Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Yeah, last week, I threw my back out pretty bad.

00:00:32 ◼   ► And today, I'm in a lot of pain, Jason, is what I'm going to say.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:36 ◼   ► It started to get better today.

00:00:38 ◼   ► So, it's actually the worst it's been.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Worst end of the day when I did it.

00:00:41 ◼   ► I figure that's important because, you know, I might be grumpy later on in the episode.

00:00:48 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:00:49 ◼   ► You might be grumpy.

00:00:50 ◼   ► You might be a little low energy.

00:00:52 ◼   ► And viewers of our YouTube stream will notice that you're a little slumpy, too.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Yeah, viewers of the YouTube video will notice that I'm leaning back in my chair today, which I don't usually do.

00:01:01 ◼   ► He's hanging on by a thread, folks.

00:01:03 ◼   ► Spend a bit more time sitting up straight.

00:01:04 ◼   ► But no, today, I've got the full lean back going on.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:08 ◼   ► This is just as like, if you listen to things that I say today, and you're like, damn, I need to disagree with Mike.

00:01:14 ◼   ► Let me tell you, don't.

00:01:15 ◼   ► Just keep it to yourself for this week.

00:01:17 ◼   ► I would love you if you do that.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Just let it go.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Just let it fly.

00:01:20 ◼   ► The boy is grumpy.

00:01:21 ◼   ► You know, he's doing the best he can.

00:01:23 ◼   ► He's here.

00:01:23 ◼   ► He's grinding.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Thank you for this opening statement.

00:01:26 ◼   ► It's like, it's a hard week.

00:01:29 ◼   ► It's a hard week for me.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Sorry that you hurt your back.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Ironically, or cruelly, while picking up your baby.

00:01:35 ◼   ► It was actually putting her down.

00:01:37 ◼   ► I was putting her down.

00:01:37 ◼   ► Oh, putting down your baby.

00:01:38 ◼   ► So it's part of love.

00:01:39 ◼   ► It was an act of love.

00:01:40 ◼   ► It felt like an explosion occurred in my middle to lower back.

00:01:44 ◼   ► And then yesterday, it started to feel better.

00:01:46 ◼   ► It's like, great, because we're supposed to be going away this weekend.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Now we're not sure we're going to be able to do that.

00:01:51 ◼   ► It's all terrible over here.

00:01:53 ◼   ► It's all gone.

00:01:54 ◼   ► Pete Tong.

00:01:55 ◼   ► I'm seeing a physiotherapist.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Don't worry.

00:01:57 ◼   ► I'm not just toughing it out.

00:02:00 ◼   ► Not just gutting it out.

00:02:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Except for right now, where you're gutting it out.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Right now, I am.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Right now, I am.

00:02:06 ◼   ► I have a snow talk question for you, Jason.

00:02:08 ◼   ► We actually got two questions this week, and they were very similar to each other.

00:02:12 ◼   ► So I thought, I don't know why this has happened.

00:02:14 ◼   ► So I'll ask both of them.

00:02:15 ◼   ► Duncan says, California is famous for its surfing.

00:02:19 ◼   ► Jason, do you own a surfboard or boogie board?

00:02:21 ◼   ► And Logan said, do you have any thoughts on paddle boarding?

00:02:24 ◼   ► Do you own a paddle board?

00:02:29 ◼   ► So this reminds me of when I was a kid on the computer bulletin boards, and there were these kids in Fargo, North Dakota, who were like, whoa, do you go surfing every day?

00:02:39 ◼   ► And I said, I'm 100 miles from the ocean, friend.

00:02:41 ◼   ► Do I own a surfboard?

00:02:45 ◼   ► No.

00:02:46 ◼   ► Have I ever been on a surfboard?

00:02:47 ◼   ► No.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Does my father-in-law surf?

00:02:50 ◼   ► Yes.

00:02:50 ◼   ► My now elderly father-in-law, he's a surfer.

00:02:55 ◼   ► But I have never done it, and I have no interest.

00:02:58 ◼   ► My balance is not very good.

00:02:59 ◼   ► I can't even water ski.

00:03:00 ◼   ► I fall right over.

00:03:01 ◼   ► So boogie board, have I been on them?

00:03:03 ◼   ► Yes.

00:03:04 ◼   ► Do I own one?

00:03:06 ◼   ► No.

00:03:06 ◼   ► That's a thing you have, like, if you're staying somewhere by the beach where there's some waves, you can, like, rent one.

00:03:13 ◼   ► And we've done that.

00:03:14 ◼   ► Rented a boogie board at Snorkel Bob's for the week with my kids.

00:03:19 ◼   ► Pretty much for my kids.

00:03:20 ◼   ► But, you know, then you go in with your kids, and you do that.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Then everybody has a good time, I guess.

00:03:25 ◼   ► You can hear my ambivalence.

00:03:28 ◼   ► And paddleboarding, I have never done it.

00:03:30 ◼   ► It looks fine.

00:03:33 ◼   ► We were at a lake in the Midwest a few weeks ago, and I thought about doing it, but it didn't come up.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Lauren's done it a few times.

00:03:41 ◼   ► Jamie's done it a few times.

00:03:42 ◼   ► We had a great kayak trip, speaking of other things that go in the water, that I have done.

00:03:48 ◼   ► A kayak trip when we were in Kauai a while ago, a few years ago.

00:03:53 ◼   ► And Jamie wanted to do stand-up paddleboard.

00:03:56 ◼   ► So she did paddleboard on the way out, and then she fell in the water, and then she and Lauren switched.

00:04:00 ◼   ► And I think Lauren did paddleboard coming back, and Jamie went in the kayak.

00:04:06 ◼   ► I have constantly thought about getting a kayak.

00:04:11 ◼   ► We are not far from the water here at all, but it's too far to just carry a kayak.

00:04:19 ◼   ► So the investment in having a place to store the kayak, having a way to put it on my car, which I don't have a way to do that, take it over to the very short drive to the place where you would put it in.

00:04:34 ◼   ► And it has been too much, even though our friend, friend of the show, Dr. Drang, introduced me to the idea of the folding kayak.

00:04:42 ◼   ► Because Drang, our friend, he's in the Midwest where there are gentle lakes, and he likes to kayak on them.

00:04:49 ◼   ► And he has a folding kayak.

00:04:52 ◼   ► I think, is it Oro Kayaks, I want to say?

00:04:56 ◼   ► Oro Kayaks.

00:04:57 ◼   ► O-R-U-K-A-Y-A-K dot com.

00:05:00 ◼   ► He has a lake kayak.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:05:03 ◼   ► How is this possible?

00:05:04 ◼   ► It's like origami.

00:05:06 ◼   ► You basically unfold it in like five minutes, and it's a kayak.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Look at this thing.

00:05:09 ◼   ► So you're going to get one of these then?

00:05:11 ◼   ► So because I live on a bay, I would need a more expensive and heavier one than what Dr. Drang uses.

00:05:19 ◼   ► Because there's more of a current?

00:05:21 ◼   ► Because there's more potential waves and stuff than on a lake, I think, even though it's a gentle kind of inlet of the bay.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Bay ST.

00:05:29 ◼   ► They do have the bay.

00:05:29 ◼   ► I assume that one's for you.

00:05:30 ◼   ► Oh, boy.

00:05:31 ◼   ► Oh, buddy.

00:05:32 ◼   ► You've got to really want to do this.

00:05:34 ◼   ► You've got to want to do it.

00:05:35 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:05:36 ◼   ► It's not $100, let's just say.

00:05:38 ◼   ► It's got a zero on.

00:05:39 ◼   ► But I've been tempted.

00:05:41 ◼   ► I've thought about it.

00:05:42 ◼   ► So that's my thing is, like, wouldn't it be fun to go just over not far and unfold that kayak and put it in?

00:05:52 ◼   ► I would do this.

00:05:53 ◼   ► This is the thing is my interest in kayaking is never going to be enough for me to find a place to store it here, put a rack on my car, figure out how to

00:06:02 ◼   ► mount it on the car, mount it on the car, mount it on the car on a regular basis and take it over.

00:06:06 ◼   ► It's just not going to happen.

00:06:07 ◼   ► Yeah, but why would you do that when you can fold one up and put it in a bag?

00:06:11 ◼   ► Yeah, well, that is the counter argument.

00:06:13 ◼   ► So I've thought about it.

00:06:14 ◼   ► But I've hijacked this to talk about kayaks because I'm much more interested.

00:06:18 ◼   ► I've done kayaking.

00:06:19 ◼   ► We just did kayaking on the Wailua River when we were in Kauai the last time.

00:06:25 ◼   ► It's pretty chill.

00:06:26 ◼   ► And up here in Richardson Bay by the Mill Valley Dog Park and, like, out and around, like, there's lots of, like, pretty easy stuff to paddle around in Marin County where, you know, there's little inlets here and there.

00:06:40 ◼   ► And that would be kind of fun to do.

00:06:42 ◼   ► The problem then is that I'm doing it by myself unless I get another kayak for Lauren.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Now it's even more money.

00:06:50 ◼   ► So we'll see.

00:06:52 ◼   ► Maybe one day I'll get a kayak.

00:06:55 ◼   ► If you would like to send in a question of your own to help us open a future episode of the show, please go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your own snow talk question.

00:07:04 ◼   ► Maybe you'll match with another Upgradient.

00:07:06 ◼   ► I think Duncan and Logan could be friends if they don't know each other already.

00:07:09 ◼   ► They could.

00:07:10 ◼   ► They sound like characters on a soap opera set in California.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Duncan and Logan.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Duncan and Logan are fighting over the same girl.

00:07:18 ◼   ► Is this literally the plot of Veronica Mars?

00:07:21 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:07:22 ◼   ► Anyway, let's move on.

00:07:24 ◼   ► Let's do some follow up.

00:07:25 ◼   ► I had a question that came from Amar who wants to know, how does Apple know when someone is a, quote, first time Apple Watch user or first time iPhone user?

00:07:34 ◼   ► When they talk about this in their earnings calls, is it just information from their Apple IDs?

00:07:41 ◼   ► This is an excellent question.

00:07:43 ◼   ► So yeah, on the earnings call, they said half of Apple Watch buyers are new to Apple Watch.

00:07:47 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:07:49 ◼   ► I think the idea that they're looking at Apple IDs that have never been paired with an Apple Watch as one of their signals is probably pretty good.

00:07:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:57 ◼   ► I kind of assume they also do a sales follow up survey.

00:08:01 ◼   ► I don't think they need to do that.

00:08:02 ◼   ► You know what?

00:08:03 ◼   ► I feel like they have that data.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Like Apple absolutely knows this information.

00:08:06 ◼   ► I would not be surprised if they've got a group that does a, tries to do a statistically valid sample sales follow up survey to get demographics of what's going on with their purchases and things like that.

00:08:18 ◼   ► But yes, there's probably a technological solution here as well.

00:08:22 ◼   ► You also, I mean, there really may also be multiple streams where they've got the Apple ID data, but they've got, the thing about doing a survey is it gives you a different data set from your, what if your Apple ID data is actually flawed in some way?

00:08:36 ◼   ► It skews high, it skews low.

00:08:37 ◼   ► You don't know.

00:08:38 ◼   ► But if you have a second data point, then you can compare it to that.

00:08:45 ◼   ► Well, if somebody knows, I would love to know because I don't, I don't know the extra answer of actually how they know this.

00:08:50 ◼   ► I, I, I know some people who may know the answer, but then those are people who used to work at Apple and probably can't, maybe, maybe could tell me, maybe, maybe not.

00:08:58 ◼   ► But anyway, if somebody knows what's the method that Apple uses to, to get this kind of thing, I would love to know just for curiosity, curiosity's sake.

00:09:05 ◼   ► I'm not sure it's a trade secret or anything.

00:09:08 ◼   ► I'm not inducing a trade secret here.

00:09:10 ◼   ► I would be shocked if they just didn't have the data.

00:09:12 ◼   ► And yes, what they could do is, as you say, they could also do surveys and overlap them, like to make sure that that data statistic matches.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Yeah, it's validation, right?

00:09:20 ◼   ► To make, make sure that the number that you see, because it could be that like, well, when you do Apple, if you did a survey, you might realize, oh, we do Apple ID matching about 10.

00:09:27 ◼   ► It's a little, it's a little high.

00:09:29 ◼   ► It's 10% high or whatever.

00:09:30 ◼   ► And then you, you know, that, and you can, that helps you guide, you know, right and get a better idea of what the real number is.

00:09:36 ◼   ► Because you're like, oh, you know, 0.6% of people set up a new Apple ID every time they get a new product for whatever reason.

00:09:43 ◼   ► You know, you can just kind of like work stuff out that way.

00:09:46 ◼   ► Well, that's how they get you.

00:09:46 ◼   ► That's how they get you is if you just always move and always shifting your Apple IDs.

00:09:50 ◼   ► No one can catch me.

00:09:51 ◼   ► I'm on my, I'm on my sixth.

00:09:54 ◼   ► I'm a ghost in the system.

00:09:55 ◼   ► No one can catch me.

00:09:58 ◼   ► No one can catch me.

00:09:59 ◼   ► I also just wanted to mention that Jason joined Connected last week.

00:10:03 ◼   ► If you want more of us, but with a Stephen flavor and also more hijinks, which is just typically is the way that the show goes.

00:10:15 ◼   ► For example, during the show last week,

00:10:20 ◼   ► I logged into Stephen's Cotton Bureau store and changed the colors of the t-shirts that you have for sale because I wanted something specific.

00:10:26 ◼   ► And I discovered that one of the hard drives on my Raid head was going to die.

00:10:32 ◼   ► During the show.

00:10:33 ◼   ► Because Soft Raid has a spooky feature where it says expected to fail in the next 60 days.

00:10:40 ◼   ► And so I had to, I had to, I bought a hard drive while we were on the show.

00:10:45 ◼   ► So that was fun.

00:10:47 ◼   ► Connected is a very different show to Upgrade, even though we ostensibly talk about the same things.

00:10:52 ◼   ► When we let it be.

00:10:53 ◼   ► There is that moment where you and I start talking and it just becomes Upgrade, as you mentioned.

00:10:57 ◼   ► Well, that's a problem, yes.

00:10:57 ◼   ► During the show, it just suddenly becomes Upgrade.

00:11:00 ◼   ► And then we have to say, oh, Stephen is also here.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Let's round up some rumors, Jason.

00:11:05 ◼   ► It's time for Rumor Roundup.

00:11:07 ◼   ► MacRumors is sharing a report from Digitimes that suggests that the A18 Pro MacBook Air could have a starting price of between $599 to $699.

