00:00:00 ◼ ► I think you and I, Louie, even had a back and forth around the holidays last year that maybe I'd have you back on.
00:00:10 ◼ ► And then I think we thought about having you on around the holidays just to have a holiday party on the show for Alan Dye leaving Apple.
00:00:27 ◼ ► I could have had five or six people on and we could have danced on his Apple employee badge grave.
00:00:41 ◼ ► Some people keep their badges afterwards, but I kind of wonder now that I think about it, even a bad spirit.
00:01:06 ◼ ► The last time I think it happened was Scott Forstall, but that was 100 percent different circumstances.
00:01:33 ◼ ► But with Alan Dye leaving for Meta and obviously negotiating his deal with Meta in secret, right,
00:01:44 ◼ ► And then I think even Apple's public statement, they didn't quite come out and say, I mean,
00:02:01 ◼ ► Right, but I do think, though, that they, in PR speak, made it clear what the circumstances
00:03:28 ◼ ► So one theory that has been expressed, and again, there would be a, you know, very limited
00:03:35 ◼ ► number of people who know this, but one theory that people have that I don't think is ridiculous
00:03:49 ◼ ► I forget when German first started reporting that John Ternus was the intended successor
00:03:59 ◼ ► But going backwards from when it was publicly announced, clearly by the end of last year,
00:04:09 ◼ ► And perhaps I would guess most of the executive team, like the Monday morning group that I
00:04:18 ◼ ► believe still holds to the same tradition that Steve Jobs held, where every Monday morning
00:04:28 ◼ ► Where they just go over everything that the company's doing, like what happened last week
00:04:36 ◼ ► I would guess all of those people knew by last year that Tim Cook intended to step down and
00:04:44 ◼ ► And anyway, there's some speculation that maybe Ternus didn't like Alan Dye and Dye knew it
00:05:06 ◼ ► And it's again, singularly through Mark Gurman, at least publicly, but I've heard this as well
00:05:12 ◼ ► too, that Ternus, Jobs obviously was intimately comfortable and spent enormous amounts of
00:05:19 ◼ ► time with the design team, software and hardware, that he was in, he wanted to be shown prototypes
00:05:29 ◼ ► Every, and he could freaking, we've got, we've got 60 minutes with Steve Jobs and he wants
00:05:38 ◼ ► I mean, he was, he was definitely involved in a way that I don't think Tim Cook ever was.
00:05:46 ◼ ► And when it comes to hardware, he, Jobs would go to the hardware design team on a regular,
00:05:55 ◼ ► I got the feeling it was both, that there'd be scheduled meetings and sometimes Jobs would
00:06:08 ◼ ► And I think to his credit that he doesn't consider himself a designer or an arbiter of design
00:06:14 ◼ ► And so he's not going to impose himself on the team, but that apparently John Ternus is
00:06:24 ◼ ► And so that is basically one theory that Alan Dye got wind that Ternus was going to be the
00:06:34 ◼ ► Maybe, maybe they just actually flat out did not get along over the years and had arguments
00:06:44 ◼ ► And I think the people who do, it's a very small circle and nobody, including Gurman, has
00:06:49 ◼ ► reported on any kind of backstory like that, any kind of personality clash or difference in
00:06:55 ◼ ► But if that were the case, then I don't think Apple would have been as apparently blindsided
00:07:03 ◼ ► So I kind of think, no, is it possible though that just, I mean, I think I said this like
00:07:08 ◼ ► a year ago, but he's, he's, he never really seemed like he was a computer person, right?
00:07:14 ◼ ► Alan Dye was not really like, he was not like a person that ever seemed to have a love for
00:07:22 ◼ ► So it kind of makes me wonder if just, I mean, not that Meta is any less of a technology company
00:07:27 ◼ ► or anything, but I mean, I wonder if he's just more willing to bounce than other people
00:07:35 ◼ ► call him a replacement because he's been there for so much longer, but you know what I mean?
00:08:12 ◼ ► I'm so, I'm, I remain so curious about this and I've still never seen like any of his work
00:08:30 ◼ ► Again, this is my own, I could be way off and I could be selling his own design, either talent
00:08:35 ◼ ► directly with his hands on the mouse or his talent as an art director, which is a very different
00:09:06 ◼ ► You know, if you drew the card to defend somebody as the best director of movies ever and you got
00:09:23 ◼ ► I mean, like Steve, like we were just talking about like how Steve and Tim differed in their
00:09:30 ◼ ► I think Steve probably didn't have like his hand on the mouse designing anything, but I
00:09:39 ◼ ► And I think that there is varying levels of involvement that can make you good for a particular
00:09:44 ◼ ► But I mean, and, and I guess Alan Dye had some, I don't, I have no idea the kind of guy that
00:09:59 ◼ ► but there was, for example, a guy named Billy Sorrentino who was sort of, I think his Dye's
00:10:12 ◼ ► And I know that there were, I know that there were people at Apple who called Dye and his
00:10:22 ◼ ► Cause it wasn't just about Billy Sorrentino and I heard when all this went down, I heard
00:10:27 ◼ ► some, Hey, don't use this because it might be able to come back to me about stories from
00:10:34 ◼ ► people who, who were at Wired and worked under Billy Sorrentino and the stories were not good
00:10:39 ◼ ► to say the least, but there's a talent like there, but nobody's, I know what you're getting
00:11:16 ◼ ► I was like, that blew my mind, but I don't think there's a moment like that for Alan Dye.
00:11:20 ◼ ► I can't, I don't think there's anything I can point to and be like, Oh, he was, Oh, there
00:11:37 ◼ ► My impression is that he just has an extraordinary talent for this sounds pejorative, but it is
00:11:57 ◼ ► And I've heard that specifically from the sort of people, like when he left and I reported,
00:12:03 ◼ ► I, you know, couldn't use anybody's names, but talking about people who were still there,
00:12:07 ◼ ► who it was like, they were saying that it's like a party here that he and the people he,
00:12:15 ◼ ► that it was the word politics came up all the time and that they really were frustrated.
00:12:21 ◼ ► And there was the sense that no, and you know this, when you work at a big company, including
00:12:25 ◼ ► Apple, and even when they're, the company is known for shipping good design, that ideally
00:12:32 ◼ ► when there's an argument about which way to go a or B, a or B and you say B and they're
00:12:38 ◼ ► like, well, what about B or C B or C and you at Apple, the process is you keep going for
00:12:44 ◼ ► letters and letters and you get back to double A versus double B, double A versus double B.
00:12:48 ◼ ► And, but you, ideally, you feel like if you lost an argument, you lost two, even if it wasn't
00:13:07 ◼ ► And more and more under Alan Dye, especially in the years after Johnny Ive left, where I really
00:13:21 ◼ ► And there, I know for a fact that the company is just chock-a-block full of really good, talented
00:13:56 ◼ ► I've seen people argue like bad design, like shipping bad design, but their arguments for
00:14:08 ◼ ► And so I think it's very possible that maybe what happened in general, like last year with
00:14:16 ◼ ► Maybe even to some extent, like iOS 7, maybe there was like some aspect of these kinds of
00:14:21 ◼ ► shifts that we've seen Apple go in where it's like they were presented with, oh, this is better
00:14:33 ◼ ► And I think, so I think the backstory, I'd love to hear more about it, but I do think it's
00:14:38 ◼ ► And I think a lot of it involves, it is complex when the talented political operators are winning.
00:14:47 ◼ ► It's very difficult for the talented designers who don't feel they're very good or, and never
00:14:54 ◼ ► felt the need to develop political skills because they felt like, hey, I'll just do good design
00:15:00 ◼ ► They have no aspirations to be, I mean, there's tons of great designers I knew at Apple that
00:15:16 ◼ ► I mean, the only way that works, the only way that works is if you have, if you work for
00:15:26 ◼ ► And I would, I would say like, that is the fundamental thing that was like so good about
00:15:30 ◼ ► the Steve Jobs era in particular was that I think there was like this, it was kind of this
00:15:39 ◼ ► Ultimately, that's why you're there and everyone knew that when they were producing something
00:15:43 ◼ ► that they were producing it for his taste, that he was like batting pretty high averages.
00:15:49 ◼ ► And we were like willing to like seed our own personal feelings for ultimately what he was
00:16:15 ◼ ► And I, and I think that is the fundamental problem is that Apple doesn't have the vision
00:16:19 ◼ ► to have like all of the people that were under there working toward the common goal they believe
00:16:27 ◼ ► Somebody sent me a note, somebody who's ex Apple now for a couple of years and just basically
00:16:33 ◼ ► saying and, and offered to give me a fuller description, which I, I have not taken them
00:16:39 ◼ ► up on yet, but basically that it, and we'll get to this too, but in my recent writings about
00:16:46 ◼ ► Apple and ads and calling back to the Steve Jobs era and a couple of very pointed quotes
00:16:52 ◼ ► from Steve Jobs about like when they introduced iCloud email and it's here, it's free email and
00:17:04 ◼ ► And we put ourselves in the customer's shoes and we're like, how many ads do we want in
00:17:17 ◼ ► And somebody, this person said that under Steve, Apple was very, this is going to sound like
00:17:36 ◼ ► And that under Tim, it is very bottom up where at the bottom level ideas can surface and then
00:17:50 ◼ ► It may not be any more hierarchical than it was under Steve Jobs, that there's not a lot
00:17:55 ◼ ► of layers of management above the actual engineers writing code and designers deciding on pixels
00:18:07 ◼ ► And I think liquid glass kind of the whole thing or all of the UI stuff, even before last
00:18:13 ◼ ► year in liquid glass, a lot of the UI stuff just sort of came from the bottom up where it's
00:18:33 ◼ ► And what, it's just a way to make not just lemonade out of lemons, but really delicious
00:18:49 ◼ ► that thing came from like someone experimenting and finding something that was kind of cool.
00:19:13 ◼ ► I don't, I'm always a little, even when somebody is a little public about their work at Apple
00:19:27 ◼ ► And when the, I forget which iPhone was the first one that instead of having a notch anchored
00:19:33 ◼ ► to the top, had the, the pill underneath, which is when they introduced somewhere around 13
00:19:44 ◼ ► But anyway, after that iPhone event in September, I was out there for the event in the Steve Jobs
00:19:52 ◼ ► And then you roll out, you turn around and you go back and the back behind the Steve Jobs
00:20:01 ◼ ► And I often don't really, or usually my go-to way of dealing with that incredible scrum.
