00:00:06 ◼ ► Yes. And I do not mean to complain. I have had, it's been quite a September and October for me
00:00:14 ◼ ► personally, but the cold is the least of my problems. But when you're a podcaster, it really
00:00:21 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but when I'm writing, it's like one of the many things I prefer about writing.
00:00:34 ◼ ► Right. And I still do an audio only, no video podcast. So as you can tell, my hair is disheveled.
00:00:47 ◼ ► The other thing I use underscores sleep plus plus app for sleep analysis. And I've been wearing
00:00:54 ◼ ► Apple Watch to sleep. Not religiously. It's like, because I don't want to get obsessive
00:00:59 ◼ ► about having a sleep score for every night. Yeah. But my last two nights have the sleep
00:01:08 ◼ ► score from sleep plus plus has been absolutely abysmal. And I should look actually at Apple
00:01:15 ◼ ► Yeah. I actually have started doing this in the last month or so. I actually have a second
00:01:20 ◼ ► Apple Watch because my main watch is a Series 7 and it does not last the day, much less overnight.
00:01:26 ◼ ► But I happen to have another watch that's a Series 10 that's a loaner. And so I've been using that for
00:01:31 ◼ ► sleep tracking. And I think what's fascinating, I've been using the Apple sleep tracking one. And I feel
00:01:37 ◼ ► like the Apple sleep tracking one is more optimistic. The rates are almost always higher. And I feel good,
00:01:44 ◼ ► like no matter what, maybe there's a placebo effect. It's like, I wake up, I feel kind of,
00:01:48 ◼ ► oh man, I'm still kind of tired. I look at the sleep score. It's like, you got a 90. I was like,
00:01:51 ◼ ► oh, great. And I sometimes look at sleep plus plus and it's, you got a 40. And I was like, jeez.
00:02:02 ◼ ► I feel like underscore is like, I can't tell if he's just there to be like, let me bring you back down to
00:02:07 ◼ ► earth or what the difference in their algorithms are. But they clearly have different approaches
00:02:12 ◼ ► to that. So yeah. Apple gave me yesterday, a 79 high and today a 65. Okay. Okay. Sleep plus plus.
00:02:23 ◼ ► And I, the cold really hit me Wednesday night. Sleep plus plus gave me a 20 out of a hundred yesterday
00:02:31 ◼ ► and a 35 out of a hundred today. So yesterday was all the way in the red and today is 15 on sleep plus
00:02:38 ◼ ► plus for last night. And I was like, I don't think I slept that badly. So I don't, I don't know what's
00:02:43 ◼ ► happening there, but yeah. Well, anyway, I feel all right though. And it is funny though, to be able
00:02:48 ◼ ► to measure it with a cold because I felt like, well, like my fear is that I'm going to be waking up all
00:02:54 ◼ ► night, like stuffy waking up. And I'd kind of slept straight through and I think, well, that's good.
00:02:59 ◼ ► And then I look at these numbers and I'm like, well, I, I think it, it, it sort of exemplifies
00:03:05 ◼ ► the limits of a lot of these health tracking things, which is that does it, does it matter?
00:03:09 ◼ ► Does it matter if your score isn't good? If you feel fine? I mean, I guess it's, it's reminding
00:03:15 ◼ ► you you're inching ever closer to the abyss. So there's that, but I don't know that that actually
00:03:21 ◼ ► helps anybody. Maybe, maybe some people. All right, let's take a break here and I'll thank our
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00:06:10 ◼ ► No, no. Okay, then let's do current events. Let's knock it out. All right. ChatGPT has announced
00:06:17 ◼ ► there. Is this good or bad? I don't know. ChatGPT has announced Atlas, their long rumored web
00:06:23 ◼ ► browser. I've used it a little for two days. Have you tried it? I haven't been like I saw it going
00:06:30 ◼ ► around and I don't use ChatGPT a lot. And so it was not something that immediately appealed to me.
00:06:37 ◼ ► And I saw Microsoft, I think, came out with their AI browser, like almost like the next day or something.
00:06:48 ◼ ► like this thing I've done on the internet for 25 plus years and to sort of rejigger how that works,
00:06:58 ◼ ► it feels difficult for me. And I'm also I wouldn't say I'm a total AI skeptic. I acknowledge it has
00:07:04 ◼ ► utility for things, but it has so many flaws for the kind of things that this seems to be using it for
00:07:10 ◼ ► that I'm very hesitant to make it front and center in my web browsing experience. I've lamented recently
00:07:16 ◼ ► that like Google has gotten so much worse, partially by injecting a lot of its own AI stuff.
00:07:22 ◼ ► Yeah, Google search. Like I have, I will be looking for things and unable to find them in a way that I
00:07:28 ◼ ► feel like 10 years ago, this was not a problem. And part of that is the content, right? Like there's
00:07:33 ◼ ► just so much crap out there. And there's so much stuff that especially was written with like SEO in mind.
00:07:38 ◼ ► And some of that is a larger issue about society, journalism, etc. But certainly their AI overview
00:07:44 ◼ ► thing has had its fair share of problems too. And so that frustrates me enough that I'm not sure that
00:07:51 ◼ ► I want to like willfully turn over my browsing experience to a chatbot at this particular time.
00:08:02 ◼ ► So I was open minded, kind of. And I don't think they answered my main question is why would I want to switch
00:08:09 ◼ ► from this from Safari, which has been my go to browser from forever at this point. And the browsers, I would if
00:08:18 ◼ ► somebody said I was at some kind of legal injunction, and I was prevented from using Safari, I would look
00:08:25 ◼ ► for the most Safari like browser. I actually like Kagi's Orion, which puts the tabs on the side, and they
00:08:32 ◼ ► use WebKit as the rendering engine. And even some of the Chromium browsers, I guess Chrome itself would be
00:08:39 ◼ ► on the list. It is basically just a web browser. That's what I want. I want a web browser.
00:08:44 ◼ ► Yeah, right. Right. I've been using the web since Mosaic in 1993, 94. I don't know, somewhere around
00:08:51 ◼ ► there. I think I'm pretty good at it. And that's what I want. But so why would I want to switch to
00:08:57 ◼ ► something else? And I remember I tried Edge, Microsoft Edge, like a year ago, sometime in 2024, like when
00:09:06 ◼ ► Microsoft seemed like they were tied to the hip with OpenAI and ChatGPT. And they had built in
00:09:14 ◼ ► Copilot features, they called it. I forget if it was powered by ChatGPT. I don't know. It just,
00:09:20 ◼ ► but it still, it looked like Microsoft Edge. And it was confusing. And it had all sorts of it was just
00:09:26 ◼ ► very, very Microsoftian where there were lots of toolbar buttons. And now there's an extra sidebar on the
00:09:32 ◼ ► right for chat with lots of buttons. And none of it was stuff I wanted. So it didn't stick at all. And I
00:09:39 ◼ ► couldn't see any use point to it or use case. Yeah. I don't get it. Whereas I actually, and do use, I don't
00:09:47 ◼ ► think I use it as much as many people, but I use ChatGPT in my work quite a bit. It's always open on my Mac
00:09:53 ◼ ► now. I love that it's a native Mac app. And it's typically pretty easy for me. If I know I'm looking for a page
00:10:02 ◼ ► that I have in mind on the internet or some page that I know must be a page, then I just do a web
00:10:10 ◼ ► search. And I've for over two years, I think now I've been using Kagi instead of Google. And I typically do
00:10:16 ◼ ► that on my Mac through launch bar. I have a launch bar action. I command space K for Kagi, hit return or
00:10:24 ◼ ► hit space, type my search. And then it opens in a new tab in Safari with Kagi search results. And usually the top
00:10:31 ◼ ► hit or one of the top hits is either the thing I knew I was looking for, or, Oh, I hadn't seen this
00:10:37 ◼ ► article, but that's a good one. I'll open that one. And then if I have a question, I go to ChatGPT,
00:10:43 ◼ ► right? Like it's not that I'm looking for a webpage. It's just that I have a question and ChatGPT is great
00:10:49 ◼ ► at that. And I really like having it in its own app. It makes total sense to me. Like I don't want
00:10:55 ◼ ► everything in my browser. I don't want, I don't want my email in my browser. I like having an app
00:11:00 ◼ ► for my email. I don't want my chat in my browser. I like having separate apps for my chat.
00:11:05 ◼ ► And it's literally right there in the name, ChatGPT. It's, it's a chat interface with an AI bot and you
00:11:15 ◼ ► chat questions and get chat answers. And it makes total sense to me that it's in its standalone app,
00:11:21 ◼ ► just like Apple messages or WhatsApp or something like that. So why I would want this in my browser,
00:11:27 ◼ ► I don't know. So I tried Atlas and I have to say, I still don't know. I will give them credit.
00:11:36 ◼ ► It is a much cleaner implementation. It's like sort of the opposite of Microsoft edge, right? It's just a
00:11:43 ◼ ► very clean browser with just a field in the middle and you type, but right off the bat, I already don't
00:11:49 ◼ ► like it because it's, you're typing in the box and is it the location field where you're pasting URLs
00:11:55 ◼ ► or is it a chat? And the answer is yes. Yeah. It's both. It's all those things. Yeah. Right. I,
00:12:01 ◼ ► I think the other thing for me is that I feel like Safari is so deeply integrated in so much of my
00:12:06 ◼ ► experience on my devices. And the reason, one of the reasons I like Safari is because since it is
00:12:11 ◼ ► Apple's browser, it is well integrated with the rest of the apps and the rest of the system.
00:12:15 ◼ ► It is also there wherever I go, right? If I'm using my phone, my iPad, my Macs, it's always there.
00:12:22 ◼ ► I have my tab groups and stuff like that. I can always get to that. And sure, chat GPT, I'm sure
00:12:26 ◼ ► opening, I would love to be the, the sort of abstraction layer there and say, well, but you
00:12:30 ◼ ► open chat GPT everywhere and you have all your stuff, but it's a lot of rewiring. It's a lot of
00:12:36 ◼ ► figuring out like, am I going to go log into all my account websites in my chat GPT browser?
00:12:47 ◼ ► Google with Chrome where they kind of want to insert themselves into that and tie you to their
00:12:58 ◼ ► I kind of feel, and by the time this episode of the podcast is out, I'll have something on
00:13:03 ◼ ► Daring Fireball. I've got like the, the outline for a post on this where I'm linking mostly to other
00:13:08 ◼ ► people's commentary. Anil Dash, friend of the show, who's been on the show. Maybe I should have
00:13:12 ◼ ► him back on the show. Talk about this soon. But he had a good blog post about it and he calls it the
00:13:17 ◼ ► anti-web browser. And I think he has a good case. And from the demo that the OpenAI team did showing
00:13:26 ◼ ► Atlas, here, I'll just quote from Anil's post. In the demo for Atlas, the OpenAI team shows a user
00:13:32 ◼ ► trying to find a Google Doc from their browser history. A normal user would type keywords like
00:13:37 ◼ ► Atlas design and see their browser show a list of recent pages. They would recognize the phrase
00:13:41 ◼ ► Google Docs or the icon and click on it to get back to where they were. But in the OpenAI demo,
00:13:46 ◼ ► the team member types out in the chat box, search web history for a doc about Atlas core design.
00:13:56 ◼ ► And as Anil says, this is worse than every conceivable way. It's slower, more prone to error
00:14:00 ◼ ► and redundant. That is not how I want to find stuff. And I don't like using Google Docs, but I do use
00:14:06 ◼ ► them occasionally. People send me stuff, sponsors or something like that. That is not how I want to
00:14:15 ◼ ► I fundamentally so much of my problems do come back to the AI, the fundamental natures of AI. I was
00:14:22 ◼ ► doing, I do sort of puzzles as a, as a collaborative thing on occasion with some friends. And we were
00:14:29 ◼ ► trying to solve one the other day. And it required like looking up some details and you're trying to
00:14:33 ◼ ► sort through things. And I did this search in Google about like, oh, hey, the clue is something about
00:14:39 ◼ ► French city in this region that also could connect somehow with an instrument. And it totally was
00:14:46 ◼ ► like, oh, yeah, there's this chateau. It's known as the instrument because the bridge spans this river.
00:14:52 ◼ ► Here's a link to the Wikipedia page. And I clicked on that link and it was all crap. It was made up.
00:15:00 ◼ ► There was nothing there. Those words did not appear on that page. And I think there is still a world
00:15:06 ◼ ► where, where these AI chatbots are so eager to prove that they can answer any question that you
00:15:13 ◼ ► have, which of course ties in with so much of the hallucination problem that I, I am very wary of
00:15:19 ◼ ► being like, well, I trust, I never trust the Google AI overview. I always scroll down to links still.
