John Gruber on Apple's WWDC moment of truth: vibe coding, Siri's Gemini secret, and software quality decline

That's of course calling Ben Thompson a

journalist.

I mean, he's a journalist. He's very independent. He's an analyst. Uh we actually the co-host of dithering in the waiting room uh who

John Gruber has the good fortune of talking to Ben Thompson

every day uh every week at least once or twice right

hopefully

twice. Um thank you so much for joining the show. Welcome to the show.

Honored to have you on.

Long overdue. Uh how are you doing? How is your week going?

Uh busy as usual. Lead up to WWDC. Always a hectic time to be writing about Apple. Uh,

very nice to join the waiting room here and hear you guys talking about Ben, though.

Yeah. No, he's the best. Um, I I heard I heard a little bit of your take on the Ferrari Luche. I would love for you to unpack it a little bit more because uh it's uh it it's it's shaping up to be a contrarian take. I think a lot of people were looking for something that was more sharply designed classically Ferrari. Like, what stuck out to you about the Lucha? Well, I will say it's funny that you um call that out. I we endeavor on dithering to make as few mistakes as possible and we've got numerous corrections to make uh regarding our take on this, including the fact that we complete but Ben and I both completely were unaware that Ferrari a couple years ago, I forget the name of it, but has like a little crossover gas car.

Oh, the FF,

right? And but basically our take was hey everybody wanted a a Ferrari looking Ferrari

sure

that just happen to be electric and yes there are some sports cars that are electric

and this is not that right the luche whatever you want to say about it it if if you took the name plate off it and just drove by on the street and asked somebody what brand car do you think that is Ferrari would probably be very low on the list you'd probably have to run through

totally

dozens of brands before you get there. And I think that really fuels the primary objection that people have. Um,

but my take is my I'm interested to hear that. My take is I think it looks like a nice car. I I do. Uh, now does it look like a $650,000 car?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I I can't see that. I mean, number one, I'm not $650,000 car money. I I my stuff hasn't gotten bought by open house.

Yeah. No, no. And that's that's Well, the the big question is like I don't I I I I have a lot of friends who love cars. I don't have really any friends that I can think of immediately that are going to want to eat the depreciation on this car. Like, this car is going to be a $300,000 car

in a couple years.

In a couple maybe even in less than that, right? Um and and we don't even know how how the reliability the car you mentioned earlier the um

Ferrari FFway which is a four-door SUV it's only a fourseater this is a fiveseater so family of five this is the only option

I used to own the original like familyfriendly Ferrari in the modern era the FF I got it because it had four seats I wanted to be able to put you know my kid in the back uh at the time And uh ironically the the it had so many electrical issues that it was not usable as a as any type of like daily driver.

Uh and uh and so that's my concern with the Luch along with the price tag. just like who's in the market to buy an ultra luxury car that is that is going to say I want something that looks like it's not a luxury car and then you know I could go and buy like multiple Continental GTs from Bentley for the price of you know one um and so so ultimately my my take was I thought it would have been a hit at like a $300,000 price tag uh and I just can't personally Imagine that when they started this project, they were aiming to build a $650,000 car that looked like this.

Yeah,

I wonder about that. Um because there were reports I forget the numbers but you know and of course I'm going to take it back to Apple but you can't help but wonder you know with Johnny Ies and and Mark Nuen's involvement in this you know that Apple famously uh had the Titan project a decadel long uh car project that they ultimately just walked away from and said you know what we're not going to do this. Um, but that got pretty far along. And there were rumors unsubstantiated. I don't think anybody even reported it. But the there were rumors that at some point when it got to the, hey, we need to make a decision here. We need to [ __ ] or get off the pot

that they speced out what the current idea for a car would be. And it was going to be like, I don't know, 200,000 or more cost of goods. and you know,

yeah,

figure out what Apple would do with their margins in terms of that. And it's it just was not

Apple branded. It was It would be like if the Apple Watch came out and the only ones they made were the solid gold ones that cost $20,000.