00:20:19 ◼ ► When people are trying to get video footage and photographs and some of these people are
00:20:23 ◼ ► trying to get entire videos out the door ASAP because they want to beat the competition.
00:20:29 ◼ ► And I often spend that time, I do want to see some things with my eyes, but then I also
00:20:35 ◼ ► know that I'm going to get briefings, smaller briefings later and it'll be a long day for
00:20:44 ◼ ► You're not pressed to post your reels on Instagram or your shorts on YouTube or anything.
00:21:24 ◼ ► And was effusive with praise for the guy on his team who he thought should get the credit
00:21:30 ◼ ► And I got to say to the whole team how much I loved it and that I thought it was so fun
00:21:39 ◼ ► Makes great lemonade out of the lemon of having a black pill-shaped thing in the middle of the
00:21:49 ◼ ► So in terms of, hey, another thing people have said to me, if Alan Dye is so bad, how in
00:22:11 ◼ ► I kind of imagine that there is an element, I mean, I'm not going to say that he is a complete
00:22:32 ◼ ► And I don't know how much of like the direction was him, like the visual direction of it.
00:22:46 ◼ ► Island, I feel so bad that we don't know his name, but he is, I guess, relinquishing some
00:23:00 ◼ ► I don't really know of that happening, by the way, any other time in Apple history where there
00:23:08 ◼ ► I mean, I know that that was like in the Steve Jobs theater and it wasn't public, but the person
00:23:17 ◼ ► I guess I'm curious just like why, why in that moment did, did someone get the spotlight?
00:23:23 ◼ ► Apple is notoriously, we don't talk about who makes stuff here for various reasons, including
00:23:30 ◼ ► It is Chan Karuna Mooney, who I hope I'm pronouncing his surname correctly, but I've met Chan and
00:24:06 ◼ ► LeMay was named the leader of software design the next day, he just wrote, Steve's been my
00:24:12 ◼ ► manager for my entire 15 year career so far at Apple, and I could not be more excited for
00:24:18 ◼ ► So no bad words about Alan Dye, of course, but a full throated public support for Steve
00:24:39 ◼ ► So it just shows how, how important it was for him, he felt, to publicly support that Steve
00:24:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I think, I do think too, there is a culture of, they always say with the Beatles, when you're
00:25:03 ◼ ► And the way I heard somebody say it once was, whoever read it, spit it, for the Beatles.
00:25:08 ◼ ► And there is a culture of that at Apple with keynotes, where the people you see on screen
00:25:15 ◼ ► now, but are on stage in old days, were usually the people who were most responsible for the
00:25:35 ◼ ► And the SVP might have been the SVP responsible, but they were like, maybe so high up that they
00:25:42 ◼ ► And in the video era, I think it is, to me, it's one of the nicer parts of the mixed bag
00:25:52 ◼ ► I mean, the stage stuff where they have like, or not the video stuff you're talking about,
00:25:57 ◼ ► when they have like the one person that introduces features or stuff about the platform, yes,
00:26:01 ◼ ► I think that person is generally like, but when you see the individual WWDC videos, I think
00:26:17 ◼ ► And I think the fact that Alan Dye got to introduce Liquid Glass, you know, that he was
00:26:25 ◼ ► I mean, I don't want to rehash the whole thing, but it was Liquid Glass on the Mac that
00:26:33 ◼ ► And I actually, honestly, I didn't even hesitate last year to upgrade my phone to iOS 26.
00:27:23 ◼ ► And sometimes I feel like when people talk about 27, I'm curious, or 26 for that matter,
00:27:30 ◼ ► like critically, I wonder if they were living on it or if they were just seeing it in screenshots.
00:27:36 ◼ ► I just like there is a difference between when you live on it and when you're looking at it
00:27:43 ◼ ► And it's just, I don't know, if you are making a movie, you've kind of got to watch the dailies
00:27:52 ◼ ► And it's like, well, what does this look like in the video or the film that we captured of
00:28:03 ◼ ► It's, you got to see the actual footage to feel, oh, this actually, I was just watching
00:28:10 ◼ ► from the side of the stage and it looked good to me, but I look at this footage and boy,
00:28:22 ◼ ► And I don't know, if you're going to talk about this stuff, anyone, like I think you deserve,
00:28:31 ◼ ► But I got to tell you, John, that note you said, like that you keep an old phone around
00:28:36 ◼ ► I went, I went like rummaging through like all my old phones to try to find an old device
00:28:40 ◼ ► that was like running iOS six still just like double check on some things I was thinking.
00:28:50 ◼ ► But there is this one thing that is really funny when you start using these old devices.
00:28:57 ◼ ► Everything feels so much slower, even if it's not computationally working harder, if it's
00:29:06 ◼ ► And I feel, I keep feeling like there was some part of like older iOS stuff that was almost
00:29:19 ◼ ► And like, yeah, we get a lot of smoother stuff with liquid glass, but I can't help think what
00:29:32 ◼ ► I mean, before we leave the topic of the leadership change of this, I'll just say, because I do,
00:29:38 ◼ ► I don't know that if I've, how publicly I've made this, but I do not hold it against Alan
00:29:43 ◼ ► Dye or the people who left with him that their background isn't in UI design or human computer
00:29:55 ◼ ► I'm a big believer in being a polymath and that you could spend your life designing stuff
00:30:09 ◼ ► Because if you did spend your life, pretty much if you spend your life, there are very few
00:30:21 ◼ ► I mean, maybe there's still some old architects who are using paper and pencil and stuff.
00:30:34 ◼ ► So you could have informed, you could be a magazine designer who has spent your life really,
00:30:46 ◼ ► Well, I mean, the thing you're saying is just you believe that someone could have like this
00:30:52 ◼ ► But an interest in the thing and like a deeper knowledge of the thing are entirely different.
00:31:00 ◼ ► I mean, I, I mean, I got into that when I was a kid, but I'm not deeply, I was not designing
00:31:10 ◼ ► I mean, I, I never used system seven or anything, but that doesn't mean that I, I'm not aware
00:31:30 ◼ ► Mac OS, we're not familiar with, it's not the mistakes, but the lessons we learned along
00:31:36 ◼ ► We learned so much over the years and to see some of those lessons kind of be undone and
00:31:58 ◼ ► He, he, if, if some, or somebody else, somebody else who'd spent their life designing for print
00:32:05 ◼ ► magazines or designing motion graphics for movies and TV shows and became, had a lifelong interest
00:32:12 ◼ ► in software user interface design and interviewed for a high level position at a company like
00:32:27 ◼ ► And you know, all of this stuff about user interface design, and you've got all this really
00:32:39 ◼ ► And I, there's part of it that I'm kind of curious about, like Alan Dye's earlier years
00:32:43 ◼ ► at Apple, not as like package designers stuff, but like more like UI designer, like when he
00:32:47 ◼ ► was thrust into that world, like where maybe he was interested in, or maybe he was handpicked
00:32:53 ◼ ► But like there, there is this new designer problem where like you, you kind of want to come in and
00:33:01 ◼ ► I just mean like, you want to redo everything you want to, you want to redesign something
00:33:08 ◼ ► It's like, you just want to like have your perspective, like reflected in the thing that
00:33:21 ◼ ► And I think other designers have learned, which is when that feeling arises, like it's good
00:33:24 ◼ ► to like, just sit with it for a little bit before you go and start changing everything.
00:33:34 ◼ ► for him, where it was just like, all right, before I go and change anything, maybe I should
00:33:51 ◼ ► He wasn't listening to advisors or something like, or, or like he didn't try to understand
00:34:01 ◼ ► The, the best, one of the best little back and forth is a direct comparison, which I think
00:34:14 ◼ ► And this person didn't say to me, I left because I couldn't get along with Alan Dye and hated
00:34:18 ◼ ► his team, but frustration with them and their inability to, to just, just not that they disagreed,
00:34:27 ◼ ► but it's like, you're talking on different levels, but I compared Alan Dye's introduction of liquid
00:34:36 ◼ ► And the words he used with Steve jobs, his introduction of Aqua back in 2001 or whatever year it was at
00:34:45 ◼ ► And the difference in the language they used was just so dramatic that the Alan Dye thing
00:34:52 ◼ ► Just our, our ideas of openness and, and it expresses the integrity of the materials and
00:35:06 ◼ ► You want to lick it or something like that, which was true that it looked like candy, but
00:35:10 ◼ ► then he also on stage at Mac world expo used the phrase, the key window, which is like UI design
00:35:18 ◼ ► lingo for the, the window that has input focus, like which window when you hit command W closes,
00:35:26 ◼ ► And that he was talking about the fact that the Aqua controls made emphasize the difference
00:35:32 ◼ ► between a foreground window and the front most window, like the window, the buttons and the
00:35:43 ◼ ► And this friend of mine who left Apple was said something to the effect of the, when I posted
00:35:48 ◼ ► that was like, I can't put, you know, I'm not surprised, but I, it really struck me that
00:35:57 ◼ ► And when I would talk to Alan die and his team, I would purposefully avoid using words like that
00:36:04 ◼ ► because I learned very quickly that when I did, I could see their eyes glaze over like a blah,
00:36:14 ◼ ► And it's like, you know, this is like a dog owner who's like, oh, I got, I can't believe
00:36:37 ◼ ► And that's how we wound up with things like split screen and the iPad where you couldn't
00:36:50 ◼ ► I think at the time you and I, where it's like, there was like, like older black and white
00:36:55 ◼ ► only versions of Mac OS could differentiate between the window based on like the window
00:36:59 ◼ ► And it was like, we only had two colors and we were able to differentiate, but yeah, side
00:37:07 ◼ ► But even if you look at the original, like 2001, like Cheetah, you know, original release
00:37:12 ◼ ► of like OS 10, like it wasn't just the Aqua controls, the like the red, yellow, green that
00:37:18 ◼ ► You know, remember like the actual title bar was opaque, but for the non active windows,
00:37:30 ◼ ► So like there, there was like, there was a multiple levels of reinforcement there about
00:37:35 ◼ ► And not to mention, of course, like the menu bar said the app's name that was currently
00:37:41 ◼ ► So like when, when iPad that didn't have like necessarily menu bar stuff, I mean, like, I
00:37:59 ◼ ► And it wasn't just whether the stripes were more prominent than in the foreground or background.
