice, I'd have no idea how to get that fixed the same day.

01:12:30 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah, I think you're SOL. I've heard that they have some kind of mail-in thing

01:12:37 ◼   ► that's pretty good, but it's certainly…

01:12:39 ◼   ► Jay Haynes Yeah, but it wouldn't be that day.

01:12:41 ◼   ► Dave Certainly very unlikely that you're going

01:12:42 ◼   ► to find a first party, even third party. I don't see how you could expect to find one

01:12:47 ◼   ► of those third party repair shops that would have a replacement Pixel 2 screen ready to

01:12:52 ◼   ► go. It doesn't seem like…

01:12:53 ◼   ► Jay Haynes This is like one of those things where…

01:12:54 ◼   ► Like I don't know how this goes up on like a website because absolutely you can think

01:12:59 ◼   ► that's a bad experience but I think other people given the same information wouldn't

01:13:03 ◼   ► think that and I certainly don't think it's like a worth castigating the company over.

01:13:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:08 ◼   ► It's like you go through it and you could see how it could be better.

01:13:12 ◼   ► You know, it could be like 30 minute turnaround in theory.

01:13:17 ◼   ► I've only ever dropped or cracked the screen on an iPhone twice and it was both times with

01:13:23 ◼   ► my iPhone 6, which unsurprisingly had a reputation for being slippery. So my no case, no Apple

01:13:34 ◼   ► Pay—not Apple Pay, Apple—what's the warranty program? I don't even know.

01:13:38 ◼   ► I'm so—

01:13:39 ◼   ► Michael Bock Apple Care.

01:13:40 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Apple Care. I haven't bought Apple Care since 1991

01:13:42 ◼   ► on any device.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Michael Bock Wow. Okay.

01:13:44 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I bite religiously.

01:13:45 ◼   ► The one that made me the most nervous was the—what was it?

01:13:52 ◼   ► Jesus, it's been so long, I don't remember the number.

01:13:55 ◼   ► I think it was a Power Mac 9100 that I blew the amount of a small car on in 1996 when

01:14:07 ◼   ► I got out of college.

01:14:11 ◼   ► I haven't bought Apple Pay since 1991 on my Mac LC that I went to college with.

01:14:16 ◼   ► So at this point, or 9600, that's right, Power Mac 9600.

01:14:20 ◼   ► I can't believe I forgot that.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Boy, I'm losing it, Rene.

01:14:24 ◼   ► My beloved Power Mac 9600 that I use for probably more than I ever use any Mac that I've ever

01:14:29 ◼   ► owned.

01:14:30 ◼   ► I haven't bought Apple, what's it called?

01:14:34 ◼   ► AppleCare.

01:14:35 ◼   ► AppleCare.

01:14:36 ◼   ► I can't remember.

01:14:37 ◼   ► I can't remember. So I'm ahead. I could have a complete lemon and I could lose. At this

01:14:48 ◼   ► point, I've bought so much stuff that I could have like a $2,500 MacBook that goes belly

01:14:54 ◼   ► up two days out of warranty and I'd still be ahead compared to how much money. Anyway,

01:15:01 ◼   ► I haven't done it.

01:15:02 ◼   ► Don't do it on iPhones either because I just don't.

01:15:06 ◼   ► I very seldom drop them, not just crack the screen, but I've had a few drops over the

01:15:12 ◼   ► years.

01:15:13 ◼   ► But the iPhone 6 I did twice.

01:15:14 ◼   ► I dropped it, it cracked.

01:15:18 ◼   ► And both times I was near an Apple store and took it in without an appointment and got

01:15:24 ◼   ► it—I think I got it back within about 60 to 90 minutes both times.

01:15:29 ◼   ► So I could see how four hours would be frustrating because it felt like a long time to me, too.

01:15:33 ◼   ► But not like, you know, I didn't complain. I thought, "Hey, that's pretty good."

01:15:38 ◼   ► You know.

01:15:39 ◼   ► You didn't write "hellish experience" as a title on during Claire well.

01:15:41 ◼   ► It was funny, though. It was very funny, though, like waiting around to get your phone back

01:15:48 ◼   ► in the store. And, you know, you could just, you know, I could go to other stores. They

01:15:52 ◼   ► say, "Hey, it'll be about an hour." But they can't take your phone number and text

01:15:57 ◼   ► you when it's ready.

01:15:58 ◼   ► Yes. Because they have your phone. And I, you know, it's like, come back in about an hour and check

01:16:05 ◼   ► in. And I'd come back and it's like, oh, it's almost ready. I think it'd be like 15 more

01:16:09 ◼   ► minutes. So I just hopped on like a MacBook in the store and browse around and I'd see something and

01:16:14 ◼   ► I would think I want to take a note to remember that and I'd go to get my phone out to note it.

01:16:19 ◼   ► And I didn't have my phone. It's very strange. I mean, I only ever damaged one for a long time.

01:16:25 ◼   ► and that was an iPhone 4S that got hit by fireworks

01:16:28 ◼   ► on New Year's and it melted the oleophobic coating.

01:16:30 ◼   ► And I made an appointment, took it in, they looked at it,

01:16:33 ◼   ► they decided to capture it 'cause I don't think

01:16:35 ◼   ► they'd ever seen that before.

01:16:36 ◼   ► And then I got a very kind but stern lecture

01:16:38 ◼   ► about taking better care of my belongings.

01:16:40 ◼   ► - Really?

01:16:41 ◼   ► - But they replaced it immediately and I used,

01:16:44 ◼   ► I logged into iCloud and it downloaded all my stuff

01:16:47 ◼   ► and I was good to go.

01:16:48 ◼   ► And I thought that was like, that was the future for me.

01:16:50 ◼   ► But then this year, so I, the slipperiest phone

01:16:54 ◼   ► I've ever owned was a Nexus 4.

01:16:55 ◼   ► And you could put that in the middle of a dining room table

01:16:57 ◼   ► and it would fall to the floor within an hour.

01:17:00 ◼   ► But I found the iPhone 8,

01:17:02 ◼   ► because they have the same similar

01:17:03 ◼   ► inductive charging plates on the back,

01:17:07 ◼   ► is also much more slippery than I would have anticipated.

01:17:10 ◼   ► And so I've broken two, like in the last two months.

01:17:13 ◼   ► - Really?

01:17:14 ◼   ► - Just like I broke one the first day I had it,

01:17:16 ◼   ► I put it down on the table

01:17:17 ◼   ► and I didn't realize it was slightly on the napkin.

01:17:19 ◼   ► And it used the napkin as a slide

01:17:21 ◼   ► and landed on a stone floor.

01:17:23 ◼   ► And it didn't break the back, it broke the front.

01:17:26 ◼   ► And then the other one, I was out and I got hit by somebody

01:17:31 ◼   ► and it sent the phone flying and it fell down

01:17:34 ◼   ► and broke the front.

01:17:35 ◼   ► - You got punched by somebody or you got--

01:17:37 ◼   ► - No, I think they were just walking by aggressively.

01:17:40 ◼   ► Like I was sitting there talking

01:17:42 ◼   ► and they just slammed into me and kept walking,

01:17:44 ◼   ► which is, I was in the US, I wasn't in Canada.

01:17:47 ◼   ► I don't know if there's a difference there,

01:17:48 ◼   ► and the phone just fell down and also broke the front.