Yeah. Yeah. It feels like uh it feels like Tesla already sort of created the iPhone of cars. It's it's like it checks a lot of the boxes. It's it it has this like sort of like polished feel integration and so uh if you don't have that industrial

an appliance you're happily

yeah the the iPhone is is not a luxury product. It's not like handbuilt in this way. It's a premium product and it's great but it doesn't but but it occupies a very different place. I'm interested in your in your like overall take on Apple's ethos. I feel like one of the things Apple does well is um is the you know the the the Henry Fordism of like if we asked people what they wanted they would have said a a faster horse. there's a lot of like it's almost like a paternalistic view of technology where they know better than the consumer and I'm wondering about your intersection of that with their decisions in AI VR recent products like how true is that today that there's still an ethos at Apple of of we might do the unpopular decision but the consumer will like it because we know better than the than the hot takesmen. I think that calling it paternalistic is the I I know what you're talking about. Um,

but it it depends on whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing with what they come up with. I think from Apple's perspective, it's it's more of a and it really does boil back to that Steve Jobs adage that design isn't what it looks like, design is how it works. And that's the job of designers to you know that certainly in the Apple view of the word that it's not being a stylist. A stylist is somebody who can tell you what to wear if you're a person or, you know, tell you what to do with your hair,

dress it up,

but you're still the same person, right? A designer is like, who do you want to be? Who are you? You know, and style is part of that, but it's just a part. And the hard work of design is making those decisions. And you know, famously just, you know, it is it's the greatest tech product of all time. probably the greatest consumer product of all time, the iPhone.

And one of the core decisions at the front was no hardware keyboard in a world where the difference between well actually all the phones had arrays of buttons, right? The dumb phones had number pads and the smartphones had BlackBerry style hardware keyboards and they Steve Jobs just addressed it headon in the introduction event. put pictures up of a Blackberry, a Palm, and I don't know, maybe a Samsung or I forget what the third one was, and said, "Look at what they do. We're not doing that. We're gonna make, you know, we're going to do it with software." And it was the thing that the most knee-jerk reaction from people who were already in the market for quote unquote smartphones at the time were like, "Well, I can't do this because I spend all day typing messages and emails on my phone, and I'm not going to do it by poking at a touchcreen." Um, but it turns out now every, you know, within a handful of years, every single phone worked that way. That's a great example of it.

Yeah.

Where

they didn't make two phones. They didn't make an iPhone that had all screen and they didn't make a second one with a hardware keyboard that took up a third of the the front of the face. Um, because they were convinced that that was the right way. Right. They and they were right. Right. It's the the market proved them right. Um, it's it's as good an example as any to just sort of exemplify their mindset. They didn't do it to be paternalistic. They did it because they thought this is this is our job to figure this out and this is a better way to take advantage of the limited space that a phone is. How does that apply to AI? We obviously haven't seen that from them yet. M

um you know I mean and so in some ways I would say this is you know it's like if you write about football every single year come January you start saying this is going to be the biggest Super Bowl of all time. You know it's

this is a this is a big WWDC though. It really is because two years ago was the one where they announced the first crack at quote unquote Apple intelligence that did not pan out

and didn't pan out in a way that they had to announce in March last year. So that last year's WW and said it's this is going to be postponed a full year effectively

facing like false advertising you know claims just around how much they

they oversold it. Yeah.

Right. And when they did that, I mean, and again, you know, we're not lawyers, we're not judges, but even as a lay person, that was kind of obvious that that was false advertising. Like, so when they announced their settlement a couple weeks ago on that case, that was really one of the least surprising settlements of all time because it was like, you showed a TV commercial that it would do a thing and it still now a year later doesn't do the thing. Isn't that false advertising? Right? It was like that felt like the only re real reason to upgrade at that point.

But but then last year's WWDC in hindsight is kind of weird. Two years ago, they announced all of this Apple intelligence stuff, the most ambitious aspects of which still have yet to ship. Then last year they were in like interregnum between the year before where they announced it, but they'd already said all that stuff is coming next year. So they kind of got like a free pass for a very AI light WWDC that was excusable because they already got over the excruciating, hey, we're not ready to announce that stuff we announced last year.

But now it's 2026 and it's time to show their cards.

Yeah.

And honestly, it seems like they've done a pretty good job keeping it under wraps what they have, right? They've they've announced the deal with Google. Very unusual to have like a white label version of Gemini that uh that that won't be called Gemini. It's just going to be used for Apple's foundation models that are built in. Yeah.

