The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► No, seriously, do you do you do you wear polarized sunglasses? I have sunglasses

00:00:04 ◼   ► I don't even I don't think they're polarized because I buy I buy the cheapest ones possible

00:00:08 ◼   ► Because I sit on them and I lose them and so I gave up buying nice ones polarization. I don't I'm not an optician

00:00:15 ◼   ► I'm not an optics guy, but the basic idea though, it sounds kind of crazy. Do you know what that how they work?

00:00:21 ◼   ► They're like blinds like horizontal blinds on the lenses. They're there, you know, I don't even think that you can see them with the naked eye

00:00:28 ◼   ► But the idea is that it makes your glasses blind, and then without reducing visibility,

00:00:34 ◼   ► it reduces glare. And so, for example, people who work on the water, like fishermen,

00:00:42 ◼   ► love polarized sunglasses because it cuts down on the glare from the water in front of them.

00:00:48 ◼   ► But you know if you have polarized sunglasses or not, because if you look at your iPhone,

00:00:54 ◼   ► it it or any kind of like LC oh it looks different it looks crazy it's like all

00:00:59 ◼   ► rain so that I do then I do yes I do have polarized you do have polarizes I

00:01:03 ◼   ► must cuz my phone looks looks freaky and at first the first time I noticed that I

00:01:08 ◼   ► thought that it was something wrong with the phone and then I realized I had

00:01:12 ◼   ► bought new sunglasses yeah that's exactly it's exactly how how this came

00:01:19 ◼   ► into my mind I actually what happened is I I had Marco Arment on the show last

00:01:23 ◼   ► week. And I heard an episode of his show from weeks ago where he was talking about the Warby

00:01:30 ◼   ► Parker glasses and sunglasses and said that he likes polarized sunglasses. And I thought,

00:01:37 ◼   ► in the middle of listening to the show, that's crazy. How can someone who uses an iPhone all the

00:01:43 ◼   ► time, as I presume Marco does, use polarized sunglasses? To me, the debate between whether

00:01:48 ◼   ► you get polarized sunglasses or not is over now that we carry iPhones with us all over the place.

00:01:53 ◼   ► Because it looks bad on your iPhone?

00:01:55 ◼   ► It makes your iPhone look crazy. To me, it makes it look unreadable. I could not bear

00:02:01 ◼   ► to use my iPhone with sunglasses on. And yet, I have my sunglasses on and I use my phone out in,

00:02:07 ◼   ► what do they call that, daytime. And I wanted to talk to Marco about it, but we ran short of time

00:02:14 ◼   ► because we did a quick show. So I didn't get to bring it up to him. Is the effect the same

00:02:19 ◼   ► in the casino? I would bet that it is, given that, given all the video poker machines, I'm sure.

00:02:27 ◼   ► I'm just trying to think of where you would be most likely to be using them.

00:02:29 ◼   ► Well, and then the further confusing it in the casino is, you know, if you start seeing

00:02:36 ◼   ► wavy lines and stuff, you're never quite sure if it's your glasses or... How long have I been here?

00:02:41 ◼   ► Yeah, how long? It's the last time I saw the sun.

00:02:45 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:02:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:47 ◼   ► What was that guy next to me smoking?

00:02:51 ◼   ► You just never know what it is that's causing the waving lines in Vegas.

00:02:57 ◼   ► But anyway, that's actually what happened to me today that reminded me that—to bring

00:03:04 ◼   ► it up with you, because I didn't bring it up with Marco—is that a couple weeks ago

00:03:07 ◼   ► I had Amy's old first original iPod out, the one with the wheel that actually spun.

00:03:14 ◼   ► I don't know, for old times' sake.

00:03:15 ◼   ► And I think it was because it was like some kind of--

00:03:18 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:03:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I got it out.

00:03:20 ◼   ► There was some air pressure, wasn't there?

00:03:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:21 ◼   ► I got it out, posted a picture on Instagram,

00:03:23 ◼   ► got a couple hundred likes.

00:03:25 ◼   ► It's a beautiful device.

00:03:26 ◼   ► It really is.

00:03:27 ◼   ► It looks ancient now because it's so crazy thick,

00:03:30 ◼   ► because it has a big hard drive in it.

00:03:31 ◼   ► But I had it out, and it was in my office

00:03:36 ◼   ► here next to my desk, next to a window in the sunshine.

00:03:39 ◼   ► And Amy was in here telling me something

00:03:41 ◼   ► before she ran out for an errand.

00:03:42 ◼   ► And she was like, why did you leave this?

00:03:44 ◼   ► because it's hers, not mine, actually. That's the other thing. She got mad at me when I posted the

00:03:47 ◼   ► Instagram because I made it look—I didn't say anything on Instagram. She says, "That's mine,

00:03:53 ◼   ► not yours." And so there, you know, there I'm sleeping.

00:03:58 ◼   ► You jacked her image.

00:03:59 ◼   ► Yep. Sleeping on the couch for three nights.

00:04:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:02 ◼   ► But then she got mad at me because I wrecked it because I left it out in the sun for a couple

00:04:07 ◼   ► of weeks. And I looked at it and it didn't really look weird to me. And then she goes, "Oh, is that

00:04:12 ◼   ► at these sunglasses. Because it actually made the original iPod with her polarized sunglasses,

00:04:22 ◼   ► it made it look as though it had a color screen, like a rainbow.

00:04:26 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah.

00:04:27 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, well, that would have been... " Now, that actually would have been... To

00:04:31 ◼   ► me, if you borrow your wife's original 2001 iPod and literally wreck it, it still works.

00:04:38 ◼   ► That's the thing that's amazing to me, is that if you can find a firewire cable, it

00:04:42 ◼   ► works. If I had actually wrecked it, that would justify some anger.

00:04:45 ◼   ► So you're okay going blind as long as you can continue to look at your,

00:04:50 ◼   ► going blind in the long term, as long as you can continue to look at your iPhone

00:04:55 ◼   ► with crystal clarity right now?

00:04:57 ◼   ► I don't think non-polarized, unpolarized, whatever the word is, normal sunglasses

00:05:02 ◼   ► are driving me blind. I think it's, you know, just you have to put up with a little bit more glare.

00:05:11 ◼   ► I actually am—you might be in the same situation. We're of similar vintage. I actually am having

00:05:18 ◼   ► trouble. I'm starting to get the presbyopia, whatever it's called, in my left eye, not my

00:05:25 ◼   ► right eye, though, which I don't know if it's better or worse. I got it all through my body.

00:05:30 ◼   ► What's it called? Is it presbyopia? I looked it up a little bit, and then I got scared and stopped.

00:05:38 ◼   ► I had to finally buy a pair of those cheaters reading glasses. Just like cheap grocery store ones.

00:05:45 ◼   ► How do they work? What did they do?

00:05:48 ◼   ► It just makes it easier to see things close to you.

00:05:50 ◼   ► How? I always thought they just magnified.

00:05:53 ◼   ► It's good, yeah. I mean, that's the same thing.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Yeah, but if I can't--

00:05:57 ◼   ► That's what reader glasses do.

00:06:02 ◼   ► As you can see, I'm really well informed about it.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Yeah, we should really be having this conversation.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Ophthalmology.

00:06:12 ◼   ► But you wear contacts.

00:06:13 ◼   ► I do.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Yeah, so do I. I'm practically blind without them.

00:06:18 ◼   ► Right, so I think that's what--

00:06:19 ◼   ► I think that long range, that's what I think I need to do,

00:06:21 ◼   ► is I need to get some kind of pair of glasses

00:06:24 ◼   ► that I take around with me and put them on to read.

00:06:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:06:29 ◼   ► It's a problem in restaurants now, in low light situations.

00:06:32 ◼   ► Trying to read a manual.

00:06:36 ◼   ► And I know now what my parents went through and why they—it always seems so annoying.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Just put the damn glasses on like an idiot.

00:06:45 ◼   ► I had no sympathy for my dad when he went through it at all.

00:06:48 ◼   ► None.

00:06:49 ◼   ► Right.

00:06:50 ◼   ► I didn't either.

00:06:51 ◼   ► I remember when my dad got his first pair of—my dad wears glasses and has his entire

00:06:56 ◼   ► adult life, I believe.

00:06:57 ◼   ► I don't think I've seen a picture of my dad without glasses on since he was like a

00:07:02 ◼   ► teenager.

00:07:03 ◼   ► I remember when he got bifocals and he really was struggling with them because it's weird.

00:07:09 ◼   ► You have to like hold things at a weird angle and stuff and see he was like lifting them on,

00:07:13 ◼   ► lifting them off and I had no sympathy for him whatsoever. Making fun of them. Yeah.

00:07:21 ◼   ► I gotta look this up. The arrogance of youth.

00:07:24 ◼   ► What's it called? It's like presbyopia or something? I don't know.

00:07:29 ◼   ► presbyterian no i think it's presbyopia

00:07:36 ◼   ► yeah presbyopia usually occurs beginning around age 40 when people experience

00:07:41 ◼   ► blurred vision near vision when reading sewing or

00:07:44 ◼   ► working at the computer karen karen got it before i did and she

00:07:48 ◼   ► started wearing she'd never won glasses and her

00:07:50 ◼   ► vision was perfect which i always found irritating to begin with and then she

00:07:55 ◼   ► also kept saying things like i think it'd be kind of cool to wear

00:07:57 ◼   ► glasses. I think I'd look good in glasses. You're not going out and getting like blank glasses to

00:08:03 ◼   ► wear just to look like, just stop it. But then she got the reader glasses and like the first time I

00:08:11 ◼   ► saw her wearing them, I'm just like, I go in and she's lying in bed, she's reading a book with

00:08:15 ◼   ► those glasses on. I'm like, "Oh, hey." Hey there, librarian. We had a kid in high school. We had a

00:08:23 ◼   ► kid in high school. I'm not going to name names. I'm 99.9% sure he does not listen to the show.

00:08:30 ◼   ► But, you know, why name a name? He came in wearing glasses one day in high school,

00:08:40 ◼   ► I don't know, 11th grade, 12th grade. And so you don't want to say anything. You don't want to be

00:08:44 ◼   ► the guy who makes fun of someone because they start wearing glasses. I actually had to start

00:08:48 ◼   ► wearing glasses in high school. I also got contacts, so most of the time I didn't look

00:08:54 ◼   ► different. But, you know, I just—you don't want to be mature about it. You don't want to act like a

00:08:59 ◼   ► fifth grader. But like within a day or two, it turned out that he didn't have prescription

00:09:03 ◼   ► glasses. He just had glasses, and he literally said, "I think they make me look smart."

00:09:09 ◼   ► And then we just tore into him. I mean—

00:09:12 ◼   ► Jared: Of course.

00:09:12 ◼   ► Pete: Oh, it's like off to the races because all of a sudden, instead of making fun of somebody

00:09:16 ◼   ► for having, you know, a legitimate problem, you can...

00:09:19 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, I've had bad eyesight since fourth grade, so, you know, I don't want to hear it.

00:09:23 ◼   ► Like, I've, you know, I've had to live with... I've had to live with this pain for a long time.

00:09:28 ◼   ► You're gonna just wear them because you think they look good.

00:09:32 ◼   ► I've told this story before. This is one of the... this might be the funniest thing that

00:09:35 ◼   ► ever happened to me in my life, and I think I've told this story on this show before,

00:09:40 ◼   ► but I bet it was years ago, so why not rehash it? It was sixth grade,

00:09:44 ◼   ► and his kid, Dwayne, I'll name him Dwayne. Dwayne and I got sent down to the nurse together for the

00:09:51 ◼   ► annual kids go down two by two and you gotta get your eyes checked, right? And I don't know why

00:09:57 ◼   ► they send you two by two. I don't think the nurse was very good with children, so she couldn't

00:10:01 ◼   ► handle very many at a time. And so, the lights are real low in the room because it's set up for

00:10:06 ◼   ► like eye exams and there's a chair to wait and it's about halfway like between, there's like a

00:10:11 ◼   ► piece of tape on the ground where you stand and then there's a standard eye chart. And she said,

00:10:17 ◼   ► you know, "Who wants to go first?" And Duane went first. I took a seat. I took a seat. I'm halfway

00:10:22 ◼   ► to the sign and I thought, "Well, you know what? This would be so easy to cheat because—and this

00:10:26 ◼   ► is the way my brain works—is, look, I'm halfway there. I can just memorize the bottom line."

00:10:31 ◼   ► I don't know. So, I'm thinking about, you know, how, why wouldn't they, you know, proctor this

00:10:40 ◼   ► exam a little bit more on the up and up. In the meantime, and remember how they used to do it,

00:10:44 ◼   ► they'd like have you read. And it was the same thing every year. You have, you know,

00:10:48 ◼   ► see which line you can read, cover the other eye, do it with the other eye. And then they,

00:10:52 ◼   ► at our school, they used to give us a pair of glasses. And they were, they're like, they look

00:10:56 ◼   ► like Warby Parkers now. They're like, I guess, you know, they're like, what looks cool now,

00:11:00 ◼   ► like black chunky glasses. But like in the '80s, they were the worst glasses you can imagine.

00:11:04 ◼   ► And they were real thick. And it was the same pair. They just put them on, and then what do

00:11:09 ◼   ► you see?" And when I'd put them on, it's like you could almost see nothing. I mean, the whole world

00:11:13 ◼   ► just—it's like Vaseline on your eyes. And this is the sixth grade, same school all six years,

00:11:19 ◼   ► so it's like the sixth time I've done this. And I'm sitting there, and I'm bored, and I'm

00:11:23 ◼   ► listening, and she's like, "What about this row? What about this row?" And Duane can't see any

00:11:29 ◼   ► other rows. He couldn't even see the big E at the top. And I started giggling. And then she had him

00:11:37 ◼   ► cover his other eye. And it was the same thing. He couldn't read a damn thing on the eye chart.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And I was just dying. I was like, "Oh my god, this—he's

00:11:47 ◼   ► like, blind." And then she goes, "What if you try these on?" And she gives him this pair of glasses

00:11:55 ◼   ► that everybody had to try. And he goes, "Oh, wow!" And I just died. I just like, fell out of

00:12:04 ◼   ► my chair laughing. And Dwayne is like, "I didn't know I was supposed to see like this."

00:12:10 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:12:10 ◼   ► Jared: Dwayne has not seen the board in like, three years.

00:12:14 ◼   ► Pete: And the nurse turns to me and she goes, "Do you think something's funnier?" And I said,

00:12:19 ◼   ► "He can't see anything!" [Laughter]

00:12:25 ◼   ► And he had, Dwayne had good parents, you know, I think his mom was even a nurse, you know,

00:12:29 ◼   ► and nurses kids are always, you know, it's not like he didn't have healthcare or anything.

00:12:33 ◼   ► I just, like, never reported it. He never, like—

00:12:36 ◼   ► Jared: Only noticed.

00:12:36 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:12:37 ◼   ► And somehow, I don't know if he had had a really bad year between fifth and sixth grade,

00:12:41 ◼   ► if he'd, you know, been absent the year before when they did the same thing.

00:12:45 ◼   ► But lo and behold, like two days later, Duane comes in wearing the thickest glasses you've ever seen.

00:12:53 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:12:55 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:12:56 ◼   ► Jared; Yeah. Hank's got glasses too. He doesn't have to wear them that much. I'd say it's pretty

00:13:02 ◼   ► good. It's just mild, but... Is it distance or close? Distance. And, man, the first pair that he got

00:13:10 ◼   ► was with Spider-Man glasses. Oh, I remember seeing a picture of him with those. That's cool. Yeah,

00:13:16 ◼   ► they were, and they were awesome, because they were very subtly Spider-Man. The case was kind

00:13:21 ◼   ► of Spider-Man-dubbed, but the glasses themselves looked like sort of Warby Parker-ish, except they

00:13:27 ◼   ► just had a little spider web on the things on the side. I thought, "Oh man, I'd wear those."

00:13:34 ◼   ► I see a lot more kids at Jonas's school wearing glasses than when I was a kid. When I was a kid,

00:13:39 ◼   ► it just seemed pretty rare. There were only a handful of kids who wore glasses.