01:17:53 ◼   ► It's iPhone 8 that's just there been my pain so far iPhone 10 has been fine knock wood

01:17:58 ◼   ► But I find it and I will say this I my experience making an appointment at an Apple store is in especially in the last few

01:18:04 ◼   ► Let's say four or five years excellent where they're ready for you almost on time the amount of time it takes

01:18:11 ◼   ► to

01:18:13 ◼   ► diagnose

01:18:14 ◼   ► Explain slash. Oh, I see. Yes, absolutely

01:18:17 ◼   ► Whatever the issue is

01:18:21 ◼   ► But I would say ideal, you know, I can't see how they would do better

01:18:24 ◼   ► They did bury making a genius appointment

01:18:26 ◼   ► Which I hate like it used to just be you go there you hit the genius button and you'd be gone and now you have

01:18:30 ◼   ► To fight your way through three or four different layers of stuff before it lets you do that, which I dislike but hmm

01:18:35 ◼   ► Interesting. I have it done. It's good. I wonder why they've done that probably

01:18:37 ◼   ► Well, I think they wanted to get rid of people who just automatically make a yeah

01:18:41 ◼   ► I mean for anything and they wanted you to go through sort of the steps to see if you really needed one

01:18:44 ◼   ► Yeah, because I've noticed I haven't been there a lot

01:18:48 ◼   ► I also have always been very lucky with non-Lemon Apple devices.

01:18:55 ◼   ► I think I talked about it in the show years ago, but my son has the same model as me,

01:19:03 ◼   ► a 2013 MacBook Pro 13-inch.

01:19:07 ◼   ► And his had an issue where if he ever ran the battery down to zero and it auto shut

01:19:16 ◼   ► down, it would never turn back on.

01:19:18 ◼   ► There was nothing you can do to make it turn back on.

01:19:21 ◼   ► And first, I was like, "Well, why don't do that?"

01:19:25 ◼   ► It was like eventually—it happened one time and we got it to get back on somehow eventually.

01:19:31 ◼   ► I forget what the deal was.

01:19:33 ◼   ► And I was like, "Well, don't run it down."

01:19:34 ◼   ► But then he would just do it again because he'd be like playing a game.

01:19:39 ◼   ► And it was like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer had a car where the engine—the gas

01:19:45 ◼   ► light came on.

01:19:46 ◼   ► And he was like, let's see how far we can go.

01:19:48 ◼   ► It was sort of like a thrill seeking.

01:19:51 ◼   ► But anyway, eventually we took it in, and they ran some tests.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And it just would not turn on.

01:19:55 ◼   ► It wouldn't take a charge.

01:19:56 ◼   ► It was just inert.

01:19:58 ◼   ► And it had to go away for repair.

01:19:59 ◼   ► It was all as bad of a thing as you could have.

01:20:02 ◼   ► It was like the logic board had to be replaced.

01:20:04 ◼   ► It has to be sent away.

01:20:05 ◼   ► It couldn't be done on premises.

01:20:06 ◼   ► And the whole thing was fantastic.

01:20:08 ◼   ► We were in the store for the briefest amount of time.

01:20:10 ◼   ► It was obvious that something was wrong.

01:20:12 ◼   ► They took it to the mysterious upstairs lab

01:20:16 ◼   ► where somebody else confirmed, yes, this is not right.

01:20:19 ◼   ► You sign out some forms, you sign your signature on an iPad,

01:20:23 ◼   ► and two days later, they called me up

01:20:26 ◼   ► and said the thing was back.

01:20:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, it's terrific. - And it worked perfectly

01:20:30 ◼   ► ever since.

01:20:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, same experience.

01:20:33 ◼   ► And I've had, before, I used to have work windows laptops,

01:20:36 ◼   ► and we would pay for onsite service from Dell,

01:20:40 ◼   ► but it was hideously expensive.

01:20:41 ◼   ► And for the people who didn't have that, you never knew you were going to get your computer

01:20:44 ◼   ► back.

01:20:45 ◼   ► So, yeah, I don't get our friend at Business Insider.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Is that what you said it was at, Business Insider?

01:20:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:54 ◼   ► That's shocking that Business Insider—

01:20:55 ◼   ► I'll find you the link.

01:20:56 ◼   ► It's very shocking to me that Business Insider would run something sensationalized like that.

01:21:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:01 ◼   ► I had a piece yesterday that a lot of people sent good things about, about these rumors

01:21:06 ◼   ► of the iPhone X being produced for only one hour.

01:21:09 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:21:10 ◼   ► It's a dud because of Ming Chi Kuo said people in China aren't buying the thing because all

01:21:20 ◼   ► they want are big screens and they think the notch is using up too much space and they

01:21:24 ◼   ► may only sell 18 million of them and stop production in summer.

01:21:28 ◼   ► It's kind of funny how this really transmogrified and I wrote about it before it had even finished

01:21:34 ◼   ► spreading where he writes this and Apple Insider does… The one thing about these Ming-Chi

01:21:40 ◼   ► Kuo reports is they're not public. Presumably, they go to paid clients of his and then he

01:21:48 ◼   ► seeds them to a very small handful of Mac rumor type publications like Apple Insider.

01:21:56 ◼   ► Yeah, the KGI security subscribers get them.

01:21:58 ◼   ► Yeah. I'm curious whether they go out before he sends them to Apple Insider and MacRumors.

01:22:09 ◼   ► Because here's the thought I had yesterday as I was—and I don't typically do this,

01:22:12 ◼   ► but I will take an aside here and just mention my long-time thing that I have a personal

01:22:20 ◼   ► policy where I don't own any stock in individual companies other than Berkshire Hathaway, which

01:22:28 ◼   ► which to me is more like an index fund. The only stock market investments I have are in

01:22:32 ◼   ► index funds and I consider Berkshire Hathaway a sort of index fund. The only way I could

01:22:41 ◼   ► possibly profit through Apple stock going up would be secondhand through the S&P 500

01:22:47 ◼   ► going up, which to me is acceptable. I don't know. But anyway, that's my disclaimer.

01:22:55 ◼   ► I don't own Apple stock.

01:22:56 ◼   ► I have not owned Apple stock in many, many, many, many years.

01:23:00 ◼   ► And even when I did, it was a ridiculously small amount.

01:23:03 ◼   ► Anyway, I looked yesterday after all this happened, after the markets closed, and the

01:23:07 ◼   ► market overall was up maybe like 2% and most of Apple's peers like Amazon and Google,

01:23:14 ◼   ► I forget who else I looked at, were also up roughly 2% and Apple was down 2%, which 2%

01:23:22 ◼   ► Up 2% down, that's the stock market.

01:23:25 ◼   ► But at Apple's scale, that's literally billions of dollars of market cap.

01:23:31 ◼   ► And I really can't help but think that the reason that Apple was down a bit on a day

01:23:35 ◼   ► when the market was up a bit was that there were a whole bunch of stories about the iPhone

01:23:40 ◼   ► 10 being discontinued because it was unpopular.

01:23:44 ◼   ► I mean, I don't think…

01:23:47 ◼   ► There's this great interview from Jim Cramer from like 10 years ago where he starts off

01:23:51 ◼   ► talking about BlackBerry but then finishes off talking about the iPhone.

01:23:54 ◼   ► And he's like, this is how it works.

01:23:57 ◼   ► I used to run a hedge fund and I know this and I don't think this is legal but you know

01:24:00 ◼   ► if you've got to make your nut this is what you've got to do.