00:15:23 ◼ ► And sometimes the AI overview is right, but sometimes it's not reliable enough for me to be willing to
00:15:35 ◼ ► I have it. I have, yeah, I do have something like that or something else where Dave defaults to
00:15:40 ◼ ► searching the web, but I like my, my wife loves the AI overview thing. She's always, well, it says
00:15:50 ◼ ► And Google, they're famously A, B testers, A, B, C, D, E, F, G testers. So I'm sure people do use it,
00:16:00 ◼ ► And I know that there's lots of studies showing or results from news publishers saying that traffic is
00:16:06 ◼ ► dropping off from places that depended on Google search as a traffic funnel to their site, which
00:16:14 ◼ ► I sympathize with, but not that much because I've, I don't know, 15, 20 years, I've never thought that
00:16:28 ◼ ► Well, it's like you're depending on an external source to prop up your business model. Moreover,
00:16:33 ◼ ► it leads to bad habits like SEO. If Google is the only thing that matters, you write all your content
00:16:41 ◼ ► Right. And it seems, yeah, it seems, and it's always seemed to, A, I don't even know which one
00:16:46 ◼ ► to list first, but A, incredibly risky, right? Because, and here's the risk, right? Now we're
00:16:51 ◼ ► seeing it where Google is suddenly not sending people away to read the stuff. They're summarizing
00:16:59 ◼ ► for them and putting it right in the answer. And they just look at it, read it and close the tab
00:17:03 ◼ ► and never go anywhere. But the other one that I was tempted to list first is just that it's a
00:17:08 ◼ ► shitty way to make a website, right? Yeah. The right way to make a website is to appeal to actual
00:17:14 ◼ ► humans. And I would say the same way for writing, let's say, like in your experience, a novel,
00:17:20 ◼ ► right? Like, yeah, it's, yeah, I don't want to write for, for Google to find my novel. That would
00:17:27 ◼ ► be very weird. I don't even know how that would work. I mean, there's people, you can't write for,
00:17:30 ◼ ► people try to write for markets, right? They're like, oh, this is hot right now. I'm going to write a
00:17:34 ◼ ► book that's this. And it mostly does not work. No. Mostly. Sometimes. But I don't think that
00:17:43 ◼ ► writing for the web is all that different at a fundamental level than writing a novel, or it
00:17:51 ◼ ► shouldn't be, where you're writing for human readers to read. Yeah. And yes, I do welcome,
00:17:58 ◼ ► I'm sure that when I write a particular banger of a post, it gets read by people who don't regularly
00:18:05 ◼ ► read me. Or like the, this year, the something is rotten in the state of Cupertino went pretty viral.
00:18:12 ◼ ► I'm sure there were people who never even heard of me who wound up reading that one. And that's great.
00:18:17 ◼ ► And that's how you get new readers. And maybe they're like, hey, this is, I never heard of this
00:18:20 ◼ ► guy. Maybe they'll stick around. But for the most part, I'm writing for my regular readers. That's,
00:18:33 ◼ ► Yeah. Like, this is why I enjoy my work, as opposed to wake up and dread it. And it seems
00:18:40 ◼ ► sustainable. And it doesn't seem as risky, right? Because there's no, hopefully, there's no
00:18:48 ◼ ► intermediation between me and my readers. The Google reader fiasco of 2006 was the closest it
00:18:54 ◼ ► ever came to a disruption, right? When Google, the most popular RSS reader, just, they just said,
00:19:05 ◼ ► Because so many people didn't understand that it was based on RSS and thought Google readers gone,
00:19:12 ◼ ► they didn't replace it with anything, right? They just stopped using that, because they didn't,
00:19:16 ◼ ► they didn't know. So yeah, yeah. And you're just sort of we, we as the collective whole of the web,
00:19:22 ◼ ► who had people reading our stuff through RSS through Google reader, or one of the things that made Google
00:19:28 ◼ ► reader so great, was they had API's, so that other like net newswire could hook up to Google reader,
00:19:35 ◼ ► and it was just sort of the sync engine API. And then you could go to work where you don't have a
00:19:40 ◼ ► Mac and couldn't have used net newswire. And you could just use the Google reader web interface while
00:19:46 ◼ ► you're at work at a PC or something, and then go home and the articles you read were updated and
00:19:51 ◼ ► marked as read and net newswire. It was really great. And it just sort of broke people's habits.
00:19:56 ◼ ► That's the problem. And they were like, Oh, yeah, I still want to read the same sites. But
00:19:59 ◼ ► nobody, a lot of people just didn't want to do the the work of taking half an hour to reproduce their
00:20:06 ◼ ► Google reader subscription somewhere else. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's always a challenge to you. I mean,
00:20:12 ◼ ► the the, the industry has always struggled with trying to figure out in the the pivot to digital,
00:20:17 ◼ ► how to, how do you make those relationships stick writ large, right? Like in terms of media,
00:20:23 ◼ ► large media companies, of which how there are fewer than there were before. And there are ones that
00:20:33 ◼ ► want to drive them directly into the ground. But yeah, it is it is tricky when you are beholden to
00:20:38 ◼ ► other interests. And I don't know that, that open AI replacing Google changes that other than it,
00:20:44 ◼ ► it switches one intermediary for another and one that seems to be even less interested in in sending
00:20:50 ◼ ► people to the originals. Yeah, exactly. And I just see it as and I think that's what one of the
00:20:57 ◼ ► things Anil was getting at with calling it anti web, yeah, is, as much as we can complain about or some
00:21:05 ◼ ► of us can complain about the AI results at the top of Google search results, you just have to scroll
00:21:12 ◼ ► down to get the Google search results, right, right, right, they are still there. And, and they are
00:21:18 ◼ ► presented visually differently. There's no, you could still do that. And so Google still is sending lots of
00:21:30 ◼ ► Yeah, which is it feels short sighted, too, right? Because it depends on the content being generated
00:21:36 ◼ ► from those other places, right? Literally, deals to either deals or no deals, right? Either you're
00:21:43 ◼ ► scraping it and not like making a deal with the publisher, or you're making a deal with the publisher.
00:21:48 ◼ ► But sooner or later, if you are eliminating so much of the direct attention on those publications,
00:21:54 ◼ ► they will have fewer writers, they will produce less content, and you will have less stuff to scrape.
00:21:59 ◼ ► All right, it's like challenge there. It's like cutting down the entire forest to make paper as opposed
00:22:05 ◼ ► to only cutting down trees at the same rate that the new ones you plant are, there's no sustainability
00:22:11 ◼ ► to it whatsoever. Yeah. And it, like many bubbles, I think this is the way bubbles tend to work. There's a,
00:22:20 ◼ ► we'll figure out the future later. Don't worry about it. Now, now, now, now, now, right? Yeah,
00:22:25 ◼ ► just now. All that matters is now. I do think it's interesting. I think, I think if there's a
00:22:31 ◼ ► critique I have of Anil's post, it's that he's too comparing chat as to the command line interface of
00:22:39 ◼ ► the past and that the world switched to graphical user interfaces in the 90s and never looked back.
00:22:44 ◼ ► I think, I think part of what makes chat GPT and all of its knockoffs, and effectively,
00:22:52 ◼ ► they're all knockoffs of chat GPT. So effective is that, and again, it gets into critiques of
00:22:59 ◼ ► certainly Siri, I think Alexa, and you could go all the way back to something like AppleScript and the
00:23:06 ◼ ► English-like nature, which was a great intention, but didn't really work, as I've written about at
00:23:12 ◼ ► length on Daring Fireball, where when you get an AppleScript that works, and then you give it to
00:23:19 ◼ ► someone who doesn't really know AppleScript at all, perhaps, but they can read it and they can read it
00:23:24 ◼ ► like English and kind of understand what it does. And that's not nothing, but when you're writing Apple
00:23:35 ◼ ► Jason Snell is my AppleScript mule. I don't write AppleScript. I just use AppleScripts he gives me.
00:23:43 ◼ ► I can read them. That's true. But if I need to change something or fix something, that is,
00:23:49 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's just all sorts of crazy little things like you have to use of instead of an
00:23:54 ◼ ► apostrophe or S or something. There's so many little edge points where it's really is like real
00:24:03 ◼ ► it comes out looking like English. And we've all made fun of Siri for 15 years about the ways that
00:24:09 ◼ ► would sound completely natural to a human being who speaks English. And one of them works and one
00:24:22 ◼ ► It's bananas. We have a scene, a home kit scene in my house that my wife made, which is to like,
00:24:29 ◼ ► we're watching TV or a movie or something. And it turns off basically everything except one lamp
00:24:34 ◼ ► downstairs. And she will tell the home pod to set it. And it will just say, "There's nothing to stop
00:24:41 ◼ ► here." And then I will rephrase and be like, "Set scene, blah." And it will be like, "Oh, sure." And it's
00:24:48 ◼ ► just baffling. And ChatGPT broke through that problem. You can ask the same thing in any natural
00:24:57 ◼ ► idiomatic way in English or whatever other languages ChatGPT supports, and you get the same answer. And it's
00:25:05 ◼ ► a real breakthrough. And Chat turns out to be a great interface that human beings really thrive on.
00:25:17 ◼ ► Right. I was going to say, sure, it's not the command line. The command line was arcane and esoteric.
00:25:22 ◼ ► You had to know, like the Apple script, "All right, I'm typing this command, and then I'm using this
00:25:27 ◼ ► switch, and then I'm using the input file and the output file, but I don't get them in the wrong order."
00:25:31 ◼ ► But when you text with a friend, you don't worry about it. People spell things all sorts of ways,
00:25:36 ◼ ► right? There's a whole jargon that's come up, but it doesn't ultimately matter. It's not like you're
00:25:40 ◼ ► writing a formal letter. And so the fact that Chat mimics that, and you sort of are just like,
00:25:50 ◼ ► People are very adept at it. It comes naturally to them. As much as I kind of miss the golden age
00:26:07 ◼ ► where we're communicating with these things that are... You wouldn't be embarrassed at the
00:26:14 ◼ ► Please don't compile my texts at the end of my life. That will not look good for anybody.
00:26:19 ◼ ► But we actually wrote thoughtful emails to each other on a daily basis. They may not be long,
00:26:25 ◼ ► but they might have been short, but they were thoughtfully written. But texting, chatting,
00:26:30 ◼ ► whatever you want to call it, appeals to way more people than email did. Like most people just
00:26:45 ◼ ► I'm fascinated too by it's cutting across various ages and stuff. Like my mom texts, my family, a lot
00:26:51 ◼ ► of my family texts, people who probably otherwise maybe didn't write email or would check their email
00:26:56 ◼ ► like once a week or something like 20 years ago. But they all text, they all have phones.
00:27:02 ◼ ► My now 87-year-old, my now 87-year-old dad texts me. Doesn't text a lot. His texts aren't
00:27:09 ◼ ► ready to be put into book form. But he never emailed me, right? Almost never. The best he would ever do
00:27:22 ◼ ► I had a cousin who for a while there would write his texts as though they were letters. Like he would
00:27:33 ◼ ► Yeah. And my dad definitely has... He's gotten away from it though. He's picked up on it.
00:27:39 ◼ ► Yeah. And so the chat interface to ChatGPT is actually really great. It really is an interesting
00:27:46 ◼ ► way to interact with the technology that they've developed. I don't think chat is a good way to
00:27:52 ◼ ► interact with a web browser. I just don't. I don't think you should be typing commands. And so there,
00:27:58 ◼ ► I really think Anil is onto something where the breakthrough was with the web in the 90s from the
00:28:04 ◼ ► origin was that most of the quote internet of that era, you went through a terminal interface,
00:28:10 ◼ ► you logged into your account at university or your ISP and you type command line things to get onto
00:28:18 ◼ ► Usenet or you type command line things to go for, or you do your email there. And all of a sudden,
00:28:28 ◼ ► you could just see things and move your mouse around and click on them. And in the same way that
00:28:34 ◼ ► seeing things and moving your mouse around to click on things was a much better interface for word
00:28:40 ◼ ► processing and spreadsheets and other early PC era productivity apps. Turns out it was a much better
00:28:48 ◼ ► way of getting on the internet and finding things to read and making things for other people to read,
00:28:55 ◼ ► the graphical user interface. And I just don't think chat is a good way. So why did they make it? And I
00:29:02 ◼ ► really do feel like it's for them, not for us. And it's like they're trying to convince you and I'm
00:29:09 ◼ ► stealing again from Anil here, but that they're trying to convince you that Atlas is an agent for you,
00:29:14 ◼ ► but really you're the agent for ChatGPT where it's, oh, please let us have full access to everything in
00:29:21 ◼ ► your private internet. Like where all of a sudden you're using Atlas to log into Gmail and there it
00:29:28 ◼ ► is. And because you've got the chat window open on the side, now they can see an index. It's not,
00:29:33 ◼ ► I'm not even saying they're using it for nefarious purposes or privacy invasive purposes that you're
00:29:40 ◼ ► not aware of, but now they've got access to this context about you that they ordinarily wouldn't have
00:29:49 ◼ ► It's a little bit like what Google did in the earliest days by having Gmail and Google Reader and
00:29:55 ◼ ► all of that. Like they could synthesize information about you. They could create a profile of you.
