716: Take the Null
05 Nov 2026More on the iPhone Duo (including its durability), more analysis of the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, and John Ternus’ leadership so far.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Siri AI foibles
- 🗣️ ATP Holiday Store is here! 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- Fineliner
- Fineliner 🤝🏻 ATP Graffiti shirt (via Nick Foster)
- Download for use in Fineliner (in Fineliner’s settings, Font, Import Profile; note that this will overwrite your icons and avatar, too)
- Palm Vx
- PalmOS emulator
- Why
Overcast Radio LLC?
- Fineliner 🤝🏻 ATP Graffiti shirt (via Nick Foster)
- MacBook PROLED
- Allison points out some dimensional errors on our part
- You can completely turn off the touch screen (via Gui Rambo)
- Pinch-to-zoom
- Glowing Apple logo implementation software details
- Avoiding keyboard marks with a microfiber keyboard dust cover (via Keith Huss)
- Rounded corners (via Jeff)
- Reimar Servas show us why rounded corners are bad (via Marcin Wichary)
- iPhone Duo
- iPhone Duo will welcome you… sometimes? (YouTube timestamp link to 1m15s)
- Crackgate
- Inner case with and without matte protector on JerryRigEverything (YouTube timestamp link to 6m45s)
- Hinge is an ingress point for sand (10m35s)
- iFixit Teardown
- Two batteries are listed separately in Settings
- iPhone Mirroring is outer-screen only (via Stephen Robles) (YouTube timestamp link to 42s)
- Unlocking using the meat of your right index finger (via Sam Shepherd)
- Reachability is coming in iOS 27.3
- Fineliner
- Phil Schiller’s long goodbye
- Post-show: Marco’s iPhones Duo
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Some fan-made tools for ATP listeners
- ATP Titles by Cole Orton
- ATP Thingy Finder
- Transcript search sites
- CatATP
- ATP Search by Marcos Huerta
- ATP Transcripts by Roger Goldfinger
- Podsearch by David Smith
Sponsored by:
- Granola: The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings.
- Claude: Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today.
- Tailscale: A secure network that just works.
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Chapters
- How’s Siri AI doing?
- ATP Store
- Graffiti font in Fineliner 🖼️
- Separate developer accounts vs. one
- Sponsor: Granola
- MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display
- iPhone Duo updates, durability
- Sponsor: Claude
- iPhone Duo misc, Touch ID
- Sponsor: Tailscale
- Ternus’ leadership so far
- Ending theme
- Living with the Duo
How’s Siri AI doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been working for you? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why do you ask? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the first question should be: Are you using Siri AI? And I think my answer is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not really. Like, I so far, I have not asked it to do anything that I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John ask my phone to do before Siri AI. So basically, I'm using the same functionality as I used to,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now it's just a little bit slower and asks me more follow-up questions. But that's, that's a little bit on me because I should
⏹️ ▶️ John be realizing it can do more than that now and asking it more. And I haven't been.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, obviously I was snarking a second ago, but I kind of mean it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like in what are we on? 27.2? In 27.2, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that used to be local and then seemingly wasn't local, like setting a timer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a great example, that up until 27.2 was awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was just abysmal. You know, set a timer for two minutes and wait 10, 15 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, timer set for, you know, two minutes four or one minute and 40 seconds or whatever, because at least it was smart enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to offset itself. But it was real bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least it wasn't like, did you say set a timer or bet a limer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's baffling. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so It's so far off. Yep. No, that is very true. um But no, that got better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 27.2. But in general, I feel like early on, and I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the only person who said this, but early on, I felt like, yeah, this is way better. I'm loving this. It's working so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better, blah, blah, blah. And then it got like real bad. And I think, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe this is me just making this up, but I feel like um it was around the time that everyone else got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to it that suddenly things got real crummy. um And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually it seems to have gotten a little bit better now, but it's not been all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roses and pansies. Now, it's also worth noting, I was not on the beta. I don't think I ever ran a beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I did, it was at the, no, I think I ran, I didn't run anything until the release candidate. And that was obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way at the end of the cycle. So a lot of people had really positive things to say during the beta cycle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can't speak to that one way or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have had the same types of experiences with Siri AI that I've always had with Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is sometimes it's really useful and a lot of times it fails. And the failure rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is high enough now that I'm just, I'm like, I hesitate to ask it anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are again. Here's here's some examples of things I've asked it recently that have worked and not worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, I asked it uh, sometime the other day when I was going to spend a couple of days in Manhattan and I said, what's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weather like between now and Wednesday morning in Manhattan? And what are the highs and lows mainly in that range?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it gave me a nice, clear weather report answer. That was great. I asked it uh, you know, recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked, what time is sunrise? And it nailed it. Perfect. Although it did say, I said, what time is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunrise at night? And it said, today, sunrise was at 7.05 a.m. it's like, okay, I mean, it's going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close enough tomorrow, but that's still okay, whatever. I said, does Blue Bottle have a larger owning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company? And it said yes. And it gave me the company name and everything. Okay, okay. Those are good. Two of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best were, what kind of recycling is tonight? Because here we have recycling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in alternating weeks. One week is like cardboard and the other week is like bottles and cans. And I have them in my calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it figured out and it said, tonight is cardboard recycling. Perfect. Those are great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was something that John Gruber gave me the address of a million years ago and I couldn't remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it was. And I said, John Gruber told me the address of so-and-so. What is it? And it dug through my messages with John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gruber. And sure enough, there was the message. That's great. Yeah. But I also asked it, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, Adam had a friend who was over, and she said something really funny, and I wrote it down in Fineliner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Fineliner indexes all of its stuff with Siri. And I can check. I have like a debug log to see like, what did my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copy of the app index so I can make sure it's there. And I asked, what was so-and-so's quote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fineliner? No chance. It searched for a while, couldn't look anywhere. It said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn't find a quote from so-and-so in Finliner. I checked your messages, emails, and notes, but nothing came up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which means, sounds like it wasn't indexing. Okay, whatever. I was walking in the city and there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long elevated park called the High Line. It's like an elevator rail platform that's been converted. And there's certain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's like, because it's an elevated platform, there's like staircases every few blocks. And I asked, where is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the northernmost entrance to the high line? And it thought for a while and it gave me the address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the high line, like the main middle of it, whatever it was, like not even close. Now, I then proceeded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go ask an AI app this exact same question. Where is the northernmost entrance to the high line? It got it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately and told me exactly where it was, like where the staircase was on this street and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this street. Perfect. So I know AI can do this. It just didn't do it. I also, at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point recently, asked, give me directions to Little Island, which is another thing over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there in Manhattan. It just spun for a while and then just
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann didn't do anything. And I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um okay like do I ask again? So I tried asking again it's like, just spun for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it said, getting directions to Little Island. And it got me driving directions. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am walking. I had been walking at that point for many blocks. I am clearly walking. I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no, no. I said, give me walking directions. And it said, getting walking directions to Little Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then just didn't respond ever again. Okay. Yesterday, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the train platform here in the suburbs, and there was something going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that I thought, you know what? I should probably call the police about this. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was getting, it was not, it didn't seem like an emergency. So I thought, I don't want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dial 911. So I put up Siri and I said, call the Suffolk County Police.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it thought for a while and it said, here's the number for the Suffolk County Police. I can't call it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Okay. Now, it was showing the number in that little blob up top, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live activity area blob. So I'm like, all right, can I just tap the number, please? And I tap it and it shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a menu inside the blob that is clipped by the blob and tapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone number in the menu does not call
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Cool. The one time you ever wanted those data detectors and they're not there. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John where it makes every single number anywhere and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco any Apple OS
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks it's a phone number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like it just like, if this was, you know, a more urgent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, like I thought asking Siri for the number for a local police department would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster than trying to search the web for it and, you know, find it that way. like nope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it's just why why do I keep doing this? If any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the major AI apps, you know, Claude sponsors this episode, disclaimer, but if Claude or Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ChatGPT, if any of them failed as often as Siri does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would never use it again. But we tolerate this level of failure from Siri. I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entirely know why, but I just, I wish Apple would hold themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even higher standards for Siri, because while Siri AI can do amazing things and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does amazing things, the failure rate is still so high on dumb stuff that should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. I hope they don't think this is good enough. I hope the high ups at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though they say how amazing this is, I hope they know it still sucks a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time and that they're working to fix it because it's not good enough.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is your final warning for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 2026. This is it. This is that moment. If you're driving,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a signal because you're a grown-up, and then pull over and go to atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store. If you're walking, check your blind spots and then move to the side of the sidewalk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then go to atp.fm slash store. And now is the moment to go ahead and place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your orders. For Americans, we hope, but do not guarantee that they should be here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in time for Christmas. For Europeans, all bets are off. I'm so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, we have a bunch of stuff on offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will let you decide if you want to go through a quick nickel tour or if you just want to speed run this. But for real,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for real, the store closes this upcoming Sunday. This is being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recorded on a Wednesday. You probably won't hear it until Thursday or Friday. It is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be all done on Sunday. Don't be that person. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens about 15 times every sale in a, haha, guess what I almost did, but I didn't weigh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But don't be the actual person, which happens at least once every sale. Oh no, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it was me this time. I'm the one that forgot. ATP.fm slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, how would you like to handle this? Do you want to speedrun or do you want to take us on a quick final tour?
⏹️ ▶️ John First, I want to say that the sale ends November 8th. Hopefully you're hearing this episode before November 8th, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it is November 8th, I think we have until midnight. So get out there and buy the stuff. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to have a couple of updates. First, enough people ordered the A18 Pro shirt that it will be printed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but still. So good.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, kudos to all the A18 Pro people. Second, the response to the ATP Pride and Trans Pride
⏹️ ▶️ John shirts has been amazing. They're far and away our best sellers. Obviously, we don't have the final numbers, but like after
⏹️ ▶️ John the sale ends, we'll tally everything up and then we'll announce on the show how much money is being donated to
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these two charities, Trans Lifeline and Transgender Law Center. But I just want to give kudos to everybody, all
⏹️ ▶️ John of our listeners who are overwhelmingly buying these two shirts, which is great. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure when and what the upcoming, like if we do this again, we might put like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, our, you know, our Pride logos on a different piece of thing. Maybe we'll embroider on something
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But like, don't think, oh, they're just going to have these shirts all the time. If you want an ATP Pride or ATP Trans
⏹️ ▶️ John Pride thing, t-shirt, long sleeve shirt, tank top, pullover hoodie, sweatshirt, get
⏹️ ▶️ John it now. Because like any of our products, I mean, we get, we get emails like this all the time, all throughout the entire year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, could you bring back the whatever shirt? Not always. Like, you know, when are you going to sell this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing again? We might in a couple years or we might never sell it again. So don't just assume because you see
⏹️ ▶️ John something for sale now that it'll be for sale later. Get it now if you want it. And that includes
⏹️ ▶️ John the zip hoodie that kind of now comes in multiple colors. So if you've, if you just never wanted a black hoodie
⏹️ ▶️ John or you're sick of black hoodies, try one of the colors. It's not many colors, but there are colors other than black.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then also the polo. Like the polo is selling pretty briskly too. But again, this may be the last time we ever sell a polo because it's so
⏹️ ▶️ John damn expensive. We're making zero money on it. So there's no charity with ATP polo. It's just very
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. So do not wait. Luckily, ATP gift memberships are available all year round.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can save them as a last minute gift the night before Christmas. You can, you know, say, oh no, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know what to get this nerd in my life or someone doesn't know what to get me. So you can always do that. But for the merch,
⏹️ ▶️ John November 8th, do not wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And to be clear, we we aren't saying, John is not trying to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring upon artificial scarcity. We really and truly do not know what will go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what will happen in the future with regards to Pride, Trans, or really any of these products. And so the safe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bet is to just go ahead and order. And generally speaking, we try to do different stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each sale with the exception of the like bog standard ATP shirt. Generally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we try to try to mix things up. So if it may end up that we'll do Pride and Trans Pride
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever, it may end up that this is a one and done. We genuinely do not know sitting here. So if there's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a question, like John said, the other thing we get constantly other than, oh my gosh, it was me this time is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, could you bring back? Just like John said. And maybe, but maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing I can say, though, is our policy has always been for the shirts for the
⏹️ ▶️ John M chips, we basically only do them once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that's true. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So like we have the
⏹️ ▶️ John on-demand shirts that we have like M1 through whatever, like on-demand shirts that are just not as printed as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the good printed versions of any of like the chip shirts, we do
⏹️ ▶️ John them once. So there's never going to be another M5 Ultra shirt or M5 Alter Interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt because those aren't they're not it's not an on-demand version. It just comes out when the things come out. So those,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we could obviously change the policy, but we've been consistent since the M1. We sell the shirt, the
⏹️ ▶️ John good versions of the shirts when the chip is new and pretty much never again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. But yeah, so I don't want you to be cross with us if we do end up doing more Pride or Trans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pride shirts in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John are you British? Yeah. This talks to Mike on a podcast too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I said bog Standard a minute ago, which I absolutely think of as a Britishism. I don't know what's happening over here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, all we're saying is now is the time you have until this coming Sunday, November 8th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at midnight ATP time. So please, please, please, ATP.fm slash door.