00:13:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:44 ◼   ► It seems pretty common. I can't even wait to see what happens to these kids. They say that

00:13:48 ◼   ► standing, being a foot away from a glowing computer screen for hours a day is bad for your

00:13:54 ◼   ► your eyes. Can you even imagine how much worse it's gonna be for these kids? I can't even

00:13:59 ◼   ► imagine. Yeah, our kids are gonna need corrective surgery. Because I feel like with us, like

00:14:03 ◼   ► we were, I mean even when we were playing video games like in an arcade or something,

00:14:06 ◼   ► I mean the CRTs were so fuzzy you didn't really have to focus that what that closely. Yeah,

00:14:11 ◼   ► I think that was good for us. And you couldn't afford to play for, you know, as long as they

00:14:16 ◼   ► can now. I always think of that, I do think of that whenever that people complain about

00:14:23 ◼   ► in-app purchases. It's like, do you realize how much money it cost me to play video games?

00:14:27 ◼   ► I worked as a teenager. I worked at a video arcade.

00:14:30 ◼   ► Oh, man. Living the life.

00:14:31 ◼   ► Man, I just spent everything at the place.

00:14:35 ◼   ► Yeah, you just left everything.

00:14:36 ◼   ► But the cool thing was I had the key to the place.

00:14:39 ◼   ► You left without a paycheck every week.

00:14:41 ◼   ► Yeah, basically. But I had the key to the place. And so, like, on Saturday night,

00:14:46 ◼   ► I would take my friends, and when it was closed, we would just go down and open it up and lock the

00:14:51 ◼   ► door and just stand there and play video games. What was your favorite video game in that arcade?

00:14:55 ◼   ► Ah, my favorite of all time, I'm not sure if it was in that one or not, was Tempest.

00:15:00 ◼   ► Oh, that's a good game. I loved all the ones, all the vector art games. Yeah.

00:15:06 ◼   ► Yeah, those were all good. Yeah. Star Wars. Yeah, the Star Wars one. Battlezone.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Battlezone was a, yeah. I guess Asteroids was vector graphics too. Never really thought about

00:15:19 ◼   ► that. But now that I think about the way that asteroids looked, I think it was.

00:15:23 ◼   ► Yeah. And there were a number of asteroids ripoffs that were pretty good, too.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Yeah. I remember my favorite neighborhood arcade growing up had Spy Hunter, always a favorite,

00:15:36 ◼   ► and Yi-Ar Kung-Fu. I know Dan Benjamin and I talked at length about Yi-Ar Kung-Fu years ago

00:15:46 ◼   ► on the show. He was a big fan. You remember that game? I don't, because I missed that phase.

00:15:52 ◼   ► Yeah. That whole fighter thing came a little bit after my time.

00:15:56 ◼   ► Yirr Kung Fu was like one of the first ones. If you Google it after the show,

00:16:02 ◼   ► and you'll see from the graphics quality that it was pre-Street Fighter.

00:16:09 ◼   ► it was a lot more like pac-man era graphics even had like that i know it was made it might have

00:16:16 ◼   ► been made by the same company as as pac-man because it had that same exact same high score font

00:16:21 ◼   ► same basic idea though where you fight you know two guys fight side by side but it was

00:16:28 ◼   ► it was an older older version of it great game oh man arcades anything going on this week

00:16:38 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

00:16:40 ◼   ► All right, I'll take a break.

00:16:41 ◼   ► Let's get it out of the way.

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00:19:04 ◼   ► So what have we crossed off the list so far?

00:19:09 ◼   ► Polarized sunglasses and arcades.

00:19:11 ◼   ► Yes, arcade games.

00:19:13 ◼   ► And presbyopia.

00:19:14 ◼   ► Well, here's the weird thing.

00:19:18 ◼   ► I didn't know this.

00:19:22 ◼   ► So with my left eye, if I close my right eye, I actually really—to be honest, I can't

00:19:26 ◼   ► read my iPhone anymore if it's just with my left eye.

00:19:30 ◼   ► If I close my left eye, I can read it with my right eye, just like I've always done

00:19:34 ◼   ► before.

00:19:35 ◼   ► And for some odd reason, with both eyes open, it looks even better.

00:19:39 ◼   ► I don't know how that works.

00:19:41 ◼   ► Even though my left eye can't focus it, it somehow looks better in my head with both

00:19:46 ◼   ► eyes open.

00:19:49 ◼   ► But obviously, if it's just happened in my life, if it's happened in my left eye in the

00:19:52 ◼   ► past year, my right eye is probably, I don't know, whatever it is in there, whatever mechanism

00:19:59 ◼   ► it is in there that lets you focus both at long distance and short range, it's probably

00:20:04 ◼   ► all rusted out.

00:20:06 ◼   ► It's like one loose screw in there.

00:20:10 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like the Millennium Falcon hyperdrive.

00:20:18 ◼   ► I had no idea, but I thought, too, the thing is that at a distance, my left eye was also

00:20:24 ◼   ► a little blurry.

00:20:25 ◼   ► And I thought, "Oh, I just need a new prescription."

00:20:28 ◼   ► And so I went to the eye doctor and got in there like, "Yep, your left eye got a little

00:20:32 ◼   ► worse since last year.

00:20:33 ◼   ► You need a new prescription.

00:20:34 ◼   ► Here you go.

00:20:35 ◼   ► Here's a sample contact lens.

00:20:37 ◼   ► Try this out."

00:20:38 ◼   ► I tried it out, and close distance stuff got worse, like way worse.

00:20:42 ◼   ► And I was like, "Uh-oh."

00:20:44 ◼   ► So I went back.

00:20:45 ◼   ► And it takes a lot for me to go back to a doctor.

00:20:47 ◼   ► And I was like, I just thought everything was blurry.

00:20:50 ◼   ► And I got this new thing.

00:20:51 ◼   ► And I have to tell you, I see great at a distance with this new contact lens, but reading is

00:20:56 ◼   ► worse.

00:20:57 ◼   ► And the eye doctor looks at me and he's like, "Uh, yeah."

00:21:00 ◼   ► He's like, "That's how it works."

00:21:03 ◼   ► The stronger the near-sighted prescription is, the worse it makes the inability to focus

00:21:11 ◼   ► at close levels.

00:21:14 ◼   ► now I'm so old that I have to choose between what I want to be able to see.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Jared: Yeah.

00:21:21 ◼   ► Pete: It's pretty sad.

00:21:22 ◼   ► Jared; I know. At this point, any Native culture worth its salt would have just

00:21:31 ◼   ► piled some sticks around me and just left me there. Continued on without me.

00:21:35 ◼   ► Pete; Just left a little marker.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Just so I could pass away peacefully without being eaten by the animals.

00:21:43 ◼   ► So I'm—

00:21:48 ◼   ► And yet here I am.

00:21:49 ◼   ► I'm 41, I think. Yeah, 41. And I've always felt—I've felt so good for years that Derek Jeter is still

00:21:58 ◼   ► playing. Now, Derek Jeter's one year younger than me. He's 40. But he's still the starting

00:22:02 ◼   ► shortstop for the New York Yankees, and he's retiring after this year. However much better

00:22:11 ◼   ► physical condition Derek Jeter has always been in me as him being a world-class athlete

00:22:17 ◼   ► and me being a guy who sits in a chair, the difference at age 40 to 41 is profound. He's

00:22:27 ◼   ► the starting shortstop for the Yankees, and I can't read my iPhone."

00:22:30 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:22:34 ◼   ► Like, I really feel like this is the beginning of the part where you just—everything—I

00:22:39 ◼   ► just start falling apart.

00:22:40 ◼   ► [T

00:22:45 ◼   ► to, if I was ever gonna get back in shape, or get in shape of any kind, I needed to start.

00:22:50 ◼   ► It was 10 years ago.

00:22:51 ◼   ► I needed to start.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Yes, I needed to start a long time ago, but now, like, that's now for sure I need.

00:22:56 ◼   ► So I started exercising again, and I went to the doctor, and I had everything, I'm having

00:23:01 ◼   ► everything done.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Wait, you did have everything done?

00:23:04 ◼   ► Every possible, every possible test is being run.

00:23:08 ◼   ► Some of them, some of them will take, you know, months to complete.

00:23:12 ◼   ► complete. Can we do a special episode of the talk show with a camera for this?

00:23:15 ◼   ► Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. I think this could be a very special episode. The doctor

00:23:21 ◼   ► doesn't want to be there. Nobody—I don't want to be there. Your listeners definitely don't want

00:23:28 ◼   ► to be there. Did you see that Saturday Night Live skit this year about the guy who asked

00:23:34 ◼   ► his doctor if he could check if he has a Darth Vader up his butt? No. I don't want to spoil it.

00:23:41 ◼   ► It's worth it though. Honestly, I'm just gonna write down here at Google, "SNL Darth Vader up my butt."

00:23:51 ◼   ► Speaking of Star Wars...

00:23:54 ◼   ► Oh man, going to doctors is fun.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Yeah, speaking of Star Wars...

00:23:59 ◼   ► New X-Wing. Which is what everybody's talking about,

00:24:03 ◼   ► even though the whole thing was supposed to be about a charity.

00:24:05 ◼   ► Exactly. I thought of that too after I leaked it today.

00:24:09 ◼   ► Hey, look at the X-Wing!

00:24:10 ◼   ► And it really sounds like a great cause, like a truly great cause.

00:24:13 ◼   ► I think it's awesome. I love it. I think that these little teasers where they're shooting them

00:24:24 ◼   ► on these practical sets, and I know that they said, you know, it was a thing they said when

00:24:28 ◼   ► they announced they were going to do episode seven, and they were going to, you know, with

00:24:33 ◼   ► J.J. Abrams directing, and they even said right up front, "We're going to dial a little back on the

00:24:38 ◼   ► computer graphics and dial it back up a little bit on the practical special effects. But

00:24:43 ◼   ► actions speak louder than words and just seeing something like a real full life-size X-wing

00:24:48 ◼   ► is awesome. Because I remember a story when we were kids, and I don't know if it was

00:24:56 ◼   ► after all three movies or just after, you know, somewhere in the run when Star Wars

00:25:01 ◼   ► was, you know, the original trilogy was being made. I remember seeing a story in a magazine

00:25:04 ◼   ► about a guy, you know, and they built, you know, practical sized x-wings. And it might

00:25:11 ◼   ► have been like 19, you know, after the 1977 original. And some guy in California bought

00:25:17 ◼   ► one of them and put it in his backyard. He like, you know, he just like bought it. And

00:25:21 ◼   ► there was a guy who had like a life-size x-wing in his backyard. And I, as a kid, all I could

00:25:28 ◼   ► think is that is the coolest thing I have ever heard in my life. And if I had that,

00:25:32 ◼   ► I would go in and sit in the X-wing every day.

00:25:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:35 ◼   ► No, I'm kidding.

00:25:36 ◼   ► Now as an adult, I look back and I think, "I can see being stupid enough to buy it

00:25:43 ◼   ► if I had a backyard that could fit it.

00:25:45 ◼   ► And I can see being stupid enough to pay someone to put it there."

00:25:48 ◼   ► And then the next day I would wake up and think, "What the hell am I going to do with

00:25:52 ◼   ► the X-wing in my backyard?"

00:25:53 ◼   ► Because it doesn't go…

00:25:54 ◼   ► What did I buy last night?

00:25:59 ◼   ► it did a couple of years ago or maybe a little bit more there was a project going on to build

00:26:05 ◼   ► a full-size Millennium Falcon. Oh, I saw that. They were like building it in the forest or someplace.

00:26:10 ◼   ► I can't remember where they were doing it, but they had like they had bought some land

00:26:14 ◼   ► and they were building a full-size Millennium Falcon. I wonder like what did they do with

00:26:22 ◼   ► like the full-size Millennium, the real full-size Millennium Falcon they built back in '77.

00:26:27 ◼   ► I presume they kept it around for the next two movies, and so the one you saw in Empire

00:26:34 ◼   ► was the same one.

00:26:35 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:26:36 ◼   ► Was there ever really a full-size one built?

00:26:38 ◼   ► Because they might have just done the door and done the rest with a matte painting.

00:26:44 ◼   ► I think that there's something pretty big in the scene where they're loading up…

00:26:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think it's a matte painting.

00:26:55 ◼   ► But I don't know if it's truly full-size and articulated from every angle, but the

00:27:00 ◼   ► one in Mos Eisley where they're getting on the ship and all of a sudden it's like

00:27:05 ◼   ► a race against time because the stormtroopers are setting up—they come in and just set

00:27:09 ◼   ► up guns.

00:27:14 ◼   ► But that's clearly a pretty big physical thing there.

00:27:19 ◼   ► And think about it like when they're shooting off the minox inside the dinosaur in the asteroid

00:27:26 ◼   ► in the next movie.

00:27:27 ◼   ► And on Hoth, there's a pretty big—you know, when Chewie's up there fixing it.

00:27:31 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a big Millennium Falcon.

00:27:32 ◼   ► Again, it may not be articulated on all sides.

00:27:36 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:27:37 ◼   ► But visually, the Millennium Falcon was represented by several models in external and internal

00:27:42 ◼   ► sets.

00:27:43 ◼   ► For Star Wars, a partial exterior set was constructed, and the set dressed as docking

00:27:48 ◼   ► Bay 94 and the Death Star hangar.

00:27:52 ◼   ► Oh, do you think... were they not able to move

00:27:56 ◼   ► that and then they changed the most-icely docking bay to

00:28:00 ◼   ► become the Death Star? That would be cool. Oh, maybe.

00:28:04 ◼   ► I bet maybe they did. Is that what that says? Is that what that says? It would be cool if that's what it says.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Yeah, because docking Bay 94, that was the most-icely...

00:28:12 ◼   ► Yeah. But it does say "Partial Exterior Set."

00:28:16 ◼   ► So so anyway new x-wing I think it's pretty cool. Yeah

00:28:20 ◼   ► I'm kind of I'm kind of pro these movies. I know some people are

00:28:25 ◼   ► concerned I think a lot of people our age have a

00:28:31 ◼   ► Subscribed and it's a sensible

00:28:34 ◼   ► Maxim but the fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me

00:28:39 ◼   ► And so they are not going to get excited about the new trilogy until until after it comes out. No way know how

00:28:46 ◼   ► I think there's no chance that it's not going to be better than the last three.

00:28:51 ◼   ► And the last three left such a bad taste in my mouth that I'm happy to have pretty much anything.

00:28:57 ◼   ► I got confused by your sentence because of the two negatives, but I agree. Right? You said,

00:29:04 ◼   ► "There's no chance that it's not going to be better," which means it has to be better.

00:29:09 ◼   ► Yes.

00:29:10 ◼   ► I think that I agree. I know Larry Kasdan's involved on the screenplay

00:29:16 ◼   ► Abrams is good. Yeah, you know, I think Abrams worst movie is better than than those. Yes

00:29:24 ◼   ► We've said this before I've said this numerous times whenever Star Wars comes up on the show though

00:29:28 ◼   ► You have to understand though that for like our kids generation

00:29:32 ◼   ► the

00:29:33 ◼   ► The they're all blur together my son Jonas still has no idea which ones are the old ones in the new ones

00:29:38 ◼   ► And I'm like, "How can you not tell the difference that there are three movies that are very,

00:29:43 ◼   ► very different?"

00:29:44 ◼   ► And that when I was your age, we thought Return of the Jedi was the bad one.

00:29:49 ◼   ► And now we think, "Oh, that was a great movie!"

00:29:52 ◼   ► Yeah, really.

00:29:54 ◼   ► Hank still has not seen the prequels.

00:29:57 ◼   ► You're hardcore!

00:29:58 ◼   ► I am.

00:29:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, for the…

00:30:01 ◼   ► He's not as…

00:30:02 ◼   ► He loved the Clone Wars TV series.

00:30:06 ◼   ► And he's seen the first three movies and then I was like and then I was finally I was like

00:30:11 ◼   ► if you want to we could watch the other movies and it's like now you insert you and John

00:30:16 ◼   ► Sira are like the founders.

00:30:18 ◼   ► But for a while it was it was a very when he was really kind of into the he was into

00:30:22 ◼   ► the movies themselves for a while before he got into the the Clone Wars show and I think

00:30:28 ◼   ► at that point he asked it was he asked a lot of questions about the other three movies

00:30:32 ◼   ► and I was like, "They're not any good. Well, we don't have them. They don't exist."