00:11:20 ◼   ► It would feature a 12.9 inch display, which is smaller than the current 13.6 inch MacBook Air.

00:11:27 ◼   ► And according to the manufacturing timelines that they have seen, they still would expect a targeted late 2025, early 2026 release.

00:11:38 ◼   ► You'll love to see it.

00:11:39 ◼   ► What do you think about that price?

00:11:41 ◼   ► You'll love to see it.

00:11:42 ◼   ► You'll love to see it.

00:11:43 ◼   ► Well, I mean, we, I think in our conversations about it, we've been talking about it in terms of the M1 MacBook Air at Walmart.

00:11:51 ◼   ► Yep.

00:11:51 ◼   ► Which has been, like, I think it's been like $699 and $649, and I think I've seen it at $599.

00:12:01 ◼   ► So, I mean, okay.

00:12:04 ◼   ► Well, but often what we want, it doesn't bear out.

00:12:07 ◼   ► I know, I know, but if you're thinking of what slot does it fit in, because Apple kind of likes their slots, I will say Digitimes is a supply chain story more than it is a marketing story.

00:12:18 ◼   ► And so price is not, like, what they're doing is they're estimating based on, maybe somebody has said, we want the price, you know, the bill of materials to be this because, but, like, I don't think anybody.

00:12:31 ◼   ► Well, I think that's why they're giving a full $100 range.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Yeah, there is a range there.

00:12:36 ◼   ► But, like, I figure it is not incredibly complicated if you see Apple bill of materials all the time, that if you get a new one, you can probably estimate what you would expect it to be priced at.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And it's going to start high, and then it's going to go low, probably, depending on what they use.

00:12:52 ◼   ► I mean, I love the price.

00:12:53 ◼   ► I think this is it.

00:12:54 ◼   ► I think this is what they want.

00:12:55 ◼   ► I think what they want is something that's like the Walmart M1 Air.

00:12:59 ◼   ► I think that they found that there is a value in a product that is, I mean, what we said the last time, and I really do believe this, is I think Apple in the Intel era felt like, Apple's very comfortable, obviously, not going down to be the low price leader.

00:13:17 ◼   ► That's a thing I used to say all the time.

00:13:18 ◼   ► Apple is not your low price leader.

00:13:19 ◼   ► People would be like, why is Apple not competing with this low price of tech product?

00:13:24 ◼   ► It's like, it's not their job.

00:13:25 ◼   ► Like, they don't want to do it.

00:13:26 ◼   ► They don't want to do it.

00:13:27 ◼   ► They want to make money.

00:13:28 ◼   ► They want to make products that make money.

00:13:29 ◼   ► And I think it's fair to say that Apple has some standards about quality, and that they may be, they are, and look, they're higher than other companies.

00:13:37 ◼   ► They are.

00:13:37 ◼   ► Apple's like, we think that the best thing is here, and we won't go below it, even to chase users because we don't like the experience there.

00:13:46 ◼   ► You can like it or dislike it, but I think that it's true that Apple has just decided they're going to make these products that are nice, and they don't want their brand to be like, well, I got a crappy Apple.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Nobody wants that.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Nobody wants that.

00:13:57 ◼   ► So, you got it.

00:14:01 ◼   ► So, I think with Apple Silicon, they have realized, and with the M1 Air still being viable, I think they've realized Apple Silicon completely changes where that line can be drawn, and that allows them to go down below $999 for the Air.

00:14:20 ◼   ► So, I think that's what's going on here.

00:14:22 ◼   ► And I think it's great, because I do think there's a market down there who would love to buy a Mac laptop and doesn't want to buy a Mac laptop for $999, and they've found with their experimentation with Walmart, especially, and maybe with some education pricing on the MacBook Air and things like that, so great.

00:14:42 ◼   ► I mean, I think it would be great if it's $599 or $699 or $649.

00:14:48 ◼   ► I think that would be, I mean, right.

00:14:49 ◼   ► I mean, right now, to get a Mac laptop, in education, it's $899.

00:14:54 ◼   ► I mean, there's a lot of space there for something cheaper that's still viable.

00:15:00 ◼   ► And the fact is that, yeah, it's going to also be an upsell product.

00:15:03 ◼   ► They're going to say, you can get this, but it doesn't have Thunderbolt, and it doesn't have this, and it doesn't have that, and its screen's a little bit smaller, because the rumor is it's a 12.9 instead of a 13.6.

00:15:13 ◼   ► So, it's just a little bit less.

00:15:15 ◼   ► What do you think, there's iPad screens?

00:15:17 ◼   ► Like, where is that coming from?

00:15:18 ◼   ► Because I just looked, the M1 was 13.3.

00:15:21 ◼   ► So, the last screen that I confined, which was a 12.9, was like the old iPad Pro screens.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:15:29 ◼   ► Also, I'll say this, the M1 was the last of, wasn't the M1 the last MacBook Air to have the, like the, didn't the bezel shrink with the M2?

00:15:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:41 ◼   ► I mean, it doesn't have the silver bezel anymore.

00:15:42 ◼   ► That was the previous non-retna.

00:15:44 ◼   ► The bezel shrunk before that.

00:15:46 ◼   ► They did it, but on the Intel.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Okay.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Well, so, my other feeling here is if it's 12.9, it may actually be physically smaller.

00:15:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:53 ◼   ► Like, that is, and there are, you know, some rumors to suggest that it's meant to be thinner and lighter and smaller and whatever.

00:16:00 ◼   ► I mean, the fact is, getting a little board with a system on a chip on it and some basic IO is, that thing is tiny in the MacBook Air.

00:16:11 ◼   ► It would be tiny in this, too.

00:16:12 ◼   ► There's not much computer in a computer these days, so they can make it real small if they want to.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Yeah, the, well, I should say, the bezel shrunk on the MacBook Air, yeah, the Intel one.

00:16:24 ◼   ► It was the last change that they made, and I think they made the whole thing smaller because it was always a 13.3-inch display.

00:16:31 ◼   ► So, you used to have the big, thick, silver display, and then they made that one final update to the MacBook Air when they were like,

00:16:38 ◼   ► Okay, we actually can't get rid of this product.

00:16:40 ◼   ► They did the Retina MacBook Air.

00:16:41 ◼   ► They put Retina in it.

00:16:42 ◼   ► And it got, like, a thin black bezel and it got rid of the silver bezel.

00:16:46 ◼   ► Yes.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And my expectation, I'm trying to look through the, you know, the Apple have their old comparison tool.

00:16:52 ◼   ► I expect they made the whole thing smaller.

00:16:55 ◼   ► Yes, they did.

00:16:57 ◼   ► They made the product smaller.

00:16:59 ◼   ► So, we'll see.

00:17:00 ◼   ► I mean, it could be a smaller computer or it could be just a bigger bezel because for that price, maybe you just get a bigger bezel and a smaller screen.

00:17:09 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:17:10 ◼   ► And that gives them the upsell, right, to say, look, you know, you don't want the $699.

00:17:15 ◼   ► If you're thinking of a $999 MacBook Air and you go, well, you also make this thing for $699 and you look at it, they want people to feel like they're losing something, right?

00:17:23 ◼   ► Because you want to be able to prevent them from going down and also, you know, give a reason to go up off of $699 if you're shopping.

00:17:33 ◼   ► And one of the ways that Apple communicates price, if you ignore the mini, is screen size.

00:17:40 ◼   ► Like, the other products, like with the phones and stuff, you want a bigger screen, you pay more money, you pay more money, you get a bigger screen.

00:17:46 ◼   ► It's probably one of the reasons that the iPhone mini didn't work out was because that just didn't work in people's minds.

00:17:52 ◼   ► Even in the air, there are the smaller and larger screens and you pay more.

00:17:56 ◼   ► You just do.

00:17:57 ◼   ► So, sure, $12.9.

00:18:00 ◼   ► Why not?

00:18:01 ◼   ► I mean, I love that price.

00:18:02 ◼   ► I think it's great.

00:18:02 ◼   ► I think we, who knows?

00:18:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:06 ◼   ► Who knows how the market will react?

00:18:08 ◼   ► But my just gut feeling is having another product down there, another laptop down there, is going to reach people.

00:18:15 ◼   ► That's why I like that Walmart MacBook Air story so much, is they're reaching people who maybe wouldn't have bought a Mac before.

00:18:22 ◼   ► Speaking of screen sizes, MacRumors is also reporting on evidence found in the code of iOS 26 that suggests that the Apple Watch Ultra will be getting a bigger screen this year.

00:18:32 ◼   ► The resolution appears to be increasing from 410 by 502 to 422 by 514.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Very specific resolutions on the Apple Watch Ultra.

00:18:42 ◼   ► Of course, this follows the Series 10, which got a bigger screen.

00:18:46 ◼   ► It is unknown if the watch itself will get bigger.

00:18:48 ◼   ► Hopefully not.

00:18:49 ◼   ► Or they just increase the screen size, which I reckon they'll do.

00:18:52 ◼   ► Because they, you know, the case bulges out to the sides, right?

00:18:57 ◼   ► They could open it up, kind of what they did with the Series 10.

00:19:00 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:19:01 ◼   ► But yeah, it looks like the Ultra 3 is an actual product change instead of just, you know, case change.

00:19:08 ◼   ► And they're actually going to make something meaningful this year.

00:19:11 ◼   ► 11,000 more dots on that little tiny screen.

00:19:14 ◼   ► It's a lot of dots, Jason.

00:19:15 ◼   ► It's a lot of dots.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And Mark Gurman is reporting in his newsletter about Apple's progress with the new App Intents feature that will power some Apple Intelligence features.

00:19:24 ◼   ► So as a recap, Apple's vision that was unveiled at WWDC 2024 would see a user being able to communicate with Siri to ask their phone to do something.

00:19:34 ◼   ► So you've got the personal context.

00:19:36 ◼   ► That's the thing we focus on the most, right?

00:19:38 ◼   ► Like Siri knowing stuff about you.

00:19:40 ◼   ► But this is also, say, for example, you could ask your iPhone to find a photo from your photo library, crop it, and email it to a contact, right?

00:19:49 ◼   ► And it would just be able to go ahead and do all of that for you because the phone understands the actions that an app can do and can kind of pass them together.

00:19:57 ◼   ► And it can even work across different applications, right?

00:20:00 ◼   ► So you work with Photos, Mail, that kind of thing.

00:20:02 ◼   ► Gurman reports that Apple is now planning to ship this alongside the bigger personalized Siri overhaul that is currently set for spring of next year.

00:20:12 ◼   ► However, there is concern internally about a few things.

00:20:16 ◼   ► One is developer adoption, which would hold the feature back, obviously.

00:20:19 ◼   ► And this could be through disinterest.

00:20:21 ◼   ► Or they might actually position some security issues like banking apps and health apps, for example, might not want from a customer risk perspective to have anything exposed to the system that they're not confident in.

00:20:38 ◼   ► Apparently, Apple, there are people inside of Apple that are also hoping that a better Siri overall, right?

00:20:43 ◼   ► So like this big rebuild that we've been talking about, could lead to less misunderstanding of user intent.

00:20:49 ◼   ► Because obviously, if you ask your phone to do something for you, it's much more destructive if the command is misunderstood, right?

00:20:55 ◼   ► If you ask your iPhone right now, what's the time of the Super Bowl?

00:20:59 ◼   ► And it gets that wrong.

00:21:00 ◼   ► That's one thing.

00:21:01 ◼   ► If you ask it to archive an email for you and archives your entire email inbox, different.

00:21:07 ◼   ► You know?

00:21:08 ◼   ► Not as good.

00:21:09 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:21:10 ◼   ► And to make sure they're doing this correctly, Apple is working on launching it with their own apps and some third-party apps as well.

00:21:17 ◼   ► It seems that they want to be able to control the experience to some extent initially.

00:21:21 ◼   ► And some of the partners that Mark mentions is Uber, YouTube, Amazon, and a bunch of meta apps, which was interesting to me, and some games.

00:21:32 ◼   ► My kind of read on looking at Mark's report here is this feels very much like a fingers crossed kind of feature rollout.

00:21:42 ◼   ► Like, maybe if developers are working, and hopefully if Siri's better, this will maybe work?

00:21:47 ◼   ► Like, I don't feel very confident in this reading this report.

00:21:51 ◼   ► Well, I mean, my read on it was that this isn't that big a thing, and that a lot of this is kind of a rehash by Gurman.

00:22:00 ◼   ► Because this is App Intense.

00:22:02 ◼   ► I mean, the way the piece is pitched is very much like, oh, Apple could change everything.

00:22:09 ◼   ► But that's a very pundit kind of take, built around what we already know.

00:22:13 ◼   ► I mean, he's got some new scraps here.

00:22:15 ◼   ► But, like, what we're talking about is App Intense.

00:22:18 ◼   ► App Intense are used in shortcuts.

00:22:20 ◼   ► App Intense are used in the new Spotlight on the Mac to be able to, you know, that's how you can send a message from Spotlight, is you're using an App Intent there.

00:22:29 ◼   ► So App Intense are supposed to be used with new Siri to let new Siri do stuff.

00:22:35 ◼   ► It is this, you know, it is the idea of letting AI stuff, you know, have tools to perform actions for you by knowing there are apps that controls, right?

00:22:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:47 ◼   ► So that's sort of, I mean, I think if you went back to our podcast for WWDC24, we talked about this then, right?

00:22:57 ◼   ► Like, this has always been the promise of this feature.

00:23:01 ◼   ► And you're right, it is very much fingers crossed, because this is a thing they haven't been able to ship, and the stakes are high.

00:23:07 ◼   ► I do wonder, I mean, he mentions banking apps, and that makes a lot of sense.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Although I wonder, like, if I'm a bank, which is, I'm not a bank, I'm a human, but if I was a bank or a person who ran a bank, and they were talking about tools to automate, let other apps control your banking experience and do stuff with your banking app, I would just say no, right?

00:23:31 ◼   ► And that wouldn't be, here's the thing, like, that isn't about Siri.

00:23:35 ◼   ► Like, if you said, what we want to do, the boffins come in, right?

00:23:41 ◼   ► And come to boffins, yeah.

00:23:42 ◼   ► Bring in the boffins for your bank, your old bank that you used to work at.

00:23:46 ◼   ► They bring in the boffins to the app office, right?

00:23:49 ◼   ► And the boffins are like, we got great news.

00:23:52 ◼   ► We got this App Intense thing.

00:23:53 ◼   ► We're going to be able to automate everything, and our customers are going to be able to, like, check their balance.

00:23:59 ◼   ► And I'd say, yeah, yeah, great, great, great, and transfer money, and I'd be like, hmm, and take out money, and be like, hmm.

