Apple Mega-Episode W/ Daring Fireball's John Gruber: AI, Vision Pro, China, App Store & More

29:36You know, he sort of needs to be, you know, Apple needs to be above the fray for stuff like that. But I, so he's never going to say publicly, we need to disentangle ourselves from China. But privately, he must be thinking that, right? There was, I forget when he said it, but Steve Jobs was still alive. And it was sort of, I don't know that Steve Jobs thought, I think he knew that Tim Cook would be his successor as CEO, whether Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer or not. You know, that this guy, you know, he seemed to have a really, Steve Jobs' complete trust. And while Steve Jobs was still alive, they started introducing Tim Cook, like, on these analyst calls, more so than product events, right?

30:26Like, you didn't really see Tim Cook coming out and demoing products while Steve Jobs was still alive. But, you know, he began having a higher profile. And in one of those events, he read sort of a Tim Cook did prepared statement and Horace Deju of asimco.com has a post. If you just Google the Cook Doctrine, you'll find Horace Deju's quote of this. But paraphrasing it, it's, you know, it's sort of like Tim Cook's view of Apple's core beliefs. And one of them is that Apple needs to own and control the core technologies behind their products. paraphrasing that's probably pretty close but one of those core technologies i mean there's i think you could broaden that though to say that apple doesn't want to depend on anybody else other than itself right that's that's the truth and that's the lesson apple learned the hard way in the early decades of the company's um history right where where they used to rely on other companies to supply their chips for them.

31:35You know, in the very early years of the Mac, it was Motorola, and then those Motorola chips fell behind. And then it was IBM and Motorola who combined to make the PowerPC chips. And for a while, they were faster than PC chips, and Apple advertised the hell out of it. Remember those bunny suit ads? You know, they made hay out of the fact that for a couple of years, a PowerPC Macintosh performed better than an Intel Windows PC. But those were always very fleeting. And for the long run, betting against Intel was a losing proposition. And I think that's more or less why they effectively threw in the towel for a while and just said, you know what, we're just going to go to Intel with the Mac.

32:19And we're never going to be ahead of the competition because we're just using the exact same Intel chips that Dell and hp and every other pc maker can get but we're also never going to fall behind and when they'd fall behind in those years on chips it was out of their control because they weren't ibm and motorola who was actually designing and manufacturing and fabbing these chips they were sort of at their mercy uh and so it has to be it has to be you have to think of actually assembling and manufacturing the products that they make is a core part of what Apple does. And the truth is, it's not entirely in their control.

33:00They can't just switch supplying countries from India to China to Brazil to Vietnam or wherever else they might be able to make things. They can't just shift them based on the best deal they can get for the iPhone 16 or the iPhone 17. Maybe they're already making plans for that. Right now, it all has to go through China. And I think for years, they've been subtly chipping away at that. And India seems like the most likely place to pick up most of the slack simply. And again, much like China, it's incredibly, it's a lot of people, a lot. And therefore, whatever the percentage of highly skilled technical labor there is, whatever percentage of young Indians who have those skills to work at a Foxconn assembly plant, multiply that percentage by how many people there are in India.

33:59And it's a lot of people. Right. And and it gives them also gives them an advantage where India is a growing market where they're selling phones and then they, you know, save money on import tariffs or taxes or whatever, you know. but I think it is so difficult. And the, the infrastructure that China has is of such unfathomable scale to people like me and you, like you hear about these Foxconn factory cities and you, you can look at, you know, I know there've been news articles that have like satellite pictures of them. They're just so big. And then you find out that's just one of several that they're using to make the iPhone 15.

34:42it just boggles the mind how big it is and nobody else can duplicate it definitely also india isn't exactly free of uh political exactly well who is really right exactly right so we talked in the beginning about the big what's next question and there's a what's next that apple may or may not want to come quickly but is going to be there we just heard tim cook talk about artificial intelligence for the first time. And I think analysts went kind of nuts and they were very happy when they heard Tim Cook mention AI on the earnings call, thinking that like you say, AI and your valuation adds a trillion dollars overnight.

35:22But there is some platform risk there, right, for Apple, because, and I think you just spoke about this on a terrific Tech Meme Right Home podcast. But if you move the interaction layer with computing away from, maybe not away, or yeah, I'll just say it away from the phone and two LLMs or two voice assistants that are going to be smart and understand how to interact with apps. The value of the iPhone sort of depreciates a little bit unless you nail that and it could potentially go to competitors, like for instance, the rabbit. So John, I'm very curious, like what you think is AI necessarily a benefit for Apple?

36:00And how do you think the company is going to try to harness this stuff? I think I've been following, I mean, my college degree is in computer science, and AI has been a term of art in computer science since before I was born. I mean, it has been, you know, go back to Stanley Kubrick made 2001 in 1967, 68, and they were projecting, you know, and I don't think they were that far off, right? the year 2001 was ambitious for a computer you could just have a conversation with, but clearly that's the way things were going, right? And we're kind of reaching, now is when we're finally kind of reaching that moment where you can have at least a brief conversation with an AI construct, and you can even do it by voice, right?

36:56Speak to it with your actual human voice, have it understand you in a reasonable amount of time, and then speak an answer back that doesn't sound all that computery, right? I mean, so where is it going now? How much smarter is it going to get? I think that's very hard to predict. But it's clearly a thing. And I'm not quite sure what to compare it to. But I guess, just to circle back to one of your earlier questions, I guess that's my best guess as to what's next after the phone is just ambient, universal, conversational assistance from something. You know, I think that the movie Her by Spike Jonze, the Joaquin Phoenix, I think it was Joaquin Phoenix who starred in it, right?

37:53I think so too. Yeah, definitely. I think that his relationship to the Scarlett Johansson voiced AI assistant is remarkably prescient, especially for how long ago at this point that movie came out. I think that movie is about 10 plus years old. So it was before the current AI moment. But that interaction model is coming. And I don't know, though, that that's a product. Right. So I'm not second guessing my earlier answer that no single product is going to supplant the iPhone or phones in general. But I think that the overall method that people interact with computers and computing services is going to move past the current take out a piece of glass and poke at it with your finger and slide to a more conversational, ambient, and a true assistant, a mental construct who knows you and who you feel is sort of, you know.