00:38:08 ◼ ► And it created a windowing system where there was this emphasis and the people involved with
00:38:30 ◼ ► And that there are people like Steve LeMay who clearly know all of these things and had
00:38:40 ◼ ► Which is why nothing was the worst, you know, and arguably, and it's one of the worst things
00:38:46 ◼ ► that one of the, you know, like how did this happen is that I still think you could say,
00:38:51 ◼ ► certainly with iOS on the phone, that I would argue that not just that I prefer it personally,
00:38:58 ◼ ► but that I could really make the case that it is just a better designed design system than Android
00:39:03 ◼ ► or any of the custom Android flavors that Samsung and other high level makers make for the phone.
00:39:10 ◼ ► And I would definitely argue even goddamn Tahoe, macOS 26 Tahoe, the worst user interface on any macOS version ever,
00:39:19 ◼ ► ever, all the way back to system one in 1984 is a better user interface than any version of Microsoft Windows ever.
00:39:28 ◼ ► Now there are aspects of versions of Windows that I would say, oh, that part of Windows like 95 or NT or something like that,
00:39:51 ◼ ► I'm recording to you right now using a machine here in my little podcast basement that's running Tahoe.
00:40:07 ◼ ► Where I think that people like Jaws and Federighi and whoever else is up at that level,
00:40:13 ◼ ► all the way up to Tim Cook could honestly look around and say, well, our UI design is still better than any other company out there.
00:40:28 ◼ ► It always felt like years and years ago, it always kind of felt to me that the gap between something like macOS and Windows was pretty significant.
00:40:40 ◼ ► I mean, I still think that what you're saying is true, that modern macOS, I would still take it over like other platforms.
00:40:51 ◼ ► And it used to be Apple was so ahead in a bunch of these areas, specifically like UI design.
00:40:56 ◼ ► And I think it slid partially because maybe someone didn't quite understand all the lessons that were already learned.
00:41:15 ◼ ► With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side.
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00:42:53 ◼ ► But it's not just like, hey, all right, now we have a command line tool and you're on your own.
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00:44:11 ◼ ► They want me to emphasize the lowercase need, Notion.com slash talk show to try Notion's developer platform today.
00:44:36 ◼ ► I think one of the other ways that Apple lost its way in user interface design and the reason why it bottomed out, I really do believe this.
00:44:54 ◼ ► But the reason I think Mac OS 26 Tahoe is the bottoming out isn't just – and I thought this at first too.
00:45:02 ◼ ► Well, of course iPhone comes first because iPhone's the biggest, most popular – it's the biggest platform in every way.
00:45:18 ◼ ► And maybe 10 years ago, like certainly when iOS 7 happened, it was iPhone first and then iPad the year later and then macOS got an iOS 7 flavored UI design like two years later.
00:45:37 ◼ ► And Apple has gotten under Craig Federighi to a, hey, we do all of these things at the same time now.
00:45:45 ◼ ► And that's the whole point of the changing the version numbers to the year is every year there's going to be a new version of each operating system and we're going to do things like this.
00:45:55 ◼ ► And I think it was easy to think, well, something as major as the rethinking of the whole user interface as liquid glass, nobody could do it across all of the platforms in one fell swoop, even Apple at their best.
00:46:13 ◼ ► But if they're going to say even the Mac gets an update with this look the same year as iOS, of course it's kind of half-assed because they put all of the effort into the iPhone first and then the iPad kind of inherits that by being just a big iPhone in a lot of ways second.
00:46:32 ◼ ► And the Mac is more complicated and didn't get as much attention and so of course it's worse.
00:46:48 ◼ ► Yeah, but I think a bigger, and it's not unrelated, but I think a bigger reason is that it doesn't really matter that the iPhone is more popular and makes more money, even though it does from Apple's, there's a, certainly from Tim Cook's perspective, that matters and it gets more attention.
00:47:07 ◼ ► But even if the Mac were the bigger business and the Mac generated more money and the iPhone in some hypothetical alternate world where human nature would have to be different, but where people are less interested in a cell phone than they are in laptops and laptops are the more popular thing.
00:47:27 ◼ ► God, that would kind of would, and I feel like that species would be a better species than us.
00:47:34 ◼ ► We're obviously weak, we're weak that we can't resist these goddamn computers in our pockets.
00:47:40 ◼ ► But the real difference is, and the more important difference, is that a desktop graphical user interface like Mac OS or Windows is more complex and complicated than a phone interface where it's one screen at a time and you don't have overlapping windows.
00:47:58 ◼ ► There is no, so distinctions like key windows get lost on iOS because there is only one key window at a time.
00:48:05 ◼ ► And then you start thinking like, yeah, but then there's like popovers and popovers to me on iOS have often looked bad, right?
00:48:12 ◼ ► And it's because it's not, especially in the iOS 7 later era, in the old days, like iOS 6, if there was a layering, it looked pretty cool and you could tell where the layers are.
00:48:24 ◼ ► And maybe there was never any confusion, but there have been years where like the way a popover looks is so white on a white background.
00:48:50 ◼ ► There was like this clearly defined spot that was the popover, whereas I think all of the stuff in iOS 7 and then it kind of like, I mean, it got better over time, but it started with iOS 7 for it's like all of that stuff had significantly less contrast that the text was way too light, right?
00:49:06 ◼ ► They went so far in one direction that they reduced all of the distinction by reducing all of the tools we had available to us to differentiate.
00:49:18 ◼ ► And so when they lost their way even with iOS, with layering and texture and using tools, just basic design concepts like borders and textures and the fake 3D depth and transparency and shadow to emphasize the difference in layering as opposed to de-emphasize it.
00:49:40 ◼ ► If that happened even on the phone, of course, the Mac suffered even more where there are more layers because there's windows that overlap with each other and in each window is all the layered complexity of a single screen on iOS, right?
00:50:02 ◼ ► I mean, there are people who I know and it's such a different – whatever their communication and computing needs are so different than mine, I appreciate it and I think it really speaks to the utility of an iPhone.
00:50:19 ◼ ► But I can't imagine being the sort of person for whom the iPhone is my main computer for work.
00:50:28 ◼ ► Like I opened up Numbers yesterday on my phone just like maybe for the first time in my life.
00:50:34 ◼ ► Like I opened it up and I was like – and I opened like a spreadsheet that's stored in iCloud, right?
00:50:39 ◼ ► So like it was great because I can use the same spreadsheet that I've already been working with on my Mac and I went to check on some data and I actually went to go check – like to edit it and it took me an embarrassing amount of time just to find a button that would actually let me edit the table.
00:50:55 ◼ ► Because on Mac OS, right, you click on the table and you're able to edit it immediately by interacting with it.
00:51:02 ◼ ► But on the phone, I think they're doing like this thing where they're trying to prevent you from accidentally editing the table just by like scrolling or something.
00:51:09 ◼ ► I don't know because your touch interface – like we have hover and click on Mac OS, but we don't really have a hover state like on iOS.
00:51:24 ◼ ► And it's interesting is like kind of like the way that you're saying like Mac OS is like inherently more complicated.
00:51:30 ◼ ► There's a lot of like formatting stuff that I'm sure is possible on iOS in some way like with Numbers.
00:51:36 ◼ ► But like it's very clear that like I could not make that spreadsheet on my iOS-like device.
00:52:09 ◼ ► I know like real estate agent type people who are like showing buildings and they're just on their feet and they're talking to people and sending text messages and they're taking pictures.
00:52:18 ◼ ► And they can do all this stuff on their phone and it's kind of amazing that there are so many people who really can but I can't.
00:52:24 ◼ ► It feels to me like I'm trying to see the whole world by looking through a drinking straw.
00:52:32 ◼ ► I mean like macOS has so much more complexity for all of its apps but it also has apps that iOS could never have anyway.
00:52:39 ◼ ► So if you need that app, as many times as Adobe has tried to put Photoshop on an iPad, I'm like, I can't take that seriously.
00:52:47 ◼ ► A spreadsheet is such an interesting example too because there are things – there are things you don't even think about using a spreadsheet.
00:52:54 ◼ ► And I'm not like a huge spreadsheet jockey but I have a couple of spreadsheets I use all the time.
00:52:59 ◼ ► I keep the Daring Fireballs weekly sponsorships in a numbers spreadsheet and have for, I don't know, like 15, 20 years.
00:53:08 ◼ ► And every once in a while I'll be like out of the house and I need to check on who is next week's sponsor.
00:53:13 ◼ ► And I'll open up that spreadsheet in numbers on the phone and I'm like scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
00:53:20 ◼ ► And it's like, oh, my God, I can't believe – I'm glad I can access it on the phone but I would never, ever use it as my main interface.
00:53:26 ◼ ► But think about things you can do in a spreadsheet that all spreadsheets back to the dawn of time.
00:53:31 ◼ ► You can like click the mouse on a cell and drag down and now you're selecting multiple cells.
00:54:13 ◼ ► On iOS, like there's like a flattened level of like kind of interactions that you're allowed to have.
00:54:31 ◼ ► But if I misspelled your first name in a cell in a spreadsheet, I wouldn't even have to think about how to select the text to change it.
00:54:46 ◼ ► On the phone, I would feel like now I have to somehow perform surgery with my hands in mittens.
00:54:58 ◼ ► Then you have to – then you're trying to select the text and you don't want to scroll the view while you're selecting the text.
00:55:04 ◼ ► And I might literally think, why don't I just make a note to myself to fix this when I get back to my Mac?
00:55:11 ◼ ► But where I'm going with this is when the iPhone was created, it was created by Forstall – at least on the software side.
00:55:34 ◼ ► But they had the good taste to not do – I know this sounds like a joke, but if you never saw it.
00:56:00 ◼ ► Well, the same was true – the same was true with like – do you remember like Windows tablet PCs like way back in the day, like 2001, 2002, like era sort of stuff?
00:56:12 ◼ ► They were running like proper Windows like with – like you had like a stylus to go around and click on the start button that was there.
00:56:24 ◼ ► And they sort of – instead of starting with all of Mac OS X and sort of taking things out here and there, clearly what they did to create the original iPhone software interface is start with a blank slate and start adding stuff back.
00:56:47 ◼ ► And they built it back up and they ended up shipping a thing that didn't even have cut, copy, and paste until version 3, right?
00:56:59 ◼ ► And trust me, I was like trying to do some blogging and stuff from my iPhone at the time.
00:57:10 ◼ ► And I didn't get super mad about it because if you added all of Mac OS X to the iPhone from the start and just did the least amount possible to make it fit on the three-and-a-half-inch screen and try to make some of the controls big enough to be tappable, it would have been horrible and fiddly.
00:57:30 ◼ ► But the iOS interface was always designed, though, by people who had this background in the more complex system, Mac OS X.