00:24:07 ◼   ► And they'd say whether, you know, it would be automated.

00:24:11 ◼   ► It would be like they could write a script that does it.

00:24:13 ◼   ► They could have a spotlight thing that did it, or the AI on the system would do it.

00:24:19 ◼   ► I would just say no, and it wouldn't be about the AI.

00:24:22 ◼   ► It would be, I mean, these bank apps, I don't know how your bank app works, but my bank app, like,

00:24:29 ◼   ► if you leave it or leave it for a moment, it's like, well, you're locked out.

00:24:34 ◼   ► That's it.

00:24:34 ◼   ► We're done.

00:24:35 ◼   ► Because they're deathly afraid of security issues with it.

00:24:39 ◼   ► You know, there are other apps that treat security that way that I laugh at.

00:24:43 ◼   ► I was logging into an airline website and was reminded that this particular airline thinks it's a bank.

00:24:51 ◼   ► And it's like, answer these security questions.

00:24:53 ◼   ► I'm like, you're an airline.

00:24:54 ◼   ► What are you doing?

00:24:56 ◼   ► But banks, it actually matters because money is on the line here.

00:24:59 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I think he's right to say banks would be concerned, and Apple might want to say, like, we don't want this category using this stuff.

00:25:08 ◼   ► But is that category really going to embrace this?

00:25:11 ◼   ► I mean, maybe you're saving them from themselves at that point if you're Apple, because I think putting automation tools on things like transferring money and stuff is probably just a bad idea in general.

00:25:21 ◼   ► You should have to do that yourself, in my opinion.

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00:27:31 ◼   ► All right, let's go on a little journey.

00:27:34 ◼   ► It's time to lawyer up.

00:27:35 ◼   ► I think this is a good, decent lawyer up segment.

00:27:38 ◼   ► Oh, a little journey.

00:27:41 ◼   ► You got me excited, but now you're bringing me down, I think.

00:27:43 ◼   ► We're going to go on a little journey.

00:27:44 ◼   ► So we're going to start off Wednesday morning of last week where Apple makes two announcements.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Announcement number one, they increased their investment in U.S. manufacturing.

00:27:54 ◼   ► Apple had previously committed to $500 billion to be spent over the next four years.

00:27:59 ◼   ► They added another $100 billion onto that.

00:28:01 ◼   ► So we're now up to $600 billion committed to improving U.S. manufacturing.

00:28:05 ◼   ► With that, they have launched the American Manufacturing Program with the aim to move more of their manufacturing needs to the USA.

00:28:14 ◼   ► As part of this, they are increasing investment in companies that can help them produce, let's just say, chips in the U.S.

00:28:21 ◼   ► It's like chips for all kinds of stuff.

00:28:22 ◼   ► Genuinely, like across the gamut, like from Apple Silicon down to like tiny little chips that they need to, you know, regulate displays or whatever.

00:28:31 ◼   ► Trying to produce more stuff and they're investing in a bunch of companies across the stack that can help them do that.

00:28:38 ◼   ► There's even one reference in there to like a partnership with Samsung over some brand new technology that they're very cagey about, but it will be produced in the U.S.

00:28:46 ◼   ► Yeah, at a factory in Texas, yeah.

00:28:48 ◼   ► Which is really interesting.

00:28:49 ◼   ► But the big recipient of the increase goes to Corning.

00:28:53 ◼   ► This is like a specific press release, the second one, because this is actually quite monumental.

00:28:58 ◼   ► Apple is expanding its relationship with the glass manufacturer to see 100% of iPhone and Apple Watch glass to be produced in the USA.

00:29:06 ◼   ► In a read from the press release here, Corning is creating the world's largest and most advanced smartphone glass production line at the Harrodsberg facility.

00:29:14 ◼   ► Corning will now dedicate this entire facility to manufacturing for Apple, which will increase Corning's manufacturing and engineering workforce in Kentucky by 50%.

00:29:24 ◼   ► And this is worldwide.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Originally, I was like, oh, is this just the glass for iPhone and Apple Watch for the U.S.?

00:29:31 ◼   ► No, all of the all of the ceramic shield and stuff, everything is going to be produced in the USA.

00:29:37 ◼   ► 100%.

00:29:39 ◼   ► So I thought like this part is cool on the face of it.

00:29:43 ◼   ► If you can do this, why would you not do this?

00:29:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I think I think the idea that there definitely is a feeling in the United States and it's not actually one party.

00:29:54 ◼   ► It is both parties.

00:29:55 ◼   ► It is lots of people.

00:29:56 ◼   ► It's gone through the last few administrations feeling that our shift away from manufacturing in the U.S.

00:30:03 ◼   ► was a mistake and that they want more manufacturing back in the U.S.

00:30:07 ◼   ► That's why the Chips Act passed in the last administration, a bipartisan act to make more chips in the U.S.

00:30:16 ◼   ► Apple has always sort of proudly pointed at portions of the products that are made in America.

00:30:21 ◼   ► And so, you know, if if the environment is generally trending in the way of the United States would really like it if American companies like Apple would make more stuff in America, just like how there are lots of non-American car manufacturers who assemble their cars for the U.S.

00:30:41 ◼   ► market in the U.S.

00:30:43 ◼   ► It's the same kind of idea.

00:30:44 ◼   ► So this is not unreasonable.

00:30:48 ◼   ► It's different for Apple in some ways, although Corning was always one of Apple's great partners.

00:30:52 ◼   ► Apple has, you know, Apple and Corning have been making iPhone glass since basically the beginning.

00:30:58 ◼   ► And it's it's been a fruitful partnership for them.

00:31:02 ◼   ► And so it's not surprising that they would like they developed ceramic shield together.

00:31:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:08 ◼   ► For them to reach out to Corning and say Corning is a place that we can, you know, we can connect with them first off.

00:31:15 ◼   ► Like that's an that's an easy one for them to say, let's just go all in on Corning because they have such a good relationship.

00:31:20 ◼   ► In the press release, it says that 100 percent of the cover glass will be made in the U.S. for the first time.

00:31:25 ◼   ► So while they were working with Corning, my expectation is maybe some of it was being produced in other countries with Corning's IP, et cetera, et cetera.

00:31:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:34 ◼   ► Or Corning's factories somewhere else.

00:31:37 ◼   ► I don't know if Corning is 100 percent in the U.S., right?

00:31:39 ◼   ► Great point.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Great point.

00:31:40 ◼   ► Great point.

00:31:40 ◼   ► Later that day.

00:31:42 ◼   ► And then pivot.

00:31:44 ◼   ► So all good news, right?

00:31:45 ◼   ► You can feel whatever you want to feel about the American administration, right?

00:31:51 ◼   ► Like you can feel whatever you want to feel about it.

00:31:53 ◼   ► But I just think the idea of Apple investing in American manufacture is not a bad thing.

00:31:59 ◼   ► Like I don't think that is inherently a bad thing.

00:32:01 ◼   ► It's right.

00:32:02 ◼   ► It is a thing.

00:32:03 ◼   ► It will create jobs in America.

00:32:04 ◼   ► Sure, there'll be disruption in other places.

00:32:07 ◼   ► But like I don't mean to start whatever, but like I think it's fine, right?

00:32:11 ◼   ► Like it's to me on the face of that is like fine.

00:32:14 ◼   ► Why not?

00:32:16 ◼   ► Later that day, Tim Cook appeared at a White House media briefing where President Trump

00:32:20 ◼   ► got to speak about the increase in U.S. manufacturing.

00:32:23 ◼   ► There was also this like, you know, you can see, Tim, if you look at the imagery of the

00:32:29 ◼   ► videos and stuff, I'll have some links in the show notes.

00:32:31 ◼   ► There's some colorful language in some of the posts that I'll include in the show notes,

00:32:35 ◼   ► just an FYI, but they'll be in there because they're-

00:32:37 ◼   ► It's because the president used some colorful language during that availability.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Yes, he actually also uses some colorful language, which that is all, that's very

00:32:45 ◼   ► interesting to me that that keeps happening.

00:32:46 ◼   ► But that does keep happening.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Like Tim is standing in front of these like boards, which is some of the graphics that

00:32:53 ◼   ► they use in the poster.

00:32:55 ◼   ► Like obviously he'd been presenting Apple's increase, da-da-da-da-da.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And then, so later this, so yeah, so Trump got to speak about this increase as well.

00:33:06 ◼   ► At this event, Tim Cook presented Trump with a commemorative trophy.

00:33:11 ◼   ► Yes.

00:33:12 ◼   ► It was made of glass from Corning and it was displayed on a, quote, 24 karat gold base.

00:33:18 ◼   ► Know your audience.

00:33:20 ◼   ► The trophy was presented in a box with a big Apple logo on it that Tim Cook struggled

00:33:24 ◼   ► to open, which I thought was hilarious.

00:33:25 ◼   ► Yes, and struggled to assemble.

00:33:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:28 ◼   ► Oh, he really did, didn't he?

00:33:29 ◼   ► I forgot about that.

00:33:30 ◼   ► He did.

00:33:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:30 ◼   ► Cook mentions that-

00:33:32 ◼   ► He struggled so much to assemble it that some of the late night comedy shows did a fast wipe.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Like, we got to take three seconds out here because this is going on too long.

00:33:41 ◼   ► They just did a fast video wipe.

00:33:43 ◼   ► And I, I had already seen the full video and I was like, oh yeah, Tim, they're not going

00:33:47 ◼   ► to show Tim struggling to get his, his, uh, trophy, uh, assembled together.

00:33:51 ◼   ► Uh, Tim mentioned that the trophy was designed by somebody who used to work in Marine, in the

00:33:56 ◼   ► Marine Corps.

00:33:56 ◼   ► He used to be in the Marine Corps, works at Apple.

00:33:58 ◼   ► Um, Cook also makes a presentation.

00:34:02 ◼   ► Uh, and then you, there are other clips where, um, Tim Cook is like hanging around.

00:34:09 ◼   ► Like he's just, he's there, right?

00:34:10 ◼   ► Like he was part of his briefing.

00:34:11 ◼   ► Well, he can't escape, right?

00:34:13 ◼   ► Because he's part of the briefing, right?

00:34:14 ◼   ► So like everybody-

00:34:15 ◼   ► Like Trump's on one side, Vance is on the other side.

00:34:16 ◼   ► There's like people in the middle and Tim Cook and Tim Cook is pinned in up against the

00:34:19 ◼   ► wall in the Oval Office.

00:34:20 ◼   ► He can't, he cannot escape.

00:34:21 ◼   ► Then there's a part where, um, where Trump is taking questions from the media and Tim Cook

00:34:29 ◼   ► is like, you know, he'll look to Trump when he's talking and he'll look to the media when

00:34:34 ◼   ► they're talking and you can watch him just looking backwards and forwards as the media

00:34:38 ◼   ► is asking the president about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

00:34:42 ◼   ► And Tim Cook is just standing there looking side to side, side to side with his, I would

00:34:47 ◼   ► say at this point, patented, uh, straight face that he has shown in many, um, images and

00:34:54 ◼   ► video over the last six months.

00:34:57 ◼   ► The resting Tim face.

00:34:58 ◼   ► Yes, it is.

00:34:58 ◼   ► We all know it.

00:34:59 ◼   ► Later in the day.

00:35:01 ◼   ► We're not done.

00:35:01 ◼   ► Later in the day.

00:35:03 ◼   ► The journey continues.

00:35:04 ◼   ► President Trump announced that there will be a 100% tariff on chips and semiconductors

00:35:09 ◼   ► imported in the U.S.

00:35:10 ◼   ► Like if you're importing them in, like any product that has them, unless you are manufacturing

00:35:16 ◼   ► in the U.S.

00:35:17 ◼   ► Not those chips, because those chips are coming from outside the U.S.

00:35:21 ◼   ► But if the U.S.

00:35:22 ◼   ► has decided you are a friendly company that makes things in the U.S.

00:35:26 ◼   ► and overseas, then they will waive the tariff.

00:35:30 ◼   ► For example, if you make glass for your iPhone, then you can import as many semiconductors for

00:35:38 ◼   ► that iPhone as you like.

00:35:40 ◼   ► and you will not be tariffed on those.

00:35:42 ◼   ► Oh, that means if you make 100% of them, then you would be able to import for all of

00:35:48 ◼   ► them.

00:35:48 ◼   ► I don't actually think it is.

00:35:50 ◼   ► No, I don't even think it is.

00:35:53 ◼   ► I don't think there's math in this.

00:35:54 ◼   ► I don't think there's math in this.

00:35:55 ◼   ► I think this is literally if the U.S.

00:35:57 ◼   ► says so.

00:35:58 ◼   ► deems you a friend who is doing things in the U.S., you are then waived of the tariff.

00:36:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:05 ◼   ► So it's, you know.

00:36:07 ◼   ► So right now, and I will state.

00:36:10 ◼   ► Right now, Apple doesn't need to pay any of these new tariffs because they're doing

00:36:16 ◼   ► all this work in.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Now, the thing is, like, surely $500 billion worth of investment was enough, but they've

00:36:24 ◼   ► added another $100 billion onto the top of that.

00:36:26 ◼   ► And I guess Apple's also getting to do some of the things that they want to do in the meantime.

00:36:30 ◼   ► Like, I'll also link to a piece that John Gruber wrote where there is a part of that

00:36:35 ◼   ► which I, we're going to get into, obviously, the big thoughts of this, but like, which I

00:36:38 ◼   ► do agree with John, which is like, Tim Cook probably wants Apple to be producing more stuff

00:36:42 ◼   ► in America anyway.

00:36:43 ◼   ► And now he is being pushed to do that because that is diversification of the supply chain,

00:36:49 ◼   ► which they've been doing.

00:36:50 ◼   ► Right, turns out.

00:36:50 ◼   ► So if there are parts of the supply chain that they can diversify and it is effective for them,

00:36:57 ◼   ► they can do it.

00:36:57 ◼   ► And one of the ways I guess it becomes cost effective is would the product price increase

00:37:02 ◼   ► if you didn't do it?

00:37:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:04 ◼   ► So like, it's going to be more expensive, my assumption is, to produce all of your glass

00:37:10 ◼   ► in America.

00:37:11 ◼   ► Otherwise, why wouldn't you have been doing it before?

00:37:13 ◼   ► But if now all of the products that have that glass would otherwise be more expensive because

00:37:17 ◼   ► they're tariffed, it makes it an easier thing to do.

00:37:19 ◼   ► So.

00:37:19 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:37:20 ◼   ► Serves a couple of purposes, business purposes.

00:37:22 ◼   ► But the news of the week is the trophy.

00:37:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:26 ◼   ► That's the actual news, I think.