39:05I know it sounds weird, but you sort of feel as your trusted friend. Something with a personality, not just... Say what you want about all of the voice assistants right now. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa. None of them really have a personality, right? Nobody's fooled by that. It's a neat parlor trick at first. The first time you tried playing with an Alexa device, it's like, hey, this is kind of cool. But you don't really think it's a personality. It becomes very clear that it's just text strings being voiced. You want it to talk the least as possible. Like, stop talking. So Apple has to be involved with this somewhere, because I think inevitably this is going to infuse all of our products, all of our interactions with computers.

39:52But I do think I think where investors and business people are wrong is the trendiness of it. Right. It sort of feels like for a lot of people what AI is. And I think we're still in this AI driven moment right now in February of 2024. But it really feels like it's just replaced the craze over cryptocurrency from three or four years ago, right? Where, you know, three or four years ago, the new thing was this cryptocurrency. And it feels like a lot of the people who are the most excited that Tim Cook even talked about AI at all were the same sort of people who were sort of hoping that Apple would issue their own Apple crypto coin or something like that three or four years ago and were mad that they didn't.

40:44But I think the difference is that that really was a fad and mostly a scam. And AI is for real. And I think Apple has to be there. But where that comes, I think, will be very, very subtle step by step as we get there. But doesn't their first swing at it, the HomePod, has not gone quite well. So I do wonder if this is a thing that Apple can do well. And I don't think it's because they don't have good computer scientists there. But some of the values that you need to bring to this, if you think about it, you have to be open, being able to work with third-party companies. like some of the best voice computing or some of the best, I don't know what we're going to call ambient computing, networks will have connections to all different apps and not privileged Apple services.

41:42You just have to let people use what they want. And that was a big problem with the HomePod. So I know you have them. I think you like them. But I am curious if you think that their culture and their mode of operating lends themselves to be successful in this area. I think I am an unusually big fan of HomePods, and I own more of them than I can count. Yeah, I loved your Vision Pro review where you talk about how the Vision Pro box is like two HomePod boxes. By the way, you go, by the way, I own more than most. Well, the problem is, it's an aside, but the problem is that when the original HomePods were discontinued And the only HomePods Apple was selling were the minis.

42:29And they weren't commenting on whether the HomePod was ever going to come back again. And I had no inside information. You might think, oh, John Gruber probably knew that they were going to come. I did not know. And so my concern was that if my HomePods died, I wouldn't have them anymore. So I bought a couple of extras. And I had to buy a couple of extras in both black and white because I don't get to decorate the house. Right. So there are places where I have black ones in my office, but the ones we have in our kitchen and our living room are white because they match the decor. But I had to buy extras in both.

43:08But then it turned out that that was a waste of money because they did come out with the HomePod 2, which is a better HomePod. and so now I've got these HomePod 1s that are in the box and I don't know what to do with them, except use them as a scale measuring device to show how big the box is of the Vision Pro. I think, though, my fandom of the HomePods is not indicative. I think Apple didn't have a clear enough vision of what the HomePod was for, And you bringing it up in the context of AI and virtual assistants, I think, is how most people saw HomePod trying to fit in. Whereas I think Apple's vision, and the reason I like it, is it's really more of an AV product.

43:55It's more like something that you might buy from Bang & Olufsen or Bose or something like that. It's just a really good sounding pair of speakers for$600 that really, really sounds uncannily good for$600 or$700 and can fill a room with spatial audio, not just stereo audio, but spatial audio that you really can't believe it's just two speakers in front of you. And that's not how they marketed it really at all as an entertainment speaker system. Because the interaction layer is Siri. And that sort of immediately brings you into this is something that's supposed to be an agent or AI related. And from my understanding, and I'm kind of curious to get, I am curious to get your take on this.

44:42So I wonder, I mean, Apple's culture keeps everybody on different project teams in silos. But if your AI scientists, you know, can't talk to each other, how far can you actually advance in this world that's going to be important, that we both agree will be important? I mean, that's what happened. There were people who were working on Face ID. They couldn't speak with the HomePod team, and that might have held them back on the AI front. So what do you think is going on on that front? And is that going to be a long-term issue for Apple as it gets into AI? I think what they... It is true that the company is largely, almost entirely siloed.

45:21And I don't On the whole, overall, this is, I think they feel like the way the company is structured is integral to the company's success and their future success. Let experts be experts. Right. But what needs to happen is when they build, and they're like, we can build blank, a major new thing. We're this close. We're a couple of years away from being able to do something truly revolutionary. Let's make this happen. Let's put somebody in charge of it. Somebody, you know, the term in Apple is what? Directly response, DRI, directly responsible individual. In other words, this is the person who one person needs to do.

46:19We need to get chips that can put footage from the camera on the front of a visor into the 4K displays inside the visor in front of your eyeballs in 12 milliseconds or less because anything more is going to make people feel nauseated. Somebody is in charge of making that happen. and when those projects get the attention at the highest levels of the company then they can draw from the whole company and bring people in well we need we need ai you know we need some of the people we need the ai to be able to do x y and z bring them in we need uh obviously like with vision pro a huge part of it really is just the camera technology right so all of the camera experts from the iPhone team.

47:10I'm sure that they brought them in as early as they could and said, okay, you're our best people at reducing noise, doing stuff in real time with absolutely no perceptible delay. We need to do all of this. Here's what we need to do in 12 milliseconds or less. And they could say, well, that's impossible right now. Well, let's bring our best camera people in to make it happen, right? That's what they need to happen. And I think like HomePod is a perfect example of a product that never really achieved that level of, hey, this is the most important thing on Tim Cook's mind right now and bringing in the best teams from across the company to do it.

47:51Fascinating. Maybe it will. I mean, if he's talking about AI now, maybe that's a place where that does happen. Well, here's, I'll say this, and I should probably write something very specific about it, but Tim Cook is often surprisingly forthcoming. Like a couple of years before they came out with the watch, there were rumors that they might be working on a watch or something, you know, people thought maybe it'd be more like a Fitbit fitness sensor type thing. And in some onstage interview, Tim Cook simply said, the wrist is an interesting place. Oh my God. And we have an interest in, you know, it's just an interesting part of your body.