Um, and there's some rumors from Mark German, uh, of course, at Bloomberg, uh, saying that they're going to have a sort of app store for AI agents, but I, you know, I think it's probably just going to be Chat GPT and Claude and, um, Gemini

to be the sort of smarter layer on top of Siri. Um, but other than that,

so does that mean you could have a potential situation where you have like a Siri L based LM or sorry, a Gemini based LM as Siri, but then you could also call Gemini

separately to get more features, which feels like even crazier.

Well, I think that effectively they don't want to talk about the fact that it's Gemini technology that's going to be Siri,

right? And they're not going to call that Gemini. They're not going to, you know, they've gotten that announcement out of the way. And that's that's Apple's foundation models. And if you don't have a Google account or don't use a Google account and don't want to use Gemini, you'll never encounter the word Gemini, right? It's just that it's Google's underlying AI technology that that's

powering it.

Yeah.

Um I think the biggest question and is how good can that be, right? How much H how good can an AI system be if you're not the company that controls and made the underlying models?

Nobody I we don't really have a good example of that yet.

Well, we well I would say that we do and there's a bunch of vertical SAS companies that don't make their own models. I think good examples are, you know, coding agents like cursor legal like Harvey. You can make good products. I guess like I'm more interested

is probably the best example. Yeah,

I'm I'm actually more interested in what Apple allows third party agents to do within iOS, right? Like will

chat GBT allow will will I be able to prompt in Siri chat GBT to do things in native iOS apps or other apps in the app store? Like will it be able to use my phone for me or will it still be like question and answer?

This is like will it break the wall?

Yeah. Will it be will it be an agent or will it be a chatbot?

Yeah, that's tricky. How do you how do you think about uh what what Ben always has this interesting take where he says uh people always want to entrepreneurs often want to build productivity tools for consumers but consumers don't want to be productive they want to be entertained and I see Apple as something that feels very productive. The iPhone and and all the Mac apps are very well organized. you can be very productive in them. But I see the phone as primarily a consumer device. And if I believe Ben Thompson's formulation of it, I believe that then uh a more entertainment focused product is maybe the end goal. And so uh maybe this is my way of saying like we're just early on Mimoji or or Genoji or something. I I I don't know where that all goes, but there's like a different set of it's a different set of of goals for a consumer company.

We used to joke that Apple Intelligence was the first AI product to really crack humor because the summaries would always so funny. No other LLM could reliably make you laugh like Apple Intelligence.

And and Image Playgrounds is by far and away the funniest image generation tool because it's so bad. I mean, it's hard to use the UI. It just doesn't give you feedback on like when is it generating. It always asking for like another. It's like do you want to add something else in and I'm like I'm kind of done. I don't know.

It takes an enormous amount of work, an enormous amount of prompting to make

an image whose quality is embarrassingly bad compared to any other tool on the market that lets you do it. So why did they do it?

Yeah. Um, I think that's a good framing and I think sometimes Apple hopefully, you know, it when something is new, it takes them some time to find their footing. And I feel like the whole thing two years ago, put aside the actual legal implications of false advertising. It's just I feel like they got caught up in the hype and the rush and we need to have something big to announce in June 2024.

Yep.

Ready or not, and it clearly was or not. Whereas the Apple way is, and they've emphasized this, Tim Cook has emphasized it many times. I don't know, maybe Steve Jobs didn't because I don't think he wanted to make an admission like that. But Cook has admitted many times that they do not aspire to be first, they aspire to be best. And if that means not being first, so be it, right? I mean, that was the going back to the iPhone. There was a whole market. Blackberry and Research and Motion was a big company and and Microsoft was all in on Windows Mobile and it was like, hey, Apple's late to the game. Nobody remembers that entire era.

Yeah. Think about how long how long were they they were so slow on Bluetooth headsets. Like Bluetooth headsets were a category for 20 years. And then now AirPods is bigger than the GDP of Vietnam probably or something. It's like a massive business. And and same thing with a folding phone. Like it hasn't come out yet, but I'm extremely optimistic about that product. I think that they're they waited until the final second until the technology was good enough. And I think when in that releases, it's going to actually be good enough and we're going to see folding phones everywhere all of a sudden. Uh, but it feels like Apple's at their best when either they're they're waiting what feels like almost almost too long, but then it's the perfect time for that particular technology be diffused, or they're more on like an Apple TV production cadence where it's not tied to an annual release cadence. And I almost wish for some of the AI features, they were they were treating it like uh, you know, films and shows that go into Apple TV. Like there's no there there's no annual release cadence. It's just like when we finish something, we'll have new seasons. Every month we do a little bit here and there and when it's polished, it goes out. But that's a very different motion for them. So, I don't know, there's a tension there. So to go back to the earlier question, I there's the the underlying stuff that really only Apple can do is provide the frameworks for the the built-in system apps, Apple's own Apple Notes and Safari and Mail and third-party apps to to offer functionality effectively like an MCP, you know, for agentic AI. And they talked about that two years ago. That was the whole thing that they were talking about where you could just ask your phone. What was the woman's example? Uh when's my mom's flight arriving? Uh you know, and it just knows to look in email and look for an knows who your mom is and knows to look in email and knows that she sent you this. Will will third parties be able to use those APIs to do it?