Graffiti font in Fineliner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk about this sweet new app that is sweeping the nation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fineliner. Nick Foster writes: In honor of ATP bringing back their best shirt, the Palm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Graffiti shirt, and Marco's new app, please enjoy this Fineliner profile where every letter is in graffiti.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will have a link in the show notes, which in turn has a picture in it. This is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love it. And Nick was even kind enough to include, I don't know how you want me to phrase this, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like a downloadable pack so you can use this yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is incredible. Yeah, so that's what Nick included was the profile export. There it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because everything in Fineliner is just a database. And so I kind of gave it its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own quote document format for exports, which is just a SQLite database. And one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can export, besides individual notebooks, is your profile, which includes the avatar, icons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and font. So that is the part that Nick exported here, which is great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I i loved this so much. this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was not a good thing for me to see when I had like an hour to kill afterwards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I'm like, this gives me some ideas. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had already, Fineliner, as I mentioned, it's you know it's a note-taking app, and I'm not going to spoil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much about it. But the idea is um I was trying to figure out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on the lead up to launch, how do I make this useful on an iPhone that does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencil support, which is most iPhones except the Duo. So you know, it's on the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's very nice to take notes on Fineliner on an iPad if you have a pencil, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's easy to take precise handwritten notes. On iPhones, it's harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that useful. And so I added a text tool for iPhones that gives them a full-blown text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box. You could just type into it. If you happen to have your own custom font established in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will use that. It's wonderful. It'll reflow the text around stuff if you drag stuff in and out of the text,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco et cetera. But I was thinking, like, are there better ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to input text on devices when you don't have a pencil with you or if you're on a device that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn't support the pencil? And one of the things I thought of was, wouldn't it be funny to put like a graffiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area on the bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously not, that wouldn't be the only way to input text, but that would be like a fun mode. And to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to kind of like test out like, how would that feel today? I actually booted up, like, I found one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those Palm OS emulator websites that you're like, you know, because now everyone's making these amazing emulators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of old computing and game hardware that you can just run in your browser. And so I found one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I booted up Palm OS. And I'm like, let me see, like, how is graffiti today? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have only the fondest memories for all of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But wow, is it slow to answer text? It's horrendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it would, it would be, it's so much worse than using an on-screen keyboard on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a modern touch device. Like, it there would be no reason for me to ever actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it besides maybe like a fun April Fool's gag. um I'm not sure if that's my style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was really fun to play with an old Palm. I virtualized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Palm 5X, which is my favorite one ever. And it was so fun to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it. And when I bought one on eBay a couple years ago to play around with, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really fun to play with for a brief time. But it is kind of like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was wonderful in the 90s slash early 2000s when this came out. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's not what you want to use now when you have other options. But this was so cool. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the actual graffiti look. I love all these ridiculous characters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the weird way you had to make certain things, especially like the F and the T. Like, it, I love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah this is really, really well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever holding company currently owns the rights to graffiti would probably find you and sue you anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they I mean, they're so far they're okay with our shirts, don't tell them. But uh it's it's a lot of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah Yeah, don't tell BMW or Apple either.
⏹️ ▶️ John but speaking of shirts, the graffiti shirt, I think this is the second time we've ever sold it, and it probably won't be back for years. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But also, I will just give a quick update on Fineliner while we are on the topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's going very well so far. Thank you to everybody for all the very kind words and a lot of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, getting a lot of replies on social media, getting a lot of nice emails. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be, it's not like exploding in popularity yet. It's having, you know, a relatively like casual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start, I would say. It's it's not like, you know, it's not setting the world on fire yet. But I'm kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm, what I'm hoping for is organic growth and spreading. And so, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you like it, spread it. Uh, Thank you. And uh, for everyone else, uh, just thank you. I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you using it. And it is, uh, it's going very well so far.
Separate developer accounts vs. one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a question for you. Out of curiosity, I don't mean for this to sound like a gotcha, so if it does, I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why are you using Overcast as the business account and not setting up like a bespoke business account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for each of your apps? And the reason I ask this is because last I remember thinking about this, which admittedly was years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very, very difficult to like unravel a Apple developer account such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you could sell just one of the apps within the account. And the rule of thumb many years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was to make an account per app. So this way, if you ever sold the app, you would just sell the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account and that was that. So I'm just curious why Overcast Radio LLC and not something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main reason why… So first of all, what you were just saying about the difficulty of transferring apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has gotten more capable and easier over time. I'm sure there are still pains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt about it or limitations about it. But it used to be like, you know, as you said, if you ever touched iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you'd never be able to transfer an app ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, yeah, I forgot about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that, I don't think that's true anymore. I could be wrong. I don't think so. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point, I realize no one's coming around buying my apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are my apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They're going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay in my app. And if somebody wants to give me $100 million for an app, we'll cross that bridge when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get to it. I don't think it's going to happen personally. But Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I, – it was kind of part of my year of efficiency theme this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as I was preparing to launch Unforgetful, I faced the same dilemma. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I launch it under Overcast Radio LLC with my Overcast developer account? Do I start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new LLC with a new developer account? Like, what do I do there? And as part of the year of efficiency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went through the process of having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LLC take an S election on the taxes, which everyone seemed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I was allowed to do given the conditions of it. And it added some complexity. I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco payroll provider that I pay myself through now and stuff. So there's some complexity, but it saves a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in taxable income. And so the question arose, like, okay, when Unforgetful was going to launch, should that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be part of that same entity to take advantage of that and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the other kind of established infrastructure I have around Overcast Radio LLC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being an entity with a developer account that makes apps? And I decided to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just do it because the advantages of setting it up separately were reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and unlikely. And the advantages of rolling it all in turns out to be huge because I've done it the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other way. I've had, you know, like I had i used to have my full city account that had its own apps on it. um Like that was like my Fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island Driving app. I had it over there. Like it was just kind of a pain to have everything be separate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when it's on one developer account and one LLC, so much stuff just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes simpler, easier, more efficient. Things like, you know, I only have to have one app figures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account. Then that covers all the apps. You know, I only have to like when I have relationships set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with like, you know, invoicing systems for hosting providers or like I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hired, you know, designers and stuff, like I already have everything set up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. And the bank accounts are set up and the credit card is set up and everything's already set up. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting accounts are set up. The domain registration, like everything is all set up for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just made it a lot easier to just have it combined into one. So Overcast Radio LLC, while it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the best name for an entity that contains these three completely unrelated apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does make a lot of sense logistically speaking and tax-wise and legally and financially and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. And no one cares what the company name is anyway.
Sponsor: Granola
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Granola. Let me tell you something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is long documented on the show that my memory is trash. And this has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much always been the case. As I get ever older, it gets ever worse. That's just the way of the world. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you're in a situation like me where you have anything less than photographic memory, then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might want to have really robust notes for your work meetings. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want that, then it'd be great to have some sort of tool on your side to help you take those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. Well, Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made easy to find. Let me build on that a little bit. Structured notes, you say, Casey? Why, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This looks a whole heck of a lot like Markdown to me, and that's what we like to see. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a call with Syracusa a couple of months ago to try this out, and it genuinely went really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Granola took some really robust notes, not too much, just the right amount. It's very Goldilocks, and I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a complimentary way. And what's great is for each of the line items that you see, you can drill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and get a transcript summary, and then it will also pull out poll quotes of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly who said what with speaker attribution, who said what, in the exact words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they use that led them to the summary that then led them to the line item. It's really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well done. And it's really great if you're like me and you want to be present in the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not worry about taking notes, but also not lose track of action items after the fact. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did work spectacularly well. And I was really, really pleased with it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once you try it on a first meeting, it is hard to go without. You can try granola
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally free. Head to granola.ai slash ATP. That's G-R-A-N-O-L-A.ai
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP. All caps on the ATP. I'm not sure if it matters, but let's play it safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To get your time back, go to granola.ai slash ATP and try it on your next call. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Granola for sponsoring the show.
MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR display. And Allison writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got super excited when I heard you say that the 14-inch ProLED MacBook Pro is two-tenths of an inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinner, but it's two-hundredths of an inch thinner. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you added in our internal show notes, the 14-inch is a half millimeter thinner and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 16-inch is 0.8 millimeters thinner. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just wrote the wrong number in the notes last time. I guess I missed the zero and I just read the wrong number.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my bad. It is not as much thinner as you would hope. But it is actually half a pound lighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, by the way, regarding the ProLED XDR, MacBook Pro, what a long name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't understand why didn't they just… I know they wanted a separate name because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have the other ones and that's fine. Why didn't they just call it the MacBook Pro XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I'll get used to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Don't forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about display. What do you mean, XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don't know what that
⏹️ ▶️ John means. You have to tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You have to include
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the width. Anyway, but I actually canceled and reordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because, again, year of efficiency, two things that helped a lot. Number one, New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a sales tax exemption for computers that you buy if they're primarily used to make software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available for sale. And I qualify for that. So I got tax-free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. And then also, after, you know, when John, you asked me during the show last week, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what am I doing with the old one? And I said, oh, I'll probably, you know, trade it in or sell it, whatever. Well, after the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I typed in this show number into Apple's trade-in thing and it offered like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $3,600. And I was like, whoa, that's more than I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um but it had a it had like a glitch in the form. It wouldn't give me a gift card. It said like, you know, that much trade-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or null gift card. Okay. Take the null. Take the null. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's like, what does that apply to any price and it becomes null? Who knows? Better than nan True.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so uh I was like, oh, but if i if I reorder it, it lets me apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to the current order. And I checked prices on eBay for the same configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And obviously, you don't look at listing prices. You look at sold items. And the sold items prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were like $3,100 to $3,900. And Apple offered $3,650.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'll take it. So we'll see how that turns out. I haven't gotten the machine yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I haven't sent this one back yet. And they haven't accepted the trade-in and whatever else. But I would say, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are thinking about upgrading and going through this process, check Apple's trade-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco values. It was a very pleasant surprise how high that was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, a friend of the show, Guy Rambo, points out with a screenshot that touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pros have a toggle to completely disable the touchscreen. In the same Cardner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat that I bring up many times, one of the three of us in there is, well, two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us are the same age. One of them is a few years younger than myself. And the other one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, at least younger in body, but very much old in spirit. And he was whining and moaning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, oh, I don't want this. I don't want this. It better be able to be turned off. Well, if you are old in spirit, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in body, and you want to turn off your touchscreen, I have great news for you. As Guy pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a, I think it's an accessibility option in Touch called Ignore Touch Gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the subtitle Ignores Gestures When Using Touch Displays in sidecar And there's an on-off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toggle right there. Additionally, John, you made another discovery?