00:37:28 ◼   ► More than anything else, I think the thing that people are getting really hung up on

00:37:33 ◼   ► is the trophy.

00:37:35 ◼   ► I guess we'll call it a trophy.

00:37:37 ◼   ► I don't really know what else you would call it.

00:37:39 ◼   ► It's a commemorative item which commemorates Apple's commitment to American manufacture,

00:37:45 ◼   ► presented to the president, signed by Tim Cook, with a big Apple logo on it.

00:37:49 ◼   ► I will say, ugly trophy, in my opinion.

00:37:52 ◼   ► Don't actually think it looks very nice.

00:37:53 ◼   ► I think there's lots of different designs that they could have made for that trophy,

00:37:58 ◼   ► irrespective of the gold.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I just don't think that the disc.

00:38:01 ◼   ► I would say it's very easy to create your own gemmoji of this trophy and send it to all

00:38:06 ◼   ► of your friends to grief on them, which I've been doing for the last few days.

00:38:09 ◼   ► What do you think about the trophy, Jason?

00:38:11 ◼   ► I mean, I think it's tricky because you're essentially trying to please a guy and you don't

00:38:25 ◼   ► know whether this will please him or not, right?

00:38:28 ◼   ► I think Apple, you know, did its best here to, we got a box and we're going to assemble this

00:38:33 ◼   ► trophy and it's got gold and it's got corning.

00:38:35 ◼   ► And, you know, I don't, I don't think, you know, they wanted something symbolic.

00:38:41 ◼   ► It does definitely feel like what, what is it exactly you need us to do?

00:38:45 ◼   ► How do we need to debase ourselves in order to get you to give us what we want?

00:38:54 ◼   ► And I've said it before and I'll say it again, what politicians in general, not just Trump,

00:39:02 ◼   ► but politicians in general want is to have victories that make them look good.

00:39:09 ◼   ► And so if you're trying to please them, you try to give them ways that make them look good.

00:39:15 ◼   ► And whether that's the, I mean, one of the reasons the trophy looks like that is because

00:39:19 ◼   ► they wanted it to be corning glass because they wanted corning to be involved in some

00:39:23 ◼   ► way.

00:39:23 ◼   ► And then somebody said, and gold because he likes gold.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Let's do that.

00:39:28 ◼   ► We'll put some gold on there too.

00:39:32 ◼   ► Look, I mean, this is, this is Tim Cook groveling, right?

00:39:42 ◼   ► This is Tim Cook debasing himself because he feels he, because he needs to, because, and

00:39:49 ◼   ► this is, okay.

00:39:50 ◼   ► All right.

00:39:51 ◼   ► I, I, I will.

00:39:52 ◼   ► How many fourth starts are the two of us going to go through?

00:39:55 ◼   ► All right.

00:39:57 ◼   ► Well, I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm, it's like a pillow.

00:39:59 ◼   ► I'm just creating a soft pillow, uh, for this that I'm going to say here, which is, well,

00:40:04 ◼   ► I've seen a lot of people who've said stuff like, obviously Tim Cook loves Trump.

00:40:09 ◼   ► I defy you to look at Tim Cook and think he enjoys being there.

00:40:12 ◼   ► Uh, I think Tim Cook and everything he said, I think he hates this, but I think, I think he

00:40:17 ◼   ► has the CEO of a, uh, incredibly valuable publicly held profit generation corporation, capitalist

00:40:25 ◼   ► corporation, uh, feels like he needs to do this for the business that, that, that making

00:40:31 ◼   ► an enemy of a president of the United States who has infinite ways of punishing enemies

00:40:36 ◼   ► and ruining their businesses is not a thing he's interested in doing.

00:40:39 ◼   ► He wants to kind of go along to get along and you can not like that.

00:40:43 ◼   ► I don't, I don't like how he has groveled.

00:40:46 ◼   ► I don't like how this, how he has debased himself here, but I understand why he's doing

00:40:51 ◼   ► it, and so, um, if you want to be mad at him, be mad at him.

00:40:57 ◼   ► If you want to be disappointed in him, I think you can absolutely be disappointed in him.

00:41:02 ◼   ► But what I keep coming back to is what I view as misplaced anger because Tim Cook groveling

00:41:12 ◼   ► in the Oval Office and giving the president a, a, a, a gaudy bobble is a symptom.

00:41:20 ◼   ► It's not the disease.

00:41:23 ◼   ► It doesn't mean, the trophy doesn't mean anything.

00:41:25 ◼   ► It, it, it, it is all part, and this is what I liked about Gruber's piece is this is all part

00:41:33 ◼   ► part of the failure of America.

00:41:36 ◼   ► Yes.

00:41:37 ◼   ► The fact that it is a system so corrupt, uh...

00:41:43 ◼   ► If you don't mind, Jason, don't hate the play, hate the game.

00:41:46 ◼   ► I mean, so, so one, it's a, it's a corrupt system and it's a corrupt administration.

00:41:50 ◼   ► They want, you know, they are enriching themselves.

00:41:54 ◼   ► They will do whatever they want and they want everybody to, to, to play ball with them.

00:41:58 ◼   ► They've been given basically kind of freedom to do whatever they want by the courts, which

00:42:03 ◼   ► they control, the legislature they control.

00:42:05 ◼   ► So, essentially, you'd give them what they want or they hurt you.

00:42:10 ◼   ► And, and that is, is that a corrupt, unjust system?

00:42:12 ◼   ► It is.

00:42:13 ◼   ► But again, I, I can be disappointed and hate the, you know, what, what Tim Cook did.

00:42:20 ◼   ► But I think if, where I pile my anger is Tim Cook or Apple, I am piling my anger in the

00:42:26 ◼   ► wrong area.

00:42:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:28 ◼   ► And then second, I will also say, let's also, so now that we've talked about the government,

00:42:36 ◼   ► let's also talk about capitalism.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Because, so, you know, everybody get out your notebooks and it's, no.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Um, what I said before, Tim Cook is the CEO of a profit-seeking corporation.

00:42:49 ◼   ► And that is something that we, I think, I thought everybody got reminded at earlier this

00:42:53 ◼   ► year, but like Apple is a giant capitalist enterprise who's designed to maximize shareholder

00:42:58 ◼   ► revenue and generate enormous profits.

00:43:01 ◼   ► And as you pointed out, um, quite rightly, um, building things in America instead of getting

00:43:07 ◼   ► a hundred percent tariff is a thing that makes financial sense.

00:43:11 ◼   ► And so you do it.

00:43:12 ◼   ► Making the president of the United States a trophy that is worthless and maybe he doesn't even

00:43:16 ◼   ► care about, but it gets, it, it, it allows him to feel good and move his attention away

00:43:22 ◼   ► from Apple to someone else so that Apple can continue to throw off enormous profits every

00:43:27 ◼   ► quarter is the goal for them.

00:43:30 ◼   ► And you don't have to, again, none of this is things that people have to like.

00:43:34 ◼   ► You can like it.

00:43:34 ◼   ► You can dislike it.

00:43:35 ◼   ► Your feelings are yours.

00:43:36 ◼   ► And I think they're perfectly valid, but I think let's keep in mind what the problem is

00:43:45 ◼   ► here.

00:43:45 ◼   ► And, and I have seen some people who, in my opinion, are acting like Tim Cook is the

00:43:53 ◼   ► problem and Apple is the problem.

00:43:55 ◼   ► And I'm not happy about Tim Cook having to do this, but I do kind of think he had to do

00:44:00 ◼   ► it.

00:44:00 ◼   ► I don't blame him.

00:44:01 ◼   ► I don't blame him.

00:44:02 ◼   ► I just don't, I can't, I don't know what you're supposed to do.

00:44:05 ◼   ► I wouldn't want that job.

00:44:07 ◼   ► No.

00:44:07 ◼   ► I wouldn't want to do it.

00:44:08 ◼   ► I wouldn't want to do it.

00:44:10 ◼   ► I remember I had, I had a, uh, I was told to do something once that I, I absolutely

00:44:14 ◼   ► hated in, in one of my previous jobs.

00:44:16 ◼   ► And I mean, and I was, I was young and you know, for whatever reason, I basically said

00:44:22 ◼   ► to my boss, you got to order me to do this because I'm not going to, you need to basically

00:44:26 ◼   ► say you have to do this and then I'll do it.

00:44:29 ◼   ► And even then I, I, I, you know, I wanted to keep my job.

00:44:33 ◼   ► So I did it and I hated every bit of it.

00:44:35 ◼   ► Um, and I still think about it.

00:44:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:37 ◼   ► But it was a thing that, that like came down from on high and it was like, this is a thing

00:44:41 ◼   ► that this organization has to do.

00:44:42 ◼   ► And if you're going to work here, you have to do this thing.

00:44:44 ◼   ► And like, you could say, well, Tim Cook shouldn't have done it.

00:44:48 ◼   ► I guess what I would say is Tim Cook was always going to do it because he's the CEO of Apple.

00:44:53 ◼   ► I think Tim Cook hates every minute of it, but I think Tim Cook is thinking my job is to

00:45:00 ◼   ► keep Apple going and being successful.

00:45:01 ◼   ► And I've, I've spent the bulk of my entire career, which is running out of time now, whether

00:45:07 ◼   ► it's five or 10 years, whatever on Apple and Apple's success and the president of the United

00:45:13 ◼   ► States hating Apple because of the supply chain that I set up is bad for Apple.

00:45:20 ◼   ► So I need to do whatever is possible to get him off my back.

00:45:25 ◼   ► And if I need to eat, I will do it.

00:45:30 ◼   ► And, uh, and he, and that's what he did.

00:45:34 ◼   ► You can bleep that part.

00:45:36 ◼   ► I will.

00:45:36 ◼   ► I've written a note to our editor, Jim.

00:45:38 ◼   ► Thanks, Jim.

00:45:39 ◼   ► It's a very rare curse.

00:45:41 ◼   ► I'm not going to, I'm not going to sugar coat that.

00:45:43 ◼   ► I mean, that's what he did.

00:45:43 ◼   ► He was eating.

00:45:44 ◼   ► There it is.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Again, Jason, um, the, sorry, it's extra work.

00:45:48 ◼   ► You can take this whole part out then.

00:45:49 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:45:49 ◼   ► No, that was good.

00:45:50 ◼   ► It's good.

00:45:50 ◼   ► I like it.

00:45:51 ◼   ► Keep going.

00:45:51 ◼   ► But like, right.

00:45:53 ◼   ► So, so that's like, I don't like it.

00:45:55 ◼   ► He doesn't like it.

00:45:56 ◼   ► He, he thinks it's his job.

00:45:57 ◼   ► Maybe you say, oh, I wouldn't do it if I were him.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Well, you're not him.

00:46:02 ◼   ► And if you rose to the level of a CEO of a company like Apple, either you would do it or you'd never

00:46:10 ◼   ► get that job because that's the job of being a CEO of a company like that.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Everybody has to do things at their job that they don't want to do.

00:46:19 ◼   ► Everybody has to do that.

00:46:20 ◼   ► There is a thing that you can, now, is it at the level of placating the president?

00:46:24 ◼   ► No, it's not at that level, but there is a thing.

00:46:27 ◼   ► And I just think that like, here's, here's one of the things that I've been wondering if

00:46:34 ◼   ► I was going to say, and if this makes you mad, then blame my back.

00:46:38 ◼   ► Don't get mad at me.

00:46:40 ◼   ► And this is, this isn't even speaking to our entire audience.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Cause I know that there are people in our audience that don't care about this and, and or support

00:46:49 ◼   ► the president and so they, so it doesn't bother them.

00:46:51 ◼   ► If, if Tim Cook gave some kind of award to a democratic president, would you be as mad?

00:47:01 ◼   ► And like, and my point to this is you're annoyed at the system.

00:47:06 ◼   ► The trophy is unimportant.

00:47:08 ◼   ► Like the fact that he gave him a trinket, it's, there is no point being mad at a trophy.

00:47:15 ◼   ► Don't be mad at a trophy.

00:47:17 ◼   ► It's a symptom of the, of the disease.

00:47:19 ◼   ► The disease, the diseases here are, you have a CEO that is motivated because of the way that

00:47:25 ◼   ► capitalism works because of the way that publicly held companies work.

00:47:28 ◼   ► He's motivated in doing the right thing for his corporation to maximize their profits and

00:47:33 ◼   ► value.

00:47:33 ◼   ► And then you're also mad at the political environment in the United States where the

00:47:40 ◼   ► government of the United States is controlled by a bunch of people who are breaking a bunch

00:47:46 ◼   ► of norms and want to want what they want and are willing to threaten all sorts of corporations

00:47:50 ◼   ► in order to get investments in the United States and to abandon foreign manufacturing as much

00:47:56 ◼   ► as is possible.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And, you know, you have to decide how it is.

00:47:59 ◼   ► So, so, you know, I'm not saying, again, I just want to say, I don't like it.

00:48:03 ◼   ► I thought it was terrible.

00:48:04 ◼   ► I thought it was embarrassing.

00:48:05 ◼   ► I thought it was real bad.

00:48:06 ◼   ► You know, I said bad words on upgraded.

00:48:08 ◼   ► They had to bleep, but, and I wouldn't want that job.

00:48:12 ◼   ► I would not want that job, but I understand why it happened.

00:48:17 ◼   ► It's because of those other things.

00:48:19 ◼   ► I'm going to bring in a question from the discord and this, this came in while we were

00:48:24 ◼   ► alive and it comes from Trevor.

00:48:25 ◼   ► Cause I actually think this is a good question.

00:48:27 ◼   ► I'd like to hear your thoughts about how Apple approached the San Bernardino FBI story

00:48:31 ◼   ► compared to how Apple's approaching Trump today.

00:48:33 ◼   ► Very quick.

00:48:34 ◼   ► Primer for people that don't remember this.

00:48:37 ◼   ► This was a, I don't even remember when this was, but there was a school shooting and the

00:48:41 ◼   ► FBI wanted Apple to unlock.

00:48:43 ◼   ► Was that a shoot?

00:48:45 ◼   ► It wasn't school.

00:48:45 ◼   ► It was just a shooting.

00:48:46 ◼   ► No, I think it was just a shooting.

00:48:47 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:48:48 ◼   ► Uh, yes.

00:48:48 ◼   ► So there was a shooting in San Bernardino.

00:48:50 ◼   ► Is it terrible that my mind always goes to school shooting?

00:48:53 ◼   ► It was like, yeah, this was the, yeah, this was, I think a non-school shooting, but it

00:48:57 ◼   ► was, yeah, this guy, this guy shot a bunch of people or shot out a bunch of people.

00:49:01 ◼   ► The FBI wanted Apple to unlock the phone and Apple said no.