01:24:02 ◼   ► And what you'll do is you'll start a rumor and you'll call somebody and you know who

01:24:05 ◼   ► to call and you'll get them to say oh the Verizon is going to take a pass on the iPhone

01:24:09 ◼   ► or the iPhone is going to be delayed and you start shorting and you start shorting.

01:24:12 ◼   ► You get this guy to put a put on.

01:24:14 ◼   ► You'll get him to call somebody else and you'll get him to say it and all of a sudden there'll

01:24:17 ◼   ► be a run on it and you'll just move the market because that's how you got to get your money.

01:24:20 ◼   ► That's how you got to get paid.

01:24:21 ◼   ► That's what you've got to do to make every, you know.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And he goes on to describe

01:24:25 ◼   ► the entire market manipulation process

01:24:27 ◼   ► of which the media is absolutely complicit

01:24:30 ◼   ► because we've seen, there've been,

01:24:32 ◼   ► in some years there are Wall Street Journal articles,

01:24:34 ◼   ► not like no author name on them, no sourcing,

01:24:37 ◼   ► that'll just say, Apple is gonna not have enough iPhones

01:24:40 ◼   ► or they're not gonna have enough screens.

01:24:42 ◼   ► And the market will react to those.

01:24:43 ◼   ► And once in a while, those stories disappear

01:24:45 ◼   ► but sometimes they're left up there.

01:24:48 ◼   ► And it just seems like blatant manipulation

01:24:50 ◼   ► because most of the time, the clients for these companies

01:24:53 ◼   ► have been told days before,

01:24:54 ◼   ► and they've done, like they've either shorted

01:24:56 ◼   ► or they've bought, and then the media reaction

01:24:58 ◼   ► moves the market, and it just feels like

01:25:00 ◼   ► this is incredibly manipulative.

01:25:02 ◼   ► - I really don't think it's a conspiracy.

01:25:06 ◼   ► You have to be conspirationally minded to think that.

01:25:09 ◼   ► I really do think that there is something to this,

01:25:11 ◼   ► and you know, that's what makes me wonder--

01:25:14 ◼   ► - It feels like pump and dump, like just basic pump and dump.

01:25:16 ◼   ► - Well, that's what makes me wonder

01:25:17 ◼   ► whether KGI Securities clients get these reports before they are leaked to the Apple press

01:25:26 ◼   ► and can read between the lines of whether this is going to play as good news or bad

01:25:30 ◼   ► news and make moves accordingly. That had never really occurred to me before as to whether

01:25:40 ◼   ► he sends them to like MacRumors and AppleInsider at the same time or whether he sends them

01:25:44 ◼   ► to them like a day later.

01:25:47 ◼   ► But I don't think there's any doubt that he moves the market.

01:25:50 ◼   ► He really does.

01:25:51 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:25:52 ◼   ► I think at least he has his name on these things, but a lot of them, again, are completely

01:25:56 ◼   ► – nobody knows who they are.

01:25:58 ◼   ► And it's important to remember – and I just won't publish them because I am not

01:26:03 ◼   ► their client.

01:26:04 ◼   ► They have their clients.

01:26:05 ◼   ► They are using me to achieve the ends of their clients and it is not my job to be used for

01:26:10 ◼   ► their financial benefit.

01:26:13 ◼   ► But anyway, I wrote about it and I think that if there is a kernel of truth here, and Ming-Chi

01:26:19 ◼   ► Kuo obviously has some good sources in Foxconn at the very least, if not the whole Asian

01:26:24 ◼   ► supply chain, but his sources at Foxconn have been pretty good in many ways, that I would

01:26:32 ◼   ► interpret this as meaning that the iPhone X is going to be one of the phones like the

01:26:37 ◼   ► the iPhone 5 like the original iPhone and the original iPhone that only are in production

01:26:44 ◼   ► for one year. I forgot about the Apple Watch, but that's a good one where the original Apple

01:26:49 ◼   ► Watch did not just slip down the pricing matrix to a second level. They actually replaced

01:26:58 ◼   ► that with what they called the Series 1. We unofficially gave the original the nickname

01:27:06 ◼   ► series zero. Yeah, I think that was Serenity Caldwell.

01:27:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I think she did quite well. I do think she did. Thank you, Serenity. And I think

01:27:18 ◼   ► that my completely conjectural—because Apple is—why they do things like this are like

01:27:25 ◼   ► the holiest of holy secrets, and I think are only really ultimately known by the highest

01:27:31 ◼   ► executive level. But I think it makes common sense to think that when they do something

01:27:35 ◼   ► truly knew production-wise, like making the first ever watch or the first ever iPhone,

01:27:41 ◼   ► that they learn things that they can subsequently even just in the course of 12 months do so

01:27:47 ◼   ► much better that it no longer makes financial sense to keep making it.

01:27:53 ◼   ► So the original iPhone was on sale for a year and as soon as the iPhone 3G was ready to

01:27:56 ◼   ► go, the original iPhone was gone. There was no second, "Oh, you can save some money and

01:28:02 ◼   ► get the year-old version, it was just gone. The only really new iPhone, truly radically

01:28:09 ◼   ► new iPhone, in my opinion, that did stay for an extra year was the iPhone 4, which did

01:28:17 ◼   ► two things production-wise that were totally new. It had the glass back with steel frame

01:28:23 ◼   ► aluminum and it had a retina screen instead of a non-retina screen. And the irony that

01:28:29 ◼   ► I pointed out was that it was also the one with the most notorious flaw, which was the

01:28:33 ◼   ► attenuation issue. Like it was the, it was, of all the iPhones ever made, the one that

01:28:38 ◼   ► stayed, it also stayed the longest as the top tier phone because it was the one that,

01:28:44 ◼   ► it was the last one to ship at the end of June, early July. And a 4S was the first one

01:28:49 ◼   ► that shifted to the fall. So.

01:28:50 ◼   ► And it was way late in the fall.

01:28:52 ◼   ► the most flawed iPhone and biggest PR debacle the company has ever faced was the flagship

01:29:02 ◼   ► iPhone for the longest amount of time and then still remained in the lineup as the second

01:29:07 ◼   ► cut iPhone for another year after that.

01:29:10 ◼   ► So the thing that gets me is like I think, and I think this is true for a lot of rumors,

01:29:14 ◼   ► is that, and Ming-Chi Kuo and other people, is that they get a little bit of information

01:29:19 ◼   ► but then they spin a narrative around that information.

01:29:22 ◼   ► And not all of them seem to understand Apple very well

01:29:24 ◼   ► because the narratives don't often coincide

01:29:26 ◼   ► with the way Apple actually does things.

01:29:27 ◼   ► And then people conflate the information in their rumor

01:29:30 ◼   ► with the context that's been invented

01:29:32 ◼   ► to sort of tell a story about it.

01:29:34 ◼   ► And then that just snowballs.

01:29:36 ◼   ► And in this case, I think your iPhone 5 analogy

01:29:39 ◼   ► is really apt because when the iPhone 5S came out,

01:29:41 ◼   ► Apple doesn't really care if the phone looks alike.

01:29:44 ◼   ► They had the iPhone 6 and 6S and 7 and 8

01:29:47 ◼   ► all in the market at the same time.

01:29:48 ◼   ► But with the iPhone 5C, the iPhone 5 was difficult to manufacture,

01:29:54 ◼   ► and reducing it in cost would be problematic.

01:29:58 ◼   ► But also, it wouldn't let Apple reach any newer different markets,

01:30:01 ◼   ► where the iPhone 5C was cheaper to make.