48:30And, And, you know, so we're certainly looking at that. I think he's, when people have asked him about their seemingly ill-fated car project, Project Titan, what Tim Cook often talks about is autonomy. And he'll say autonomy is definitely an area of interest to Apple. I feel like it's still, right now as you and I are speaking, it still seems fantastical that we would have Star Wars quality robots in our home. like a C-3PO or an R2-D2 type droid that lives in our house and can go, you know, fold your laundry and go get you a beverage from the refrigerator without you getting off the couch or answer the door when, you know, FedEx comes with a package.

49:26That's going to happen though, right? I don't know if that's a 10-year thing or 20-year thing. I mean, 20 years is so far in the future, but that, it feels certain that that's going to happen sometime soon. And that is autonomy, right? And I feel like, and also that is personal computing, right? So having some sort of robot that you can just talk to, and that can do things in your house. I mean, you know, we've got Roombas, we've got, you know, we're taking little baby steps in that direction, where we've got vacuum cleaners that can self-navigate around one floor of your house, you know, no chance whatsoever of going up or down even a single step, but, you know, baby steps.

50:14That's coming. And I can definitely see Apple being, you know, with their reputation for privacy, their reputation for designing things that people find pleasing to look at, pleasing to use, you know, being good at designing user interfaces, right? Just at the broadest term, talking to C-3PO is a user interface. And I could see that being ultimately what comes out of Project Titan, not a car that you actually drive around and buy instead of buying a Tesla or a GM or whatever, a Honda or whatever other brand. Wow. Because we just saw a bunch of stories come out about Apple's plan with the self-driving car.

51:04We have a Washington Post story that came out actually 15 minutes ago. Folks were recording. Oh, I didn't see that. On Tuesdays as Apple quietly has tripled its testing of autonomous cars. And there's a Bloomberg story that says that they want the EV to debut in 2028, but have basically given up on full autonomy. I'm sure you've seen it where they've, they, they initially had a steering wheel in, then they took a steering wheel out of the car. I guess now it's back in, which is part of the reason why there've been all these delays. Um, what do you think? Do you, so, so, okay. We could, I definitely could see them getting into personal, like personal robots.

51:39Um, this seems like it might still be on the EV. Yeah. You know, and I've, it's the worst kept secret in Apple history because so many people have worked there and they've churned through so many executives. And at least at the executive level, people like Mark Gurman at Bloomberg can just follow along by looking at LinkedIn profiles. And, oh, here's a guy who used to work at Ford and then he worked at Apple for six years. And now he's left and he works at General Motors or something like that. That's happened to an awful lot of people who've come through Apple from the car industry. And there have been reports, you know, resets and new people coming in.

52:25And now Kevin Lynch is apparently the guy who's been in charge of Apple Watch software since its inception, is apparently leading the software side of it. So I don't think they've given up on it. I know that they're, you know, and we know, we just, we actually know even as secretive as they are we know that they've filed for many permits or whatever you want to call it to be test driving cars on streets and stuff like that uh but i i still don't know i i you know it just seems so it's so weird i i would actually find them making an r2d2 so much less so much easier to to imagine than them selling their own brand of car even though i don't think it's off the table i think they might but i think it's just so it's such an unusual product right for for apple to be making definitely i've heard and i the other thing too is i know and i don't know which way to bet you know it's often there's so many things that were deemed impossible i mean there were people who thought no computer would ever pass the turing test the turing test is alan turing's you know here's one level of ai is can you have a text chat and not be able to tell that it's a human or, or a AI construct, right?

53:42Chat GPT, et cetera, clearly passed the Turing test. Definitely. There were people who thought that was impossible though, and it would never, ever happen. I do know, I know people who've, including people who've worked at Apple on Project Titan, who've, who firmly believe that there's never going to be full self-driving cars. Never. It's impossible. And that it's not so much that they think it's impossible in the abstract. Like if you bought up a Hawaiian island and you bought all the roads and now you own the roads and you can say human driven cars are now illegal and the only cars allowed on the roads on this island are self-driving cars that follow these protocols so that they can communicate with each other wirelessly.

54:31That I think we could probably get to very, very closely, right? We could probably do that now and just put things in the road, sensors for the cars to detect. It's the fact that to get from where we are today, where all the cars are driven by human beings and introducing computer-driven cars, that is incompatible. There are a lot of people who think that's impossible, but there's obviously a lot of people who think it is possible, including people who think we're tantalizingly close, but everybody I've talked to who's, who's actually worked on the problem is way more pessimistic than Elon Musk to name one prominent example of an optimist.

55:14Yeah. I spent a good chunk of the summer out in San Francisco and spent time in Waymo's and cruises and was saying, all right, everybody, this is going to, this is really close. And then obviously we saw what happened with cruise. So we talked about Apple's interest in the wrist. we can't have a conversation and not talk about its interest in the face or the eyes. I don't know what you would, what body part we would talk about, but the Vision Pro, obviously major new product. I tried it out over the weekend. I was really impressed by it. It was way better than I expected. And I had high expectations, although a little bit too expensive, but the, I mean, I had a bunch of questions.

55:53We asked Joanna Stern on Friday, whether this was for early adopters or everybody. And it seems like it will be for those early adopters for a while. But I'm also curious, I'd love to ask you, what is the scale of the bet that Apple is making here? Because I've been struggling to figure that one out. Is this like a massive bet by Apple? Is it kind of a bet the farm bet? Or is it totally fine if it completely flops and goes to nothing? hmm i i feel like if it flops and comes to nothing it's the problem isn't that they needed it to be a success financially and that they needed to recoup however many billions they spent developing it and oh you know they didn't bet the company on on the research and development for this product uh the project titan just to go back to it they've spent way more billions of dollars trying and to this date failing to build a car than they put into this, which is now on the market and are actually selling it.

56:58So if it flops, if it's ultimately deemed a flop, then the problem isn't that they needed it to be a hit financially. I think the problem is it's like a dead canary in the coal mine where it's a sign that Apple's leadership has lost their innate sense of, oh, this is good, right? That is more important. That's the thing that makes Apple, Apple is a sort of institutional sense of taste, right? And it's very true. It's so obviously true. And startups in our industry can move so fast because the nature of software is so flexible that it's obviously true that every single one of these big companies that we would call big tech is the company itself is infused with the personality of their founders.