Yeah.

And then number two, obviously that's going to work with Siri, Apple's built-in AI.

Yeah. But will the third party stuff and right now all we have is chat GPT is that optional layer on top of that but will and you know according to German and it you know Apple said at the time you know and if you even look now if you look on your iPhone today that's called an extension you know the chat GPT there's only one extension GPT there are no other ones

presumably there will be others at least two others I would presume cloud and Gemini

I don't see them working with XAI. Um, and I don't know who else is even a maybe on that list. I also don't see them working with Meta, right? So, those are the only companies I could even think of who have a product of this scope and caliber. But will those be willing be able to do access the same things? So that if I choose as a user to use uh Google Gemini as a layer on top of Siri, will Gemini have access to everything in my Apple Notes so that I can ask questions about it

and vice versa and

right. Yeah. Will you be able to go to Siri and ask to pull up the latest email in Gmail or will Google say, "Hey, for that we want you to come over to our world garden." Apple's done a fantastic job with the shortcuts API. It feels like they've built out basically like mobile MCP servers for every app. You've been able to call an Uber with Siri for like a decade. No one does it because it's a little bit fuzzy, but it feels like in the AI era, we're getting less fuzzy. We should be on this turning point, but who knows where the the business dealings will wind up,

right? And it's a blessing and a curse. It's, you know, there's positives and negatives, but Disney or Apple has a Disney like brand where they are overly familyfriendly.

Yeah.

Um I one of my favorite examples of that is I I've my son's now just graduated college actually, but when he was younger, we used to go on the Disney cruise ships.

There you go. Thank you.

Um

Disney cruise ships. Disney cruises are super kid-friendly.

But they're the only major cruise line in the world that does not have a casino on the ship, so no good for daddy,

you know, and they find the middle ground. They do serve alcohol, you know, but there's no casino on a Disney cruise ship. Um because it's off-brand for them. And who knows how that'll change. You know, ESPN is a Disney property and is certainly all in on sports. But Apple has a similar problem and it especially it comes to a head like they with the phone and with the mobile revolution they navigated this spectacularly well with the app store

where there's all sorts of third party apps that provide and do things that Apple itself would not want to be a part of but they can sell through the store and take 30 or 15% from. Um there are Apple does not make games. People spend an enormous amount of time playing games on their phone. Uh and there's an enormous amount of money to be made by selling uh inapp purchases in mobile games. Apple is one of the most profitable gaming companies in the world. Maybe the most. I don't know if you did the math. I'm not quite sure how you would figure that out. And they don't break down services revenue by gaming. But they're certainly one of the most dominant and profitable game companies in the world by making no games at all. They just have the app store. Um, and with AI, I think they're trying to carve out this middle ground where their own branded Apple intelligence is never going to be as adept as the leading edge models because the leading edge models are going to answer questions that Apple would consider inappropriate to be answered and they are going to help you do things that Apple would consider inappropriate for an Apple branded product to help you do, right? Like there are lines far short of uh deep fake porno imagery. There's lines far short of that that Apple is not going to want their own thing to cross.

And that's the role of these extensions for ChatGpt and Gemini and uh Claude where if you choose, right, if you want to stick with the Apple branded stuff, you're going to have a more limited AI experience. And if you want more, there's an extension system and they can wash their hands of it because that's not Apple's Siri, that's ChatgBT or that's Gemini or that's uh Claude who's giving you that. But I really do think the whole thing is not going to get off the ground if those third parties with the users's permission don't have access to all that stuff on your phone, in your mail, in your notes, all of that stuff. because if they don't then they're going and I think this is where it's an Apple's benefit not just to get their 30% of the subscription revenue that you would pay by subscribing through your phone through these extensions to get a plus or pro plan from one of those makers. And trust me, Apple wants that 30 or 15% from that subscription revenue. But the other benefit to Apple for this is it will keep those companies integrating with having your digital life in the Apple ecosystem, your your information, your personal information in Apple Notes, your email in Apple Mail.