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw a couple people report on this, that apparently you can set it up so that pinch to zoom
⏹️ ▶️ John acts like like control mouse wheel or like
⏹️ ▶️ John two finger swipe. Like in other words, pinching anywhere on the screen will do the zoom thing for accessibility, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is nice, as opposed to like zooming within like the preview app or whatever. So for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who do want to touch the screen, that might be more convenient than the, you know, control two finger swipe or whatever you've been doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I use that all the time when I don't have contacts in, and it is very helpful. And I could see pinch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to zoom or pinch to you know, full screen zoom, whatever you want to call it, being really helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coming back to geek rambo the glowing Apple logo on the new MacBook Pro models is controllable by software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has a 25 hertz PWM frequency and per device calibration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Core brightness, which is the name of the framework, I guess, implements automatic brightness and controls the relationship between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display and logo brightness. One interesting tidbit, the brightness of the logo is adjusted differently depending on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice. So that bodes well for being able to control that using whatever private
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs that he's discovered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to keyboard marks on the screen, Keith Huss writes, this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we'll link it, microfiber keyboard dust cover has totally saved me from oily keyboard impressions on my 2026
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. It's a correctly sized, super thin microfiber cloth that you just close up in your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the keyboard. They also offer a size for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and it's something like $2 on AliExpress.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always get paranoid about putting anything inside the clamshell of a laptop and closing
⏹️ ▶️ John it because there's so low tolerances. I'm afraid is this going to crack something or do something weird? But apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John Keith has had good luck with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I've seen people use these for years. I've never been tempted to use one, but I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one when I saw the message. I'm like, no, because the imprints are pretty rough on my 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nanotexture. And that's what I ordered, another 14-inch with nanotexture. I'm like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the time has come for me to try this method.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. There is some dissension in the ranks. John, I can introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this if you'd like, but I feel like it might be best if you take us through this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wish I had known about this last episode because it would have really colored my comments on
⏹️ ▶️ John the new MacBook Pro with Proled XDR display. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so Jeff writes, on the new MacBook Pro Proled, the bottom corners
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen are rounded. AppKit prefers to keep your window corners concentric with the display instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John clipping them. For content inside the window, you can use APIs like NSViewLayoutRegion, UIViewLayoutRegion,
⏹️ ▶️ John Geometry Proxy Container Corner Insets, and Container Corner Offset to easily constrain
⏹️ ▶️ John your layout against the changing radius. And there is a video linked. We will link the Jeff's post and the
⏹️ ▶️ John video. I would encourage both of you to look at the video if you have not, and while I explain what's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what Jeff is saying is that the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John the physical screen on the ProLed MacBook Pros, have rounded corners
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top and the bottom. Time was when Apple made screens that were rectangular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they started rounding the top corners on the laptops. And that was not
⏹️ ▶️ John great, but there was some precedent because back from the original Macintosh, and the original Macintosh
⏹️ ▶️ John had a 9-inch CRT and it was rectangular, okay? But the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar had black pixels in the upper left and upper right corners that
⏹️ ▶️ John made the menu bar look like it had rounded top corners. It didn't. The screen was just not drawing those.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a monochrome display, right? So it was a white menu bar and they just didn't light up those pixels. If you played a full
⏹️ ▶️ John screen game or whatever, of course, it would use those pixels. But when the menu bar was visible, it rounded them. And that's kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple was doing with rounding the corners of the display, although the radius was much bigger in the modern age. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wasn't just not drawing the pixels there. They would either not include those pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John in the screen or cover them with parts of the bezel or whatever. So you could never put a
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel in the corner of the screen because there was no corner. They rounded the top and bottom corners. And I didn't like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, the menu bar is up there anyway. And guys, so if you play full screen video, you're going to miss the corners.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's annoying, but whatever. Now they rounded the bottom corners. Now they've gone too far. too far. Too far.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's so terrible. Again, the physical screen does not have pixels. Like you can't see them.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they're there, they're covered. Maybe they're not there entirely. They've rounded the top and bottom corners
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen on the ProLid laptops. And it's not a small corner radius.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's pretty big. You have to watch this video because the problem is, let's say you have a window
⏹️ ▶️ John that has like they show like a sidebar with like a filter at the bottom of the sidebar where you can type things in to filter the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. And, you know, there's a corner radius on the window because macOS 27
⏹️ ▶️ John windows do have a rounded corner, but that corner radius is not as big as the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John corner radius on the screen. So if you take that window and move it down to the lower left corner,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like, uh-oh, we're about to clip your UI because some part of
⏹️ ▶️ John your UI now is going to be hidden in the pixels that we refuse to sell you in the corner of your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're like, oh, don't worry. We've updated AppKit and UIKit and all these other things so that your
⏹️ ▶️ John app can detect when that's happening and squirm the damn controls away from
⏹️ ▶️ John the corner and also make the corner radius of the window bigger as it approaches the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John so it can nestle into the corner and shove the text field over all so that UI isn't
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they could just make a rectangular screen to show rectangular content on their
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangular laptops. This is so incredibly dumb. It just it boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind. Someone thought this was a good idea and then someone said, but but but what about when people, they're not going to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John see stuff there? What if they have it like, oh, don't worry, I've got a solution. This solution was not, this is a terrible idea. We should never do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, no, we can make the framework, provide API so the UI will squirm out of the way
⏹️ ▶️ John and the corners of the window will get rounder. But only one of the corners, I think. I don't know, maybe it does all of them. I can't tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John The corner will get rounder and the text field will move out of the way. Someone should have stopped this and raised their hand
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, what are we doing here? Like, what is the purpose of screen? what Why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey screens exist?
⏹️ ▶️ John what what What are they there for? Are they there to show us the content that's on our computer? Or are they there
⏹️ ▶️ John to look cute? And which has higher priority? So incredibly dumb. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can connect an external display. Who knows? Maybe their external displays are going to have tennis ball-sized rounded corners.
⏹️ ▶️ John And anytime you bring UI up near, it'll morph the sides of the windows so everything squishes over
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can have big round corners on their six thousand dollar pro display XDRs if they ever make another one. I am
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly angry about this. This is so dumb and is also yet another reason for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John hate laptops. And I will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann link again in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. We'll link again in the show notes to uh uh Martin
⏹️ ▶️ John Vichari's uh post about Reimar Servas's post about rounded corners and how bad
⏹️ ▶️ John they are and how they steal space and are stupid. It's like, at what cost rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John corners? And the cost is incredibly high all throughout the UI, not just the corners, everywhere it's high, but like, oh, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John just like it. It's cuter. And they were too rounded in Tahoe. Now they're less in Golden Gate. So I'm okay with it. But now they're
⏹️ ▶️ John coming for the screen. Please just read these articles if you think rounded corners aren't a big deal. Who cares? It's just an
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetic thing. It's not. It physically reduces the space you have to see content on your screen in
⏹️ ▶️ John every window, in every toolbar, in every sidebar, and now in the entire screen. I'm very angry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, like, why do they have to round them so much that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matters? Like, the simple solution here is just have the standard window corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radius be small enough that it could fit like a small thing in the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, no, when you're laying out content in a window, you're never putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls or text labels at the very, very first pixel, like near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any edge. You're always spacing it in by at least five to 20 pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John You could, in like a CAD app that has like a bar along the bottom with lots of things, you could put it in a totally lower left corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I will point out. But nobody would do that. You would always set it in by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least like five or 10 points, at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like again, some apps really want to use every inch of the screen, especially like really technical apps that don't care how they look, like a CAD
⏹️ ▶️ John app or a 3D app with a million text fields everywhere. But I will point out, these are, remember, these are the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros. One of the strengths is OLED is that you can turn off pixels and they're totally black.
⏹️ ▶️ John So guess what? Just make the screen have all the pixels. And if you want rounded corners, fine, don't light up those pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John But oh, if you have a problem, the solution is, oh, in this instance, we have to light up the pixels because you shove the
⏹️ ▶️ John window in the corner. Like what? You can have your cake and eat it too. You won't even be able to tell that the pixels are there
⏹️ ▶️ John because you just turn them off, right? There's no reason to physically not include those pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John on this incredibly expensive display. Do what the original Mac did. Include the pixels. Just don't light them up and it
⏹️ ▶️ John will be invisible because it's black. So dumb.
iPhone Duo updates, durability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, before John completely finishes crashing out, let's move on to the iPhone Duo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we talked about this at least in passing last episode, but the iPhone Duo will welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you if you purchase it from an Apple store, and I think only in the U.S. And we had talked about, I'd seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of reports of this for buy online. I did order one from an Apple store, picked it up in an Apple store. I was the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person, I'm pretty sure, to pick it up in my Apple Store. This did not happen for me. I'd seen, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't have a source for this, but I'd seen somebody say that they were asked if they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, wanted this personalization to happen. And they had to wait like five minutes for you know magic to happen with that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toast thing, whatever it's called, that magical box that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come up with. um but anyways uh Luke Milani or Miani's video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh has uh an example of this, and we'll put a link in the show notes, a timestamp link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. So you can see this. But sure enough, in cursive, it says, you know while it's opened, hello, Luke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I kind of wish that this had happened for me just because I think it's fun. But yeah, apparently not 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey execute. They don't execute 100% of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it is that like the little toaster pizza oven where you put it in or whatever. You would think like, oh, they'll just
⏹️ ▶️ John put it on a server somewhere. And, you know, they don't need to put it in a pizza oven. They'll just give you the box. And when you open it up, it'll connect to the server
⏹️ ▶️ John and find out who you are. But at this point, when you just open it up, it doesn't even have a network connection. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John can't look it up on this. This is like the literally the first thing that you see before it connects to Wi-Fi, before it connects to
⏹️ ▶️ John cellular, before anything just took it out of the box. So it has to be some kind of thing that they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John use their little, we can reprogram your device while it's in the box. And they just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John put in your name or whatever. It's cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it's, it's a fun little tweak. I have not seen it on um, either of the two duos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've unboxed. Um, But I also get the impression that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Retail is, you know, struggling to keep up, I'd say, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the realities of the duo launch. Like it's been a lot for them. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, like, you know, the stock is you know, very, very small volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People are very highly demanding it. People are still lining up outside Apple stores every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day trying to get duos, mostly because there's a huge market for resale. But also, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in the city yesterday, and I saw two duos in use by real people in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wild, which is now tied for how many times I've seen the iPhone Air used by real people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wild. But like, you know, real people are also, it isn't all just being resold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Real people are actually using it for themselves also. And there's just no supply.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like I've heard it from the retail people that like, you know, basically everyone, you know, we mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week that I was using, I mentioned I was using one of those like stock tracking sites to alert me when they came in stock. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone's doing that. And people are using AI agents to like buy them for them as quickly as possible when they do come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, like the moment they come in stock. So like one, I found, I've learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer to, I mentioned last episode that when I tried to pick up, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I picked up the two terabyte model that I, the only one I could get, I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I could change the payment method to my business credit card. So you also get your efficiency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was told then that they couldn't. Well, I found out from some birdies why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they couldn't. So the way their system would work, it's already paid for when you go to pick it up. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to process it as a return and then have me rebuy it. But the moment it's scanned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in as a return, it goes back into available inventory for the store. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then someone else could grab it online. And they would, because they have AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bots running and monitoring websites and everything. And so they, they, they would not have a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to guarantee that they could resell the same one back to me a moment later because somebody else would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grab it in the meantime. So that's the reality of what, like, the kind of conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like speeds and everything that Apple retail is dealing with right now. So I'm guessing like once this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all calms down, which could be weeks or months away, uh, then I'm guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're going to have more time to like apply these customizations and things like that. That, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be different and better then, um, For now, I I wouldn't expect this to be a common occurrence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Donald DeCodes is apparently a YouTube channel, and they have a good explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the nanotexture layer on the iPhone Duo. We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did a really good job of like explaining slowly and very carefully why this layer
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, how is this particular one designed, and how does it do the job that it does, and how is it different than other things. Really good video.
