The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Glenn, happy holidays. Happy holidays to you.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Was Philadelphia an ice storm extravaganza like Seattle? No, you know what?

00:00:07 ◼   ► We, it was cold ice cold. I mean, really. I mean, and again,

00:00:11 ◼   ► I don't even want to complain cause I know the temperature. Yeah. Uh,

00:00:15 ◼   ► basically I don't want to complain. It got really cold,

00:00:18 ◼   ► but we avoided all of the precipitation or, you know,

00:00:22 ◼   ► other than like a little bit of rain,

00:00:23 ◼   ► but I didn't even have to salt our sidewalks.

00:00:25 ◼   ► So given how much terrible precipitation, snow, ice,

00:00:29 ◼   ► whatever has hit everybody over the last week, I don't want to complain.

00:00:34 ◼   ► Yeah. We got, we got coded on the Friday before Christmas,

00:00:37 ◼   ► Seattle turned into a,

00:00:39 ◼   ► just a solid sheet of unbroken ice across the entire city.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Like we'd been put under some kind of acrylic layer.

00:00:46 ◼   ► And if you didn't have to go out, I was talking to,

00:00:49 ◼   ► I had a medical appointment yesterday and I was talking to all the medical

00:00:51 ◼   ► staff and I was like, do you have to go out? And they're like, I was,

00:00:54 ◼   ► I was supposed to come in and I was getting the car ready.

00:00:56 ◼   ► And then they're like, don't come in. And the doctor I had is like, well,

00:00:58 ◼   ► I wasn't going to go in, but a patient needed me and he's from the Northeast.

00:01:02 ◼   ► So we drove very carefully and we met at the hospital. Oh, I'm sorry.

00:01:05 ◼   ► I saw a thing and again,

00:01:07 ◼   ► Philadelphia does not get by far and away the worst winter weather,

00:01:12 ◼   ► but it's, you know, we, we definitely, you know, get icy roads.

00:01:15 ◼   ► And I saw that with the weather nationwide that like a surging

00:01:20 ◼   ► Google trend was how to drive on icy roads.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Don't. Yes, exactly.

00:01:27 ◼   ► I lived in Maine for two winters, two winters in one summer,

00:01:31 ◼   ► which is the wrong way to do it.

00:01:33 ◼   ► And the trick is in climates that get a lot of bad weather, typically, you know,

00:01:37 ◼   ► you know, you get the snow and it gets packed down and you drive on snow and you

00:01:40 ◼   ► have snow tires, you have chains in your car if you need them.

00:01:42 ◼   ► And it's the ice that gets you and people are like, well,

00:01:45 ◼   ► if I can drive on snow, I can drive on ice. No, you can't drive on ice.

00:01:48 ◼   ► That's don't know. No, it's like tip number one. Don't tip number two.

00:01:53 ◼   ► Seriously. Don't tip number three, seriously leave your car where it is.

00:01:57 ◼   ► You know, if you're worried about the battery,

00:02:00 ◼   ► start the car up and just leave it in park for five minutes to warm it up and,

00:02:04 ◼   ► and then just turn it off and go back inside. And number four, if you really,

00:02:08 ◼   ► really have to go somewhere that the only secret to driving on ice is

00:02:13 ◼   ► to go like an inch a minute. Oh, there is no,

00:02:18 ◼   ► you don't the traction. Oh, there's,

00:02:20 ◼   ► we have a Subaru and I noticed the first time this year it was,

00:02:23 ◼   ► is a gift from my in-laws when they stopped driving and I was like,

00:02:26 ◼   ► what is that X button X mode button? I don't know what this does.

00:02:29 ◼   ► And I look it up and it's like, Oh,

00:02:31 ◼   ► it engages every kind of mode to improve traction and low gear and all at one

00:02:36 ◼   ► separate tire function. And I'm like, Oh, I didn't even know we,

00:02:40 ◼   ► this it's like X mode is really like ice and bad hill mode. I'm like, okay,

00:02:46 ◼   ► well next time we'll press the button. I guess, I don't know if you want to,

00:02:49 ◼   ► if you want to treat and no one was hurt every time we have ice in Seattle,

00:02:53 ◼   ► you just type in like queen and ice or something like that into,

00:02:57 ◼   ► and that's our tallest Hill in Seattle. And there's one very steep Hill.

00:03:01 ◼   ► That's the counterbalance Hill where they used to run a cable car and they had a

00:03:04 ◼   ► counterbalance that's still present underneath,

00:03:07 ◼   ► even though there's no cable cars and people, you know, we're like, well,

00:03:09 ◼   ► it's just, it's not that bad. And then you go,

00:03:11 ◼   ► it's like if you were curling with cars and this was happening all the time,

00:03:16 ◼   ► all over queen Anne and people were like, Oh, Nope, they're either,

00:03:18 ◼   ► they'd be shooting it out the window. Oh no, they, Oh,

00:03:22 ◼   ► now it's going down and the person in the car would just slide sideways and

00:03:25 ◼   ► bumper car. And Oh anyway, we got through it.

00:03:29 ◼   ► Well, I hope everybody out there is all right.

00:03:31 ◼   ► One thing that I feel certain is guaranteed given the quantity of people is

00:03:36 ◼   ► that there's no doubt in my mind that there are numerous people who will be

00:03:41 ◼   ► listening to this episode,

00:03:42 ◼   ► hearing your and my voices who were hit by the Southwest airlines.

00:03:47 ◼   ► I don't even know what to call it. Collapse fiasco.

00:03:51 ◼   ► I'm fascinated by it because I'm always interested in the way systems break

00:03:56 ◼   ► down. Yes.

00:04:00 ◼   ► And I'm always interested in companies that are customer focused,

00:04:05 ◼   ► you know, and, and I am, I am a fan. I, you know,

00:04:10 ◼   ► I wrote about it briefly yesterday or the day before. I,

00:04:13 ◼   ► I like Southwest airlines a lot. I don't fly them.

00:04:16 ◼   ► I used to fly them as my primary airline and in the early days of doing daring

00:04:21 ◼   ► fireball professionally,

00:04:23 ◼   ► it was really the difference between me being able to afford to go to all of

00:04:29 ◼   ► these various Apple events that I went to and not,

00:04:33 ◼   ► it was like around the mid two thousands, 2006,

00:04:37 ◼   ► 2007 that that era early days of DF,

00:04:40 ◼   ► me doing it professionally Southwest had super low flight.

00:04:44 ◼   ► I mean just unbelievably lower cost flights than any other airline from Philly

00:04:49 ◼   ► to the Bay area, to Austin for South by Southwest.

00:04:53 ◼   ► Oh yeah. And a couple other places.

00:04:55 ◼   ► One of the things that they had done was that they had,

00:04:58 ◼   ► it reminds me of Apple.

00:05:00 ◼   ► Remember when Apple locked in the flash memory prices?

00:05:05 ◼   ► It was like in the, in the iPod era. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:05:09 ◼   ► And it was like everywhere they had prices that were ridiculous compared to

00:05:13 ◼   ► everyone else cause they'd bought up all the capacity, right?

00:05:15 ◼   ► Or a huge amount of capacity.

00:05:17 ◼   ► It was like a maybe the move that secured Tim Cook as the future leader of the

00:05:22 ◼   ► company.

00:05:23 ◼   ► Oh yeah. Right. And then they kind of did it again with the iPad too when it was

00:05:26 ◼   ► released.

00:05:27 ◼   ► That was I think why that price differential was so huge as they had secured a

00:05:31 ◼   ► massive amount of expense or not expensive at parts that when you buy them on

00:05:35 ◼   ► the open market or we're much higher. Yeah. But like 15 ish years ago,

00:05:40 ◼   ► Southwest did something similar with fuel prices where they had locked in like a

00:05:45 ◼   ► longterm contract on jet fuel and,

00:05:49 ◼   ► and the prices skyrocketed.

00:05:50 ◼   ► But Southwest uniquely had locked in these low prices and for a couple of years

00:05:55 ◼   ► it was just like night and day, many,

00:05:59 ◼   ► many hundreds of dollars to fly coast to coast from Philly to the Bay area

00:06:03 ◼   ► versus, you know,

00:06:04 ◼   ► I remember getting like $129 coast to coast flights, you know,

00:06:07 ◼   ► on Southwest and,

00:06:09 ◼   ► and flying Southwest is not like flying what you think of as a budget airline.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Right. It's, you know, it's different.

00:06:20 ◼   ► They have the weird rule that throws everybody off. I think they still do it.

00:06:24 ◼   ► It's been a while since I flew Southwest where you don't get a reserved seat and

00:06:29 ◼   ► you sort of bored like, I don't know,

00:06:31 ◼   ► like getting on a bus or actually Amtrak has started doing reserved seats,

00:06:36 ◼   ► which I actually really like, but more or less, you know,

00:06:39 ◼   ► it's like you get like a boarding group number and first on first choice of

00:06:44 ◼   ► seats and you just sit wherever it, there's an open seat.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And they figured out that by doing it that way,

00:06:53 ◼   ► they actually fill the plane faster than if there are reserved seats.

00:06:57 ◼   ► And that was the number one reason why they did it that way.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And it throws everybody who's used to other airlines off,

00:07:03 ◼   ► but once you get used to it, it's, it works out.

00:07:05 ◼   ► There's often the single biggest hiccup is like, Oh, you know,

00:07:10 ◼   ► and then the flight attendants will come on the PA system and say,

00:07:13 ◼   ► there's like a mother and a young child. And there's only like two middle seats,

00:07:17 ◼   ► 10 rows apart that are open. Would any,

00:07:21 ◼   ► would anybody be willing to move their seats?

00:07:24 ◼   ► So this mother and young child can board together. Whereas, you know, and again,

00:07:28 ◼   ► well, I'm a rotten person, Glenn. I never raised my hand,

00:07:32 ◼   ► but I gotcha. God'll get you John. Well, but you know, it's, but you're, see,

00:07:36 ◼   ► this is, this is that I don't think Southwest,

00:07:39 ◼   ► some other airlines are much worse about this, right?

00:07:40 ◼   ► In which they sort of pit our personal and are like our generous and selfless

00:07:45 ◼   ► interests against each other and Southwest from what I've,

00:07:48 ◼   ► I've never flown Southwest.

00:07:49 ◼   ► They don't really service the areas that I go to from Seattle or they're not the

00:07:53 ◼   ► best deal.

00:07:53 ◼   ► I can always get Alaska is often our kind of airline for lower cost and certain

00:07:58 ◼   ► routes and Alaska has nonstop to a lot of places really affordably.

00:08:01 ◼   ► So we're really lucky in our hub,

00:08:02 ◼   ► but Southwest doesn't seem to put everybody into like a prisoner's dilemma or a

00:08:07 ◼   ► Hobson's choice or any of the other scenarios they, so when you get that,

00:08:11 ◼   ► you know, Hey, could somebody move? Because we have, you know, that situation,

00:08:14 ◼   ► that's like a minority of the time, right? It's not,

00:08:17 ◼   ► you're not constantly feeling like you can't get your bags. Like, you know,

00:08:20 ◼   ► I just flew to,

00:08:22 ◼   ► my kid did a very long European trip bumming around Europe recently and I joined

00:08:26 ◼   ► him for the last two weeks. I was in central Europe for a couple of weeks in

00:08:28 ◼   ► November, December, and just flying these long haul, you know,

00:08:31 ◼   ► the like two segments, they used miles both ways and they're, you know,

00:08:35 ◼   ► you got on the plane, like it feels like there's like freight car storage above

00:08:39 ◼   ► you. They're like, we might not have room for all the bags. I'm like, what the deal,

00:08:42 ◼   ► you, what are you doing?

00:08:44 ◼   ► It's like you could put several people up there and you're like, well,

00:08:47 ◼   ► if you don't get on first, if you're not in the boarding,

00:08:48 ◼   ► this ticket class doesn't include a carry on bag this bigger and you're not

00:08:52 ◼   ► here. And I'm like, Oh, just, you know, you're trying to make every dollar.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And all you're doing is making everybody, you know,

00:08:58 ◼   ► the airlines are determined and maybe Southwest before this excluded to make

00:09:03 ◼   ► everyone feel about them like the cable companies and telephone companies.

00:09:06 ◼   ► And I'm like, come on, you could be, you could be better,

00:09:09 ◼   ► but they're so eager to get it to scrape every dollar out. I don't know.

00:09:12 ◼   ► Well, Southwest,

00:09:13 ◼   ► so you've probably read all these great accounts from people who have airline

00:09:16 ◼   ► system experience and it's like South.

00:09:19 ◼   ► I thought the best description I read was Southwest. This is,

00:09:22 ◼   ► I think the a seat you were listening to that seat 31 B it was that Southwest is

00:09:26 ◼   ► a, is a, you know, it's national airline,

00:09:28 ◼   ► but it likes to pretend it's kind of a regional point to point airline when it

00:09:33 ◼   ► suits them because they want to argue that they don't have the same,

00:09:36 ◼   ► they shouldn't be subject to the same rules as the mainline. Yeah. No airlines,

00:09:40 ◼   ► like a United or something. And it's like, no, they really are.

00:09:43 ◼   ► And this is when it breaks down because their system is designed on a knife's

00:09:47 ◼   ► edge and the knife cut through it.

00:09:48 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, it's really, I mean, and again,

00:09:51 ◼   ► they are a customer focused airline, you know,

00:09:54 ◼   ► and maybe by the standards of overall customer

00:09:59 ◼   ► focused companies period,

00:10:01 ◼   ► even the best airline in the United States is actually not that great, but, but,

00:10:07 ◼   ► but given the state of U S air travel, Southwest,

00:10:11 ◼   ► in my opinion is an excellent company, but it, it, it's like a,

00:10:15 ◼   ► I don't know,

00:10:16 ◼   ► some kind of worst case scenario where everything that could go wrong for

00:10:20 ◼   ► Southwest went wrong and they had a crew

00:10:25 ◼   ► at certain airports stranded who couldn't get to where they needed to go

00:10:30 ◼   ► and get into an airport hotel. Right.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Cause Southwest doesn't have other arrangements with hotels.

00:10:34 ◼   ► They couldn't get them rested in time to redeploy them. Right. And you know,

00:10:38 ◼   ► for, for good reason, you know, there are,

00:10:40 ◼   ► are rules about how much rest, you know, airline staff, you know,

00:10:45 ◼   ► pilots and flight attendants need, you know, before they can work.

00:10:48 ◼   ► And they had planes at other airports, you know, but, but no crew.

00:10:53 ◼   ► So they had planes at certain airports, crew at other airports,

00:10:56 ◼   ► and no way to catch up, which is just so strange.

00:11:01 ◼   ► It doesn't think like something that could happen, but it did. And to me,

00:11:06 ◼   ► the most telling fact was that yesterday, Wednesday,

00:11:11 ◼   ► 99% of all canceled flights in America were Southwest flights.

00:11:16 ◼   ► Yup. And they're still at 50% when we record this.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And they're about, they claim on December 30th,

00:11:22 ◼   ► there'll be back to essentially full operation, you know,

00:11:26 ◼   ► unless some of the post-it notes fall off the wall where they've been tracking

00:11:29 ◼   ► flights. Right. And it's, you know, and it's one of those things where I,

00:11:33 ◼   ► I always remember this phrase, I forget who I learned it from,

00:11:35 ◼   ► but better necessarily implies different, right?

00:11:40 ◼   ► That to be better, you have to be different. And it's,

00:11:45 ◼   ► it's such a good phrase to keep in mind because human nature is to

00:11:49 ◼   ► eschew differences, right?

00:11:51 ◼   ► We tend as humans to

00:11:55 ◼   ► avoid things that are weird or different. And, you know,

00:11:59 ◼   ► we could go on and on about how that sort of was the,

00:12:02 ◼   ► the problem Apple faced with the Mac for decades, right? Was that, ah,

00:12:07 ◼   ► the Mac is too different and it, it was different and that's what made it better.

00:12:12 ◼   ► But people are like, ah, I don't want something that I'm not used to.

00:12:15 ◼   ► And Southwest is sort of like that for an airline where it's like, ah,

00:12:19 ◼   ► it's weird. You don't get a reserved seat.

00:12:22 ◼   ► They don't participate in any of these cross airline things where,

00:12:26 ◼   ► where like worst case scenario,

00:12:28 ◼   ► you're flying United and something bad happens and they don't have

00:12:33 ◼   ► airplanes.

00:12:34 ◼   ► It's like United can somehow work something out with American and maybe stick

00:12:38 ◼   ► you on an American flight. If there's like an empty seat,

00:12:42 ◼   ► and you don't even have to pay. And because they have some kind of,

00:12:45 ◼   ► I don't know what they call it, like a partner.

00:12:47 ◼   ► I learned the term it's called an interline agreement. I just,

00:12:50 ◼   ► now you learn something new when things belt down.

00:12:52 ◼   ► There you go. Interline agreement. Southwest has no interline agreements.

00:12:57 ◼   ► And you know,

00:13:00 ◼   ► in some ways that served them well over the decades because it's made them

00:13:04 ◼   ► different. But then something like this happens and they're like,

00:13:07 ◼   ► and they're telling these poor customers and I'm again,

00:13:11 ◼   ► again, I'm sure that some of them are out there listening to us talk about it.

00:13:14 ◼   ► And, and my,

00:13:15 ◼   ► to me,

00:13:16 ◼   ► I am not phobic in the least bit about airplane crashes because I

00:13:21 ◼   ► truly, I, for whatever reason,

00:13:24 ◼   ► the way my brain works,

00:13:26 ◼   ► I've completely internalized the statistical

00:13:31 ◼   ► truth that the safest way to get from point a to point B is in an

00:13:35 ◼   ► airplane. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not worried about that. To me,

00:13:39 ◼   ► my phobia whenever I travel air travel is exactly what happened

00:13:44 ◼   ► to people trying to travel on Southwest this week,

00:13:47 ◼   ► which is you get to the airport, you go through security,

00:13:51 ◼   ► and now you're on the other end of security and flights start getting canceled.