00:30:02 ◼ ► And I wonder with ChatGPT and using this browser, whether this is like sort of the command line
00:30:09 ◼ ► or the dial up access of the era, if this is a way station for them on the way towards something
00:30:15 ◼ ► else. Because you mentioned the chat isn't a great way to interact with the web, but part of me also
00:30:20 ◼ ► thinks, well, chat's not a great way to interact with a computer either, as we've already discovered,
00:30:25 ◼ ► but that they want to be there. They want to be intermediating your relationships with all the
00:30:30 ◼ ► other apps on your system, too, if they could. They would like to, because again, they can learn
00:30:35 ◼ ► all this stuff about you. They can do all this interesting stuff. And we've seen a little bit
00:30:38 ◼ ► of this stuff with the MCP protocol, right, where you can sort of wire together things. And there's
00:30:44 ◼ ► some very interesting stuff to be done there. But I don't imagine that open AI is content to stop
00:30:58 ◼ ► And for the people who live their life in the web browser, and there's a lot of people who use Macs,
00:31:05 ◼ ► who use their Mac that way, where they really kind of spend all day in their web browser,
00:31:15 ◼ ► thing as their productivity tool. And for those people, using Atlas as their browser is a way to sort
00:31:23 ◼ ► of give them that, right? Where now it's sort of like, oh, we're sort of the OS. We're an OS in an OS.
00:31:31 ◼ ► But effectively, if you're living your digital life, mostly or almost entirely in a browser,
00:31:41 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I mean, I'm sure they'd like to get there. And maybe this is the stepping
00:31:45 ◼ ► stone for them. But yeah, again, I don't know that it's something I'm... It's not a step I want to take,
00:31:51 ◼ ► There are just things that I would like robots to do for me in general, whether they are robots that
00:31:57 ◼ ► just live in my computer, like ChatGPT, or physical robots like C-3PO, who I would love it while I'm
00:32:04 ◼ ► watching TV if a robot could go get me a drink from the fridge and bring it to me. I really would look
00:32:11 ◼ ► forward to more and more automated driving. I don't really enjoy... Sometimes I enjoy driving,
00:32:18 ◼ ► but for the most part, and if I had daily commute, man, it would be great if my car could just take
00:32:24 ◼ ► me to work and I could safely dick around on my phone or catch up on email or something like I'm
00:32:29 ◼ ► in an Uber, like a personal Waymo. That would be great. There are times when I want to drive because
00:32:35 ◼ ► it's fun. And there are lots of times where I would like to be driven. That's great. Surfing the web is
00:32:46 ◼ ► Well, I see this a lot with the talk about the agentic AI, right? And oh, you'll go make your
00:32:52 ◼ ► vacation plans for you or whatever. And I, again, I imagine there are some people for whom that is
00:32:58 ◼ ► attractive, but I know people like my wife is another one who she loves. She wants to look at
00:33:02 ◼ ► all the hotels. She wants to figure out the flights. She loves doing that. And so I guess it's there for
00:33:07 ◼ ► for the people who want it and the people who don't want it, don't need it. But it is things
00:33:12 ◼ ► where I find the, the shopping by agentic AI thing, most puzzling because I don't, I don't want it to
00:33:19 ◼ ► decide. Like I want to at least, even if I come to the same result that it does, I want to feel that I
00:33:26 ◼ ► have done the research and looked at the options and figure it out and know all the trade-offs and stuff
00:33:31 ◼ ► like that rather than just being told, Hey, I did all that for you. And here's the thing you want.
00:33:35 ◼ ► I don't get it at all. I really don't like, what are you buying that you don't want to choose for
00:33:43 ◼ ► yourself? And there are so many ways that, I mean, I think, I don't know how long web browsers have
00:33:50 ◼ ► sort of reached. And I don't think this is a knock against traditional web browsers. And I'll hold up
00:33:56 ◼ ► Safari in particular as like a sort of icon or exemplar of just a traditional web browser. That's just a
00:34:05 ◼ ► web browser, right? And it's got tabs and it has scriptability so that you can do things with
00:34:12 ◼ ► Apple script or JavaScript that should to manipulate it. It has extensions, but it's just there for
00:34:18 ◼ ► surfing the web and some of the features and it's, they've sort of reached the end state. It's, I think
00:34:25 ◼ ► that's natural that it's like after it's so used, such a much used app and the idea of, Oh, like I
00:34:31 ◼ ► remember back in the day, everything, there were no tabs. Everything you opened was in a new window
00:34:35 ◼ ► window. Yep. And instead of having like a hundred tabs in eight or nine windows, I'd have a hundred
00:34:42 ◼ ► windows. It wasn't great for performance. No, it was definitely not good for performance and it wasn't
00:34:46 ◼ ► good for finding them. But like when you're searching it's, Oh, here's three or four, I'm looking for new
00:34:52 ◼ ► shirts and here's three or four that I like open and tab, open and tab, open and tab. Now I've got each
00:34:57 ◼ ► of the shirts that I'm looking at in their own tab and I look at them and I can see their availability and
00:35:03 ◼ ► either put them in my cart or close the tab and then I'm done. And I feel like I've gotten what
00:35:08 ◼ ► I want. I don't want somebody else to do that for me. I don't know why, I don't know why this is
00:35:14 ◼ ► presented as a use case. This is a, because for some people, I guess it feels like a chore as opposed to
00:35:21 ◼ ► something they're doing for fun. But I mean, I guess if I were like, Oh, I need new jeans. Like
00:35:28 ◼ ► you could look at my history of like where I bought my jeans or whatever and what my size is and all
00:35:34 ◼ ► that and just go, go buy them. But I also don't think that's saved much time compared to go, I go
00:35:39 ◼ ► to Amazon and like, Oh, I bought those jeans six months ago. I'll buy another pair like bang. So I don't
00:35:44 ◼ ► know. Maybe that's the Steve Jobs in me. Just buy the same jeans, same shirts, just keep rolling.
00:35:49 ◼ ► I guess there is a thing. Obviously, schoolwork comes to mind where it's like you have this assigned
00:35:54 ◼ ► book to read or chapters to read. And back in the day, it would be get the CliffsNotes and just sort
00:36:00 ◼ ► of cheat your way by reading the summary of the thing instead of reading the thing. And now you can
00:36:10 ◼ ► I despair. I despair of it. I was in a coffee shop not long ago. And it's in an area with both a high
00:36:16 ◼ ► school and a college. And a younger person came in and sat down next to me. I happened to glance over
00:36:23 ◼ ► at their screen. And I watched as they literally copied a document from like Google Docs and pasted it
00:36:29 ◼ ► at GPT. I was just like, Oh, boy. This is this is Oh, soon you won't even have to do the copying and
00:36:37 ◼ ► pasting. It'll even do that for you. I don't know. It's it feels a little worrying. I don't want to come
00:36:41 ◼ ► across too much as like kids these days. But it is a little disconcerting how how quickly it became
00:36:47 ◼ ► like I have friends who are teachers. And they struggle with this all the time. People get kids,
00:36:51 ◼ ► students college all the way down to elementary school generating their homework in in AI and stuff
00:36:57 ◼ ► like that. And it's hard to find. There's no good tools, really, because all the tools themselves
00:37:02 ◼ ► rely on AI. Right. But it's AI all the way down. It really is. This is robots checking robots.
00:37:07 ◼ ► Yeah, it's AI detectives trying to find AI. We're all looking for the person who did this.
00:37:12 ◼ ► But to me, a lot of the web browsing that they're presenting as use cases for agentic web browsing
00:37:19 ◼ ► are things I enjoy. I read books to enjoy them. I don't want to read an AI generated summary of the
00:37:24 ◼ ► book. I want to read the book. Yeah. So I don't really get it. And even for some of the agentic
00:37:30 ◼ ► use cases, if you have a personal assistant, a real human being, and you need to get from California to
00:37:37 ◼ ► New York for a conference or a meeting or something, and you could say, here's the dates, can you please
00:37:43 ◼ ► take care of this for me? And you trust your human assistant to get you on the flight that they know
00:37:50 ◼ ► which times a day you like to fly. They know which airline you have status on. And they'll take care
00:37:56 ◼ ► of this stuff for you. That's one of the things personal assistants do. And AI could maybe serve
00:38:03 ◼ ► that role or is already serving that role for everybody. But I don't see why you need that baked
00:38:08 ◼ ► into the browser, right? Why not just use chat GPT, the app? I don't get it. I don't know. So
00:38:14 ◼ ► anyway, long story short, I don't get it. And I think it's more for them, not for us. And pretty
00:38:21 ◼ ► much done with my experiment with Atlas. Also, current events new moving on. There's, I don't think we
00:38:27 ◼ ► have, I have much to say about this, but Apple lost a ruling, a landmark UK lawsuit over app store
00:38:35 ◼ ► commissions. Here I am quoting from Reuters. Apple abused its dominant position by charging app
00:38:40 ◼ ► developers unfair commissions. A London tribunal ruled on Thursday a blow in a blow, which could
00:38:46 ◼ ► leave the US tech company on the hook for hundreds of millions of pounds of damages. The competition
00:38:50 ◼ ► appeal tribunal CAT ruled against Apple after a trial, blah, blah, blah. The cat ruled that Apple had
00:39:00 ◼ ► abused its dominant position from October 2015 until the end of 2020 by shutting out competition in the
00:39:06 ◼ ► app distribution market and by, quote, charging excessive and unfair prices as commissioned to
00:39:12 ◼ ► developers. I think there's other reports about this have said that there, if Apple unsurprisingly
00:39:19 ◼ ► is appealing, they always appeal, right? Yep. Of course. Yeah. Take it as far as you can go.
00:39:25 ◼ ► If they lose the appeal, they're on the hook for $1.5 billion in damages. And as I sometimes joke,
00:39:33 ◼ ► hey, a billion dollars isn't that much to Apple, which just sounds ridiculous to say about any
00:39:38 ◼ ► entity. But a billion here and a billion there, and all of a sudden you're talking about real money
00:39:44 ◼ ► for anybody. Yeah. It is interesting to see as more of these cases seem to come across various parts
00:39:52 ◼ ► of the world in different ways, but all kind of, I think, getting to the same issue, which is the app
00:40:00 ◼ ► store. And the app store, I think, has long been their largest vulnerability in terms of just exposure
00:40:09 ◼ ► to regulation. Nobody really seems to care very much about your iPhone. Like, they've tried attempts
00:40:14 ◼ ► to be like, oh, the iPhone and Android, that's a duopoly, etc. It doesn't seem to hold a lot of water
00:40:19 ◼ ► because people, there is a choice and people like their various phones. The app store, and I mean,
00:40:24 ◼ ► we in the Apple community, especially those of our friends in the developer community, have long
00:40:30 ◼ ► had bones to pick with the app store. They are not shy about it. And I think a lot of their concerns
00:40:36 ◼ ► have been well-founded, and sometimes Apple addresses those concerns. But fundamentally, at the end of the
00:40:40 ◼ ► day, we still have this issue where the company controls all means of distribution on iOS, which is
00:40:47 ◼ ► one of the largest platforms in the world. I think that's going to become more and more tenuous,
00:40:53 ◼ ► it seems, between stuff like the DMA in Europe, other various countries like, I think, Japan and Korea,
00:41:00 ◼ ► too, have taken shots at this. At what point does it become, like, cut your losses? I mean, like,
00:41:06 ◼ ► Apple wants to hold on to this, and they want to make as much money. And right now, if they haven't
00:41:11 ◼ ► seeded that, it's because they think, even with all the lawsuits, they will still do better controlling
00:41:16 ◼ ► the app store every place they can than letting open the floodgates. But that'll change eventually.
00:41:22 ◼ ► At a certain point, if this keeps, if this wave continues in this direction, if they lose this appeal,
00:41:27 ◼ ► if they lose the stuff that they've challenged in the DMA and the European courts now as well,
00:41:31 ◼ ► they're going to have to make some changes. And I think the smart move potentially would be to
00:41:36 ◼ ► have more of a competitive angle about it. In the same way Steve Jobs got up years ago when they
00:41:42 ◼ ► introduced the iTunes store and said, we can't eradicate piracy, but what we want to do is compete
00:41:47 ◼ ► with it. And they made it so attractive to go and buy your songs for a dollar or your albums for 10
00:41:53 ◼ ► bucks that I don't want to trawl Napster and LimeWire to try and find something that may not
00:42:15 ◼ ► the commission. I mean, they've done this already sort of with the small business program,
00:42:19 ◼ ► but I feel like increasingly they may be under pressure to bring it down to even lower levels,
00:42:25 ◼ ► even for people not in it. Or conversely, finding ways to be like, look, what we really want is to be
00:42:32 ◼ ► getting a cut of money from the big players, your Spotify's, your Netflix's, etc. We don't care about
00:42:39 ◼ ► anybody making an app for 1,000 people or even maybe 10,000 people. We care about the people make
00:42:46 ◼ ► apps for millions of people. And those are like, we strike partnerships with them, for example. Do we
00:42:50 ◼ ► take that approach? I don't know. But this feels, again, I think the other challenge is Apple is a
00:42:57 ◼ ► global company. And we've seen this with a lot of their media plays, right? When they make a movie or a TV
00:43:04 ◼ ► show, they've got the rights to it. They can send anywhere in the world. If you've got Apple TV, you can
00:43:08 ◼ ► watch Slow Horses in Japan or Korea or China or whatever. At what point does it become too complex for
00:43:15 ◼ ► them to manage all of these different rubrics and systems for different places? Obviously, they built that
00:43:22 ◼ ► whole system in Europe, which has gone back and forth a number of iterations. There's the possibility that
00:43:27 ◼ ► you'll see more countries saying, well, we want what they have in Europe. And they're like, well,
00:43:31 ◼ ► we've already built it. We can roll it out in Brazil or Japan or whatever. But at what point does it
00:43:37 ◼ ► become too annoying to try to be like, in every country, we have to worry about what are the specific
00:43:42 ◼ ► app store rules? What are the commissions? And then they have to pass that on to developers who are
00:43:46 ◼ ► distributing stuff internationally. It becomes very complex. And might they be served by letting go a
00:43:52 ◼ ► little bit and thus making their lives easier and still being able to hold on to some revenue?