57:55Every single one. I mean, which one can you, would you even argue first is the least true about? I would say at this point, maybe Google, but that's simply because Larry and Sergey have sort of stepped aside, right? They're not there anymore. I would argue Amazon actually shifting away from retail, but. Maybe, right? And it sort of coincides with Bezos stepping aside and letting Andy Jassy take over. But Bezos, you know, until recently, Amazon was very Jeff Bezos-y, very, very much. I mean, just the goofy design of their homepage, right? It's like arguably, clearly the two most successful websites, I think, of all time are Amazon.com and Google.com, right?

58:41And they couldn't be more different. Google.com is a logo, a text box, two buttons. Exactly. And the Amazon.com homepage has always had 187 buttons and text fields. I mean, going back to when they only sold books, it was too complicated. And that's Jeff Bezos. I think that, wait, what was the question? Where I got some? The magnitude of the bet of the vision, bro. And I think that part of the way that Steve Jobs infused Apple with his personality is that it's a company with good taste at an institutional level. and including the refinements for, okay, here's the thing we're going to come out with in September.

59:38Let's get every single little thing right down to the little piece of tape with an orange arrow that tells you how to open the cardboard box that it comes in, make it as nice as possible. And then in a bigger sense, what should we be doing three years from now? What is our sense of what would be a good product? And Apple, I think, thinks that the reason Vision Pro is out right now is because they see this at the highest levels of the company as this is a good product right now. Whatever the obvious flaws of this first generation model are, it still is good enough to make right now. It's not a developer kit.

1:00:21It's not only for nerds. You have to be a little bit of an enthusiast, right? Everybody always is. That's the way adoption curves work. I mean, the original iPhone wasn't really a mass market product until, I don't know, iPhone 4 or 4S maybe. You know, it took a couple of years where even though all sorts of people who eventually bought iPhones and wouldn't go back, if you could have given them an iPhone and convinced them to spend$800 or whatever the cost was in 2007 on the first one, they would have been happy with it. They just didn't buy it because they're not they're thinking$800 for a phone.

1:01:03I don't care how cool it looks, even though I think that looks really cool. I'm not spending$800 on a phone. And that's a very normal thing for a normal person to think. And I think that's clearly how most people think about this headset. Like, hey, this looks cool. Everybody says it looks amazing when you put it on and you start watching movies or these 3D immersion experiences. But I'm not spending$4 ,000 on this thing. Forget it. That's very normal. But I do think that they think it is fundamentally, this is a great idea and a great product. And if it does flop, it's a sign that they've lost that ability.

1:01:35And what do you think? I I I I Even though I've spent more time with it than any you know anybody outside apple right uh you know i've had for a couple weeks i've had it like two weeks i guess um and a bunch of demos from june until i got the review unit i i think they're right and i do think though there's still a sort of they might be wrong about the reasons in the way that they were with the watch like when they first came out with Apple Watch, they had some of the things that they thought in the very first demos, you know, like putting two fingers on it to share your pulse with a loved one.

1:02:21Yeah. Sort of using it as an intimate form of communication. Never really, they don't even talk, they don't even have those features anymore. I think some of this, it's still up in the air what people are going to find most useful in it. But I think fundamentally, it's clearly a good product. It really is. There's just no other way to watch movies like this. As an entertainment device alone, it might be worth$3 ,000 or$4 ,000. And then everything else is sort of extra after that. Right. So I'll first of all say that the spatial video, that stuff blew me away watching some of those videos. But my note on it was very similar, which is that this is an entertainment device.

1:03:11That's what I came away thinking. Yeah. And I almost feel like maybe they are a little embarrassed to present it that way, you know, or that they feel not embarrassed, but that they kind of feel like, well, we're Apple and we make serious computing platforms. And so the spatial computing, this is the next metaphor for productivity. Just the things, you know, some of the most polished apps that are available for Vision Pro right now are just the basics of productivity. Mail, Safari, messages, notes, calendars, actually just the iPad app. But those sort of things, doing it in this spatial environment, I feel like they feel like we're Apple.

1:03:59We need to push that message as opposed to pushing it as something that's more akin to just an entertainment device from Sony or something like that. Right. Which is where I think it shines the brightest. So I saw a bit of a documentary where somebody was like tightroping across like a chasm. It must have been Arizona or something like that. And it just, I, my heart's like felt like it was stopping when I watched Free Solo 2D, but it was nothing compared to being up there on that tightrope with this person. I don't know what the name of it is. I have a mild fear of heights, you know, but it's, I don't, I don't like looking at people in movies doing things near the edge.

1:04:41There's one of the Mission Impossible, I think it might be Mission Impossible 2 opens with Tom Cruise rock climbing, you know, in the movie ostensibly without any kind of protective gear on and he's holding on. It, it, my son laughs at me because every time we've watched that movie, I just say, here, feel my hands and my hands get sweaty just watching it. That tightrope video for the Apple Vision Pro, it makes my palms just pool with sweat. Yeah. It's next level. Not for me, tightrope walking. I don't, I wouldn't want a tightrope walk 10 feet up in the air, let alone a mountain. Yeah. It's, it's incredible.

1:05:20And it really does. The other one too, and I've had a couple of friends say it, the, did you do the encounter dinosaur? I did. Yeah. I mean, that was pretty cool. But the real life, being up there real life was the thing that really did it for me. But the dinosaur thing was amazing also. But the dinosaur thing, there's a part, and it's dynamic. Right. And I'm not quite sure how dynamic it is. I haven't gone through. Yeah, the butterfly lands right on your finger. But when the big dinosaur, I don't know if it's a velociraptor or whatever it is, but it's a big, scary, obvious carnivorous dinosaur, turns its attention to you and the head - Jumps out the window.

1:05:57Comes out. And it's close enough for you. It's within arm's length in your mind. I flinch. I can't help but flinch. And I've had that demo. I got that demo in June. I've done it again now that I have the unit at home. I know it's fake. I know it's not going to bite me. But there's a part of my brain, like a lizard, no pun intended, a lizard part of my brain that cannot help but flinch. And it cannot help but start sweating my palms when I look down and I see that I'm at the edge of a cliff in front of this tightrope walker. It's so real. It's pretty amazing. I mean, for listeners out there, you kind of look at this square screen of these dinosaurs out in the field.