01:30:03 ◼   ► And it let Apple test the idea of a less expensive, more colorful,

01:30:06 ◼   ► more fun iPhone.

01:30:07 ◼   ► And here you have an iPhone X, which is expensive to make.

01:30:11 ◼   ► It uses a scarce resource like OLED.

01:30:13 ◼   ► And if Apple replaces that with an LED iPhone,

01:30:16 ◼   ► They can save the OLED supply for the new flagships

01:30:19 ◼   ► But also they can make it slightly bigger or do whatever they think they need to test out

01:30:23 ◼   ► Like whether it is China or something else to test out a slightly different form factor. Yeah

01:30:27 ◼   ► Well, the funny thing to me is how this that there's that old kids game whisper down the alley or whatever

01:30:36 ◼   ► It's called where broken telephone broken telephone where it's kids line up in a row and you're supposed to whisper as quietly as possible

01:30:42 ◼   ► Somebody starts with something and then that you know

01:30:45 ◼   ► 20 kids in a row. One kid whispers it to the next and you're split in good faith. You're supposed to

01:30:50 ◼   ► try to whisper it to the next person as accurately as possible. I distinctly recall as a child

01:30:56 ◼   ► purposefully mangling it in a humorous way. Don't invite John Gruber to your game of broken

01:31:05 ◼   ► telephone. But even when kids try to do it, honestly, it is kind of funny how it comes out

01:31:11 ◼   ► wrong at the end. And it's really this story in particular quickly got wrong where the

01:31:18 ◼   ► original report for Ming-Chi Kuo is the fact he reported was that he thinks Apple might

01:31:27 ◼   ► stop production of the iPhone X this summer in the lead up to the new phones, which I

01:31:35 ◼   ► would fit exactly with what, you know, not that they would stop selling it. He's completely

01:31:40 ◼   ► writing that at some point in July, Foxconn can stop making iPhone 10s and focus on iPhone

01:31:48 ◼   ► 11s or whatever we're going to call them.

01:31:53 ◼   ► Apple will still have these iPhone 10s that had been made through July to sell through

01:31:58 ◼   ► mid-September when they switch to the new product line where the iPhone 10 doesn't exist.

01:32:05 ◼   ► That's what Ming-Chi Kuo wrote.

01:32:06 ◼   ► That's what Apple Insider, I believe, accurately summarized, but I can't prove because I don't

01:32:13 ◼   ► have Ming-Chi Kuo's report.

01:32:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:16 ◼   ► It matched what MacRumors wrote, which I think means it's pretty consistent.

01:32:21 ◼   ► It was then taken up by somebody at Newsweek who made it seem as though the iPhone was

01:32:29 ◼   ► was being discontinued now and they'd stop selling it in the summer and we'd go, you

01:32:36 ◼   ► know, like in the mid-summer there would be no more iPhone 10s to buy and that new iPhones

01:32:40 ◼   ► wouldn't be ready yet because that's how badly the iPhone 10 was selling.

01:32:45 ◼   ► So the only thing that makes more sense is to stop selling it.

01:32:48 ◼   ► Right. And then it went – it got to the point where the just – the summary of the

01:32:51 ◼   ► story was that Apple is right now in the midst of canceling the iPhone 10. And I – this

01:32:56 ◼   ► is a true story.

01:32:57 ◼   ► Yeah, Forbes was horrible about that too.

01:32:58 ◼   ► You may not have seen it. I wrote this story on Daring Fireball right before we recorded

01:33:03 ◼   ► and published it. There's a great contractor we've had working on and off in our house,

01:33:09 ◼   ► a guy named Wayne. Really nice guy. Does good work. Sort of a technical enthusiast. One

01:33:14 ◼   ► day he was here and he was doing work in my office. It probably doesn't really look like

01:33:25 ◼   ► an Apple store because it's not very well organized. But it certainly looks like maybe

01:33:30 ◼   ► I robbed an Apple store in terms of the number, especially a couple of months ago when I had

01:33:35 ◼   ► boxes of multiple new iPhones out on my desk. And he's like, "What do you do?" And I told

01:33:43 ◼   ► him. And he was kind of intrigued by it. He's sort of a gadget, a regular person gadget

01:33:49 ◼   ► nerd. He was here today and it's like, "Ding-dong, here he is, the doorbell. Hey, how you doing,

01:33:57 ◼   ► Wayne? Good to see you, John." Something about the Eagles being in the Super Bowl. Friendly

01:34:03 ◼   ► chit-chat. Then he's like, "Hey, what the heck's the deal with this thing I saw yesterday

01:34:08 ◼   ► where the iPhone X's been canceled? Is that legit?" I was just blown away. It could not

01:34:14 ◼   ► be a more regular person and he's heard that Apple is canceling the iPhone 10. Crazy. It's

01:34:22 ◼   ► absolutely insanity.

01:34:24 ◼   ► I saw people on Reddit asking, "Well, Apple is canceling the phone. Are they going to

01:34:28 ◼   ► take my phone away? Will they repay me?" This is how people react to those kinds of stories.

01:34:33 ◼   ► They're not stupid. They just don't understand when they use headlines what it means to them

01:34:38 ◼   ► and they start to panic.

01:34:39 ◼   ► All right, it really is like the headline. You know, everybody talks about fake news and fake

01:34:45 ◼   ► stories and truly out, you know, truly, you know, this nobody really lied here, although I would

01:34:52 ◼   ► say there's some mendacity involved in I think, purposeful exaggeration, especially in the

01:34:58 ◼   ► headlines. And I really cannot emphasize enough for people who don't think about this because you

01:35:03 ◼   ► know, you're not in the business of writing headlines, but headlines have always been

01:35:07 ◼   ► important even in the print world. And on magazines, they sell the magazines. So there's

01:35:14 ◼   ► always the pre-digital equivalent of clickbait is salacious headlines on the magazines or

01:35:22 ◼   ► a newspaper tabloid to sell copies. Like, "Oh, there's an exaggerated sensationalist

01:35:30 ◼   ► headline."

01:35:31 ◼   ► If it bleeds, it leads. A man bites a dog, all that stuff.

01:35:34 ◼   ► Right. But even then you're not a click away, right? Like even if the cover of the New York

01:35:39 ◼   ► Post has you intrigued enough to say, "Oh, damn it. I'm buying a copy." You've still

01:35:43 ◼   ► got to wait in line. You've got to reach in your pocket and get 50 cents out and hand

01:35:47 ◼   ► it over. And you know you're buying, you're not just dipping your toes in. You're picking

01:35:52 ◼   ► up a whole 85-page newspaper. You know what I mean? Whereas a click is always, you're

01:35:58 ◼   ► just a click away. You could just touch it. Just touch, just touch, just tap here, tap

01:36:02 ◼   ► this, tap this, tap this. Listen to this.