00:49:05 ◼   ► And it became a big, big deal.

00:49:07 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

00:49:09 ◼   ► This isn't the same.

00:49:10 ◼   ► That is not the same.

00:49:12 ◼   ► Because the scenario that the FBI and I guess the government were asking for was for a

00:49:19 ◼   ► backdoor to the iPhone.

00:49:21 ◼   ► Apple just denied another backdoor to my government, right?

00:49:26 ◼   ► Like, and that became like a whole thing, which that has just continued working its way

00:49:30 ◼   ► out in a sense of like, we will leave the business in the UK if you keep pressing us

00:49:35 ◼   ► for this, if the American government now asks for that, then we can compare those two things.

00:49:42 ◼   ► I do not think that that is similar, right?

00:49:46 ◼   ► Like in the idea of like, we hold Apple to this, I have never had any feeling about Apple

00:49:53 ◼   ► and their view towards capitalism because that's what this is, right?

00:49:59 ◼   ► Like they're willing to, I don't really know if they're actually paying anyone off.

00:50:07 ◼   ► Like they're just doing what the president wants, right?

00:50:10 ◼   ► Which is to invest in American manufacturing.

00:50:12 ◼   ► It's not like, well, it does not appear that Apple has done here.

00:50:16 ◼   ► It's like what a bunch of other companies are doing where they're, where they're actually

00:50:21 ◼   ► paying the president, right?

00:50:22 ◼   ► They're giving money to the library.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Now, if we get to that point, then we've gone to a different scenario.

00:50:29 ◼   ► But like, I just think that this is, this is just an example of one of the biggest companies

00:50:36 ◼   ► in the world doing the things that they've always done.

00:50:38 ◼   ► They're just doing it a different way, which is they are doing the thing that makes them

00:50:43 ◼   ► the most money, the easiest, and causes them to have the less aggravation from the companies

00:50:48 ◼   ► that they operate in.

00:50:49 ◼   ► Like, look, Apple in China is probably worse than Apple in America, right?

00:50:56 ◼   ► Sure.

00:50:56 ◼   ► And like, we've always looked at that as like, well, this is a bad mark on the company, right?

00:51:00 ◼   ► And I think that the things that they do to placate China are worse than what they're doing.

00:51:06 ◼   ► That ride hailing, according to the Apple in China book, that ride hailing investment they

00:51:11 ◼   ► did where they put an enormous sum of money into some ride hailing, that was because the Chinese

00:51:14 ◼   ► government made them do it.

00:51:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:16 ◼   ► And they never saw anything from it.

00:51:18 ◼   ► No.

00:51:18 ◼   ► And it was literally give us money.

00:51:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:20 ◼   ► To show your, show your fealty.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Now, is it, is it not great that we're comparing government relations in the U.S. with the People's

00:51:29 ◼   ► Republic of China?

00:51:30 ◼   ► I would say it's not great.

00:51:31 ◼   ► No.

00:51:31 ◼   ► But what I would say is about, to go back to San Bernardino for a second, I'll just say

00:51:35 ◼   ► San Bernardino happened in a complex web of what the FBI wanted, what the government wanted

00:51:44 ◼   ► more broadly, what the, what was legal, what Congress could do, what the judges might rule.

00:51:51 ◼   ► There was a whole kind of framework about it.

00:51:54 ◼   ► What's happening with tariffs is fiat.

00:51:57 ◼   ► It is literally the president of the United States can destroy your business with a stroke

00:52:03 ◼   ► of a pen.

00:52:03 ◼   ► It's not a complex interaction between lawyers and judges and is this legal and does Congress

00:52:11 ◼   ► need to pass a law and there's this surveillance court over here.

00:52:14 ◼   ► And like, that's not what's happening here.

00:52:16 ◼   ► And that's, to me, that's the biggest difference is if, if the, if, if applicants put in a position

00:52:24 ◼   ► where they need to decrypt something and the argument is we're going to slap you with an

00:52:29 ◼   ► enormous tariff on all your products, unless you decrypt something, we'll see what they

00:52:32 ◼   ► do.

00:52:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:33 ◼   ► That's different though.

00:52:34 ◼   ► That's, that's a much more kind of cataclysmic thing.

00:52:36 ◼   ► And again, I, you know, I, there's comments in our, in our discord right now that are like,

00:52:41 ◼   ► well, you know, I just want them to stand up.

00:52:43 ◼   ► I want them to stand up for what's right.

00:52:44 ◼   ► And it's like, again, Apple's not interested in standing up for what's right.

00:52:48 ◼   ► Apple is interested in doing what's right for Apple as a corporation that generates a lot

00:52:52 ◼   ► of money and has a lot of shareholder value.

00:52:54 ◼   ► And, you know, be disappointed in that if you want to be.

00:52:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:59 ◼   ► And maybe, maybe suggest that maybe they never were that company.

00:53:03 ◼   ► You just thought, we just thought they were.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Apple, I would say, and we've talked about this a lot.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Apple is among trillion dollar, enormous, highly profitable companies, a company that

00:53:16 ◼   ► has made some interesting choices because they want to think long-term.

00:53:21 ◼   ► They want to think about the big picture.

00:53:23 ◼   ► They want to think about how they serve their customers.

00:53:25 ◼   ► And they think about what benefits them in terms of being viewed as a company that has values.

00:53:32 ◼   ► All those things are intermixed.

00:53:33 ◼   ► They aren't, you can't pull them all out.

00:53:36 ◼   ► You can't say, well, this means Apple has no corporate values.

00:53:38 ◼   ► They do have corporate values.

00:53:40 ◼   ► However, the corporate values that they espouse are balanced with generating enormous profits

00:53:45 ◼   ► and shareholder value.

00:53:47 ◼   ► And also, the arguments are often, by the executives, including especially Tim Cook, the arguments

00:53:52 ◼   ► are, we do these things because we can afford to have a, think about the bigger picture about

00:53:58 ◼   ► the world and their, you know, their carbon neutral promise and their use of recycled materials.

00:54:03 ◼   ► And I'll point out one great example of this, which is Apple has been committed to recycling

00:54:08 ◼   ► materials in iPhones for quite a while, especially since Greenpeace called them out.

00:54:13 ◼   ► They've had their little eco checklist and they've moved toward having more recycled material

00:54:17 ◼   ► in their devices, as well as the move toward being carbon neutral.

00:54:21 ◼   ► Well, that was questioned by some people as being kind of green and wasteful.

00:54:27 ◼   ► And what were they doing?

00:54:28 ◼   ► And Apple says, well, we're thinking of the big picture.

00:54:30 ◼   ► And we think that recycling the materials is a good idea.

00:54:32 ◼   ► And then you get in a situation where China says, we may not give you rare earth minerals

00:54:37 ◼   ► that you need for your smartphones.

00:54:39 ◼   ► And Apple is like, well, we've been working on lots of rare earth recycling and we just

00:54:44 ◼   ► made a deal with a rare earth mineral company in California and we're going to, you know,

00:54:50 ◼   ► that's going to be part of our strategy.

00:54:51 ◼   ► So a lot of times it's been borne out that the big, the long-term big picture thinking that

00:54:56 ◼   ► they do that is seen as corporate values ends up being valuable to them.

00:55:00 ◼   ► But like, it's a, it's, you can't pick and choose.

00:55:03 ◼   ► It's all part of the same thing.

00:55:05 ◼   ► And if there was a corporate, deeply held corporate value that would destroy the company's

00:55:10 ◼   ► valuation in the stock market, it would not be so deeply held for very long.

00:55:15 ◼   ► That's just the truth of it.

00:55:16 ◼   ► And it's like everything else, you just, if you think they've changed, well, let's wait

00:55:20 ◼   ► until these scenarios come up.

00:55:22 ◼   ► Like there is someone in the Discord who makes like a great point that like, there are a lot

00:55:26 ◼   ► of people inside of Apple, a lot of queer employees, trans employees who they're being

00:55:33 ◼   ► undermined by the government.

00:55:35 ◼   ► But as far as I'm aware, Apple doesn't seem to have made any changes to its DEI policies

00:55:39 ◼   ► like many other companies have.

00:55:41 ◼   ► So while you don't necessarily feel like the actions of the president are, sorry, the actions

00:55:48 ◼   ► of Tim Cook are making you feel like it's a company that outwardly, at least the president

00:55:55 ◼   ► is like, you know, not against him.

00:55:58 ◼   ► It seems like the parts, like the infrastructure inside of the business has not changed.

00:56:04 ◼   ► And so like, maybe you need to look at that and be like, okay, at least Apple is not removing

00:56:10 ◼   ► my protections where if maybe I worked at Disney, they would.

00:56:14 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And so like, nothing's perfect here, right?

00:56:19 ◼   ► If everything's far from, I think that we're both saying it's disappointing to us.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Like no one wants to see this happening, but it's not surprised.

00:56:28 ◼   ► I am not surprised by it in the way that it seems like a lot of my colleagues seem to be.

00:56:35 ◼   ► It is not surprising to me.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:38 ◼   ► I would say, yeah, disappointing for sure.

00:56:42 ◼   ► But we've been talking about this for a long time.

00:56:43 ◼   ► This is, look, Tim Cook is trying to navigate a difficult environment.

00:56:52 ◼   ► That's what he's trying to do.

00:56:54 ◼   ► And if you view this environment as being the last days of America and that it's all

00:57:00 ◼   ► going to be taken over and that they're going to, you know, and it's the worst case scenario

00:57:04 ◼   ► and it's going to be this just enormous disaster that happens and that Tim Cook will be judged

00:57:11 ◼   ► as a collaborator.

00:57:12 ◼   ► You can do that.

00:57:13 ◼   ► And you might be right.

00:57:16 ◼   ► You might be right.

00:57:18 ◼   ► But I would say that I would say that from Tim Cook's perspective, as a CEO of a giant

00:57:24 ◼   ► profit-seeking company, he's trying to navigate through this and do what he needs to do and

00:57:32 ◼   ► no more.

00:57:33 ◼   ► And as you pointed out, Mike, there are some side benefits because he is kind of trying to

00:57:38 ◼   ► diversify out of China.

00:57:39 ◼   ► And this gives him a really good reason why he has to do some of that to invest in America.

00:57:45 ◼   ► And also, I would say, yes, investing in America for a giant American company like Apple is

00:57:50 ◼   ► not bad.

00:57:51 ◼   ► And political pressure from both parties, by the way, to invest more in America is a thing

00:57:58 ◼   ► that they're reacting to.

00:57:59 ◼   ► But in the end, there's going to be, you know, more than half a trillion dollars, depending,

00:58:03 ◼   ► you know, as Apple calculates it, coming into the U.S., including a whole bunch of new people

00:58:07 ◼   ► hired in Kentucky to work at Corning.

00:58:10 ◼   ► So, like, there are positives, but, you know, in the end, it's about Tim Cook trying to navigate

00:58:20 ◼   ► difficult circumstances in a way that keeps Apple as much Apple as it can be in these circumstances.

00:58:28 ◼   ► And again, if you want to be disappointed in that, please do.

00:58:32 ◼   ► But I would say don't lose sight of why he has to do that.

00:58:36 ◼   ► And I would, again, argue that he has to because he wouldn't be the CEO of Apple if he wasn't

00:58:41 ◼   ► willing to do that sort of thing.

00:58:43 ◼   ► It's about the rest of it.

00:58:46 ◼   ► It's about his role and Apple's role as a giant profit-seeking corporation.

00:58:49 ◼   ► And it's about where we are with the government and the way that it's been, you know, taken over

00:58:55 ◼   ► and the way force is being applied by it to American institutions.

00:59:01 ◼   ► That's where we are.

00:59:02 ◼   ► Again, if you haven't, if you've maybe not heard, we said a lot.

00:59:06 ◼   ► We both think this absolutely sucks, right?

00:59:10 ◼   ► But I think that, I think, at least obviously my opinion, so of course I think this, I think

00:59:17 ◼   ► we're able to take a more level-headed approach to what is actually going on here.

00:59:21 ◼   ► I think.

00:59:22 ◼   ► Yeah, there's, and what I would say is there's both.

00:59:25 ◼   ► We have been talking for a long time about, you know, Trump comes in the first time and

00:59:30 ◼   ► they're like, oh, whatever it was, $300 billion for America.

00:59:34 ◼   ► Biden comes in and they do the CHIP Act and they're like $400 billion for America.

00:59:38 ◼   ► Trump comes back and they're like $500, $600 billion for America.

00:59:41 ◼   ► This has been going on a while and you look at that and you're like, okay, like, I see

00:59:46 ◼   ► what's going on.

00:59:47 ◼   ► It's politics.

00:59:47 ◼   ► It's been politics for years now about making the U.S. government feel like Apple is an active

00:59:53 ◼   ► participant in America and in the American economy.

00:59:55 ◼   ► And it's why Apple does all those self-serving press releases about the app economy.

00:59:59 ◼   ► And we've enabled so many app developers and they take credit for all the app developers

01:00:03 ◼   ► who are employed anywhere in the United States as part of Apple's great economic boom, which

01:00:08 ◼   ► we can argue about, but they do that.

01:00:09 ◼   ► Like all of that has been going on forever.

01:00:11 ◼   ► So that's not surprising at all.

01:00:13 ◼   ► I will say what is new and unique about this situation is that Apple felt the need or the

01:00:19 ◼   ► White House felt the need or whoever felt the need for Tim Cook to come to the White House

01:00:24 ◼   ► and kiss the ring.

01:00:25 ◼   ► And that's unpleasant and unfortunate and says something not just about the system we live in,

01:00:32 ◼   ► but the times we live in and the people who are running my country.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And that's just how it is.

01:00:37 ◼   ► It's happened before.

01:00:40 ◼   ► Politicians, presidents laying industry low when it serves them.

01:00:47 ◼   ► It's happened before.

01:00:48 ◼   ► I think it's really unfortunate.

01:00:50 ◼   ► So I would say that's the difference for me is there's the, we'll throw another hundred

01:00:55 ◼   ► billion on the pile.

01:00:56 ◼   ► I mean, they're over half a trillion dollars in commitments now, right?

01:00:59 ◼   ► Like they're spending a lot of money here.

01:01:01 ◼   ► There's that.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And then there's the, yeah, but you also have to go to the White House and kiss the ring.

01:01:06 ◼   ► You have to base yourself in public, express your, you know, admiration for the great man

01:01:15 ◼   ► and then sit there and smile while they ask him and J.D. Vance about Jeffrey Epstein.

01:01:19 ◼   ► So that's the part that, again, I wouldn't want that job.

01:01:24 ◼   ► It pays well, but I wouldn't want that job.