00:30:41 ◼   ► I do. I worry about those movies because they came from the same guy.

00:30:51 ◼   ► And it's, you know, talking about getting older, you know, and there's—I don't even know how

00:30:57 ◼   ► true this is. I'm not a doctor. But they say that like, you know, I for within every few years,

00:31:02 ◼   ► every single cell in your body dies and is replaced throughout the cycle of life. So like,

00:31:08 ◼   ► I don't know, within like 10 years, every cell in your brain has died and been replaced, you know,

00:31:13 ◼   ► and I, you know, I think hopefully, you know, that they, you know, the reason you can have any kind

00:31:17 ◼   ► of memories that last longer than that is that, I don't know, the way shit gets stored is, you know,

00:31:24 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, I'm going out. I've got a memory of Dig Dug in 1984." And then the new

00:31:30 ◼   ► neuron comes in and goes, "All right, got it. I got it." Right? But I don't know. There is something—

00:31:36 ◼   ► Nice job. Enjoy your retirement.

00:31:38 ◼   ► There is something that happened to George Lucas as he got older that is just very—I mean,

00:31:44 ◼   ► he might be—he seems like a very nice man, and I think he's had a very happy life. But as an artist,

00:31:50 ◼   ► the guy who made THX 1138 eventually made The Phantom Menace is just mind-boggling.

00:31:57 ◼   ► And that it wasn't because, "Ah, it's like a work for hire, you know, it's like I, you know,

00:32:02 ◼   ► got to do it for the money." It's like he funded the whole thing himself.

00:32:05 ◼   ► He got to do it exactly as he wanted. Like, he set everything up. And that's what was so…

00:32:13 ◼   ► that to me is why those movies were so profoundly disappointing, was that

00:32:19 ◼   ► it always impressed me that in a very different way than like Stanley Kubrick, that he was a guy

00:32:24 ◼   ► who wanted to do things his own way outside the studio system. You know, I always thought it was

00:32:29 ◼   ► cool. Everybody knew, you know, he wasn't Los Angeles-based. He was in Northern California,

00:32:33 ◼   ► nobody else was up there making movies. And that he created this amazing franchise that and set up

00:32:41 ◼   ► the licensing in such a way that he got all the money from it so that he would never have to go

00:32:46 ◼   ► to the studios for money to make a movie again he could just make whatever movies he wanted to

00:32:50 ◼   ► and then he made they used it to make howard the duck and the phantom menace

00:32:54 ◼   ► yeah i mean he had no one to answer to other than himself jonas watched howard the duck at his

00:33:03 ◼   ► grandparents house uh oh my god really a couple of months how did that happen i don't know i asked

00:33:09 ◼   ► him it was like i think he was there he was being babysat for the you know weekend being watched for

00:33:13 ◼   ► for the weekend while Amy and I were away, and I don't know, it was on Netflix or something

00:33:17 ◼   ► like that, and they're like, "Well, let's watch that!" It's about—and I tried to

00:33:22 ◼   ► explain to them that it was from the guy who invented Star Wars, and you wouldn't believe

00:33:25 ◼   ► me.

00:33:26 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:33:27 ◼   ► So, we're at half an hour in. We should probably talk about Apple eventually.

00:33:32 ◼   ► Yeah. Hey, financial results came out today.

00:33:35 ◼   ► Yep, they sure did.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Well, today for us, not today for the people, the suckers listening to this later in the

00:33:42 ◼   ► It's probably not going to come out until Thursday or something like that.

00:33:46 ◼   ► People should listen to this live.

00:33:47 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know why they don't.

00:33:49 ◼   ► Yeah, should I do that?

00:33:50 ◼   ► You know, the ATP guys have that.

00:33:54 ◼   ► It is helpful as I'm listening to ATP and they either make a mistake or they can't

00:34:01 ◼   ► think of something, that they don't have to interrupt themselves and Google it.

00:34:04 ◼   ► They just keep their eye on the chat and so, but, you know.

00:34:08 ◼   ► It's kind of amazing.

00:34:09 ◼   ► And it sort of reminds me of the podcast equivalent of like on a live TV, the way the anchor always

00:34:17 ◼   ► has an earpiece and a director or somebody offstage can tell them things, you know, so

00:34:23 ◼   ► that the person who's on air doesn't have to interrupt the show.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Like it works.

00:34:29 ◼   ► And I remember having it with the old talk show with Dan Benjamin for a while.

00:34:33 ◼   ► Not a long stretch, but for some stretch we had like an IRC channel or something like

00:34:38 ◼   ► that.

00:34:39 ◼   ► helpful. I don't think I could do it though, because I think the reason it works for ATP

00:34:44 ◼   ► guys is that they record on a very regular schedule. You know, there's like, I don't know,

00:34:49 ◼   ► every Wednesday night at 9 Eastern they're on and I don't think I've ever recorded two episodes of

00:34:54 ◼   ► the show at the same day and time. Right? Jared: I can vouch for that.

00:35:00 ◼   ► Pete: Like, sometimes…

00:35:01 ◼   ► Jared; The ones that I've been on.

00:35:03 ◼   ► Pete; I'm like, are you up at midnight? Because I'm wide awake. It's 3 AM Eastern,

00:35:07 ◼   ► but it's only midnight out there. Are you good to go?" And you're like, "Yeah!"

00:35:11 ◼   ► Do you remember being disappointed? I was disappointed when I found out that, like,

00:35:20 ◼   ► the Tonight Show wasn't live. Yeah. Although, well, let's see. Growing up in New York,

00:35:31 ◼   ► Saturday Night Live was live. Yes, yes. Which was great. That was always crazy. And it was

00:35:37 ◼   ► always great to see them crack up and stuff like that. Those were always the moments that

00:35:42 ◼   ► you remembered. But yeah, but that was basically, well, I guess, no, they're all like that.

00:35:50 ◼   ► Like Letterman's not live either. No, nobody's live anymore. The Tonight Show used to be

00:35:54 ◼   ► live on the East Coast. And then I think at some point in the '60s, they switched. Or

00:36:02 ◼   ► maybe it was when they moved to California in the '70s, when they moved from New York

00:36:05 ◼   ► to California in the '70s. Maybe that's when they switched. And it just felt like a bit

00:36:13 ◼   ► of a cheat. But then I started thinking of it as more like knowing a magician's magic

00:36:19 ◼   ► trick. Like at first, it ruins the illusion. And then you think, "Hey, this is pretty

00:36:22 ◼   ► These people, they're clearly pretending—they don't lie, they don't tell you it's live,

00:36:27 ◼   ► but they're acting as though it's late at night somehow.

00:36:29 ◼   ► Yeah. But that was weird. I went to a Letterman show once, back when he was on NBC,

00:36:39 ◼   ► and it was like at four o'clock in the afternoon or something.

00:36:42 ◼   ► Right. Not late at night at all.

00:36:44 ◼   ► But yeah, but they kind of—I mean, they tongue-in-cheek. He does a tongue-in-cheek

00:36:49 ◼   ► thing, pretending that it's a night, you know, that he has to stay up until 11 o'clock to show.

00:36:53 ◼   ► Right, or like on election night he'll make jokes as though he knows who won the election.

00:37:01 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:37:03 ◼   ► So, financial results came in. Is that where we were on?

00:37:12 ◼   ► Yes, that's what we were on.

00:37:15 ◼   ► I hardly really looked at them. It seemed like they were more or less kind of sort of

00:37:19 ◼   ► in line not shocking

00:37:21 ◼   ► Financially good iPhones

00:37:24 ◼   ► Pretty good a little bit. I think iphone a little higher than expected. Yeah

00:37:29 ◼   ► Margins are still great

00:37:32 ◼   ► Higher than expected and that was that's been the thing

00:37:34 ◼   ► Like that that during the rundown of the stock like the the great 2013 apple depression

00:37:43 ◼   ► was always about the margins, that the margins are going to collapse. They can't, you know…

00:37:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:48 ◼   ► And part of it was because they'd had a run for a couple of, maybe even over a year,

00:37:53 ◼   ► where they had insanely high margins. I think maybe, who knows how much of it was just…

00:37:58 ◼   ► Remember when they bought all the LCD screens and a bunch of RAM in advance?

00:38:04 ◼   ► It was like somehow that bet paid off huge, and they had like 40-something percent margins

00:38:10 ◼   ► for a while. And part of it was just that that was a fluke in terms of being high. And they kept

00:38:16 ◼   ► saying it was a fluke, like, you know, this was all, you know, we'll take the money, but this is

00:38:20 ◼   ► a surprise. Normally they should not be this high. And then part of it was, you know, just, you know,

00:38:26 ◼   ► bad luck that it, you know, went down a little bit. But then I know there was a lot of speculation

00:38:31 ◼   ► for a while that the margins were going to compress, I think is what they say.

00:38:36 ◼   ► Yeah, but no. And the only, it's like the only real question is the iPads are down again.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Yeah, iPads down, well it's two things I think, and I think that maybe they're related, I don't

00:38:51 ◼   ► know. iPad is down 10% year over year or 9%?

00:38:55 ◼   ► I think it's 20.

00:38:55 ◼   ► Oh really? Well, all right.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I think so.

00:38:57 ◼   ► Well, Macs are up 18%, and Macs being up 18% is even more impressive because,

00:39:04 ◼   ► because according to most, like IDC and other people who track the whole industry, the industry

00:39:10 ◼   ► as a whole is still down 2% for the same quarter.

00:39:14 ◼   ► So in an industry where like Windows PCs or I guess including the Mac, including all Mac

00:39:20 ◼   ► and Windows, who knows, all Windows PCs must be even worse if the Mac is up to 13%.

00:39:25 ◼   ► Down even further, right.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:28 ◼   ► And I think that's kind of surprising because I feel like a couple of years ago when the

00:39:32 ◼   ► iPad was 2011, 2012, when the iPad was early days and was clearly a hit, I think everybody,

00:39:41 ◼   ► including me, was sort of thinking about how is this, as the iPad gets more powerful and

00:39:47 ◼   ► more popular and more familiar, how is that going to affect Mac laptop sales?

00:39:52 ◼   ► It's probably going to be like a sort of slow decline.

00:39:56 ◼   ► It seems like it's the other way around.

00:39:58 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:39:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:00 ◼   ► Yeah, it's interesting.

00:40:01 ◼   ► interesting I don't know exactly I mean I think well I think some of the

00:40:05 ◼   ► negativity about Windows machine sales is Windows 8 yeah it's just not I mean

00:40:13 ◼   ► often those kinds of upgrades drive sales and it's having almost you know

00:40:18 ◼   ► it's having a negative effect this time because everybody hates it I really just

00:40:22 ◼   ► don't think if you went back to like 2011 and the early days of tablets and

00:40:26 ◼   ► you know mobile phones you know growing gangbusters I just don't think I would

00:40:30 ◼   ► have believed that come 2014 the Mac would still see 18% year over year.

00:40:35 ◼   ► Yeah, I wouldn't have thought that either.

00:40:37 ◼   ► It does my heart well though because it's great to see the Mac doing well.

00:40:41 ◼   ► Yeah. I liked that ad. Did you like the stickers ad?

00:40:46 ◼   ► Yeah. I liked it a lot.

00:40:48 ◼   ► Yeah, and I noticed that little flash of the old logo was great.

00:40:54 ◼   ► The old logo came up twice. So this is a new commercial that Apple, they call it a short film.

00:40:59 ◼   ► It happens to be exactly 30 seconds long.

00:41:02 ◼   ► But, I don't, you know, alright.

00:41:05 ◼   ► And you'll see it on TV.

00:41:07 ◼   ► They're going to pay money.

00:41:09 ◼   ► In between segments of a show.

00:41:11 ◼   ► In between commercials, they're going to pay to broadcast a 30-second short film

00:41:18 ◼   ► about one of their products.

00:41:23 ◼   ► Well, if they're not going to do it, then who is?

00:41:25 ◼   ► is if you haven't seen it it's just 30 seconds of almost like stop-motion

00:41:31 ◼   ► animation almost it's just I don't know if they're a bunch but it's just a whole

00:41:34 ◼   ► bunch of very very quick cuts I think maybe less than a second each of MacBook

00:41:43 ◼   ► I think mostly MacBook Airs but then it's all Mac it's all MacBook Airs oh I

00:41:47 ◼   ► thought at the end they switched to bigger really because I thought that the

00:41:50 ◼   ► whole ad was about the error because it's like everybody's favorite.

00:41:57 ◼   ► Maybe it's two different sizes of MacBook Airs.

00:42:00 ◼   ► But with all sorts of custom stickers decorating the outer Apple logo case.

00:42:07 ◼   ► They never show the screen.

00:42:08 ◼   ► It's always just the Apple logo.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Some of them I've seen before, some of them pretty clever.

00:42:15 ◼   ► But then I noticed the one about halfway through, it's like a pixel art version of the old

00:42:21 ◼   ► six-color Apple logo that you put over the Apple logo on the MacBook, and then when the

00:42:27 ◼   ► Apple logo lights up, it lights up the decal.

00:42:31 ◼   ► I saw that one at first, and I thought, "Oh, cool.

00:42:35 ◼   ► That's a neat way to sneak the old Apple logo into an ad."

00:42:38 ◼   ► But then at the very end of the ad, it very quickly cycled through different styles of

00:42:43 ◼   ► Apple logo, not on a MacBook, just the Apple logo, including the old six-color Apple logo.

00:42:49 ◼   ► And I found that really interesting.

00:42:51 ◼   ► I got some pushback.

00:42:53 ◼   ► I wrote about it and I said something.

00:42:54 ◼   ► What did I say?

00:42:55 ◼   ► I said it pretty well, so I should probably just rip myself off.

00:43:00 ◼   ► I wrote, "People have been decorating their laptops with stickers and decals ever since

00:43:04 ◼   ► they became consumer products.

00:43:07 ◼   ► You didn't see many stickers on them when they cost $5,000."

00:43:10 ◼   ► I think the first time I tried to buy a PowerBook, it was $6,000.

00:43:14 ◼   ► And I was like, "Wow, that isn't going to happen."

00:43:17 ◼   ► And I don't think we need to commission a demographic survey to state that younger people

00:43:22 ◼   ► are more likely to do this than older people.

00:43:24 ◼   ► It's no coincidence that the spot is debuting in back-to-school season.

00:43:29 ◼   ► In the old days, Apple didn't have to worry about conformance.

00:43:33 ◼   ► Just owning a Mac made you stand out from the crowd.

00:43:35 ◼   ► But what happens now when everyone you know has a MacBook and every MacBook looks the

00:43:39 ◼   ► same. Something like this commercial is what happens. Some people push back on Twitter,

00:43:45 ◼   ► like, "Everybody you know has a MacBook," and it's like, you know, obviously something

00:43:50 ◼   ► like that doesn't literally mean everybody. But I'll bet it's the case at a lot of schools

00:43:55 ◼   ► that there are, you know, whether it's high school or college, where it seems like everybody

00:44:01 ◼   ► you know has a MacBook. I don't know. I've seen those pictures. You see those pictures

00:44:06 ◼   ► of lecture halls.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean that's been happening for years. Yeah before

00:44:10 ◼   ► As these market changes happened in the PC market where where PC started falling in Apple and Mac started rising

00:44:17 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think that's you know that women

00:44:20 ◼   ► Like younger, you know teenagers and college students. It's even more profound

00:44:25 ◼   ► So yeah, take every word everyone with a grain of salt

00:44:29 ◼   ► But if it seems like most of your friends all have Mac books all Mac books

00:44:34 ◼   ► you know, especially from the back look exactly the same, you know, the air the pro that they're all just aluminum with a white logo

00:44:41 ◼   ► I mean, I think it's a cool look but you know as a kid that's there's a sort of

00:44:46 ◼   ► Resistance to that sort of conformance

00:44:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not a fan of the plastic covers

00:44:55 ◼   ► What plastic covers every once in a while?

00:44:57 ◼   ► I'll put a put a cover on my iPhone

00:44:59 ◼   ► But I just because I feel like I'm gonna drop that but I don't on a MacBook

00:45:03 ◼   ► I don't like the plastic.

00:45:06 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah, and I don't think you need to protect it.