00:43:57 ◼ ► I think it's not that complex overall. But I do feel that there's an aspect, an important bit of it's
00:44:06 ◼ ► not. There's an important bit of it that is overlooked, either deliberately, or even by not really thinking
00:44:16 ◼ ► hard enough about it or looking back far enough about it by the most strident of Apple slash App Store
00:44:24 ◼ ► slash App Store, Google Play duopoly critics, which is that it's a very different scenario than most
00:44:37 ◼ ► monopoly or near monopoly abuse cases where it's not like they built a monopoly and then turned the
00:44:46 ◼ ► ratchet up on the commissions. The Cory Doctorow term in shittification, it hasn't gotten in shittified.
00:44:54 ◼ ► They haven't made the App Store worse. And I think that's where, in terms of what in the world is Apple
00:45:01 ◼ ► thinking, and we in the Apple commentariat have been talking about this for at least five years, but in some
00:45:09 ◼ ► ways longer, of why doesn't Apple, why can't, it seems so obvious to us that heavy-handed regulatory
00:45:16 ◼ ► scrutiny, fines of some significant nature, right? This is 1.5 billion pounds. It converts to $2 billion.
00:45:25 ◼ ► Again, it's not going to bankrupt Apple, but it adds up. It's a PR disaster, right? Every single one of
00:45:34 ◼ ► these cases around the world, it's Apple's always on the losing end now. When's the last time that they
00:45:39 ◼ ► won one of these regulatory scrutiny things, right? The whole EU, now the UK, Japan, Australia, I think,
00:45:48 ◼ ► is looking into it for something similar. They're on the wrong end of it every time, and it adds up,
00:45:58 ◼ ► when the government, you know, democratic governments are holding them, finding them to be
00:46:04 ◼ ► abusing their position. But they haven't changed anything. And that's to explain why has, what is
00:46:10 ◼ ► Apple not seeing? And I think it's that they've got tunnel vision on the fact that they haven't
00:46:15 ◼ ► changed it. It's always been 70-30. The only ways they've changed the 70-30 split are in the favor
00:46:22 ◼ ► of developers, right? Where for subscription pricing, after the first year of 70-30, it goes
00:46:28 ◼ ► to 85-15. They've added the small business program sometime in the last five years, where if you're
00:46:34 ◼ ► a developer with under a million dollars in revenue through the App Store in a year, you can apply for
00:46:40 ◼ ► this program and start with an 85-15 split. They've only moved it in that direction. But the world has
00:46:48 ◼ ► changed, right? That's the clear thing. The App Store's centrality to... And the duopoly,
00:46:54 ◼ ► the complete duopoly that the App Store and Google Play Store have over digital good purchases through
00:47:01 ◼ ► mobile phones is as near a complete duopoly as you're going to get. There are... I mean,
00:47:08 ◼ ► how many people does anybody listening to this podcast know who either don't use a phone or use
00:47:15 ◼ ► a phone that doesn't use Apple's App Store or the Google Play Store for purchases? I don't know
00:47:21 ◼ ► anybody. I know that they exist, that there are like Linux-based alternatives. Sure. Right? You can set
00:47:28 ◼ ► up a Google-free Android phone. I don't know, personally, anybody who uses such a thing.
00:47:33 ◼ ► Nobody. And it's... So basically, what I think government bureaucrats and politicians around
00:47:42 ◼ ► the world are looking at is they just see it. And they are as technically inept and as bad as they
00:47:47 ◼ ► are at product design, because they're politicians and bureaucrats, not product designers. They're
00:47:52 ◼ ► correct about the fundamental issue that this centralized aggregation of power and taking a
00:48:02 ◼ ► 15% to 30% slice off all this commerce of everything going through everybody's phones isn't tenable
00:48:09 ◼ ► as the way that our society should work. Right. And for Apple's part, I mean, there's a few challenges,
00:48:17 ◼ ► right? I mean, Apple's argument in the earliest days was we want to be safe and secure and make
00:48:23 ◼ ► sure apps are good citizens and make sure your phones work well. And I think that's all laudable.
00:48:28 ◼ ► They've struggled with it. And some of that is just a matter of scale, right? There is so much stuff
00:48:34 ◼ ► on the App Store. They miss stuff. We know they do frequently. It gets pulled sometimes. But like,
00:48:42 ◼ ► Pulled months after it was widely reported how bad these apps were. Right. But you flip side that
00:48:47 ◼ ► with the control issues too, right? I mean, we've talked about all the ICE apps. They were in a
00:48:51 ◼ ► position where there is no alternative to the App Store. And so if they remove something, it is
00:49:00 ◼ ► functionally not there. It is not a thing that you can get, right? Because there is only one channel.
00:49:06 ◼ ► And that makes them responsible in ways that maybe they could argue internally. They don't want to be,
00:49:13 ◼ ► right? Like they maybe don't want to be in a position of removing those kinds of apps, but they
00:49:19 ◼ ► have to because there is no alternative. That is a challenge as well. I think I hesitate to be too
00:49:26 ◼ ► mercenary about this, but I've written about this a bunch. They are a corporation. They are a corporation
00:49:30 ◼ ► that is designed to make money. And I think part of me wonders, yeah, maybe they have tunnel vision
00:49:37 ◼ ► about feeling like they're doing a good job of regulating this system. But I also have to imagine
00:49:43 ◼ ► that somebody is running the numbers and saying like, well, 2 billion here, a billion there. Yeah,
00:49:47 ◼ ► it's real money. But like our revenue from services based on the App Store is still 4 billion. I mean,
00:50:00 ◼ ► incongruity with Apple in particular, where Apple's never been that company. And they say it and they
00:50:06 ◼ ► mean it in so many different ways that they don't mean to make the most money. They mean to make the
00:50:12 ◼ ► best products and then make as much money from making the best products as they can. And if that means
00:50:17 ◼ ► they make the most money, which they have with the iPhone, so be it. But the driving motivation is to
00:50:24 ◼ ► make the best product they can and then make a profit from it. Not the other way around.
00:50:28 ◼ ► The App Store has always been the one that felt like it didn't fit with that from the earliest
00:50:33 ◼ ► days of them saying, remember when they first launch subscriptions and the like, taking a cut of
00:50:39 ◼ ► subscriptions. There were many of us at the time who were like, really? You're going to take a cut of
00:50:44 ◼ ► people's content that they're producing here? I think they've always struggled with this. If that is
00:50:50 ◼ ► indeed their core identity, this part of it always is, as you said, incongruous. And I think
00:50:59 ◼ ► well, we love this because it does make a lot of money. And a lot of that money is free,
00:51:04 ◼ ► quote unquote. But does it fly in the face of their corporate culture? I mean, Steve Jobs was no stranger
00:51:11 ◼ ► to saying, these people are making their money off the backs of our products and we want to cut
00:51:16 ◼ ► it because we feel like we deserve it. The best time to walk away from the money train of the App
00:51:21 ◼ ► Store was long ago. And I know that the adage is, it applies in so many aspects of life that the best
00:51:27 ◼ ► time to do something was in the past. And the second best time is right now, right? The second best time
00:51:33 ◼ ► to do it would be starting now. But the big, in this case, it's a real difference because to back away
00:51:39 ◼ ► from this, they'd have to walk away from money they're already making. Right. And that's, that's
00:51:43 ◼ ► a problem. And Apple isn't, none of these companies, all of the major companies have sort of learned
00:51:50 ◼ ► their lesson from the Jack Welch GE era of the nineties of having these, the biggest corporations
00:52:00 ◼ ► in the world truly treat their shareholders as the primary thing to run the company around and just
00:52:07 ◼ ► thinking about the stock price and making shareholders happy. Yeah. None of these companies
00:52:11 ◼ ► are, and the newer ones starting with Google have set themselves up with unique stock structures
00:52:19 ◼ ► where the public shareholders don't even really control the company. And Apple is not pretty,
00:52:25 ◼ ► Apple doesn't have that sort of stock structure where the two founders of the company or in Meta's
00:52:30 ◼ ► case, Zuckerberg personally owns a controlling share of a class shares that can't be outvoted.
00:52:37 ◼ ► Every single public shareholder of Meta can't outvote Mark Mark Zuckerberg on an issue, which is a,
00:52:43 ◼ ► perhaps a dubious way to set up a publicly held corporation. But it, it, it, it still would be a
00:52:52 ◼ ► problem though for Apple to say, we're going to purposefully make less money from the app store.
00:52:56 ◼ ► Yes. But I, it still would be the right thing to do. And there's a way they don't have to come out
00:53:01 ◼ ► and say that they could just say, we're doing these great things for customers and leave it as implicit
00:53:06 ◼ ► that this might decrease the services revenue from the app store because it's going to happen one way
00:53:12 ◼ ► or the other. And they can't keep hanging their hats on the fact. And I'll, I'll, I'll argue against you
00:53:20 ◼ ► here where at the very inception of the app store, it really was completely pro developer and pro user
00:53:28 ◼ ► where on mobile devices, everything went through the carriers, all the apps you got on any phone.
00:53:35 ◼ ► If you had a Verizon Blackberry, you got apps from Verizon, not from Blackberry. And if you switch to
00:53:41 ◼ ► AT&T, none of your apps worked anymore because now you're on a new carrier and your apps were all
00:53:46 ◼ ► built through your Verizon account and the app sucked. Right. Yeah. And the ecosystem was bad. I mean, and
00:53:52 ◼ ► they, they, they did as with the smartphone itself, they reinvented it and full credit where credit is due.
00:53:57 ◼ ► And I think the problem is that that's a very different world from the world we live in now.
00:54:01 ◼ ► And you, the developer get to keep 70% was incredibly generous. And again, I, I, Apple hasn't brought up
00:54:09 ◼ ► the boxed software thing too recently, but even just sometime within the last five years,
00:54:15 ◼ ► they've brought it up in some of these arguments and that's so antiquated. There's an entire generation
00:54:22 ◼ ► of young adults who don't, who've grown up in this era. My son is 21. He's a senior in college. He was
00:54:28 ◼ ► three when me and my wife got our first iPhones in 2007. So he doesn't really remember a pre iPhone
00:54:34 ◼ ► world. He doesn't remember boxed software. It's certainly, and there never was box software for
00:54:40 ◼ ► phones. There never was. And talking about like when you had to box up your software and print CDs and
00:54:45 ◼ ► print paper manuals and go through Ingram micro as a middle, a wholesaler distributor, and that you'd be
00:54:53 ◼ ► lucky if you got 10% of the retail price of the box software back. That's all true. And the 70 30 split
00:55:02 ◼ ► was way better than the split. The carriers were giving the distributors of software for phones
00:55:06 ◼ ► pre iPhone. But again, that's it. It's, it's that Steve jobs quote about, Hey, when you do something
00:55:13 ◼ ► great, don't I'm paraphrasing, but you know, don't get too caught up thinking about it, move on to the
00:55:18 ◼ ► next thing and make something else. Wonderful. It's time to give up on the fact that the 2007 or 2008
00:55:25 ◼ ► original app store was a breakthrough and a, and a true win for developers and consumers and face the
00:55:35 ◼ ► fact that things by, by 2015, which I don't know why the UK picked that as the starting date to look
00:55:41 ◼ ► at, but certainly it's a good by 2015, the world was different in terms of the app stores take to what
00:55:47 ◼ ► to, to, to credit to what, again, what they did, right? Like they are, they are a, in this case,
00:55:51 ◼ ► a victim of their own success because they, they reinvented it and it did so well that it became
00:55:58 ◼ ► the default, but it also, it also spotlighted all the problems with it because they got magnified,
00:56:06 ◼ ► right? I mean, your point earlier about how Apple always seems like they're on the losing end
00:56:10 ◼ ► of the PR when, when all these things come up. I mean, they're one of the most valuable companies
00:56:16 ◼ ► in the entire world, or if not one of the most profitable companies in the entire world
00:56:20 ◼ ► and their sympathy for them, much as people like their products, sympathy for them is not high in
00:56:27 ◼ ► the court of public opinion. You're not going to find a lot of people shedding tears over a trillion
00:56:30 ◼ ► dollar corporation. Definitely not. Even people who use a MacBook and iPad and an iPhone and have for
00:56:39 ◼ ► the last 15 years and wear an Apple watch and, and like to just pop into their local Apple retail
00:56:47 ◼ ► store just to walk around because they just kind of like it. Even those people like look at these
00:56:55 ◼ ► It's a tough thing too, just because I think what's difficult is, and I mean, you've written about this
00:57:00 ◼ ► too, but like the relationship of the customers with Apple versus customers with developers,
00:57:06 ◼ ► developers with Apple, like that whole triangular relationship is very tricky because you see a
00:57:11 ◼ ► lot of customers. Customers don't feel the pain here necessarily, right? You're not sitting there
00:57:16 ◼ ► buying your apps for two or $3 and thinking, my God, how could these prices be so bad that you don't,
00:57:23 ◼ ► and you don't know, right? Most people don't know how much money goes to the developer, how much
00:57:27 ◼ ► money goes to Apple. We know because we're in the, we're in this sphere, but like the average person
00:57:31 ◼ ► on the street has no idea how that split breaks. No, so many people think developers work for Apple,
00:57:36 ◼ ► right? Yes, exactly. I mean, I can't, I'm sure it's the same thing with you. I've lost track of the
00:57:41 ◼ ► number of indie developer friends who, when they tell people, oh, I make apps for the iPhone and they
00:57:45 ◼ ► say, oh, so you work for Apple. People used to say that about me when I worked at Macworld. Oh,
00:57:49 ◼ ► you work for Apple. No, I don't work. Right. People don't understand, but yeah, it's a different,
00:57:56 ◼ ► it's a different. And so like the customers aren't in a position necessarily to complain because they
00:58:00 ◼ ► don't feel ill used. And most of them aren't even going to think about if they could go to another
00:58:04 ◼ ► app store, right? They're like, no, let's just go to the app store and you install it. What do you
00:58:07 ◼ ► mean? Because most people aren't downloading software from the web and they were in the way they were maybe
00:58:12 ◼ ► 15 years ago when you would, maybe more people using computers were comfortable downloading
00:58:18 ◼ ► software to the web. But now everything is app stores, whether it's Apple or Steam or whatever,
00:58:23 ◼ ► like you're used to downloading stuff through a storefront and it's associated with the platform
00:58:29 ◼ ► in many cases. And I think that they just don't, they don't see the impact. Like it's the developers,
00:58:35 ◼ ► unfortunately, are the ones who get squeezed. I'm talking out of my ass here a little, but
00:58:39 ◼ ► just think back to like when automobiles were a new thing and it's like, there were no traffic laws
00:58:51 ◼ ► some family in your neighborhood. You hear about Dan, Dan, the Morin's bought a car. They bought
00:58:55 ◼ ► an automobile. Holy hell. Let's go see it and go over and there's Dan Morin cranking the thing on
00:59:03 ◼ ► the front of the car to start it up. And it's a, yeah. And you'd be like, Hey John, you want to take
00:59:06 ◼ ► a ride in my automobile? And I'd be like, sure. And then we'd go driving down the dirt road and passing
00:59:12 ◼ ► the people on the horses and stuff. And they'd be honking your horn with the old timey honk.