00:13:55 ◼   ► And there's a six hour line, literally six,

00:13:59 ◼   ► six hour line to talk to somebody at the desk. And what,

00:14:04 ◼   ► what do you do?

00:14:04 ◼   ► You're waiting. Yeah. You're stuck. You know,

00:14:06 ◼   ► I'll tell you my worst airplane thing.

00:14:08 ◼   ► And this happened to me once is although not as bad as some of the incidents you

00:14:11 ◼   ► heard a few years ago is when they put you on the plane,

00:14:14 ◼   ► they take you out and then they're like,

00:14:15 ◼   ► we're delayed and you're on the plane for hours. Then they're like,

00:14:18 ◼   ► you know, you can't get up and use the bathroom. They're like, all right,

00:14:20 ◼   ► we're going to let you use the bathroom. They're like, okay,

00:14:21 ◼   ► all the bathrooms are now closed and you're like, and, and we can't, oh,

00:14:25 ◼   ► and there's no gate for us to go back to. Right. Like some kind of,

00:14:27 ◼   ► and then that happened.

00:14:28 ◼   ► There were a few planes that happened to a few years ago and that that's when

00:14:31 ◼   ► the department of transportation pushed out a bunch of new, like it was,

00:14:34 ◼   ► it took that impetus to put out new rules and penalties and, and things. I,

00:14:38 ◼   ► I also expect what Southwest has been doing, I think along the way, like, you know,

00:14:42 ◼   ► despite this meltdown, you and I know, and I think all the listeners know,

00:14:46 ◼   ► unlike some organizations and companies,

00:14:48 ◼   ► nothing they're doing here is malicious or in the interest of making more money.

00:14:52 ◼   ► In fact, they would be delighted to not be in this situation.

00:14:54 ◼   ► There's nothing good about this for them and they didn't do it intentionally.

00:14:58 ◼   ► Although they put out some nasty note to their workers a few days ago that may

00:15:02 ◼   ► have had an impact where they're like, people are taking too much,

00:15:04 ◼   ► too many fake days off or something. And that, you know, soured the pot,

00:15:08 ◼   ► I think for what's coming on. But, but that said,

00:15:11 ◼   ► every statement they've made is like, they literally put on their website,

00:15:15 ◼   ► this is unacceptable or this is, you know, they, in their public statements,

00:15:19 ◼   ► they've said, what we're doing is wrong and bad. And I'm like, all right,

00:15:21 ◼   ► well that is kind of disarming. And they've told everyone who's asked,

00:15:24 ◼   ► we're going to pay you back.

00:15:26 ◼   ► And so it doesn't help when you had to spend 48 hours in an airport and miss

00:15:29 ◼   ► Christmas. The money doesn't help, but you're not going to be monitored.

00:15:32 ◼   ► If you had a book, an airline, like some people are like,

00:15:34 ◼   ► I had to spend a thousand dollars to rebook on United.

00:15:36 ◼   ► We rented a car and we spent $700 and we drove and we had to put it air,

00:15:40 ◼   ► whatever.

00:15:40 ◼   ► And Southwest so far has been saying we're going to pay you back for all the

00:15:44 ◼   ► expense you incurred. I just gonna have to send a lot of receipts.

00:15:47 ◼   ► So it's a hassle, but they're not like, well, this isn't our problem.

00:15:50 ◼   ► The historic thing and ice, blah, blah. They're not trying to play that game.

00:15:53 ◼   ► And if they do this well, I mean, some people are complaining already.

00:15:57 ◼   ► They're having trouble with refunds cause the airport plane airlines still

00:15:59 ◼   ► melted down. But if they do this well,

00:16:01 ◼   ► they come out of it and they put it cause they're going to have to push out like

00:16:05 ◼   ► all their flyers. They're gonna have to push out vouchers to everybody.

00:16:07 ◼   ► They're going to have to pay them back. They're going to have to have fair sales.

00:16:11 ◼   ► It's going to take them years to reestablish and they're all gonna have to

00:16:14 ◼   ► promise like we're going to rebuild our system, you know,

00:16:16 ◼   ► and rebuild relationships with all of their employees who have been all abused

00:16:20 ◼   ► in different ways.

00:16:21 ◼   ► And all the gate agents who've been screamed at by people have been stuck in

00:16:25 ◼   ► airports for 48 hours. There's no excuse for doing it.

00:16:27 ◼   ► Cause not the gate agents problem,

00:16:28 ◼   ► but people are going to do it cause they lost it there. They haven't slept.

00:16:32 ◼   ► So anyway, there's years of rebuilding, but so far I'm like,

00:16:35 ◼   ► I can't think of another company that has been as objectively like, yeah,

00:16:39 ◼   ► this is our fault at Southwest when something during the meltdown part,

00:16:43 ◼   ► not during the face saving part later.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. I think they're doing an okay job with the crisis management,

00:16:49 ◼   ► you know, and, and you know,

00:16:51 ◼   ► thankfully nobody has actually gotten hurt because of this. So,

00:16:54 ◼   ► so maybe it's not the best analogy,

00:16:56 ◼   ► but of course the gold standard is the Tylenol recall back in the

00:17:01 ◼   ► eighties where there was what, what was the, as I recall the, the basic,

00:17:05 ◼   ► it really was true. What it was like some, some lunatic never caught,

00:17:10 ◼   ► right? Never, never. I forgot that part. I was looking it up recently. Yep.

00:17:13 ◼   ► They like injected cyanide into some tablets or replaced some tablets with

00:17:18 ◼   ► cyanide, but it was like a handful at a handful of stores, right?

00:17:22 ◼   ► It was very limited. They absolutely knew the serial numbers or whatever,

00:17:27 ◼   ► you know, whatever the numbers were.

00:17:29 ◼   ► And it was a certain tablet from a certain factory and then they,

00:17:32 ◼   ► they could have just recalled just, just the laced packages.

00:17:37 ◼   ► And instead their CEO at the time was like, Nope,

00:17:40 ◼   ► let's every single thing with the name Tylenol in it,

00:17:44 ◼   ► whether it's cough syrup or, or tablets or whatever, if it says Tylenol,

00:17:49 ◼   ► everything comes off the shelves, everything gets destroyed.

00:17:51 ◼   ► And we'll start over from scratch and guarantee that this will never happen

00:17:56 ◼   ► again. And that's when they rolled out the tamper proof caps too,

00:17:59 ◼   ► or the flute seal. That was part of that operation. I think as they retooled,

00:18:03 ◼   ► they took months, I think there was no Tylenol.

00:18:06 ◼   ► You can only get generic or whatever on the market. And then they, right.

00:18:09 ◼   ► But there was, there was, there was speculation when it first happened. And,

00:18:14 ◼   ► you know, and that, you know, it really wasn't, it wasn't like an urban legend.

00:18:17 ◼   ► There really were a limited small number of Tylenol packages that had cyanide

00:18:22 ◼   ► from a lunatic.

00:18:23 ◼   ► And there was a lot of speculation that this would be the end of the brand,

00:18:26 ◼   ► that they would have to shut down. Nobody's ever going to buy it again.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And instead because they reacted so strongly and so

00:18:34 ◼   ► everything to put everybody's mind at ease by, by literally taking everything,

00:18:39 ◼   ► whether they knew that it couldn't possibly have been involved with the same guy

00:18:43 ◼   ► or not everything off the shelves, like within six months,

00:18:46 ◼   ► their brand trust numbers were actually higher than before the incident,

00:18:51 ◼   ► which is crazy. I don't know that that's going to happen with Southwest.

00:18:54 ◼   ► Honestly, I, I, this is going to take to me,

00:18:57 ◼   ► this is going to take some time because if you do the math and I did the math and

00:19:02 ◼   ► I was like, just the back of the envelope math, I was like, wait,

00:19:04 ◼   ► that's too many people that can't be right. But Southwest,

00:19:08 ◼   ► part of their gimmick or,

00:19:10 ◼   ► or their operational excellence is that they only fly one type of airplane

00:19:14 ◼   ► Boeing 737.

00:19:15 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it much simpler for, right.

00:19:18 ◼   ► That's one of their things. If you don't like that plane, don't.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. If you don't like a Boeing. Yeah.

00:19:23 ◼   ► And they have slightly different seating arrangements where there's like always

00:19:27 ◼   ► the it's, they, they don't have first class or business class,

00:19:31 ◼   ► but what they have are very generously spaced exit rows,

00:19:35 ◼   ► which is, you know, if you fly Southwest, that's like,

00:19:37 ◼   ► that's like the in demand seats,

00:19:40 ◼   ► including one on every plane that doesn't have a front,

00:19:44 ◼   ► a seat in front of it. So you can really stretch your legs out.

00:19:46 ◼   ► There's like one seat with no, no seat in front of it in the exit row.

00:19:50 ◼   ► Sometimes it's on the left, sometimes it's on the right,

00:19:53 ◼   ► but it has all of their planes are Boeing 737.

00:19:56 ◼   ► So like the engine parts are all interchangeable and

00:20:01 ◼   ► the, the number of seats is identical.

00:20:04 ◼   ► So any Southwest flight can fly any, any,

00:20:08 ◼   ► any Southwest plane can stop, can fly any Southwest flight.

00:20:12 ◼   ► And it's part of their general operational excellence where they,

00:20:17 ◼   ► you know,

00:20:17 ◼   ► tend to lead the industry and on-time departures and arrivals and stuff like

00:20:21 ◼   ► that. I forget where I was going with it.

00:20:23 ◼   ► It's the homogenization of the right, right.

00:20:26 ◼   ► There's where I was going with it is that I,

00:20:31 ◼   ► I think that people are going to be a little bit slower to forgive

00:20:36 ◼   ► the people who were affected. Cause if you do the back,

00:20:39 ◼   ► the back of the envelope math,

00:20:40 ◼   ► which is where I was going is there's 143 seats on a Southwest flight. Oh,

00:20:44 ◼   ► I see. Okay. And they tend to fly.

00:20:47 ◼   ► They also tend to lead the industry in how full their planes are,

00:20:51 ◼   ► which is how they're so efficient. So 2000 and they, this week,

00:20:56 ◼   ► they've averaged more than 2000 canceled flights a day. Cancel not. Oh,

00:21:00 ◼   ► I see. Yeah. Yeah. So you were talking,

00:21:02 ◼   ► do the math 2000 times 140 is like 330,000.

00:21:07 ◼   ► So 330,000 passengers a day with canceled flights for like,

00:21:12 ◼   ► I really thought about the numbers.

00:21:13 ◼   ► So a million plus people this week or a million passengers easily. It's easily,

00:21:17 ◼   ► it's easy to, yeah.

00:21:19 ◼   ► Easy to figure out that there's a million people and there just isn't that much

00:21:23 ◼   ► surplus.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Even if you can squeeze people onto United and American and Alaska and whatever

00:21:29 ◼   ► other airlines, there's just no way to,

00:21:30 ◼   ► there's no way to put a million people on onto otherwise booked planes. So I,

00:21:35 ◼   ► I think it's going to be a while before Southwest recovers, but you know,

00:21:39 ◼   ► I wouldn't bet against them because I do think that fundamentally it's a company

00:21:43 ◼   ► that is customer focused. So we shall see.

00:21:46 ◼   ► It's it's fun to fly different airlines because you get to see,

00:21:50 ◼   ► get to see how they perform. And I flew Lufthansa. This is again, under my,

00:21:54 ◼   ► you know, United partners. So I used to use miles and I got the, you know,

00:21:57 ◼   ► the coach Lufthansa experience is honestly better than most, you know,

00:22:02 ◼   ► it's, it's not quite business class, but it's, it ain't too shabby for their

00:22:06 ◼   ► long haul flights. So it was kind of funny. I was like, Oh yeah, that's right.

00:22:10 ◼   ► You can run a really profitable airline that, that is,

00:22:13 ◼   ► it's really sharp in the air too. So I don't know. It's, I think, you know,

00:22:17 ◼   ► actually there's,

00:22:18 ◼   ► I think there's the biggest change that I think in airlines is that the new

00:22:22 ◼   ► seats are so thin compared to those old bulky ones.

00:22:25 ◼   ► And I think they're generally more comfortable too.

00:22:27 ◼   ► And they didn't give us all the room back in, you know, in knee space.

00:22:31 ◼   ► But I think I feel like the newest planes,

00:22:34 ◼   ► even in the worst coast sections are more comfortable than some of the better

00:22:38 ◼   ► planes in the, you know, 20, 30 years ago. I don't know. I don't,

00:22:41 ◼   ► maybe it's just me. I really,

00:22:42 ◼   ► my behind falls asleep and my back goes wonky on longer flights.

00:22:47 ◼   ► And I managed to get through, you know,

00:22:48 ◼   ► like 14 hours in one direction and 12 and the other pretty with two segments.

00:22:52 ◼   ► So, yeah, I, I know I agree with that. I think when you,

00:22:55 ◼   ► when you first board a plane and you, you sort of look around and,

00:22:59 ◼   ► and you can quickly discern, was this plane recently renovated?

00:23:03 ◼   ► Or is it, are these seats like 30 years old?

00:23:06 ◼   ► A new plane definitely is more comfortable. No, there's something,

00:23:09 ◼   ► there's something to the, the seat technology that they've, you know, they've,

00:23:13 ◼   ► they, you know, they, they, they squeeze every inch out of the leg space,

00:23:18 ◼   ► but by making the seat a little thinner,

00:23:21 ◼   ► they kind of gain back an inch or two and an inch.

00:23:24 ◼   ► Cause you gotta be a certain depth, right?

00:23:26 ◼   ► You're always going to have to be back in the seat a little bit.

00:23:28 ◼   ► So I can like cross my legs and coach and I flew my first 737 Max's on a

00:23:33 ◼   ► trip to Ohio in October. And I was like, huh, it's like 737 Max. Like, well,

00:23:38 ◼   ► they've been flying enough of them long enough. I'm not going to worry about it.

00:23:40 ◼   ► It was still like, all right, first time out on one of these is the planes are fine.

00:23:44 ◼   ► It didn't, I didn't have any, any worries,

00:23:46 ◼   ► but it was just kind of funny to suddenly be like, Oh yeah,

00:23:48 ◼   ► that was that thing, wasn't it? Before the pandemic. Yeah.

00:23:52 ◼   ► That was the thing everybody was talking about. Oh, geez. All right. Anyway,

00:23:55 ◼   ► let me take a break here.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Thank our first sponsors are good friends at Linode go to L I N O D E.com/the

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00:26:13 ◼   ► Linode.com/the talk show a little bit of news.

00:26:18 ◼   ► It's surprising to me a little bit how news Apple newsy December has been.

00:26:23 ◼   ► Usually it's pretty quiet, but two pieces that sort of seem related to me,

00:26:28 ◼   ► related to Apple Silicon, for lack of a better catch all term.

00:26:33 ◼   ► Mark Gurman had an excellent report in the,

00:26:37 ◼   ► at Bloomberg on the Mac Pro, which is the obvious,

00:26:42 ◼   ► we all know this, this isn't speculation or rumor.

00:26:45 ◼   ► When Apple announced the move to Apple Silicon at WWDC

00:26:50 ◼   ► 2020,

00:26:51 ◼   ► Tim Cook said that this transition will be complete by the end of 2022.

00:26:56 ◼   ► And it turns out it's not because of one, one Mac,

00:27:02 ◼   ► the Mac Pro, which is the only one that is still only on Intel.

00:27:05 ◼   ► It's part of the backstory is this spring

00:27:10 ◼   ► when Apple unveiled the Mac studio, which is a new form factor.

00:27:15 ◼   ► I think one of the big stories of 2022,

00:27:17 ◼   ► cause it's a form factor that Mac Pro Mac users

00:27:22 ◼   ► have been dreaming about for, I think literally decades,

00:27:27 ◼   ► you know, certainly since the G4 Cube,

00:27:29 ◼   ► which was the last sort of attempt at a sort of

00:27:34 ◼   ► small form factor, bigger than a mini,

00:27:38 ◼   ► but pro spec features Mac when they unveiled it,

00:27:43 ◼   ► John Ternus in their pre filmed event said this, you know, you know,

00:27:47 ◼   ► we've got one more Mac to go, the Mac Pro, he even mentioned it,

00:27:51 ◼   ► that, you know, the Mac Pro is still coming this, you know,

00:27:55 ◼   ► more or less, I think to emphasize that

00:27:58 ◼   ► however well spec the Mac studio is, and it is very well specced.

00:28:05 ◼   ► It is not the Mac Pro on Apple Silicon.

00:28:08 ◼   ► And I think that if Ternus hadn't said that in their event,

00:28:12 ◼   ► a reasonable conclusion for everybody outside Apple would be, Oh,

00:28:17 ◼   ► maybe the Mac Pro brand is dead. And in the Apple Silicon era,

00:28:21 ◼   ► the Mac studio is the Mac Pro.

00:28:23 ◼   ► This is the beefiest Mac desktop you're going to be able to buy.

00:28:28 ◼   ► So deal with it. Let's, you know, let's treat it that way. But they didn't,

00:28:33 ◼   ► they came out and said the Mac Pro is still coming. And the Gurman report,

00:28:37 ◼   ► I don't know how best to summarize it,

00:28:39 ◼   ► but basically is that they ran into that.

00:28:44 ◼   ► They had planned to have an M one based something, something, you know,

00:28:48 ◼   ► like something like a double M one ultra,

00:28:52 ◼   ► like two ultras attached together.

00:28:55 ◼   ► And that would be the foundation of the Mac Pro and it didn't happen.

00:28:59 ◼   ► And now who knows?

00:29:01 ◼   ► Although it makes, I mean, it made sense. I would have been shocked.

00:29:05 ◼   ► It would have, well,

00:29:06 ◼   ► it would have been interesting cause I would have been shocked if they'd release

00:29:09 ◼   ► an M one based Mac Pro because we all knew an M, you know,

00:29:12 ◼   ► we all knew there's another number coming right.