00:57:43 ◼ ► But I think actually Steve outlined the rough strategy for that like pretty – in the iPhone introduction video, I probably don't remember exactly what he said.
00:57:59 ◼ ► And at the time, I think every nerd was like thinking that was like a crazy, fun, wild thing to think about because their brains were probably thinking, oh my god, there's like a dock, there's a desktop.
00:58:16 ◼ ► But what Steve meant and what he clarified a little bit later, right, was like that Mac OS X had all the technologies they needed, right?
00:58:26 ◼ ► And so it was more about it runs that same – it forked to the OS in a way that we could use all the same technologies we already built to stuff we had under the hood.
00:58:36 ◼ ► But we could build new UI explicitly for the phone rather than start with the interface.
00:58:47 ◼ ► And they knew everything that was missing, everything that was imprecise about iOS, they were well aware of and did it deliberately.
00:58:57 ◼ ► And what happened as the iPhone became preeminent and mobile computing became preeminent and these post-iOS 7 – whatever you think of iOS 7, it clearly obliterated the entire – not just the way phones' interfaces were designed.
00:59:31 ◼ ► But all these years later, everything still – basically, everything from websites to desktop apps to Windows to the way even Linux and stuff looks is all downwind of the radical change Johnny Ive and his team posed on iOS 7.
00:59:48 ◼ ► But something happened in the intervening years, though, where that became the primary way that some designers looked at software, was starting with the phone and mobile.
01:00:03 ◼ ► And then that's all – they had only this limited, primitive, conceptual attitude towards user interface design and then tried to bring that to the Mac, which demands precision and all of these other concepts.
01:00:25 ◼ ► Like, it's clearly like this thing that was iOS first and then when they moved it – when they moved that design over to Mac OS, it was like absolutely not any better, right?
01:00:44 ◼ ► There's no way to – so all the spatial awareness that you had done like on a 2D axis, like X and Y, like that you could understand.
01:00:52 ◼ ► You had like bigger icons, you could dive into a category and kind of forget the rest, right?
01:01:00 ◼ ► I mean the system settings source list is like obnoxiously long and there's categories within categories and like it's kind of – I think there's a reason that like the search field has become like the main criticism for that, right?
01:01:12 ◼ ► It's like if it doesn't work, then actually you fundamentally failed because people rely on that search field because the source list is obnoxiously like hard to manage, right?
01:01:21 ◼ ► But that is like a perfect example I think of the iOS first thinking that came over to Mac OS and it's like, man, you don't get it.
01:01:30 ◼ ► Like I understand like a 2D axis, like just only up and down makes sense like on iPhone because we don't want to have – we already have a grid of icons that's on the home screen, right?
01:01:54 ◼ ► The new system settings in Mac OS, which we've been with for at least four or five years now I think, it's not a disaster, but it's worse in every way than what came before it.
01:02:04 ◼ ► And one of the things that's lost is the fact that in the old system preferences, each pref panel really was technically – they were apps.
01:02:19 ◼ ► And you could – if I walked over to your desk and you happened to be in system preferences, as soon as I got to your desk, I'd know, oh, you're in the Wi-Fi preference panel.
01:02:37 ◼ ► You're in the mouse or trackpad control panel, and it just had a look that was as distinctive as like a really good personal app.
01:02:48 ◼ ► Whereas all of the pref panels now just look like a series of white rows with the green – or the blue, I guess it is, the blue switch on the right side.
01:02:58 ◼ ► And it's like you're in the severance office, and it's – of course, every hallway looks the same, and every door looks the same, and every room looks the same.
01:03:15 ◼ ► This is all an effort in general to kind of make everything look the same intentionally for familiarity.
01:03:22 ◼ ► But what it does is it robs every app, every pref painter, whatever, of its distinction to know one thing from the other.
01:03:29 ◼ ► I mean, we don't need to talk about GarageBand, but GarageBand on macOS having – you know what I mean?
01:03:33 ◼ ► Like the little wood panel on the side and the darker interface and even Aperture from days of your Aperture was like a fully graphite interface, not just the controls or whatever, not just the window controls, but like the toolbar.
01:03:45 ◼ ► But both of these apps could exist simultaneously, and you understood they were on the same platform because they shared some sensibility to them, but they looked entirely different and made you feel like you were just operating in a different tool.
01:03:57 ◼ ► But if every tool starts to look the same, then I guess even though things feel more familiar, I actually understand less, if that makes sense.
01:04:06 ◼ ► I don't really know the difference between one thing and another thing like when they all look the same, right?
01:04:11 ◼ ► But to go back to the thing you said, you said like maybe Alan Dye and his team like were designing like iOS first, and so when they were bringing those things over to macOS, I will say there was like this early moment, I think it was like with the original iPad.
01:04:25 ◼ ► I was working at the Icon Factory at the time, and we were designing Twitterific, and one of the things that was totally eye-opening was seeing how we needed to make an iPhone version, an iPad version, and a macOS version of the same app.
01:04:39 ◼ ► I mean, it was like the first time we had like truly universal app across multiple platforms, right?
01:04:43 ◼ ► I will say that the iPhone existing in its way, like being like mostly a hierarchical list of panes you navigate from, super helped us design what should have been the macOS app.
01:04:57 ◼ ► And I don't think it's impossible to go that route where you start with iPhone or at least factor it into your equation, but when macOS apps are so complex, and we're talking about apps like Final Cut, I mean, come on, no one's going to ever do that on a phone, even if they had it, right?
01:05:18 ◼ ► But for certain complicated tasks, right, where there is a need to have a bunch of UI, I actually, like I said this last year too, I think there's a need to see UI and have it be clear and distinctive for what it is.
01:05:30 ◼ ► So I think that starting with iOS in that way, I think can really be like detrimental to your app, right?
01:05:42 ◼ ► But like, I think these are different platforms with different needs for user interfaces, and you can't treat one like it can be just simply ported to the other.
01:05:51 ◼ ► Yeah, so that brings us to this year, and I am in such a better mood about the state of Apple's UI this year than I was a year ago when you were on the show, Louis, because I do think it's almost every single UI change in iOS 27, and especially macOS 27 Golden Gate, compared to the 26 versions, is for the better.
01:06:20 ◼ ► Definitely not, because it's starting, especially on the Mac, starting from such a problematic place.
01:06:45 ◼ ► I mean, that is a fundamental thing that I think was, like, absolutely a misinterpretation of that UI element.
01:07:09 ◼ ► Are you—nobody else—I mentioned it a couple weeks ago on Daring Fireball, and it's one of those things that was so low on my list for Tahoe.
01:07:15 ◼ ► because I had other complaints that I didn't, but I'm still—I'm bummed that one thing Golden Gate doesn't address is that when you click on a menu in the Mac menu bar, like the view menu or the edit menu, it still is like a capsule-shaped highlight of the menu name, like file or edit, and not a round rect.
01:07:37 ◼ ► It just doesn't—and the way that it's disconnected from the menu that shows up beneath it, it makes no sense to me.
01:07:51 ◼ ► You know, I'm glad you bring that up because there was something else I noticed on iOS.
01:07:58 ◼ ► But if you go to the keyboard and you tap a key on the keyboard, you no longer get that fly-out shape from the—what is that?
01:08:12 ◼ ► And it's like now it's just like—it's like a rounded rectangle with a rounded rectangle on top of it.
01:08:19 ◼ ► Where you're saying there's a relationship from this thing to this thing, but actually the relationship, as indicated, is not there anymore like it used to be.
01:08:32 ◼ ► It's—so you hold down like the S—you tap S and you get a big S above it, which tells you—and it's told you since the original iPhone, hey, that's the key that the keyboard thinks your fat finger pressed.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And you can kind of—it's a really clever solution to the problem of your finger covers the button so you can't see the highlight of the actual button.
01:08:56 ◼ ► And in—for some reason that I cannot freaking explain, in iOS 27, those—it's still—you still get a pop-up that tells you—the keyboard thinks you tapped S, but the pop-up isn't connected to the actual S that your fat finger is on.
01:09:17 ◼ ► And I remember when I posted about it, there was somebody that was like, oh, it's just a beta.
01:09:31 ◼ ► There's just—there's hundreds of little things like that in macOS that go back to the dawn of macOS that please parts of my brain to no end because they are connected or that they make sense in the world of macOS.
01:09:45 ◼ ► That you click the file menu, and a menu drops down underneath the word file, and the word file gets a highlight because you've clicked it, and it's showing the file menu, and then the menu shows underneath.
01:09:59 ◼ ► And that menu that shows underneath should be connected to the word file in the menu in the way that, like, when you have a folder, a physical manila paper folder with tabs, the tab is connected to the folder.
01:10:20 ◼ ► Now, when you do a contextual click, like, you right-click on something, like, almost anything in the OS, you get, like, this Ask Siri that's above, like, the first item now, right?
01:10:33 ◼ ► But the thing that's crazy to me is that, like, forever, forever, John, like, whenever you, like, right-clicked, assuming there was enough space, the first item would be directly to the bottom right of where your cursor currently is.
01:10:45 ◼ ► But now, and that still is true because, like, for example, if you, like, click on a file, like, open is still the first thing, and it's in that same position that it always was.
01:10:52 ◼ ► But now the menu is actually taller to compensate for the fact that they're trying to say, like, ah, we know that your muscle memory is still here, but the muscle memory is a little bit fucked because they actually increase the size of it.
01:11:05 ◼ ► So your brain is trying to understand that now this weird Ask Siri thing that maybe you will never even ever use in your life is suddenly, like, this little tumor that's growing on the top of, like, the menu command.
01:11:21 ◼ ► And when I pointed it out to a friend weeks ago, I wondered if that was one of the things they might reconsider over the summer, and it doesn't really seem like they've reconsidered anything over the summer.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Where in macOS 27 now, when you control-click on anything in the OS, and there's now this permanent Ask Siri sort of, it's not a menu item, it's like a text field that you can type, you click on it.
01:11:54 ◼ ► And the idea is, if you click on a file, like, it just says myfile.txt, and you control-click on it and ask Siri, it's like you're providing the file as input to Siri.
01:12:14 ◼ ► And it knows which text file because you control-clicked on it, and then you type that command.
01:12:27 ◼ ► And presumably, and it's true and most good, it's part of the principles of user interface design.
01:12:40 ◼ ► It's undo and redo and then cut, copy, paste, because those are, like, the most common edit menu commands.
01:12:47 ◼ ► So top, the first position is still the first position, and it's still the command that used to be there in 26 and macOS 18 or 15 or whatever.