⏹️ ▶️ John Highly recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, it was very good. Then we have to bring up, I think we again made passing mention of this last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, and now we need to really properly dig in. Crackgate or whatever you'd like to call it. Andy Anako
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 24th of October, this is the day after release, if I'm not mistaken, writes, check out the newly minted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone duo subreddit. It's filled with posts from Happy Day One owners, as well as ones from people whose screens broke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost instantly. These busted duos are all broken in the same way, vertically along the crease, with a thick horizontal bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about two-fifths of the way up on the right-hand side. Doesn't this consistency imply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an underlying design or manufacturing defect?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, it does. Jay Peters at the Verge, two days later on the 26th. Here's Apple's full statement from Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex Kirschner. The response to iPhone Duo from early users has been incredibly positive, and we're seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting things from developers who are rapidly updating their apps to take advantage of its unique form factor. We are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aware of an issue impacting some impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey units. If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact Apple Care for a replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the statement was fine and like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. Like, I know people are mad. They're like, oh, there's a problem and Apple's not doing it. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they're going to, like, if your thing breaks on the day you buy it, Apple's just going to replace it for free. Like, it is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they start doing this right after all your Apple Care runs out, then that's a big thing and we need to make a big stink. But
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, I feel like it's just, it's a bummer and it's sucky and Apple's going to have to eat the cost of it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as an owner, it's mostly just like, oh, I got unlucky and I got one of the bad ones, but you're going to get a new phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, see, the problem. Okay. So first of all, all of these problems are exacerbated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the shortages because these stores can't keep a lot of spare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock because they have no stock. So yeah, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, obviously if this happens to your phone, Apple's going to take care of you, but you still have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, either return it by mail or go to the store and wait for a new one. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to the store, they might not have one that day or that week to give you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it is a bummer. I'm not saying it's not a bad thing that happens to you, but like all these stories, people bring out the pitchforks
⏹️ ▶️ John and like Apple knows about this and is denying it and is refusing to repair it. It's like none of that is happening. It's a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, it's bad that like Apple's first phone has problem. It doesn't surprise me, though. Like, honestly, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John a very difficult, complicated, fragile thing. And Apple's going to screw it up on their first time out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And here's the thing. I don't think the evidence that we have so far shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is an inherent flaw to the design. It looks like, you know, based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on people who have figured out, there's like there's one part inside the hinge that seems like it has a weak point and cracks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a certain point. But that seems like it could easily, it could either be easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tweaked halfway through the build of this product or something, or it seems like it was just literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a bad run of that part that has a weakness in it from a bad manufacturing run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. Because it's not happening to every duo. You know, the reviewers that put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them in bending machines thousands of times, like it never happened to them. So obviously it isn't happening to all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. That being said, it is obviously a significant issue. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, what does that mean? Does it mean 5% of them fail? That's a lot in terms of absolute numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But does it mean the one that you personally have will fail in this way? Probably not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is still a big issue for Apple. And they do have to and will be dealing with it. And when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say a small number, that is PR speak, that is standard procedure. You always say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a small number. That doesn't mean it's a small number. Um, but it again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably anecdotally, it is probably at least a reasonably small percentage. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a bigger problem than they are saying in all likelihood, but it is not the biggest problem in the world. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it does seem like it is not a guarantee that every duo will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break this way. But we will see. Um, And yet all of these problems are exacerbated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the short supply. Once the supply gets better, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, you know, maybe they iron out some of the manufacturing issues that might be causing this flaw to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. Maybe, you know, obviously repairs and replacements would get easier to do and faster to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that will kind of heal all wounds like as volume goes up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect this is probably going to be widespread enough that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet it gets one of those extended warranty coverage things they do where they'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cover it for free past AppleCare for a couple of years. It seems like it's that scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problem. So again, not every unit, but it's certainly a lot of them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay tuned for that. In one year from now, when all of their stock AppleCare plans expire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet this issue still gets fixed for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we'll see if it ends up being a manufacturing defect or a design defect or whatever, but that's the thing to worry about. Not happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that happens like on the first batch that they made on like day one or whatever, like you figure they'll address that. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is a year from now. If screens are breaking like this a year from now, now you have a serious problem. Now you need one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John programs. Now there's a class action lawsuit. Like that's where things get serious. But day one, the first one's off the
⏹️ ▶️ John assembly line. It doesn't surprise me that this has a problem. And Apple's never going to tell you what the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John is. They're not going to tell you. You'll find that out in the class action lawsuit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I guarantee you, it's higher than they're trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us think, but it's lower than it being the end of the world. But I do think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will end with that outcome. I think it will have a class action lawsuit. I think it will have an extended service bulletin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever those are called. I think those things will happen. But for a given iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Duo owner, we don't know like, how likely is it that your phone will break in this way at some point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn't seem like it's super high right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there's some complications that we'll get to in a second. But first, for the one person who did try to figure out what the problem was
⏹️ ▶️ John or has a theory anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So uh, Terrence O'Brien at The Verge writes, YouTuber Curious Haggy was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to reproduce the cracked screen during some durability testing of the iPhone Duo. We'll put a link to that YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's the one where it's like, like, uh, this is where they're all breaking. The line is on the same place. Mine
⏹️ ▶️ John broke in the same way. I opened it up. I looked underneath the part where that line was and lo and behold, a piece of the hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John cracked and it just was free-flowing and loose. It must have cracked and flung itself up against the back of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John which hits it in exactly that spot. And it's like, okay, I believe that's how their phone
⏹️ ▶️ John broke because there's a literally a broken piece of metal right under the part of the screen that broke.
⏹️ ▶️ John A, that metal shouldn't be broken. And B, smoking gun, it's right under, it's right underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John the the place where the screen got damaged. But does that mean that's how they all have broken? Because I haven't seen the
⏹️ ▶️ John other ones opened up. So it's a good theory, uh but there's more to it. Now we get to our friend. uh
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know what this person's name is. Is his name actually Jerry? I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe there was a recent video where he said his name isn't actually Jerry and Jerry was like a relative,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like his grandfather or something
⏹️ ▶️ John MKBHD referred to him by name. I don't remember what it was, though. Maybe it was Zach or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. So this is Jerry Rig Everything and there's a timestamp link in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes. But quote unquote, Jerry peeled off the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matte layer on top of the screen and shows he has two duos side by side, one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the covering and one without. And you can see the difference. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who are worked up about how muted the colors are on the inner screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on and so forth. But for me, as someone who does use this phone outdoors, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in strong sunlight, that and I'm not as discerning as like, I don't know what John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracusa, for example, I don't mind the matte screen. And in fact, I think I prefer having this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it's so much more useful outdoors in sunlight. So for my personal taste,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I vastly prefer the way, the way it is, the way it looks with the matte layer on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I absolutely concede and concede and can see that the color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reproduction is definitely better without that matte layer on top of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there's a different background behind these two. So it kind of messes it up. But yeah, like if you like the shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John one, you could in theory take off the matte thing. But keep in mind that the matte thing isn't just doing light diffusion. It's also
⏹️ ▶️ John literally protecting the screen. It's another layer of protection. So it serves that function as well. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John would not recommend this. And also, I think this is the same video, or maybe it was one of the other reviews that explained, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can't put this, you know, when Apple replaces this, they have to do it with like, you know, fraction of
⏹️ ▶️ John a fraction of a millimeter precision because of the way that like when you fold it, the the layers
⏹️ ▶️ John slide past each other slightly. And it's, it's, it's not the type of thing where you can say, ah, this is close enough
⏹️ ▶️ John because you literally fold it in half. So please don't try this at home. But that's, that's this whole channel. Jerry Rig Everything, he destroys
⏹️ ▶️ John phones. Like that's, that's the, that's the deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's a task best left to YouTubers, not us. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, Also from that video, do not get sand in your duo. JerryRig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything puts a pile of sand on the duo and it would no longer close or open all the way due to sand getting in the hinge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I feel like there was another video that we, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you linked right below
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, there you go. Thank you. Uh, Where this is also spoken about. Sorry, I watched a lot of YouTube videos this morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that John had come up with. Um, So they all kind of blurred together. But anyways, yeah, sand or other small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pieces of dust. Like on paper, the duo should be able to keep it out given the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 68. Thank you. Uh, But in reality, it seems perhaps a little less cut and dry.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that's that's the thing with the rating. So the the second video is from iFixit. iFixit did like the fine neon
⏹️ ▶️ John dust. We'll have timestamp links to both the JerryRig everything sand and the I fix it. Neon
⏹️ ▶️ John dust. Uh, and Jerry is just destroying stuff and seeing how it works. And then iFixIt
⏹️ ▶️ John like opened it up and just forensic of like, because it's like very brightly colored dust. You can see where it went
⏹️ ▶️ John and not where it didn't go. And here's the deal, according to iFixIt, their examination
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. It seems like, and this is a real kind of like loophole that Apple should address
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point, that the rating, IP68 or whatever it is, is
⏹️ ▶️ John about water and dust ingress into the part where the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John lives, not the hinge. Because the dust didn't get into the place where the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John is, the place where the RAM is, the place where, you know, dust and water didn't get into those areas,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it 100% got into the hinge. That's why I was so shocked when they gave this rating because like, how are they sealing the hinge?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the screen like floats over this empty chasm. I'm like, oh, maybe there's just like
⏹️ ▶️ John a sealed area below where the, like where the screen loops into there. So it doesn't, you know, like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they sealed it up. Nope. That's where the hinge lives. Sand can 100% get in there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when it does get in there, say goodbye to your hinge. Like the phone wouldn't even close anymore because the
⏹️ ▶️ John sand was in there crunching and crunching away. And this is part of the thing of like lots of people put
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of grit in the hinge and then they would try to open it. And it's like, it won't even open all the way. It won't even go flat. And they'll
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, I'm going to force it because I'm a YouTuber. I'm going to force it. And they force it. And you know what happens? The hinge breaks and
⏹️ ▶️ John pokes the screen. So now, a year from now, when someone says, look, I have the line on
⏹️ ▶️ John my screen. It's just like those day one people. Their thing broke when they took it out of the box. I have the same thing. It's obviously a manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John defect. Is it? Or did you get one piece of sand under that part of the hinge and then force it
⏹️ ▶️ John open? And that one piece of sand caused that little thing to snap. I'm not saying the people whose things broke out of the box, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John a manufacturing defect or something or a design flaw. But a year later, if you get
⏹️ ▶️ John sand and grit into your hinge and you force it open and then your hinge cracks and then it hits
⏹️ ▶️ John your screen and breaks it in the same place, that I feel like is not really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this, it's not the same problem as the other thing. Like Apple should still replace it under Apple Care if you still have it or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's not a, well, I don't know the class action lawsuit worked out. Is it a design flaw
⏹️ ▶️ John that, because this is true of all the folding phones, basically, if you get sand in the hinge, it's game over. So
⏹️ ▶️ John do not take your iPhone duo to the beach. Just don't do it. Like it doesn't take a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John sand to render this inoperable. And it's not like you can open it up and just, I'll just blow it out like a Nintendo cartridge and it will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like it's a very delicate piece of machinery. And although they sealed up the
⏹️ ▶️ John two halves, the two halves are waterproof and dustproof. The hinge is not part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the two halves and it is absolutely not dustproof. So do not get fine