00:45:09 ◼   ► Well, the other thing that's interesting about that commercial is it shows a bunch of them that

00:45:14 ◼   ► are beaten up, literally dented, scratched, well used. And that's pretty interesting because,

00:45:22 ◼   ► to my knowledge, I think Matthew Panzareno pointed this out, I don't think Apple's ever advertised

00:45:26 ◼   ► with well-worn versions of their machines.

00:45:30 ◼   ► No, no, nothing.

00:45:33 ◼   ► But they've talked about it before, like, Jonny Ive at least has in those videos he

00:45:38 ◼   ► shoots from the weird white universe he lives in.

00:45:43 ◼   ► You know, it's like where that guy who runs the Matrix is running the Matrix.

00:45:49 ◼   ► Sure.

00:45:50 ◼   ► You know, that they choose these materials for how they wear, you know, and that it should

00:45:56 ◼   ► be like a pair of, you know, good old pair of boots or blue jeans or something like that,

00:46:01 ◼   ► you know, that it should look better as it ages. But they don't show it like that.

00:46:05 ◼   ► But I do think there's a truth to it, you know. And I think that especially, you know,

00:46:09 ◼   ► a phone is different because it's got glass and can, you know, that's the glass, all

00:46:13 ◼   ► things are off with that. I don't use a case for my phone, but I don't blame anybody

00:46:16 ◼   ► who does because glass. Whereas, you know, MacBooks are, in my experience, extremely

00:46:21 ◼   ► rugged.

00:46:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:23 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Especially since they've switched to SSDs.

00:46:31 ◼   ► I think that the aluminum, I think that it's kind of neat.

00:46:34 ◼   ► I think Johnny Ive probably liked that ad.

00:46:36 ◼   ► I think he liked probably seeing him beat up and worn in an ad.

00:46:40 ◼   ► Because I do think they designed for that.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:44 ◼   ► Does your kid have a Macbook?

00:46:45 ◼   ► He uses a very old Macbook Air.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:49 ◼   ► my old Macbook Pro and man, he's rough on that thing.

00:46:52 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:46:55 ◼   ► Like physically rough or like rough like?

00:46:58 ◼   ► Everything. I mean, it's, you know, and he's like, he spilled a drink on the keyboard and

00:47:05 ◼   ► now I gotta figure out how to get the keys off to click 'cause they're sticky now.

00:47:08 ◼   ► Like underneath, they're sticky. It's easy to clean the top of them, but now they're like...

00:47:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:14 ◼   ► The touch, I would not type on that thing.

00:47:18 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:47:20 ◼   ► Jonas has a bit of a passive-aggressive streak to him, where he's taken now to showing me some Minecraft mods.

00:47:30 ◼   ► They're called "shaders," and they totally change the way the game is rendered.

00:47:35 ◼   ► And he says, "Look, this one is meant for old MacBook Airs to make it look better, and it's still laggy."

00:47:44 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:47:46 ◼   ► "Wow, isn't that interesting?" And then he's like, "But this one's actually all right,

00:47:50 ◼   ► even though it wasn't meant for an old MacBook." But this one's… well, and he goes, "Well,

00:47:57 ◼   ► it's laggy, but it's not as laggy." And I do kind of feel bad, but in the sense that

00:48:03 ◼   ► somehow I'm proud that he cares about frame rate and…

00:48:08 ◼   ► Right, right. No, I get that. I get that too.

00:48:10 ◼   ► Right. Like, we have got a great running gag in our house, where like… because it's… well,

00:48:15 ◼   ► you guys are three too so it's there's never a tie somebody's always going to win and so like one of

00:48:20 ◼   ► ours is um standard def video on the tv amy doesn't really notice doesn't really seem to care jonas

00:48:28 ◼   ► jonas acts has always been poisoned like a spit take like you expect me to watch this

00:48:38 ◼   ► i don't think ken notices the video quality that much maybe that's because he's not wearing his

00:48:43 ◼   ► glasses, but he definitely—frame rates or buffering drive him berserk.

00:48:50 ◼   ► Oh my god. God help you if something is buffering on Netflix or something.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Anything drops below 60 frames.

00:49:00 ◼   ► When are we going to move to another country where they have better—

00:49:03 ◼   ► 60 frames per second. When I was a kid, we had eight pixels on the screen.

00:49:07 ◼   ► And a black and white TV.

00:49:12 ◼   ► Our Atari 2600 literally had a switch you could flip that said,

00:49:17 ◼   ► you're playing on a black and white TV.

00:49:20 ◼   ► Remember that? It was a switch. It was like B&W.

00:49:23 ◼   ► And it was like, I guess it somehow would, you know, only choose

00:49:26 ◼   ► shades of gray. Right. Things that would make it.

00:49:31 ◼   ► My first video game console had a mode for black and white TVs.

00:49:38 ◼   ► Anything else on the quarterly finances?

00:49:42 ◼   ► Just that they are looking forward to having a big fall.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Oh, is that what they said?

00:49:46 ◼   ► I didn't see it.

00:49:47 ◼   ► I see it.

00:49:48 ◼   ► We're recording at a time where I have not seen the conference call, which is usually

00:49:55 ◼   ► where more information comes out.

00:49:57 ◼   ► So they've dropped a hint that they expect to have a big fall.

00:49:59 ◼   ► Yes.

00:50:00 ◼   ► Oh, and the other thing, which, you know, we've been hoping for and kind of expecting

00:50:06 ◼   ► And then the other thing I thought was interesting was that Tim Cook said that the growth in

00:50:12 ◼   ► the iPhone 5c, you know, they don't give out, they don't break out how well each iPhone

00:50:17 ◼   ► does, but he said the growth this quarter in the iPhone 5c tier was higher than the

00:50:23 ◼   ► growth in either the 4s or the 5s tier.

00:50:28 ◼   ► So right, in other words, not, you know, obviously there was no previous 4c to compare against,

00:50:35 ◼   ► But it was the pricing tiers.

00:50:37 ◼   ► Yes.

00:50:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:39 ◼   ► So it was…

00:50:40 ◼   ► Compared to the 4S a year ago, I guess.

00:50:43 ◼   ► Compared to the 4S a year ago, correct.

00:50:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's interesting, especially since there were a lot of people who were

00:50:48 ◼   ► sort of chalking the 5C up as a failure, as somehow that it was…

00:50:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:53 ◼   ► That's the…

00:50:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:55 ◼   ► And it's only…

00:50:56 ◼   ► You know, it's arguably a failure in that I don't think…

00:50:59 ◼   ► They didn't sell as many as Apple thought they were going to sell.

00:51:02 ◼   ► Or maybe they didn't sell them as many as they thought they would in the first quarter,

00:51:05 ◼   ► but maybe for the year as a whole.

00:51:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Or I guess it's only been nine months or so.

00:51:10 ◼   ► But it's still like it's like the fourth or fifth best-selling phone.

00:51:15 ◼   ► I see a lot of them.

00:51:16 ◼   ► I really do.

00:51:17 ◼   ► I've started.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I've still you keep seeing more and more.

00:51:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I think, you know, I don't think Apple, I know from talking to some people at Apple

00:51:26 ◼   ► that they don't they don't they don't have a crystal ball.

00:51:29 ◼   ► They don't they didn't know exactly how many like talking to them last year when they

00:51:32 ◼   ► first announced them and to me the part that stuck out right on day one was that

00:51:37 ◼   ► i think it was at 199 or was it 299 there was one price where you could for the exact same price

00:51:44 ◼   ► carrier subsidized you could get either the 5s or the 5c you could get like the best 5c or the

00:51:50 ◼   ► worst 5s at i think okay i don't know if it was 199 different just different um amounts of memory

00:51:58 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, you know, and the 5S has, it was like the 16 gigabyte 5S versus the 32 gigabyte

00:52:07 ◼   ► 5C.

00:52:08 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

00:52:09 ◼   ► I could be wrong on that.

00:52:10 ◼   ► Don't even email me.

00:52:11 ◼   ► But, you know, something like that.

00:52:13 ◼   ► You get a 32 gigabyte 5C or 16 gigabyte 5S at the exact same price.

00:52:18 ◼   ► And I thought that was interesting because that's, it's like for some people who,

00:52:23 ◼   ► someone who's less informed, you know, might be that's a difficult decision.

00:52:27 ◼   ► And how did they think that was going to break out?

00:52:29 ◼   ► And they're like, we don't know.

00:52:32 ◼   ► We really don't know.

00:52:32 ◼   ► We have some estimates, but until we put the stuff out,

00:52:36 ◼   ► we're always a little surprised by which exact configurations

00:52:42 ◼   ► sell better than others.

00:52:44 ◼   ► There's some consistency year over year,

00:52:46 ◼   ► but sometimes you can't predict it.

00:52:48 ◼   ► So I think they're probably a little surprised

00:52:50 ◼   ► that the 5C didn't sell great right off the bat.

00:52:54 ◼   ► And maybe they're a little surprised that it has legs as strong as it does.

00:52:58 ◼   ► But I think there's an easy explanation.

00:53:02 ◼   ► The one that people who are enthusiasts are going to buy is always going to be the top

00:53:08 ◼   ► of the line.

00:53:09 ◼   ► The brand, yeah, the real new one.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:53:11 ◼   ► That you care about things like that the camera is a little better, has an extra half stop

00:53:16 ◼   ► of exposure, and you care about the fact that the AA-7 is a faster CPU.

00:53:21 ◼   ► CPU. I mean, every day, my life is better every day because my phone runs 64-bit.

00:53:26 ◼   ► I can't believe there's people out there running a 32-bit cell phone.

00:53:30 ◼   ► If I had a 32-bit cell phone, I probably couldn't read my phone with either eye.

00:53:36 ◼   ► I'd just kill myself. That's what I'd do.

00:53:38 ◼   ► That's what I would do. But no, you know what I mean? We think about things like that,

00:53:43 ◼   ► and then we do stupid things like go get in line on day one to buy one so that we can have it the

00:53:49 ◼   ► first day that it comes out. Whereas people who are not like that, like just buy a phone

00:53:55 ◼   ► whenever their old one breaks or whenever they feel like their old one, "Man, I'm

00:53:59 ◼   ► sick of this old phone. I've got to get a new phone." And then they go in and they're

00:54:03 ◼   ► like, "Wow, I like that pink one. That looks cool. I'm going to get that one." And

00:54:08 ◼   ► they don't care about the fact that the camera is one-year-old. And so of course it

00:54:13 ◼   ► makes sense that that's the one that—I think in hindsight, it now makes sense that

00:54:17 ◼   ► the one that would do better year over year.

00:54:21 ◼   ► Be more like a more of a slow burn.

00:54:23 ◼   ► Right. And it still looks new. It looks like a new phone. Whereas like a year ago,

00:54:29 ◼   ► if you were going to buy the mid-tier phone, you were getting the 4S and it kind of looked

00:54:32 ◼   ► a little older and just kind of looked like a year old phone compared to the 5S. Whereas the 5C

00:54:41 ◼   ► looks just as new, just a different style.

00:54:45 ◼   ► There was another, there was a rumor about, did you see this? I can't, was it the Wall Street Journal?

00:54:49 ◼   ► That Apple was ordering 60 to 80 million big phones.

00:54:58 ◼   ► Oh, I saw something about this, right?

00:55:00 ◼   ► Some huge number of...

00:55:01 ◼   ► Right. Whereas like they...

00:55:03 ◼   ► Phones for the phone.

00:55:04 ◼   ► You know, like, I think like last year in the fall they sold like 50 million?

00:55:07 ◼   ► And so like...

00:55:09 ◼   ► Something like, yeah.

00:55:10 ◼   ► 60 to 80 is like a huge spike. Yeah, I saw some stuff on Twitter about that where it's like,

00:55:14 ◼   ► one rogue report that they're ordering 80 million iPhones now means that, you know,

00:55:21 ◼   ► six months from now when they report the holiday quarter…

00:55:23 ◼   ► Jared: It's still 75. It's a disappointment.

00:55:26 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:55:26 ◼   ► Yeah, anything less than that is going to be a huge mess,

00:55:29 ◼   ► no matter how much higher it is than what it actually was a year ago.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Let's, well, hold that thought. I'm going to do a sponsor read, and I want to hold that thought on

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00:58:30 ◼   ► them all right big iphone um i i might be a week or two behind but on atp syracusea brought up i

00:58:40 ◼   ► thought a great question and i was like how come nobody's talking about this they're talking about

00:58:44 ◼   ► you know this there's this pervasive rumors that there's gonna be too big our iphones 4.7 inch and

00:58:49 ◼   ► and 5.5 inch. How come if there's going to be a 5.5 inch iPhone, where are the component

00:58:58 ◼   ► leaks? Because there's all sorts of component leaks, purported at least, for the 4.7. And

00:59:04 ◼   ► they're from people who've had, like a year ago, when they had component leaks of things

00:59:10 ◼   ► Things like the gold back of the 5s were pretty much spot on.

00:59:17 ◼   ► But there's no…

00:59:18 ◼   ► And there's…

00:59:19 ◼   ► So, you know, the 4.7-inch new iPhone seems to be tracking exactly on pace leak-wise as

00:59:29 ◼   ► the last two or three years of iPhones, which to me it makes it seem like a slam dunk, like

00:59:34 ◼   ► unless something goes wrong.

00:59:38 ◼   ► It seems like that's going to be a new product soon.

00:59:42 ◼   ► But there's nothing.

00:59:43 ◼   ► I haven't seen anything.

00:59:44 ◼   ► There have been screens that have come out for the 4.7.

00:59:47 ◼   ► There have been cases.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Nothing for the 5.5.

00:59:50 ◼   ► And then Reuters had a story last week-- I think it was Reuters.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Maybe it was Businessweek.

00:59:54 ◼   ► But one of them had a story that said that the 4.7-inch iPhone 6

01:00:00 ◼   ► is going into production now, meaning July,

01:00:03 ◼   ► and that the 5.5-inch one is going into production next month, meaning August.

01:00:08 ◼   ► But you might think, well, if it's a month behind, then maybe the leaks are going to start coming soon.

01:00:16 ◼   ► But the leaks for the 4.7-inch phone came more than a month ago.

01:00:19 ◼   ► Started a long time ago.

01:00:20 ◼   ► Right. They started months, plural, ago.

01:00:24 ◼   ► I mean, of course it makes sense that they would pick up if it is entering production.

01:00:29 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:00:30 ◼   ► There's something about this 5.5-inch thing

01:00:33 ◼   ► that, to me, is starting to sound like it

01:00:35 ◼   ► isn't going to happen.

01:00:36 ◼   ► Well, it seems kind of crazy to think that they would

01:00:38 ◼   ► have phones in three sizes.

01:00:40 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:00:42 ◼   ► That seems too--

01:00:45 ◼   ► I've said it before on numerous times.

01:00:47 ◼   ► It just seems like it's--

01:00:49 ◼   ► And to introduce two at the same time seems very odd.

01:00:52 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems like it would make

01:00:53 ◼   ► Phil Schuler's head explode.

01:00:55 ◼   ► From a product marketing perspective,

01:00:56 ◼   ► how do you frame it?

01:00:58 ◼   ► How do you frame the story?

01:00:59 ◼   ► Like with the iPads, they've got the same specs, same camera,

01:01:06 ◼   ► same CPU, same pixel dimensions.

01:01:09 ◼   ► It's just you want one bigger or smaller,

01:01:11 ◼   ► and you have to pay an extra $100 or $129

01:01:14 ◼   ► or whatever the difference is for the bigger one.

01:01:16 ◼   ► And it somehow seems to make sense in consumer minds

01:01:19 ◼   ► that you pay a little more to get a bigger one,

01:01:21 ◼   ► pay a little less to get a smaller one.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Or maybe it doesn't.

01:01:24 ◼   ► Maybe that's why iPad sales are down.

01:01:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:01:26 ◼   ► But it somehow comes across as feeling fair.

01:01:30 ◼   ► Whereas if they come out with two new iPhone 6s,

01:01:32 ◼   ► and they're like the same A8 system on a chip,

01:01:36 ◼   ► the same new and improved camera, the same thinness,

01:01:40 ◼   ► and one costs more than the other, well, which one costs more?

01:01:44 ◼   ► I'd rather have the smaller one.

01:01:46 ◼   ► So would I.

01:01:47 ◼   ► Right?