00:59:17 ◼ ► And there's no laws. There's no seatbelts. There's no headlights. There's nothing. Yeah.
00:59:22 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. There's no regulations about the safety of the thing. There's no regulations for how you deal
00:59:28 ◼ ► with the intersection. And then at some point between there where it was a novelty just to know somebody
00:59:34 ◼ ► who bought an automobile in the way that it was a novelty to know someone in 2007 who had the original
00:59:40 ◼ ► iPhone. And I remember going to Whole Foods and I have my shopping list in the, what was it? Ta-da list
00:59:45 ◼ ► from, from 37 signals where my wife and I could, it was fucking great. We had a shared shopping list
00:59:52 ◼ ► where we could both add items. And there I am checking these things off and people just random
00:59:57 ◼ ► strangers would say, is that an iPhone? And I'd be like, this is the downside of having this.
01:00:03 ◼ ► Right? You couldn't even put it in a fake case those days because there's nothing else.
01:00:08 ◼ ► The upside is I felt like I was living in the future where I had this cloud synced shopping list
01:00:15 ◼ ► that my wife and I had shared access to. And the downside was every other time I went, I'd have to
01:00:20 ◼ ► talk to a stranger about the iPhone. To today's world where literally everybody has an iPhone or
01:00:27 ◼ ► an iPhone-like phone, right? There's something changed in between 2007 and now. And something
01:00:32 ◼ ► changed with the automobile between 1907 and at some point in the middle of the 20th century where
01:00:37 ◼ ► everybody, every, the whole country had been, and big parts of the world, automobilized, right?
01:00:45 ◼ ► And of course there were going to be things like traffic regulations and speed limits and
01:00:50 ◼ ► safety regulations, right? It started, which, which were put off for way too many decades,
01:00:55 ◼ ► right? Of course that was going to happen. And it's what, what would you, what was better for
01:01:01 ◼ ► the car makers? Was it better for the government to specify all this stuff or should they have gotten
01:01:06 ◼ ► ahead of the curve and done the safety stuff on their own? And I think for Apple, it's clearly,
01:01:12 ◼ ► this is what we've been, it's not, Hey, the app store started as a crooked, bad deal. It started
01:01:17 ◼ ► as a great deal and a breakthrough, but something it's clearly changed and the world is different.
01:01:22 ◼ ► And the role that the app store, the Apple's app store plays in the world of digital commerce is so
01:01:28 ◼ ► big that of course governments are going to look at it. And of course they're going to just look at it
01:01:34 ◼ ► and say 30% seems like way too big a cut for something that there is no option not to use.
01:01:39 ◼ ► And it's that simple. And it doesn't matter if it was a great cut 20 years ago or 15 years ago,
01:01:46 ◼ ► or a fair cut 10 to 15 years ago. At this point, they look at it and say, this is not fair. And
01:01:55 ◼ ► Apple can solve it themselves. And really not like a tweak, not like a little nudge, but do something
01:02:02 ◼ ► fairly radical to open it up from Apple designed by Apple that is designed with the intention of
01:02:09 ◼ ► assuaging these concerns from government regulators and politicians around the world and issuing it
01:02:16 ◼ ► globally and saying here, this is our vision for the next few decades of the app store. And it has a lot
01:02:21 ◼ ► of choice and it does it removes the centrality of our position to skim off the top financially of
01:02:29 ◼ ► everything. Or the government regulators and politicians are going to design it and define it
01:02:36 ◼ ► themselves, right? There is no other option because the starting point of the government regulators and
01:02:41 ◼ ► politicians saying this current situation is untenable is not going to change. So either Apple can find a
01:02:49 ◼ ► solution that's going to douse all these fires around the world, or we're going to get stuff
01:02:55 ◼ ► like the DMA, which in my opinion is well-intentioned, right? That's the thing that when people get mad at
01:03:00 ◼ ► me for my anti-DMA stance, I'm not arguing with the starting point intention of it. I'm arguing only
01:03:07 ◼ ► against the actual implementation details of it, which are terrible, but it's inevitable. It's one or the
01:03:13 ◼ ► other. Yeah, I think the real tipping point will be certainly, I mean, there's multiple cases in which
01:03:21 ◼ ► it could arise, but the United States has so far not engaged on this. There's been the DOJ antitrust
01:03:28 ◼ ► fail, but it didn't really touch the app store. It was about a whole bunch of other weird esoteric
01:03:33 ◼ ► things. And this is not going to happen anytime soon. There's no appetite for this right now,
01:03:38 ◼ ► certainly not in the administration where Tim Cook is, is buddy, buddy. He's funding a ballroom
01:03:43 ◼ ► for our... But if it happens, it's not going to change. That DOJ case against Apple is still there.
01:03:53 ◼ ► It's just dormant for the last post-Biden. I forget who's the president. But if there's a point where
01:03:57 ◼ ► the US follows in the footsteps of the stuff that the UK and the EU and others have done and decides,
01:04:03 ◼ ► hey, look, we looked at what all these other countries are doing. And even though Apple is
01:04:07 ◼ ► an American company, and obviously we want to support American companies, we still think this
01:04:11 ◼ ► is potentially unfair against developers who are also small businesses. At some point, that bill will
01:04:17 ◼ ► come due. And the US is the biggest market for Apple. And so... Or I don't know if it's the biggest,
01:04:26 ◼ ► They don't need this. And it's like going all the way back to the beginning of your and my
01:04:31 ◼ ► conversation here about it. You pointed out that as much as they do make good money from this,
01:04:35 ◼ ► it's not central to their finances. They can... And anything they come up with that I think would be a,
01:04:49 ◼ ► You could assuage an awful lot of the concerns of the people whose biggest concern is simply the money
01:04:56 ◼ ► and being able to use other payment methods or that Apple's own in-app purchase would take a
01:05:03 ◼ ► significantly lower, like a 90 to 10 split or something like that. You could do... And the other
01:05:09 ◼ ► people who are concerned about the choke point of distribution of software, which just came up most
01:05:14 ◼ ► recently with the IceBlock app, which is a really interesting use case that I don't want to
01:05:19 ◼ ► digress too far about. But it's really, really interesting because the nature of IceBlock,
01:05:26 ◼ ► this iPhone iOS app that was meant for people to report ice activity in their local proximity,
01:05:33 ◼ ► and then you could get alerts that ice activity was by having the app, by giving it access to your
01:05:40 ◼ ► location. It... The lesson that so many people who didn't understand the technical details of it was,
01:05:47 ◼ ► well, that's why it should have been a web app, because then it wouldn't be subject to Apple
01:05:51 ◼ ► removing it from the app store. But the nature of IceBlock technically was that it couldn't be done
01:05:57 ◼ ► as a web app with the same privacy control, because the author of the app didn't want to have a database
01:06:02 ◼ ► of people's device IDs, didn't want to have a database of users' location. He outsourced all that
01:06:09 ◼ ► to iCloud and trusted Apple to protect it. And so far, Apple hasn't been asked to, nor have they given
01:06:16 ◼ ► over any of that private information. But it couldn't be done with the same degree of, oh,
01:06:22 ◼ ► the author of the app does not know any of the users of the app, their device identifiers,
01:06:28 ◼ ► their locations. He never had access to any of that. It had to be a native app. But if native apps can only
01:06:35 ◼ ► go through Apple's app store, then when the government says, hey, Apple, we would like you
01:06:39 ◼ ► to take this app that we're angry about out of your app store, and they're like, sir, yes, sir,
01:06:44 ◼ ► whatever you say, Mr. Trump, take it out, then it's gone. And to assuage those people's doubts by having
01:06:51 ◼ ► alternative distribution methods for native apps that could still use iCloud as storage, that don't go
01:06:59 ◼ ► through the centralized app store. You could assuage those concerns about the distribution of software
01:07:05 ◼ ► and the concerns of people who are most upset about the money with something that would still leave
01:07:13 ◼ ► Apple with tons of money that they would make from the app store. That's part of it. I mean, yeah, I think
01:07:19 ◼ ► just not all the money more and more. It seems like the stuff that we've done both on the Mac and in the DMA in terms
01:07:26 ◼ ► of providing an alternative mechanism, perhaps something like notarization seems like a sensible solution.
01:07:33 ◼ ► That said, Apple itself has misused the notarization in the EU. I never really blinked at that.
01:07:41 ◼ ► So that doesn't 100% deal with this problem, but it feels closer to what you're probably looking for.
01:07:48 ◼ ► It would be a better place. I agree. And I think they would have a harder time with some of the
01:07:52 ◼ ► notarization stuff in the US. I think they've sort of skated by some of it on Europe. But yeah,
01:07:56 ◼ ► it feels like that is the eventuality we are getting to. It's just Apple has not come to terms with
01:08:06 ◼ ► And at a very simple level, it actually works against Apple's arguments to argue, whether it's
01:08:12 ◼ ► Apple or anybody who wants to defend Apple more strenuously than you or me certainly do, that opening
01:08:19 ◼ ► it up more would be catastrophic to Apple financially in terms of how much money they could make through
01:08:25 ◼ ► the app store. That argument implicitly says that Apple can't compete with third-party payment
01:08:31 ◼ ► processing and services. And that to me is an argument Apple doesn't want to make. I think
01:08:38 ◼ ► they obviously could. Everybody should be able to compete. That's one of the fundamental tenets
01:08:43 ◼ ► of capitalism. And Apple has always been a very good competitor. They're good at competition.
01:08:49 ◼ ► I've always wondered why they don't just do something like... You can use Apple Pay for digital goods.
01:08:57 ◼ ► Also, it's like just credit card processing at that point. Hey, implement Apple Pay instead
01:09:02 ◼ ► of the in-app purchase. I don't know. That seems like... I was surprised years ago that they didn't
01:09:06 ◼ ► do that. It didn't have that weird thing between like, well, you can use it for stuff in the real
01:09:10 ◼ ► life like Uber or physical goods that you're buying, but you can't use it for digital goods. You got to
01:09:16 ◼ ► use in-app purchase. It's still credit cards no matter what. I don't know. It's always seemed a little
01:09:21 ◼ ► arbitrary. They'll be fine. But I feel like they're headed towards a case where they're not
01:09:27 ◼ ► as fine, right? There is a path they could chart that would be financially lucrative and get these
01:09:33 ◼ ► regulations, regulators off their backs and get rid of the bad publicity of Apple being the target of
01:09:42 ◼ ► negative outcomes in these lawsuits one after another after another all around the world.
01:09:47 ◼ ► There is a path to chart to get there and they seem completely unwilling to even take steps in
01:09:54 ◼ ► that direction. Yeah. Anyway, let me take a break here. Thank our other sponsor of the show are good
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01:13:12 ◼ ► of the talk show. All right. So, M5 products. The M5 is out. We got the low-end entry model MacBook Pro,
01:13:21 ◼ ► new iPads Pro, and a headset thing called the Vision Pro. I haven't heard much about it.