00:29:15 ◼   ► And we know that another number is going to represent an evolution of, you know,

00:29:18 ◼   ► what they learned in the first one. And it's well as you know,

00:29:22 ◼   ► as you've discussed many times,

00:29:23 ◼   ► I think you were one of the best people writing about technology who talks about

00:29:28 ◼   ► lead time because everybody who reports in the space is always like, well,

00:29:32 ◼   ► Apple made a sudden change. And you're like, look,

00:29:33 ◼   ► let's back that out to eight months ago when they had a design it, test it and,

00:29:38 ◼   ► or whatever, or sometimes 14 months or two years.

00:29:40 ◼   ► So the M two was well underway when the M one shipped,

00:29:44 ◼   ► like it was deeply figuring out, you know,

00:29:46 ◼   ► from the early stages of M one production. So, you know,

00:29:49 ◼   ► you're in that standpoint,

00:29:50 ◼   ► you're a product manager or Tim cook or whatever level the company,

00:29:52 ◼   ► these kinds of decisions are being talked about to percolate up.

00:29:56 ◼   ► And I would imagine you'd be hard pressed to say, well,

00:29:58 ◼   ► let's just do an M one version cause we could do it. Be like, we said two years,

00:30:01 ◼   ► we got some leeway. The M two is, you know,

00:30:04 ◼   ► X percent more efficient on that and this, we figured out this other problem.

00:30:07 ◼   ► Let's, we need the double M two ultra or whatever we're going to do.

00:30:10 ◼   ► That's going to be the pro chip and everybody like, Oh, okay, we'll get,

00:30:14 ◼   ► you know, the studio will ship that's on the horizon.

00:30:17 ◼   ► That's going to fill a certain amount of demand and we're going to kind of prime

00:30:20 ◼   ► the pump and we're going to, and unlike Apple's usual moves,

00:30:23 ◼   ► we're going to tell people at the event. Right. And so it,

00:30:26 ◼   ► I think it all makes logical sense except that they could not apparently produce

00:30:29 ◼   ► the M two they wanted to. Right. That seems like, I mean,

00:30:32 ◼   ► it seems like fundamentally there was an issue with, with production,

00:30:36 ◼   ► like actually getting it into manufacturing, into the fab.

00:30:40 ◼   ► The M here's I'm quoting from Gurman's report.

00:30:43 ◼   ► The M two ultra chip is destined to have some serious specifications for

00:30:46 ◼   ► professional users, including up to 24 CPU cores,

00:30:49 ◼   ► 76 graphic cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192

00:30:54 ◼   ► gigabytes of memory. All right. I'm going to stop there and just say, that's,

00:30:59 ◼   ► that's a lot of Ram, but,

00:31:03 ◼   ► but with the current Mac pro, the,

00:31:06 ◼   ► the last Intel based Mac pro it's a terabyte of memory,

00:31:11 ◼   ► I believe. Yeah, it was a huge, right. Cause they were very careful about that.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Right. Right. Speaking of that after the lawsuit. So if you,

00:31:18 ◼   ► but they claim and the M series is supposed to be so much more memory efficient

00:31:23 ◼   ► though, I mean, I think that's part of the argument, right?

00:31:24 ◼   ► Well, I don't know it, but it is a weird downgrade, right? It's, it's, you know,

00:31:30 ◼   ► literally like one fifth of the Ram at the maximum end.

00:31:34 ◼   ► And I realize there are very few people who have memory needs like

00:31:39 ◼   ► that, but if you really do need that much memory, you need the memory, right?

00:31:43 ◼   ► There are some people in scientific computing and who are doing certain things

00:31:47 ◼   ► who are memory constrained at a terabyte, right? You know,

00:31:51 ◼   ► at the extreme end, you're always going to find outliers like that.

00:31:55 ◼   ► And if you're already happy to have a terabyte,

00:31:59 ◼   ► if you wish you could have more than a terabyte maxing out at 192 gigabytes is

00:32:04 ◼   ► a serious downgrade,

00:32:05 ◼   ► no matter how efficient apple silicon is overall versus the Intel platform.

00:32:10 ◼   ► All right. Continuing from Gurman's report, which is the,

00:32:14 ◼   ► the M two ultra would be the equivalent of the high end chip.

00:32:18 ◼   ► That's currently in the the Mac studio, right?

00:32:21 ◼   ► What he's calling in again,

00:32:23 ◼   ► he's not saying that this would be the marketing name,

00:32:26 ◼   ► but maybe it would be the M two extreme would be two M two ultra is put

00:32:30 ◼   ► together in the way that the M one ultra is two M one maxes put

00:32:35 ◼   ► together. Right? So M one ultra is two M one maxes.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Gurman is saying that their original plan was to have an M something extreme,

00:32:45 ◼   ► which would be two M whatever ultras,

00:32:48 ◼   ► the M two extreme would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores,

00:32:53 ◼   ► 152 graphics cores. But here's the bad news. The company is likely likely,

00:32:58 ◼   ► that's a very key likely scrapped that higher end configuration,

00:33:03 ◼   ► which may disappoint apple's most demanding users, blah, blah, blah.

00:33:06 ◼   ► There's a thing hidden in here too is all of the M excuse me,

00:33:11 ◼   ► all the M one chips to date have only on like a sock like system on

00:33:16 ◼   ► a chip memory. Right? Right. So this,

00:33:18 ◼   ► to get 192 gigabytes even you would have to,

00:33:21 ◼   ► you they can put that on the same die. That's going to be external memory.

00:33:24 ◼   ► So conceivably some higher end ones, if those shipped, those would have,

00:33:29 ◼   ► you know, so it's, I'm right there, right? Is that that would all have to,

00:33:32 ◼   ► there'd have to be some amount of external memory or not. Maybe with 192,

00:33:36 ◼   ► maybe not. But it feels like you start to get, are they,

00:33:39 ◼   ► they're still in the four nanometer process size. So how big would a die?

00:33:43 ◼   ► I'm already thinking how big the die is with 24 CPU is to 76 graphic cores.

00:33:48 ◼   ► You know, you start to get, I don't know. I mean there are limits, right?

00:33:51 ◼   ► There's limits and yield issues and manufacturer issues.

00:33:54 ◼   ► And I wonder if that's not like I'm an expert in this topic.

00:33:57 ◼   ► I've studied it in part, but I'm not a chip maker. But I know there are,

00:34:00 ◼   ► that's where they start to get into problem areas if they can achieve the right

00:34:04 ◼   ► yield.

00:34:05 ◼   ► And we saw a little bit of that with the M one and M two where some of their low

00:34:08 ◼   ► end chips that don't achieve the, the,

00:34:10 ◼   ► the testing get sold as the seven CPU or, or other GPU and so forth.

00:34:15 ◼   ► So they're, they already approached that with some, you know,

00:34:18 ◼   ► some end of what they're doing.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Yeah. To me, it's one of the most exciting,

00:34:22 ◼   ► even though I'm definitely not going to buy one, I have no,

00:34:24 ◼   ► no reason to get a Mac pro. I don't even need the Mac studio.

00:34:28 ◼   ► I'm very happy with my maxed out,

00:34:30 ◼   ► no pun intended and one Mac book pro as my one and only main Mac.

00:34:37 ◼   ► But as an observer, I'm super,

00:34:40 ◼   ► super excited to see what the Mac pro story is.

00:34:44 ◼   ► It's gotta be coming in 2023. And I don't know, maybe I,

00:34:49 ◼   ► this, this is not informed speculation at all.

00:34:52 ◼   ► No little birdies have told me this,

00:34:54 ◼   ► but I've just had it in my head that for the given the Mac studio,

00:34:58 ◼   ► once we saw the Mac studio and how beefed up it was,

00:35:01 ◼   ► but the Mac studio is still based on the idea

00:35:06 ◼   ► that whatever it is you order, it's all soldered onto the board.

00:35:11 ◼   ► So if you know, however much Ram you want to get,

00:35:14 ◼   ► you have to order it when you order your Mac studio.

00:35:17 ◼   ► So my thinking is that, well, what if, is there a way,

00:35:22 ◼   ► is that feasible that they could do a Mac pro that has a

00:35:27 ◼   ► bigger chassis so that it's expandable and friendly to an

00:35:32 ◼   ► enthusiast, you know, like,

00:35:33 ◼   ► like Mac pros over the years typically have been where you can open it up.

00:35:37 ◼   ► And this would be the one and only Mac that in addition to having

00:35:43 ◼   ► X amount of Ram soldered onto the systems on a

00:35:48 ◼   ► chip and to get that unified memory performance

00:35:53 ◼   ► advantage where the same Ram is used by the graphics system as is used by the

00:35:58 ◼   ► CPU system.

00:35:59 ◼   ► But what if there was also another area where you could just put

00:36:04 ◼   ► regular Ram chips in?

00:36:06 ◼   ► So if you,

00:36:07 ◼   ► what you really want to do is just max out the Ram and you

00:36:11 ◼   ► don't really need massive amounts of parallel CPU or GPU

00:36:16 ◼   ► processing,

00:36:17 ◼   ► it's really just Ram that you just want to put all this in Ram that they could

00:36:22 ◼   ► have the, the main Ram,

00:36:24 ◼   ► which is the Ram that's on the unified memory architecture that is soldered onto

00:36:28 ◼   ► the boards.

00:36:29 ◼   ► But then there's another level of Ram that's expandable and it would only be

00:36:33 ◼   ► used in cases where you're doing a computational

00:36:38 ◼   ► task that literally takes hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of Ram,

00:36:42 ◼   ► if it's available.

00:36:44 ◼   ► And that secondary Ram wouldn't perform quite as well as the

00:36:49 ◼   ► unified memory,

00:36:50 ◼   ► but it's better than not having the Ram at all, right?

00:36:55 ◼   ► It's sort of like treating the unified memory that's on

00:37:00 ◼   ► the systems on a chip as sort of like a cash, you know,

00:37:04 ◼   ► like in CPU terms and the, the rest of the Ram,

00:37:08 ◼   ► if you add it is just there. I don't know.

00:37:11 ◼   ► I don't know if that's feasible or not, but it sounds to me like,

00:37:15 ◼   ► what is the point of still having the Mac pro if it's not expandable? If,

00:37:19 ◼   ► if this one product is not expandable in that way,

00:37:23 ◼   ► even if no other Mac hardware has user expandable memory.

00:37:28 ◼   ► Well, and yeah, and I mean, even from the storage standpoint, you know,

00:37:32 ◼   ► Apple became allergic to slots. They like, they like jacks, not slot.

00:37:36 ◼   ► And which is an int, which I'm sorry, it sounds obscene way of saying,

00:37:40 ◼   ► but the, which is weird because in a,

00:37:43 ◼   ► in a Thunderbolt world and a PCI-E world and a got it a word like

00:37:47 ◼   ► M2 connectors for SSD world or so running

00:37:52 ◼   ► over NVME trying to get all my acronyms in there in that world.

00:37:57 ◼   ► The difference between a port and a slot aren't the same as they used to be,

00:38:02 ◼   ► but because it used to be slots were faster and ports were slower, more or less,

00:38:06 ◼   ► right? Not uniformly, but it's kind of the thing you want to direct memory access.

00:38:09 ◼   ► You had to go to a slot inside something that you did a wide, you know,

00:38:13 ◼   ► multi pin card that went in for maximum parallel pin access at once for these

00:38:18 ◼   ► wide data paths. So that's kind of one area that is sort of funny.

00:38:22 ◼   ► And the other is that, you know, Apple's obsession with the sock,

00:38:25 ◼   ► I understand it because they brought, you know,

00:38:27 ◼   ► it reduces your cost of manufacture enormously, reduces the failure rate.

00:38:31 ◼   ► Like there's incredible it's savings.

00:38:34 ◼   ► And it's also as a user standpoint thing like this issue keeps coming up.

00:38:37 ◼   ► This is a little sidebar,

00:38:38 ◼   ► but I think it's relevant to the whole is I get email regularly at the Mac 911

00:38:42 ◼   ► email at Mac world about people with questions about like booting off external

00:38:46 ◼   ► drives with external volumes with an M1 or M2. And I have to remind people,

00:38:50 ◼   ► I'm like, remember if your internal drive dies on an M1 or M2,

00:38:55 ◼   ► your machine will not work.

00:38:56 ◼   ► There's no way because of policy management issues and it's part of the

00:38:59 ◼   ► security features. This is still, I think,

00:39:01 ◼   ► relatively less known because SSDs are generally very reliable.

00:39:06 ◼   ► Apple, you know,

00:39:07 ◼   ► typically buys the most reliable ones and they do burn in and all the rest.

00:39:11 ◼   ► So it's very, very unlikely now between the sock and the SSD,

00:39:16 ◼   ► the odds of getting a Mac that dies,

00:39:17 ◼   ► like I would love to know the hard failure rate in like three months and a year

00:39:21 ◼   ► on max now that aren't like a power supply issue. I've got to believe it's very,

00:39:25 ◼   ► very low. And it's also Apple doesn't have to source out memory, right?

00:39:29 ◼   ► It's got all these advantages. They're doing it in the dye and it's all great,

00:39:33 ◼   ► but it does seem to be, you know, that they kind of contracted into that.

00:39:37 ◼   ► And I feel like there's this great opportunity though,

00:39:40 ◼   ► cause there's still a lot of work being done in slot based products.

00:39:43 ◼   ► And there was a big movement at one point, which I think has died about the eGPU,

00:39:47 ◼   ► you know, that was a port based thing. But there's, I don't know,

00:39:49 ◼   ► I may maybe we're evolved past that.

00:39:52 ◼   ► Maybe you don't need external or you know,

00:39:54 ◼   ► slot based graphics cards or slot based memory anymore.

00:39:58 ◼   ► But I think your argument is good.

00:39:59 ◼   ► I don't see how Apple would put a terabyte on a die.

00:40:01 ◼   ► I was misspeaking a little bit here though.

00:40:03 ◼   ► 192 gigabyte Ram on an Apple M whatever chip is not that ridiculous cause they're

00:40:08 ◼   ► putting 128 gigs on some on the M one ultra.

00:40:14 ◼   ► You can configure it to 128 gigs so they can do that today.

00:40:18 ◼   ► So 192 is not, you know, bizarre, but I think you're right. I mean,

00:40:22 ◼   ► there is a point which you can't get up to a terabyte or two terabyte for memory

00:40:26 ◼   ► bound issues. But, and I also think it's a correct too,

00:40:29 ◼   ► is there's going to be memory intent or sorry, yeah,

00:40:31 ◼   ► memory intensive applications and drive intensive applications.

00:40:35 ◼   ► And some of those will be CPU bound and some won't be the same way.

00:40:39 ◼   ► The CPU won't be waiting for memory or it's the delay is,

00:40:43 ◼   ► is not as a big a deal as being able to have all the adjustable memory available.

00:40:47 ◼   ► So it feels like there's a space for that.

00:40:50 ◼   ► How many people do you think need a Mac pro in the world now with them in the

00:40:55 ◼   ► Mac studio, you know, in with that out in the market,

00:40:59 ◼   ► I felt like that really shaved the edge off a lot of potential Mac pro buyers

00:41:04 ◼   ► into fairly high end applications.

00:41:06 ◼   ► But these are also going to be incredibly lucrative, you know, high, high dollar,

00:41:11 ◼   ► high margin machines. So Apple has a motivation to do it.

00:41:14 ◼   ► I, you know, that's a good question. And I do think, you know,

00:41:16 ◼   ► listening to various other podcasts where people talk about it and you know, I,

00:41:20 ◼   ► I, it comes up all the time is why does Apple even bother? Right?

00:41:25 ◼   ► Maybe, maybe there won't be a Mac pro or maybe the Mac pro will just be the Mac

00:41:29 ◼   ► studio in a bigger chassis and you get it just for putting additional

00:41:34 ◼   ► internal SSDs inside. You know,

00:41:36 ◼   ► I wouldn't be shocked if that's what happens, but I don't think so.

00:41:41 ◼   ► And I think the reason why isn't that it makes business sense that there are so

00:41:45 ◼   ► many people who need something above and beyond the Mac studio,

00:41:49 ◼   ► that it really makes great business sense in and of itself.

00:41:53 ◼   ► But I think it's similar. And I, I know I've made this analogy before,

00:41:58 ◼   ► but it's sort of like why car car makers get into formula one,

00:42:03 ◼   ► right? Why do Mercedes and Porsche and Honda and companies like that fund

00:42:09 ◼   ► formula one racing teams and build this technology because it,

00:42:14 ◼   ► there's a trickle down effect where pressing being at the

00:42:19 ◼   ► forefront of what is

00:42:21 ◼   ► theoretically possible today in raw compute power is

00:42:28 ◼   ► not a bad advantage to have for

00:42:32 ◼   ► what will trickle down to literally to iPhones three, four years from now.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Right. And, and I think that's been true for car makers, right? And it's not,

00:42:43 ◼   ► and the advantage,

00:42:44 ◼   ► the difference is with car makers getting into like making F1

00:42:49 ◼   ► race cars, it's just for the sport of it ultimately, right?

00:42:53 ◼   ► You're just making it.

00:42:54 ◼   ► Whereas making the equivalent of an F1 race car

00:42:59 ◼   ► desktop computer is actually practical for the

00:43:04 ◼   ► handful of top tier compute users. You know,

00:43:08 ◼   ► whether you're doing special effects for major motion pictures at

00:43:13 ◼   ► 8k resolution or scientific simulations for, you know,

00:43:17 ◼   ► to go back to the Southwest thing,

00:43:19 ◼   ► you're an airplane engineer Boeing,

00:43:21 ◼   ► and you're running complex aerospace engineering simulations on a new

00:43:26 ◼   ► wing design for an airplane. And,

00:43:28 ◼   ► and you need as much CPU as much parallelism,

00:43:33 ◼   ► as much Ram as the fastest IO possible, you can't get enough.

00:43:38 ◼   ► You know, you're, you're nowhere near, you're,

00:43:40 ◼   ► you're still waiting for the computer for whatever it is that you do.

00:43:44 ◼   ► I think that there is an advantage to Apple being in that game

00:43:49 ◼   ► and being there that will trickle down a handful of years down

00:43:54 ◼   ► the road to the mass market products that truly fund

00:43:59 ◼   ► the company. I really do believe that that's true.