01:13:09 ◼ ► But it does, what happens, and the friend who, I explained this to a friend who really complained about this because it really was screwing with him.
01:13:18 ◼ ► And I showed, like, last year, this year, a comparison and how, oh, if you just didn't even look and just moved your mouse the same way,
01:13:30 ◼ ► But then he was like, but I'm still angry because I look at it and I see the top position and that's, I don't care where it is.
01:13:43 ◼ ► I've remarked about this, I mean, several times with Photoshop, which is its own, like, beast.
01:13:47 ◼ ► But Photoshop, I keep adding all this generative AI bullshit, John, it's pissing me off.
01:13:57 ◼ ► And when they add menu commands, they often add it to the top or the bottom instead of somewhere in the middle.
01:14:09 ◼ ► But, like, suddenly when it's enabled content credentials as the latest feature, it's like, man, you can't just inject this.
01:14:16 ◼ ► The proper place for this Ask Siri thing, to be honest, if you're going to have it, is maybe five items down or something.
01:14:30 ◼ ► I have to say that in my tinkering, I've got the Golden Gate installed on a secondary Mac I use.
01:14:59 ◼ ► I mean, I guess this is for people that don't know where everything is and they're like, oh, I can just ask Siri to do that thing.
01:15:11 ◼ ► I mean, like, is the person that doesn't know that Move to Trash is there or something?
01:15:27 ◼ ► But I feel like in practice, it's all I've really heard are complaints like yours, that it's just screwing with people's visual muscle memory because it's taken over the top spot.
01:15:38 ◼ ► And I think the sort of people who'd use contextual menus are the sort of people who don't have a problem dragging the file into the Siri window.
01:15:48 ◼ ► And I don't know what else you could contextual, you know, and every other thing you can right click on to ask Siri about, there are other ways to get that thing into Siri.
01:16:04 ◼ ► I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, but I kind of feel like, eh, this is a place they didn't need to put it.
01:16:09 ◼ ► Because I kind of feel like, hey, there are a couple of ways on the Mac to bring up Siri, right?
01:16:27 ◼ ► You can, I think you can still put it in a menu bar, but just command space and the dock icon alone are two super prominent ways to do it.
01:16:54 ◼ ► But it's like, I mean, the thing that I guess, like the reason I brought it up was, you know, you talked about like the relationship of like the menu title to like all of the list of menu items.
01:17:11 ◼ ► And now it's like, it's weird because when you right click now, it's just like that there's something above your cursor and there never used to be something there before because it always felt like it was coming out of that cursor trajectory.
01:17:58 ◼ ► And for the people that really do want it, I really just like knock it down like four spots and I think we'd be fine.
01:18:43 ◼ ► They do not have cameras built into them for one thing, which definitely helps make them look more like normal glasses.
01:18:49 ◼ ► They are smart glasses with a screen built into one of the lenses or both of the lenses, actually, with a screen that is in one of the lenses.
01:19:06 ◼ ► And when I they sent me a pair and the pair that I picked actually looks fairly similar to the style of eyeglasses I normally wear.
01:19:35 ◼ ► And when you see stuff on screen projected in your field of vision, it does not look to somebody looking at you.
01:19:58 ◼ ► If you need to give a speech or a talk or a presentation or something like that, you can load up the whole talk you want to give in the teleprompt app for your even realities.
01:20:07 ◼ ► And then when you engage it, you see the script like a teleprompter in your field of vision.
01:20:21 ◼ ► They have AI features where you can record meetings through the glasses while you're wearing them.
01:20:27 ◼ ► They have, for the developers who are listening, the even G2 glasses just launched Terminal, which is a new feature that keeps your AI coding agent in view when you want it.
01:20:37 ◼ ► So you can be out and about, bring up Terminal, and then check in and give commands to CloudCode or Codex or whatever your agent of choice is.
01:21:03 ◼ ► They have a ring that you can wear that is a smart ring that tracks your fitness and stuff like that, but also serves as an input device for selecting items in your vision with the glasses.
01:21:19 ◼ ► Go to evenrealities.com and see how everyday smart glasses keep helpful information, insights, so you can stay productive and hands-free throughout the day.
01:21:37 ◼ ► No special URL, just evenrealities.com, but then at the promo code talkshow gets you 10% off the even ring one and or the even clip.
01:21:49 ◼ ► The clip is the sunglasses clip that snaps on top of the glasses and add them to your even G2 order.
01:22:04 ◼ ► You wrote a piece that I love, and I was like, oh, now I've definitely got to get Louis back on the show because you wrote a piece defending, is it fair to say, defending the mandatory squircle?
01:22:38 ◼ ► I love the argument that you could just look at the silhouette of the classic numbers where you see these bar charts in 3D or like the podium for Keynote.
01:22:49 ◼ ► You just see it as a black and white silhouette, and you're like, oh, I know what app that is.
01:22:54 ◼ ► And now the silhouette for every icon is the exact same shape, the exact same squircle.
01:23:22 ◼ ► I mean, I know this shape has literally changed a couple times now in a technical sense.
01:23:26 ◼ ► But a rounded square, in some sense, has been The Shape of Apps for almost 20 years now.
01:23:32 ◼ ► And I think that the other thing your piece really convinced me of, and it was very thoughtful.
01:23:43 ◼ ► But the other thing, and you make clear, is focusing just on the mandatory squircle shape is losing the forest for the trees.
01:23:51 ◼ ► There is something wrong with the state of icon design overall, and it's not the shape.
01:23:57 ◼ ► It is the sort of, hey, there's so much artistry that you can do, even if you don't have control over the overall shape.
01:24:14 ◼ ► It's no excuse for icons that are indistinguishable and bland and don't look like they were...
01:24:22 ◼ ► I think the idea that we can no longer distinguish these, I think, is not a good argument.
01:24:26 ◼ ► I think we can absolutely distinguish these, and I think there's evidence that it can be done.
01:24:30 ◼ ► But I think that what we're seeing, and maybe what some people react to negatively, is that there are a ton of people that are not making maybe good enough efforts to distinguish themselves.
01:24:45 ◼ ► At a glance, these two icons right next to each other is like, well, whose fault is that?
01:25:14 ◼ ► It's got to get better from here, is the app icons for all of the creator suite from Apple.
01:25:21 ◼ ► And I feel like we can just let it fly because it's Apple, so we don't have to worry about hurting anybody's feelings.
01:25:28 ◼ ► Not that I really worry about hurting anybody at Slack's feelings, but, you know, it's Apple.
01:25:56 ◼ ► However, there is some, I guess, it's not clear to me why Numbers needs to be like so similar to Final Cut Pro.
01:26:12 ◼ ► And having the same constraints between the two, constraints that the rest of app icons don't have.
01:26:19 ◼ ► Because you brought up the Numbers icon from before, right, with its unique silhouette.
01:26:23 ◼ ► And I don't think it was a particularly great icon because it was always in a perspective that matched no other icon on the platform.
01:26:40 ◼ ► But to the other end, you have an app like Final Cut Pro, which I think has always been throughout its entire history, except maybe perhaps Apple Creator Studio.
01:26:49 ◼ ► Every version of Final Cut Pro's icon prior to now was like the exemplary icon for macOS.
01:26:56 ◼ ► It's like, it was always like, oh, that's, it's like, it's like iMovie, but it's more pro.
01:27:04 ◼ ► But it was still that same clapboard shape at the angle, like for older macOS 10 versions.
01:27:09 ◼ ► But then like when, when we did get more of that kind of like Yosemite, like flavor where the silhouettes, like the unique silhouettes of old macOS 10, but color scheme of iOS, it got like this beautiful little rainbow situation.
01:27:24 ◼ ► And then I think when, even when we got to like Big Sur, when it was like the icons are outside of the bounce, like the top of the clapboard was, it's like the top of the clapboard was the top cut of, it's like they cut off the top of the thing.
01:27:42 ◼ ► And every single one of these was exemplary of like how to make a great macOS 10 app icon.
01:27:47 ◼ ► And yeah, the creator suite ones, they're not, they're doing something different with those.
01:28:02 ◼ ► It, it, the other thing, and I guess I, I, I do think maybe part of the squircle mandatory nature plays into this is that the way icons are rendered now is, is complicated in a way that it, it never was before.
01:28:37 ◼ ► 128 and 32 by 32 and 16 by 16 and all the two X versions of them, you could have completely different assets.
01:28:44 ◼ ► And so there was like, I'm sure an element of that, that was complicated because a lot of developers were automating that by like automatically scaling down.
01:28:56 ◼ ► So there was complexity, but in, in, in that rendering, but I think what you're referring to is the liquid glass is like this recipe.
01:29:13 ◼ ► And early enough in like Mac OS 26, I got to tell you as a person that, you know, I mean, a pair key, we're drawing icons like all day, every day.
01:29:22 ◼ ► And like we were delivering icons to our clients last year, post the announcement, but pre-release and the rendering would differ.
01:29:32 ◼ ► In different areas in the doc was different from in finder because not everyone was getting the memo or something.
01:29:50 ◼ ► I think they definitely, whatever this rendering pipeline is, it looks much better this year than last year.
01:30:05 ◼ ► The fact that this is even going on now, it's like, oh, I can kind of see what Apple is doing here because that's kind of cool.
01:30:20 ◼ ► And I really wouldn't have believed that there were visual effects being applied to them.
01:30:31 ◼ ► Some of them are so subdued from what they were last year that I would straight up argue that this is more an evolution of the original iOS 7 style than an evolution of yesterday's style.
01:30:41 ◼ ► And I think the visual kind of clarity around specular highlights and stuff, I think, especially for the app icon edges, that was stuff we were trying to do years ago.
01:31:00 ◼ ► Because everyone was kind of hand doing it, just like themselves, like trying to figure out what level of opacity it should be.
01:31:08 ◼ ► And even with all of these different parameters inside of an app icon, at least there is some, I guess, formula, some format everyone has access to.
01:31:16 ◼ ► And just the defaults of them will make them look like they belong with all the other ones.
01:31:31 ◼ ► And then come next June, when macOS 28 and iOS 28 comes out, that same icon, without you having changed anything, or let's say through Parakeet, an app you delivered to a client and it's out there in the world, it will render differently.
01:31:59 ◼ ► But, like, I am one of, I think, few people that are just absolutely just horrified at the idea that year after year, Apple could change that formula a little bit or change the definitions of that formula.
01:32:17 ◼ ► I already, I contacted one of our clients from last year that I made, like, an original liquid glass icon for.