Yeah.

Safari is your browser.

Whereas, if they don't let third parties have access to that, it's going to push people to say, "Hey, I want Chat GPT running all of this for me. I'm just going to use what chat GPT tells me to say or I'm going to go the Google route and put everything in Google calendar, Google Keep, all the Google products, not the Apple products. um

or or the stranger or or like the like I don't know I keep comping it to like the Napster analogy of like if you're running open claw on a Mac Mini and it's literally just opening the iMessage app taking a screenshot and sucking that out against Apple's will and like it's open source and Apple's fighting it constantly but it doesn't really they can't really beat it like that. But that feels very hacker. That feels very proumer. That doesn't feel like where we're going in terms of broad adoption,

right? It because it's going to start looking clunky compared to other platforms that have a more native. This is the way it's meant to be.

And the other thing about that too is it's all the Mac, right? Because the Mac is the Apple's open platform where something like that can happen, where open claw is possible. And as convoluted as it is that open claw is driving iMessage by taking screenshots and then analyzing it as an image to figure out what to do. As clever as that is, that's only possible on the Mac. And at least I would guess 85 90% probably around 90% of Apple users don't have a Mac, right? They just have an iPhone andor an iPhone and an iPad. Um, and so if you know for for it really to to for the for the Apple overall Apple user base to move forward as this world becomes the normal world of computing and not the cutting edge world of computing. It's got to work on the iPhone

and there's no way to do that without Apple's help.

Yeah. Know 100%.

What is the latest on how Apple is approaching mobile vibe coding apps? we covered, you know, a while ago. Some of them, you know, not getting removed from the app store, but not allowing them to ship updates. It feels like

it I I can understand exactly why both parties there are have the views that they have. Apple's like, hey, you're just kind of like building software on the fly. This is like, you know, one, a threat to the to the App Store

uh business. It's also, you know, going to allow people to generate applications that we don't want uh on the iPhone. And then the other side, hey, you're stifling innovation. Users really want this. It's harmless. Let it happen.

We don't know. Uh and I that is way up. That's a great question because I would put it easily top three or four on my list of things that I'm most interested in for the WWDC keynote is what is the, you know, what is their answer to this? Um,

including is it, you know, is this one of those things where 90 minutes or two hours after it starts and it's over and people are talking about the stuff that was announced and we're all going to be like, "Hey, wait a second. They didn't even talk about the whole vibe coding thing. what they didn't even mention it, you know, like and to me that would be a red flag because yes, it it's disruptive to the way that the software distribution and development has worked on the platform for 20 years now.

Um,

yeah. And it's like very clearly the future. It's very clearly the future that any iPhone user in 10 years will be generating will be generating some of their own software. They're still gonna want

a lot of stuff that's purpose-built, but I would bet that in a decade.

Yeah.

Everyone that is buying an iPhone at some point or another will make their own piece of software on the fly just like they would generate. And you sort of can with the shortcuts feature like you can build something that looks like I I I know it's super limited but uh like if I was truly giving them the most credit in the walk crawl run I would say that the next version of iOS 27 Siri uh yeah it's not going to have a a a text box that you can talk to and it will generate you an iOS app natively but you should in theory be able to describe a workflow that then becomes like a shortcut that is created instead of using all the drop down menus and going around finding all the apps and linking everything. It should be able to instantiate that for you because it's probably just markdown under the hood or something. Um well,

but

I don't know.

They they just need to have an answer because it's like part of part of what makes disruption theory so satisfying as a business theory is that the disrupted doesn't get to choose. Yeah. Like but that's what happens there. the the dis the the entrenched monopoly or part of a duopoly or just entrenched

way of doing things faces the disruptive technology they dismiss it at first then when it becomes bigger and kind of can't be ignored

they just sort of say well I choose not to be disrupted and it's like you can say that but it never works

never works no no it's a powerful force

and it's it is in in my opinion just nerding out you know going back my my undergraduate degree was in computer science it is

in some ways offensive to me that iOS is a nearly 20year-old platform computer it is a computer

and it's the it's a 20-year-old computer on which you cannot make software for the computer itself

and I totally understand why That wasn't the case for the first few years when it was more limited hardware and even a few years after that when the whole idea of the app store was new. But and at this point, I mean, you an iPad Pro costs like $2,000.