⏹️ ▶️ John particulates anywhere near that hinge. You will be sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think like, and look, I'm not saying that Apple should design this to tolerate YouTubers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pouring sand into it. They're obviously doing a significant stress test, but I think this is worth thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. Like, you know, are you the kind of person that has to frequently clean a bunch of dust out of the port from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom of your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there sand in the pocket of your jacket where you put your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. or Or just like, like, how often do you have to like clean dust from around your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your pocket or whatever storage situation you have? Are you frequently having to like, you know, clean under under the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridges that you of your case or whatever? Like, again, like putting stuff out of the port, pulling stuff out of the speaker holes. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you operate your phone in conditions or store your phone in conditions where you're going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of lint and dust and sand, possibly, like, yeah, the Duo and any foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably not a great choice for you, or at least you should probably get AppleCare for the duration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time that you're going to have it. But it looks like, you know, look, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done an admirable job sealing it up from the elements reasonably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you have to still keep in mind, it is still a folding phone. In the same way that, like, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do a really great job, you know, if they do like a MacBook Pro and they try to seal it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from any kind of, you know, small ingresses, it's like, it's still a laptop. Laptops inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a bunch of entry points and are inherently very sensitive to certain types of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like dust and liquids, where your phone is more easily sealed up. Well, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foldable phone is going to be less inherently sealable and inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water and dust proof than a regular slab phone. That's always going to be the case because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has this incredibly intricate moving hinge that is constantly being open and closed throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John they could seal a laptop because I think the laptop hinge is sealable, but the way the screen folds into
⏹️ ▶️ John a little empty area on phones, currently
⏹️ ▶️ John has come up with a way to either see because you have two choices. You can seal that, which Apple has chose
⏹️ ▶️ John not to do or try to do, or you can make the mechanism tolerate, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, tolerate dust coming into it. Like some way to like get the dust out and let it like make all
⏹️ ▶️ John the gaps big enough that everything falls through it and doesn't get caught within it. uh And with current screen technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John sealing it seems to be impossible. But laptops could be sealed if Apple really wanted to, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the hinge on laptops is the type of thing like, you know, it's not, there's no like
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED screen looping itself in and filling a cavity and like a double edge hinge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the hinge inside this is so complicated. Look at the hinge on a MacBook Pro. It's simple and there's, you could easily make that
⏹️ ▶️ John so no dust can get in there. And even if some does get in there, it's not going to break anything. So like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no one, no one has any idea how to do it with folding. And Apple's a big achievement here is, hey, the two halves
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone are sealed. Nothing's going to get in there, but my folding phone is useless to me if I can't fold it or unfold
⏹️ ▶️ John it because the hinge is hosed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Right. So just to recap, like JerryRigEverything's video and then iFixIt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also puts some extremely fine dust in a baggie and shakes the, in, and, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duo in a baggie and shakes it all up. And it's also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and then they opened it
⏹️ ▶️ John up and say, found say, where did that dust go? And the answer is it all went in the hinge. Yep. Yeah, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not in the other parts. Like they opened up the other halves and like, it didn't get in here, but it did get in the hinge.
Sponsor: Claude
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iPhone Duo misc, Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basic Apple Guy writes something that I did not notice, but I find fascinating. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone Duo lists two batteries in the battery health thing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings. So I'm looking at mine right now, and yeah, they look identical,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same maximum capacity, same cycle count, same manufacture date, same first use. But sure enough, there's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery one and battery two.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're two different sizes. They don't show that on the screen, but they are two different, very differently sized batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Steven Robles points out something that I've discovered probably since we last recorded, Um, but I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad that I think John put this in the show notes because I would have forgotten to bring it up. Uh, iPhone mirroring absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works on the duo, but just the outer screen. And as far as Steven and I can tell, there's no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to open it, if you will, to the inner screen, which is fine, but a bummer. And I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that gets better over time. Sam Shepard uh, writes, uh, they, they wrote directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us, I believe, but I'd seen this floating around in a couple of places. And it is brilliant, and I've tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and it works. Sam Shepard is unlocking the iPhone Duo with kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his like index finger first or zeroth to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first knuckle area. It's very hard to paint a word picture about this, but imagine if you're looking at your palm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you're going from the place where your index finger meets your palm to the first hinge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first knuckle. That's what Sam registered with Face ID and I've since done as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's not foolproof, but it works pretty well. And Sam has a really good and very short video on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where he talks about what he's done and shows a demonstration of it. This gets my, to use a Merlinism,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey official okie-dokie. This was a great idea and it's working pretty well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is lowering your security because there's just not as many lines and swirls on that part of your finger.
⏹️ ▶️ John some, but not enough that I feel like that that's drastically reducing the security. It's like
⏹️ ▶️ John when people registered like their dog's nose or their cat's paw on Touch ID when it first came out. Like you can do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't necessarily recommend this. And I put Sam Shepard's thing in here because I think he was the
⏹️ ▶️ John very first person I saw do this before all the other later articles. So I want to give credit where credit is due.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there's a picture in his post and you can see, you know, how i I circled it in red in our
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes, but you'll see I think it's like a video. You just grab the phone around there and you push that
⏹️ ▶️ John pad of your finger against Touch ID and it unlocks. But go look at that pad on your finger right now and then look
⏹️ ▶️ John at your fingertip and compare the complexity and number of ridges and swirls. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like this is a security downgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you might be right. I think Apple giving us like a little bit of security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downgrade, opting in. It's a tricky question. Should they allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to have lower security on our devices? It's like You can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to answer that question both ways, depending on what day you ask me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a tough decision. You know, One thing you could potentially argue is like, well, wouldn't this phone be better?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe something also like an iPad non-Pro, like an iPad Mini, wouldn't these be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better with some kind of camera-based face ID option that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could say, all right, well, for basic unlocking, let me just use the front camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don't have face ID hardware and just try to recognize me. And maybe don't let me make purchases that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or access sensitive data like on, you know, unlocking a password app or, you know, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure notes. I think as the iPhone line goes on, if they continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the duo and it continues to succeed, which seems likely, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always going to have the challenge of where to put face ID hardware in this. Like, do you put only one on the outside? Do you put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two entire sets of it, one on the outside and one on the inside? So it can work the same way in both. I think that, and, you know, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously a a physical space problem. It's a looking through the screen problem and it's a cost problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there's multiple large problems to trying to do that. So there's going to be, I think, persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demand in the iPhone ecosystem for some alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Touch ID, but where face ID in its full form can't or won't reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit. So I think they will probably be pushed by market demand to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address this problem in some way. And so again, maybe that way is kind of what they're doing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um That like they have like this just camera based face recognition, and it does provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lower level of security that gives you access to some things, but doesn't give you access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to everything without a higher level.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's an added level of complexity where is my phone completely unlocked or partially unlocked? I really don't think they're going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. I think Apple's current solution is uh, Apple Watch Unlock, which they love because it makes you buy another Apple device.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're like, we already have a solution to this. It's called unlock with your Apple Watch, and it's very secure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but a lot of iPhone owners don't also own Apple Watches.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they use Touch ID, and then they train it on their cat's nose and lower their security.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Or – well, and also – but You can also make an argument that like when all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanisms inevitably fail, which look, both Touch ID and Face ID fail all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time and require you to enter your passcode all the time, what happens? People have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low security passcodes. They eventually just give up and make their passcode 1212.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that's like you look around at what like, what do regular people do? It's that. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone equivalent of sticking a Post-it note with your computer password that your network admins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made you, you know, made you set on the monitor or under the keyboard tray or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you, you know, like security can only be so inconvenient or complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before people will just route around it. So if the system is so cumbersome and annoying and limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people are just having to enter their passcode 20 times a day and having the passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly be simpler to make that easier, and that just increases the odds of other people guessing or shoulder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surfing it, that's not actually serving security. So it is, it's a very tricky question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think, you know, obviously the easier you can make good security, the better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these things are always in tension. But I do think the answer here is probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be they probably need some kind of visual camera-based face ID alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who choose it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think if they did that, I think they'd make it unlock it fully. Like they don't make, if you make your code 1111, they
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock the phone fully, man. Like that's, that's, that's, there is no like lower security mode where it's like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a garbage passcode, so you're not really unlocking everything. You can't purchase with it. Your pass, your iCloud keychain
⏹️ ▶️ John is unlocked. Nope. If you make that your passcode, it will unlock everything just like it has always done.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think they, that's their way of kind of leaving it up to the user. It's like, if you want to make 1111
⏹️ ▶️ John your passcode, good luck out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like I, that's not an amazing outcome for anybody. Like that, like if, if what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, what you need to do to make your phone convenient for you to use is to make your passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1111 because either Touch ID is too slow or fails all the time or you're trying to use Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID in challenging situations such as outdoors, that's not actually serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody's security. And that just becomes security theater at that point. It's like, oh, great, I'll jump through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these hoops that Apple's making me jump through because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven't entered my code. And then, like, OK, well, my code is 1111 because I have to enter it five times a day and it's really annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. But like the camera-based ones, it's a real problem. Like, that's why they make the home view so incredibly limited because someone
⏹️ ▶️ John could just print a picture of you from the internet and hold up in front of the phone. And that's that's they don't want to go that far. Like, the real question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what's the threat model? If someone steals my phone, can they unlock it? Well, if they shoulder shift the code, I'm screwed even if my code is
⏹️ ▶️ John really complicated. So that's bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but look at Android phones. Most Android phones do camera-based face ID, and it's not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, look, it used to be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one's stealing those. That's true. But it used to be really bad when they first did it. But like, it is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure now than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, but again, like, maybe for a lot of people, that would be fine. It's certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple just needs to make the Face ID hardware smaller and cheaper. And put it in Macs for
⏹️ ▶️ John crying out loud. So that's the path they're traveling. Hopefully this will be a transient problem where it's like, remember when Face ID couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ John fit in our devices and now it's so thin it's in everything? That's where we need to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One last piece of iPhone Duo and actually just follow up in general. Reachability is coming to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Duo in 27.3. As per Julie Clover at MacRumors, reachability can be enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in settings, accessibility, touch, reachability. It is on by default after updating to the iOS 27.3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beta. When the iPhone Duo is closed, a short swipe left on the left edge or a short swipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right on the right edge will shift the outer display's content left or right. And there's a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey images in that article.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this the first time reachability has gone left to right instead of top to bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe so. I mean, the duo has a lot of things where the first time something is on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or right instead of the top or bottom.