01:32:22 ◼ ► And I just, I just delivered a new 27 one that just was like, well, if this is how it looks, this is how I think it should look now with that same thing.
01:32:31 ◼ ► But, no, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's a little stumbling block that I feel like developers feel year after year, right?
01:32:37 ◼ ► And we've always felt, I mean, even pre-liquid glass, I mean, if you go look release after release of macOS 10, you'll see the icons do subtly change year after year.
01:32:46 ◼ ► And if developers did the same thing, then they could kind of keep up with it in the same way they did with their software in general.
01:32:52 ◼ ► If you keep updating your app, so it looks and feels like it's the current iOS or the current OS, then it will, it'll feel like it belongs.
01:33:02 ◼ ► And if you, if you're not on top of it, I mean, then I guess you're just, but here's, here's the part that, that really I'm, I'm struggling to quite understand is an app icon that now I make for iOS 27.
01:33:21 ◼ ► But if I design an icon now for OS 27 and it gets built for OS 26, I have to now consider that, John.
01:33:29 ◼ ► I have to consider like how that is being rendered on older platforms, even though it's the same exact file being delivered.
01:33:42 ◼ ► It's just the nature of software that you're never really done or most cases, it's hard to say you're done.
01:33:48 ◼ ► You've got to kind of keep updating for the new technologies in the operating system underneath it, even if you're not adding major features to the app itself.
01:33:58 ◼ ► But I feel like Apple has just sort of reached a new level of presumption about how everybody who makes software for their platforms is constantly, nothing has ever settled in any way in any of it.
01:34:25 ◼ ► And maybe this situation where they force it into a squircle, like where you put it on the gray background, like when that happens, I guess we are living in a situation now where that does look a little bit better and more at home.
01:34:38 ◼ ► Like for the apps that are older, that are aging, that are not necessarily being updated.
01:35:03 ◼ ► It just speaks to me that it's a little bit myopic about the way Apple works internally, where Apple has a team of people working on every different app.
01:35:14 ◼ ► And I know that there's certain smaller apps, especially on the Mac, in the corners of macOS, where it's just one person.
01:35:34 ◼ ► But there is somebody who is responsible for, hey, when we change the look of macOS 28 next year, this is.
01:35:53 ◼ ► When you have like indie development companies that have like just seven apps or something, they're not necessarily working on those seven apps all at the same time.
01:36:06 ◼ ► And so by the time they actually get around to like refreshing things, it might be like a year from now.
01:36:16 ◼ ► And hopefully, you know, I know, you know, if you're indie and you're a small team, there's only so much you can do even in an ideal world.
01:36:22 ◼ ► But a lot of indie developers would like to have a couple of apps going at the same time and maybe come out with new apps once in a while.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And if you have to constantly keep everything in your existing app and redo it and redo the paint every year, you're never going to be able to find the time to move on to make a new thing.
01:36:44 ◼ ► I think this is exactly the pain that developers feel, that they are constantly just maintaining their app for Apple, for Apple's benefit, not for their users' benefit, but for the benefit of Apple to like keep chugging along on their UI churn, which is silly because I think all of these individual companies have their own aspirations, right?
01:37:02 ◼ ► They're the only thing that they want to focus on and because they constantly, and it's real money, John.
01:37:06 ◼ ► I mean, it's not just like the amount of time that they have to spend engineering that app.
01:37:10 ◼ ► I mean, like if people need a new app icon, I mean, they do have to spend money on that probably.
01:37:15 ◼ ► And when they, and it's like, if that becomes an every year expense for them, I'm sure some people are like, hmm, do I want this thing or do I want a new icon?
01:37:25 ◼ ► And I think that just doesn't work for Apple's benefit, but maybe that's why Apple did what they did.
01:37:31 ◼ ► Like with last year's release, like putting it all in a squircle is just like saying, we know not everyone will continue updating this.
01:37:43 ◼ ► One thing I do not like, I do not like the visual interface to Siri when you, not the app, but when you hold the side button on the phone or do command space on the app.
01:37:54 ◼ ► Oh, that little blobby thing that comes down from the dynamic island that's like that black translucent inky sort of situation.
01:38:03 ◼ ► And I've tried to get, I've tried to love it after a month or six weeks or however long it's been.
01:38:26 ◼ ► And I had to look, but I think SF symbols has icons for each generation of Siri, which is so funny to me.
01:38:33 ◼ ► It's like, it's like, cause they, cause they need to be able to reference different versions of Siri.
01:38:37 ◼ ► If you have the AI stuff turned on or not, I guess for previous versions of iOS and macOS.
01:38:56 ◼ ► I like, I, for, for a long time, the benchmark to me was like, can I at least just set a timer?
01:39:04 ◼ ► I am actually faster and more reliable choosing a song from my library manually on my Mac than it is to make sure that it's playing the correct thing when I say it out loud.
01:39:13 ◼ ► So I just kind of gave up on it, you know, but like setting timers, John, I got myself a kitchen timer and I hit a button and it starts.
01:39:26 ◼ ► So I guess the visual change doesn't bother me because I'm not even looking at it anymore.
01:39:47 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, I was going to say on the Mac, I'm just using tiny start right now, which is great.
01:39:58 ◼ ► When I invoke that command, if I want to search different apps, I will go in that app and search that thing.
01:40:03 ◼ ► I don't need this global search solution, but you're right about the pull down thing, but can actually that I don't like on iOS.
01:40:10 ◼ ► iOS now just pulling down, pulls down this whole field from the top of the screen, John, it used to go to the lock screen.
01:40:26 ◼ ► But then if you want to make it go away, you would think, well, then you can slowly push it up.
01:40:37 ◼ ► And I've had problems where I like when I do use Siri and I, and I, and it's searching for something.
01:40:48 ◼ ► That was another one where after seeing it at WWDC in early June, I thought, well, they'll probably really, really put some attention on that UI over the summer.
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01:43:44 ◼ ► But the one thing I haven't talked about on the show yet that's in the news is the Apple lawsuit against OpenAI for trade secret infringement.
01:43:54 ◼ ► And you used to, and one of the things they're saying is that they were, that the ex-Apple people now at OpenAI were, A, instructing the Apple people to bring parts.
01:44:07 ◼ ► There was a quote, they didn't say who said it, but that one Apple employee wrote in a message, I didn't even know we were allowed to do that.
01:44:22 ◼ ► And that they were also giving them instructions on what to do when they gave notice that they were leaving Apple to.
01:44:31 ◼ ► And this is the sort of thing, that's the sort of aspect of this lawsuit where we, A, we've only heard Apple's side of it yet.
01:44:43 ◼ ► Which statements have not been great, in my opinion, because the one was like, we have no interest in other companies.
01:44:53 ◼ ► And like my analogy, it's still, I crack myself up with it, is if I think you stole my wallet and I find a police officer and I think, that guy right there, he stole my wallet.
01:45:33 ◼ ► All I've been thinking of is that the unambiguous way the statement to make is, we did not steal anybody's trade secrets.
01:45:44 ◼ ► You make a good point, though, where it's like, and again, I'm not interested in stealing anybody's wallet, but I am curious what Louis Mantia has in his wallet.
01:45:54 ◼ ► I bet you've got some really fun stuff in there, you know, like some really clever cards.
01:45:59 ◼ ► I'm not interested in stealing your wallet, Louis, but I have to admit, I am curious what is in it.
01:46:05 ◼ ► I mean, it's like, well, I don't know if you're a person that ever watched My Cousin Vinny.
01:46:13 ◼ ► There's a moment where Vinny says something like, if only I could get a look at Trotter's file sort of thing.
01:46:18 ◼ ► It's like, of course you would want that information and he gets it because that's by law what you're able to do here.
01:46:25 ◼ ► And I think that's the correct implication that actually maybe it's wrong that I would get to like spy on this other person's information.
01:46:31 ◼ ► In that specific case, he was totally allowed to have that information and he ends up getting it by what he thinks is sweet talking, but it's actually just the law.
01:46:38 ◼ ► It's like the idea that open eye would not be like, oh God, if only we would know about that.
01:46:44 ◼ ► But there's a reason that you don't do that is because you don't want to break the law.
01:46:55 ◼ ► Well, this is where I want to circle back to what you said about what you used to work at Apple and then you left.
01:47:10 ◼ ► But I mean, as far as I remember, the way that it went was I thought I was going to give my two weeks and just continue finishing up whatever projects I was working on and see myself out.
01:47:22 ◼ ► But at the end of the two weeks, but in reality, giving that notice is just is to Apple just saying, OK, well, this guy's done.
01:47:34 ◼ ► You're going to make sure that I don't ever interact with anyone that might be sharing potentially information that is not something I need to know or something I could walk away with.
01:47:47 ◼ ► You have to section me off in like my own little office and my own little spot where it's like I never interact with anybody.
01:47:57 ◼ ► So I I'm a little I'm a little curious about like how any of this has changed or anyone's strategies that they may have.
01:48:05 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure there are people that are just like they don't give notice until they're actually ready to go rather than giving a two weeks notice like and not expecting that they're going to be shut out the door.
01:48:35 ◼ ► I mean, anybody who knows anybody at Apple knows somebody who's been at Apple, left Apple, done something else and then come back to Apple.
01:48:55 ◼ ► You can leave on good terms and go away for a couple of years and then come back on good terms.
01:49:07 ◼ ► But when it's with this scenario in particular, with IO and Love From and OpenAI, there is bad blood.
01:49:33 ◼ ► And I certainly didn't hear anything that would be – I was as surprised as anybody when Apple announced this lawsuit.
01:49:40 ◼ ► But I knew that it was – if you were an employee who Apple – your manager would like to retain because you were good at your job and got along with people and you say,
01:50:21 ◼ ► But if you've made the decision already, I think they're like, all right, get out of here then.
01:50:26 ◼ ► And so it's definitely been the case where for a while or from the beginning – and we know it's actually Apple confirmed it.
01:50:33 ◼ ► I think Gurman had reported that it was like upwards of 400 employees have left – former Apple employees are now employed at OpenAI.
01:50:40 ◼ ► And Apple put that in the legal complaint that they filed that it's – I forget if they said about 400 or over 400.
01:50:51 ◼ ► And that's a lot of people for a company that hasn't shipped a single hardware thing yet.
01:51:04 ◼ ► But I got to say, man, like even with 400 people, like if what Apple is like suggesting is true here,
01:51:10 ◼ ► if like their accusations are true, that like there were trade secrets and everything that migrated their way over to OpenAI or IO or whatever,
01:51:23 ◼ ► I can't quite believe it because how do you work at Apple and not understand the security implications of your job?