01:01:26 ◼   ► And they wouldn't give it to me because I wouldn't execute it like Tim Cook does.

01:01:30 ◼   ► That's just it.

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01:03:30 ◼   ► I'm going to do it again.

01:03:33 ◼   ► What?

01:03:34 ◼   ► You're doing it again?

01:03:36 ◼   ► We're doing another blind ranking.

01:03:37 ◼   ► Oh, no.

01:03:38 ◼   ► And I've worked harder this time at trying to stack the items to make it harder for you to make your decisions.

01:03:47 ◼   ► Okay, good.

01:03:48 ◼   ► We'll find out if I actually succeeded.

01:03:50 ◼   ► This time, Jason, I have a list of 10 bad Apple products.

01:03:57 ◼   ► Okay, bad determined by you.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:00 ◼   ► I will give you one at a time.

01:04:02 ◼   ► You have to put them on your one to 10 list.

01:04:06 ◼   ► I will give you no indication of which is better than the other.

01:04:08 ◼   ► You can only put one product in each slot.

01:04:11 ◼   ► So it's a list of 10.

01:04:12 ◼   ► You don't know what they are.

01:04:13 ◼   ► I'm going to start giving them to you.

01:04:15 ◼   ► And we're going to see where you end up with your blind ranking list.

01:04:18 ◼   ► I know you understand, but do you understand?

01:04:24 ◼   ► Yes.

01:04:24 ◼   ► So I have to go one to 10.

01:04:26 ◼   ► And they're going to go where they're going to go.

01:04:33 ◼   ► You pick 10 bad Apple products.

01:04:35 ◼   ► I have one question.

01:04:36 ◼   ► Yes.

01:04:37 ◼   ► Is one the worst Apple product?

01:04:40 ◼   ► One is the most bad.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Yes.

01:04:42 ◼   ► One is the most bad.

01:04:44 ◼   ► Most bad to less the most bad.

01:04:47 ◼   ► Okay.

01:04:49 ◼   ► You could also think of this as flops or fails, you know?

01:04:53 ◼   ► Okay.

01:04:53 ◼   ► We can think of it like that.

01:04:54 ◼   ► But they're products.

01:04:55 ◼   ► They're not events.

01:04:56 ◼   ► They're products.

01:04:56 ◼   ► Okay.

01:04:57 ◼   ► Products, and I would just say it's hardware and software products, but like products.

01:05:01 ◼   ► Okay.

01:05:02 ◼   ► Great.

01:05:03 ◼   ► We're going to start out with, from 2015, the Apple Watch edition, the $17,000 gold Apple

01:05:12 ◼   ► Watch.

01:05:13 ◼   ► Okay.

01:05:14 ◼   ► I have a question for you.

01:05:15 ◼   ► Yes.

01:05:15 ◼   ► Are these 10 products that you consider to be 10 really, really bad products, or did you

01:05:20 ◼   ► put some good products in with that?

01:05:22 ◼   ► I didn't put any good products in here.

01:05:23 ◼   ► Okay.

01:05:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:24 ◼   ► I don't know if you're supposed to do that.

01:05:25 ◼   ► Apple Watch, the gold watch.

01:05:27 ◼   ► The gold watch.

01:05:27 ◼   ► Speaking of gold things.

01:05:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:29 ◼   ► So this was an Apple Watch that did nothing different except be gold.

01:05:34 ◼   ► And you've got a big box.

01:05:37 ◼   ► Series zero, but gold.

01:05:39 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

01:05:39 ◼   ► I think it's dumb, but I don't think it's super offensive.

01:05:43 ◼   ► It's just dumb.

01:05:44 ◼   ► I'm going to put it ninth.

01:05:45 ◼   ► Ooh.

01:05:46 ◼   ► Okay.

01:05:46 ◼   ► All right.

01:05:49 ◼   ► My second item for you.

01:05:50 ◼   ► Okay.

01:05:51 ◼   ► Is the hockey puck mouse.

01:05:54 ◼   ► So this was a, was this for the G3, this mouse?

01:05:59 ◼   ► iMac, yeah.

01:05:59 ◼   ► The original iMac.

01:06:00 ◼   ► The iMac G3.

01:06:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:01 ◼   ► It was a round mouse.

01:06:03 ◼   ► Perfectly round.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Very hard to understand how to use it correctly because you weren't sure what direction you were

01:06:09 ◼   ► pushing it in.

01:06:10 ◼   ► And you move it right and the cursor goes up because you don't know what it is, where it

01:06:14 ◼   ► is.

01:06:14 ◼   ► They made, they literally made things that snapped onto it that were oval.

01:06:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:17 ◼   ► And didn't, didn't they do like an apology mouse essentially?

01:06:21 ◼   ► They're like, yeah, the, the, the clear, the clear oval one was the, basically the apology

01:06:26 ◼   ► mouse from 2000.

01:06:27 ◼   ► Did they give those away to people?

01:06:29 ◼   ► At Macworld Expo 2000.

01:06:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:31 ◼   ► So they were like under your seat kind of thing.

01:06:33 ◼   ► Here we have a, we have a mouse for you.

01:06:35 ◼   ► I mean, I, I, I've literally, yeah, I've literally got one on my desk.

01:06:38 ◼   ► They, they, uh, yeah, they, they made a good one and they put it, they put it in a box

01:06:42 ◼   ► under everybody's seats at Macworld Expo New York 2000.

01:06:44 ◼   ► And it was very much like a Steve, one of those, one of those, this will come back many

01:06:49 ◼   ► years later when Steve Jobs had to give away a bumper case to everybody is the idea of like,

01:06:53 ◼   ► Hey, well, here you go.

01:06:54 ◼   ► What I'll tell you is that, what I tell you is everybody, uh, what it meant is that for

01:06:59 ◼   ► every Macworld Expo after that, everybody looked under their seat the moment that they went

01:07:03 ◼   ► in, which there was never anything under their seat again.

01:07:05 ◼   ► Because Apple never screwed up ever again.

01:07:08 ◼   ► I'm going to say hockey puck mouse is three.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

01:07:14 ◼   ► I'm going to say a name.

01:07:16 ◼   ► I've not said in a long time here for your third item.

01:07:18 ◼   ► Oh, Obi-Wan.

01:07:20 ◼   ► iTunes Ping.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Oh, iTunes Ping.

01:07:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:25 ◼   ► Oh.

01:07:25 ◼   ► So, I was around when Ping was introduced and I know its name and it comes up as a joke.

01:07:33 ◼   ► In preparing for this episode, I had to actually remind myself of the functionality of Ping,

01:07:38 ◼   ► like what it actually did, because Apple have released other products, like kind of in the

01:07:44 ◼   ► years since where it's like, do you remember, I think there was Apple Music Connect was a thing

01:07:49 ◼   ► where if you were an artist, you could like post little updates on your artist page.

01:07:54 ◼   ► But Ping was essentially Facebook inside of iTunes, but only about music.

01:08:02 ◼   ► So, you could automatically, as a user, have your Apple Music purchases shared with your friends and your friends could comment on them.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Music artists could post status updates that you could also comment on.

01:08:18 ◼   ► And you could also, in theory, I don't know if this actually ever really worked, like buy concert tickets inside of Ping.

01:08:26 ◼   ► I'm going to put it fifth.

01:08:28 ◼   ► Okay.

01:08:28 ◼   ► It was bad, but harmless.

01:08:31 ◼   ► Can I just say, so we're three items in.

01:08:33 ◼   ► Am I doing a better job than I did with the other one so far?

01:08:37 ◼   ► It's all, I mean, it's all to play for.

01:08:39 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:08:40 ◼   ► All to play for.

01:08:40 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:08:40 ◼   ► We'll see how frustrated I get as the slots fill up and I have to put things in places I don't want to put them.

01:08:45 ◼   ► All right.

01:08:46 ◼   ► Well, let's see how you feel about this.

01:08:47 ◼   ► Number four, air power.

01:08:50 ◼   ► Oh, air power.

01:08:52 ◼   ► This was so failure.

01:08:54 ◼   ► This is such a failure, I should say.

01:08:56 ◼   ► It never actually shipped.

01:08:57 ◼   ► So this was the Apple charging mat where, in theory, you could put your products anywhere on this mat and it would charge.

01:09:07 ◼   ► And what made that unique was there wasn't a product like that and there kind of still isn't really.

01:09:12 ◼   ► And in fact, this product was such a failure, it wouldn't have worked when MagSafe came along a few years later, right?

01:09:19 ◼   ► Like the air power would have just been, maybe they never would have done MagSafe, although there were a bunch of other reasons why MagSafe is good.

01:09:25 ◼   ► But like essentially you could put it wherever you wanted.

01:09:27 ◼   ► The Apple showed it off.

01:09:29 ◼   ► They were like, look how cool we are.

01:09:30 ◼   ► We can innovate.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Look at this incredible product.

01:09:33 ◼   ► It's coming soon.

01:09:34 ◼   ► We can't wait for you to do it.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And this is in 2017.

01:09:38 ◼   ► It got canceled in 2019 because the story goes, it kept catching fire.

01:09:45 ◼   ► Those things were overheating because there were so many coils in there.

01:09:50 ◼   ► Where does air power go in your ranking?

01:09:53 ◼   ► I'm going to put it sixth.

01:09:56 ◼   ► Okay.

01:09:56 ◼   ► And my reason is, again, it was kind of harmless in the sense that it never actually shipped.

01:10:03 ◼   ► But it was a flop.

01:10:05 ◼   ► Number five.

01:10:09 ◼   ► Okay.

01:10:09 ◼   ► MobileMe.

01:10:11 ◼   ► MobileMe was Apple's original cloud service.

01:10:18 ◼   ► It launched so poorly, they had to do it all over again with iCloud.

01:10:22 ◼   ► So this was what?

01:10:25 ◼   ► This was like mail.

01:10:26 ◼   ► What was it?

01:10:28 ◼   ► Like at Mac, right?

01:10:29 ◼   ► Email addresses, contact, calendar sync, that kind of stuff.

01:10:33 ◼   ► And it had the me, yeah.

01:10:35 ◼   ► And did it have an app logo?

01:10:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:37 ◼   ► It's like the app that was in there as well.

01:10:39 ◼   ► MobileMe.

01:10:40 ◼   ► I will say, so Zoe is saying this in the Discord.

01:10:43 ◼   ► I agree.

01:10:43 ◼   ► I have MobileMe and never had any problems with it.

01:10:45 ◼   ► I had no issues with MobileMe.

01:10:47 ◼   ► But lots of people did.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Things were broken.

01:10:49 ◼   ► And I think this was the thing where Steve Jobs, there was like this.

01:10:53 ◼   ► This had come up recently.

01:10:54 ◼   ► There's like when talking about the Apple intelligence stuff.

01:10:57 ◼   ► I think this was when Steve Jobs said, like, you've ruined Apple's reputation.

01:11:01 ◼   ► He said something in an internal meeting.

01:11:03 ◼   ► Where does MobileMe rank for you?

01:11:06 ◼   ► This, it was, the ramifications, like you said, some people had a fine experience with it.

01:11:15 ◼   ► But it was slow.

01:11:15 ◼   ► It was unreliable.

01:11:16 ◼   ► And the ramifications of it were large, not only internally, but also I would say that,

01:11:22 ◼   ► I mean, first off, iCloud existed because they couldn't call it MobileMe anymore.

01:11:27 ◼   ► They had to call it something else.

01:11:28 ◼   ► It was such a stinker that they had to change the name.

01:11:30 ◼   ► And I think even iCloud, to this day, some people resist using Apple Cloud services because

01:11:37 ◼   ► of, I would argue, how bad MobileMe was and what a bad impression it left.

01:11:41 ◼   ► I'm going to put it second.

01:11:43 ◼   ► You know, I'm going to say, no matter what you say, I feel like I'm doing a better job

01:11:47 ◼   ► this time because I feel like you're having to actually deliberate.

01:11:50 ◼   ► Well, last time you just was like, had no problem.

01:11:52 ◼   ► Things were just flying into the grid, left, right, and center.

01:11:54 ◼   ► And you had no problem.

01:11:55 ◼   ► The list was unharmed.

01:11:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:57 ◼   ► Also, I made some good guesses about what was in the list.

01:12:00 ◼   ► And with the exception of like maybe one thing, I have no idea what you've decided is in this

01:12:05 ◼   ► list.

01:12:05 ◼   ► So I'm struggling with that.

01:12:07 ◼   ► All right.

01:12:08 ◼   ► Number six.

01:12:08 ◼   ► So in the early 2000s, people loved their iPods.

01:12:11 ◼   ► People loved playing music from their iPods.

01:12:14 ◼   ► And something that they loved was to insert their iPods into what was a growing market

01:12:19 ◼   ► of speaker products that existed on the market.

01:12:21 ◼   ► There were brands that I don't remember their names now, but I know I would like maybe like

01:12:27 ◼   ► In Motion or something.

01:12:29 ◼   ► It was one of these kinds of brands.

01:12:30 ◼   ► And Bose SoundDoc.

01:12:32 ◼   ► Bose SoundDoc.

01:12:33 ◼   ► But these things were popping up left, right and center.

01:12:35 ◼   ► So Apple was like, I want to get myself a slice of that pie.

01:12:38 ◼   ► So they decided to unveil in 2006 for the cool, cool price of $349, the iPod Hi-Fi, which

01:12:47 ◼   ► is well known to long-time listeners to this show, because I think you still use one.

01:12:52 ◼   ► It's right behind me.

01:12:52 ◼   ► I don't use it right now, although I might.

01:12:54 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:12:55 ◼   ► But it's right behind me.

01:12:56 ◼   ► I'm currently using a couple of Sonos Play Ones on opposite sides of my office.

01:13:04 ◼   ► The iPod Hi-Fi sounded fantastic, but nobody wanted something.

01:13:08 ◼   ► It was something that was so big.

01:13:09 ◼   ► It had an aux in.

01:13:12 ◼   ► It was big, but the speakers were really good.

01:13:15 ◼   ► Steve Jobs told us how good they were.

01:13:17 ◼   ► Wasn't this, this is one of my favorite Steve Jobs classic things, is that he threw away all

01:13:22 ◼   ► of his multi-thousand dollar Hi-Fi equipment at home to replace it with the iPod Hi-Fi.

01:13:28 ◼   ► And just did the iPod Hi-Fi.

01:13:30 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what he said.

01:13:31 ◼   ► That's what he said.

01:13:33 ◼   ► This is also the weirdest press event, because they had a dorm room or something that they

01:13:41 ◼   ► had set up upstairs of town hall with an iPod Hi-Fi in it.