1:06:41And then one kind of turns its attention to you and walks out of the screen to you. And you're like, what is happening here? Also, I have to say they have, so dinosaurs, apparently they were four-legged creatures, but they must have been in the process of evolving away from their like little hands. And you never really understand how funny those tiny hands are until you see them in the Vision Pro. The most hilarious appendage I've ever seen on an animal. It really is. It's very comical. It's like, why are they there? Why didn't they just evolve to not even have them? Yeah. I don't know. Pick their nose or something.

1:07:12So you tweeted, it wasn't a tweet. You posted on Daring Fireball this quote from Paul Graham, which I thought was very interesting, where he said that if you don't have people making fun of your first edition of the product, you ship too late. And it's definitely, I understand that Apple said that this was, Apple felt that this was a product that was good and worth shipping. but there's one part of this rollout that I'm very curious to hear your perspective on because we have had people like walk out with Apple products like on their wrists and in their ears and in their hands as a status symbol and we've seen and it generally it might look I don't know we took us a moment with AirPods but generally we get there iPhone for sure you have the newest iPhone like it's you put it on the table to show your status but the the people walking around cities, going through crosswalks, driving the cyber truck, sitting on the subway.

1:08:09What do you make of the fact that the people that have worn this thing out in public just look silly? Well, and especially after you've demoed it, because you know if you've used it that it is not a walkabout device. It doesn't project windows a fixed distance in front of your face, like, you know, so that as you're walking, this contextual information in your virtual world remains five feet in front of you. No, it's fixed in space. So if you get up and walk, you walk right through the window and the window stays behind you and you can turn around and look at the back of the window. It's right there.

1:08:49So these people who are walking, you know, I've seen most of the footage you have, including the guy driving the Cybertruck, which. That was obviously someone who was like, we're going to make some content here there's no way that that was like someone being like oh there's a person wearing the vision pro in a cyber truck let me spontaneously videotape this right because why else would you have been filmed although i guess if you thought holy shit there's a cyber truck and you think you're just filming a cyber truck you know the guys get the vision pro on i mean that's a jackpot yeah i would like to think that that happened serendipitously you know i think it probably was fixed but my god imagine if you just thought oh my god there's the first Cybertruck I ever saw on the road.

1:09:30Let's get a footage of it. And then as you go by, you see that the guy driving it is wearing a Vision Pro. Well, I will say if you bought a Cybertruck, you're likely to buy a Vision Pro as well. So I think these people are just looking for attention because it's not meant to be useful when you're in motion. It really isn't. There's nothing you can do. I mean, I guess you could be listening to a podcast, but it's the stupidest way to listen to a podcast, you know, imaginable, but you couldn't even be watching like a YouTube video because the window would stay behind you. And I actually think that's by design.

1:10:06It's, it's a safety thing. It's not meant to be something you use when you're walking around. So I, you know, but I will get used to it. It is, I'm, I guess it's my just nerdy personality where I'm, I've always been a little less, I mean, I have my vanities, you know, and I know what, you know, as often as many people feel self-conscious, but I don't feel self-conscious with technology. I never thought AirPods were weird. And I know, I know people did, but I always thought right from the very first AirPod, I was like, these look exactly like the white earbuds we've been wearing for 15 or 16 years, except you cut the cables off.

1:10:54So you're taking away from what's there. But I know so many people who thought I'm not going out in public with these AirPods. I'll look weird. Yeah. We were out there at the, I was with BuzzFeed at the time and we were out there while they were, you know, unveiled them and gave us a chance to make a video about it. And I ran around their like demo room, the hands-on area with the two AirPods in my ears and they didn't fall out. And then I was like, all right, I'm sold. I couldn't imagine them staying in, but they did. I remember being a kid though. And when Sony Walkman, Walkmen, I guess we pluralize it.

1:11:28When the Sony Walkman was new, there was sort of the same sort of thing. Like, oh my God, you look like such a tool on the subway with these orange Nerf ball headphones in your ears. And, you know, we get used to it. Covering your eyes is obviously a different level, though, than covering your ears with headphones in public. Because it's not even just humans, it's all primates. And in fact, many mammals, eye contact is so super, it's just something we've evolved to read at all times. There's a great, great documentary on Netflix called Chimp Empire. It's like a four-part documentary. It's one of the best nature documentaries I've ever seen.

1:12:11But it's absolutely amazing how these chimpanzees communicate with each other just by eye contact. So they're all just chilling around in the forest. Nothing's really going on. And if one of the chimps just looks up into a tree, all the other chimps will look up and say, oh, what's he looking at? Because maybe it's like an enemy or something like that. it's all part of human nature to just want to make eye contact. And, you know, it's why Arnold Schwarzenegger wore sunglasses in the Terminator, right? It's like it dehumanized him. It makes you look like a badass when you have sunglasses on. So it's a weird product to be wearing out in public.

1:12:52I guess what I'm getting at with this question is, are we going to see a similar backlash to these things like that we did to the Google Glass? Like, they're like, we saw the Google Glass turn into the glass hole device. Is that a similar risk here? I don't think so. And I think part of it is that Google Glass broke some ground 10, 11, 12 years ago, whenever it was, and sort of broke the ice on it. But I really think that the glass asshole term came not because of the product, but because of the sort of people who wore Google Glass at the time. Did you ever try Google Glass? Yes. It was useless.

1:13:37I mean, it was such a gimmick. I mean, if I were touring Google's labs and they said, hey, here's a thing one of our guys came up with, you know, just not as meant to be a product, but like as a proof of technology, I would have been like, oh, that's pretty cool. I could see where this might be something in 10 years. It didn't seem like something you would actually have any reason to use in real life. And therefore, the people who chose to use it and be ostentatious about it, I think by nature tended to be the sort of people who, you know, you might call a glass hole without the GL. Yeah, that's true.