01:51:43 ◼ ► And there's this guy, Chang Liu, who is unfortunately named in the lawsuit and is at the center of it.
01:51:51 ◼ ► And one scenario would be the, none of this is a good case, but the best case from Apple's perspective is that he's just emblematic of a type of behavior that is widespread amongst the employees who have left Apple for OpenAI.
01:52:09 ◼ ► And that after he left, he had kept an Apple laptop for a couple of weeks and was still using it to log in.
01:52:15 ◼ ► And he had figured out some kind of way that even after he was no longer an Apple employee, his credentials for file sharing, which probably went through Box, which is what Apple uses for remote file sharing.
01:52:27 ◼ ► But they didn't name Box in particular, but somehow he could still log in and still get files as an Apple employee, even though he wasn't an Apple employee.
01:52:43 ◼ ► And that Apple has records of all this, that obviously there's logs of who logged in with what credentials to the file sharing.
01:52:52 ◼ ► Like, presumably of all the allegations in this suit, those are the ones that Apple's definitely got dead to rights.
01:53:01 ◼ ► You know, you got to wonder, like, if he's such an idiot, how did he get a job at either company?
01:53:06 ◼ ► But again, the security implication of it, I feel like people have their own ideas about, like, what security at Apple is like.
01:53:12 ◼ ► But I'll tell you that, like, yeah, you sign confidentiality agreements and you generally understand not to share things.
01:53:18 ◼ ► And I think that people at Apple, generally speaking, are more cautious in general than they need to be.
01:53:25 ◼ ► I have known people that work at Apple and they are, like, super, super tight-lipped about anything that they work on, even in the most general sense, because I think they fear some wrath or whatever.
01:53:38 ◼ ► But it's wild to me, I guess, that you could be working there and not have that understanding.
01:53:43 ◼ ► Even if you had a different understanding of, like, how much, I don't think it's logging into a file server to download files on your Apple laptop after you terminate your employment level.
01:53:56 ◼ ► And even before you terminate, you know, and there's some allegations in there that they were coaching employees on how to, okay, if you're going to take this job, before you tell Apple you're quitting, do this and this and get these files first and copy them to a personal device.
01:54:10 ◼ ► And then tell Apple you're leaving for open AI because as soon as you tell them you're leaving for open AI or just tell them you're leaving and don't even tell them where you're going because if you do tell them you're coming here, they are immediately going to call security and you will be immediately walked out of the building with a box with whatever was in your office in your hands immediately because that's what they're doing for open AI.
01:54:35 ◼ ► And there was something about coaching them to prepare for the Apple's global security team, approaching them about questions about their whatever.
01:54:44 ◼ ► And if some of that stuff sounds like, hey, that sounds fishy that they're coaching them this.
01:54:49 ◼ ► But Marco Armand on ATP said, and I was thinking the same thing, but I have to give him credit because he put it on a podcast first, is it's sort of like when you teach kids about their basic civil liberties here in the United States.
01:55:00 ◼ ► And that when a police officer comes to your house and knocks on the door and says, we'd like to come in, you can just say, no, thank you.
01:55:14 ◼ ► Now, whether they actually won't come in, who knows, but you're in your rights to say no.
01:55:21 ◼ ► And for example, an important one, too, is if you have stuff in the trunk of your car and you get pulled over on the highway, the police, you don't have to give them any permission to search the trunk of your car.
01:55:42 ◼ ► And so there is a scenario where OpenAI and former Apple employees at OpenAI telling soon-to-be-ex Apple employees, here's what to expect and what we think you should do and what you should know.
01:55:56 ◼ ► And that if after you leave and you're no longer an Apple employee, if Apple Global Security says we'd like you to come in for an interview, you can just tell them no.
01:56:16 ◼ ► It just looks bad if you're looking at it in the perspective of the other things Apple is alleging in there.
01:56:23 ◼ ► That whole part of the complaint made me roll my eyes where they're like, Tang Tan, a former VP at Apple, had a document of what Apple managers know about employees who, when they leave, and was using it to coach people.
01:56:41 ◼ ► But Apple's, here's what they do when employees give their notice that they're leaving.
01:56:48 ◼ ► Well, I think this was also mentioned on ATP, too, about what do you retain when you leave, and how do you section off that part of your brain so that you don't keep it?
01:56:58 ◼ ► I mean, of course, any documents, any very specific methods of doing something are likely proprietary.
01:57:27 ◼ ► But there's also this question, I guess, about, I don't know, who owns what about this sort of stuff?
01:57:46 ◼ ► I don't think these are Apple trade secrets to use a raster marquee tool rather than a vector shape if I'm drawing a circle.
01:57:56 ◼ ► I don't know how you know how to separate that stuff in your brain because, and especially when you work for multiple companies, you start holding, like, the secrets in your brain.
01:58:04 ◼ ► And I'm not saying it's impossible to know whose secrets are what and where you heard it.
01:58:12 ◼ ► It's not totally all around a possibility for me that someone could leave Apple, go to work for another company, and inadvertently do something, share some piece of information.
01:58:28 ◼ ► It's possible that someone learned something that they assumed was, like, just general on-the-job knowledge and not this is something Apple specifically has patented the fuck out of.
01:58:48 ◼ ► And so I've never, and I've, even though I have a lot of friends who work there and have worked there, I've never said to somebody who works at Apple, hey, can I play with your laptop, your work laptop?
01:59:05 ◼ ► But I do think people who are used to a lot of typical corporate IT put stuff on your computer that locks it down, and they're like, I can't believe anybody at Apple would be trying these things.
01:59:18 ◼ ► I think they vastly underestimate how unlike that being an Apple employee is, that your computer is mostly running macOS, and yes, you have to log into a work VPN to connect to work things, and the VPN logs your activity.
01:59:34 ◼ ► But there's not a lot of, or any real software that locks you out of things on your device.
01:59:44 ◼ ► You love macOS and iOS the way they're supposed to be for users, and you get to use them in that way, and you're not using a sort of handcuffed version of these platforms like you are in a lot of corporate environments.
01:59:58 ◼ ► So I think it is easier to forget that it is a work machine, and you are going to hand it in, and after you hand it in, they can look at it forensically and see everything you were doing on it.
02:00:14 ◼ ► In some cases, I think you almost can't get by without logging into your personal iCloud account on your work machine.
02:00:24 ◼ ► And then your iCloud gets like a magic work folder in iCloud Drive that has some of the work-related documents.
02:00:32 ◼ ► And then when you're no longer an employee, they take that flag off your iCloud account, and then you don't have the magic folder in iCloud Drive anymore.
02:00:41 ◼ ► But you are supposed to or almost have to log in with your personal iCloud on a work machine.
02:00:48 ◼ ► And therefore, you can be having these conversations in iMessage on your work machine, and iMessage is end-to-end encrypted between you and, let's say, the person at OpenAI you're communicating with about your future job.
02:01:22 ◼ ► I mean, I guess it depends on if they have login capabilities, admin login capabilities to look at that data.
02:01:37 ◼ ► No, I mean, I can only speak to what was the – yeah, I can only speak to what happened 15 years ago for me.
02:01:45 ◼ ► I don't like – I think there was – I think some – maybe I'm naive, but I don't think so.
02:01:51 ◼ ► But maybe there were some naive people that thought they were constantly being spied on because that's kind of like how other workplace environments work.
02:01:57 ◼ ► But from my experience, the laptop, the computer I brought home with me, it was a work laptop and it had access to work things through VPN stuff.
02:02:21 ◼ ► Yeah, but once they – you know, global security at Apple has the computer in the hand, then they've got it all.
02:02:34 ◼ ► I think it's a good thing and it's part of what makes Apple Apple that there is a large – even as big as the companies have gotten and as their headcount has grown,
02:02:41 ◼ ► there's a large amount of trust between Apple and the employees as while you're an active employee that they trust you to do the right thing.
02:02:51 ◼ ► And like you said, if anything, by and large, they over-index on it and they're too careful and don't even talk about things they could talk about.
02:02:58 ◼ ► Do you think any of this – any of what's going on right now will change that dynamic at Apple?
02:03:16 ◼ ► I don't think as a policy, but I do think that's part of the reason they filed the suit is as a sort of, hey, while we're at 400 people who've left here for there, let's keep it from growing to 800 because we can make it a big pain in your ass.
02:03:31 ◼ ► It's going to – we're going to scrutinize – if you do leave us for them, we're going to scrutinize everything you've done and you better have all your I's crossed and – or T's crossed and I's dotted, et cetera, et cetera.
02:03:46 ◼ ► And I guess the other thing that I know it's like, well, what does Apple want out of this?
02:03:51 ◼ ► I do think – I think they just want to send a message that just says enough and I think they do.
02:03:56 ◼ ► I don't think they're trying to say we're going to prosecute you or pursue you illegally, but they do want to discourage Apple employees from leaving.
02:04:08 ◼ ► And I think it is particularly personal with Johnny Ive and Tang Tan and the other higher-ups.
02:04:20 ◼ ► I mean, I've heard people say it's Apple's job to retain their talent and I agree with that sentiment.
02:04:32 ◼ ► So like I have no idea, I have no insight here about like did these people, if they wanted to go, were they going because they believed in the possibility of whatever OpenAI and IO are creating and Johnny Ive are creating?
02:04:55 ◼ ► I don't know because like I said, like there is a difference between saying like I am thinking about going and I am going, right?
02:05:01 ◼ ► And I think that you can't – if someone says I'm going, like retaining your talent at that point I think is a little hard, right?
02:05:09 ◼ ► I think that once someone's made the decision, I think it's like, well, all right, we can try to convince you otherwise, but your decision is probably already made.
02:05:17 ◼ ► Well, I think maybe part of it – and I guess with 400 people, there's 400 stories and I'm sure they're all over the place.
02:05:31 ◼ ► I think they're – and I think this is almost everybody – I haven't even seen anybody really disagree with it, that it kind of makes sense amongst any personal details about John Ternus and his personality.
02:05:45 ◼ ► But just the basic idea that their hardware story is in such a good place across the board that it kind of makes sense that the senior vice president of hardware engineering is the guy who got the promotion to be CEO, right?
02:05:56 ◼ ► The hardware is the best part of the company and therefore the hardware guy is the new CEO.
02:06:17 ◼ ► But as good as Apple's hardware has been, and the Apple Silicon has been great for the Mac, if you're a designer who wants to make novel new shapes and form factors and use new material, it hasn't been a great time.