01:01:47 ◼   ► It doesn't seem to me like you should pay more for a bigger one.

01:01:51 ◼   ► So that doesn't make any sense to me.

01:01:53 ◼   ► But maybe we're in luck.

01:01:54 ◼   ► Maybe this will be the year where I don't want to buy the most expensive iPhone.

01:01:57 ◼   ► I mean, particularly because they've approached this so slowly and carefully to date.

01:02:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:03 ◼   ► Jumping up to 5.5 inches seems unnecessary.

01:02:07 ◼   ► And they're still growing sales.

01:02:09 ◼   ► I mean, it's not like, you know, if it was the iPad, maybe then we might think,

01:02:15 ◼   ► okay, well, sales are falling.

01:02:16 ◼   ► Maybe they need to do something else.

01:02:19 ◼   ► But, you know, it's not like they have a big problem selling iPhones.

01:02:24 ◼   ► Yeah, these four-inch iPhones are only selling in record numbers.

01:02:30 ◼   ► And conversely, I don't think it makes any sense, product marketing-wise, if there's

01:02:34 ◼   ► two, for one to be like an A tier and one to be the B tier.

01:02:39 ◼   ► Because there's some number of people who are going to want the other one but want the

01:02:46 ◼   ► other specs, right?

01:02:48 ◼   ► Somebody is going to say, "I want a top-of-the-line iPhone."

01:02:50 ◼   ► And if the top of the line one is the 5.5 inch and the mid-tier one is 4.7 inch, like

01:02:56 ◼   ► the 5C equivalent class spec-wise, well, I'm going to be upset because I don't want a

01:03:03 ◼   ► 5.5 inch iPhone.

01:03:04 ◼   ► Even though I've spent half an hour at the beginning of the show talking about how I

01:03:07 ◼   ► can't read my iPhone, I don't want it.

01:03:12 ◼   ► I'd rather not be able to read my phone than carry something that big.

01:03:19 ◼   ► I don't get it.

01:03:20 ◼   ► they could do it you know and then if you know like let's say that the 5.5 inch one has a better

01:03:24 ◼   ► camera than the 4.7 inch one well that i mean that's gonna make me angry right i just don't see

01:03:31 ◼   ► it it doesn't make any never made any sense to me like the iphone i don't know i'll i'll wait and

01:03:37 ◼   ► then and then do they still they sell four phones or do they sell or does the yes it doesn't make

01:03:44 ◼   ► make any sense. If they switch to a thing where the new iPhone 6 is out and it has

01:03:50 ◼   ► now it has a 4.7 inch screen I don't that doesn't sound good to me I like 4

01:03:56 ◼   ► inches but I'll try it and it does sound reasonable and it just maybe you know as

01:03:59 ◼   ► batteries get bigger you know you know maybe I'd be happy with it and I'll

01:04:03 ◼   ► think you know what I kind of like having a bigger phone and you know yeah

01:04:08 ◼   ► you know like I said my eyes are getting worse maybe maybe I mean well and when

01:04:12 ◼   ► When the 5 came out, it was physically smaller than the 4s.

01:04:16 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:17 ◼   ► It was a larger screen, but in terms of volume,

01:04:20 ◼   ► it was actually a smaller phone.

01:04:21 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:22 ◼   ► And--

01:04:22 ◼   ► So I would hope they would do something like that again.

01:04:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:24 ◼   ► It felt like a fair trade-off.

01:04:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:27 ◼   ► Whereas going to 5.5 is just ridiculous.

01:04:30 ◼   ► Although, I'm not saying, no, that I

01:04:32 ◼   ► can't believe that other people would want a device like that.

01:04:35 ◼   ► I totally understand that some people love them

01:04:38 ◼   ► And that there is like a sweet spot between,

01:04:42 ◼   ► I don't need a tablet and a phone.

01:04:44 ◼   ► I just have this one device.

01:04:45 ◼   ► I know it's not for me.

01:04:47 ◼   ► I've seen such similar devices.

01:04:49 ◼   ► I can't imagine carrying them around, carrying it around

01:04:51 ◼   ► in my pocket everywhere I go.

01:04:53 ◼   ► So I just don't see it.

01:04:56 ◼   ► I do think that also, though, and with the discussions--

01:04:58 ◼   ► no joking aside about my presbyopia--

01:05:04 ◼   ► it does raise the question, though,

01:05:05 ◼   ► of what is the point of getting a bigger screen?

01:05:08 ◼   ► Is it to make everything bigger so that you see the same amount of text, but now it's

01:05:13 ◼   ► bigger?

01:05:14 ◼   ► Or is it to put more on the screen and keep the text the same size and now that you can

01:05:19 ◼   ► have more text at the same time?

01:05:23 ◼   ► I think the answer is maybe both.

01:05:25 ◼   ► A little bit of both.

01:05:26 ◼   ► Right?

01:05:27 ◼   ► With the settings, you know, like with the, um, um, what do they call it?

01:05:31 ◼   ► Oh, so you get one or the other?

01:05:33 ◼   ► They don't call it adaptive text, but there's, you know, with iOS 7, they introduced the

01:05:37 ◼   ► thing where you go into general text size and you can make text bigger system-wide and maybe

01:05:45 ◼   ► you know it always seems to me like when you make it bigger on the current iphone it just takes up

01:05:51 ◼   ► too much space maybe with a 5.5 inch phone that it would be a great option for people with

01:05:56 ◼   ► failing eyesight that i i could see that as a great product but i just i still don't see how

01:06:02 ◼   ► they sell it alongside the 4.7 inch at least at the same year it just seems like a lot to sell

01:06:09 ◼   ► yeah i don't know that to me i'm i'm leaks even though there are leaks coming out i feel like we

01:06:15 ◼   ► know less about what they're going to announce iphone wise than in years many years i can't even

01:06:22 ◼   ► remember the last time that we that i've had so many questions yeah because last year about this

01:06:27 ◼   ► time we had oh well I don't know if it was quite this time certainly by August

01:06:32 ◼   ► we had seen the 5c I had already written my review no no we didn't see the 5c did

01:06:41 ◼   ► we know but I thought we saw the shells oh I thought we only saw the 5s the the

01:06:45 ◼   ► metal ones I didn't think we saw the plastic ones although maybe we didn't

01:06:48 ◼   ► they were white may I think they were white yeah but we didn't see all the

01:06:51 ◼   ► colors I don't think I think we just saw like a white plastic one yeah yeah I

01:06:56 ◼   ► I do remember something like that. So we're in agreement. Number 5.5 yet, anyway.

01:07:03 ◼   ► I don't know. And then there's people saying, the rumor is saying that it's a month behind

01:07:08 ◼   ► or that it might come early next year. They wouldn't announce that in September then. That

01:07:14 ◼   ► seems weird that they would do that. Like, if it's three or four months behind, it seems to me like

01:07:19 ◼   ► that's a non-starter. It should either be at the same time and therefore in time for the holidays

01:07:27 ◼   ► or like six months later. You could maybe do it in April or something like that, like when they

01:07:33 ◼   ► announced the first couple of iPads. But the holidays, it's such a weird blip on their quarter.

01:07:40 ◼   ► I mean, you can see it every time they have these, like today, every time they do the quarterly

01:07:44 ◼   ► finance announcements. It's such a weird blip. They're such a holiday heavily company that

01:07:51 ◼   ► it just doesn't make sense that they would have something that would debut in, I don't know,

01:07:55 ◼   ► January or something like that. And they can't announce it in September because then people would,

01:07:59 ◼   ► you know, it's the whole Osborne effect thing. Like they're not going to want to buy the 4.7 inch one

01:08:04 ◼   ► until they can see the 5.5 inch one and make a side by side comparison.

01:08:10 ◼   ► or they can't just have five point—you know, we're not going to sell it until January,

01:08:14 ◼   ► but we'll put them in the stores so you can see them. Well, then if people love them,

01:08:18 ◼   ► then, you know, what? They're going to—did they wait? That doesn't make any sense. You don't show

01:08:24 ◼   ► people something unless you can sell it to them. I just don't get it. Something just doesn't happen.

01:08:29 ◼   ► Some of those rumors came from Ming-Chi Kuo—I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong—who is held up as,

01:08:37 ◼   ► like one of the really good rumor sources. And used to work for Digitimes. Now works for KGI

01:08:48 ◼   ► Securities. Wouldn't that be funny if-- I don't even know if it's a he or a she.

01:08:52 ◼   ► It's a he. All right. He got fired from Digitimes for his poor track record.

01:08:58 ◼   ► And he's gotten a number of things correct, but he's also gotten a number of things

01:09:03 ◼   ► completely incorrect because last year he said that the iPhones was going to be announced at

01:09:07 ◼   ► WWDC. Right. And he's the one saying that the iPhones delayed, you know, the big iPhones are

01:09:15 ◼   ► delayed and won't be coming. It might not come until next year. I think that if the 5.5-inch

01:09:22 ◼   ► iPhone is delayed, maybe they were working on it, maybe it is delayed for whatever reason,

01:09:28 ◼   ► That means it's pushed back a year.

01:09:30 ◼   ► That's what I think.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I would think so, too.

01:09:34 ◼   ► They are not going to do something

01:09:35 ◼   ► like two, three months after the initial one.

01:09:38 ◼   ► So here's the thing.

01:09:39 ◼   ► Here's what I can't wait for then.

01:09:40 ◼   ► Imagine this scenario.

01:09:42 ◼   ► September comes.

01:09:43 ◼   ► There's a big iPhone event.

01:09:44 ◼   ► The Yerba Buena Center is rented out.

01:09:47 ◼   ► They put up some kind of big colorful poster.

01:09:51 ◼   ► I fly out there.

01:09:52 ◼   ► We have a big dog and pony show.

01:09:57 ◼   ► And the only new iPhone they announce is a 4.7 inch iPhone 6.

01:10:04 ◼   ► It doesn't matter how awesome that phone is.

01:10:07 ◼   ► How many people are going to say, where's my 5.5 inch iPhone?

01:10:11 ◼   ► Right?

01:10:14 ◼   ► I mean, it's like the can't win situation that Apple is in.

01:10:18 ◼   ► I don't see how they could do this.

01:10:23 ◼   ► It still doesn't make sense to me how they would do both.

01:10:25 ◼   ► But if they don't do both, there's going to be some number of people who are outraged

01:10:29 ◼   ► and are going to say that they are out of touch, they're going to disappear in 60 days

01:10:35 ◼   ► if they don't get a 5.5-inch phone out.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Did they disappear after that 60 days?

01:10:46 ◼   ► I wanted to know if someone would ask on the conference call.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Are you guys still in business?

01:10:52 ◼   ► I guess he, Trip Choudhury, does not get on the conference call.

01:10:55 ◼   ► It would be great if he did.

01:10:56 ◼   ► He does not get to answer, to ask questions on the conference call.

01:10:58 ◼   ► Oh my god, can we Kickstarter that?

01:11:00 ◼   ► I would totally Kickstarter a project to get Trip Choudhury onto the, uh, every conference

01:11:08 ◼   ► call.

01:11:09 ◼   ► You know, at least for the next four.

01:11:11 ◼   ► You know, we'll pay whatever it costs and we'll get Trip Choudhury on every—he gets

01:11:15 ◼   ► one question on every call.

01:11:17 ◼   ► He'd just take Gene Munster's spot, right?

01:11:22 ◼   ► is just going to ask about Apple TV.

01:11:24 ◼   ► Tim "Lucky" Johnson He's going to ask you, yeah. You know he's

01:11:26 ◼   ► going to burn a question on the Apple TV.

01:11:27 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah. Let's give one to Tripp Choudry. Tim, Tripp Choudry here.

01:11:32 ◼   ► Tim "Lucky" Johnson Are you still in business?

01:11:33 ◼   ► Pete "Lucky" Johnson Are you still in business? I've got you

01:11:35 ◼   ► penciled in for disappearing in early June when you didn't release an iWatch thing.

01:11:41 ◼   ► Tim "Lucky" Johnson Ah, that guy.

01:11:42 ◼   ► Pete "Lucky" Johnson This is Tim. I don't do impressions. This is

01:11:48 ◼   ► my Tim Cook Southern accent. This is Tim.

01:11:49 ◼   ► Tim "Lucky" Johnson I'm going to take that question.

01:11:50 ◼   ► No, we're still here.

01:11:53 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:11:53 ◼   ► Talk to you next quarter.

01:11:59 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:11:59 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, I don't know.

01:12:02 ◼   ► No.

01:12:02 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:12:02 ◼   ► Jared: Check in in 90 days.

01:12:03 ◼   ► Pete; Well, check in.

01:12:05 ◼   ► Hopefully.

01:12:05 ◼   ► Jared; Yeah, right.

01:12:07 ◼   ► Pete; If we can keep the lights on.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Jared; The other, one other thing from the, that I heard on the little bit of the conference call

01:12:18 ◼   ► that I heard before we got on the air was that, well, the iPad sales were down overall.

01:12:26 ◼   ► They were up about 50% in countries like China and India, which was interesting. And they

01:12:33 ◼   ► were down in the mature countries or developed nations.

01:12:39 ◼   ► They call them BRIC countries. B-R-I-C. Now what is that?

01:12:44 ◼   ► Brazil, India, China.

01:12:45 ◼   ► What's the word?

01:12:46 ◼   ► Yeah, Brazil, Russia, India, China. Brazil, Russia, India, China. It sounds like four random countries.

01:12:54 ◼   ► Which is, yeah. Although they're—except that they're both—all four are enormously populous, right?

01:13:01 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, so those four countries, it's way up. And isn't that exactly the—those are exactly the

01:13:12 ◼   ► sort of countries where I feel like everybody said they would never sell any iPads.

01:13:20 ◼   ► Well, and that they also are like the sort of countries where everybody was saying last

01:13:25 ◼   ► year when the 5C came out and wasn't cheap.

01:13:29 ◼   ► You know, that everybody's saying, "Oh, they're going to make a cheap iPhone."

01:13:32 ◼   ► And it came out and it wasn't.

01:13:33 ◼   ► It was, you know, it had nothing to do with the cost.

01:13:36 ◼   ► It had to do with having the mid-tier occupied by a new device at the same price point instead

01:13:42 ◼   ► of a year-old device coming down.

01:13:45 ◼   ► That's all they did.

01:13:46 ◼   ► It had nothing to do with the price.

01:13:48 ◼   ► It was about replacing the middle tier with a new phone rather than…

01:13:54 ◼   ► And one that was probably cheaper to build.

01:13:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

01:13:57 ◼   ► So it helped their margin.

01:13:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:14:00 ◼   ► I think, because, yeah, I think that there's something… yeah, there's something to

01:14:03 ◼   ► that where I think that the refined aluminum, if they had held the past pattern instead of the 5C,

01:14:11 ◼   ► the 5C wouldn't exist and the iPhone 5 would still be sold at that point, which is what the 5C is

01:14:18 ◼   ► internally. Which also, I guess, if we want to speculate about iPhones, do you think there's

01:14:25 ◼   ► going to be an iPhone 5CS, which would be an iPhone 5S in a plastic case?

01:14:31 ◼   ► No, I would.

01:14:32 ◼   ► Mmm, I don't know if they're gonna call it a 5CS because it's starting to get like a

01:14:36 ◼   ► mouthful.

01:14:37 ◼   ► No.

01:14:38 ◼   ► To me, the simplest thing is that the 5C drops down, the 5S drops down, and you get a 4.7

01:14:43 ◼   ► inch.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Yeah, but I kind of feel like the pattern they set last year is they don't want to sell

01:14:48 ◼   ► the nice metal case or, you know, exterior.

01:14:53 ◼   ► In the middle?

01:14:54 ◼   ► In the middle.

01:14:56 ◼   ► I do feel like...

01:14:57 ◼   ► I feel like that year was a setup just to get to the point where the plastic case is

01:15:03 ◼   ► on the bottom level.

01:15:04 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

01:15:05 ◼   ► It could be.

01:15:06 ◼   ► It's either one or the other.

01:15:07 ◼   ► That's a good point.

01:15:08 ◼   ► It could be about that they needed to get it out one year in advance before it troubles

01:15:11 ◼   ► down.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:13 ◼   ► It could be.

01:15:14 ◼   ► It could be.