00:44:02 ◼   ► And I think they believe it.

00:44:03 ◼   ► And I also think Apple itself has many,

00:44:07 ◼   ► many people who need that sort of computer.

00:44:10 ◼   ► Yeah. I think you bring up a superb,

00:44:14 ◼   ► like other end of the telescope thing too, is the M1,

00:44:17 ◼   ► the initial M1 chip is the most powerful thing Apple made the wrong way up,

00:44:21 ◼   ► right? Like they released the lowest end possible chip in this series,

00:44:26 ◼   ► but it was such an outperforming chip.

00:44:28 ◼   ► And usually Apple is trickling down technology. They've,

00:44:32 ◼   ► they've developed for more sophisticated purposes and they have versions that

00:44:35 ◼   ► are meant for more consumer level ones. Right? Right. So the M1 is,

00:44:38 ◼   ► is was a buildup operation and they're still building up.

00:44:42 ◼   ► So I think that's right. As you get a cycle that through and we're seeing,

00:44:45 ◼   ► you know, the original M1s are falling off the plate. Eventually they'll move.

00:44:49 ◼   ► I would imagine they're going to move entirely to M2s unless there's a cost

00:44:53 ◼   ► reason to retain it. But the M1s are such good.

00:44:55 ◼   ► The machines that are M1 based are, have such good performance.

00:44:59 ◼   ► They're not like they're outdated. They're just a little slower.

00:45:01 ◼   ► And that's the amazing thing. So maybe you have to wait,

00:45:03 ◼   ► they come up with the M3 and then you lose the M1 generation.

00:45:06 ◼   ► But I don't know if that's totally new for Apple,

00:45:09 ◼   ► but I don't feel like they would build a new machine around the slowest possible

00:45:13 ◼   ► chip in that new architecture. And in this case,

00:45:15 ◼   ► the slowest possible chip was so fast,

00:45:18 ◼   ► had so many savings that it made sense for them to shift over there and then

00:45:22 ◼   ► gradually ratchet all their models up. So, but yeah, I mean if they only sell,

00:45:26 ◼   ► I think that argument is also valid to the Formula 1,

00:45:29 ◼   ► 1 because Apple has to be aspirational. It has to have products that people want

00:45:33 ◼   ► to buy and sometimes they're going to go into purchasing and say,

00:45:35 ◼   ► I need a $40,000 machine. And they're going to say,

00:45:38 ◼   ► you can have a $10,000 one. We all right,

00:45:40 ◼   ► we'll get $10,000 and what now and we'll put more money in the budget next year.

00:45:44 ◼   ► But the fact that the $40,000 machine exists may give them more leverage to buy

00:45:48 ◼   ► a cheaper, cheaper one. And there's,

00:45:50 ◼   ► we also see all the time that when you have more computational power available

00:45:54 ◼   ► on a kind of in a desktop environment,

00:45:56 ◼   ► you start doing more sophisticated things that couldn't be done because they

00:45:59 ◼   ► required supercomputers.

00:46:00 ◼   ► So part of the AI revolution has been that neural networking could be done on

00:46:06 ◼   ► with originally with specialized graphic cards and then less and less requiring

00:46:10 ◼   ► that as computers, just the basic computational, you know,

00:46:14 ◼   ► central chips or the socks have improved. You can do incredible AI stuff.

00:46:18 ◼   ► And Apple devotes parts of its chip to this specific activity without having to

00:46:22 ◼   ► have machines that are so tricked out that they're unaffordable.

00:46:25 ◼   ► So as you get,

00:46:27 ◼   ► if you have a Mac pro that's an M two extreme based or whatever it is,

00:46:31 ◼   ► or an M three or whatever the next thing is,

00:46:32 ◼   ► that's going to provoke more research that will allow, you know,

00:46:36 ◼   ► open up new fields of research or so it'll open up new areas that researchers

00:46:39 ◼   ► will buy these machines specifically for because they have the capability on the

00:46:43 ◼   ► desktop to perform that kind of computation. Yeah.

00:46:47 ◼   ► The other story along the Apple Silicon line,

00:46:50 ◼   ► and this was published on December 23rd by Wayne Ma

00:46:55 ◼   ► at the information, which is paywalled excellent publication,

00:46:58 ◼   ► very expensive though. It's like 400 bucks a year. And every time I think, Hey,

00:47:03 ◼   ► it's a lot of money. Maybe I'll unsubscribe.

00:47:04 ◼   ► Then they drop a story like this that is right in my wheelhouse. And I'm like,

00:47:09 ◼   ► all right, I'll keep my subscription. But this is the messy soap opera back,

00:47:13 ◼   ► but, but,

00:47:14 ◼   ► but messy soap opera that affects a multi-trillion dollar company or a trillion

00:47:17 ◼   ► dollar company. It's so tricky. Quoting from Wayne Ma's story inside Apple's war

00:47:22 ◼   ► for chip talent. And a lot of this comes down to, and this is a fact, I mean,

00:47:26 ◼   ► it's not speculation, but,

00:47:28 ◼   ► and I don't think it's surprising given the success of the Apple Silicon

00:47:34 ◼   ► entire division that an awful lot of talented people have left Apple,

00:47:39 ◼   ► either to start their own startups doing chip design,

00:47:43 ◼   ► or they've been poached by Qualcomm or Intel or other companies, you know,

00:47:47 ◼   ► but that, you know,

00:47:48 ◼   ► it's the way it goes when one company has tremendous success in a certain area,

00:47:52 ◼   ► the talented engineers in that division become the

00:47:57 ◼   ► target of intense bidding from competitors,

00:48:01 ◼   ► right? That's, that's the way the market works,

00:48:04 ◼   ► but Apple has had some level of brain drain from their chip division. Now,

00:48:08 ◼   ► is it so much that the division is in trouble because

00:48:13 ◼   ► they've lost so much talent or is it that they have so much talent that they had

00:48:17 ◼   ► talent to spare and they can still continue to lead the industry? Who knows?

00:48:21 ◼   ► We'll, you know, we'll find out soon enough,

00:48:23 ◼   ► but I guess stories like this are sort of, you know,

00:48:26 ◼   ► certainly the information story to me is written with

00:48:31 ◼   ► the overall takeaway point that maybe Apple's

00:48:35 ◼   ► Silicon advantage is regressing to the mean and, you know,

00:48:40 ◼   ► which is it's what happens, whether it's sports, right? You know,

00:48:44 ◼   ► the Chicago Bulls are no longer the six time champions they were when Michael

00:48:49 ◼   ► Jordan and Scottie Pippen were playing 25 years ago. You know, it's,

00:48:52 ◼   ► things ebb and flow.

00:48:55 ◼   ► And even when you have a decade long run of tremendous

00:48:59 ◼   ► success, it tends not to last forever. Nothing,

00:49:04 ◼   ► you know, nobody, especially in Silicon, you know, even Intel,

00:49:08 ◼   ► the mighty Intel no longer is,

00:49:10 ◼   ► it was once unthinkable to think that Intel would be so far behind the state of

00:49:15 ◼   ► the art in chip performance, but here we are today and they are,

00:49:19 ◼   ► but maybe they'll come back.

00:49:20 ◼   ► We used to all be on MySpace also.

00:49:22 ◼   ► And it's sad to think that the saddest thing that the same pattern happens,

00:49:27 ◼   ► right? I mean, Intel had so many stubbles,

00:49:29 ◼   ► they like lost the mobile chip market like four times, three times,

00:49:33 ◼   ► at least X scale and a bunch of other stuff and a bet on the wrong wireless

00:49:36 ◼   ► technology.

00:49:37 ◼   ► And sold their stake in what do you call it? The arm, right?

00:49:41 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. I tell you, here's the passing of a moment.

00:49:43 ◼   ► I have had a website registered Y max, Y max news,

00:49:48 ◼   ► dot blog.com or Y max net news.com or something.

00:49:51 ◼   ► I've actually forgotten the name for 20 years because I had my wifi networking

00:49:56 ◼   ► news site and then I launched some ancillary blogs with less news,

00:49:59 ◼   ► like cellular and public safety and so forth.

00:50:01 ◼   ► And those never got that much traction, but the Y max one did for a bit when,

00:50:05 ◼   ► and I was like,

00:50:06 ◼   ► I got a renewal notice and I'm like, why am I still paying for Y max news?

00:50:10 ◼   ► In 2022, I got to give it up. So I gave it up this year.

00:50:14 ◼   ► All right, let me read this story. The,

00:50:16 ◼   ► basically the gist of Wayne Ma's story is that the a 16

00:50:21 ◼   ► chip that is only available today in the eighth app,

00:50:24 ◼   ► iPhone 14 pro models, right? Infamously this year,

00:50:28 ◼   ► the non pro iPhone fourteens are still using

00:50:34 ◼   ► the a 15 chips from last year's iPhones.

00:50:38 ◼   ► Although the iPhone 14 non pro have the

00:50:43 ◼   ► better version of the a 15 that was in the eight,

00:50:46 ◼   ► the iPhone 13 pro has trickled down to the

00:50:51 ◼   ► regular non pro iPhone 14.

00:50:53 ◼   ► And that was a little baffling. I remember at the time everyone was trying to

00:50:55 ◼   ► assess that out. All right. But for the a 16, here's quoting from Wayne Ma,

00:51:00 ◼   ► Apple planned a generational leap for the graphics processor in the latest

00:51:04 ◼   ► version of the tie in smartphones, the iPhone 14 pro,

00:51:07 ◼   ► but engineers were too ambitious with adding new features and early prototypes

00:51:12 ◼   ► drew more power than what the company had expected based on software

00:51:16 ◼   ► simulations that could hurt battery life, make the device too hot,

00:51:20 ◼   ► according to two people, blah, blah, blah,

00:51:22 ◼   ► obviously because Apple discovered the mistake late in development,

00:51:27 ◼   ► it had to base the graphics processor in its iPhone 14 pro line,

00:51:31 ◼   ► largely on the design of the chip that went into last year's iPhone model.

00:51:36 ◼   ► According to four people familiar with the matter,

00:51:38 ◼   ► those people described the snafu,

00:51:41 ◼   ► which hasn't been previously reported as unprecedented in the group's history.

00:51:46 ◼   ► The iPhone 14 pro models,

00:51:48 ◼   ► which went on sale in September showed only small gains, blah, blah, blah.

00:51:51 ◼   ► One of the features, let me see if I can find it here in his story.

00:51:54 ◼   ► One of the features that was supposedly set and had

00:51:59 ◼   ► to be cut from apparently according to his report was hardware based

00:52:04 ◼   ► ray tracing. One of the, one of the,

00:52:07 ◼   ► one of the features that Apple had to cut from the iPhone 14 pros graphics

00:52:11 ◼   ► processor was ray tracing a computer,

00:52:13 ◼   ► computer lighting a technique that brings an extra level of realism to games.

00:52:17 ◼   ► A lack of big improvements in chips can make upgrading, blah, blah, blah.

00:52:20 ◼   ► I have heard this from friends. I have,

00:52:22 ◼   ► I stay informed in the games world through

00:52:27 ◼   ► my son who is a legit gaming enthusiast and some friends who

00:52:31 ◼   ► are have both feet in that industry. And I,

00:52:35 ◼   ► before this story in the information came out, that was something that I,

00:52:40 ◼   ► friends and my son had both put onto my radar,

00:52:44 ◼   ► which is that the state of the art and graphics,

00:52:46 ◼   ► one of the next things to look for 2023 2024 is built in ray

00:52:51 ◼   ► tracing support. And I've seen some demos, you know, like,

00:52:56 ◼   ► Oh,

00:52:56 ◼   ► here's this certain game with hardware based ray tracing on versus off.

00:53:00 ◼   ► And it's like, you know, the way all these modern 3d games look is so good.

00:53:05 ◼   ► It's like, so the, the before, as it were,

00:53:09 ◼   ► it still looks really good,

00:53:11 ◼   ► but then you look at the after with hardware based ray tracing and it is like

00:53:16 ◼   ► a real step towards photo realism. And

00:53:20 ◼   ► I mean, they've done non real time ray chasing has been a feature of computer

00:53:24 ◼   ► animation for 30 years, maybe longer than that without question.

00:53:28 ◼   ► But like, what's the speed, you know, you're running at, I don't know.

00:53:30 ◼   ► So one time it's probably a hundred or 200 times real time. Right. So,

00:53:34 ◼   ► Oh, even slower than that.

00:53:36 ◼   ► Cause I remember being at Drexel in the nineties when I was studying computer

00:53:39 ◼   ► science and there was, I remember every year the graduate students, you know,

00:53:43 ◼   ► their thesis projects, you know, would, would be there.

00:53:47 ◼   ► And you know, a lot of, a lot of stuff that you could do for a thesis in computer

00:53:52 ◼   ► science is it's just purely mathematical. There's nothing to look at,

00:53:57 ◼   ► but there in the mid nineties, ray tracing was huge. And there were definitely,

00:54:01 ◼   ► every year there were a couple of, you know,

00:54:03 ◼   ► graduate students whose thesis is, were in the ray tracing realm.

00:54:08 ◼   ► And therefore they had really cool demos or printed output.

00:54:12 ◼   ► Like look at this thing that, you know, the software they wrote wrote,

00:54:16 ◼   ► but you could watch it run on like what at the time were these,

00:54:20 ◼   ► we had a bunch of sun workstations in the computer science department that were

00:54:24 ◼   ► more or less, you had to be a grad student to get access to,

00:54:26 ◼   ► and you could watch them work. And it was like pixel by pixel by P you know,

00:54:32 ◼   ► like it was,

00:54:34 ◼   ► it made like the image writer dot matrix printer seemed like it,

00:54:38 ◼   ► it output stuff fast, right? Ray tracing a single frame,

00:54:42 ◼   ► super duper slow toy story. Of course, the first breakthrough feature film.

00:54:47 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah.

00:54:48 ◼   ► It's like when you and you look at the original toy story and how

00:54:53 ◼   ► low fidelity it is compared to the modern Pixar films and other, you know,

00:54:58 ◼   ► 3d animated movies of that kind,

00:55:00 ◼   ► but you talk to the Pixar or hear the Pixar people talk about how

00:55:05 ◼   ► long it took to render a frame.

00:55:10 ◼   ► It's been a thing in computer science graphics for a while.

00:55:13 ◼   ► It's the new frontier. It's,

00:55:16 ◼   ► it makes total sense to me that that would have been,

00:55:19 ◼   ► it was slated to be an iPhone 14 pro feature this year and got cut.

00:55:24 ◼   ► Cause it's definitely not, they're very, very interesting to me that, you know,

00:55:29 ◼   ► just the basic story that the,

00:55:31 ◼   ► the a 16 graphics were supposed to be a lot better than they were,

00:55:35 ◼   ► or then they actually turned out to be now they're not bad. I actually like,

00:55:39 ◼   ► you know, is geek bench metal,

00:55:42 ◼   ► the best benchmark. I don't know,

00:55:45 ◼   ► but it's certainly the easiest way to compare.

00:55:49 ◼   ► It looks like the a 16 is about seven or 8% faster at

00:55:55 ◼   ► graphics than the a 15 from a year ago. So, you know, nothing to sneeze at.

00:55:59 ◼   ► It's, you know, not a bad year over year improvement, but not groundbreaking.

00:56:04 ◼   ► And the other thing, here's the thing,

00:56:06 ◼   ► and you hinted at this a couple of minutes ago, neither,

00:56:10 ◼   ► my main frustration with both Wayne Ma story and the information and Gurman story

00:56:15 ◼   ► in Bloomberg about the Mac pro is that there's no dates of when

00:56:20 ◼   ► these internal crises were determined.

00:56:23 ◼   ► When did Apple determine that, Oh,

00:56:27 ◼   ► this design for the ACE a 14 or a 16 chip

00:56:31 ◼   ► is going to take up way too much heat and energy.

00:56:36 ◼   ► When was this a year ago?

00:56:38 ◼   ► A year ago, two years ago.

00:56:40 ◼   ► By your math and thinking, I got to believe this was,

00:56:43 ◼   ► was it like two years before the iPhone 14 pro shipped? I, I would have,

00:56:48 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know enough about, I don't know enough about the cycles,

00:56:51 ◼   ► but I would have a hard time believing that they went into production and the

00:56:55 ◼   ► chip. No, I mean, yeah, it's cause they need the,

00:56:59 ◼   ► the amount of time for each of those stages is too long.

00:57:01 ◼   ► So maybe it was 18 months ahead of the iPhone 14 pro shipping,

00:57:06 ◼   ► but that sounds,

00:57:07 ◼   ► that sounds really tight in terms of like scaling up the fab to get to the

00:57:13 ◼   ► yields you need and then integrating. I don't see, I just don't,

00:57:16 ◼   ► I don't believe it. So it could have been two years, right? I mean,

00:57:18 ◼   ► let's say outside is 18 months, but it could have been two years,

00:57:21 ◼   ► maybe more, but, but maybe more.

00:57:23 ◼   ► But I think the lay person reading these stories would think that these were

00:57:26 ◼   ► issues that came up like a year ago, January of 2022 or something.

00:57:31 ◼   ► And it's really frustrating to me and I'm not disputing their reporting.

00:57:35 ◼   ► I believe, you know,

00:57:37 ◼   ► but both Gurman and Wayne Ma and the information in Bloomberg are certainly

00:57:40 ◼   ► reputable. I, all my complaints about Bloomberg's, the big hack story,

00:57:44 ◼   ► which is why the reason I complain about it is it's,

00:57:47 ◼   ► it's so exceptional for never been repeated since then that they've done

00:57:51 ◼   ► something that boneheaded, right? It's, you know, if it were,

00:57:55 ◼   ► if that sort of fiasco were par for the course for Bloomberg,

00:58:00 ◼   ► nobody would listen to Bloomberg reports.

00:58:02 ◼   ► It's the fact that they're overall so credible,

00:58:05 ◼   ► but with the sources they have to me, they should be able to have dates.