Yeah. Has a keyboard and a huge screen. It's as powerful as you can't use it to make apps. It's kind of It's kind of

Don't you think they'll Don't you think they'll find a way to allow this and make money from it? Cuz I would imagine

Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah, I imagine they're

Yeah,

I they know people want this, but the so the main reason to not allow it is like one just like safety and integrity of software on the iPhone security stuff, but then also, hey, we got to figure out how to make money on this, the Apple way.

Yeah. And and there's obviously some technology that's already and and a a way of doing things. the whole test flight ecosystem which is what Apple's beta distribution is for iOS and it was a startup you know I forget probably more than 10 years ago when it was an independent startup but Apple saw the wisdom of it right this is a thing that Apple didn't invent they should have invented it but then they saw how clever it was and they're like oh we'll acquire these guys and build it into our platform and so there are ways to distribute software now outside the the app store and it's just by limiting the number of people who can do it. I think the test flight limit is like 10,000 or something like that.

And they could do something with AI where that limit is much lower like even if it was just like

10 people, right? Like a consumer level of test flight distribution where you can make apps for your friends and family or yourself and distribute it on up to 10 devices and it doesn't go through Apple, doesn't need approval. You just make it and distribute it and it's only limited to 10 people. um you know something like that. But there needs to be a story like that though. And I think

again only Apple can really make it a really good rich system um where you can make apps that really feel like real apps. But the technology to make the apps, it's obviously there. We're all talking about it this last 6 months. It's obviously there and you could do it on the phone itself. And the it's super frustrating that some of the the third parties that were doing it like uh Bitriig and I forget some of the other ones, but Bitriig was the one I'm most familiar with where they kind of you know they're not kicked out of the app store but they stopped taking uh

uh

updates to it.

And it's like super frustrating because it's not theoretical. It is an actual thing that was actually working and they took it away, right? and it was super cool. And yes, it's disruptive to Apple's business, but in a way that the disruption is inevitable anyway. So, why not go with what's cool and do the coolest thing possible that makes new possibilities available to your users and the developers on your platform?

Okay, last question. Uh, give us a recommendation of a recent uh favorite episode of the Acquired FM podcast.

Uh, I don't have any recent ones. I'm I'm I'm going through the uh

You're going through the archive, right?

The back catalog.

But but what what what what's a recent favorite that you've listened to? Not recent from uh their catalog, recent from your listening history. What would you recommend for someone who's getting into the acquired podcast?

So for people who aren't familiar this obviously probably everybody listening to this watching this show knows of the acquired podcast. me, a big dummy who does not who does a lot of reading and does not listen to I don't have a commute. This is my home office, so I don't have a lot of podcast time. I stumbled a friend of mine recommended the Mars episode, the Mars Incorporated episode. That's the one. And a friend said, "You got to listen to this." And I I' I'd heard of acquired, you know, but it's like I don't know, there's if you listen to every podcast somebody says you should listen to, you would spend 24 hours a day listening to

fulltime job,

right? So, I go there and it's 4 and 1/2 hours and I'm like, you got to be [ __ ] kidding me. Uh, and I'm like, but all right, I'll listen to it. And it's of course fantastic and it's amazing. But the Mars one, it it just sucked me in. So, that's the one I would recommend. And fantastic. It is a hundred-year-old candy company

that the business decisions that not the founder, but the founder's son, Forest Mars, who's the one who took it from sort of a mom and pop thing to a big one. The decisions he made in like the 1920s and 30s are exactly like the world of business today in the 2020s and 30s. It was like he came from today's world, timeraveled a 100 years into the past and applied today's knowledge of branding and scale uh to that world and and there's just these other crazy bits that I had no idea like the fact that uh Hershey who was the bigger company at the time supplied all the chocolate to all the companies including Mars and they just were like sure we don't care and it was sort of

uh like a heads they win if you buy a Hershey bar and tails they don't lose because you're buying a Snickers bar that was covered in Hershey's chocolate until the day Forest Mars called them up and said yeah we're going to cancel your uh our chocolate contract and they're like what are you crazy and he's like yeah we're going to make our own chocolate

integrating final final final question it can be a really brief answer do you think that Apple's overall software quality is getting better or worse? Cuz when I use when I use like the FaceTime app recently, I just get enraged because it's a constant experience of, oh wait, I'm in this group and they started a FaceTime and I didn't get a notification and uh I'm on a call and and now it's doing a FaceTime and I start to maybe maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm I turned 30 and uh I just can't use the device anymore. But it just feels like across the board uh there's less like polish than I than I remember. And and uh I'm wondering what you think.