01:36:03 ◼   ► the tabloids at the end of the supermarket line.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Right. Except that you can't, you're just a towel. All you have to do is touch it. Just

01:36:10 ◼   ► touch, just touch this spot. Touch this spot on the, you know, and your thumb is already

01:36:14 ◼   ► just an inch away. Just move your thumb one inch and tap this and we'll explain this seemingly

01:36:20 ◼   ► impossible headline away that the iPhone, you know, Mighty Apple Incorporated is canceling

01:36:29 ◼   ► their supposedly best product ever made. But it seeds these, you know, I know meme, the

01:36:41 ◼   ► word meme has sort of been co-opted to mean these graphical animated GIFs with headlines

01:36:49 ◼   ► underneath. But going back to Richard Dawkins' original definition of just the way that an

01:36:53 ◼   ► an idea can sort of spread through a culture. You know what I mean? It's not even like a

01:37:03 ◼   ► story. It's not like there's, it's just that headline, just the notion of Apple has canceled

01:37:07 ◼   ► the iPhone tent, which is preposterous. Yeah. And I also, I told, and I also thought it

01:37:16 ◼   ► was interesting that my contractor friend Wayne, the way he posed it to me, he was like,

01:37:24 ◼   ► "That's not right, is it?" He knew to be skeptical. You know what I mean? It wasn't like he was

01:37:28 ◼   ► fooled. The problem isn't that people like Wayne have been tricked into thinking it's

01:37:36 ◼   ► true that Apple canceled the phone. Because he's not dumb. He just isn't deeply involved

01:37:42 ◼   ► this. It's just something he cares about tangentially. And because he's not dumb,

01:37:45 ◼   ► because he's actually a smart, bright guy, he knew to be skeptical. But he just didn't understand

01:37:57 ◼   ► how to square the two things. He knows this doesn't sound right, but that's what people are saying.

01:38:02 ◼   ► That's the essence of FUD. It's fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They're fearful that it might be true,

01:38:06 ◼   ► they're uncertain whether it is or true or not, and so start to doubt what they think is real.

01:38:10 ◼   ► And it's a huge problem.

01:38:11 ◼   ► I remember my mom once called me,

01:38:13 ◼   ► she said I was watching BBC

01:38:14 ◼   ► and they said that the iPhone had been hacked.

01:38:16 ◼   ► And because like I do what I do,

01:38:18 ◼   ► I knew what the story was.

01:38:19 ◼   ► And it was if you, you know, if you went to a,

01:38:22 ◼   ► if you jail broke your iPhone

01:38:24 ◼   ► and you went to a specific Chinese cracked iPhone app store

01:38:27 ◼   ► and you downloaded certain apps and you were a journalist,

01:38:29 ◼   ► they were trying to target you with malware.

01:38:32 ◼   ► And it had nothing to do with anything

01:38:34 ◼   ► that would affect anyone else who was an Apple customer.

01:38:37 ◼   ► But the BBC ran it as though the iPhone was hacked.

01:38:39 ◼   ► And another major blog said that Apple's unblemished security

01:38:45 ◼   ► record is now broken.

01:38:47 ◼   ► It was never not broken, and it wasn't broken now.

01:38:50 ◼   ► But this is a narrative that people are getting fed.

01:38:52 ◼   ► And then people who are already worried about technology,

01:38:55 ◼   ► who don't find it accessible, or who think it's scary,

01:38:58 ◼   ► they're just made more afraid.

01:38:59 ◼   ► And you're literally victimizing people

01:39:02 ◼   ► who would benefit from the technology.

01:39:04 ◼   ► Do you read--

01:39:05 ◼   ► I love it.

01:39:05 ◼   ► I've used it for years.

01:39:07 ◼   ► many years, I don't even remember how long, but the website Techmeme, I don't know if it's because

01:39:13 ◼   ► I thought of the word meme or not, but Techmeme is sort of an aggregator of nerd tech industry news.

01:39:21 ◼   ► Gabe Rivera is the founder. I haven't seen Gabe in years, but I know Gabe a little bit.

01:39:27 ◼   ► And the gist of it is if you've never been there, go to techmeme.org. I find it to be a terrific way

01:39:35 ◼   ► to just get a snapshot of, hey, has anything big happened,

01:39:39 ◼   ► especially like when I'm traveling,

01:39:41 ◼   ► if there's a day when I'm busy

01:39:43 ◼   ► and I haven't checked anything in a while,

01:39:45 ◼   ► just quick look at tech meme

01:39:48 ◼   ► and scroll down a bit from the top.

01:39:49 ◼   ► And it's a good way to sanity check,

01:39:51 ◼   ► have I missed anything big

01:39:52 ◼   ► that I really need to know about during Fireball?

01:39:55 ◼   ► Nope, or yes, look at that, wow.

01:39:58 ◼   ► I need to take a break here and go look at it.

01:40:00 ◼   ► And it ranks things,

01:40:03 ◼   ► I don't know what quite the algorithm is,

01:40:05 ◼   ► but anyway a couple of years ago tech memes switched from running the original publications headlines to

01:40:10 ◼   ► rewriting them

01:40:12 ◼   ► editorially good old-fashioned human

01:40:14 ◼   ► Human writing

01:40:20 ◼   ► And a lot of publications really got pissed off about that

01:40:24 ◼   ► And made them verbose enough to tell you everything about the story in the headline, which they thought would limit click-through

01:40:32 ◼   ► And you know oftentimes but but if you're if you're headlining if that's how much could be if that's how much it's news is in

01:40:40 ◼   ► Your story really who's at fault there?

01:40:42 ◼   ► Yeah, well if you're not adding value beyond the facts, then you know, it's not their fault the abuse of headlines

01:40:49 ◼   ► I can't get off. I can't overstate

01:40:52 ◼   ► Just how bad of a problem it is in my opinion

01:40:55 ◼   ► Yeah

01:40:55 ◼   ► You know and and tech meme goes to the opposite measure of actually rewriting them out of respect for the

01:41:02 ◼   ► Visitors detect memes time and attention. Yeah, there's a great Twitter a clown. I forget the name of it

01:41:08 ◼   ► I think it's called saved you a click. Yes

01:41:10 ◼   ► It's so great and

01:41:15 ◼   ► Like I saw one today where it was like it's often movie news

01:41:21 ◼   ► but they just in other words, they'll take a totally salacious tweet or headline and

01:41:25 ◼   ► Just quote it in a tweet and then tell you and usually in about five words

01:41:31 ◼   ► What the story actually is saved you a click. Yeah, and it was one it was like the Russo brothers

01:41:37 ◼   ► talk about

01:41:41 ◼   ► The

01:41:43 ◼   ► What's the movie with Scarlett Johansson where she sees a superhero

01:41:46 ◼   ► The Black Widow or the Black Widow Black Widow movie the Black Widow movie and

01:41:52 ◼   ► This this saved you a quick summary of the entire story was they're very excited to work on it

01:42:00 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know, that's the whole story. Like what are they gonna do?

01:42:04 ◼   ► Are they going to have a love-hate relationship with saved you click because in there are some writers who are really good and I want

01:42:09 ◼   ► To go on that ride with them like they're teasing out a headline

01:42:12 ◼   ► Telling you a phenomenal story and then they'll sing you at the end almost like a like an M Night

01:42:17 ◼   ► Shall we have a Shyamalan movie at its finest and then it really could they just said Darth Vader's his father

01:42:21 ◼   ► I'd be like, ah, damn it

01:42:22 ◼   ► I wanted to go on that ride

01:42:23 ◼   ► But there are a lot of cases where there really is nothing else and they do save me a clinic

01:42:27 ◼   ► So you're saying that they're not quite they're not quite judicious enough in who they go after yes in terms of

01:42:32 ◼   ► It's a really yeah, and yes, it depends on the quality of the writer

01:42:36 ◼   ► But I think there are some writers out there that deserve to

01:42:38 ◼   ► Let the experience of revealing what they want to say and there are others that are just trying to steal your attention

01:42:42 ◼   ► And I think there's a line between the two

01:42:45 ◼   ► I

01:42:47 ◼   ► Don't think we're gonna get to our your 2017 year in review

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01:45:54 ◼   ► So we've had extradition, I forget if it's two or three years in a row where you've come

01:45:57 ◼   ► on at the end of the year and we've done like a year in review. And I ran out of time last

01:46:04 ◼   ► last December, so we didn't do it. But here you are in the first episode of 2018. We could

01:46:08 ◼   ► we could whip through it. Yeah, totally. I mean, not much happened, right?