00:58:09 ◼   ► And I would just love to know when these decisions were made, because to me,

00:58:13 ◼   ► it's one of the most fascinating things about Apple is how long their hardware

00:58:18 ◼   ► lead times are and, and how secretive it is for whatever

00:58:23 ◼   ► reason. One of the holiest of Holy secrets that they have,

00:58:27 ◼   ► they do not talk about these timelines of how,

00:58:31 ◼   ► how far in advance and they, they don't want, they don't want to disabuse,

00:58:36 ◼   ► the notion that they can make last minute decisions, even though I know they can't,

00:58:40 ◼   ► everybody who's involved knows they can't. Right. I remember,

00:58:44 ◼   ► I forget his name, but back when it was one of the first,

00:58:49 ◼   ► truly, wow, I'm, I'm, this is unbelievable.

00:58:52 ◼   ► I can't believe that I'm one of the media people here for the

00:58:57 ◼   ► antenna gate.

00:58:58 ◼   ► I went to the West when you went to the anechoic room and that whole thing,

00:59:01 ◼   ► right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And their lead, you know, it was, I don't know,

00:59:06 ◼   ► a hundred people from the media were invited on the, you know,

00:59:09 ◼   ► a day in advance to go to the press conference, you know,

00:59:12 ◼   ► and Steve jobs was there fresh off, you know,

00:59:15 ◼   ► curtailed vacation in Hawaii and they played the Jonathan Mann story.

00:59:20 ◼   ► If you don't like it, take it back or something like that. Remember that?

00:59:23 ◼   ► Yeah. It was great. It was one of his great, his viral moments.

00:59:27 ◼   ► It's the press conference itself was by far and away the most interesting press

00:59:31 ◼   ► event I've ever attended at Apple. But then I was part of,

00:59:35 ◼   ► maybe there were like a dozen of us who got like this backstage tour of their

00:59:40 ◼   ► anechoic chambers and to see some of these places where they've tested their

00:59:44 ◼   ► antenna designs. And it was about a dozen of us in the media.

00:59:49 ◼   ► The tour was led by their lead cellular antenna

00:59:54 ◼   ► engineer. I don't remember his name off the top of my head,

00:59:57 ◼   ► but, but he was doing the talking,

00:59:58 ◼   ► but with us were Phil Schiller and Katie cotton

01:00:03 ◼   ► as, as our escort, but nobody else from Apple.

01:00:06 ◼   ► It was the only three people from Apple, this engineer,

01:00:09 ◼   ► Phil and Katie. And at one point, you know,

01:00:14 ◼   ► and they were encouraging questions and we'd seen these things.

01:00:17 ◼   ► And after one of the chambers, you know,

01:00:19 ◼   ► there were smaller ones and bigger ones that super freaky. If you've, you know,

01:00:23 ◼   ► again,

01:00:24 ◼   ► a Ruben Caballero or Caballero senior that's about his name. I remember his name.

01:00:29 ◼   ► You'd hear, I mean,

01:00:29 ◼   ► cause those people's names are rarely uttered in public also with their titles.

01:00:33 ◼   ► So yes.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Yep. Ruben Caballero. That was him. And he was charming and delightful. And,

01:00:38 ◼   ► and, but you could tell he wasn't practiced at this because,

01:00:42 ◼   ► because up until that point,

01:00:44 ◼   ► his work had been utterly secret and they're like, okay, Ruben, we need,

01:00:48 ◼   ► we're going to invite a dozen people to the media. Can you explain what you do?

01:00:54 ◼   ► And you know, if you've never been in one of these anechoic chambers,

01:00:57 ◼   ► it is super freaky. It, it, it, you just can't believe it.

01:01:00 ◼   ► And some of them were very big, you know, where, where, you know,

01:01:04 ◼   ► five or six of us could go in at the same time, you know,

01:01:06 ◼   ► and have plenty of room,

01:01:07 ◼   ► but you would open your mouth and talk to one another and you could hardly hear

01:01:11 ◼   ► each other. Oh, it's, it's so freaky.

01:01:14 ◼   ► You're just in this room with these foam walls in this weird sort of pyramid

01:01:18 ◼   ► shape and you're,

01:01:20 ◼   ► you're two or three feet away from anybody else and you'd talk at a normal

01:01:24 ◼   ► volume and the sound from your voice just disappears.

01:01:28 ◼   ► It was super freaky, very interesting, all sorts of interesting information.

01:01:32 ◼   ► But one of the people in the press asked something about like, well,

01:01:35 ◼   ► when did you start working on this external antenna design?

01:01:40 ◼   ► Cause that was the whole thing with the iPhone four.

01:01:42 ◼   ► And Ruben Caballero, he started to answer,

01:01:47 ◼   ► and I think he said something to the effect of like two years.

01:01:49 ◼   ► And as soon as he started this, it was something like that.

01:01:52 ◼   ► I have it in my notebook somewhere,

01:01:54 ◼   ► but Phil Schiller jumped in immediately and was like,

01:01:58 ◼   ► we're not going to talk about timelines. And it wasn't he, you know,

01:02:01 ◼   ► and Phil was Phil and it was very smooth, but I noticed it.

01:02:05 ◼   ► And he was just like, we're not going to talk about timelines. And,

01:02:08 ◼   ► and Ruben immediately, like I could see it on his face. He was like, Oh yeah,

01:02:13 ◼   ► I wasn't supposed to talk about timelines. And it wasn't the word, you know,

01:02:16 ◼   ► he didn't spill state secrets all, you know, the,

01:02:20 ◼   ► the gist of what he gave away was that they'd started working on the iPhone

01:02:24 ◼   ► four's external antenna design around when the iPhone three came out, right?

01:02:32 ◼   ► Three. And then a year later was three GS and two years later was the iPhone

01:02:37 ◼   ► four.

01:02:37 ◼   ► So it was like one year after the original iPhone was when they were like looking

01:02:44 ◼   ► at down the road, where do we want to be two years ago?

01:02:47 ◼   ► What if we do this flat back flat front flat sides and we'll move the antenna

01:02:52 ◼   ► outside the frame. And that way we'll solve this whole,

01:02:57 ◼   ► because if you think back to the first three iPhones,

01:03:00 ◼   ► the first iPhone had this gorgeous aluminum back,

01:03:03 ◼   ► but then to fit the antennas,

01:03:05 ◼   ► the bottom inch or so on the back was black plastic.

01:03:08 ◼   ► And it was sort of a weird transition, still a beautiful device,

01:03:12 ◼   ► but they had this problem where all the antennas had to be behind plastic,

01:03:17 ◼   ► not the aluminum. And then to solve that, you know, to, to work around that,

01:03:21 ◼   ► the three, the three G and the three GS had all plastic backs,

01:03:26 ◼   ► which were more antenna friendly, but not as nice a device.

01:03:31 ◼   ► And so, you know, two years,

01:03:34 ◼   ► but Phil Schiller did not want people to know that re it was very,

01:03:38 ◼   ► very clear again, wasn't uncomfortable. It wasn't like,

01:03:41 ◼   ► I'm sure Ruben did not get reprimanded afterwards or was in trouble.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Did not want that to come out.

01:03:48 ◼   ► I'm so curious about that with these Silicon issues. I am so interested.

01:03:53 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, I think, yeah, I mean, that's the looking back thing.

01:03:58 ◼   ► And I think, I mean, the article,

01:04:00 ◼   ► the information article is notable too because it's trying to tie together.

01:04:04 ◼   ► Wayne Ma is trying to tie together. And again, I think the timeline would help,

01:04:07 ◼   ► but I, I, maybe he just can't because it would reveal sources too. Right.

01:04:11 ◼   ► You know, right. At the time, but he's, he's trying to tie together, you know,

01:04:14 ◼   ► the,

01:04:14 ◼   ► the leadership of this division within Apple is being painted with the same kind

01:04:18 ◼   ► of it's the same kind of discussion usually here reserved for female company

01:04:23 ◼   ► leaders and politicians who are difficult to deal with. Like Amy Klobuchar,

01:04:27 ◼   ► she was getting covered.

01:04:28 ◼   ► She made her staff wash a comb and yelled at him because he didn't bring a fork

01:04:32 ◼   ► on the plane is the famous one. Right. And I'm like,

01:04:34 ◼   ► so this fellow Johnny's Ruggie is the Apple exec who's documented here as the

01:04:38 ◼   ► head of the that's the semi division.

01:04:40 ◼   ► So make an actor division and it's like, well,

01:04:42 ◼   ► he's really brusque and this and he won't hire people. And I'm like, yeah, it's,

01:04:46 ◼   ► I mean, I would hate to be, I,

01:04:48 ◼   ► I'm just trying to imagine how you hire people in one of the most rarefied

01:04:51 ◼   ► industries for the best company making Silicon in the world.

01:04:56 ◼   ► So how much of this is,

01:04:58 ◼   ► this is a really difficult space and the guy's a little prickly and he's hiring,

01:05:03 ◼   ► you know,

01:05:03 ◼   ► it's just a very difficult place to hire into and to keep people because they're

01:05:07 ◼   ► extremely valuable. There's a lot of money flowing around.

01:05:10 ◼   ► And they're talking about on this Exodus of Apple employees and it's like, well,

01:05:13 ◼   ► maybe he's not the best boss. I don't know. And maybe it could be,

01:05:16 ◼   ► that might be one factor.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Maybe people aren't given enough opportunities for advancement or whatever,

01:05:21 ◼   ► but it's also,

01:05:22 ◼   ► you got to think about the salaries that are being offered to people to jump

01:05:25 ◼   ► ship to these startups because there's so many, I mean,

01:05:28 ◼   ► there's so many billions and billions of dollars,

01:05:30 ◼   ► trillions ultimately involved in these spaces. So, and you know,

01:05:34 ◼   ► in acquisitions too is the next company, some of these spinoffs that,

01:05:37 ◼   ► where everyone's mad that they Apple people went off to join these or start

01:05:41 ◼   ► these other companies or join them, they could be the next Apple acquisition for,

01:05:45 ◼   ► you know, half a billion dollars or a billion dollars or more.

01:05:47 ◼   ► And we don't know that either. So it's kind of a, again,

01:05:50 ◼   ► I think the reporting seems solid, but I'm kind of like, well, maybe is it,

01:05:54 ◼   ► you know,

01:05:55 ◼   ► one former junior Apple employee was told he needed to get Srouji's permission

01:05:58 ◼   ► before he could participate in a hackathon.

01:06:00 ◼   ► So he abandoned the request given the effort approval would take. And I'm like,

01:06:03 ◼   ► well, that okay. But that doesn't seem that unreasonable.

01:06:06 ◼   ► You're working in one of the most secretive aspects.

01:06:08 ◼   ► So maybe you'd reveal a technique honestly,

01:06:10 ◼   ► that you learned that they don't want to know. So I don't know.

01:06:13 ◼   ► There's a little bit of that in there where I'm like, this is,

01:06:15 ◼   ► this is kind of inside baseball management stuff and,

01:06:19 ◼   ► and, and whatever. But if it's harming that division, it's an issue.

01:06:23 ◼   ► I suppose shareholders might be interested or, or what have you,

01:06:26 ◼   ► and they need to figure out how to retain and encourage talent.

01:06:29 ◼   ► I think the other part of the article though,

01:06:31 ◼   ► that I think I'm more so than the drama part is the,

01:06:34 ◼   ► I mentioned smile inches in passing. It's this thing about, you know,

01:06:37 ◼   ► it's kind of like the end of time coming, right?

01:06:39 ◼   ► Wait Moore's law has been remarkably accurate.

01:06:42 ◼   ► And it's the fact that it was so vaguely formulated. It's not perfect line,

01:06:46 ◼   ► but it's pretty good. And we're hitting the end, you know,

01:06:48 ◼   ► they're going down to three nanometer processes and then two nanometers.

01:06:52 ◼   ► And there's this new nano sheet technology to keep current from leaking across

01:06:57 ◼   ► transistors and so forth. But it's sort of, there's just a lot of noise and that's,

01:07:00 ◼   ► you know, 20, 25, I guess is when we're going to see maybe two nanometer process

01:07:04 ◼   ► chips. So we're getting down to the smaller and smaller size with more and more

01:07:07 ◼   ► limits that are just, you know,

01:07:09 ◼   ► you started getting down to quantum effects and all of this stuff.

01:07:12 ◼   ► There's a point at which they won't be able to make smaller chips with the

01:07:15 ◼   ► current like approach that has essentially been unbroken with modifications and

01:07:20 ◼   ► compensations for the history of the Silicon industry. So what happens then?

01:07:26 ◼   ► And that's not that many years away. So there is an issue.

01:07:29 ◼   ► You were talking about reversion of the mean, but then there's also like,

01:07:32 ◼   ► what is the next thing? It's all in the lab, I'm sure.

01:07:35 ◼   ► And research universities and R and D deep within sealed vaults inside Intel and

01:07:40 ◼   ► arm and others. But what happens after 2025? What's the next big breakthrough?

01:07:47 ◼   ► And I don't, I don't know what that is.

01:07:48 ◼   ► I'm not sure there is one that's going to have the same kind of gains that have

01:07:51 ◼   ► been happening consistently for this many years.

01:07:54 ◼   ► Yeah. I, it's interesting to see where that goes. The one,

01:07:58 ◼   ► the one area where I do see it coming,

01:08:00 ◼   ► I don't have any guesses as to how high end compute for what we consider personal

01:08:05 ◼   ► computers continues going forward and personal computers,

01:08:13 ◼   ► meaning Macs, iPads, iPhones,

01:08:16 ◼   ► things that have a user interface and run apps. And you,

01:08:20 ◼   ► you can kind of think of I'm using this as a computer, right?

01:08:24 ◼   ► When you use your iPhone, maybe most people don't think of it as a computer,

01:08:29 ◼   ► but you and I know, and the people who listen to the show know it's a computer.

01:08:32 ◼   ► How does that keep going forward in the face of these physical limitations at the

01:08:37 ◼   ► atomic literally getting close to the atomic level of, of, you know,

01:08:41 ◼   ► how the processes can continue improving? I don't know.

01:08:45 ◼   ► I don't know enough about it,

01:08:46 ◼   ► but the one area where I can see that is continuing to advance the,

01:08:51 ◼   ► continuing to advance at a remark at the same remarkable clip that computers

01:08:56 ◼   ► have kept getting better and more exciting my entire life, right?

01:09:03 ◼   ► Ever ever since I first realized that a computer was a thing and became

01:09:06 ◼   ► infatuated by the idea in the seventies as a little kid with video games is the

01:09:12 ◼   ► miniaturization and the computerization of everything.

01:09:20 ◼   ► AirPods would be my primary example where you literally could not make AirPods

01:09:25 ◼   ► 10 years ago. There's the,

01:09:28 ◼   ► the Silicon did not exist because they run as they're too little computers.

01:09:33 ◼   ► There's a computer in your left ear and a computer in your right ear.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And the Silicon didn't exist 10 years ago.

01:09:41 ◼   ► It really wasn't possible. I mean, maybe in theory, 10 years ago,

01:09:45 ◼   ► but certainly 15 years ago,

01:09:47 ◼   ► there was no way to make anything like an AirPod because the chips didn't exist.

01:09:51 ◼   ► And that's the direction. And again,

01:09:55 ◼   ► I'm such a fan of my AirPod pros. I just knew it's one of the rare devices that

01:10:00 ◼   ► I continue not to take for granted. And I just keep thinking, my God,

01:10:04 ◼   ► these things are astonishingly amazing and I can hardly even feel them in my ear.

01:10:09 ◼   ► They're so lightweight. But obviously all this stuff,

01:10:14 ◼   ► everybody's thinking about AR glasses and you know, beyond VR goggles,

01:10:19 ◼   ► but to get to the point where you could just wear regular eyeglasses that look

01:10:23 ◼   ► like normal eyeglasses and you keep them on all day and they're not heavy,

01:10:27 ◼   ► they're just as comfortable as regular glasses,

01:10:30 ◼   ► but they actually are computers and you know,

01:10:33 ◼   ► projecting some kind of heads up display in front of you at all times and

01:10:37 ◼   ► listening to you. Obviously having AirPod style,

01:10:42 ◼   ► super lightweight chips with very long battery life is part of that.

01:10:47 ◼   ► And who knows how many untold,

01:10:51 ◼   ► I was going to say dozens, but hundreds of other type areas,

01:10:55 ◼   ► tiny little chips like that can come from.

01:10:57 ◼   ► And Apple is obviously very interested in that sort of direction for the future

01:11:02 ◼   ► for hardware, you know, and their Silicon team is key, right?

01:11:06 ◼   ► The Apple's Silicon prowess is so central to the AirPod success.

01:11:12 ◼   ► Story and will be central to their hopeful success in areas like AR and VR and

01:11:17 ◼   ► who knows, you know, what else? Or Apple watch is another great example, right?

01:11:24 ◼   ► Oh yeah. Goodness. Right. Yeah.

01:11:26 ◼   ► I'd love you to go back and claim chowder what people said when Apple bought PA

01:11:29 ◼   ► semi. I think you've done it before. It is, it is. People were like,

01:11:32 ◼   ► why would Apple get into Silicon? How can they compete with that? You know,

01:11:35 ◼   ► and you know, that's,

01:11:37 ◼   ► that was the beginning of the end for Intel's ability to lead the industry.

01:11:41 ◼   ► Although maybe it's,

01:11:42 ◼   ► there's some talk about maybe where they're at now is a better place,

01:11:45 ◼   ► but it just seemed impossible at a computer manufacturer,

01:11:48 ◼   ► especially one at Apple size at that time,

01:11:50 ◼   ► despite them already throwing off tens of billions of dollars in cash a year,

01:11:54 ◼   ► they were still relatively small.

01:11:56 ◼   ► And the fact that they've been able to custom engineer chips that have produced

01:12:01 ◼   ► those kinds of gains, but, and I think it's like this, it's to several points,

01:12:05 ◼   ► right?

01:12:06 ◼   ► Not only do they have,

01:12:07 ◼   ► were they able to make a better mobile chip and then,

01:12:10 ◼   ► and then integrate system on a chip design that makes for even better efficiency

01:12:15 ◼   ► and not only are they able to create the M one and produce a chip that is that,

01:12:20 ◼   ► I mean, it is hilarious.