Sponsor: Tailscale
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Ternus’ leadership so far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk topics. And we probably only have one kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interrelated topic for tonight. And that is we're going to start with Phil Schiller's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long exit and kind of some rumors about Turnus' plans for Apple. This is from early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey September, and Mark Gurman writes, Phil Schiller's exit is notable. The veteran
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executive ran the App Store and Apple events. The App Store portion alone generates an estimated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $30 billion a year. Schiller is 66 years old and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there's a bit more to the story, I'm told. Turnus and services chief Eddie Q want to make even more money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While there was no internal blow-up or anything like that, it's something he wanted no part of. Let the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record show that Phil Schiller is the only Apple executive to, only like active Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executive to come on the show and is clearly the best one of them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John so here's the thing. This is the umbrella topic that we're talking about here is what kind of CEO will John
⏹️ ▶️ John Ternus be? This was, I think, from like not before he took over, but like right when he did or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's German, so his sources are usually real. But on the other hand, it is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like rumors from inside the company. you know, who, Someone who claims to
⏹️ ▶️ John know the mind of Phil Schiller, it's like supposedly this is a thing that Turnis and Eddie Q want and supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John part of Schiller doesn't want it and he's leaving and connect the dots and it's like, well, he doesn't want any part
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. And it's just, it's, you know, there are many logical leaps leading to this story
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, Turnus and Q want to do this thing and Schiller, because he's a
⏹️ ▶️ John good person, doesn't. And so he's leaving. And I'm not sure I buy that story. But as
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the first sort of inside scoop story from someone who normally has, you know, actual real
⏹️ ▶️ John inside scoops from Apple, having it say, hey, your new CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John that you're all excited about, you know, one of the things that he wants to do? Squeeze more money
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the app store. Talk about the thing you do not want to hear. You're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, no, John. That's not. You're supposed to, We're you're new
⏹️ ▶️ John and you're supposed to fix things. This is worse. This is taking a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and making it worse. I mean, Eddie, Q, like, whatever. We just like, yeah, isn't he adorable? He wants money from services. He
⏹️ ▶️ John loves services and goes to basketball games or whatever. But you're the new CEO and we didn't like what Tim Cook was doing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the app store. And you come in and the first rumor we read about you is, yeah, the app store, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John squeeze more out of that. We need We need additional recurring revenue from the platform. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope, I mean, the Schiller thing is a sideshow. I don't, I think Schiller's retiring because he's, he's
⏹️ ▶️ John old and wants to retire. Like, and maybe he does or doesn't disagree with this, but he presided over the app store during lots of things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we disagreed with. And who knows what happens there? So I'm putting Schiller entirely aside and I'm saying I mostly discount
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that he's leaving because he disagrees with what Ternus wants to do with the app store. I feel like that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John why he's leaving, but who knows? But I desperately want this rumor about
⏹️ ▶️ John what Ternus wants to do to the app store to be not true. I'm willing to believe Eddie Q wants that. I want Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, no, no, Eddie, let's not squeeze the developers even more because they already hate
⏹️ ▶️ John us. Yep. We'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't love the sign, the sound of this, but we'll see if it's actually true.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this was September. I haven't heard anything about it since. And if anything, German occasionally gets wrong, it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, hearsay from inside the company. Who knows who the sources are and what agendas they have? Like, this is not like
⏹️ ▶️ John there's a new product coming in here with specs and we'll know whether it's true. This is like interpersonal drama
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thoughts in the minds of executives. They're never going to say out loud. But I'm keeping an eye on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Turnus start turning the screws on the app store or turning them tighter? Because the screws are already there
⏹️ ▶️ John and they're screwed in pretty tight already. So I'm watching this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the only thing that I would maybe be a little optimistic about here is Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gurman has really good sources for facts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and much spottier sources for reasons and stories.
⏹️ ▶️ John And interpersonal drama.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And look, and that stuff's hard to validate even for us after the fact. Like we like when he says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this product's going to be released. It's going to have a touchscreen, blah, blah, blah. Like we can validate that after the fact. Oh, yeah, he was right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, Gurman called that two years ago or whatever. It's much harder for us to know, oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gurman called the fact that this executive fought with that executive or whatever. Like that's, that's hard for us to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it's hard to check this, but historically speaking, that kind of stuff seems like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is either never verifiable or turns out to seemingly not be true more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often than his predictions about facts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although in this one, what we'll do is just watch what Apple does. Do they turn, do they squeeze more money out of the app store? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John a turnist policy? We're not going to know it today. We're not going to know at the time the rumor comes out in September, but it's a thing we can watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The other thing is like Phil Schiller has been the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head of the App Store for most of this time, including all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the really worst of the screw turning years. Like all those years under Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook that the App Store was like basically going around, like scrounging around for everyone's business model saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you guys, you just launched a new startup and you're not using an app purchase. You got to give us money or you're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. That was all with Phil Schiller presiding over the app store. Now, Phil Schiller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn't and still isn't the CEO. So there's people above him who can overrule him. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw in some of those court documents that came out that that seems to have happened at some point for certain decisions around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. But it's, we don't know how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if Phil is no longer doing this, are things going to get only worse? Or might things get better?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because might some of the things that we not this is a lot of mixed verb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tenses here. Might some of the things that we didn't like have been Phil's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call? And maybe somebody else can change those. And then finally, I think my final
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of this that is a little optimistic is like, John Ternus is new to this role.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don't know that much about him yet, but so far, we like what we see. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think even though, like, even though I don't think I agree with Tim Cook on a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actions he took towards the end, especially, it was obvious that Tim Cook is a pretty smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person who does things in a very considered way. And Tim Cook chose John Ternus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like a lot of people who we tend to think are pretty smart people, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we agree with a lot, seem to support John Ternus. So the people who all work around him seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think widely that he's a pretty good leader, a pretty good person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pretty capable for this role. So what that shows me is even if he's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going into this with an idea like trying to squeeze the app store that we don't think is right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tells – all of that context suggests to me he could change his mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like he, – we've all had ideas that we change our mind about. Look, I'm an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expert in this. I think we can give these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people more of the benefit of the doubt that they can learn, they can try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, they can change their mind or fail or change course over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until and unless they show us that they can't or won't. And some people do show us that. Some people show us that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, wow, the decisions they continue to make in this area continue to be terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Tim Cook's engagement with Donald Trump. I think that was horrendous and is horrendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he never got better at that um and still probably still hasn't.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I kind of stopped you know hoping for that there. But John Ternus is in many ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of these issues, a clean slate. We don't know how he's going to decide. So even if he said at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let's squeeze our money out of the app store, maybe in a year, he won't think that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don't know yet. And I'm willing, because he is new and seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good in a lot of areas, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that like this probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn't the be-all end-all, if it even is true, which itself is a pretty big question mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of the downsides in the very smooth transition that they are all so happy. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple executives are always saying how proud they are of their beautiful transition from Tim Cook to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obviously, because obviously, again, the transition of Steve Jobs dying it was not ideal and not on their time scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, it's just a tragedy. Right. And so now it's like, well, now we don't have somebody dying. We can actually plan for this. Let's do it
⏹️ ▶️ John well. But part of that plan and part of the plan of like not spooking Wall Street and whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, making it smooth and everything is that uh it doesn't allow
⏹️ ▶️ John the new incoming CEO to do what new incoming CEOs do in companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in trouble because Apple's not in trouble, right? But if you have a company that's in trouble and you
⏹️ ▶️ John do a CEO transition, always, always, not just privately, but also publicly, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John CEO comes in and says, look, here's what I'm going to do differently. Here's what I, here's
⏹️ ▶️ John my vision for Acme Corporation. They have to because like, that's their job. It's like, well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point is we wanted a new person to come in. What is your vision for this company? We're kicking out
⏹️ ▶️ John the old one for whatever reason, probably because the company's in trouble. Tell me, it happens all the time with car companies
⏹️ ▶️ John because they're always perpetually in trouble, especially American ones. It's like, what's your new vision for, you know, General Motors
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? And they come in and they present their vision. Turnis is absolutely not doing that because when
⏹️ ▶️ John you're taking over for Apple and Apple is not in trouble, Turnis feels like his job
⏹️ ▶️ John is to not rock the boat. Everything's fine. It's exactly what Tim Cook had to do, which is like, Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John is gone, but everything's going to be fine. No big changes. Tim Cook didn't come in and say, I have a bold new vision
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple and it's to make cars. Like he didn't say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah it wouldn't have been a good thing to say. uh and turnus did not come in and outline his vision.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we're so used to seeing that when there's a change in leadership, not just in companies that are in trouble, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like in any kind of like big leadership change. Like presumably the new leader is there for a reason. But Apple's idea is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, there's just, there's just the institution of Apple and a steward who guides the ship.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there's no difference of opinion or difference of strategy. It's just a smooth thing that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John don't worry about who that person is behind the curtain. It's somebody is there in charge, but it's just Apple, you know, just sailing
⏹️ ▶️ John along. And that's not reality, but that's the face they try to give. So with a rumor like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can't compare it to, remember Turnus's bold new speech on day one where he said his vision for Apple? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was no such thing. He said the same word salad that Tim Cook has been saying for his entire career. was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Apple's great and we're wonderful and it's a great company and I love it. I love technology. It's like, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John So in the complete absence of knowing what Ternus's vision for Apple is,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it happens to be exactly the same as the vision that Tim Cook has been articulating, all we have are these
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible rumors. And like, I hope to God this one is not true in any way, shape, or form. I I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John out here hoping that he like thinks it and changes his mind. I'm hoping he never thought it because, boy, what a wrong-headed
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to think. Like, what of all the things, this, if you had to pick what is the worst possible
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy Ternus could pursue when taking over Apple, I would say, squeeze the
⏹️ ▶️ John app, squeeze more profit out of the App Store would be really high on the list. So I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I'm just crossing my fingers this is just BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure hope so. I don't know. I don't, I don't love it, but man, the services money is sweet if you ask
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, services, like, oh, yeah, by all means, squeeze more money out of services. Just the app store. I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John know it's like, well, that's all services is. is games and the apps. Like, I get it, but just like, go. If you love