01:46:15 ◼   ► I don't have notes on this. What do you think? What's your high-level takeaway of

01:46:23 ◼   ► the year that Apple had? The year of the industry?

01:46:26 ◼   ► One of those years… I'm not sure if I prefer it or not, but it was one of those

01:46:30 ◼   ► years where Apple didn't have a March event and we got used to having them again because

01:46:34 ◼   ► 'cause they had a series of events

01:46:35 ◼   ► for like the 12-inch MacBook and Apple Watch

01:46:38 ◼   ► and the iPhone SE and the,

01:46:40 ◼   ► the close we got was the product red iPhone,

01:46:43 ◼   ► which wasn't an event, it was just sort of pushed out there.

01:46:46 ◼   ► But we waited till WWDC to have any sort of Apple,

01:46:50 ◼   ► before Apple took the stage at all.

01:46:51 ◼   ► And then when they did, we got like a plethora of things.

01:46:54 ◼   ► We got all the Kaby Lake, the MacBook, the MacBook Pro,

01:46:58 ◼   ► the iMac Pro was shown off, the HomePod was shown off.

01:47:04 ◼   ► I don't know if people are wondering why it was showing off so early, why those parts

01:47:08 ◼   ► were not so early, if they're going to ship in September, but they've done that in the

01:47:11 ◼   ► past.

01:47:13 ◼   ► And we got all the new operating systems, and it was just, it felt like we went so long

01:47:16 ◼   ► without it, and then everything was just slammed onto us all at once.

01:47:21 ◼   ► My high-level takeaway of 2017 is, I don't know if it's my primary interest in the company,

01:47:30 ◼   ► but it certainly is, if it's not number one, it's very, very close.

01:47:33 ◼   ► But it's probably number one and it's selfish and very selfishly.

01:47:39 ◼   ► Everything I've done professionally in my life, other than the high school job I had

01:47:47 ◼   ► stocking shelves in a supermarket/pharmacy and scraping gum off the tables of my school

01:47:56 ◼   ► when I was in 10th grade during the summer and cutting the grass, I've done with a

01:48:02 ◼   ► a computer. 99.999% of that work was on Apple computers. Not through luck, but through actually

01:48:17 ◼   ► choosing what I do. I've spent, other than some internships in college, really spent

01:48:24 ◼   ► very little time needing to use Windows professionally, and that was by choice.

01:48:31 ◼   ► And I see 2017 as an interesting year for Apple as the maker of machines for creative

01:48:38 ◼   ► professionals, where I do think that they dropped the ball on the latest MacBook Pros.

01:48:47 ◼   ► There's just no question in my mind.

01:48:49 ◼   ► There's certain aspects of them that are debatable like, "Hey, maybe they didn't need to make

01:48:55 ◼   ► it any thinner. I wish it was the same thickness as before and just put more battery in there."

01:49:02 ◼   ► Debatable. I could see why other people would say, "This is amazing. It's as thin and light

01:49:07 ◼   ► as a MacBook Air, but it has a retina screen in its performance." But the keyboard is undeniably

01:49:13 ◼   ► a step backward. It is failing for people. There's too many people who they're getting

01:49:20 ◼   ► keys stuck. And that's just it. The keyboard has to be reliable. It absolutely has to be.

01:49:28 ◼   ► And I like to get a Mac and use it until I feel like it's really problematic. So I've

01:49:33 ◼   ► still got my recording right now using my 2013 MacBook Pro that I bought with a core

01:49:39 ◼   ► i7 and maxed out the RAM at 16 and all big 1GB SSD. The thing still runs really, really

01:49:48 ◼   ► well. So I wasn't in the market for a new one. But boy, ever since this report of the

01:49:52 ◼   ► unreliable keyboards has broken out and really become well-known months ago, every time I'm

01:50:00 ◼   ► traveling or otherwise using my MacBook Pro for work and I'm writing, and guess what?

01:50:06 ◼   ► I write a lot. I keep thinking about how I've never had a MacBook or PowerBook or an iBook

01:50:13 ◼   ► that had a keyboard that I didn't trust 100%. And how frustrating I would find it to have

01:50:20 ◼   ► a keyboard that wasn't 100% reliable. Like 100%. 100%. I've had this machine now for

01:50:28 ◼   ► over four years. I don't think I've ever once tried to type a letter on this keyboard

01:50:37 ◼   ► and not had the key that I thought I was pressing register the key in the software I was typing.

01:50:45 ◼   ► No, I'm sorry. I say 2013. I just checked. It's mid-2014, 2014. So it's a year and

01:50:51 ◼   ► so is my son's, the lemon that was fixed. I misremembered. Good thing I went to the

01:50:57 ◼   ► about box wouldn't want to get that wrong. So it's a three-year-old computer. But literally,

01:51:02 ◼   ► however many keystrokes I've typed since sometime in the second half of 2014 when I

01:51:09 ◼   ► bought it and it became my personal laptop, it is literally at 100% to my knowledge. I've

01:51:16 ◼   ► never once tried to type a K and not had the K register or had the K stick or something

01:51:20 ◼   ► like that. Anything less than that is unacceptable to me. So I really think they have a problem

01:51:26 ◼   ► there with the keyboard. I also think that as the as we stand right now, I think that

01:51:32 ◼   ► the touch bar is not good enough. I think there's way too many people who don't like

01:51:39 ◼   ► it at all and way too few people who have good things to say about it. It's hard for

01:51:43 ◼   ► me to judge because I only used it for like two weeks while reviewing them. And I was

01:51:47 ◼   ► intrigued by it. But it still seemed like this is really cool idea. Let's wait and see

01:51:52 ◼   ► how it shakes out in software.

01:51:54 ◼   ► And it seems like the way it's shaken out

01:51:56 ◼   ► is that people don't really care for it or love it.

01:52:00 ◼   ► So I'm very similar to you in that I have that exact same

01:52:02 ◼   ► MacBook Pro, like the 13-inch from 2014.

01:52:05 ◼   ► And I loved it.

01:52:05 ◼   ► It was probably my favorite computer

01:52:07 ◼   ► because I vacillated between the MacBook Pro and the MacBook

01:52:10 ◼   ► Air in terms of power and portability.

01:52:12 ◼   ► And that one really felt like it had it all.

01:52:14 ◼   ► But I'm different in that I've been using the 13-inch

01:52:16 ◼   ► with Touch Bar since it came out,

01:52:18 ◼   ► since the very first time it was available.

01:52:21 ◼   ► And I have two thoughts about it.

01:52:23 ◼   ► One is I vastly prefer the keyboard

01:52:25 ◼   ► on the new MacBook Pro to the previous ones.

01:52:27 ◼   ► But I know that not everybody thinks that.

01:52:30 ◼   ► And Apple is the only manufacturer of MacBooks.

01:52:33 ◼   ► So you cannot have a product that's divisive.

01:52:35 ◼   ► You can have people who like one keyboard more

01:52:37 ◼   ► than the other.

01:52:38 ◼   ► But if you have a large portion of your customer base

01:52:40 ◼   ► who actively hates that keyboard, that's a problem

01:52:43 ◼   ► because they have nowhere else to go.