01:12:21 ◼   ► Your site's one of the better places to find these comparisons,

01:12:24 ◼   ► but to see the people who are in the non Apple world,

01:12:26 ◼   ► try to justify that the M one or two is not as good as it claims by looking at

01:12:31 ◼   ► windows, laptops and Linux, whatever. It's just so funny. You're like, no,

01:12:34 ◼   ► I'm sorry, you're going to have to change your worldview. I was, I never,

01:12:37 ◼   ► when the M one came out, I really didn't believe it.

01:12:40 ◼   ► I actually had to own a machine before I truly accepted what a change it was.

01:12:44 ◼   ► And I'm like all in an Apple. I've been using Apple products since 1985. I'm not,

01:12:48 ◼   ► I'm not even dubious. And I was telling her, okay, this,

01:12:51 ◼   ► this is more of a game changer than I thought. But so it's not only that,

01:12:54 ◼   ► but it's also that they can produce these micro chips that, you know,

01:12:58 ◼   ► these tiny microchips, I should say, that allow them to do these, you know,

01:13:02 ◼   ► to do the air pods. And that's what the glasses, if Apple releases glasses,

01:13:06 ◼   ► you can imagine it's going to have the I've style thing of like,

01:13:09 ◼   ► we've packed in the battery into the stems and like the, you know,

01:13:13 ◼   ► all the custom circuitry. So you're going to wear a pair of maybe slightly chunky,

01:13:16 ◼   ► but very stylish, a black, you know, black glasses. And then the frame is going to

01:13:21 ◼   ► be a hundred percent full of electronics or something, right.

01:13:24 ◼   ► With induction charging in the stems or whatever.

01:13:27 ◼   ► Yeah. I'm,

01:13:29 ◼   ► I'm guessing that they're just going to stuff little tiny thin batteries all

01:13:33 ◼   ► throughout the glass.

01:13:34 ◼   ► Absolutely. Every, every corner, every edge. And then the,

01:13:38 ◼   ► the lenses I assume will be multi-lens or multi-layer LCD panels

01:13:43 ◼   ► interlaced with other kinds of probably more exotic stuff that get managed by

01:13:48 ◼   ► the microcomputers and the multiple computers probably running it. But you know,

01:13:52 ◼   ► then you're like, well, where do you put the processor? It's like, well,

01:13:55 ◼   ► they'll have designed some new chip form factor probably to stick the package in

01:13:58 ◼   ► the right spot.

01:13:59 ◼   ► With like a regular pair of eyeglasses.

01:14:01 ◼   ► It's like if you sit on your glasses or something and break the arm off,

01:14:05 ◼   ► you know, and it's like, oh,

01:14:07 ◼   ► you go back to your eyeglass place and you pay a nominal fee. It's like,

01:14:10 ◼   ► I'm sure with the Apple glasses, it might look like a normal pair of glasses,

01:14:13 ◼   ► but it'll be like,

01:14:14 ◼   ► it's like when you break the back of your iPhone and it's like how many

01:14:18 ◼   ► hundred dollars? And it's like, if you just break the side off your Apple

01:14:21 ◼   ► glasses, it'll, you know, it'll be like, oh, $250 just for the arm. It's like,

01:14:26 ◼   ► oh yeah, well there's all sorts of stuff in there. Apple's been prepping us with

01:14:29 ◼   ► the changes to Apple care though, where they're like, oh,

01:14:31 ◼   ► well now we're including an incident for this much. Oh, well accidents are

01:14:35 ◼   ► included. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're gonna have to,

01:14:37 ◼   ► Apple glasses are going to have to have a very generous Apple care plan,

01:14:40 ◼   ► at least the early days to get people to go in on it. Yeah. Anyway,

01:14:44 ◼   ► before we leave the subject, that the thing,

01:14:45 ◼   ► one of the things I'm looking forward to 2023 is to me,

01:14:50 ◼   ► Apple is very clearly a company of annual patterns and we

01:14:55 ◼   ► still don't know what their pattern is for Apple Silicon max, right?

01:15:00 ◼   ► It's we've only gotten a second generation device.

01:15:04 ◼   ► The only ones that we have are the Mac book air and the

01:15:08 ◼   ► low end non pro 13 inch Mac book pro,

01:15:13 ◼   ► you know, the Mac book air in a, in a thicker chassis.

01:15:16 ◼   ► What is the pattern for the rest of Apple Silicon?

01:15:19 ◼   ► Because the one device we know is on an annual schedule is the iPhone, right?

01:15:23 ◼   ► Every year, every September, there's a new iPhone and a new generation of a,

01:15:27 ◼   ► a series chips, but everything else,

01:15:30 ◼   ► including the iPad is seemingly more like an 18 month schedule, right?

01:15:35 ◼   ► So iPads, all iPads, none of them get update,

01:15:39 ◼   ► updated annually, even though they've been on Apple Silicon forever.

01:15:43 ◼   ► And it just, it,

01:15:45 ◼   ► the thing that makes it seem unusual to me is that they're going

01:15:51 ◼   ► with this numbered M one M two integer pattern.

01:15:55 ◼   ► But I think that there will be max that skip generations,

01:16:01 ◼   ► right? That maybe, you know,

01:16:04 ◼   ► there won't be a Mac book pro that gets every single M

01:16:09 ◼   ► generation, you know, that at some point it's going to skip a generation.

01:16:13 ◼   ► Who knows? And obviously the Mac pro obviously skipped the M one

01:16:18 ◼   ► generation and

01:16:20 ◼   ► well, think about what you said earlier too, is that you don't need a Mac pro.

01:16:23 ◼   ► You've got a Mac book pro, right? This is your, and I,

01:16:26 ◼   ► I asked this question to people from time to time is, is what is the end of

01:16:30 ◼   ► upgrades, right? It's like my, I have an, uh, M one,

01:16:34 ◼   ► like first generation Mac book air with 16 gigs of Ram.

01:16:38 ◼   ► And I only have a half a gigabyte, sorry, half a terabyte rather.

01:16:42 ◼   ► I think a terabyte of storage on it. And I wish it just seemed like too much

01:16:47 ◼   ► money at the time to get a terabyte, but between iCloud and other things,

01:16:50 ◼   ► I make it work. So the only thing I'm short on is storage.

01:16:53 ◼   ► The only thing that would probably get me to upgrade,

01:16:55 ◼   ► I don't know when I will stop using my M one Mac book air because I don't,

01:17:00 ◼   ► I actually, for the first time in the history of owning laptops,

01:17:03 ◼   ► I don't need a faster one. Everything I need to do, I can do it the speed.

01:17:07 ◼   ► I need to do it more or less.

01:17:08 ◼   ► And I've done things like layout or work with giant InDesign files on it where

01:17:13 ◼   ► it's been essentially full speed, like real time, very little lag.

01:17:17 ◼   ► And that was even before Apple had fully transitioned to native,

01:17:20 ◼   ► native Apple Silicon code. So this is my question is like,

01:17:24 ◼   ► maybe Apple doesn't have to be on the same kind of cycle for many of the

01:17:28 ◼   ► machines because it's got, it's not terminal models, but the models are,

01:17:32 ◼   ► you know, what if they don't, if it's good enough for a couple of years,

01:17:36 ◼   ► and maybe people, I mean,

01:17:38 ◼   ► I don't think Apple wants people to own their computers necessarily for five to

01:17:41 ◼   ► seven years.

01:17:42 ◼   ► But you look at the history of how of ownership and kind of the support number

01:17:46 ◼   ► support years Apple's put it in Mac OS.

01:17:48 ◼   ► And it's like maybe we are going to see that lengthening that reduces their

01:17:52 ◼   ► revenue from max, except that they're expanding the Mac audience all the time.

01:17:56 ◼   ► And they still have, you know,

01:17:58 ◼   ► a hundred million people who need to upgrade to M machines who haven't yet.

01:18:02 ◼   ► So it feels like they could probably not worry as much about the speed of

01:18:07 ◼   ► revision of max and just keep focusing on why you should get the latest one.

01:18:11 ◼   ► If you have a machine that's, you know, three to seven years out of cycle.

01:18:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too.

01:18:16 ◼   ► And I think they're very comfortable with the idea that PCs,

01:18:19 ◼   ► when the Mac is their PC as a, as a, uh,

01:18:24 ◼   ► you know,

01:18:25 ◼   ► literally 40 year old category that that a four or five year

01:18:29 ◼   ► upgrade cycle is fine, especially since they've,

01:18:32 ◼   ► they've held the line on prices, right? Where the,

01:18:36 ◼   ► the low end Mac book air is still nine 99,

01:18:40 ◼   ► even as the rest of the industry is sort of

01:18:44 ◼   ► filtered down to these three and $400 low end laptops,

01:18:49 ◼   ► Apple holding the line at a thousand dollars and selling most of these, you know,

01:18:53 ◼   ► the, the 14 and 16 inch Mac book pros start at $2,000

01:18:58 ◼   ► effectively. And really the, the configurations most people are buying,

01:19:02 ◼   ► I think are closer to $3,000,

01:19:03 ◼   ► which in today's PC world is very expensive, you know? And, and I think that

01:19:09 ◼   ► they're just fine selling.

01:19:10 ◼   ► They're very happy to sell you a $2,800 Mac book pro that you won't,

01:19:14 ◼   ► that you won't even think about upgrading for four years, you know,

01:19:17 ◼   ► with a 30 something percent margin. So they're like, that's fine.

01:19:20 ◼   ► We paid our money off you. And then, and this is the growth of this.

01:19:23 ◼   ► This is what I get. You got to bring this up, right?

01:19:25 ◼   ► We forget to do this sometimes that Apple is a services company now.

01:19:28 ◼   ► And of course they care less.

01:19:30 ◼   ► They have shifted enough people over to buying from the Mac app store. And,

01:19:34 ◼   ► you know, I'm ponying out that whatever the Apple one subscription is, I don't,

01:19:37 ◼   ► I don't know what it costs because it's less than it costs before for me to

01:19:40 ◼   ► buy all those things separately. And my family gets everything.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Some on family sharing. So they they're getting, I don't know,

01:19:46 ◼   ► $400 a year for me for Apple one. And I'm super happy about it.

01:19:51 ◼   ► I don't have any complaint about the price for the services provided. Yeah,

01:19:55 ◼   ► I agree. I do. I do agree. All right,

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01:21:37 ◼   ► What else do we got? We've got, uh, I want to talk,

01:21:43 ◼   ► speaking of password security. Oh man.

01:21:45 ◼   ► Last pass has had,

01:21:48 ◼   ► I would say a week that would make Southwest airlines seem like they've had a

01:21:53 ◼   ► good, a good week.

01:21:54 ◼   ► Yeah. Holy cow. You know, it's funny.

01:21:58 ◼   ► There's one of these things of like where you list off, well,

01:22:00 ◼   ► what password managers do people use? And it's like, well,

01:22:02 ◼   ► you'll be like, I always one password, you know,

01:22:04 ◼   ► there's a built in one in iCloud key chain.

01:22:07 ◼   ► You can use that and all of Apple products, but it's not, you know,

01:22:09 ◼   ► it's not good outside the ecosystem. Like, well there's, you know, last pass,

01:22:12 ◼   ► there's dash lane, there's, you start listing off others, right?

01:22:14 ◼   ► But last pass has always been kind of in that list and I don't know that it's

01:22:18 ◼   ► going to be in that list anymore. Like I don't think,

01:22:20 ◼   ► I don't think it should be. And I think there's a lot of reasons why it,

01:22:23 ◼   ► it's not because they were hacked. That's bad.

01:22:26 ◼   ► They made a number of operational mistakes that they've admitted some of clearly.

01:22:30 ◼   ► But the problem is I think, I think it is embarrassing to have master password

01:22:35 ◼   ► based security as your only line of defense in 2022 or maybe in 2015.

01:22:41 ◼   ► Right. And this is what's come out.

01:22:44 ◼   ► And I didn't realize this cause I haven't used last pass and I haven't looked at

01:22:47 ◼   ► their security for a while when I was,

01:22:49 ◼   ► since I was doing kind of more technical encryption looks and last pass,

01:22:54 ◼   ► you know, so every other, so I shouldn't say every other,

01:22:57 ◼   ► all the major password and secret management services out there you're likely to

01:23:02 ◼   ► use. And I will cite again, Apple's iCloud,

01:23:04 ◼   ► key chain operation and one password in particular because I know those more,

01:23:08 ◼   ► more in depth. I know there are others like this that are more specialized.

01:23:11 ◼   ► People call it bit warden,

01:23:13 ◼   ► which is an open source project that has not needs more apparently outside

01:23:17 ◼   ► auditing. They need to raise money to do certain things for more assurance.

01:23:20 ◼   ► But again, it's an option that's designed around this.

01:23:22 ◼   ► You need to have device based key material mix into anything so that if you're

01:23:27 ◼   ► archive is in a cloud storage environment and it's compromised that without

01:23:31 ◼   ► access to the devices and the ability to unlock a device.

01:23:35 ◼   ► So it's a physical proximity attack typically unless you're a sophisticated

01:23:39 ◼   ► nation state actor who could remotely install expensive one time use zero days

01:23:44 ◼   ► to crack your phone and extract device keys,

01:23:48 ◼   ► which isn't even possible in a secure enclave environment in most circumstances.

01:23:53 ◼   ► Right. Blah, blah, blah.

01:23:54 ◼   ► It's long list of things that you're still secure, right?

01:23:56 ◼   ► So if you're one password vault, if one password had a massive,

01:23:59 ◼   ► massive attack,

01:24:00 ◼   ► some horrible thing happened and all of their cloud stored vaults that they sync

01:24:04 ◼   ► for users and give access to through web apps were stolen.

01:24:07 ◼   ► There is zero risk that anyone's material would ever be decrypted because you

01:24:11 ◼   ► must have the secret keys that are device stored. Right. And that's that.

01:24:15 ◼   ► If all of your,

01:24:16 ◼   ► if Apple had an iCloud breach and all of its end to end security information,

01:24:20 ◼   ► including iCloud key chains were stolen and somebody had a billion years to work

01:24:24 ◼   ► on it,

01:24:25 ◼   ► they're not going to decrypt it because you need the keys stored only in secure

01:24:28 ◼   ► enclave and all of your Apple devices. It's absolutely, you know,

01:24:31 ◼   ► unless there was some exploit we don't know about and the design would be very

01:24:35 ◼   ► difficult to deal with with last pass. If somebody steals your last pass vault,

01:24:39 ◼   ► which bazillion were just lost and can guess through brute force,

01:24:43 ◼   ► your your master password, it's totally decrypted and that's it. Boom.

01:24:45 ◼   ► That's the story.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Yeah. That's a great summary.

01:24:48 ◼   ► And the problem with that is that the,

01:24:54 ◼   ► I think, and I read a lot about this this week,

01:24:57 ◼   ► but I think the problem is that with, with all of these vaults, I mean,

01:25:02 ◼   ► I guess millions, I don't, I'm not quite sure how many customers they have,

01:25:05 ◼   ► but you know, all of them, you know, the vaults are lost or,

01:25:09 ◼   ► or have been taken,

01:25:10 ◼   ► but they are secured by the user's own master password.

01:25:15 ◼   ► Right. So it is computationally unfeasible for anybody in possession of all of

01:25:24 ◼   ► those vaults to decrypt, certainly all of them,

01:25:27 ◼   ► but even to mass attack all of these stored vaults.

01:25:32 ◼   ► But if they wanted to target specific users,

01:25:36 ◼   ► it's computationally feasible to,

01:25:40 ◼   ► and especially, you know,

01:25:43 ◼   ► if some of these users don't have super long, super secure master passwords,

01:25:48 ◼   ► you know, it doesn't,

01:25:49 ◼   ► or if the master password was secured by the previous, this whole thing, you know,

01:25:53 ◼   ► some listeners will get this and some won't, and it's a deep cryptographic thing,

01:25:57 ◼   ► but it's like the number of rounds of hashing you do on a, on a password.

01:26:00 ◼   ► So you type in your password, you type in John Gruber rocks, right? And it gets,

01:26:05 ◼   ► that's not a good password. Don't use it. Folks has to be longer,

01:26:07 ◼   ► has to be longer and random.

01:26:08 ◼   ► But I do appreciate the sentiment. So if that was your password, I do.

01:26:12 ◼   ► I think I thank you for selecting it, but go change it.

01:26:15 ◼   ► So you type that in and then the hashing algorithm, the way hash works,

01:26:21 ◼   ► it's a one way cryptographic function.

01:26:23 ◼   ► So you put in one thing and the thing that comes up the other end is essentially

01:26:27 ◼   ► deterministically manipulated,

01:26:29 ◼   ► but you can't reverse it without an enormous asymmetrical amount of computational

01:26:33 ◼   ► power. So you do that once. That can be really strong.

01:26:35 ◼   ► That's how Shaw two and these other things use for certain kinds of pastures

01:26:39 ◼   ► storage work. But you could also, if you want to increase the difficulty,

01:26:42 ◼   ► you can use something, use an iterative routine.

01:26:44 ◼   ► So instead of just hashing it once you hash it, you know,

01:26:47 ◼   ► 5,000 times, a hundred thousand times, 200,000 times, and each iterative,

01:26:51 ◼   ► I should say the shot to algorithm includes that as part of it.

01:26:54 ◼   ► The number of hashing operations that occur, but it's part of an algorithm,

01:26:57 ◼   ► right? So one password has this approach. Last pass,

01:27:00 ◼   ► others have their approaches and you can wind up if you haven't updated,

01:27:05 ◼   ► people have been finding as they look through their settings at last pass that

01:27:09 ◼   ► they are set to, you know, 5,000 iterations where last pass now,

01:27:13 ◼   ► I think the current setting is like a hundred thousand and 100 iterations and

01:27:19 ◼   ► 5,000 is much easier to crack than the a hundred thousand.