01:13:45 ◼   ► And it was all like, they're like, yeah, we'll dress these rooms with lifestyle scenes containing

01:13:50 ◼   ► Apple products.

01:13:51 ◼   ► It was so weird.

01:13:52 ◼   ► One year before the iPhone, which I just think is like, just timeline-wise, it's just so fascinating

01:13:59 ◼   ► product like this to exist.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:14:02 ◼   ► I'm putting it at 10 because I think the only problem with the iPod Hi-Fi was the price.

01:14:06 ◼   ► That's because you love it.

01:14:07 ◼   ► It was a good product.

01:14:07 ◼   ► You love it.

01:14:08 ◼   ► That's why.

01:14:08 ◼   ► Good.

01:14:09 ◼   ► Sounds good.

01:14:10 ◼   ► And unlike the HomePod, it has an aux in, so you could use it years after the iPod was

01:14:15 ◼   ► irrelevant, which I did.

01:14:17 ◼   ► I'm moving things around here because I think this would be fun to just do it now.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Okay.

01:14:23 ◼   ► From 2018, the HomePod.

01:14:24 ◼   ► This was not at this point in the list, but I think it's too fun not to put them together.

01:14:31 ◼   ► The HomePod, too expensive, unreliable, and wrecked wooden tables, if you remember the

01:14:37 ◼   ► original one.

01:14:38 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:14:38 ◼   ► Good times.

01:14:39 ◼   ► But they have the rings on the wooden tables.

01:14:40 ◼   ► I got one of those right next to me, too.

01:14:42 ◼   ► If you've mentioned in the past episodes that, you know, everybody's dies.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Mine haven't.

01:14:49 ◼   ► I don't know if yours have, but everybody's dies.

01:14:51 ◼   ► I have lost a couple.

01:14:52 ◼   ► I actually am sending one in to get repaired.

01:14:54 ◼   ► There's a guy who's figured out how to fix HomePods.

01:14:58 ◼   ► He figured out what breaks in them.

01:15:01 ◼   ► And you can just send it to him, and he'll fix it.

01:15:04 ◼   ► I'm going to try it with one.

01:15:06 ◼   ► What a tiny cottage industry.

01:15:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:10 ◼   ► It's just some dude who thinks he can make some money fixing iPods or HomePods.

01:15:13 ◼   ► Whatever.

01:15:14 ◼   ► I'm going to put it...

01:15:16 ◼   ► So the thing about the HomePod is, like the iPod Hi-Fi, it was overpriced and over-engineered

01:15:23 ◼   ► as well, the sound was pretty good.

01:15:26 ◼   ► They were never really that reliable.

01:15:28 ◼   ► But I still have one and maybe two again soon that I use.

01:15:37 ◼   ► So of the original HomePod.

01:15:40 ◼   ► It's a mess, though.

01:15:42 ◼   ► I'm going to, you know, these are products that don't deeply offend me.

01:15:46 ◼   ► I'm going to put it eighth.

01:15:47 ◼   ► Okay.

01:15:48 ◼   ► So we have three items left on the list.

01:15:51 ◼   ► You have spots one, four, and seven open.

01:15:55 ◼   ► Yes.

01:15:56 ◼   ► You've got a good spread across the board here.

01:15:59 ◼   ► I'm going to throw out one to you here.

01:16:02 ◼   ► It's going to be interesting to see where you put this.

01:16:05 ◼   ► Ranging from the years of 2015 to 2019, the Butterfly Keyboard.

01:16:10 ◼   ► Oh, Butterfly Keyboard.

01:16:11 ◼   ► Apple's thinnest keyboard.

01:16:13 ◼   ► Apple's most unreliable keyboard.

01:16:17 ◼   ► Destroying computers left, right, and center.

01:16:19 ◼   ► Where is it going to go?

01:16:21 ◼   ► I'm going to put it fourth.

01:16:23 ◼   ► And I'm going to do that.

01:16:25 ◼   ► This is, you can pat yourself on the back.

01:16:26 ◼   ► I'm going to reserve number one.

01:16:28 ◼   ► I'm hoping something really, really bad is still lurking.

01:16:34 ◼   ► And so I'm going to put it fourth.

01:16:36 ◼   ► I thought about putting it first.

01:16:37 ◼   ► But I'm going to reserve.

01:16:40 ◼   ► I may regret this later, but that's where I'm going to put it.

01:16:42 ◼   ► Because it's a blind ranking.

01:16:43 ◼   ► I have to do it.

01:16:44 ◼   ► I'll put it fourth.

01:16:44 ◼   ► It's bad.

01:16:45 ◼   ► It's very bad.

01:16:47 ◼   ► I'm excited now.

01:16:50 ◼   ► I'm excited.

01:16:51 ◼   ► This is fun.

01:16:52 ◼   ► All right.

01:16:52 ◼   ► So I'm going to go with now.

01:16:53 ◼   ► Apple Maps.

01:16:58 ◼   ► Apple Maps.

01:16:59 ◼   ► The original launch in 2012.

01:17:01 ◼   ► So bad.

01:17:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:05 ◼   ► Scott Forstall.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Tim Cook had to issue an apology.

01:17:10 ◼   ► It resulted in iOS 7.

01:17:13 ◼   ► Because, Johnny, I have got to take over.

01:17:17 ◼   ► You know?

01:17:18 ◼   ► Where's that going to go?

01:17:19 ◼   ► Is it going at number one?

01:17:20 ◼   ► Is it going at number seven?

01:17:21 ◼   ► It goes at number seven.

01:17:23 ◼   ► I mean, you've got to start somewhere.

01:17:24 ◼   ► They felt they needed to do it right then.

01:17:26 ◼   ► They weren't quite ready.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Unlike MobileMe, where they had to, like, change the name and move to a different country and, you know, put on a hat and some sunglasses.

01:17:37 ◼   ► Apple Maps has just kind of continued on.

01:17:39 ◼   ► I think there still exist people who will refuse to use it because they had an initial bad impression.

01:17:44 ◼   ► But generally, I think that they've recovered from that.

01:17:46 ◼   ► So I don't think it has a lot of long-standing damage.

01:17:49 ◼   ► I'll put it seventh.

01:17:50 ◼   ► So we've only got one spot left.

01:17:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:52 ◼   ► So I saved number one for what I think I wouldn't put at number one.

01:17:57 ◼   ► But we'll see.

01:17:58 ◼   ► What do you think it is?

01:17:59 ◼   ► I think it's the G4 Cube.

01:18:01 ◼   ► Oh, interesting.

01:18:02 ◼   ► Okay.

01:18:03 ◼   ► That's an interesting guess.

01:18:05 ◼   ► From 2009.

01:18:07 ◼   ► Oh.

01:18:08 ◼   ► The third gen iPod shuffle.

01:18:11 ◼   ► Oh.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Horizontal buttons.

01:18:15 ◼   ► I love this, Mike, for me.

01:18:17 ◼   ► I love this for me.

01:18:18 ◼   ► No, no.

01:18:19 ◼   ► Well, and this I got the gen wrong.

01:18:20 ◼   ► Oh, no, the iPod shuffle.

01:18:21 ◼   ► The buttonless shuffle.

01:18:22 ◼   ► With no buttons.

01:18:23 ◼   ► No buttons.

01:18:24 ◼   ► Look, they're too bad.

01:18:25 ◼   ► They're the two worst iPods.

01:18:26 ◼   ► And so you pick one of the two worst iPods.

01:18:28 ◼   ► Yes.

01:18:28 ◼   ► I'll put it at number one.

01:18:29 ◼   ► I'll do it.

01:18:30 ◼   ► I'll defend the indefensible.

01:18:32 ◼   ► I'll just go with it.

01:18:32 ◼   ► Yes, and let's put all the other bad iPods up there, too.

01:18:36 ◼   ► No, this one.

01:18:37 ◼   ► See, the other iPod shuffle that clipped on with the buttons, that one, I like that one.

01:18:43 ◼   ► That was a great one.

01:18:43 ◼   ► I love that one.

01:18:44 ◼   ► And they brought it back.

01:18:45 ◼   ► Mike, this is the product so bad that the next generation iPod shuffle,

01:18:49 ◼   ► reverted to the previous design.

01:18:52 ◼   ► When does Apple do that where they're like, oh, never mind.

01:18:56 ◼   ► We're going back to the old model because this was such a bad idea of an iPod with no buttons.

01:19:03 ◼   ► It only worked with voice control.

01:19:04 ◼   ► So you had to use the kind of earbuds from Apple or ones that had a microphone.

01:19:12 ◼   ► And you could only control all of your iPod by speaking to it.

01:19:17 ◼   ► Well, that's not entirely true because if you had the headphones with the clicker on it, the clicker would do play, pause, and volume.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Good point, good point, good point, good point.

01:19:25 ◼   ► And if you had only one playlist on the iPod shuffle, which a lot of people just did, you could just press play and it would shuffle.

01:19:31 ◼   ► And that's fine.

01:19:32 ◼   ► And I think there was maybe a switch on it to put it in non-shuffle mode.

01:19:36 ◼   ► But yeah, I have one in a drawer over here.

01:19:39 ◼   ► It's a terrible idea for a product.

01:19:42 ◼   ► Yeah, it was just too far.

01:19:44 ◼   ► It was too far.

01:19:45 ◼   ► Because like, yes, you know, it just required.

01:19:48 ◼   ► It just wasn't.

01:19:50 ◼   ► It just wasn't.

01:19:50 ◼   ► It just wasn't a thing.

01:19:51 ◼   ► It just wasn't a thing.

01:19:52 ◼   ► Otherwise, they would have kept it that way, wouldn't they?

01:19:55 ◼   ► If that was the thing.

01:19:56 ◼   ► I think there was a stainless steel one of those, though, which was nice.

01:19:59 ◼   ► I mean, probably.

01:20:01 ◼   ► So let's see what your list is at.

01:20:04 ◼   ► And then I'll give you the opportunity, if you'd like to re-rank, you can re-rank.

01:20:08 ◼   ► So at number one, third gen iPod shuffle.

01:20:12 ◼   ► At number two, mobile me.

01:20:13 ◼   ► At number three, the hockey puck mouse.

01:20:16 ◼   ► Number four, the butterfly keyboard.

01:20:18 ◼   ► Number five, ping.

01:20:20 ◼   ► iTunes ping.

01:20:21 ◼   ► Number six, air power.

01:20:22 ◼   ► Number seven, Apple Maps.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Number eight, the HomePod.

01:20:26 ◼   ► Number nine, the gold Apple Watch Edition.

01:20:29 ◼   ► And number 10, the iPod i5.

01:20:31 ◼   ► Would you put those in any additional, in any reverted order, if you had the opportunity to do so?

01:20:37 ◼   ► Hmm.

01:20:38 ◼   ► I think.

01:20:39 ◼   ► I'm happy with this order.

01:20:43 ◼   ► If I had to make a change, I think philosophically, my question would be.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Would I, no, no, actually, you know, I'm, I'm okay with it.

01:20:56 ◼   ► I'm okay with this order.

01:20:57 ◼   ► And my reason is, I think the top four or five are legitimately bad real products.

01:21:08 ◼   ► I think, you know, iTunes ping, legitimately bad.

01:21:12 ◼   ► They had to overcome it.

01:21:14 ◼   ► Some people thought it was fine.

01:21:19 ◼   ► You know, iTunes ping, no, no, no.

01:21:21 ◼   ► So the top four are bad.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Five, six ping and air power are kind of harmless because they didn't ship.

01:21:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:28 ◼   ► Apple Maps got better.

01:21:31 ◼   ► HomePod got better and was fine as a product.

01:21:38 ◼   ► It was just mispriced and misconceived watch edition gold was a, that's the one I might lift up

01:21:44 ◼   ► because that was, that was a misfire in a few different ways that were representative.

01:21:47 ◼   ► But at the same time, it, you know, it just was a very expensive Apple watch series zero,

01:21:52 ◼   ► whatever.

01:21:52 ◼   ► And the iPod hi-fi again, like, like the home pod, a, uh, uh, perfectly okay product that

01:21:59 ◼   ► was mispriced and misconceived, uh, very much like the home pod.

01:22:03 ◼   ► So again, I might lift up the watch edition gold and put it further up all the way, maybe

01:22:09 ◼   ► even all the way to fifth.

01:22:10 ◼   ► But, um, I, I feel like I've got a good, I'm actually very happy with my top four.

01:22:17 ◼   ► Cause I think those are, are those products are the worst.

01:22:19 ◼   ► I don't, I'm sorry.

01:22:21 ◼   ► It's your list.

01:22:22 ◼   ► I'm happy.

01:22:22 ◼   ► You're happy with your list.

01:22:23 ◼   ► I don't, I don't think that that iPod shuffle was the worst.

01:22:27 ◼   ► I think the butterfly keyboard would be worse than that because like you couldn't avoid the

01:22:32 ◼   ► butterfly keyboard really, where you just didn't have to buy that iPod shuffle, right?

01:22:36 ◼   ► Mobile me, you kind of couldn't avoid that.

01:22:39 ◼   ► The hockey puck mouse.

01:22:40 ◼   ► You can't like these, these were bad and they were forced upon you because it's other decisions

01:22:45 ◼   ► you wanted to make.

01:22:45 ◼   ► And it was kind of no way around.

01:22:46 ◼   ► I mean, if I made this list from scratch, I probably wouldn't put the buttonless shuffle

01:22:51 ◼   ► as the greatest crime ever committed.

01:22:53 ◼   ► Um, but I also hate that product and I don't feel bad about it being number one.

01:22:58 ◼   ► Cause I think it's such a bad product.

01:23:00 ◼   ► You know, does that make any sense?

01:23:01 ◼   ► Like, are there things that are worse here?

01:23:03 ◼   ► Um, yes, uh, you know, I could reorder them, but also I look at where everything is and

01:23:10 ◼   ► I don't feel like, I don't look at, at the numbers that I gave them and say, oh no, I've

01:23:16 ◼   ► made a horrible mistake.

01:23:17 ◼   ► You driven me into, uh, you know, make it, picking a perfectly good product is number one

01:23:21 ◼   ► worst of all time.

01:23:23 ◼   ► Um, so that's fine.

01:23:26 ◼   ► I would have felt that way about the G4 cube because that was, um, that was a, that was

01:23:31 ◼   ► a problematic product, but it wasn't the worst of all time.

01:23:33 ◼   ► So no.

01:23:33 ◼   ► And you have a soft spot for that one, I think.

01:23:36 ◼   ► I mean, it's pretty, but it was also a disaster.

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01:26:03 ◼   ► It's time for some Ask Upgrade questions to finish out today's episode of the Upgrade program.