01:52:45 ◼   ► And the failure thing is just not debatable.

01:52:47 ◼   ► I have had keys fail on older MacBooks,

01:52:50 ◼   ► but they were super easy to either clean or replace,

01:52:53 ◼   ► like just trivial.

01:52:54 ◼   ► And this one is absolutely not.

01:52:56 ◼   ► This is an expensive repair.

01:52:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, and let me just emphasize that.

01:52:59 ◼   ► It's not that in my life I've never had a key go bad

01:53:01 ◼   ► on any Apple laptop.

01:53:03 ◼   ► I mean, I think I had a white,

01:53:05 ◼   ► I know I had a white iBook, the 12-inch white iBook,

01:53:08 ◼   ► and I think the keys got a little squishy,

01:53:09 ◼   ► but they were fixable.

01:53:11 ◼   ► I didn't have to go to a store.

01:53:12 ◼   ► I could, you know, jimmy it with a pocket knife or something.

01:53:15 ◼   ► I'm just saying, but I'm saying that the 100% record

01:53:17 ◼   ► is with this particular MacBook Pro from mid-2014 that I fastidiously never eat food around,

01:53:27 ◼   ► which my son does.

01:53:28 ◼   ► I'm a filthy blogger, so I thought mine was just waiting to die.

01:53:32 ◼   ► My son's keyboard is like Oscar the Grouch's keyboard. It's really kind of astounding.

01:53:40 ◼   ► But you know what's funny though? It would drive me crazy. He's got keys that to me stick,

01:53:47 ◼   ► But they don't stick stick.

01:53:49 ◼   ► They just don't click right, but it actually works.

01:53:52 ◼   ► If you just trust that what you think you're typing,

01:53:54 ◼   ► you're typing and look at the screen, it actually works.

01:53:57 ◼   ► Even though it feels, ugh, it makes me sick.

01:54:00 ◼   ► But anyway, I love them.

01:54:02 ◼   ► I think it's a problem.

01:54:04 ◼   ► And I also think it's interesting on the flip side

01:54:07 ◼   ► for professional work, you've got,

01:54:11 ◼   ► it was a big, big year for iPad Pro.

01:54:16 ◼   ► - But before we move on from the MacBook Pro,

01:54:17 ◼   ► the one other thing that I wanted to say about this is,

01:54:20 ◼   ► this is one of those things where data,

01:54:22 ◼   ► you know, people talk about data a lot,

01:54:23 ◼   ► but data is nothing without analysis.

01:54:25 ◼   ► And Apple has a ton of data about what we buy.

01:54:28 ◼   ► We literally vote with our wallets

01:54:30 ◼   ► for everything that Apple does.

01:54:31 ◼   ► And people don't buy desktops.

01:54:34 ◼   ► When they do buy desktops, they buy iMacs,

01:54:36 ◼   ► but they don't buy desktops, they buy MacBooks.

01:54:38 ◼   ► And MacBook Air is super popular.

01:54:40 ◼   ► And everything Apple is telling them,

01:54:41 ◼   ► including the success of the iOS devices,

01:54:43 ◼   ► is that the lighter and more mainstream

01:54:45 ◼   ► make these products, the more they will sell.

01:54:47 ◼   ► And despite people really not liking these MacBooks, they're incredibly popular.

01:54:52 ◼   ► And you could say that there was a hunger or a thirst or there's no alternative, but

01:54:55 ◼   ► it's also possible that Apple is making more mainstream MacBooks.

01:54:59 ◼   ► But they did it at the expense of the pros instead of adding a product.

01:55:03 ◼   ► It's great that they had the MacBook escape for people who didn't want everything else,

01:55:07 ◼   ► but they didn't have a MacBook Pro Pro the way they have the iMac Pro that was sitting

01:55:10 ◼   ► on top of the line that was there for the people who really wanted high memory, high

01:55:15 ◼   ► power, high processing, and didn't give a crap if it had battery life or thinness at

01:55:19 ◼   ► all. I think that missing product was… I think if they'd had that extra one on top,

01:55:24 ◼   ► the way they had the extra one on the bottom, we wouldn't have seen anywhere near the

01:55:27 ◼   ► negative sentiment we got.

01:55:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. I wish I had put it in a note so I would have

01:55:33 ◼   ► been sure to make it, but you made it well. But I think you're exactly right that they

01:55:36 ◼   ► They should, in theory, there should be what the current thinner MacBook Pros are to the

01:55:46 ◼   ► iMac.

01:55:50 ◼   ► There should be like the 5K iMac.

01:55:53 ◼   ► There should be something that is like the iMac Pro and/or Mac Pro.

01:56:01 ◼   ► These are really MacBook Air Pros that we got.

01:56:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:56:04 ◼   ► names matter, but I think if you put names aside, and I don't know what you'd call it,

01:56:12 ◼   ► somebody that could come up with something, but there should be a thicker, heavier, more USB ports,

01:56:19 ◼   ► pro things that... The pro word is so problematic, and I see so many columns and listen to so many

01:56:30 ◼   ► podcasts where I get frustrated because it's like almost like if you took the word pro

01:56:36 ◼   ► off the MacBook Pro, like you said, just call it like the new MacBook Air or just, you know,

01:56:43 ◼   ► or if they just like iPhones just put the word MacBook on all of them, whether it was

01:56:48 ◼   ► the MacBook One port, the MacBook Pro, whatever. I think you can easily get lost in the weeds

01:56:55 ◼   ► by defining pro as professional and because different people who make their living on

01:57:03 ◼   ► it in a professional sense do it in so many different ways. There are people who literally

01:57:08 ◼   ► don't need any of the ports. There are people who can use it all day long and get terrific

01:57:13 ◼   ► battery life with exactly the thinness and who really appreciate how much thinner it

01:57:17 ◼   ► is and lighter to carry around.

01:57:21 ◼   ► And there are people who are like, well, I would call new generation pros who they're

01:57:24 ◼   ► they're entrepreneurs or they're doing, they're doing a running a business. And to them, they,

01:57:29 ◼   ► they consider themselves pros the same way that people old school would be like designers

01:57:33 ◼   ► or renderers or anything. And you also have the other end of the scale where you have

01:57:37 ◼   ► people who almost see like Apple is taking fire from on high and giving it to the masses

01:57:41 ◼   ► and how dare these people be pros. Only what I do is pro and there's assholes on both sides

01:57:45 ◼   ► that argument, but in the middle is a bunch of people being underserved.

01:57:48 ◼   ► Yeah, and I appreciate that frustration of, "Wow, they used to make a machine that had

01:57:55 ◼   ► plenty of ports that I used, and now I can't get one unless I buy the old, you know, I

01:58:01 ◼   ► can't get the new one with the ports that I use, and I'm stuck using these dongles."

01:58:06 ◼   ► And I thought about it too, because I've always had to use dongles.

01:58:08 ◼   ► I had to use DVI dongles and FireWire dongles and all sorts of things, but I realize a big

01:58:13 ◼   ► difference here is that USB was never one of the choices they had to make.

01:58:17 ◼   ► It was always the fringe stuff that I used dongles for like Thunderbolt or something

01:58:21 ◼   ► and USB is something everybody needs. So now the dongle is everybody's problem and not

01:58:24 ◼   ► just the nerd niche sort of problem.