I love how you prefaced it with make it a short answer.

Yeah, it's impossible. Um,

I think that to make it as short as possible, I think Apple over the last 10 years is facing a be careful what you measure problem with software quality where things that you can measure are things like crashes. When an app just crashes and it says like, "Hey, do you want to send a crash report to Apple?" like if you've opted into the share crash reports with Apple thing and their apps crash almost never, right? Like it's almost unusual when you know you're using Apple Notes and the app just crashes. It doesn't happen. And they've tackled a whole bunch of things like that because you can measure it, right? Like there's like a number that used to come in. How many times did how many users today had uh Safari crash?

Well, you can measure that and they've cut that down. The things you can't measure are things like your problem with FaceTime. Like I'm confused. How do I add somebody here? I thought that I added a third party

or there's an ability to call somebody, but it doesn't ring on their side.

Yeah.

But I'm like, what is the point of what's the point of just

just joining a call when the other person's not getting a live notification? Well, if you happen to be in that iMessage group chat at the time, you can see that notification. I'm not This is how it works.

The phone's a busy place, but I'm just saying it's like a terrible user experience every time where I'll send John a text. I'll just be like, "John, we're in the FaceTime because I know he didn't get it.

You can press the ring button, but it's an extra button."

It's a perfect example because you Apple's never going to get a number that goes up

because you encountered that problem. There is no number that's going to land in front of Craig Federigi's dashboard of problems with Apple software that says Jordy Hayes had problems adding somebody to a FaceTime today, but you did.

And that's the sort of thing it it's getting away from when Steve Jobs was there and was not just the CEO and of the company, but the number one user of the products, right? And if that happened to Steve Jobs, that would get fixed. That would start getting fixed the next day, right? If he had problems adding somebody to a FaceTime call, all of a sudden that would be the biggest problem in the world, right?

I message IM message search, right?

The number one app that I use.

Well, search is just bad everywhere.

Yeah. But Apple should be able to create like the most elegant solution. It's the number one app.

Search is bad everywhere. I'm not afraid to say it.

Searching. Searching in iMessage technically works, but it is sort of like the way that putting two empty soup cans and tying a piece of string and holding it taut that you can talk to somebody through the can. It does work cuz this audio goes through the string and goes to the can on the other side,

but that's not what people think of when they think of talking on the telephone, right? And the way that you search in iMessage and the way that you get results in the sidebar is not the way people think of search. People think of, hey, I was searching for this one. I was talking to somebody about this one word and it was just a month ago. Just show me the goddamn message where I was searching for that word. And I think that's the sort of just sort of opinionated from the top thinking that was there because Steve Jobs was running the company and Tim Cook just isn't that type of person and the company has taken on as a company more of the personality of Tim Cook. That's the nature of leadership, right? The organization tends to take on the personality of the person leading it. And

and there's a lot of good things that have come from that.

Absolutely. But I and that's and that's for example I Tim Cook loves numbers and so something like hey how many times a week do apps crash? Those numbers have come down, but that is driven by a culture that kind of comes from Tim Cook. And I think

hopefully under John Turnis that they can sort of not not turn the ship around, but just make a minor course correction back towards, hey, let's focus on just some opinionated [ __ ] like, hey, this app is confusing. Like when you open this and you just want to add a collaborator to this, why why does it look like this? Shouldn't this be way more obvious? You know, and I think, you know, we can't measure it. This isn't going to come with a number that goes up and down. It's a Jane Sequa. We know it when we see it, but this isn't up to snuff. And I think they've gotten away from that.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. We went way over time.

You fit it exactly into 60 seconds. Thank you.

Uh, we got to do this again because this is super fun. We could go all over the place and there's so much more to talk about, but have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so