01:13:31 ◼ ► It's hot. It's new. It's super popular. But not hot. It's warm. It's lukewarm. Yeah. Well,
01:13:39 ◼ ► I mean, the M5 is, I mean, we've kind of, it's fascinating to watch the Apple Silicon evolution.
01:13:44 ◼ ► We have seen, obviously, five generations of these chips now in about five years. It is,
01:13:50 ◼ ► yeah, they're right on. They, the regularity. Well, six years, right? It's six years. I guess,
01:13:56 ◼ ► yeah. 2020. 2020. Yeah, it was. Okay. Yeah. I can't count. It's an off by one error. It's fine.
01:14:01 ◼ ► Yeah. But yeah, it was like November of 2020 when the first M1 Max shipped in November.
01:14:07 ◼ ► So, we kind of know the deal, right? You know, you get some year-over-year improvements. They choose
01:14:14 ◼ ► a little area they're going to work on this year. The GPUs with those neural accelerators kind of got
01:14:20 ◼ ► beefed up. There's some increased memory bandwidth, stuff like that. But a lot of the stuff is very
01:14:24 ◼ ► incremental. But that's, I mean, I would argue, and I think Stephen Hackett wrote a good piece
01:14:29 ◼ ► over 512 pixels talking about, this is what we wanted. Yeah. We wanted the lack of, we didn't
01:14:34 ◼ ► want the Intel world where it was like, I don't know, Intel makes some new chips and they'll come
01:14:37 ◼ ► into Max eventually. Maybe you'll be waiting a couple of years between models getting, no,
01:14:41 ◼ ► we get a new model pretty much every year to 18 months. And yeah, that means that they're not all
01:14:47 ◼ ► going to be barn burners, right? It's not, if you go from the M4 to the M5, it's not going to be a
01:14:52 ◼ ► huge change for you. But if you go from the M1 to the M5, it's probably a pretty significant change.
01:14:56 ◼ ► I just, I just two months ago upgraded, I had an M1 Air, the MacBook Air that I had been using since
01:15:04 ◼ ► the first generation. I bought it basically as soon as they got announced. And I just bought an M4
01:15:09 ◼ ► MacBook Air to replace it. And it's great. If you go three generations, it's, it's pretty,
01:15:15 ◼ ► pretty substantial improvement there. So I'm still on my M, so I'm still on my M1 Max MacBook Pro,
01:15:24 ◼ ► which came a year later. It came in October of 2021. There was a whole year where there was just
01:15:31 ◼ ► the M1 chips before we got the M1 Pro and Max. So it's about four years old. And the only thing after
01:15:40 ◼ ► a month of testing the M4 MacBook Pro last year, the one thing I loved about it was the nano textured
01:15:47 ◼ ► display versus mine where it only had the glossy display. Yeah. But, and I've always said this, I'm
01:15:55 ◼ ► sure you agree because you review a lot of products too. Like the way to, the real test of whether
01:16:00 ◼ ► something is faster, the new thing is faster, isn't when you start using the new thing. It's when you go
01:16:06 ◼ ► back to your, your older thing. And then it's, Oh, I hadn't really noticed how much faster this was.
01:16:13 ◼ ► And now I'm back on my old two-year-old iPhone or year old, whatever, or four-year-old MacBook.
01:16:19 ◼ ► And I went back to my personal M1 Max with 64 gigs, which was the maximum amount of RAM you could get in
01:16:27 ◼ ► at the time. My MacBook after a month, full month, full time using the M4 Max MacBook Pro. And I didn't
01:16:36 ◼ ► notice any performance difference. I know it's faster, but I know it's faster at a couple of
01:16:41 ◼ ► things, but nothing that I do regularly. I don't run out of RAM with 64 gigs. I, I, and I was like,
01:16:47 ◼ ► ah, I was really going to buy one. I thought, cause that's, that's a good, that's from the M1 to the M4,
01:16:57 ◼ ► cause I would max it out again. It's my main work tool. It's, it feels justified to spend
01:17:02 ◼ ► five, six, $7,000 on something I'm going to use every single day for my work. But when I went back
01:17:08 ◼ ► to my old one, I couldn't notice anything that felt slower, anything. I was like, ah, I guess I'll wait
01:17:13 ◼ ► a year. Yeah. I, for me, honestly, the thing that tipped me over was I, I had skimped a bit on the
01:17:19 ◼ ► storage on my air and even with nothing on it, just the base system and like my own data,
01:17:26 ◼ ► et cetera, not even that much stuff. Like maybe my photo library, I was constantly hitting the like,
01:17:31 ◼ ► Oh, you're running out. You're running out of space. You're running out of space. I was like,
01:17:35 ◼ ► I got to the point where I couldn't, I, there's nothing else I can take off this. So I had to,
01:17:38 ◼ ► I had to, and it was like, then Amazon sells these things at like huge discounts. Now it's a really
01:17:43 ◼ ► nice one. I can get it for the same price I paid for my M one air five years ago. It was a hard
01:17:48 ◼ ► move not to make it. It's great. But yeah, I think the, the testament to Apple's Silicon prowess is that
01:17:55 ◼ ► it's only now, I think for a lot of people that like M one stuff is starting to feel a little bit long in
01:18:01 ◼ ► the tooth. And Apple did finally start really comparing much more like in their press releases.
01:18:06 ◼ ► Oh, it's this compared to the M one, as opposed to saying they've been talking about Intel for so long.
01:18:12 ◼ ► Yes. Right. So they've now been like, all right, five years. That's a pretty reasonable time to start
01:18:16 ◼ ► comparing against our new generation. And also to show that we have an, like good enough improvements
01:18:21 ◼ ► in performance over that time, because M one to M two M two to M three, a lot of those cases,
01:18:27 ◼ ► they were very minor improvements. But again, Apple has always had a good history of having
01:18:31 ◼ ► devices that tend to last. And, and this is no exception. So the M five, I mean, it's the truest,
01:18:37 ◼ ► it's the truest definition of speed bump. We're just going to pop a new chip in it. I mean,
01:18:41 ◼ ► I remember when I first started covering Apple stuff or reading Apple news and people would talk about
01:18:44 ◼ ► speed bumps and I thought they meant those things you put in the road that you drive over. I don't know
01:18:48 ◼ ► why they call them that. That's pretty weird. But yeah, these are, these are very speed bump
01:18:57 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. And as Stephen Hackett's piece argued that there is no alternative universe
01:19:04 ◼ ► where every come every October, Apple wows us with an all new MacBook pro design that it's
01:19:12 ◼ ► not possible. It's not possible. It wouldn't make any sense. And it's why you and I do what we do.
01:19:18 ◼ ► It's why people listen to shows like this one. We, we all have a bit of tech enthusiast in us where
01:19:23 ◼ ► we do want to be amazed and wowed and have our minds blown by something new. And we, we're not
01:19:30 ◼ ► the people we, we are in some aspects of our lives, early adopters of some things, right? Whereas
01:19:37 ◼ ► normal human beings aren't early adopters of anything. That's the whole bridging the chasm
01:19:42 ◼ ► metaphor of, of innovative product design. But it's, you have to have the maturity to realize you're not
01:19:49 ◼ ► going to get it. You, you, you shouldn't want to get it or crave it every single product release,
01:19:54 ◼ ► right? These are very stable products, right? You don't want revolutionary new MacBooks every year.
01:20:02 ◼ ► You shouldn't feel always be waiting for the next thing. Oh, this is good. But next year it'll be a
01:20:07 ◼ ► new one. And I mean, they, they get away with it sort of with the iPhone, but it's again, not as
01:20:15 ◼ ► Right. And that's, I was going to get to that. That's a great point though, that the iPhone is
01:20:21 ◼ ► about as aggressive as you, as, as possible. And I think Apple is about as aggressive as possible with
01:20:27 ◼ ► the iPhone where the camera system certainly changes every year and they change the sizes.
01:20:32 ◼ ► they've, the iPhone pros have went to titanium for a few years and now they're back to aluminum
01:20:39 ◼ ► where they haven't been aluminum for a very long time because before titanium, they were stainless
01:20:43 ◼ ► steel, right? So now they're all the way back to aluminum, good old aluminum. So they, they change
01:20:49 ◼ ► things with the iPhones, especially the iPhone pro. They introduce new phones every year or not every
01:20:55 ◼ ► year, but every couple of years, like the iPhone mini and then the plus sized ones. And now the iPhone
01:21:01 ◼ ► air, I guess we could talk about it at the end that the air seems to be a report, all report in the same
01:21:07 ◼ ► way that all reports about Apple and regulatory stuff about the app store are negative. All reports
01:21:13 ◼ ► about the iPhone air are negative in terms of sales. But, but to your point, like there's a, you're right.
01:21:20 ◼ ► The iPhone is the most aggressive and I think it runs like a, like a spectrum, right? It goes all the
01:21:24 ◼ ► way down to the Mac pro. Right. But even with the iPhone where they are the most aggressive about
01:21:30 ◼ ► changing it year over year and the most single mindedly obsessive about sticking to an annual
01:21:38 ◼ ► schedule, September, the only time they get knocked off that September schedule, like COVID in 2020
01:21:43 ◼ ► knocked them off by a month, which is amazing. Yeah. Right. That it was like October instead of
01:21:48 ◼ ► September with all of the disruption. They're single mindedly focused on an annual 12 month schedule.
01:21:54 ◼ ► They change as much as they can. And even there, 95% of people who pay attention to iPhone announcements
01:22:01 ◼ ► are like, ah, it's the same thing every year. Yeah. Even there. So it's a good place to be. And the
01:22:08 ◼ ► alternative is not, wow, my, the M5 MacBook Pros are totally unlike the M4 MacBook Pros, which weren't
01:22:16 ◼ ► at all like the M3 MacBook Pros. That's not tenable. The alternative is like the, the period where there
01:22:22 ◼ ► was no retina MacBook air for four or five years after it seemed like it should have been possible.
01:22:28 ◼ ► And sometimes the MacBook Pro would go to two and a half years without an update, even a speed bump.
01:22:35 ◼ ► Whereas the closer we get the, the flip side of that, which has also been interesting is watching
01:22:38 ◼ ► their strategies for rolling out each new chip generation, because I think it's kind of changed like
01:22:43 ◼ ► every time in terms of when you get the base chip, the pro and the max variants, whether or not there's
01:22:49 ◼ ► an ultra variant, like each time the schedule has been a little bit different in terms of which
01:22:54 ◼ ► computers come out when. And it's, it's kind of fascinating because they're, you're watching them
01:22:59 ◼ ► juggle in real time, especially as they now have processors that are shared so broadly across all of
01:23:05 ◼ ► their devices. And they're working at such scales that they need to be kind of cagey about, all right,
01:23:11 ◼ ► we can launch the MacBook Pro M5 and the iPad Pro M5, because neither of those are going to sell,
01:23:17 ◼ ► particularly in the quantities that say an M5 MacBook air would sell in, which we would need
01:23:23 ◼ ► a lot more. And so are we get a little more bang for our buck by saying we can put it in these devices
01:23:28 ◼ ► now, and then put it in the air in the spring when we've had a chance to ramp up our production lines
01:23:37 ◼ ► Apple and having these, these expansive product lines and the fact that they're all underpinned by
01:23:43 ◼ ► this Apple Silicon. So that's, it's kind of fascinating to watch them. It's, it's turning a
01:23:47 ◼ ► battleship, right? There are so many different factors that need to be considered in order to decide
01:23:52 ◼ ► which, which like things we can release. I mean, I, I think as part of the reason that roadmap wise,
01:23:57 ◼ ► we, we knew that at some point they would probably do an Apple vision pro with a better processor in
01:24:03 ◼ ► it. And so, but we also know it's not like that's going to sell in huge quantities. It's probably not
01:24:09 ◼ ► going to sell to most people who have M2 Apple vision pros because they can't trade them in.
01:24:13 ◼ ► And it's the improvements are minor anyways. So they, they're very, they're very canny about how
01:24:20 ◼ ► they do this and how they roll these out. Yeah. I've summarized this in a post, my post on the
01:24:25 ◼ ► announcement, which I think is worth pointing out. They didn't even hold an event for not even in
01:24:30 ◼ ► person. And they didn't put one of their prerecorded video keynotes out for this. All of these M5
01:24:37 ◼ ► related announcements were just by press release in Apple newsroom posts. And they've had briefings
01:24:43 ◼ ► for us in the media about some of these things, but I, Apple continues to the way they present news
01:24:51 ◼ ► continues in my opinion, to be very humble and accurate about the importance of it, right? If they
01:25:01 ◼ ► have, if they send out invitations to the media to come to Cupertino or go to New York or do something,
01:25:07 ◼ ► have a big in-person thing, that's because they think it's important and it tends to be more
01:25:13 ◼ ► important. And if they just do a show, one of these Apple shot on iPhone videos, that's an hour long
01:25:21 ◼ ► keynote, or maybe even less than an hour, they think it's more important than just doing by press release.