01:15:15 ◼   ► I don't know, though.

01:15:17 ◼   ► I'm not so sure about that.

01:15:19 ◼   ► I don't know either.

01:15:20 ◼   ► I think it's sort of about—see, my guess is that it's sort of about setting your

01:15:26 ◼   ► expectations for which one will cost more before you even turn them on.

01:15:31 ◼   ► That you can look at a 5C and a 5S side by side while the screens are off.

01:15:36 ◼   ► And I think most people would be able to guess which one's more expensive than the other.

01:15:40 ◼   ► Whereas my 5S, the current 5S, pick your favorite color versus the iPhone 6, this 4.7 inch iPhone

01:15:51 ◼   ► 6.

01:15:52 ◼   ► I don't know that you'd be able to do that.

01:15:55 ◼   ► If you just purely like bigger devices, I guess you'd think this one's nicer.

01:15:59 ◼   ► But if you like smaller devices, you might think that the 5S is.

01:16:04 ◼   ► Whereas if they put the 5S internals into a 5C-style plastic case, then it sets that

01:16:10 ◼   ► up.

01:16:11 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:16:12 ◼   ► That's a good question.

01:16:13 ◼   ► That's one of the things I'll be looking forward to next month, or September, I guess.

01:16:16 ◼   ► The brick countries.

01:16:18 ◼   ► No, I think that everybody said last year that they need to sell a cheap iPhone for

01:16:23 ◼   ► China because people in China per capita don't have a lot of money. What do they call them?

01:16:29 ◼   ► Emerging markets? Is that the term?

01:16:31 ◼   ► Emerging markets.

01:16:32 ◼   ► Right. And I don't think Apple thinks there are such things as emerging markets. I really

01:16:38 ◼   ► don't. I think the way they approach it is that there's people who can afford iPhones

01:16:43 ◼   ► and people who can't. And I don't mean it to be flippant, but the fact that the average

01:16:49 ◼   ► person in China maybe can't afford an iPhone 5c or probably can't afford an iPhone c, let's

01:16:55 ◼   ► face it. Doesn't mean that there aren't millions and millions of people in China who can because

01:17:01 ◼   ► there's billions of people in China.

01:17:05 ◼   ► The other thing they did in the spring was add an 8GB iPhone 5c.

01:17:10 ◼   ► Yeah. That's a little weird. I kind of...

01:17:13 ◼   ► I wonder if that had anything to do... if that had much to do with it.

01:17:16 ◼   ► Boy, I just can't believe I can't believe that the difference from Apple's perspective between 8 and 16 gigabytes is

01:17:23 ◼   ► So much is enough to warrant that it just seems miserly

01:17:27 ◼   ► Yeah to give 8 yeah

01:17:30 ◼   ► Cuz it's you know and and you know and put a camera in it that can shoot high-def video and stuff

01:17:36 ◼   ► It's like wow, that's it just seems miserly

01:17:38 ◼   ► I mean, I was looking I was looking at Amazon had a sale on Kindle fire last week and I was looking at them and

01:17:46 ◼   ► And it's like the price difference between the--

01:17:49 ◼   ► I think there was an 8 gigabyte and a 16 gigabyte.

01:17:51 ◼   ► And the price difference between the two was like $20.

01:17:53 ◼   ► And even then, you've got to figure that's just--

01:17:57 ◼   ► the cost difference can't--

01:17:58 ◼   ► I bet it's less than $20.

01:17:59 ◼   ► But that's--

01:18:00 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:18:00 ◼   ► You can't-- how can you price them $5 apart or whatever?

01:18:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:06 ◼   ► And I know RAM is the same way.

01:18:07 ◼   ► And that's another John Siracusa frequent complaint,

01:18:11 ◼   ► that Apple always shortchanges the devices on RAM,

01:18:15 ◼   ► that the five--

01:18:17 ◼   ► I think we still only-- I don't know.

01:18:19 ◼   ► Whatever we have, we all wish we had more.

01:18:21 ◼   ► I think we only have one gigabyte of RAM

01:18:23 ◼   ► in the current ones.

01:18:24 ◼   ► I think that sounds right.

01:18:27 ◼   ► And it comes back to ByteApple in the long run

01:18:32 ◼   ► at the tail end, like when somebody with a 4S

01:18:35 ◼   ► upgrades to iOS 7, and it feels like their phone is

01:18:39 ◼   ► running slower.

01:18:40 ◼   ► Like the number one thing Apple could

01:18:42 ◼   ► do that would make that better-- he

01:18:45 ◼   ► thinks and I agree would be if if they had doubled the RAM all along like if

01:18:52 ◼   ► every single iPhone had shit maybe excuse the first generation one because

01:18:56 ◼   ► you know I was crazy I can't believe they built this thing but if like the

01:19:01 ◼   ► last few years of iPhones had had more like if they had gone to a gigabyte in

01:19:05 ◼   ► the years when they had 512 megabytes and if these ones now that have a

01:19:09 ◼   ► gigabyte had two gigabytes it would I think it would give them a lot more head

01:19:14 ◼   ► room down the road for the last supported iOS update they're going to give.

01:19:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:21 ◼   ► Because it's sort of a no-win situation for them, where if they cut them off earlier,

01:19:24 ◼   ► everybody would be like, "Wow, I just bought this phone two years ago, and I already don't

01:19:27 ◼   ► get the software update."

01:19:29 ◼   ► But then they get the software update, and if it makes their phone feel slower because

01:19:32 ◼   ► they don't have enough RAM, because it's optimized for the brand new, you know…

01:19:38 ◼   ► The first priority is to make it awesome on the top-of-the-line iPhone, which has more

01:19:42 ◼   ► RAM.

01:19:43 ◼   ► then they get bitten.

01:19:45 ◼   ► I know you get a limited edition,

01:19:48 ◼   ► limited edition, like 256 gigabyte iPhone,

01:19:52 ◼   ► but my wife and I both have a 16.

01:19:55 ◼   ► We've been eking by on 16.

01:19:58 ◼   ► So when I got the first iPhone,

01:20:00 ◼   ► we both had four gigabyte iPhones.

01:20:03 ◼   ► We were, you know, speaking of limited edition,

01:20:06 ◼   ► that was a real limited edition phone.

01:20:10 ◼   ► And I used that for two years.

01:20:12 ◼   ► And towards the end, it got really painful.

01:20:15 ◼   ► And I'm at the same place now with 16 gigabytes.

01:20:18 ◼   ► I was just like, I can't do it anymore.

01:20:21 ◼   ► And I don't know.

01:20:22 ◼   ► I just spent it.

01:20:23 ◼   ► It seems like at some point, I mean, they got to jump up.

01:20:26 ◼   ► I could--

01:20:27 ◼   ► I could--

01:20:27 ◼   ► I think I--

01:20:28 ◼   ► The base phone is 32.

01:20:29 ◼   ► I could definitely get by with 32.

01:20:31 ◼   ► I don't think I am right now.

01:20:33 ◼   ► I think if I check, I think it's somewhere in the 40s.

01:20:38 ◼   ► My iPhone is filled up to somewhere around 40 gigs.

01:20:40 ◼   ► So I'm using upwards towards the 64.

01:20:43 ◼   ► But there's a whole bunch of crap I could delete, I think.

01:20:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:46 ◼   ► Well, that's how-- and that's how--

01:20:48 ◼   ► I had a 32 gig 3GS.

01:20:50 ◼   ► And it was just like--

01:20:52 ◼   ► I never even came close, particularly

01:20:55 ◼   ► during that time period.

01:20:56 ◼   ► And I felt like I was loading it up with movies and stuff,

01:20:58 ◼   ► and I was never watching them.

01:20:59 ◼   ► And I thought, well, why am I doing this?

01:21:01 ◼   ► So I kept getting 16 gig phones after that.

01:21:05 ◼   ► And now I finally got to the point where, OK, now I

01:21:07 ◼   ► can't even get stuff on there, have all the stuff that I want.

01:21:10 ◼   ► that I really need on there.

01:21:13 ◼   ► I will point out before I take a final break

01:21:15 ◼   ► for our third sponsor, I will point out

01:21:18 ◼   ► the obvious tension between the fact that half an hour ago,

01:21:21 ◼   ► we were singing praises of Apple's 39% profit margin.

01:21:25 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:21:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:26 ◼   ► And now we're telling them that they

01:21:28 ◼   ► should double the RAM and flash storage in every single model

01:21:34 ◼   ► across the board.

01:21:36 ◼   ► Somewhere at Apple, there's somebody who's listening--

01:21:38 ◼   ► Podcasting!

01:21:40 ◼   ► Somebody is sitting there listening and smiling and saying, yes, you cannot have it both ways.

01:21:45 ◼   ► Yeah, podcasting makes it easy. Just give everybody double the RAM.

01:21:50 ◼   ► Double the RAM. It's only 50 million phones. There is a secret to 39% profit margin.

01:22:02 ◼   ► Sure. Right. Right. But I feel like I'm looking at a new-- my wife's getting close to needing a

01:22:09 ◼   ► a new MacBook and I'm going to be there probably next year.

01:22:12 ◼   ► And I just can't sanction getting a four gigabyte--

01:22:16 ◼   ► four gigabytes of memory anymore.

01:22:18 ◼   ► Oh, no.

01:22:19 ◼   ► And 128 gig drive.

01:22:21 ◼   ► No, I think--

01:22:22 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:22:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's got to be more than that.

01:22:25 ◼   ► Well, for me, it's--

01:22:26 ◼   ► So I got to go 8256 and--

01:22:29 ◼   ► Boy, I don't know.

01:22:31 ◼   ► It's like modern web pages are just--

01:22:33 ◼   ► like when you look in Activity Monitor

01:22:36 ◼   ► and you see how each tab now gets to show you

01:22:39 ◼   ► how much RAM it's using.

01:22:40 ◼   ► It's like, it's crazy.

01:22:43 ◼   ► Not crazy, but you need more than four gigabytes.

01:22:45 ◼   ► And it just seems, again, we're getting old.

01:22:48 ◼   ► Four gigabytes of RAM sounds like,

01:22:51 ◼   ► it still sounds to me magical.

01:22:52 ◼   ► 'Cause it's the magical barrier

01:22:55 ◼   ► where you need 64-bit processing for one process

01:22:59 ◼   ► to address that much space.

01:23:00 ◼   ► And I knew about that limit, but like, you know,

01:23:04 ◼   ► the 90s or even the 2000s, it just seemed like some beautiful Shangri-La of the future,

01:23:09 ◼   ► when you would have that much RAM. Meanwhile, I'm paying for 8-megabyte memory chips with my last

01:23:17 ◼   ► dollar to load up an old Mac LC with 16 megabytes of RAM. And it just seems crazy that now we're

01:23:29 ◼   ► saying, "I cannot get by with 4 gigabytes of RAM." But that's how it goes.

01:23:33 ◼   ► Yeah, live like this.

01:23:34 ◼   ► Right?

01:23:35 ◼   ► At some point, I guess, we'll be talking about terabytes of RAM.

01:23:40 ◼   ► Our kids.

01:23:43 ◼   ► I will say this.

01:23:43 ◼   ► One last point, though, about it, though,

01:23:45 ◼   ► is that, yes, obviously, there's some tension there

01:23:47 ◼   ► between the profit margins and doubling the RAM and flash

01:23:52 ◼   ► storage on every single device.

01:23:54 ◼   ► But on the other hand, we do know

01:23:56 ◼   ► that Tim Cook, in particular, and Apple as an institution,

01:23:59 ◼   ► is very, very fanatical about customer satisfaction.

01:24:03 ◼   ► And again, I'm just ripping John Syracuse off here,

01:24:07 ◼   ► but customer satisfaction is definitely

01:24:09 ◼   ► tied to the amount of RAM in your device,

01:24:12 ◼   ► especially one or two years down the road.

01:24:16 ◼   ► So it's a multi--

01:24:19 ◼   ► it's like one of those three-way tugs of war.

01:24:22 ◼   ► If there's one thing that maybe they

01:24:23 ◼   ► would be willing to sacrifice a bit of long-term profit margin,

01:24:28 ◼   ► just a bit. A bit of long-term profit margin for customer satisfaction seems like the type

01:24:33 ◼   ► of trade-off that they would see as worth it because customer satisfaction is a long-term

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01:27:49 ◼   ► What were we talking about?

01:27:50 ◼   ► Something about iPads, iPhones. Oh, Jamming More Ram in for free.

01:27:55 ◼   ► Yeah, Jamming More Ram in for free.

01:27:57 ◼   ► But it's got to go up sometime. And I feel like we're close to an inflection point.

01:28:03 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:28:06 ◼   ► And you really can take use of it.

01:28:08 ◼   ► I mean, I hate to say it, but the device is still-- everything is always RAM-starved at

01:28:15 ◼   ► this level.

01:28:16 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:28:17 ◼   ► You know, you don't see it as much as you used to, but you switch from one app to another

01:28:21 ◼   ► and then do another, and then you go back to Safari and your tabs have to reload, because

01:28:24 ◼   ► Safari had to give up its RAM and flushed all the tabs and just remembers the URLs.

01:28:31 ◼   ► you're in the supermarket and you get crummy cellular reception in the dairy aisle and

01:28:37 ◼   ► now your tab doesn't reload as fast. You know, it happens, you know? Whereas if you had double

01:28:42 ◼   ► the RAM, your tab would still be there because you loaded it before you went to the supermarket.

01:28:46 ◼   ► I do a lot of my reading in the supermarket.

01:28:49 ◼   ► Is there something they do in building a supermarket that shields cellular connections?

01:28:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:28:55 ◼   ► Because it seems like every time I go to the supermarket, I get a worse connection than

01:28:58 ◼   ► almost anywhere else.

01:28:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's those shelves that they use or something like that.

01:29:02 ◼   ► It's the milk.

01:29:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:03 ◼   ► All the liquids.

01:29:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Absorbing the signal.

01:29:10 ◼   ► Not a scientist.

01:29:14 ◼   ► You're not a doctor and I'm not a scientist.

01:29:21 ◼   ► You know, there's something I wanted, a customer satisfaction thing I wanted to talk about.

01:29:25 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. And he mentions that, and I don't know if he said customer sat again this time,

01:29:31 ◼   ► but they beat that drum throughout that conference call every single quarter.

01:29:36 ◼   ► Well, I think that they see it as a way of trying to prove scientifically, however much

01:29:47 ◼   ► a customer satisfaction survey can be held up as science, but it's certainly better than just

01:29:51 ◼   ► empty words, that people like Apple products, on average, better than other people like

01:29:59 ◼   ► competing products from other companies, which is a long-term advantage.

01:30:06 ◼   ► It's a way of saying we're not in a commodity.

01:30:10 ◼   ► A big portion of these markets that we're in, laptop computers, tablets, cell phones,

01:30:17 ◼   ► is a commoditized market.

01:30:19 ◼   ► But where we're operating is not a commoditized market in that there's a sizable demand for

01:30:25 ◼   ► the non-commoditized products at the high end of these markets.

01:30:31 ◼   ► Do you have a lot of people you see with Kindle fires?

01:30:36 ◼   ► No, I don't see many Kindle fires.

01:30:39 ◼   ► That might be a Seattle area thing.

01:30:41 ◼   ► Yeah, and I always wonder if it's more the area that I live in.

01:30:45 ◼   ► I see and I also see just like a lot of people buying them as cheap tablets for their kids

01:30:49 ◼   ► Hmm like they fake I think they some some people think well

01:30:54 ◼   ► They think that I should get the cheapest one because it's just for the kid and then they also think that

01:30:58 ◼   ► He's probably just gonna drop it and yeah, I don't want him dropping an iPad. Yeah, that's interesting

01:31:03 ◼   ► I wonder how the decline in year over year. I iPad sales already

01:31:09 ◼   ► I mean already I mean like in the life of the product I I

01:31:13 ◼   ► I think part of it is that people, when they get a tablet, if they keep using it, they

01:31:18 ◼   ► use it a lot longer than they use a cell phone, and it's more like laptop in terms of replacement

01:31:24 ◼   ► cycle.

01:31:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess so.