1:14:16Yeah, no, it's a perfect, very interesting insight on the glass. So speaking of, you know, headset wars or glass battles, we have this very interesting rivalry that's developed in recent years between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. I think just to just to begin with, I wrote about this in Big Technology recently. My perspective is that Cook may have helped Mark Zuckerberg maybe more than any CEO in the world. He's released the Vision Pro, which immediately legitimizes everything Zuckerberg has been doing with Reality Labs. His ad embargo has really hampered competitors like Snapchat, for instance, and a lot of that ad money has gone to Meta.

1:14:59and by keeping Apple messages only on iPhones, he's sort of opened up this area in this era of rich messaging for somebody else to come in and be the cross-platform messaging app, and that's been WhatsApp. So I'm just kind of curious, do you think Apple is aware of how much they're helping Meta, and what's your perspective on this battle? I love that column of yours, And I really just all the point your highlights there. I agree with all of them. And I think we're actually seeing this. I remember I didn't link to it yet from Daring Fireball, but I just saw something that WhatsApp usage in the United States is on the upswing.

1:15:42And I think in particular, that's a really keen example. I know iMessage has been in the news lately with the, what was it, Beeper. Right. That was like an unapproved backdoor way of getting iMessage on Android phones without Apple's permission. And then they figured out how they were, you know, what paths they were taking and closed those paths off. But, you know, it generated controversy in terms of, hey, I think people on Android should be allowed to use iMessage. You know, it's almost like a right, even though it is a proprietary network that Apple uses as a value add for their products. But I think it's more interesting to think that Apple, in the long run, being open to everybody is the way that a messaging platform should work, you know, just by definition.

1:16:37and that Apple, it's just taking a very long time to see that Apple made a mistake by not putting iMessage on Android for free 10 years ago just to bolster the network. And that in the long run, something like WhatsApp is eventually going to win out just because it is open. And I think we might be seeing that. And again, to your point, who's the most likely beneficiary of this? I would definitely think it's WhatsApp in particular, which is a meta product. I don't think Signal has a path to become the two or three billion user product that WhatsApp already is.

1:17:24And establishing headsets as a sort of good use of research and development, I think it's unclear whether Meta is going to be successful in that regard, but it certainly doesn't hurt to be in the same place where Apple's splashy new product is and to be able to say, we've been here for years, putting billions of dollars into it. I do think it's an interesting thing. And I think the other part of it is that as much antipathy as Apple might have culturally to Meta and that people at Apple tend not to like people at Meta, it seems like Tim Cook personally doesn't really care for Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, he's been as snippy in his commentary on Mark Zuckerberg as anybody I've ever heard Tim Cook talk about.

1:18:17I mean, you threw out that maybe Tim Cook would get into politics or something if he stepped aside from Apple. That was just a joke about age. Yeah, but you can see it, though, in him. If he did, you wouldn't be flabbergasted, right? I don't think he has any aspirations to political office. But if he did, I would be surprised because I just would, I'm curious what his platform would be like to see him advocate for policies instead of products would shock me. But I don't know. I've Donald Trump's been the president. So. Right. So, yeah. And again, and Trump did show, I mean, single handedly showed that you can get involved in political office at the president level.

1:19:00Right. I mean, I think you'd have to go back to Eisenhower to find somebody who was the president without holding any lesser office. And even with Eisenhower, I would say that working your way through the ranks of the military is sort of political. right that those are political skills um i can't imagine that tim cook would do anything short of the presidency right i mean because i think he would see it's if he wants to influence the world it's easier to influence the world as the ceo of apple than as a senator from california or the governor of california i really do i think tim cook is more well known than gavin newsom for reasons i think president or bust but where i'm going with this though is that tim cook is maybe not so much a political animal, but he's very diplomatic, right?

1:19:48He is, he is like by nature, a diplomat and, and all the stuff you and I just talked about with China, he's very diplomatic. His entire relationship with the Trump administration for four years, incredibly diplomatic. And for him to say things, I forget what the question was, but it was like, they asked him what he would do in Zuckerberg's position. And he said, I'd never be in that position uh he called for regulation sorry go ahead but what was the issue at hand it was cambridge analytica it was oh that's it cambridge analytica right and he also uh he shut down meta's internal apps right well but they broke the rules right i mean it wasn't like a ticky-tack violation right right they they were you know but i do think that if if apple had a better relationship with meta that maybe they would have let that slide or at least on the other hand hey this is coming right maybe that happened i don't know but yeah but i i but you're right though in terms of being flies on the wall like we are in the media that was kind of telling and and the backstory was i think that was the thing with uh abusing the test flight betas oh yeah to to push to allow So yeah, to push updates.

1:21:07And the Meta had a product that they were literally paying teenagers like 20 bucks a month to install a VPN on their phones. Oh, yes. And the kids were like, oh, sure, I'll take 20 bucks a month for nothing. And the idea, though, is that when you have a VPN on the phone, you could see every single thing the kid is doing because all their network traffic goes through your VPN server. And that product was one of the reasons why they decided to buy WhatsApp for$25 billion or whatever the ridiculous price tag. I mean, not ridiculous, but very high price tag. It was because they had proof. They're like, holy crap, look at how many young people are using WhatsApp around the world.

1:21:45They only knew that because of that. And so Apple saw this as, oh, this is clearly in violation of the rules for what you're supposed to be doing here. So they revoked Meta's developer certificate. it. And in the meantime, that broke all of their internal apps. Like they have apps, internal apps, where you can like, you know, use your phone to badge into buildings. Or, and I think they said you could like, you know, at Meta, you can use your phone to buy lunch at the commissary. And so for like two days, people at Meta couldn't get into their doors. They couldn't buy lunch. It was kind of spiteful.

1:22:19Yes. But on the, but Apple really isn't a spiteful company, right? That's part of Tim Cook's diplomatic nature. So if you ask him a question like that, he got snippy and gave that answer. But if he hadn't been asked, he never would have said anything, right? They never were going to jerk Meta around with their developer certificates unprovoked. They weren't just, you know, they're not going to just spitefully screw around with Meta and their internal apps. Meta had to break a fairly serious rule for them to do that. And I think that's the more interesting part is I don't see Apple ever taking actual offensive action against Meta, really.