01:25:26 ◼ ► And if it's less important, it doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. It's, Oh, well then why even have
01:25:30 ◼ ► a press release? No, these are good updates, but they don't, they don't abuse the, the attention
01:25:38 ◼ ► that they know that they can garner at the snap of a finger by doing a keynote. It's they're,
01:25:43 ◼ ► they're accurately reflecting. Yeah. It's a time and effort and energy like decision too, right? I mean,
01:25:48 ◼ ► like last year we saw all those videos with it where they did three days in a row, right? With the new
01:25:54 ◼ ► MacBook Pros and then the Mac mini and all that for the M4. And it was kind of interesting because
01:25:59 ◼ ► it felt like, I felt so bad. I remember we, I mean, we talked about it on this show, like they had to
01:26:03 ◼ ► keep talking about Apple intelligence, but like the same person was in every video talking about Apple
01:26:07 ◼ ► does, but a little different each time. And it's again, this year, I think they decided that there
01:26:12 ◼ ► wasn't even quite enough of a splash for them to do that. Could they have done an M5 MacBook Pro
01:26:18 ◼ ► video and an M5 iPad Pro video and an M5 Apple vision Pro video? I think so. But I think people
01:26:23 ◼ ► would have rolled their eyes at a lot of it because it would have been kind of, there's no meat.
01:26:28 ◼ ► Yeah. And it gets to like a little boy who cried wolf problem. Right. And it's not so much like in
01:26:33 ◼ ► the parable, it's about just outright lying. Oh, there's a wolf and there is no wolf. And then
01:26:38 ◼ ► people stop believing it. But it's imagine he's got like a really good set of binoculars and he sees a
01:26:43 ◼ ► wolf several mountains over and it's like, hey, there's a wolf. And they're like, where? And
01:26:48 ◼ ► it's 11 miles away. And it's all right. It's true. There is a wolf, but it's 11 miles away. So maybe
01:26:55 ◼ ► you didn't need to scream it. And then eventually people stop paying less attention. And I feel like
01:27:00 ◼ ► they put out a press relief here that there's an M5 wolf. It's coming. It's coming. Anytime. It loves AI.
01:27:07 ◼ ► It's great at AI. I really respect them for that. And I think it shows that Apple thinks
01:27:13 ◼ ► still overall continues to think long-term. Whereas if it was all short-term and people who were just
01:27:19 ◼ ► looking to put, I worked in Apple product marketing for two years, you'd squander all of that as much
01:27:33 ◼ ► But it is different. I don't know how strategic it is. I think it's more that the one place where
01:27:37 ◼ ► they're aggressive with the year to year M3 to M4, M4 to M5 is that they are very aggressive about
01:27:46 ◼ ► moving to the latest and greatest fabrication processes at TSMC. And I think that because they're
01:27:55 ◼ ► moving as fast as they can, the schedule is just not regular. Like the most regular is just the regular,
01:28:02 ◼ ► no adjective, M number chip, right? M5. Here we are. It's October again. It's around Halloween.
01:28:08 ◼ ► Here's a new... Right. There's nothing magically inherent to a year that makes chips advance on a
01:28:16 ◼ ► year-by-year basis. That's not how it works, despite what Moore's law has always predicated. But it's not
01:28:22 ◼ ► the year time frame is not beholden by the advance of the technology. It is a marketing thing to a certain
01:28:27 ◼ ► extent. And it's also like a roadmap thing. And we have this much discipline, right? There's no reason
01:28:35 ◼ ► It could be every 15 months or it could be whenever Apple feels like it. And instead, I think the company
01:28:41 ◼ ► really feels and believes across the whole company that running the whole company on a more or less
01:28:48 ◼ ► annual schedule is good for the company and keeps them from complacency. And it does, I think, to some
01:28:58 ◼ ► degree, too, speak to human nature. We are animals who are aware of the annual calendar, right? It's
01:29:06 ◼ ► maybe less so in Cupertino, where it's sort of the same weather all around the year. But certainly
01:29:11 ◼ ► in Philadelphia and Massachusetts, you have this internal sense. And there are, even in Cupertino,
01:29:17 ◼ ► there are things like Christmas season and summer is somewhat different. The sunlight hours are
01:29:23 ◼ ► certainly different in winter and summer. We run on an annual schedule. We feel years pass, but it's a
01:29:29 ◼ ► good schedule. Yeah. So it's an interesting set of upgrades, even if there's not anything in here that
01:29:35 ◼ ► really makes you sort of jump out of your chair and shout. It's intriguing to see what things they
01:29:40 ◼ ► are focusing on. And I think the addition of those accelerators to the GPUs is, I was talking with
01:29:46 ◼ ► this about, with Jason Snell about this. It is kind of Apple coming to terms with reality about,
01:29:51 ◼ ► we built this great neural engine, but everybody wants to do AI on GPUs. So for sure, fine, we'll do it
01:29:59 ◼ ► on the GPUs. Granted, what the utility of those, I know Federico Vitticci wrote a good piece over
01:30:04 ◼ ► on Mac Stories about the M5 iPad Pro and trying to find ways to get similar results to what Apple did in
01:30:11 ◼ ► terms of local AI processing and struggling in some ways because the tools are just not there yet.
01:30:17 ◼ ► Like, they are not really designed for that platform, even though Apple does have some of them internally.
01:30:22 ◼ ► They're not things that are actually being used everywhere. I find that in my experience so far,
01:30:27 ◼ ► I mean, so the A19 Pro has those same accelerators because it's based on the same cores.
01:30:33 ◼ ► I have found, like the one time I made a Genmoji in the last month on my iPhone Pro, it went speedy,
01:30:40 ◼ ► I'll tell you that. It was faster than the last one, but I'm not sure that's enough of a use case for me
01:30:56 ◼ ► is the Vision Pro, which goes all the way from M2 to M5. So just in terms of pure benchmarking,
01:31:02 ◼ ► it's going to show way more improvement than M4 to M5 because there was no M3 or M4 Vision Pro.
01:31:08 ◼ ► But how do you show that? And it's such a hard... I always think back to when the first HomePod shipped.
01:31:14 ◼ ► I think it was at WWDC, I'm pretty sure, because I remember it was in the big, big, big North Hall at Moscone West.
01:31:21 ◼ ► And Phil Schiller was on stage and just talking about how it's inherently kind of impossible
01:31:27 ◼ ► to show an audience of 4,000 people how good these HomePods sound when you're in an auditorium with 4,000 people,
01:31:35 ◼ ► where you really need to hear them in a realistic scenario like a living room or a kitchen or an office.
01:31:45 ◼ ► How do you show what a retina display looks like when everybody's viewing the website on a non-retina display?
01:31:56 ◼ ► And even with the Vision Pro, even if you're comparing the M5, the M2, you can't A-B test it.
01:32:07 ◼ ► And you're still at the whims of people's eyesight and people, whatever lenses they're using and all that stuff.
01:32:52 ◼ ► I mean, I think the most impressive thing to me about that upgrade is the fact that they managed to eke out that extra performance and extend the battery life.
01:33:00 ◼ ► That's a real testament to their engineering there because getting an extra half hour out of that battery life is not nothing.
01:33:07 ◼ ► It also shows that the Vision Pro, I mean, Jason and I have talked to this a lot on Six Colors, but the Vision Pro is so far out there.
01:33:39 ◼ ► And it's not that it's bad at what it does now, but, like, it shows you how much, like, how much more you can do because they're using these incredibly good displays and everything.
01:33:55 ◼ ► And thinking, like, yeah, you can even think, okay, it could be improved, and there's all these, sure, more refresh rate, rendering more pixels.
01:34:01 ◼ ► All this stuff would be better, but it's still an incredibly impressive piece of hardware for all of that.
01:34:22 ◼ ► And I had switched to the Dual Loop because I felt like the Solo just wasn't quite working for me enough.
01:34:43 ◼ ► And I think that they did a really nice job with improving the fit dial that lets you tweak.
01:34:49 ◼ ► I love that it's got that sort of – it's like I compared it in my review to the watch stem, right?
01:34:59 ◼ ► It is fascinating to me that they put more weight in it because it feels counterintuitive.
01:35:10 ◼ ► Like, it's never going to be a device you wear five or six hours a day, battery life notwithstanding.
01:35:15 ◼ ► And I think you won't notice the additional weight so much from the band as you will notice the compensation in the balance.
01:35:28 ◼ ► But it does help it make it a little bit more comfortable for the sessions where you are using it.
01:35:53 ◼ ► And I was going to say to you, I don't even know where mine is because I never – it seemed –
01:35:59 ◼ ► It's right here at my podcast station, which is nowhere near my Vision Pro, which is upstairs.
01:36:48 ◼ ► It's like there is a – even when I've gotten my Vision Pro to as comfortable as I feel like it's going to get, there is a front face heaviness that makes your chin want to go down.
01:37:02 ◼ ► And it just feels – the downside, though, is I don't know what I'm going to do when I travel with it.
01:37:18 ◼ ► But when I travel, I'll still take the solo because I'd rather – it already feels like I'm lugging this ridiculously heavy thing just to watch one movie on the airplane.
01:38:01 ◼ ► I mean, I've used the Spatial Persona thing a bit here and there chatting with some – I chat with Jason, James Thompson too.
01:38:08 ◼ ► I've had a couple like calls and like I am consistently blown away with it because it was the thing.
01:38:14 ◼ ► I think I was so – I had such a negative reaction to it when they first announced it, right?
01:38:43 ◼ ► Like, I've had – like I said, I'm having calls with people I know and have spent quite a bit of time with in person.
01:38:59 ◼ ► I'm probably going to be wrong because they're probably going to keep moving this to make it more and more realistic.
01:39:11 ◼ ► There's like the original personas, which if you never tried it, it was – it wasn't unpleasant.
01:39:21 ◼ ► But it was somewhere in the Uncanny Valley where you got like a window, like a square window floating in front of you.
01:39:28 ◼ ► And the window was flat, but the persona of the person you're talking to was three-dimensionally behind in the window, right?
01:39:44 ◼ ► Right, but it was like a real-world window, not a computer flat window where when you look at somebody through a window, like when you pull up to the drive-in at McDonald's or Dunkin' and it's your turn to get your food, you see the person – the window is two-dimensional.
01:40:04 ◼ ► And you see the person and they hand you the bag and it's three-dimension that you see the person behind the window.
01:40:20 ◼ ► But we were sitting like in a foursome and there was somebody on my left, somebody on my right, and somebody directly across from me.
01:40:39 ◼ ► And then 30 seconds later, I'm like, oh, I completely forgot about the sound because it's so good.
01:40:46 ◼ ► Really good for screen sharing content from Vision Pro where it's, oh, all of a sudden now, instead of being in a circle, the four of us, we're seated like theater style in a row.
01:40:57 ◼ ► And there's a screen in front of us where what somebody wants to show me, whether it's like a keynote deck or just demo the new photos app or something like that.
01:41:07 ◼ ► And just way closer to an in-person briefing in terms of the emotional and the – that I don't feel like I have to deliberately pay attention to this.
01:41:19 ◼ ► I feel like because I'm with these people and I'm here with them, my attention is naturally being pulled toward what they're telling me and presenting as opposed to a WebEx where it's, I have to pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.
01:41:34 ◼ ► They've been talking for 30 seconds and I've not been paying attention because I've been trying to pay attention.
01:41:41 ◼ ► I did the – I was on a – my friend Micah Sargent has a program over on Twit that's Tech News Weekly.
01:41:46 ◼ ► And I – on a whim, I joined the show in Zoom but with the persona because I had never tried that before.
01:41:55 ◼ ► It kind of works, but it kind of goes back to that same issue you're talking about where you're – but like for them, it looked like just a meme.
01:42:06 ◼ ► It's a bizarre accommodation, but it also is one of those ones where looking back at how else were they going to do it?
01:42:17 ◼ ► Like there was all this – the rumors that it was going to be like, oh, you're all Memoji or something.
01:42:23 ◼ ► And it's – and it feels like that's what – that's what you see on the Facebook, like on the meta and stuff like that.
01:42:41 ◼ ► And it's weird too because like right now, you and I, we're using this web-based thing, StreamYard, to record this show.
01:42:58 ◼ ► So the difference with this is that you don't see yourself because it's truly a first-person perspective.
01:43:03 ◼ ► But I did look at myself when I made my new persona, and I have to say it moved past a certain uncanny valley, right, where like the previous personas I'd made, maybe even earlier, like when I first installed Vision OS 26 beta back right after WWDC with the new stuff.
01:43:24 ◼ ► Where I'm actually not weirded out, and before it was like, wow, that does look like me, but I'm really freaked out, and there's a part of my brain that is like, this is weird and wrong, that's you.
01:43:39 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, in the same way that you see like an artist rendition or something, you're like, oh, yeah, they captured something.
01:43:45 ◼ ► Or at least it's now gotten to the point where I'm like, I hope that's what I look like because I think I look pretty good there, right?
01:44:00 ◼ ► Even the first version of Persona at the original WWDC debut of Vision Pro six months ahead of launching or seven months ahead of launching, where it was super early beta.
01:44:14 ◼ ► As weird as this is and as kind of crazy as it is that the person is through a window, not just there, it still is impressive.
01:44:22 ◼ ► But looking at myself was always this combination of I'm technically impressed by this, but totally freaked out.
01:44:30 ◼ ► And now it's just, oh, I'm just technically impressed and I kind of hope that's actually what I look like.
01:44:39 ◼ ► If I had to do meetings with a distributed team more regularly, I'd really want to do it this way.