01:26:11 ◼   ► First, we will go to Nathan who asks, when a new beta is released, do you have a specific

01:26:16 ◼   ► order that you update your devices or is it random?

01:26:18 ◼   ► And I will say beta 6 came out while we were recording.

01:26:22 ◼   ► While we were talking.

01:26:23 ◼   ► Yeah, because I guess we're now on the weekly because we're hurtling towards the release of

01:26:29 ◼   ► this hot off the press, I think, version of iOS when it originally shows.

01:26:34 ◼   ► But do you have a specific order or do you just do whatever you feel like?

01:26:37 ◼   ► I don't have a specific order.

01:26:43 ◼   ► The watch comes last because it takes forever and it's really unreliable.

01:26:46 ◼   ► And I think I've got my watch on the public beta.

01:26:48 ◼   ► So it does an overnight update and I don't worry about it.

01:26:52 ◼   ► I do the iPhone and the iPad usually first, but that's mostly because those betas tend to

01:26:58 ◼   ► come out before the Mac beta comes out.

01:26:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:01 ◼   ► But I don't have any particular order beyond that.

01:27:04 ◼   ► And then the watch is last, obviously.

01:27:05 ◼   ► And I haven't even done the Apple TV because I fear the consequences of that.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:09 ◼   ► I don't do the watch or the Mac like ever.

01:27:13 ◼   ► I just don't do that.

01:27:15 ◼   ► I decide I've reached the point where I need to do the watch.

01:27:17 ◼   ► I generally hold that off until late.

01:27:19 ◼   ► And so I just did it with the public beta.

01:27:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:23 ◼   ► If I was ever going to do it, I'll do public, but I just don't do the watch.

01:27:26 ◼   ► Typically for me, I will always start with an iPad.

01:27:29 ◼   ► So that's the only one I'm doing.

01:27:30 ◼   ► Then when I bring my iPhone into it, my iPhone is the one that I go for first because that's

01:27:34 ◼   ► what I'm using the majority of the time.

01:27:36 ◼   ► So that's what I go for first.

01:27:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:38 ◼   ► Sometimes it's really whatever is closest.

01:27:40 ◼   ► I have my iPhone on my desk today.

01:27:42 ◼   ► And so I have, it is rebooting right now.

01:27:45 ◼   ► My iPad is in the bedroom.

01:27:47 ◼   ► And so I'll have to go do that after the show.

01:27:49 ◼   ► And then I obviously can't do the Mac.

01:27:51 ◼   ► Whenever it comes out, I'll do it after the show and not during.

01:27:53 ◼   ► I'm not going to update during the show because that would be, we'll talk more about that.

01:27:57 ◼   ► Maybe an upgrade plus a little bit about how those are going.

01:28:02 ◼   ► Darren wrote in and said, a lot of talk about the Finder in this year's Mac OS Betas.

01:28:06 ◼   ► I happen to notice how everyone calls it the Finder instead of just Finder.

01:28:09 ◼   ► No one ever says the photos or the shortcuts or the messages to refer to these, but it's always

01:28:15 ◼   ► the Finder.

01:28:16 ◼   ► Do you have any idea where this comes from?

01:28:19 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:19 ◼   ► Funny story.

01:28:22 ◼   ► I have always called it the Finder.

01:28:25 ◼   ► And when I got to Mac World, I discovered there was a real clash with the copy desk because

01:28:36 ◼   ► the copy desk, I think at Mac World and not at Mac user also, wanted it to just be Finder.

01:28:41 ◼   ► In Finder, because Finder was an app.

01:28:43 ◼   ► So you say in Finder.

01:28:44 ◼   ► And I guess that's also an Apple style guide too, that you would call it Finder, not the Finder.

01:28:48 ◼   ► It is, in Finder.

01:28:49 ◼   ► Finder is just an app.

01:28:50 ◼   ► So you wouldn't say in the files, I think is a better example.

01:28:53 ◼   ► You'd say in files, in the files app, you would say, but not the files.

01:28:57 ◼   ► But we often will say in the Finder and not in the Finder app or in Finder.

01:29:01 ◼   ► I don't know all the details and it would be interesting to hear what my pals who are, remember classic

01:29:11 ◼   ► Mac OS days would say.

01:29:13 ◼   ► I think colloquially in classic Mac OS, we called it the Finder.

01:29:20 ◼   ► I think that was a place you could go.

01:29:23 ◼   ► It wasn't the desk.

01:29:24 ◼   ► There were things on the desktop, but like the Finder was like the, first off, you know, what

01:29:31 ◼   ► is it?

01:29:31 ◼   ► It's the Finder.

01:29:32 ◼   ► It does finding.

01:29:33 ◼   ► It is the place you find things.

01:29:36 ◼   ► So I think it was all colloquial.

01:29:37 ◼   ► I think that early on, it was perhaps officially, certainly, you know, among a lot of users, they

01:29:45 ◼   ► would refer to it as the Finder.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Everything else was different.

01:29:48 ◼   ► Although there are a couple other examples, and I think it maybe goes back to the fact

01:29:51 ◼   ► that it's, it is a part of speech where it is a thing that does a task because there was

01:29:58 ◼   ► also back in the day.

01:29:59 ◼   ► So now we have a way you use a, use the settings and you bring up the print utility and you choose

01:30:04 ◼   ► what your printer is.

01:30:06 ◼   ► And you bring up the network settings in the Finder or Finder and you do file sharing.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Back in the classic Mac OS days, how you did both those things was with an app that we called

01:30:18 ◼   ► the Chooser, which I suppose you could call Chooser if it still existed today.

01:30:24 ◼   ► Was it actually called Chooser?

01:30:26 ◼   ► Chooser.

01:30:27 ◼   ► I've never heard of this.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Oh, Mike, you sweet summer child.

01:30:32 ◼   ► The Chooser.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Maybe this just hasn't stuck in my brain, but I feel like I've never heard Chooser.

01:30:38 ◼   ► The Chooser.

01:30:39 ◼   ► Oh man, the Chooser was a classic.

01:30:42 ◼   ► The Chooser is an application program for Macintosh using classic Mac OS as a desk accessory and

01:30:47 ◼   ► became a standalone application.

01:30:48 ◼   ► It allowed users to connect to Apple Share file servers, enable or disable the network access

01:30:54 ◼   ► and select which printer to use.

01:30:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I just said.

01:30:57 ◼   ► I just read it from a minute.

01:30:58 ◼   ► This is where you get, this is where you went to connect to a file server via Apple Share,

01:31:03 ◼   ► and this is where you picked your printer.

01:31:05 ◼   ► It was a little, you can read the Wikipedia page.

01:31:10 ◼   ► It had on the left side, a bunch of printers you could choose from.

01:31:15 ◼   ► And then on the right side, sort of like other interfaces where there was like setup and you

01:31:20 ◼   ► want to print in the background.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Background printing, Mike, was if you print something and you want to just watch a dialogue

01:31:26 ◼   ► box as it sits there and prints and communicates over your very slow serial port, and you can't

01:31:33 ◼   ► do anything else until it's done.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Or I think in System 7, you could turn on background printing and it would print while you did other

01:31:39 ◼   ► things.

01:31:39 ◼   ► What a revolution that was.

01:31:41 ◼   ► And computers.

01:31:41 ◼   ► You know what I'm saying?

01:31:43 ◼   ► So, and I'll say the Wikipedia page for chooser says the chooser and then bolds chooser because

01:31:52 ◼   ► while chooser is the name, it's referred to as the chooser and the finder similarly in the

01:32:03 ◼   ► Wikipedia page for finder says the finder.

01:32:07 ◼   ► I think it was that there were things that were tools that did tasks and that's how it

01:32:15 ◼   ► started.

01:32:15 ◼   ► And so it was like the finder finds files, the chooser chooses printers.

01:32:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:20 ◼   ► That's what it is.

01:32:21 ◼   ► And so you started to think of it that way, even though they were called finder and chooser.

01:32:25 ◼   ► Find is not an app.

01:32:27 ◼   ► Like find is not an app.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Only a maniac would say, well, I need to change my printer.

01:32:33 ◼   ► I will go to chooser.

01:32:35 ◼   ► Like nobody would have said that.

01:32:37 ◼   ► Nobody would have said that.

01:32:38 ◼   ► So I think that's where it comes from.

01:32:40 ◼   ► And I think we have moved on and that like, if you're a real stickler, the right way to

01:32:44 ◼   ► refer to finder is as finder.

01:32:47 ◼   ► But a lot of us from the old school still think of it as the finder because there was

01:32:51 ◼   ► the finder and there was the chooser.

01:32:52 ◼   ► And that's just, I think that that's where it comes from.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Sounds like Batman.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Sounds like Batman villains now.

01:32:58 ◼   ► The chooser, the Riddler.

01:33:00 ◼   ► That's right.

01:33:00 ◼   ► The penguin.

01:33:01 ◼   ► The finder.

01:33:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:02 ◼   ► The finder.

01:33:02 ◼   ► The joker.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Yep.

01:33:06 ◼   ► Rob writes in and says, do you feel it strange that it's been nearly 18 months since Apple

01:33:09 ◼   ► stopped selling Apple Watches in the US for the blood oxygen functionality and there seems

01:33:15 ◼   ► to still be no progress or resolution in bringing its functionality back.

01:33:19 ◼   ► I am an original Apple Watch Ultra owner and like the functionality and I won't be purchasing

01:33:23 ◼   ► a new Apple Watch to replace my current until it is resolved.

01:33:26 ◼   ► What are your thoughts?

01:33:28 ◼   ► So I did some research today.

01:33:29 ◼   ► The most recent update that we have is actually from the beginning of last month where Apple

01:33:36 ◼   ► was still talking to US appeals courts about getting this overturned.

01:33:40 ◼   ► It doesn't appear that this is going to change.

01:33:45 ◼   ► I mean, there was an executive training.

01:33:47 ◼   ► The CEO of Massimo got pushed out and I think people thought that was going to suggest that

01:33:52 ◼   ► a deal was going to be done.

01:33:53 ◼   ► But it still seems like Massimo is not backing down and Apple is still trying to make their

01:33:57 ◼   ► case to get the import ban lifted.

01:34:00 ◼   ► So, you know, just as I know, in case people aren't following it super closely, like outside

01:34:05 ◼   ► of the US, this functionality still exists.

01:34:07 ◼   ► Like if I bought an Apple Watch Series 10, I would have a blood oxygen sensor in it.

01:34:12 ◼   ► And it's interesting to kind of go back to the beginning of this show where we're talking

01:34:16 ◼   ► about, you know, the Apple Watch Ultra getting an update this year too.

01:34:19 ◼   ► And I could imagine that maybe Ultra users specifically want these kinds of sensors because it's more

01:34:25 ◼   ► data about their body and the things that they're doing.

01:34:27 ◼   ► It's fascinating that this has not been resolved and that we're still at this point.

01:34:33 ◼   ► And yeah, so I honestly think Apple will want to win this case.

01:34:38 ◼   ► However, they're going to do it and they're not going to bring it back until they're willing

01:34:42 ◼   ► to do it because they don't want to give Massimo whatever it is Massimo wants money-wise

01:34:46 ◼   ► for each watch.

01:34:47 ◼   ► It is strange.

01:34:48 ◼   ► It is strange.

01:34:49 ◼   ► I do wonder sometimes if, if, here's the question.

01:34:54 ◼   ► I mean, if people are asking questions about Tim Cook, if you're Apple, you could probably

01:35:01 ◼   ► go to your friends in the White House and say, what can we do to fix this?

01:35:04 ◼   ► And I wonder if they're not interested in doing that because it seems too gross for them, even

01:35:09 ◼   ► though that this would be a benefit.

01:35:11 ◼   ► That could be said about a bunch of things that they don't seem to be doing.

01:35:16 ◼   ► It doesn't appear that the US government is putting a lot of pressure on worldwide governments

01:35:22 ◼   ► around steering stuff or whatever, right?

01:35:25 ◼   ► It doesn't appear that that is happening.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah, you're right.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Why can't this just get squashed?

01:35:29 ◼   ► Well, maybe they're just not asking.

01:35:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I think this is another example of Apple's go-for-broke legal strategy.

01:35:39 ◼   ► Like, you know, this is, we're going to push this all the way to the end.

01:35:43 ◼   ► And if at the end they still find no resolution, maybe they negotiate something.

01:35:49 ◼   ► But, um...

01:35:51 ◼   ► And I guess maybe they're willing to do a debilitation sensor because that is, of all of the sensors

01:35:55 ◼   ► in the Apple Watch, the most useless, realistically, for most people, because Apple has not done

01:36:01 ◼   ► anything daring with it like they have with the heart rate monitor, for example.

01:36:05 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:06 ◼   ► Or even the sleep apnea censoring and stuff like that.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Which they're not using oxygen for at all because they're using machine learning based on movement.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Yep.

01:36:14 ◼   ► So, yeah.

01:36:14 ◼   ► If you'd like to send in a question of your own or any feedback or follow-up about the

01:36:20 ◼   ► show, you can always go to UpgradeFeedback.com.

01:36:22 ◼   ► Don't forget, sorry, there was the amnesty over my bad back about being mean to me.

01:36:28 ◼   ► Please.

01:36:28 ◼   ► His back is very sick.

01:36:31 ◼   ► Very sick.

01:36:32 ◼   ► Thank you to our members and supporters of Upgrade Plus.

01:36:35 ◼   ► You can go to GetUpgradePlus.com and you'll get longer ad-free episodes of the show every

01:36:39 ◼   ► week.

01:36:40 ◼   ► Today, we're going to hear about the sad, sad stories of Jason and his Mac OS Tahoe Beta

01:36:46 ◼   ► 5 experience, which has been very sad for Jason.

01:36:49 ◼   ► You can find us on YouTube by going to Upgrade Podcast.

01:36:52 ◼   ► If you go there and find us on YouTube, you'll see Jason's been doing a lot of work on his

01:36:57 ◼   ► studio and he's got a beautiful display behind him.

01:37:01 ◼   ► And I think you were probably holding up your mouse at one point during today's episode.

01:37:05 ◼   ► During the show, yeah.

01:37:06 ◼   ► That did happen at one point.

01:37:07 ◼   ► People can see that.

01:37:08 ◼   ► The apology mouse.

01:37:09 ◼   ► I would like to thank Facta, Ecamm, and FitBod for their support of this week's episode.

01:37:13 ◼   ► But most of all, I would like to thank you for listening.

01:37:17 ◼   ► Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snow.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Goodbye, Mike Early.

01:37:21 ◼   ► Goodbye, Mike Early.

01:37:35 ◼   ► Goodbye, Mike Early.