01:27:23 ◼   ► And you can set it higher even. So there's,

01:27:24 ◼   ► there's the master password length and complexity. There's the,

01:27:28 ◼   ► so the amount of entropy in it, right? So how hard is it to crack?

01:27:31 ◼   ► There's the sort of social engineering guessability. And then there's the,

01:27:35 ◼   ► the, the, even if you have a really good password, your master password,

01:27:39 ◼   ► if it hasn't been iterated a sufficient number of times,

01:27:42 ◼   ► it can also be trivial. And John, you saw this, I didn't know this.

01:27:47 ◼   ► They don't encrypt the URLs in your password storage.

01:27:51 ◼   ► Yeah, that's that is going to leak. So if you're asking, so you say that,

01:27:56 ◼   ► what you said is valid. It's, they have some information,

01:27:59 ◼   ► an account information leaked.

01:28:01 ◼   ► So it's possible that a cracker would be able to match up a user with a vault

01:28:05 ◼   ► either through some leaked metadata about the account or failing that through

01:28:10 ◼   ► looking at URLs because some of those URLs are going to contain encoded

01:28:13 ◼   ► information about your user ID at an account because the URL is improperly

01:28:18 ◼   ► anonymized in the way that any given site,

01:28:21 ◼   ► you have a thousand passwords and some sites will encode your username into it

01:28:25 ◼   ► conceivably or maybe your email address. So in a different circumstance,

01:28:29 ◼   ► if everything in the vault were encrypted and no metadata were available in an

01:28:33 ◼   ► unencrypted form, then the vaults might still be fairly useless to other people,

01:28:38 ◼   ► even the ones that are weakly protected because it might be impossible for a

01:28:41 ◼   ► cracker to know which ones were weakly protected.

01:28:45 ◼   ► So they'd have to go through a lot of work even to figure out which ones they

01:28:48 ◼   ► could start to crack. But that's not the case.

01:28:51 ◼   ► Anyway, bad news for LastPass. I, I,

01:28:56 ◼   ► I don't know about you. I, you know, in terms of what I use,

01:29:00 ◼   ► I honestly have mostly overwhelmingly,

01:29:04 ◼   ► I would say rely on iCloud key chain and I,

01:29:09 ◼   ► I've trusted it for numerous years and it over one of the things I did last year

01:29:14 ◼   ► in 2022 was I moved most,

01:29:19 ◼   ► almost all of my two factor authentication codes. Like when you get those, Oh,

01:29:24 ◼   ► as a second factor,

01:29:26 ◼   ► go to Google authenticator or authy or any number of,

01:29:30 ◼   ► you know, there's an open protocol for generating these things.

01:29:33 ◼   ► And then once a minute you get a new six digit code and you,

01:29:39 ◼   ► you need to enter the current minutes,

01:29:42 ◼   ► six digit code for this account as your second factor to get in.

01:29:46 ◼   ► I moved most of those to iCloud key chain,

01:29:49 ◼   ► which started supporting those over a year ago. And

01:29:53 ◼   ► I couldn't be happier.

01:29:55 ◼   ► And I know that there's a lot of people out there who don't,

01:29:58 ◼   ► a one reason not to go all in with I call key chain is if you have cross

01:30:04 ◼   ► platform work needs.

01:30:05 ◼   ► If you use windows regularly or you want to use Android regularly or need to,

01:30:10 ◼   ► or just want to maintain your ability to,

01:30:18 ◼   ► to do that in the future. And you know,

01:30:20 ◼   ► you obviously can back out of iCloud key chain and switch from iCloud key chain

01:30:25 ◼   ► to one password or something else that's cross platform in the future.

01:30:29 ◼   ► But if you've already,

01:30:32 ◼   ► if you're already have all your two factor codes in authy or Google authenticator

01:30:37 ◼   ► and want to keep them there,

01:30:39 ◼   ► not because you think it's the best interface for them or the most convenient,

01:30:42 ◼   ► but because you like the idea that that's a cross platform way to do it.

01:30:46 ◼   ► I totally get that. But me personally,

01:30:50 ◼   ► I'm so all in on the Apple ecosystem,

01:30:53 ◼   ► including Safari as my main browser,

01:30:57 ◼   ► that the integration with iCloud key chain is just phenomenal.

01:31:02 ◼   ► And I know that there's a lot of people who hear Apple and cloud based syncing

01:31:07 ◼   ► and think it's always a disaster. And you know, I, I, I've been,

01:31:14 ◼   ► this is not my first rodeo. You know, I've,

01:31:17 ◼   ► I've seen Apple's struggles with cloud based syncing firsthand over a long

01:31:22 ◼   ► number of years.

01:31:23 ◼   ► I will say as somebody who's been at pretty much all in on iCloud key chain for

01:31:29 ◼   ► years, the syncing with iCloud key chain is as good as any syncing.

01:31:33 ◼   ► I've seen for any product anywhere. And I, you know, I,

01:31:38 ◼   ► I'm not personally vouching that they're never going to have a sync problem,

01:31:41 ◼   ► you know, that would be catastrophic for people.

01:31:44 ◼   ► And for my very most important accounts,

01:31:47 ◼   ► I've got saved codes printed out and stored in a safe location.

01:31:53 ◼   ► And you know, uh, uh,

01:31:57 ◼   ► and iCloud key chain catastrophe would be very, very annoying to me.

01:32:01 ◼   ► And there I might have a problem.

01:32:03 ◼   ► There might be some accounts that where I'm not really,

01:32:05 ◼   ► I haven't thought it through and I might be locked out and need,

01:32:09 ◼   ► I don't know what I would, you know,

01:32:10 ◼   ► but for the ones that I'm most concerned about, I know that I could recover,

01:32:15 ◼   ► even if I lost access to iCloud key chain with recovery codes, et cetera.

01:32:19 ◼   ► And I've never needed to.

01:32:21 ◼   ► And the integration with Safari and all the things that I've been doing,

01:32:26 ◼   ► the things I would want my password manager to do, I couldn't be happier.

01:32:31 ◼   ► And I, you know, I know a couple of the people who work on that team at Apple.

01:32:35 ◼   ► I think it is for lack of a better term, one of Apple's a teams,

01:32:39 ◼   ► I think they take it with the utmost care and it's,

01:32:45 ◼   ► you know, it's one of Apple's a teams working on that.

01:32:48 ◼   ► And it just keeps getting better. I don't know. What do you, what do you use?

01:32:51 ◼   ► I've been moving. I've used offie for, for my, what are they?

01:32:55 ◼   ► T O T P S time-based one time passwords, right?

01:32:59 ◼   ► And I've used that for years because that was the best Google authenticator was a

01:33:03 ◼   ► mess because it would, you know, you'd have a restore your phony,

01:33:05 ◼   ► it was all your code that was the worst, whatever. And so I,

01:33:08 ◼   ► at some point I found offie and a Twilio owns it now.

01:33:11 ◼   ► I don't know if they made it and it's a great, it's free for that purpose.

01:33:15 ◼   ► There's other stuff they sell,

01:33:16 ◼   ► but they don't market you and it sinks securely and it's available.

01:33:20 ◼   ► There's a Mac app that came out. It's not great, but it's fine.

01:33:23 ◼   ► So I used offie for years and years and then as soon as the, I guess,

01:33:27 ◼   ► Apple calls it, you know, verification codes or something.

01:33:29 ◼   ► When that rolled out with Monterey and iOS, iPad,

01:33:32 ◼   ► iOS 15 I was documenting it of course,

01:33:34 ◼   ► cause I read a book about iPad and iOS security and Mac security for the take

01:33:38 ◼   ► control series. And I thought, Oh, this is actually really, really well implemented.

01:33:43 ◼   ► It's best when you're using Safari on a Mac and it's best when you're doing kind

01:33:47 ◼   ► of anything in an app that's correctly integrated or in Safari on iOS and iPad

01:33:51 ◼   ► iOS devices. But you know, the cross platform thing,

01:33:54 ◼   ► you can just go on your iPhone, you just go to settings, passwords,

01:33:58 ◼   ► search on the thing and it shows you the verification code. So,

01:34:02 ◼   ► and I've had that issue. I mean,

01:34:03 ◼   ► occasionally there's some Safari integration issues where you can't edit the

01:34:07 ◼   ► list of websites to which a verification code applies.

01:34:11 ◼   ► So I've had some cases in which a site verifies on one site,

01:34:14 ◼   ► but then when you log in it has a different sub domain.

01:34:16 ◼   ► So occasionally I've had to go and be like, all right,

01:34:19 ◼   ► I've got to go to passwords in Mac OS and bring this up.

01:34:22 ◼   ► It doesn't give me the auto-fill touch ID option. I confess,

01:34:26 ◼   ► and I know I'm not the only person. I have a Mac mini and I bought a, uh,

01:34:30 ◼   ► a magic keyboard with touch ID almost well first to test cause I write about

01:34:36 ◼   ► these things. So I needed to own one and now I keep it attached all the time,

01:34:40 ◼   ► even though it's not my primary keyboard because I use touch ID on my Mac all

01:34:44 ◼   ► the time and it's such a delight compared to passwords or reducing security

01:34:49 ◼   ► levels that you know,

01:34:50 ◼   ► I'm using touch ID on my non laptop Mac for that purpose. I know Mac,

01:34:55 ◼   ► iMac users have had that option all along, but I specifically bought it.

01:34:59 ◼   ► But I think the feature works really well. I think it's,

01:35:01 ◼   ► I think the way it's presented, especially in like an in browser is good.

01:35:04 ◼   ► I have never, I've never had,

01:35:06 ◼   ► you said that and I'm thinking of all the iCloud sync problems I've had with

01:35:10 ◼   ► things like photos or calendar events,

01:35:12 ◼   ► things where I've had to go and do weird, you know,

01:35:14 ◼   ► resets and were have had no explanation why things were wrong for weeks.

01:35:18 ◼   ► I've never, that I can recall, have an iCloud key chain sync issue.

01:35:23 ◼   ► And I think it's got a different pathway.

01:35:25 ◼   ► So I'm sure the data is backed up at iCloud in this secured fashion.

01:35:29 ◼   ► But my belief is, I remember this is in the security document or not,

01:35:33 ◼   ► the iCloud security document.

01:35:34 ◼   ► I believe that it's kind of a push to your devices as opposed to like a sync

01:35:39 ◼   ► where it kind of accumulates it and then your devices kind of pole and whatever.

01:35:43 ◼   ► I think iCloud key chain items are essentially device to device synced with

01:35:48 ◼   ► iCloud as the conduit. And maybe describing that wrong,

01:35:51 ◼   ► but it does seem like it is more,

01:35:52 ◼   ► more rapidly done and more accurately done than any thing else I've ever had

01:35:56 ◼   ► trouble with on iCloud.

01:35:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I, I, that's, you know, everybody's experience is anecdotal, right?

01:36:02 ◼   ► But yeah, but some things to me sync better than others.

01:36:06 ◼   ► I also find that Apple notes has been the modern era of Apple notes ever since

01:36:11 ◼   ► they moved past I map as the backend sinking,

01:36:16 ◼   ► which was terrible to be honest. I mean,

01:36:18 ◼   ► I kind of understand why they did it because it was sort of a shortcut to get

01:36:22 ◼   ► sinking of some sort. But when,

01:36:25 ◼   ► when they switched to a native iCloud set of APIs for sinking your notes,

01:36:30 ◼   ► it's been rock solid for me. I mean, really, really good.

01:36:36 ◼   ► I kind of get the feeling, you know, in a very obvious way,

01:36:39 ◼   ► the way that you would think, Hey,

01:36:40 ◼   ► I would kind of hope that the iCloud key chain team is extra careful and is

01:36:45 ◼   ► there, you know, puts an even higher priority on not making mistakes,

01:36:52 ◼   ► even at the expense of moving slower year over year. Right. So,

01:36:59 ◼   ► yeah, you know, it's fewer new features move slower, but instead of,

01:37:05 ◼   ► you know, take the old carpenters adage of measure twice, cut once.

01:37:08 ◼   ► Maybe with something like iCloud cloud key chain,

01:37:11 ◼   ► you measure 10 times and cut once.

01:37:13 ◼   ► I learned something amazing about Russia a few decades ago from a Russian friend

01:37:17 ◼   ► at the time. I said, measure twice, cut once. He said, Oh, he said, in Russia,

01:37:21 ◼   ► we say measure seven times and cut once. And I said, Oh wow.

01:37:24 ◼   ► He said everything is sevens. And I was like, that taught me a lot.

01:37:27 ◼   ► The other thing is, you know, this is the neat feature, right?

01:37:29 ◼   ► Is that because it's integrated and this is probably why you do this.

01:37:32 ◼   ► It's why I'm doing it now as well as I trust, I trust what Apple's doing.

01:37:36 ◼   ► I believe their security documentation.

01:37:37 ◼   ► I haven't had negative experiences and iCloud key chain has worked solidly for

01:37:41 ◼   ► me all these years for regular passwords.

01:37:44 ◼   ► I've been using one password for many years also, and I still,

01:37:46 ◼   ► I use them both in different, slightly different ways, kind of integrated.

01:37:50 ◼   ► But it's the,

01:37:51 ◼   ► it shows you the QR code when you're doing the two factor enrollment and you

01:37:55 ◼   ► hold down, you know,

01:37:57 ◼   ► you press and hold on it on a touch device or you right click on it in Safari.

01:38:01 ◼   ► And it says, add as verification code. And that's your setup. I mean, come on.

01:38:05 ◼   ► That's, that's the kind of frictionless integration you want. And you're like,

01:38:09 ◼   ► well, why wouldn't I do that? Because now I'm there. There's issues.

01:38:12 ◼   ► People worry about out of band issues as well. Like, is this protected enough?

01:38:16 ◼   ► The classic one that comes up that I get contacted by people about regularly and

01:38:21 ◼   ► I've documented in my books is that when you do two factor, I mean,

01:38:25 ◼   ► it's funny that Apple isn't, hasn't adopted TOTPs for its own site.

01:38:28 ◼   ► It's using its own proprietary but very high security system that is kind of a

01:38:33 ◼   ► two step authentication in order to get a number. Right.

01:38:36 ◼   ► But when you do a login with a regular username and password,

01:38:40 ◼   ► and then it gives you the prompt and it's like, Hey, prove who you are here.

01:38:45 ◼   ► You need to enter this TOTP. Is this your location? And then what your device,

01:38:48 ◼   ► one of your devices, you enter the code, right? All that's good.

01:38:50 ◼   ► You want to trust this device. People have said to me, well,

01:38:53 ◼   ► why should I trust entering a code into the same browser?

01:38:57 ◼   ► Like if I'm on my machine or that the machine is on,

01:38:59 ◼   ► so I'm on a browser on my Mac and the Mac produces the code that Apple sent.

01:39:04 ◼   ► And it's like, because it's not in the same band path,

01:39:06 ◼   ► I'm not on my browser and the browser is presenting me my code.

01:39:10 ◼   ► I'm on the browser and a separate Apple system that is device again,

01:39:15 ◼   ► device locked like this is your Apple ID account logged into that Mac through a

01:39:19 ◼   ► verified connection that you've already done two factor authentication on for

01:39:23 ◼   ► iCloud and Apple ID on your system.

01:39:26 ◼   ► That pathway is being used exclusively over secure transport to present that

01:39:31 ◼   ► code to you. So it's trustworthy because it's not in browser.

01:39:35 ◼   ► And that's the same thing for the verification code.

01:39:38 ◼   ► You're in Safari and your verification codes in Safari,

01:39:41 ◼   ► but there's not a pathway where a website can pull that verification code out as

01:39:45 ◼   ► essentially separate sandbox entities that don't talk to each other.

01:39:49 ◼   ► Yeah. You're the one who explained this to me a few years ago and I'll always

01:39:53 ◼   ► appreciate it. And I'm still not sure I entirely understand it to be honest,

01:39:57 ◼   ► but I trust it at this point,

01:39:58 ◼   ► but I'll bet everybody listening to the show has had family members say to them,

01:40:03 ◼   ► how, how does this make sense when I'm logging in? I'm on my, I'm on this,

01:40:08 ◼   ► I'm on, I'm on my Mac book and I'm logging into an Apple website.

01:40:12 ◼   ► And to confirm I am who I am,

01:40:15 ◼   ► it's the same Mac book saying, is this a login that you want to approve?

01:40:20 ◼   ► But it's, it is, I guess the other, the flip side of the coin is that it is the,

01:40:25 ◼   ► the sort of counterintuitive way that,

01:40:29 ◼   ► that Apple's privacy initiatives are often in conflict with security

01:40:34 ◼   ► initiatives. And where I'm going with that is that the browser is so private

01:40:40 ◼   ► that the browser doesn't tell the website, this is a known,

01:40:46 ◼   ► this is the device I'm on, right? This unique identifier,

01:40:50 ◼   ► for this Mac book. No,

01:40:52 ◼   ► that you don't want your browser to give a unique identifier for your hardware

01:40:57 ◼   ► to any website, whether it's Apple's or Google's. But so like you said,

01:41:01 ◼   ► it's out of band of the communication of your browser to apple.com.

01:41:06 ◼   ► But when Apple says, okay,

01:41:09 ◼   ► we'll send a ping to all of your known devices that we trust and that you've

01:41:13 ◼   ► vouched for,

01:41:14 ◼   ► which includes the Mac book you're on to verify that this is right,

01:41:18 ◼   ► then you can just do it right on your Mac book. And once you understand that,

01:41:21 ◼   ► that it's sort of an entirely different communication channel between apple,

01:41:26 ◼   ► you know, it's your browser is not your device,

01:41:31 ◼   ► but that confirmation is your device saying, yes,

01:41:34 ◼   ► this trusted device is saying that this is okay.

01:41:37 ◼   ► It's because the browser to, to regular people, right?

01:41:41 ◼   ► The browser and your operating system appear to be monolithic.

01:41:44 ◼   ► They're all right. Same thing. Apple doesn't trust the browser.

01:41:47 ◼   ► But it trusts your device. So it's weird when it's like, well,

01:41:50 ◼   ► if you don't trust my browser, why are you trusting this? It's like, ah,

01:41:53 ◼   ► they're really, the browser's untrustworthy. So you could be phished.