1:23:06Maybe the closest they ever came was with the app tracking transparency. But again, your column really made the point. And Ben Thompson has said the same thing. He said it, And I have to give, I hate it because I like to be the one on our podcast who's right more than the other person. But he called it at the beginning that it was going to be most beneficial to the very biggest companies, mostly Meta and Google, because they're the only ones who could handle the complexity of it in a way that would let them keep selling ads. And the truth is, Meta and Google have come out of the post-app tracking transparency world in a stronger position than any other companies.

1:23:47Right. But I think internal to Meta, even though I feel like the flip side of the coin is that inside Meta, I don't think they are grateful for the fact that it's left them in a stronger position. because I think they're cocksure enough of their own abilities that they, of course they were still going to be on top. We're meta. We're the smartest ad tech people in the world. So you could throw anything at us and we're still going to be on top. They don't take it as a feather in the cap that they've come out of app tracking transparency more profitable than ever. I think they're just resentful that any other company made them do anything they didn't want to do.

1:24:26Definitely. And they did lose, their revenue was down 10 billion in a year while they were figuring it out. So they're pissed. Yeah. Let's get to it. Yeah, go ahead. Well, and it just created the, it just, it laid bare that they're dependent on these other platforms. Yeah. Oh, so I just want one story about that. I was, for my book, I was in with Mark Zuckerberg talking about why he wanted to do virtual reality. And it was very clear that, you know, he was holding up an Android phone and talking and it was very clear. is basically just like, we need the operating system. We don't want to do it differently.

1:25:04And lo and behold, then they changed the name to Meta. So there you go. Well, and I actually feel like that's where they're a little, I'm not so optimistic about their chance. Although what I think will probably inevitably happen is what happened with Android. Android before the iPhone was a very different product. It never came to market, but you've seen the leaked images. They look like BlackBerrys. The prototype Android devices, it was more or less like an open source BlackBerry platform with an actual physical keyboard and a much smaller sort of iPod size display above it. And then the iPhone came out and Google was like, oh, shit, this is the way phones should work.

1:25:45And then they adjusted. Right. I kind of feel like that can happen with Meta. I have a Quest 3. It is nothing like a Vision Pro in terms of being a computing platform. Don't even talk about the resolution of the screen, which you could say that's just a direct correlation to the cost. Not judging it on the technical merits of the quality of the screen or the quality of the sound, just the overall concept for what is the computing world, what is the metaphor for computing, is so primitive compared to the ambition of Vision Pro, where it's this total spatial computing environment where you can have all these windows for everything.

1:26:22But now that Meta has seen it, following another company gets a bad rap. And the people who treat Apple like their favorite sports team get mad when Android copies features from iPhone. and Android clearly copied more from iPhone than iPhone ever copied from Android. That's just the nature of it. But once an idea is out in the world, it's there for everybody and you can't take it back. And so whatever good ideas Apple has brought to the world of these devices, Meta now has those ideas. Yeah, Meta, I mean, Meta is the ultimate copier. If you look at everything from reels to stories, I mean, the list goes on.

1:27:06And you could even see the shift in their marketing from Metaverse to this mixed reality world after the Vision Pro demo announcement came out. And it was very clear that Apple had ideas that influenced them within Menlo Park. Yeah, definitely. All right. And again, that's just the nature of how ideas spread. I mean, there's no, you know, Steve Jobs got mad about it and said they were going to go, what, thermonuclear on Android over ripping them off. But it's almost adorable that he was so mad about it because he should have, it's just his, it was his personality. He should have known from every other innovation that Apple had ever had that once those innovations are out there, other companies are going to borrow them.

1:27:49Yeah. Okay. Last topic. Apple charges these 30 % fees in the App Store. We talked about it as an important part of their services revenue. They're also very insistent that folks do not steer from their apps into other places where they can basically get the pay for the services, but at a discount without that Apple tax. they're almost so insistent on this that it's we talked about the antitrust things they're starting to see legislation and pushback in places like europe and then apple's response is basically like all right you don't want to play by our rules here's a new set of rules they also suck so uh do you think it's a strategic error for them to be so insistent on you know those fees and those anti-steering rules to the point where like they're now you know back and forth in court with companies like Epic, incurring regulations in Europe?

1:28:43I mean, real estate, as you mentioned, is a good business, but is there a chance that this backfires? Oh, I think there definitely is. And I think I've been very consistent for years in seeing, in particular the anti-steering rules as a mistake. And one of the other rules of the App Store, and to me, which is on its face wrong, is that one of the rules of the App Store is that you, the app, I'll say you, second person, the developer of an app, you can't explain to your user the rules of the App Store. There are rules of the App Store that you're not allowed to put in your app as the rules. If you're not allowed to talk, if one of the rules is you can't talk about the rules, that's messed up.

1:29:39That, to me, is on its face. Hit the red buzzer right there. Let's backtrack and figure this out because that's not a good place to be. That's never good, right? I mean, we can laugh about Fight Club, but that's a movie. They're not running a business. and so I think that if Apple had relaxed on this steering stuff years ago it would have alleviated a lot of this pressure and left most of the money you know right where it was flowing through their processing that gives them this 30 slash 15 percent depending on whether it's a subscription that's a year older or whatever. But I think that they should have just openly let apps years ago just say, you know, like, and they call them reader apps now, but for the most part, it's like Netflix and stuff.

1:30:33But like, you can get the Netflix app now, and Netflix years ago stopped going through Apple's payment processing. But if you're not signed into Netflix now, you download it to your iPhone, and you launch Netflix, and it says go to netflix.com slash sign up to create an account and sign up a thing. And I think they should have just let, I think they should let other apps do, I think they should just let anybody do that. Even if it's a game, they should say, oh, if you want to buy a bag of$20 bag of gold coins for whatever game it is you're playing, where the coins give you hints or extra lives or whatever they do, and they don't want to pay Apple.

1:31:13I think they should just be able to have a dialogue that says, go to our game developer company.com and sign up there or something like that. Most people wouldn't do that. And I know so much of the money comes from games. Games are so lucrative. They're such a lucrative part of the app store and their impulse purchases. That's what games are. So I don't think that, you know, I think a rule that said if you process the payments in app, you have to use our system. But if you don't want to use our system, you can send people out of the app and have them go through your website. So why are they so in app?