01:31:28 ◼   ► And B, maybe, you know, this is a case where the iPad has become too expensive, you know,

01:31:36 ◼   ► that maybe, I don't know how many of these, I don't know who else is selling a lot of

01:31:40 ◼   ► But if people are buying them, like you said,

01:31:43 ◼   ► for kids and stuff like that, that's a great reason

01:31:47 ◼   ► to buy a $250 device instead of a $500 device

01:31:50 ◼   ► if you're giving it to a kid who--

01:31:53 ◼   ► look at the way things like a DS are constructed, the Game Boys.

01:31:59 ◼   ► They're made to be handled by children in ways that iPads are not.

01:32:07 ◼   ► I don't think iPads are particularly fragile for tablets,

01:32:09 ◼   ► but they do have a glass screen and they're not, they don't look rugged.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Right. So they're just more expensive to replace.

01:32:17 ◼   ► Right. And it's not like iPad sales have collapsed. It's just a drop. But, you know,

01:32:21 ◼   ► it just seems worrisome at a time when I think most of us thought that they'd still be going up

01:32:26 ◼   ► just because more and more people would be buying their first tablet.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Yeah. It's hard. I mean, I, you know, I always want a new one. So

01:32:36 ◼   ► I find it odd that not everybody else does.

01:32:40 ◼   ► Here's an interesting customer satisfaction angle.

01:32:43 ◼   ► And it's like a long-term thing, is that it's a belief.

01:32:50 ◼   ► And I think this applies at a consumer level

01:32:53 ◼   ► and at an enterprise level.

01:32:54 ◼   ► I don't want to spend a lot of time on that IBM thing.

01:32:57 ◼   ► But Apple has long had the knock against it

01:33:02 ◼   ► that they charge too high a prices,

01:33:04 ◼   ► and that they, you know, they're greedy and that they make these obscene profits and they charge

01:33:09 ◼   ► too much for everything. And that their stuff is just too expensive, right? And in some, you know,

01:33:17 ◼   ► there were some times in the late 90s, early 2000s, where like, you know, pound for pound,

01:33:21 ◼   ► maybe the Mac was more, you know, a comparable Mac was more expensive than a comparable PC.

01:33:26 ◼   ► But especially in the Intel Mac era, you know, that's, that's, you know, long ago been turned

01:33:32 ◼   ► around where it's like there's been a lot of times where you know to come to to

01:33:36 ◼   ► get the same spec I remember when the Mac pros came out last year the new ones

01:33:39 ◼   ► I guess that was earlier this year you know people tried to configure the same

01:33:44 ◼   ► type of thing from Dell and it wasn't gonna come in a cool case like the Mac

01:33:48 ◼   ► Pro and it was way more expensive right and and laptops to like well sure Apple

01:33:53 ◼   ► starting laptop price is $899 and you know there's a lot of companies that

01:33:58 ◼   ► sell, you know, $299, $399 PC laptops. But to get the same specs, it actually would cost

01:34:03 ◼   ► more, and you'd get a lesser build quality. Not really fair. But people have that belief,

01:34:10 ◼   ► and I think that when they see little things, they're viewed through that prism. And here's

01:34:15 ◼   ► an example. I was at a family thing a couple weeks ago, and somebody, you know, outdoors,

01:34:23 ◼   ► barbecuing or drinking beer, you know. And somebody had mentioned, and it wasn't in the context of,

01:34:29 ◼   ► "Hey, I know you write about Apple." It was just people were talking about iPhones and it had

01:34:35 ◼   ► nothing to do with me being present. I was just a fly on the wall. It wasn't, you know, complaining

01:34:41 ◼   ► to me about it. But it was somebody, a woman who was complaining because she still had an iPhone 4

01:34:49 ◼   ► or 4S. I don't know which one, but it had the 30-pin adapter and the thing. But her husband had just

01:34:53 ◼   ► gotten a new iPhone, and his came with Lightning, a Lightning adapter. And she was like, "Why

01:35:00 ◼   ► did they do that?" And her perspective was that they did it only to get them to buy a

01:35:05 ◼   ► whole bunch of $29 Lightning cables, and that it was a ripoff. But her annoyance was real

01:35:13 ◼   ► in terms of like, now a single charger in the kitchen doesn't work for both of them.

01:35:17 ◼   ► And it's a short-term problem. I just kept my mouth shut. This is one of those things

01:35:22 ◼   ► or people wonder, like, "What does John Gruber do in that situation?" You know what I do? I just

01:35:28 ◼   ► pick up my beer and I take a sip, and I keep my mouth shut, and I look around and make sure that

01:35:34 ◼   ► my dad doesn't do something stupid and be like, "Well, John knows everything about Apple John."

01:35:39 ◼   ► You know, I'm like ready to bolt from the chair and maybe go join the wiffle ball game or something

01:35:45 ◼   ► like that. Like, I do not want to get involved. I do know. I can explain to you now, you know,

01:35:50 ◼   ► know, that it is, you know, if they don't do it, then we're stuck with 30-pin adapters

01:35:56 ◼   ► forever. And the 30-pin adapter was actually kind of gross. It was like a weirdly, unappley-type

01:36:02 ◼   ► port.

01:36:03 ◼   ► That's it. I mean, people complained about that adapter for years.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Yeah, but it was weird. And it served them well, technically.

01:36:09 ◼   ► And then they replaced it. It's like, "Oh, they replaced it."

01:36:11 ◼   ► Right. And they replaced it with a port that is much better in every way than 30-pin and

01:36:17 ◼   ► much better in every way than micro USB. It's more sturdy, it works up and down, which is

01:36:24 ◼   ► amazing, and annoys me even more when I have to deal with USB stuff now. And, you know,

01:36:32 ◼   ► they can either make a port that's better, or they can never make a new port. And Apple's

01:36:38 ◼   ► way is to do something better. And within a few years, all the phones that are in use

01:36:42 ◼   ► and all the iPads that are in use will all be on Lightning and nobody will have that

01:36:45 ◼   ► But I do understand it's annoying. But she, you know, didn't, never even entered into

01:36:51 ◼   ► her, the discussion. It never even occurred to her that the lightning adapter on her husband's

01:36:55 ◼   ► phone was better. That's the thing that she completely, clearly did not see, just

01:37:01 ◼   ► completely missed. All she could see was that it was totally different, totally incompatible,

01:37:06 ◼   ► and therefore obviously a money grab. And the thing that I think hurts Apple in that

01:37:12 ◼   ► regard. I don't think that even enters Apple's mind at all. I think whatever profits, I think

01:37:17 ◼   ► they do make nice profits on $29 Lightning adapters or $19, whatever they sell them for.

01:37:21 ◼   ► But I don't think materially that they add up to, you know, any significant part of their…

01:37:30 ◼   ► Significant line item, yeah.

01:37:31 ◼   ► Right. But I do think there's a customer satisfaction angle

01:37:34 ◼   ► on there where…

01:37:35 ◼   ► It makes the experience better.

01:37:37 ◼   ► Right. Well, no, but that it hurts. When you use a lightning

01:37:44 ◼   ► adapter, it does help your customer satisfaction. And I

01:37:47 ◼   ► think it, you know, if it's the only device you have, instead of

01:37:50 ◼   ► them using it instead of micro USB is why Apple gets better

01:37:53 ◼   ► scores. But I do think there's a negative thing where people

01:37:57 ◼   ► think they did this just to practically steal $29 from me.

01:38:02 ◼   ► Like, I feel like maybe they, they should rethink their

01:38:06 ◼   ► pricing policy on things like extra adapters and and

01:38:12 ◼   ► should destroy their margins further again i'm giving them advice that it

01:38:15 ◼   ► will hurt their profit margins but i feel like whatever damage it would

01:38:19 ◼   ► do to their profit margins to sell things like lightning adapters and

01:38:25 ◼   ► you know everything that they sell for 29 dollars or less

01:38:31 ◼   ► all of those things if they you know really drop the price on a lot of those

01:38:34 ◼   ► things and sold them closer to cost, the goodwill would be more valuable than whatever hit it

01:38:41 ◼   ► would take to their profit margins, is my theory. Now, again, there might be some guy

01:38:45 ◼   ► at Apple with a spreadsheet…

01:38:46 ◼   ► And he's shaking his head.

01:38:49 ◼   ► Yeah, right. I ran the numbers. You're wrong.

01:38:53 ◼   ► And he doesn't even have an office chair. He just sits on a throne of $100 bills. It's

01:39:03 ◼   ► A billion dollars in cash.

01:39:05 ◼   ► It's that mountain of cash that the Joker set fire to in the Batman movie.

01:39:10 ◼   ► He's just sitting there up top there counting and lightning adapter.

01:39:14 ◼   ► One of those green eye shade things on.

01:39:18 ◼   ► But I do.

01:39:19 ◼   ► I think people have this notion that Apple is out to nickel and--

01:39:23 ◼   ► not nickel and dime yet, because it's not quite nickel and diming.

01:39:27 ◼   ► I do think people know that, that they don't--

01:39:30 ◼   ► I think that's part of the reason people are switching to Macs, is that you don't open your Mac and get nagged to buy

01:39:35 ◼   ► antivirus and stuff like that. You open your Mac and they don't ask you to buy anything else. So it's not nickel and diming.

01:39:41 ◼   ► It's something else, but that it's, you know, that they're looking for money.

01:39:46 ◼   ► Right. And that this stuff is way too expensive.

01:39:49 ◼   ► And I think also it's maybe partly because they know who to blame, they know to blame Apple. Whereas in the old days,

01:39:57 ◼   ► It was notorious that every brand of phone had a different custom adapter for power

01:40:02 ◼   ► Yeah, and that if you lost it god almighty or you know

01:40:05 ◼   ► you'd have to go into the Verizon store AT&T or everybody your phone and

01:40:08 ◼   ► Show them your phone and be like I need a model to each model

01:40:12 ◼   ► You had to be you couldn't just say I got a Nokia you'd be like here's my here is my phone

01:40:16 ◼   ► You know and they'd be like, oh you need the

01:40:19 ◼   ► XL 47 8 yeah, that'll be $50. Yeah, it was they were crazy expensive

01:40:25 ◼   ► Or if you wanted to do so, you'd get one if you wanted to buy a second one so you could charge your phone at work and keep your other one at home or something like that.

01:40:34 ◼   ► They were super expensive, way more expensive than Apple's. But I feel like when it's your carrier doing it, you don't even think to complain about it because you know they're going to screw you.

01:40:42 ◼   ► Whereas I think people feel like Apple shouldn't be screwing them.

01:40:45 ◼   ► screwing them. We had collected so many of those dock connector cords that I just, you know, I had

01:40:53 ◼   ► them lying all over the house, so you could power a phone anywhere. And now we're at a low point

01:41:00 ◼   ► again until I build up my inventory. And somebody the other night, just like a friend who lives up

01:41:06 ◼   ► the street, said they wanted to borrow one of those cables, like a lightning cable for a week.

01:41:11 ◼   ► and I was like, "Well, they can't have one of mine." You've got an extra one. You can give them yours,

01:41:18 ◼   ► but I'm not parting with any of mine. I don't like them. I don't like them that much.

01:41:23 ◼   ► I got one more thing. Do you hear this thing that

01:41:28 ◼   ► Ryan Block and—

01:41:34 ◼   ► The Comcast thing?

01:41:38 ◼   ► Yeah. Where they—

01:41:39 ◼   ► I didn't-- I can't-- I couldn't listen to it because it just-- those kinds of things make me cringe.

01:41:45 ◼   ► I only listened to about a minute for the same reason.

01:41:48 ◼   ► Yeah. But, yeah.

01:41:51 ◼   ► So Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont, who-- they got married a couple years ago,

01:41:57 ◼   ► and they decided to cancel their Comcast service. And apparently, Veronica was on the phone,

01:42:06 ◼   ► was going to, you know, and that's doing one for the team is calling, you know, that's

01:42:10 ◼   ► one of those things where when you're a couple, when one of you decides, "I'll call Comcast,"

01:42:16 ◼   ► you know, you don't have to do the dishes that night, right? And she called just to

01:42:23 ◼   ► say, "We want to cancel our Comcast service." I don't know, it doesn't even matter. I don't

01:42:27 ◼   ► know if they're replacing it with Fios or something like that. But number one, you know

01:42:32 ◼   ► that those two know what they're doing.

01:42:34 ◼   ► Co-founder of Engadget and the host of more tech TV shows

01:42:43 ◼   ► than anybody I know probably are making an informed decision

01:42:48 ◼   ► to cancel Comcast.

01:42:49 ◼   ► And she just couldn't get the guy to cancel their service.

01:42:53 ◼   ► And then had to hand the phone over to Ryan,

01:42:56 ◼   ► and he started recording a call.

01:42:58 ◼   ► And it's just absurd.

01:42:59 ◼   ► I mean, if you can take things like this and you haven't,

01:43:02 ◼   ► you should just Google Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont, cancel Comcast. It went viral, as they

01:43:09 ◼   ► say, because the guy was just absurd. The guy was like, "Why do you want slower internet?" And Ryan

01:43:16 ◼   ► Block was like, "Why won't you just cancel my service?" And he's like, "I'm trying to understand

01:43:21 ◼   ► why you want to get slower internet." And he's like, "I'm trying to understand why you won't

01:43:27 ◼   ► Cancel my service just cancel it. That's all I want to do

01:43:31 ◼   ► And it went on and on it was like 10 minutes long and and the thing that's great is it went viral and the thing

01:43:37 ◼   ► about that is uh

01:43:39 ◼   ► The they had to like address it like Comcast chief operating officer had to address it and say that it was painful to listen to

01:43:45 ◼   ► This call and I am not surprised that we've been criticized for it

01:43:49 ◼   ► Respecting our customers is fundamental and we fell short in this instance. I

01:43:54 ◼   ► I know these retention calls are-- I guess it's an internal memo. It's not really meant for public

01:43:59 ◼   ► distribution. These retention calls are tough, and I have tremendous admiration for our retention professionals

01:44:04 ◼   ► who make it easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast.

01:44:08 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:44:09 ◼   ► That's so awful. That's so-- that's actually even worse.

01:44:13 ◼   ► A number of sites-- and I forget where I read it, probably The Verge or someplace, but it wrote about the economics behind

01:44:20 ◼   ► these people's jobs and

01:44:23 ◼   ► Basically their whole incentive their whole compensation package is wrapped up in the number of people that they can convince to stay

01:44:30 ◼   ► You know

01:44:31 ◼   ► I thought that I just thought it from listening to the part of the call I heard was that the guy was into it enough

01:44:36 ◼   ► Or he was clearly not just getting an hour, you know, you know, yeah bucks an hour

01:44:40 ◼   ► It was he was invested. It was a car salesman. Yeah, it's the reverse. Yeah, it's a

01:44:45 ◼   ► Like I'd say it's like a car salesman. It's like selling. It's like they're selling it all over again

01:44:50 ◼   ► Right, but it's weird because it's like and car salesman. I'm sure you know, it's infamous famously shady

01:44:56 ◼   ► you know operators and they know all sorts of tricks, but it's like

01:45:00 ◼   ► And I'm sure they take advantage of some people who come in naive or who are timid

01:45:08 ◼   ► You know not that you and I are you know tough guys

01:45:12 ◼   ► Right, but it's like if we were in a car dealer you and I are going out to buy a convertible to spend it

01:45:19 ◼   ► you know, take a summer road trip and we're going to buy a convertible. And you and I go in,

01:45:22 ◼   ► and we don't like what we're hearing. And we start walking out the door, and the guy tries to keep us

01:45:27 ◼   ► from walking out the door. We're still walking out the door, right? You can just walk out, you know,

01:45:32 ◼   ► as shady as a car dealer, you know, dealer can be, you know, you can just keep moving your feet,

01:45:36 ◼   ► and eventually you are out the door and you're not listening to them anymore. Whereas if you

01:45:40 ◼   ► are already hooked up, that's the thing. You're hooked up to auto bill Comcast $100 a month.

01:45:47 ◼   ► And even if you call your credit card and say don't pay them they're gonna you know

01:45:51 ◼   ► It's they're gonna put your account in collection until they officially disconnect you

01:45:54 ◼   ► You've signed a thing that you're sending them $100 or you know

01:45:59 ◼   ► 150 dollars a month you need them to do this and if they won't do it, what can you do?