⏹️ ▶️ John services revenue, there are lots of places to get services revenue. I'm not against services. I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, do your services better and get more people to pay for them. And like, I get it. But the app store specifically, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John just like poking a wound.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then continuing on, let's talk about a different post from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later in September, also from German. John Ternus is moving to accelerate product development,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broaden Apple's range of devices, and create a leaner organization with a greater focus on engineering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The early ideas under consideration include relying less on traditional spring and fall product release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey schedules and eliminating some middle management positions to reduce the layers separating engineers from senior executives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ternus has indicated that Apple must introduce products more quickly and become more experimental to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remain competitive in the artificial intelligence era. There are cost-cutting efforts in motion. Ternus is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeking new sources of revenue and ways to generate more money from existing products, especially as growth in the company services
⏹️ ▶️ Casey business slows. Turnis has advocated for a leader organization for years. While leading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware engineering, he told employees during an all-hands meeting that Apple should hire fewer people, ask more of its existing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineers, and reduce organizational bloat. During a presentation, he showed a slide charting annual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headcount growth and argued that the company should be accomplishing more with fewer employees. Turnis, services
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head at HQ and chief financial officer Kevin Parekh are also looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for new ways to bolster revenue as growth in Apple Services' business decelerates and its app store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey economics come under pressure. They have discussed launching new services and extracting more revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from existing products and offerings. Meanwhile, the cost cutting will continue for the company's upcoming swath of holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parties. Some teams have been told they won't be allowed to bring plus ones for the first time in years. Oh, no, not
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the plus one. All right, so this is a mixed bag. Okay, so this is the, my summary of this one. And the notes
⏹️ ▶️ John is more products, faster, leaner. So a couple things. The leaner
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, if Turnus was to give a public facing, you know, I'm a new CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John and here's my vision for Apple, this would be the type of thing you might include. I think our organization
⏹️ ▶️ John has too much bloat. We need to be leaner like we were back in the old days when we were making, you know, great products. There's
⏹️ ▶️ John too much, too many people, you know, just too many layers, right? That is a very often a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem in organizations. And Apple historically has tried not to be that. But any
⏹️ ▶️ John company over time, like you build up layers of management between things and it just makes it harder to like steer
⏹️ ▶️ John the ship. And usually the best products are done by small teams that are close to the, there's not like 17 layers
⏹️ ▶️ John of management between you and the CEO. Like that's not a formula for success. So that's a very
⏹️ ▶️ John cliche kind of like, I'm going to come in and clean house and we'll be a leaner organization. But here's the problem with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple's reputation for decades now has been the company that
⏹️ ▶️ John already puts like three people on a team that other companies would put 300 on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that's their whole thing is like, oh, you know, again, Twitter had like 500 engineers working on like the search
⏹️ ▶️ John box and Apple has like three people working on like this gargantuan new effort, right? Watch OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like just there's, but you know, but like you joke about it because WatchOS doesn't seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's a lot of development, but a lot of their big projects have been very small teams. Like that's their whole thing. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like Apple has drifted away from that. But I look at this idea and I'm like, okay, so if there's
⏹️ ▶️ John too many like middle managers and people who aren't contributing, by all means, trim that. But like to make the team smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John have the teams actually grown to the point where it's a problem? Or is it like back in the old days, you know, we had
⏹️ ▶️ John two people who made the entire G4 cube, right? Like, I don't, I, I'm a little bit suspicious of
⏹️ ▶️ John this one, because I feel like, yeah, again, I'm, I'm, not that I have anything against middle managers, but if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John too many of them, if there's like, you know, you have four people doing the actual work and then 17
⏹️ ▶️ John managers before you get to the CEO, that's not a good org chart. So that should be changed. I don't know what the state
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is inside Apple, but the team sizes, everything I have heard from inside Apple is the team sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John are not out of control. If anything, everybody feels like they're under-resourced, that there's not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John people on their team doing what they're being asked to do. So I could put this one kind of in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, eh, it sounds like a reasonable thing that a CEO might want to do. It's not ridiculous, but I worry
⏹️ ▶️ John that, again, of all the things that Apple needs, smaller teams on implementing
⏹️ ▶️ John projects is maybe not it. And then the second part of this is more products faster. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a complicated one because, I mean, geez, we're just coming off
⏹️ ▶️ John of so many products have been announced just in September and October. Like this show
⏹️ ▶️ John has just been slammed. This is the the most Apple, new Apple products I think we've seen released in the
⏹️ ▶️ John shortest period of time in the entire history we have done this show. But every single one of these products
⏹️ ▶️ John was planned and scheduled and executed before Turnus was CEO. You know what I mean? Especially the home
⏹️ ▶️ John view, which is like a year old, right? But on the other hand, he was in charge of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole time. So is this attributable to Turnus? It's certainly not attributable to Turnus' new
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas as CEO, but maybe he's taking his ideas from when he was head of hardware and saying, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I did when I was head of hardware? We're doing that, but more. That is plausible, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. So it's hard for me to say like, oh, he's already doing it. More products faster. I'm like, well, he wasn't CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John for those, but he was the head of hardware. So I don't know. But like, it seems like you would say
⏹️ ▶️ John he's already delivered on more products faster because, God, we have so many products and they're coming out faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than we could even cover on this podcast. Is that a good thing for Apple? It's certainly different. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this whole thing about like, I don't just want to do it in spring and fall. It takes us too long to make products. That I
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly agree with because, I mean, there's been, I've been listening to, um, it's about to say 20 Max or 2020,
⏹️ ▶️ John but um a Design in California, uh, Jason Snell and Mike Curly's podcast that I was
⏹️ ▶️ John on uh, as a guest on one of their series, talking about how long it was. I mean, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the story is like, you know, the iPod was conceived and shipped within a single calendar year, but lots of products
⏹️ ▶️ John back in those days of like the early 2000s, Apple, with the exception of Mac OS X,
⏹️ ▶️ John were conceived, implemented, executed, and shipped on incredibly short timelines. Whereas now
⏹️ ▶️ John we're like, there's a German rumor of a device that's going to ship in 2029 and maybe it'll
⏹️ ▶️ John slip to 2030. And it's just such a long wait. We wait years and years from the first rumors of the product
⏹️ ▶️ John that eventually it does come out exactly as it was rumored four years ago. And it's like, really? It took you four years
⏹️ ▶️ John to produce that? Whereas the old Apple would have done that in a year, a year and a half. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think there's something to that of like, let's not, not every product needs to be this multi-year slog
⏹️ ▶️ John where we just iterate on it forever, like get stuff out, try things, be more experimental,
⏹️ ▶️ John ship more stuff. Don't feel beholden to these specific schedules. But on the flip side of
⏹️ ▶️ John that, can you imagine if Apple released products at the rate it has released them in September, October, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it just did this all year long, year after year, we would just be buried in products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at the same time, I think there is a lot of room for them to speed that up. Like we've, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, as you mentioned, like we've seen a lot of cases where you see some story come out where like, oh yeah, they've, they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a good example this would be like, you know, if some like camera AirPods thing comes out, like, or medical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glasses like, you know, we were all saying a couple years ago, like, wow, they should really get on that. It seemed like it's kind of a growing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. And then they just, and it's like, oh yeah, they'll, there are rumors like, oh, yeah, they'll have that in, you know, two years from now. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what? Like, that it really takes them that long to make that kind of product?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it doesn't ship and it's delayed for another two years. And we're like, like, that's the worst. Like, they actually ship. You're like, that rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John was true. It was four years ago. That was, but it just took them four years to put it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is, you know, I recognize it is a very difficult problem because, first of all, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high standards and they don't want to ship crap. And we like them for that. But also, when they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship a product, they need to make it usually in much higher volumes than a lot of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the home products. They should do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that's true. But And the other thing is, like, you know, if they, if we are telling them they need to release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things faster, that does strain things like the software quality, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don't want that either. But we are also in an era now where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pace of technological iteration is pretty fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now in the industry. A lot of that's AI-driven. A lot of it's not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are getting quickly better, faster from everybody. And competition is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting better quickly. And of course, AI itself, we can't ignore that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's a huge part of it. AI, both models and products and features built around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those models are getting better very quickly. And this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pace that Apple is not accustomed to and has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not been able to meet for many, many, many years. So they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to speed that kind of stuff up. And it is going to be hard and it is going to be messy and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be imperfect. But just in order to keep leading and being competitive in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the industry that they're in, they do have to get a lot faster. And honestly, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do need to get a little bit less careful with the types of products and product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risks they're willing to take. I'm not saying make a bunch of spy glasses for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I am saying like try more things. Tim Cook's Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty conservative and that served them well in a number of ways. That's very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco financially. It's very good for like the stock price. It's pretty predictable, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficient with inventory and stuff like that. But they didn't take a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of like new swings under Cook. And the ones they did were sometimes really weird, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car or the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took two big ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Vision Pro and the car were Tim Cook's two big swings. One of them shipped, one of them didn't. um And
⏹️ ▶️ John there's lots of small ones where Tim Cook took a lot of small swings of like, we're going to invest in a
⏹️ ▶️ John company that makes quartz crystals or micro LED displays. And a lot of those are just like fizzled out or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But they were, it was not the type of thing of like, I've got an idea for a product. Let's just ship it
⏹️ ▶️ John and try it. Because as you pointed out, like, that's not, hasn't been Apple's MO. And also Apple always always
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow convinces themselves, and they're mostly right most of the time that like, look, if we make anything, we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make millions of them. And so we it's harder for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John like, let's just try it and see if people like it. Because if they do, and you didn't plan to manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John 20 million of them, you're screwed, especially in the current like environment with like parts and everything. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, maybe this is not timing is not great to be more daring with the things that they ship
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you're Apple, like that's what people, you know, ding Apple for all this. like, oh, look at this, this Android manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John a framework laptop. Why can they do it? And Apple can. It's like, they're gonna sell a hundred thousand of those. Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to sell 100,000 a day. So like it
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes impossible to, you know, it's a whole different equation of like, we have to pre-buy
⏹️ ▶️ John all these parts. We have to manufacture them all. We have to forecast demand. We have to make sure that we're right. It's harder
⏹️ ▶️ John for them. It's harder for a big company to do that. It's one of the disadvantages of being a big company, but we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Like the home view is arguably that. The rumored robotic home view is arguably
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Like there's lots of products that may actually ship that are weird and may be duds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and you know, in, in this recent rash of products,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's been pretty straightforward. It's like, oh, the new, a new laptop, a new Macs, like the home view is the
⏹️ ▶️ John weirdest one. And that one was done a year ago. Um, So I'm not sure what will come
⏹️ ▶️ John with this, but like the things I like about it the most are don't be beholden to the
⏹️ ▶️ John strict release schedule that always has to be spring and fall. When it's when it's done, ship it. Uh, You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have an idea, put it out there. And maybe like just green lighting things within the
⏹️ ▶️ John company um, and being a little bit more daring about that. And not like, I think Tim Cook's
⏹️ ▶️ John problem was, you know, he had a little bit of the, everyone is asking him his entire career
⏹️ ▶️ John as CEO, when's the next big thing? When's the next big thing? And so he felt the need to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the next big thing. And it definitely wasn't the car, but that, you know, that was a big thing. Wasn't the next big
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Um, And then the Vision Pro, which was a big thing, turned
⏹️ ▶️ John out not to be the next big thing. But he's always like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John these big bets. And then the times when he didn't, where it's like, we'll just make some kind of wireless earbud,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. That wireless earbud turned out to be a huge business. And he just side-doored it. Like no
⏹️ ▶️ John one even thought like, oh, this is the next big thing. But honestly, it kind of was the next big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods changed the world a lot more than the Apple Car and the Vision Pro did. But like no one