02:06:32 ◼ ► I think it's been a great time as a user because the hardware hasn't been making changes for change's sake.
02:06:41 ◼ ► So the M2 version and the M3 version and the M4 version all kind of look the same, and at some point they made space black look actually black instead of slightly darker gray.
02:07:08 ◼ ► I mean, if you're a creative person and you're looking to be creatively fulfilled, I'm sure you're always looking for, like, new problems to solve, right?
02:07:18 ◼ ► We've been there for a little while now where actually there's no more problems to solve.
02:07:26 ◼ ► And the only way to improve is to break it a little bit with one version so that you can fix it in another.
02:07:33 ◼ ► It's not real, like, we, I don't know, people call it rearranging deck tears on the Titanic, right?
02:07:38 ◼ ► You've moved things around for the sake of moving it around, and it's maybe all for naught anyway because it's all syncing.
02:07:43 ◼ ► But I guess I don't really understand why someone would want to leave Apple in particular.
02:07:53 ◼ ► I have no speculation, I have no interest, I have no understanding of this, but what possibly compels people that were all of those seasoned software and hardware people at Apple to find whatever they're doing at OpenAI, like IO, to be vastly more creatively fulfilling?
02:08:12 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know either, except that I think there's a lot of people who really did like and love Johnny Ive and really appreciate his sort of earnest artist approach to technology.
02:08:30 ◼ ► I mean, I think as far as hardware design, of course, I agree with you that I think there's a lot there.
02:08:37 ◼ ► I mean, I said this about Johnny or about Alan at the beginning of the episode that like, was Alan like actually a person that ever really loved computers?
02:08:45 ◼ ► I can't say that I can recall any moment where it seemed to me that Johnny ever loved computers either, right?
02:08:55 ◼ ► He's always been like a person that cared way more about like how the thing felt, how it looked, how it sat, how it was held in your hand, how it interacted with you.
02:09:15 ◼ ► I do think he likes computers, but I think he was more interested in the people first and the fact that computers were so such a big part of everybody's life.
02:09:28 ◼ ► I think anybody at Apple could see in the 90s, like when he and Steve Jobs, when Steve Jobs discovered him sitting there being ignored in the design studio that like, hey, people are only going to use computers even more and more as time goes on.
02:09:44 ◼ ► And it's such a big part of people's lives that if you just want, even if you just want to design things and Johnny Ive has, he's designing cars now and he's taking, you know, everybody's designed chairs.
02:09:56 ◼ ► Everybody who's a designer like Johnny Ive is designed a chair and you want to design anything.
02:10:05 ◼ ► It's like the big podium for either Sotheby's or the other big auction house in London.
02:10:11 ◼ ► Like, I understand the idea that like you could design more things than just computers.
02:10:23 ◼ ► And of course, like computers are where people are, but I kind of am still kind of curious, I guess, why there is so much of a push to try to develop a thing to replace a phone or a computer, right?
02:10:33 ◼ ► Whether it's glasses, whether it's VR headsets, whether it's some wearable tech, whatever it is.
02:10:40 ◼ ► But I have to say, it's like none of these seem to ever catch on as a mainstream thing.
02:10:45 ◼ ► And I think that's because actually the phone and the computer are actually very good as they are.
02:11:01 ◼ ► But if you're trying to develop something that is not either of these things because you believe that those things have already dominated the space, that you're trying to make this third thing, I don't think the third thing has ever proven to work.
02:11:23 ◼ ► I think that in any kind of new field, there's often this weird, there's this initial period where a new thing is new and it's novel and everybody's trying to figure out the best way to make it.
02:11:34 ◼ ► And there's a lot of innovation and a lot of dead ends are pursued, but they're exciting because you don't know it's a dead end until you get to the dead end.
02:11:46 ◼ ► The whole iPod, in fact, turned out, the idea of an iPod turned out to be a dead end effectively.
02:11:52 ◼ ► And I know that there's sort of a resurgence right now where people are buying old iPods.
02:12:03 ◼ ► And, like, being able to put an iPod in there and just, like, scroll wheel my way, it's awesome.
02:12:13 ◼ ► It's a long story, and I can't say exactly who told me this, but somebody who had a meeting in Steve Jobs' suite at, obviously, the old Infinite Loop office, but was going to have a meeting in a conference room outside Steve Jobs' personal office towards the end of, not at the very end,
02:12:37 ◼ ► And for whatever, I don't think it was always there, but it was, like, after the iPod hi-fi was discontinued, there were 20 of them, he said, just stacked in his office.
02:12:52 ◼ ► He had this meeting where the nature of the meeting was such that he could not bring it up, and he'd never had a meeting directly with Steve Jobs before.
02:13:07 ◼ ► All we could think, and he told me the story, and all we could think of is that Jobs loved
02:13:12 ◼ ► it, didn't want to discontinue it, but the sales were bad, and he was like, all right, all right,
02:13:24 ◼ ► And this is when my friend saw them, but Steve Jobs loved the iPod Hi-Fi and had a stash
02:13:58 ◼ ► at a loss about what device kids are supposed to have, like, when they're not, quote, quote,
02:14:25 ◼ ► The iPhone is so good that it's even killing the notion of devices that you'd want for,
02:14:32 ◼ ► and children is a perfect market where you might want to give them a standalone camera.
02:14:38 ◼ ► Or a standalone music player, and you don't want to have not only a cell plan, but you just
02:14:45 ◼ ► But the iPhone is so good compared to every other standalone device, like a voice recorder
02:14:52 ◼ ► or a camera or a music player that it kills it, and then you end up with kids with phones
02:15:13 ◼ ► And as much as you can imagine that there were use cases for it, I think what effectively really
02:15:19 ◼ ► happened, and it coincides with when it disappeared and when they started slowing the annual, it
02:15:25 ◼ ► would only get updated every couple of years, and then it went away, is it happened at the
02:15:29 ◼ ► point where all the parents were buying their second or third iPhone for themselves, and so
02:15:39 ◼ ► And so I think what really killed the iPod, I think the main market for the iPod Touch, I think the
02:15:45 ◼ ► main market was always kids, and the kids were getting hand-me-down iPhones, and so it just
02:15:53 ◼ ► I think OpenA's eyes and Love From and I.O.'s appeal from Apple employees, I think it's
02:16:01 ◼ ► I think from a hardware perspective, Apple's hardware is great, but they're not doing new
02:16:08 ◼ ► They're shipping new laptops that look like the old laptops, and even the iPhone Air, which
02:16:14 ◼ ► is the coolest new iPhone Apple has made in a long time, it's still just thinner, right?
02:16:25 ◼ ► under Steve Jobs 20 years ago, they were coming out with wacky new devices all the time, right?
02:16:32 ◼ ► I don't know if that's a Steve Jobs thing or if that's just like a maturity of the industry
02:16:36 ◼ ► No, I think it was a Steve Jobs thing, and it gets back to that point I made like an hour
02:16:43 ◼ ► And what comes bottom-up now is never, let's make an all-new device just for fun and see
02:17:12 ◼ ► I mean, I guess you could because the Pro Display XDR still doesn't really have a camera on it,
02:17:33 ◼ ► Yeah, but if you want to make all new devices, I feel like Johnny Ive has a better pitch for
02:17:40 ◼ ► Well, yeah, maybe people see the definition of where Apple is and they're like, well, we
02:17:48 ◼ ► We know that we're not going to change too much of this product lineup and we know we're
02:17:57 ◼ ► And I think on the software side, it was a largely frustration with, hey, Apple's software
02:18:11 ◼ ► And there really is just this dearth of competitors in the industry, not just in California, if you
02:18:21 ◼ ► have to work in person, but just in anywhere in the world where, okay, I'm going to leave
02:18:31 ◼ ► its, whatever era you personally think was the best era of Apple software UI design, where's
02:18:44 ◼ ► Like when you ask that kind of question, I can't not think about Scott Forstall leaving
02:18:59 ◼ ► I think that's a better situation for some of these people that are just like, well, maybe
02:19:05 ◼ ► I mean, we've seen it with people that are getting disillusioned from the tech industry
02:19:11 ◼ ► And I think there were people on the software side who just want to do exciting new top
02:19:35 ◼ ► I mean, I kind of wish that a bunch of those people just went and started their own individual
02:19:39 ◼ ► companies and became independent developers or independent designers in some way and just
02:19:44 ◼ ► Because now they're all working under a new roof, but it's all under one roof again with
02:19:50 ◼ ► And maybe that vision is good and maybe the product that comes out of it or products that
02:20:00 ◼ ► And I think all of them are capable of so much more than kind of the box they work within.
02:20:14 ◼ ► I mean, if what you're looking for is making better software the way that it used to be, maybe
02:20:21 ◼ ► So to close it up, my fear is that if people at OpenAI and systematically stole trade secrets
02:20:33 ◼ ► to the degree that Apple is claiming that maybe they did, that this is the tip of the iceberg,
02:20:38 ◼ ► and that this lawsuit could be so devastating to OpenAI's hardware endeavor that it never
02:20:52 ◼ ► And I, and I know that I think here I'll disagree with John Syracuse who's like, ah, well, they'll
02:21:05 ◼ ► And if they, even if they don't have good evidence, but they think that evidence is there, there
02:21:10 ◼ ► is no amount of money that OpenAI or any kind, well, how about if OpenAI came with an open
02:21:43 ◼ ► And there is, if you just think about it from a common sense level, there is sort of a, it's
02:21:52 ◼ ► not just that Apple doesn't need more money, it's that you can only offer so much money.
02:22:18 ◼ ► It would immediately make, not just Apple, but anybody observing this thinking, wait a minute,
02:22:39 ◼ ► But at a certain point, even those people at Apple who are like, I don't know if this is
02:22:53 ◼ ► So I don't think there is anything, anything that OpenAI can possibly do to settle this lawsuit
02:23:00 ◼ ► before Apple is thoroughly satisfied that discovery reveals everything there is to be discovered in
02:23:08 ◼ ► terms of iMessages and emails and any other activity or planning within OpenAI regarding
02:23:19 ◼ ► And my hope is that that discovery doesn't really reveal that much more than what this initial lawsuit says.
02:23:38 ◼ ► And years from now, we just say, I remember that one time when there was six months where
02:23:48 ◼ ► And I think that would be a travesty because it's the first company that I'm vaguely interested
02:24:10 ◼ ► If there are this year, if there's any reason to dance on somebody leaving Apple at the end