01:44:44 ◼ ► It would make me, it is so much more engaging and pleasant that it really would get me over that hump, which is the big thing for everything related to Vision Pro is do I really want to get it out, put it on, fire it up.
01:45:03 ◼ ► Because that's one thing they still haven't fixed is if you don't leave this thing plugged in, it will be dead.
01:45:10 ◼ ► I've been using it a lot since I got a review unit and I've been just trying because I got one late.
01:45:17 ◼ ► And lately I've been trying to use it for gaming a bunch because I'm just super curious to see all the different sort of gaming experiences, whether it's the native stuff or the stuff you can play on from iPad games.
01:45:27 ◼ ► And even there's some game streaming apps where you can like stream stuff from your PlayStation or Xbox.
01:45:32 ◼ ► And it's been intriguing to use it there for something that's like, this is kind of a step further than just like immersive video or using it to watch a big movie or something like that into something a little more interactive.
01:45:45 ◼ ► I think it has a lot of the same struggles there that Apple has with gaming everywhere, but they're trying, they're damnedest to try and we can do all these different things, right?
01:46:00 ◼ ► You can use hand controllers, like all of these things are sort of them trying a lot of different things.
01:46:06 ◼ ► I think the main thing that's laying them down at the moment is the user base being so small, there is little incentive for people to say, develop more native games for it.
01:46:16 ◼ ► iPad games look fine, but they're limited by being iPad games, which are just, you don't get the full experience.
01:46:26 ◼ ► Streaming stuff is let down a little bit by, you got to stream it and there's always going to be some performance problems when you're streaming stuff, but it's, it's still impressive.
01:46:34 ◼ ► And when you can get in there and like, I was playing like PS5 games streaming on a giant screen right in front of me and it's pretty cool.
01:46:49 ◼ ► And again, you, it's almost like, it's not just that you have to use it to understand it.
01:46:55 ◼ ► Even when you've done it before is how impressive it is to look at a really big screen, even though you're looking at these little tiny post stamp screens that are right in front of your eyes.
01:47:09 ◼ ► It's a hundred percent convinced that you're looking at a hundred foot screen in front of you.
01:47:20 ◼ ► I'm glad that they, even though this was long planned, I'm sure to do this, this speed bump.
01:47:24 ◼ ► I'm glad that it shows between this and they've, they've been doing some developer stuff in Cupertino the last couple of days, I think that's vision pro related.
01:47:31 ◼ ► And they, even though there's the reports that they've dialed back on sort of what the next version of this might look like, they are clearly still full steam ahead on the platform.
01:47:44 ◼ ► I think they're full steam ahead and it's inevitable that the plans are going to change, right?
01:47:54 ◼ ► over four years of seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, learning, seeing what advances are made in the technology and stuff like that.
01:48:14 ◼ ► Anybody who was following this thought that this version would change anything hardware wise.
01:48:46 ◼ ► The trash can Mac Pro started at $5,000 even when it hadn't been updated in any way for, I don't know, six or seven years or something.
01:48:56 ◼ ► And they're holding the, they were holding the price for the next thing that would be worth $5,000.
01:49:05 ◼ ► I don't know if they actually know like what a 2028 Vision Pro that more people think, oh man, it's still $3,500.
01:49:19 ◼ ► So they want to keep that price out there so that it doesn't go from, oh yes, it started at $3,500.
01:49:34 ◼ ► And now all of a sudden they're adding $1,500 to the price of, that's just not how they think.
01:50:12 ◼ ► But it's sort of a little sandwiched between the iPhone 17, which is a great phone, honestly.
01:50:18 ◼ ► Like, I've been impressed with everything that the sort of the message of the iPhone event earlier this year was like those low-end products, whether it was the iPhone 17 or the Apple Watch SE, they keep getting better, right?
01:50:30 ◼ ► They keep eliminating things that were missing from them and make them more compelling, right?
01:50:39 ◼ ► Adding some of these features to, like, the distinction stuff is like, hey, the Pro is always going to be nicer, but you don't feel like you're making as many sacrifices.
01:50:46 ◼ ► So to sandwich the air right in between those two, especially price-wise, I think is challenging because the question is, who is the audience for it?
01:50:56 ◼ ► Is it early adopters, but early adopters who don't want all the power or battery life of the Pro?
01:51:01 ◼ ► Or is it people who just really want a really nice, really thin phone, but they don't have as many cameras as even the standard phone?
01:51:18 ◼ ► Like, I've given – I still haven't ordered a personal new iPhone yet, but – and I've – only because I really am at least partially torn between spending a year using an iPhone Air as my daily phone
01:51:40 ◼ ► I think I told this to Molson the last episode of the show, and I still feel the same way, but I'm still torn enough that I haven't placed an order.
01:51:47 ◼ ► But I'm not surprised – and again, I always say when I link to these reports from Ming-Chi Kuo or Counterpoint Research or anybody else who says sales of this iPhone product are bad or they are good,
01:52:01 ◼ ► that you have to take them with enormous grains of salt because they're all guesstimates.
01:52:07 ◼ ► And they can – and Apple doesn't – we have to wait for Apple to release their quarterly results at the end of the month.
01:52:17 ◼ ► But like this – it's the classic, like, touching part of the elephant problem, which is they don't – they may get some numbers.
01:52:25 ◼ ► Like, those reports might have some numbers, but, you know, they can't speak to Apple's expectations.
01:52:30 ◼ ► And the fact that the iPhone Air is right in the middle price-wise means that the average selling price isn't going to tell us much.
01:52:37 ◼ ► So, for example, if all the rumors are right and there's a foldable iPhone that comes out next year and all the foldables from every other company make non-foldable phones look cheap, right?
01:52:59 ◼ ► If the average selling price really goes up noticeably, you could say this is a really strong sign that the foldable iPhone is a hit.
01:53:14 ◼ ► But there's – I don't – they tried the mini for two years, and by all accounts, it wasn't that big a hit.
01:53:47 ◼ ► You're right, though, because I think if you really love big phones and you really are a phone enthusiast, you probably were just – maybe you don't use the extra camera lenses.
01:53:58 ◼ ► So you enjoyed the option of saving a few hundred dollars by buying an iPhone 15 Plus instead of a Pro Max.
01:54:06 ◼ ► Nobody really has passion for saving $200 or whatever, $300, whereas people have passion for the mini form factor.
01:54:14 ◼ ► And I think people have already and will continue to have, even if it's only a one experiment only, passion for the thinness and lightness of the iPhone Air.
01:54:28 ◼ ► I've been using it daily, driving it for most of the last six weeks, five or six weeks.
01:54:41 ◼ ► It's still not quite as good as the Pro, but I'm not entirely sure that I could Pepsi challenge the difference that if you just held it up.
01:54:49 ◼ ► And I've taken a lot of side-by-side photos, and it's kind of hard, especially in good lighting.
01:55:00 ◼ ► And I actually do – the longer I use it, the more annoyed I am by the area, the width of the iPhone Air.
01:55:13 ◼ ► Even if the Mini is only the screen size of the 17 Pro or the regular 17, like, I want one that's this thin and a little smaller side-to-side, top-to-bottom.
01:55:35 ◼ ► And, again, it speaks to your point about, like, with the Vision Pro going to the M5, that they added all this stuff like higher refresh rates and higher resolution.
01:55:44 ◼ ► And it's – the battery life story with this year's whole lineup of phones is amazing, right?
01:56:06 ◼ ► Even then, when I came in to pick up my Pro, they were like, oh, have you seen the Air?
01:56:10 ◼ ► And so they handed me one, and I was like, you – the experience of holding it, again, kind of like we were talking about the Vision Pro with using it or not.
01:56:23 ◼ ► And I think the camera tradeoff is so fascinating to me because it is a place where everything about it makes sense, right?
01:56:34 ◼ ► But at the same time, the cameras are what we described earlier, the aggressive upgrade schedule.
01:56:57 ◼ ► Is there – if that is the future of the way the iPhones are going to look in the same way that we saw with the iPhone X or something like that, if this is the design direction, how do they overcome that?
01:57:07 ◼ ► How are they going to engineer it so that you don't have three giant camera lenses on the back of a phone that need that much space?
01:57:18 ◼ ► And it's just – so I think it all boils down to the obvious question we all had while it was a rumor even, but even immediately after the keynote where it was announced is, well, who is this for?
01:57:40 ◼ ► And I feel like while it's a very different type of mini by just being thinner than the 12 and 13 minis were, it's very similar though in that it appeals very much but to a – clearly a niche, a niche.
01:57:55 ◼ ► And with the minis, we could – we saw from Apple dropping the form factor that they don't care.
01:58:12 ◼ ► And Apple seemingly, if it's only 5% to 10% of sales, they don't want to keep it in the lineup.
01:58:18 ◼ ► And I don't see how this one – I think some of the estimates I've seen is that it's 8% of this year's new iPhones are the air.
01:58:35 ◼ ► Yeah, it is interesting because they did the thing where they – it didn't have a number on it, right?
01:58:44 ◼ ► I think, to your point, you wrote about this, but I don't think it was intended not to be a standalone product.
01:58:51 ◼ ► I think it's also where the engineering challenge is, hey, we're building a foldable phone.
01:59:01 ◼ ► But I think when you add that foldable in next year, I mean, I certainly wonder whether or not the air gets an update every year.
02:00:12 ◼ ► They're like, all right, they're both great, but we're putting all our eggs in the Pro basket.
02:00:15 ◼ ► And we're pushing that as hard as possible because it's still the more expensive phone.
02:00:41 ◼ ► I've never – off the record, I've never been able to get anybody from Apple to really say – I'd love to, but I've never gotten anybody to say, yeah, we kind of knew the 12 and 13 minis weren't going to be a big hit.
02:00:52 ◼ ► But we sold enough for them, it was worthwhile, we just wanted to put it out there, we thought it would be cool, and it was cool, but we kind of – we never really had plans for a 14 mini, even from the start.
02:01:01 ◼ ► And if the 12 mini had been a bigger hit than we expected, sure, maybe we would have adjusted our future pipeline, but we didn't expect that.
02:01:13 ◼ ► I'd love to know if that's the truth or not, but the lack of an ad campaign makes me think that it was, that they didn't really expect much.
02:01:23 ◼ ► And the lack of an ad campaign so far – and again, the holiday season is really only starting – I feel like we really shouldn't be talking about the holiday season until after Halloween.
02:01:41 ◼ ► So let's see, and I would love to see them make commercials for it, but do they feel like then that's weird and their iPhones are fighting each other?
02:01:53 ◼ ► Are like the air advertisements showing up in like glossy fashion magazines or whatever, and the pro stuff is getting TV spots?
02:02:15 ◼ ► It does sort of make an interesting trend line, though, which is that they've really struggled with that fourth spot.
02:02:43 ◼ ► Maybe there's some kind – and again, they clearly don't – in some alternate universe, and many other tech companies today, I think Samsung is a perfect example.
02:02:54 ◼ ► We in the tech press tend to focus on the Galaxy line, but they make a zillion cheaper phones at all sorts of different price points.
02:03:15 ◼ ► So there is an alternate world where Apple comes out with maybe not six or seven new iPhones every year, but six or seven iPhones every two years, and that others are on different schedules.
02:03:25 ◼ ► And I guess the 16e counts as a phone in the lineup, and it's really impressive, in my opinion.
02:03:44 ◼ ► It's like there's room at the low end for a new phone, and if they're right about the – they certainly were right about the pro phones, that there was room at the high end above the regular –
02:04:16 ◼ ► And everybody was like, oh my God, all the other ones are $2,000, and Apple, of course, comes in with a $4,000 iPhone.
02:04:22 ◼ ► And then meanwhile, the day it launches, there'll be a line around the block outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store of people trying to buy.
02:04:30 ◼ ► But if you're going to tap into people's passion, if people have a passion for a really small iPhone,
02:04:56 ◼ ► Like, one of my, I'll just leave it at this, is that I've always wondered, what if instead of making a 12 and 13 mini, they'd made a 12 and 13 Pro mini?
02:05:08 ◼ ► And okay, what they like to do with the Pro and Pro Max phones is have the exact same camera system on both.
02:05:28 ◼ ► It's like it's got a slightly better telephoto lens than the non-Max one because there was space to put it in.
02:05:43 ◼ ► It was like the other Pro phones but only had one lens because it was, people would understand, people who wanted it would understand.
02:06:11 ◼ ► But I kind of wonder if that, it would have sold in similar quantities and because it would have cost more because it had Pro on the name and had otherwise had Pro specs, that maybe it would have been, Apple would have caught Tim Cook's interest financially because same number of users almost, but more money because it was more expensive.
02:06:36 ◼ ► If the iPhone 17 is the MacBook Air, your MacBook Pro comes in three different flavors.
02:06:59 ◼ ► I think that there is a similar size audience for the iPhone Air as the iPhone 12 and 13 minis.
02:07:12 ◼ ► And if people out there listening are on the fence about it, I would encourage you to eat.
02:07:28 ◼ ► All right, Dan, everybody can read your most of your writing that pertains to the show is, of course, at Six Colors with your colleague, Jason Snell, also a friend of the show.
02:07:53 ◼ ► We referenced all of your novels, your science fiction series, and short stories collections are all available there.
02:08:13 ◼ ► I got my, I sent it out to my early readers, and they came back with a bunch of feedback.