01:58:27 ◼   ► Yeah. It's, you know, I used to roll my eyes at people barking about SD card slots because

01:58:33 ◼   ► I was shooting with a Canon and I had a CF card, so I needed the dongle anyway. And then

01:58:38 ◼   ► I bought a Fuji X 100 S and I could just plug the SD card right into my Mac book. And it's

01:58:42 ◼   ► like, hey, that's pretty cool. Like, yeah, I'm not angry that

01:58:47 ◼   ► they don't have SD card slots on the new ones. But I'm kind of

01:58:50 ◼   ► glad that I'm still using one that has one. Yeah. So anyway,

01:58:54 ◼   ► it until you need it. Anyway, I do think you're right, though. I

01:58:57 ◼   ► think I trust Apple to listen. I also know that, you know,

01:59:02 ◼   ► there's an awful lot of people at Apple itself who use Mac

01:59:06 ◼   ► books, including, you know, people like Tim Cook and Phil

01:59:09 ◼   ► Schiller, who, if their keys get stuck, they're gonna, they might bring it up. Yeah. Yeah.

01:59:18 ◼   ► And also their holes, all their engineers and all their software and hardware engineers

01:59:21 ◼   ► use Mac books every day and they need them to work. I also think, and I'm kind of excited

01:59:26 ◼   ► about it. I think that Apple could appreciate that, hey, we didn't hit it out of the park

01:59:32 ◼   ► with the first touch bar. Not to call him out, but I think Marco Arment on the ATP had

01:59:45 ◼   ► said his wish would be for Apple to say, "You know what? We tried it. It wasn't a good idea.

01:59:49 ◼   ► We're next MacBook Pro. You can buy it fully spec. You don't have to get the lowest end one. You can

01:59:55 ◼   ► get any of them without it." I would rather see Apple say, "You know what? It wasn't good enough.

02:00:00 ◼   ► let's make it better.

02:00:02 ◼   ► Let's do a 2.0 touch bar that people do want to give up

02:00:07 ◼   ► the old style function keys for.

02:00:10 ◼   ► Maybe with a hardware escape key.

02:00:14 ◼   ► - No, but it's super interesting.

02:00:16 ◼   ► - Which I don't think is a ridiculous idea,

02:00:17 ◼   ► which I don't think is a ridiculous idea.

02:00:20 ◼   ► To have a button on the top right for touch ID

02:00:23 ◼   ► and an escape key on the left

02:00:24 ◼   ► and just do the touch bar in the middle.

02:00:26 ◼   ► - But that's the thing.

02:00:27 ◼   ► So you could also, you could just call it the home button

02:00:28 ◼   ► if you wanna make it super friendly for people.

02:00:29 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter, but is touch ID long

02:00:32 ◼   ► for this world?

02:00:33 ◼   ► Like if we go to face ID, does that disappear?

02:00:35 ◼   ► And that's the most compelling part about the touch bar.

02:00:37 ◼   ► Like I use a touch bar as a shortcut

02:00:40 ◼   ► because I can just swipe across Safari tabs faster

02:00:43 ◼   ► than I can actually find the Safari tab I want

02:00:45 ◼   ► with the keyboard.

02:00:46 ◼   ► And there's all sorts of things that I can do

02:00:48 ◼   ► that's just quick on it.

02:00:49 ◼   ► But I use that touch ID thing all the time.

02:00:52 ◼   ► - I did too.

02:00:52 ◼   ► And it was the single thing I hated giving up

02:00:56 ◼   ► from the review unit that I had.

02:00:58 ◼   ► But I also think now, several months into the iPhone X lifestyle, that there's no doubt

02:01:03 ◼   ► in my mind that the Touch ID is not long for this world.

02:01:08 ◼   ► And on a MacBook in particular, it seems Face ID would be way more better than Touch ID

02:01:19 ◼   ► than it even is on the phone, and I clearly think it's better on the phone.

02:01:22 ◼   ► But in terms of getting an angle and working with being completely, I want to say ambidextrous,

02:01:32 ◼   ► but not biased towards the right side on your right hand.

02:01:37 ◼   ► I mean, Windows Hello works now without any of the technology Apple's applying to it.

02:01:41 ◼   ► It would just be a fantastic product.

02:01:43 ◼   ► Right.

02:01:44 ◼   ► And you've got some time when you open a MacBook, and there's some time there where Face ID

02:01:51 ◼   ► already register you. Unlike the phone where you can make arguments about which is faster

02:01:57 ◼   ► by the stopwatch, it should clearly be faster on a MacBook, opening it from a closed position.

02:02:03 ◼   ► Anyway, so I think it's funny that to me the best part about the Touch Bar system on the

02:02:10 ◼   ► current MacBook Pros is the Touch ID sensor, which I think is likely going away. I don't

02:02:16 ◼   ► I don't know when.

02:02:19 ◼   ► Anyway, I want to move on to the iPad side of things.

02:02:21 ◼   ► And I think it was a very interesting year for the iPad

02:02:23 ◼   ► Pro, because I think we saw the most serious attempt at making

02:02:31 ◼   ► iPad running on-- or iOS running on iPads more like several

02:02:37 ◼   ► steps closer to what would this be like if it was primarily

02:02:41 ◼   ► for iPads and not secondarily for iPads.

02:02:43 ◼   ► like an iPad OS rather than a vanilla iOS.

02:02:47 ◼   ► - Right, and I liked all of the ideas.

02:02:50 ◼   ► I liked the list of problems they were trying to solve.

02:02:55 ◼   ► It all seemed, there wasn't any aspect of it

02:03:01 ◼   ► that I would think, and I say this guardedly

02:03:05 ◼   ► because I don't use an iPad Pro for a lot of work,

02:03:08 ◼   ► so I'm judging it sort of as a tourist, but I liked it.

02:03:13 ◼   ► and as a user interface critic.

02:03:15 ◼   ► But then as time wore on and they settled in,

02:03:17 ◼   ► I still think the biggest problem

02:03:19 ◼   ► isn't that they didn't come up with good ideas,

02:03:21 ◼   ► but that it still doesn't go nearly far enough.

02:03:24 ◼   ► - Yeah.

02:03:24 ◼   ► - In terms of things that I find so convenient

02:03:27 ◼   ► and so quick and so easy to do

02:03:30 ◼   ► almost without thinking about it on a Mac,

02:03:32 ◼   ► which feel like I'm doing surgery on somebody with chopsticks

02:03:37 ◼   ► when I do it on an iPad.

02:03:40 ◼   ► - Yep.

02:03:41 ◼   ► - No, I ran into, I was working on iPad Pro.

02:03:45 ◼   ► I used it when I traveled a lot

02:03:46 ◼   ► and I was working on it the other day

02:03:47 ◼   ► and I was trying to get the images off of Apple's newsroom

02:03:50 ◼   ► and I couldn't just touch on it

02:03:52 ◼   ► because it's got that over effect

02:03:54 ◼   ► where it will give you the social sharing stuff.

02:03:57 ◼   ► And then I tried to download it and it was a zip file

02:03:59 ◼   ► and I could have opened an app to do it

02:04:00 ◼   ► but I just realized that using Apple's default tools,

02:04:03 ◼   ► I couldn't use Apple's default website.

02:04:05 ◼   ► And I pulled out, I just got upset and I pulled out my Mac

02:04:07 ◼   ► and I did it in three seconds.

02:04:09 ◼   ► and those sort of problems that need to be solved.

02:04:13 ◼   ► And as much as people talk about sort of adding

02:04:15 ◼   ► parts of iOS to Mac, like touchscreen Macs,