01:46:03 ◼   ► This is such rotten double-speak

01:46:07 ◼   ► And Jackie Chang had posted on Twitter that a reminder that and I forget the names of these services

01:46:13 ◼   ► But those services that you get people to do like a task for you test. Oh, yeah

01:46:17 ◼   ► Yeah, you can you can actually call those guys and have them like just gonna you know

01:46:21 ◼   ► Just gonna call Comcast and disconnect your come test for you

01:46:25 ◼   ► So if you don't want to sit on the phone with that guy this you know

01:46:30 ◼   ► And it just ties right in with me Lincoln to the the George Orwell

01:46:34 ◼   ► Politics in the English language like who make it easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast

01:46:42 ◼   ► If that's not the most

01:46:44 ◼   ► Rotten

01:46:47 ◼   ► Double speak I've ever heard that is so much more evil than if he just flat-out said

01:46:54 ◼   ► Who make it difficult for customers to leave disconnect, right?

01:46:59 ◼   ► Right because it's exactly what it means it is exactly it is like like three plus three on one side and six on the other

01:47:10 ◼   ► Who make it difficult for customers to leave Comcast

01:47:14 ◼   ► We have you you have Comcast right I do I live in Comcast country, yeah, I'm in cable town, right and

01:47:25 ◼   ► Literally our Skype call is getting quick creaky. I

01:47:29 ◼   ► Swear to God you can't make this up

01:47:33 ◼   ► You're starting to sound

01:47:37 ◼   ► I swear to God.

01:47:44 ◼   ► I kind of pat myself on the back because we have here in Tacoma, I've said this before,

01:47:49 ◼   ► we have city provided internet service.

01:47:53 ◼   ► And so I don't have to use Comcast, but I do for our, we have a landline.

01:48:01 ◼   ► We in Philadelphia have a Comcast-provided city.

01:48:05 ◼   ► Have I told you, they literally have the tallest skyscraper in Philadelphia that is the Comcast

01:48:13 ◼   ► Center.

01:48:14 ◼   ► They have just bought a plot of land a block away, and they are going to build a new tallest

01:48:20 ◼   ► skyscraper.

01:48:21 ◼   ► Your internet should be super fast.

01:48:24 ◼   ► Yes, thanks to them building two skyscrapers.

01:48:27 ◼   ► non-disconnectable. Anyway, what a rotten, what a rotten, rotten company Comcast is.

01:48:38 ◼   ► This is terrible. I don't know. That's it for me for this week, though. You got anything?

01:48:43 ◼   ► Okay. Did you talk about the Microsoft layoffs?

01:48:46 ◼   ► Oh, no, I didn't. Yeah, we could do that.

01:48:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:50 ◼   ► And that's home.

01:48:51 ◼   ► 18,000 people over the next year.

01:48:54 ◼   ► 12,000 don't count because they're from Nokia.

01:48:59 ◼   ► Yeah, they don't count.

01:49:02 ◼   ► You know, I hate to make jokes about--

01:49:04 ◼   ► Poor Finland.

01:49:05 ◼   ► You know, I don't want to make jokes about layoffs.

01:49:07 ◼   ► Because I'll bet there's got to be somebody who listens

01:49:10 ◼   ► to the show who's one of them.

01:49:11 ◼   ► So I've lost jobs, and it's not fun.

01:49:16 ◼   ► I tried to get laid off for years, it didn't work.

01:49:19 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:49:22 ◼   ► It's the worst.

01:49:23 ◼   ► It never happens to the people who want it.

01:49:24 ◼   ► No, it never happens to the people who deserve it.

01:49:27 ◼   ► It's like, "We're going to have some layoffs.

01:49:31 ◼   ► Here's the list."

01:49:32 ◼   ► Yes!

01:49:33 ◼   ► And then you raise your hand and you're like, "What about buyouts?

01:49:35 ◼   ► Maybe we could have molds.

01:49:37 ◼   ► Maybe we could have buyouts, too."

01:49:40 ◼   ► Early retirements?

01:49:41 ◼   ► They knew I was going to leave.

01:49:42 ◼   ► That's why they didn't lay me off.

01:49:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it's kind of sad.

01:49:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:49:51 ◼   ► I mean, they kind of need it as a business,

01:49:53 ◼   ► but it's never good for the people in it.

01:49:56 ◼   ► No.

01:49:57 ◼   ► And it's humbling, because I think it's not that many years

01:50:03 ◼   ► ago when the idea of a Microsoft layoff

01:50:05 ◼   ► would have been unthinkable.

01:50:08 ◼   ► And it's a reminder, a wake-up call to everybody else.

01:50:12 ◼   ► For companies like Google and Apple and Amazon,

01:50:15 ◼   ► who are the big tech companies of the last decade,

01:50:20 ◼   ► and who've never had a layoff.

01:50:23 ◼   ► If it could happen to Microsoft,

01:50:24 ◼   ► man, it could happen to anybody.

01:50:25 ◼   ► I mean, Apple's had layoffs, but never like a mass layoff,

01:50:28 ◼   ► and it hasn't been, not in the modern era of Apple.

01:50:32 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:50:32 ◼   ► - You know, you gotta be careful about getting fat.

01:50:38 ◼   ► - Tell me about it.

01:50:39 ◼   ► (both laughing)

01:50:44 ◼   ► Did you read Ben Thompson's piece on breaking Microsoft up?

01:50:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:50:50 ◼   ► That was a good piece.

01:50:52 ◼   ► I don't think it's going to happen.

01:50:54 ◼   ► No, I don't think so either, because I

01:50:56 ◼   ► think if it would have-- if that was on the table,

01:51:00 ◼   ► it would have happened instead of this,

01:51:02 ◼   ► and would have happened maybe coincident with Satya and

01:51:07 ◼   ► Nadella taking over.

01:51:08 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:51:08 ◼   ► I think that's an alternate universe.

01:51:10 ◼   ► What do they do post-Balmer maybe is break it up,

01:51:14 ◼   ► Whereas now, I don't think that they would do that.

01:51:17 ◼   ► I don't know that that's the answer.

01:51:19 ◼   ► So just to recap, his theory, I mean,

01:51:21 ◼   ► his idea is that Microsoft is turning into a services company

01:51:25 ◼   ► so that the hardware and operating system part

01:51:28 ◼   ► should be put into a different company and run separately.

01:51:35 ◼   ► Yeah, it does make sense.

01:51:37 ◼   ► And there's a certain--

01:51:39 ◼   ► what's the word?

01:51:41 ◼   ► It just doesn't make sense.

01:51:42 ◼   ► They're at odds with each other, where

01:51:44 ◼   ► there's a part of Microsoft that sees it as a company that

01:51:47 ◼   ► provides software to OEMs, and now there's

01:51:49 ◼   ► a part of the company that sees itself as an OEM.

01:51:53 ◼   ► And that's just not compatible.

01:51:55 ◼   ► And they can kind of yada, yada, yada it

01:51:57 ◼   ► to make it seem like it's compatible,

01:52:00 ◼   ► because the revenue and profits are still coming in.

01:52:03 ◼   ► But at a common sense level, it just

01:52:05 ◼   ► doesn't make sense that they can be providing these software

01:52:08 ◼   ► to companies to make mobile devices,

01:52:11 ◼   ► and they're going to make their own mobile devices

01:52:14 ◼   ► without favoring one or the other.

01:52:16 ◼   ► And everybody who's tried it, it never works.

01:52:18 ◼   ► So Google provides software to OEMs with Android,

01:52:21 ◼   ► and they make their own Android devices.

01:52:23 ◼   ► But very few people use Google's Android devices.

01:52:26 ◼   ► They've never really taken off.

01:52:28 ◼   ► And if the Nexus, in some alternate world

01:52:30 ◼   ► where the Nexus phones are huge hits,

01:52:35 ◼   ► Samsung isn't going to be using Android.

01:52:38 ◼   ► It just wouldn't work.

01:52:40 ◼   ► And like, go back to the 90s, when Apple licensed the Mac OS, it just didn't work.

01:52:49 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's an interesting idea, but there's too much institutional...

01:52:55 ◼   ► I mean, there's no way they could get rid of Windows.

01:52:59 ◼   ► No, I think, you know, and I don't think it needs to...

01:53:02 ◼   ► I just think Windows could be run as its own division,

01:53:04 ◼   ► division but i think that they should stop thinking of the windows division as anything other than

01:53:08 ◼   ► legacy just let it be what it is and it's pc operating system in an ever shrinking market but

01:53:13 ◼   ► that is huge and it's probably you know eventually going to level off like the shrinkage you know if

01:53:19 ◼   ► like i just said to you the idc for this past quarter is that the pc market shrank two percent

01:53:23 ◼   ► year over year it seems like maybe the bleeding is over you know i think it's going to keep dwindling

01:53:27 ◼   ► and it's going to keep dwindling in terms of the overall pie chart of computing devices because

01:53:34 ◼   ► it's not just that smartphones and tablets are replacing PCs, it's that we're adding

01:53:38 ◼   ► multiple devices that are what used to be thought of as a PC, and that the share of them that are

01:53:46 ◼   ► traditional PCs is getting smaller, in addition to the fact that people are buying fewer actual

01:53:51 ◼   ► units year over year. But just let it run. And I think that's the problem. The whole basic problem

01:53:56 ◼   ► with Windows 8 is trying to please two groups at once, whereas if they had just made a Windows 8

01:54:02 ◼   ► that was like Windows 7 like here if you have a traditional laptop or a desktop

01:54:08 ◼   ► PC here you go here's a new version of Windows better than ever and we've got

01:54:13 ◼   ► this other entirely new mobile operating system yeah but it's weird now it's

01:54:20 ◼   ► weird now that they you know they're his Nadella's whole memo was about you know

01:54:24 ◼   ► we're now a company that helps people get things done and they still have all

01:54:30 ◼   ► this entertainment stuff. They did Nix making TV shows.

01:54:36 ◼   ► Yeah, they've always had that. They still have the Xbox, which does not

01:54:40 ◼   ► seem that that does not fit into that mandate at all.

01:54:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think, you know, I've had that thought too. I've tossed out ideas, and

01:54:47 ◼   ► I've thought like, "Hey, if Netflix commissions TV shows, why doesn't Apple

01:54:50 ◼   ► commission TV shows, you know, for Apple TV and have, you

01:54:53 ◼   ► know, new Kevin Spacey show that's only on Apple TV?"

01:54:56 ◼   ► But you know what? That way lies lack of focus.

01:54:59 ◼   ► I'm not saying Apple would never do that particular thing, but you know, they certainly can't do all of them, you know

01:55:05 ◼   ► And I don't know making making TV shows was you know, never what Microsoft was good at

01:55:11 ◼   ► I've just I've always found that this whole thing that the

01:55:13 ◼   ► these companies think that they need to do everything to be

01:55:17 ◼   ► Counterproductive but

01:55:20 ◼   ► What do I know? Yeah

01:55:22 ◼   ► well

01:55:22 ◼   ► I do think that there's it's always seemed like that way to me like I thought it was crazy in the 90s when when

01:55:28 ◼   ► Microsoft started jointly with NBC, the MSNBC.

01:55:32 ◼   ► I was like, what are you doing?

01:55:34 ◼   ► Why would you want to make a CNN competitor?

01:55:37 ◼   ► You're Microsoft.

01:55:38 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:55:39 ◼   ► Like I can see why somebody would want to make

01:55:41 ◼   ► a CNN competitor, right?

01:55:43 ◼   ► I can see why multiple people would,

01:55:44 ◼   ► but why would Microsoft?

01:55:46 ◼   ► Why do you feel like you need everything,

01:55:47 ◼   ► including a news channel and the whole thing,

01:55:52 ◼   ► wound up not working out that well.

01:55:54 ◼   ► I mean, MSNBC is a fine network,

01:55:57 ◼   ► But I mean, Microsoft, the MS and MSNBC hasn't stood from Microsoft for, I don't know, the

01:56:02 ◼   ► better part of the decade.

01:56:03 ◼   ► I mean, they've been out of that forever.

01:56:05 ◼   ► It was very strange.

01:56:09 ◼   ► We should have a Kickstarter for us to buy Microsoft.

01:56:13 ◼   ► I did see that their stock, they did quarterly results today too, and they missed, but only

01:56:19 ◼   ► missed because of Nokia, the Nokia division, which did a little bit worse than expected.

01:56:26 ◼   ► the stock market reacted with no reaction whatsoever.

01:56:30 ◼   ► No, I mean, I think it's right.

01:56:32 ◼   ► I don't think anybody should have been surprised by that,

01:56:33 ◼   ► right?

01:56:34 ◼   ► I think common sense prevails.

01:56:35 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:56:36 ◼   ► Before we started recording, it looked like after hours,

01:56:38 ◼   ► Apple was about even, too.

01:56:40 ◼   ► I don't know if it's still true, but that's always kind of--

01:56:43 ◼   ► that's getting weird, like having the stock market not

01:56:46 ◼   ► panic after hours, no matter what happens with Apple.

01:56:51 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems like that whole thing has kind of turned a bit.

01:56:56 ◼   ► They seem to be a little bit more happy with what's going on, despite, you know, I mean

01:57:03 ◼   ► the usual suspects are still being jerks, but...

01:57:05 ◼   ► Yeah, it looks like it's nice and even.

01:57:08 ◼   ► It's sticking around $94.

01:57:13 ◼   ► You know, was it bad?

01:57:14 ◼   ► I think it was Ben Thompson who was on the show a couple weeks ago, and I thought it

01:57:18 ◼   ► made a very keen observation that I've never really heard before, which is that the stock

01:57:21 ◼   ► market rewards the gut feeling that even if you screw up, you being the company that they're

01:57:29 ◼   ► evaluating in a process, even if you screw up, you'll still be in business. And that's where

01:57:35 ◼   ► Apple got hurt for years and years, where there used to be this consensus that Apple was always

01:57:42 ◼   ► on the precipice and one slip away from the whole house of cards falling under. And I feel like that

01:57:50 ◼   ► they've, you know, none of these dire things have happened like margins collapsing or whatever,

01:57:54 ◼   ► and everybody's sort of gotten the idea that, hey, Apple could screw up, you know, like they

01:57:58 ◼   ► could release an iPhone 6 that is not that popular, and they are not going to go under.

01:58:03 ◼   ► You know, they could have the next, you know, the next Mac cube come out and,

01:58:07 ◼   ► you know, wouldn't be good, wouldn't be good news, but it's not going to,

01:58:12 ◼   ► you know, it's not a house of cards that's going to fall down, it's a sturdy foundation.

01:58:17 ◼   ► And it only took them 35 years to realize that.

01:58:20 ◼   ► Right. Slow learners.

01:58:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:58:24 ◼   ► All right, Jon Moltz, thank you for joining me.

01:58:28 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:58:28 ◼   ► People can find to get more Moltz at... To get the full Moltz treatment is what they can get.

01:58:34 ◼   ► At verynicewebsite.net. Is that correct?

01:58:40 ◼   ► That is correct.

01:58:41 ◼   ► Verynicewebsite.net for the full Moltz treatment. You've got

01:58:45 ◼   ► uh uh i'm gonna turn this car around turning this car around turning this car around great

01:58:53 ◼   ► podcast with uh a couple of guys uh well there's john armstrong yep and

01:59:00 ◼   ► lex friedman lex friedman that's it i was at the tip of my tongue

01:59:06 ◼   ► what you feel is not casey let's not casey less um and they can get you there and what are you

01:59:13 ◼   ► on the Twitter. You're @Moltz, right? At Moltz. At Moltz. Right. You know what I wish you could do?

01:59:18 ◼   ► All your jocularity. I wish that I could specify for certain iMessage users that just use the last

01:59:26 ◼   ► name. You know, like, I messaged you, I was going to be late for the show, and it says "John M." Well,

01:59:31 ◼   ► I got so many Johns. I got John Syracuse in there. I mean, I don't want to... I don't see you as

01:59:36 ◼   ► John M. You're not John M. You're Moltz. No. I'm Moltz to everybody, basically. But it's got to be

01:59:41 ◼   ► the same for me with you. If I text you, you don't want to see John G. You're like, "Who the hell is

01:59:46 ◼   ► that?" Nobody calls me John G. Not since first grade. The curse of the Johns.

01:59:52 ◼   ► Yeah.