01:41:56 ◼   ► And the thing to remember is it's not the Safari or any other browser,

01:42:01 ◼   ► whatever, but it's not Safari prompting you with that map that says,

01:42:06 ◼   ► oh, there's a login from somewhere. That's the system doing it,

01:42:10 ◼   ► which is out of it.

01:42:11 ◼   ► This is with advanced data protection, right? The newest thing,

01:42:15 ◼   ► which I think is super cool.

01:42:16 ◼   ► I assumed when I saw the first press release about it, oh,

01:42:19 ◼   ► you won't be able to access your data on iCloud.com anymore because it's all

01:42:23 ◼   ► going to be ended and encrypted. But no, Apple will let you do it. I don't know.

01:42:28 ◼   ► I've turned over a test account. I turned ADP on it so I could test it.

01:42:31 ◼   ► And you go to the website, iCloud.com and says, Hey, all your data,

01:42:35 ◼   ► except your email contacts and calendar entries are protected by ADP.

01:42:39 ◼   ► Do you want to access it? And if you say yes,

01:42:42 ◼   ► it does push to one of your devices that lets you enter a key that they have

01:42:46 ◼   ► then allows it to decrypt temporarily within the browser,

01:42:51 ◼   ► the data that sent from iCloud. So the data is still encrypted at iCloud.

01:42:56 ◼   ► It's sent to your browser,

01:42:57 ◼   ► cached in your browser and decrypting your browser with that temporary key.

01:43:01 ◼   ► And that is very clever. That's what one password does. For instance,

01:43:04 ◼   ► with when you use one password.com to access your end to end encrypted stuff,

01:43:09 ◼   ► it's never receiving the password. All the password access,

01:43:13 ◼   ► all the password interaction is local to your browser cache.

01:43:16 ◼   ► So it's never transmitted. And so I thought, you know, so that I knew,

01:43:19 ◼   ► one password was doing that,

01:43:20 ◼   ► but so Apple has found that trustworthy enough apparently that they're willing

01:43:24 ◼   ► to let you do that. So if you enable ADP, which I think is, you know,

01:43:28 ◼   ► there's plus pros and cons,

01:43:30 ◼   ► but it's could be very good as just an extra level of privacy and security.

01:43:33 ◼   ► Then you are not excluded from using iCloud.com for data for those newly

01:43:38 ◼   ► protected categories, which is cool.

01:43:41 ◼   ► But counterintuitive.

01:43:43 ◼   ► Yeah. And, and you could also, I don't, did you notice this little,

01:43:45 ◼   ► there's like a little switch too.

01:43:47 ◼   ► You can also now if you choose whether or not you have ADP and turned on,

01:43:51 ◼   ► you can separately choose in, in iOS six, let's do all the numbers, right?

01:43:55 ◼   ► It's Mac, MacOS 13.4, 13.1 Ventura,

01:43:59 ◼   ► Iowa's 16.2 iPad was 16.2.

01:44:02 ◼   ► So you have an option for ADP in the U S or you're at any of those versions

01:44:06 ◼   ► worldwide.

01:44:07 ◼   ► You can now disable iCloud.com access for your account.

01:44:11 ◼   ► And that's separate from ADP.

01:44:14 ◼   ► Yeah. It's a little subtle thing. I noticed it. I was like, wait, what is this?

01:44:17 ◼   ► And it's so you can have the normal encryption where some of your stuff is

01:44:20 ◼   ► encrypted at rest and some end to end like it is for almost everybody today.

01:44:24 ◼   ► And you're like,

01:44:25 ◼   ► I don't want to expose a phishing risk or any other risk to iCloud.com so I'm

01:44:30 ◼   ► just going to turn that off. And if you turn it off, you can turn it back on.

01:44:33 ◼   ► But if you can only do that from devices, you can't do it from a website.

01:44:36 ◼   ► So it's a, it's a different security choice, but it's an interesting one.

01:44:40 ◼   ► Yeah. It doesn't disable any sinking either.

01:44:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:44:43 ◼   ► And the one thing I can think of that that would do is it puts your device

01:44:48 ◼   ► security in front of everything, right? So all of your Apple devices have,

01:44:52 ◼   ► you know, face ID or a passcode or your Mac has a password and touch ID,

01:44:57 ◼   ► but there's no way to get into anything without getting into the device first.

01:45:03 ◼   ► Whereas iCloud,

01:45:05 ◼   ► you can use a Apple ID and a password and then a phone number.

01:45:10 ◼   ► You can have use your backup because Apple is still letting you do backup SMS

01:45:14 ◼   ► and automated voice calls. So if somebody were to, I mean, it's, you know,

01:45:17 ◼   ► it's a lot of steps, but if someone were to hijack a SIM, for instance,

01:45:21 ◼   ► at a cell phone company,

01:45:22 ◼   ► then they'd still,

01:45:23 ◼   ► they might be able to crack your iCloud through iCloud.com access.

01:45:27 ◼   ► But with this method, someone could,

01:45:30 ◼   ► I mean, they could log into certain services without a device because they can

01:45:35 ◼   ► still use an SMS method, but it wouldn't provide them the same amount of control.

01:45:38 ◼   ► Yeah. I think that, you know,

01:45:40 ◼   ► for most people I certainly have,

01:45:41 ◼   ► I'm going to leave iCloud.com access for me on and I think for most people

01:45:46 ◼   ► that's right, but you can, you know,

01:45:47 ◼   ► it's not too hard to squint your eyes and see how it's more secure to just turn

01:45:51 ◼   ► that off if you're genuinely paranoid or if you actually suspect that you're

01:45:56 ◼   ► more likely to be attacked.

01:45:59 ◼   ► Apple's now doing this tiered thing. You've got lockdown mode at the top.

01:46:02 ◼   ► You've got the new iMessage feature that'll roll out this year that warns you of

01:46:06 ◼   ► potential that there are people have intercepted or they have sniffers in the

01:46:09 ◼   ► middle of an iMessage conversation.

01:46:11 ◼   ► There's iMessage out of band confirmation for identity coming in 2023.

01:46:15 ◼   ► That's the top. Then you have ADP below that.

01:46:18 ◼   ► And then below that is iCloud.com access on or off.

01:46:22 ◼   ► And below that is fundamental at rest device based security with some elements

01:46:27 ◼   ► for iCloud syncing being end to end encrypted besides those data parts.

01:46:30 ◼   ► So it's a good, good layer of cake that's been built now.

01:46:33 ◼   ► It still makes me laugh thinking back to the original iPhone and it was just

01:46:39 ◼   ► slide to unlock. Yes. Oh, wait, no password. No passcode, right?

01:46:44 ◼   ► Well, you could set a password, I believe, right? But it wasn't,

01:46:47 ◼   ► it wasn't part of the golden. This is the way,

01:46:50 ◼   ► this is the way we intend you to use the device.

01:46:53 ◼   ► And I certainly didn't have a passcode on my iPhone for a couple of years.

01:46:56 ◼   ► No, cause slide to unlock was way too cool. It was. And then,

01:47:01 ◼   ► but once you slid to unlock, you just had all my email, had all your messages.

01:47:05 ◼   ► Sure. All right.

01:47:07 ◼   ► Let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor of the day.

01:47:10 ◼   ► It is our good friends at Squarespace. Oh,

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01:49:03 ◼   ► well, let me talk about this.

01:49:05 ◼   ► I want to talk a little bit about Twitter and Mastodon because I know people are

01:49:09 ◼   ► tired of talking about Twitter and Musk. I'm tired of it too, but it's so,

01:49:12 ◼   ► it's fascinating. Here, parlaying off our security discussion.

01:49:18 ◼   ► So I've been a Twitter blue subscriber for most of the year.

01:49:22 ◼   ► I think it came out earlier in 2022 is a $3 a month product that I pay happily

01:49:27 ◼   ► paid for to get the top articles feature.

01:49:30 ◼   ► I like the being able to have 30 seconds to revert your thing before it went

01:49:36 ◼   ► out.

01:49:37 ◼   ► I forgot that that was, I did not realize that was a Twitter blue feature,

01:49:41 ◼   ► even though, so it's like,

01:49:43 ◼   ► I still do most of my Twitter use from tweet bot,

01:49:47 ◼   ► so I don't in the third party doesn't have it,

01:49:49 ◼   ► but I use the first party app enough that I, you know,

01:49:53 ◼   ► I've seen that feature editing tweets is only a Twitter blue feature.

01:49:58 ◼   ► The top articles feature is it's like nuzzle used to be,

01:50:01 ◼   ► but basically it's a very simple concept. And, and to me,

01:50:06 ◼   ► Twitter is at its best when its features are very easily explained.

01:50:11 ◼   ► But the basic idea is all the people who you follow you,

01:50:15 ◼   ► the people you've chosen to follow it. If,

01:50:18 ◼   ► if a number of the people you follow have all tweeted links to the same article

01:50:23 ◼   ► that becomes one of the top articles of the day.

01:50:27 ◼   ► And you can just go to this page or tab in the app and just see

01:50:31 ◼   ► the articles across the web that are the most linked

01:50:37 ◼   ► to by the people you choose to follow on Twitter.

01:50:40 ◼   ► And then they have a second tab,

01:50:41 ◼   ► which is sort of the second order version of that,

01:50:46 ◼   ► where the people who you follow,

01:50:49 ◼   ► who they follow their top articles.

01:50:52 ◼   ► And they had Twitter had that relationship with paywall publication. Yeah.

01:50:56 ◼   ► So many things you could read through Twitter blue. Yeah.

01:50:59 ◼   ► You would have needed a subscription. So yeah,

01:51:01 ◼   ► it was my favorite thing since nuzzle also is the closest thing.

01:51:03 ◼   ► And nuzzle to me was a little bit better at

01:51:07 ◼   ► populating the list and nuzzle.

01:51:12 ◼   ► One reason for me as a news junkie is that with nuzzle, you could set it to like,

01:51:16 ◼   ► three hours instead of 24 hours.

01:51:18 ◼   ► Twitter's version is a little bit simpler and it's just,

01:51:21 ◼   ► you don't get that kind of granularity,

01:51:23 ◼   ► but more than made up for the fact that Twitter,

01:51:27 ◼   ► unlike nuzzle has these partnership deals with a lot of websites where you can

01:51:32 ◼   ► burst through paywalls and read,

01:51:34 ◼   ► read these articles without being a subscriber. Great feature.

01:51:38 ◼   ► I went through this thing. It seems like this is,

01:51:41 ◼   ► I don't know if it's Apple's fault or Twitter's fault, but I,

01:51:44 ◼   ► I paid for it through the iOS app.

01:51:46 ◼   ► So it was going through my iCloud or iTunes account, whatever you want to call

01:51:50 ◼   ► it to 99 a month. And I don't know,

01:51:54 ◼   ► earlier in December I started getting some kind of error.

01:51:59 ◼   ► It was inconsistent and it was something,

01:52:01 ◼   ► something that my payment method had expired and it didn't

01:52:05 ◼   ► make any sense to me because I knew that my iCloud,

01:52:09 ◼   ► I knew that my iTunes credit card was not expired.

01:52:13 ◼   ► It's the credit card I have on my iCloud account is, or iTunes account,

01:52:17 ◼   ► whatever you want to call it.

01:52:18 ◼   ► It's actually an Apple card and I know that the expiration date is,

01:52:22 ◼   ► I don't know, a year or two in the future,

01:52:24 ◼   ► but if any card is going to give me a proper warning when it

01:52:29 ◼   ► expires, it's an Apple card. Right. Uh,

01:52:32 ◼   ► but I think what really happened is that now that under Elon Musk,

01:52:37 ◼   ► the new Twitter blue, which includes verification check Mark,

01:52:42 ◼   ► which I, I have, but I didn't even ask for,

01:52:45 ◼   ► and I honestly don't care about, I honestly,

01:52:48 ◼   ► you could take away the blue check Mark on my at Gruber account and I really

01:52:52 ◼   ► don't care. That's not why I'm, I want to pay for it.

01:52:55 ◼   ► But I think what happened is now that the new version of Twitter blue is

01:52:59 ◼   ► $8 a month.

01:53:00 ◼   ► If you pay Twitter directly on their website and $11 a month through the app

01:53:05 ◼   ► to account for the 30% cut that Apple takes. And for a while,

01:53:10 ◼   ► it seemed like maybe they'd grandfathered in those of us who'd been paying $3 a

01:53:15 ◼   ► month. But I think they, I think they wanted, I think they messily very,

01:53:20 ◼   ► can you believe it under Elon Musk that something was slapdash and haphazard

01:53:25 ◼   ► and not entirely, but I think that basically they,

01:53:30 ◼   ► they wanted to cut all of us off who were paying $3 a month and make us pay

01:53:34 ◼   ► eight or $11 a month.

01:53:36 ◼   ► But the error message was about the payment credentials being expired,

01:53:41 ◼   ► which they probably just dumped all the tokens,

01:53:44 ◼   ► the receipt tokens from their database and let it just error out to annoy people

01:53:48 ◼   ► like us. I, I let mine lapse before that a little bit before that.

01:53:53 ◼   ► Well, I'm so,

01:53:54 ◼   ► but I'm so keen on the top articles feature that I wanted to resubscribe.

01:53:59 ◼   ► I was like, okay, I'll resubscribe. I don't know if you saw this.

01:54:02 ◼   ► I tweeted it the other day, but they won't let me, they won't let me sign up.

01:54:07 ◼   ► I want to give Twitter $11 a month cause I'd actually would rather pay for it

01:54:11 ◼   ► through iTunes and no better control, better control. I'll pay,

01:54:15 ◼   ► I'll pay three more dollars a month knowing that I can cancel at any time

01:54:20 ◼   ► through iTunes than to, especially at this point,

01:54:23 ◼   ► trust Twitter with my credit card and a recurring subscription.

01:54:26 ◼   ► I would like to pay $11 a month to them for this and they won't let me

01:54:31 ◼   ► because the phone number I have associated with my Twitter account is from an

01:54:36 ◼   ► unsupported carrier. And now what that means now,

01:54:39 ◼   ► the carrier in question is Google voice. Oh, Oh now,

01:54:44 ◼   ► and I tweeted about it and people are like, well,

01:54:46 ◼   ► that's like a security thing cause lots of scammers sign up for Google voices

01:54:49 ◼   ► free. You get a phone number for free and crying out.

01:54:53 ◼   ► But the reason I use a Google voice account,

01:54:56 ◼   ► I use this Google voice account for any,

01:55:00 ◼   ► pretty much anything that only supports SMS as a second factor,

01:55:05 ◼   ► which is actually not very secure and not, not, you know,

01:55:08 ◼   ► yeah. Cause you can get the codes via email, right? Well, and you can also log in.

01:55:12 ◼   ► And I, and I do think carriers, you know,

01:55:15 ◼   ► especially the big ones like Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile have,

01:55:20 ◼   ► I think it certainly anecdotally,

01:55:23 ◼   ► it seems like SIM hijacking is less of a thing that they've, you know,

01:55:28 ◼   ► but I still don't trust I'm on Verizon. I've been on Verizon for a while.

01:55:31 ◼   ► I don't,

01:55:32 ◼   ► I trust Google with my main Google account security way more than I

01:55:37 ◼   ► trust Verizon and way more than I trust somebody. I think,

01:55:41 ◼   ► I honestly don't see how it's feasible that somebody could hijack my Google

01:55:46 ◼   ► account.

01:55:46 ◼   ► And whereas I don't necessarily trust that somebody who specifically wanted to

01:55:51 ◼   ► target me, John Gruber, the daring fireball guy who has, you know,

01:55:56 ◼   ► 300,000 followers on Twitter, somebody could go into a Verizon store and say,

01:56:01 ◼   ► I'm John Gruber and I, you know, this is my phone number and you know,

01:56:04 ◼   ► it's not that hard to get my personal cell phone number. I lost my, you know,

01:56:08 ◼   ► I need a new SIM card.

01:56:09 ◼   ► I trust Google more than I trust Verizon with that even though I more or less

01:56:13 ◼   ► trust Verizon, but I,

01:56:14 ◼   ► All the carriers put ID, the possibility,

01:56:18 ◼   ► but not requirement for an ID code to protect that.

01:56:20 ◼   ► And so if you don't have an ID code set on your, your wireless account,

01:56:25 ◼   ► then that's possible. Although they're having stories of people,

01:56:27 ◼   ► also social engineering around the requirement for an ID.

01:56:31 ◼   ► But I think that's why the incidents has gone down. It's also cause you know,

01:56:34 ◼   ► Bitcoin is worth less. So people have less interest in hacking most people.

01:56:38 ◼   ► But I think the ID thing was enough of a deterrent that it became less low

01:56:42 ◼   ► hanging fruit. But I think also if you went in with a,

01:56:44 ◼   ► someone went in with a faked bill and a faked ID and said they were John Gruber

01:56:49 ◼   ► and had your phone number, they might still be able to talk somebody into it.

01:56:51 ◼   ► That's not, not implausible.

01:56:54 ◼   ► I just feel safer with my Google account. I do, you know,

01:56:57 ◼   ► I have lots of complaints about Google's overall customer experience,

01:56:59 ◼   ► but I think Google's account security is top notch. And if you have to,

01:57:03 ◼   ► if I have to use SMS as a second factor,

01:57:06 ◼   ► I always use my Google voice account if possible.

01:57:09 ◼   ► And I do have my Google voice account set up to forward all text

01:57:14 ◼   ► messages to my main email. So

01:57:18 ◼   ► when I do, when, when they do text me, quote unquote,

01:57:23 ◼   ► text me a, a six digit code,

01:57:26 ◼   ► all I have to do is look at my email and it's right there. And you know,

01:57:31 ◼   ► it's just as easy as checking it from an SMS message, super frustrating.

01:57:35 ◼   ► And it's so funny because it's one of the times where I've run into the,

01:57:39 ◼   ► and I hate to, I tried never to use the word fan boy,

01:57:43 ◼   ► but I can't think of a better term. The,