1:31:49Why are they so stubborn about this? I mean, does it go back to what we talked about in the beginning, which is that when the iPhone growth might plateau, you need something else and that might change the experience for the user? Maybe. I don't think that they can know for certain. Even Apple, and I've talked to people at Apple over the years, they're not omniscient. Times when they come out with a product in multiple colors, they're often surprised. I've talked to people at Apple like, oh, we had no idea that yellow was going to be super popular in Germany, and we had to rejigger our distribution around the world because for some reason people in Germany love buying yellow iMacs or something like that.

1:32:34They didn't know. So do they know how much money they would lose if they loosened up on the steering? I don't think they do. I think that they have a guess. my thinking is that it is a sort of, it's like a cultural internal belief in the company of Apple that they really, really believe that they deserve it. They deserve, that they've built this amazing platform that is not like your Mac or Windows running on a PC, that they see it as an altogether higher level of platform that they've built iOS around. And that it makes customers love it so much and they trust the payments that go through Apple so much and that the process is so beneficial and that it's win-win for everybody, you know, that 70 % that developers get to keep is way more money than they'd get if it was 100 % of a pre-iPhone era product, because people are so much more willing to spend and that it's theirs, it's Apple's, they deserve it.

1:33:57And it's, you can't shake them off it. I just don't think, I really do think it is a sort of cultural internal belief that they just really, really, It's like electrifying to them. And I'm not saying it's every single person at Apple. And I think the more you go towards just engineers and designers and the just regular boots on the ground level employees at Apple, they're the ones who see things more like us on the outside. Like, why is the company so hell bent on keeping every single penny from this thing? Right. Right. Fascinating stuff. Okay. Let's, let's end on a, on a fun one. So when Tim Cook goes and decides that he wants to run for president, who's your odds on favorite for who succeeds him?

1:34:48That's a really tough question because I think, I think if he were hit by the proverbial bus and just was incapacitated right now today, you know, let's, Let's say hopefully, instead of being killed, let's say he's just in the hospital for a year. And he's going to return. He's going to be fine a year later. But who's going to run Apple right now? I think it would clearly be Jeff Williams, the COO, who is in the position Tim Cook was when Steve Jobs was the CEO. But that's like the emergency hit by a bus scenario. I think it's pretty obvious it would be Jeff Williams. But on the other hand, Jeff Williams doesn't appear in the quarterly conference calls the way Tim Cook does.

1:35:44It doesn't seem like he's being groomed to take over because he's the same age as Tim Cook. I think they're within a year of each other. Jeff Williams might be 62 instead of 63, something like that. So if you think Tim Cook is going to retire around the age 68 or 69 or 70 or something like that, it seems unlikely to me that his designated preferred successor is one year younger than him. I mean, it's just, I don't think the math works out, unfortunately, for Jeff Williams, if he has aspirations for that. And so who's younger, who, you know, like a decade or decade plus younger than Tim Cook, who could credibly take over as CEO?

1:36:29And I honestly don't know. You know, when jobs left, they didn't go for a product person, right? Johnny Ive did not become the CEO. Phil Schiller did not become the CEO. Craig Federighi did not become the CEO. It didn't come from the software side or the hardware product marketing side or from the design side. But I don't know that any of those men wanted to be CEO. I know Joanna Stern asked Craig Federighi whether it's possible. And he, you know, he demurred. Is it possible, though, that they would, you know, that maybe maybe it's not so much that they go for the operations side and that somebody like Jeff Williams or what's his name, Sabeel Khan?

1:37:15I think he's the senior vice president of operations. Are you looking at the? No, I should have that open.

1:37:23You know, if they come from the operations world, it might be Khan would be the most likely person. He's the one who, Sabi Khan, he's a parent. I don't know how old he is either, though. He might be close to 60. He's the one who supposedly way back when, when like they first, who is Tim Cook now? The new man taking over Apple CEO. he's the one who apparently that that famous story where there was some kind of supply chain issue in china and they were having an operations meeting and they decided somebody needs to get over there right now and take care of this issue at this factory and like five minutes later in the meeting tim cook turned to him to khan and said why are you still here because he was the one who was supposed to go and he realized oh you didn't mean like after the meeting you mean like i should be on my way to SFO.

1:38:16And he just said, okay, okay, I got it. And he said, all right, I'll see you. I'll send you an email when I get to China and just stood up from the meeting, headed right to SFO without packing anything other than like his MacBook and just figured he'd buy clothes in China or at the airport or something. Right. So I guess he'd be on the list, but that's only if there is internal to Apple some sort of idea that operations people are the, that's the chain to become CEO? Maybe not. Maybe Tim Cook, it's not because he came from operations. Maybe it's because Steve Jobs saw something in him, which I think we all on the outside now see, right?

1:38:56That he does seem like a leader, you know? And, you know, we're talking only half in jest that he could run for president, perhaps. Who has that sort of charisma and sort of leadership skills? I don't know. Maybe it could be Federighi. Maybe it could be John Ternus, who's in charge of hardware engineering, is a bit younger. But I really don't know. And whoever does know at Apple is a very short list. I would guess nobody outside the board really knows anything about it. There must be a document with the board that is the succession plan. And if that gets out, then that would be a fascinating scoop.

1:39:39But off the top of my head, I would think Jeff Williams, if there was a hit by a bus scenario. Eddie Q might be on that list. But again, he's close to 60. So many people on Apple's leadership team are very close in age to Tim Cook. So it's kind of hard to pick somebody, you know, a decade plus younger. Yeah. John, you've been so generous with your time. I just want to shout out where people can find your stuff. Daringfireball.net, Dithering, the podcast, and the talk show, the podcast. Anything I'm missing? No, that's it. That's all they need to know. It's all good stuff. This has been so great.

1:40:21I learned so much, and I appreciate you staying here for so long. John Gruber, thanks so much for being here with us. This is a short podcast by my standards. I know, I see. You got some three plus hour ones. That's amazing. I don't know how you do that. I don't know either. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. We will be back on Friday with a show breaking down the news with Ranjan Roy coming back to you Friday. And then next Wednesday, Arvind Srinivas, who's the CEO of Perplexity, is going to join me for a discussion of whether his company can actually challenge Google and redefine what AI can do for search.

1:40:57All right, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

1:41:05That was a lot of fun. Amazing stuff. So great. Thank you.