⏹️ ▶️ John was paying attention to that one. So I'm hoping Ternus is thinking we need
⏹️ ▶️ John to do more things like the AirPods. You know, not a big product. No one's going to put it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John cover of Time magazine. But actually, if it's successful, it'll be life-changing for a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. This is from a different post in the beginning of October. Also, German.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is quite a bit for me to read, so buckle up. During early conversations about taking the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ Casey role, Ternus questioned whether he was up to the challenge. I'm not you, Ternus told Cook. You do so many amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. Cook, in his characteristically deadpan tone, replied, I know you're not me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey His point was that Turnis needed to be himself. Aside, how do you hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? How do you hear this? Presumably, this conversation was just the two of them. How does Gurman know that
⏹️ ▶️ John It's obviously retold game of telephone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can't you totally
⏹️ ▶️ John hear Tim Cook doing his
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook has his – not his inside voice, but he has – Tim Cook has the voice that he talks to the public
⏹️ ▶️ John with, and then he has the voice that we hear tales of him talking internally in the company with. And I know you're
⏹️ ▶️ John not me. I see him saying with a totally unsmiling face in his internal company voice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah. In recounting the story to employees, I guess there it is, Turnis describes it as a turning point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What Cook said, what Cook said that, quote, has really resonated and stuck with me, quote, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he spent his time as CEO where he added, quote, the most value for Apple, Ternus said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I need to spend my time where I can add the most value for Apple. That idea, he said, has given Ternus the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freedom to approach the role differently. There will be differences in where we spend our time, but the mission,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the goals are the same. Ternus is largely leaving the company's financial operations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Chief Financial Officer Kevin Parekh and its supply chain to Chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Operating Officer Sabit Khan. Instead, Turnis is spending considerable time with Chief Hardware Officer Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shruji and Hardware Engineering Leader Tom Mareb, remaining deeply involved in product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering. But I'm told he is also devoting substantial attention to another area that has long lacked a single overarching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leader, design. Ternus already had some involvement with the design studio as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple's head of hardware engineering, given the close coordination required between the two functions. Since becoming CEO,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey however, he has immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. Several people familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the department said he works hands-on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiple times in a single day. One of Ternus' first priorities was to restore the design studio standing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within the company. The group had lost numerous employees to Ives firm, Love From, as well as OpenAI's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware team and other companies. That contributed to its diminished influence and credibility within Apple. The departures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forced the company to promote junior designers and hire extensively from the outside to replenish the team's ranks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Many people inside and close to the company believed it should recruit an outside chief design officer to oversee the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey organization, but I'm told no such search is underway. Apple instead made a significant effort during the launch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the iPhone Duo to portray Molly Anderson and Dai's successor Steve LeMay as its design leaders. Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey posed with Anderson in the new phone, while Anderson and LeMay helped introduce the device in a joint
⏹️ ▶️ John So at the time this was written, we hadn't yet had Ternus' first earning call, but on the first earning call,
⏹️ ▶️ John you saw an embodiment of the first part of the thing you just read, which is, you know, Tim Cook was
⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying, look, I spent my time on these particular things because that's my skill set. You should spend
⏹️ ▶️ John your time on the things that fit your skill set. And so Tim Cook was the operations guy, and
⏹️ ▶️ John he would talk about operations stuff on the earnings calls. And he knew it backwards and forwards. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this was his area of expertise. This is what he did as a job before he was CEO. And so there he was on
⏹️ ▶️ John the calls and he would talk about all this stuff. Turns out on the earning call brought on his CFO and
⏹️ ▶️ John a COO and just deferred to them and they answered all those questions because that's not his deal. That's not his
⏹️ ▶️ John area. Gruber was pointing out in his site that when Jobs was CEO, he didn't even show up for most of the earning calls because it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that's not my deal. Talk to the CFO. They'll explain stuff. He just showed up when he felt like he had something to say. Maybe Turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John feels like he needs to be there again like the, oh, there's no CEO. It's just Apple gliding along smoothly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook was on all the earnings calls. I'll be on all the earnings calls. But honestly, he doesn't really need to. He has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John on this one because this is his first one. Obviously, you got to show up or whatever. Like, I get that. Like, if he's
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to defer to the CFO and COO to answer all the questions anyway, after he's, after his like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John welcome, I'm the new CEO whatever, like maybe after the first year or so, he can just not show up for them
⏹️ ▶️ John because that's, you know, that's not his strength. That's not, he's not going to be in there like saying, let me tell you how
⏹️ ▶️ John you should manage your inventory or write contracts with suppliers. That's not his thing. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the, the, uh you know, with Turnus retelling, again, who knows when he's, this is third hand
⏹️ ▶️ John like Turnus says that he talked to Cook and said this. And we heard what Turnus said from an employee who
⏹️ ▶️ John told German who, you know, again, game of telephone. But he's basically explaining, Um, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I'm not going to beat Tim in terms of where I spend my time, but I'll spend my time in other areas. And the second part of this
⏹️ ▶️ John story is Gurman says, guess where he's spending his time? He loves the design studio. Just like Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John used to go down there and play with stuff. He's down there all the time. And that makes sense because he was the hardware head of hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I'm sure like I said, he was working with them on designs of the hardware all the time. And that's where he's choosing
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend his time. And when I read this, I'm like, all right, you know, like maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of his strengths. It's part of his area of expertise. He probably has a good relationship with Johnny Seruji.
⏹️ ▶️ John He's trying to rebuild the design team. That makes sense. These are all, again, if he was to give a speech about
⏹️ ▶️ John his vision for Apple, he would be saying, I'm going to rebuild the stature of the design team because
⏹️ ▶️ John we've had a lot of people hired away to love from an open A. Like it's all true. We know it's true. He's not making that speech.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just hear about it through rumors, but that seems like a very sensible thing to do. But when I look at
⏹️ ▶️ John this whole big paragraph, I'm like, all right, you know, this makes sense. But I think of, I immediately think
⏹️ ▶️ John of something that Marco already mentioned because it's probably already in his mind. And what I think about is,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, John, you know there's another part of products that Apple sells
⏹️ ▶️ John that is really in need of some attention, and it's called software.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, he was the head of hardware. And hardware is great and continues to be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he should work with the industrial design team and work on new, great hardware. Great. Thumbs up. It's your
⏹️ ▶️ John strength. You've already been doing a good job at it. Go where your strength is. But every single
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those hardware products has software on it. And the software needs some
⏹️ ▶️ John help in many different ways. The software interface, the software reliability, just the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that the software does, choices about the software. And I get that's maybe not his strength.
⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the things that I would expect from the fictional never to be given speech about my vision for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John as the new CEO would be, what is your vision for hardware software integration
⏹️ ▶️ John and where the software should go? Not that software is out to sea or in a terrible situation, but most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things these days I have complaints about Apple about are about software. And it reminds me of
⏹️ ▶️ John when Johnny Ive was put in charge of everything. And he was at the time considered to be great
⏹️ ▶️ John at hardware, although he got worse at that when his worst instincts kicked in. But he didn't know a damn thing about software
⏹️ ▶️ John and made some dumb decisions. And I didn't like it when he was in charge of software. Alan Dye,
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible decisions, made bad software. Dye's gone. Ive is gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John New hardware guy comes in. I've never even seen him mention software. I'm not sure if he knows his products run software.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's so important to the experience. He just assumes that we'll automatically be there and someone else will worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, that is a key thing. And, you know, everyone loves Steve LeMay. And, you know, we don't know anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about him other than what he's done. It seems like he's improved macOS. So thumbs up on that. But like, like LeMay kind of the software
⏹️ ▶️ John one and Molly Anderson's kind of the hardware one. I don't know how they're splitting up the duties there or whatever, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to see something about how Turner's recognizes that software is an important part of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple products and that it's in a bad spot right now and needs help. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, an acknowledgement, like, do you know what's wrong with Apple software now? Do you know how software is
⏹️ ▶️ John making the hardware look bad? Like Marco just gone talking about Siri AI and all that stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you have incredibly capable hardware, incredible hardware devices that are let down by substandard
⏹️ ▶️ John software. Do you just think, oh, the software is there and it's fine and I can give the talking points on it and say some, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about how wonderful it is and how much better it is and how, you know, he's saying all this stuff about Siri AI, but it's like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no, man, it's just not, it's not good. Like, I don't expect him to know like the intricacies of like good user interface
⏹️ ▶️ John design and what's wrong with macOS and the stupid rounded corners and all that other stuff or whatever. But like even just something as simple as
⏹️ ▶️ John your most important product and your headlining feature, Siri AI, it's not good enough. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John should be a fire under your butt. And I don't see a single thing about it in any of these stories. It's like, I'm going to concentrate on design.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, Turnus. Design is going okay. Concentrate on software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, maybe design is going okay because he has been present in it, though. Like I, the thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when you're the CEO of Apple, you can't just focus on any of these things. It's like, yes, he,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is good that he is involving himself in design so far that seems to be pretty successful for the product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, he does also need to care about software a lot. Like that, I don't think, I don't think we can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him like say, oh, you know, you shouldn't focus on design because you should be focusing on software. No, he should be focusing on both.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to see him go where the fire is. You know what I mean? Like, you know, steady as she goes on the things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John going well. But like, again, this is just one story, so we don't know. But like like if you're saying, what's my vision
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple? You wouldn't spend a lot of time talking about the things that are already going well. You'd be like, I'm going to continue doing that stuff because it's great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here's where, like, again, with the new CEO comes in, here's where the problem is. The old CEO, we kicked him out
⏹️ ▶️ John because we had a problem with X. And now I'm going to come in and I'm going to fix it. Let's say you're a car maker and your cars are unreliable. You're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John reliability is job number one. You're not saying you're not going to make, you know, cool sports cars or
⏹️ ▶️ John you're not going to make the Corvette anymore. It's like Corvette's going great, but like reliability is a problem. A new CEO comes in. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make our cars more reliable, right? Because that's where the problem is. It's not like he's going to personally do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't expect him to personally design the software, but he's like, I'm going to rebuild the industrial design team and I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do this. Because he's directing the company. His vision for the company should
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, don't squeeze more out of the app store, make developers happier and fix the software.
⏹️ ▶️ John But instead, it's like, I just I just really want to get more into industrial design. Like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe this is, maybe I'm missing it and this is really just a story about he's going to spend his time, but I really want to see him
⏹️ ▶️ John say, I recognize where I see the fire. I see where the fire is and I'm going to direct
⏹️ ▶️ John the company to put water in that direction while I go over here and play with the industrial design team. That's fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, uh, this is yet more from early September from Gurman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As part of the transition, Cook is moving out of his office in Section 7 of Apple Park and handing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the space over to the new CEO. That means Ternus is moving into the executive suite for the first time. Before being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey named CEO, he worked alongside the hardware engineering organization in an office away from Apple Center of Power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Software Chief Craig Federighi, another longtime holdout from the executive wing, remains with his team elsewhere at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Park. Tim Cook is getting a new office at Apple's campus, but the biggest indicator that Cook will remain heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey involved is his giant new pay package, which has raised eyebrows among Apple leaders. For the next year, Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will get a base salary of $2 million. That's down from the $3 million he had as CEO, a salary that Ternus now receives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the $2 million is still twice the typical base salary of senior vice presidents and members of the C-suite. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms of restricted stock units for 2027, Ternus was given a target of $55 million on top of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey salary and unspecified bonus, while Cook gets $45 million. These
⏹️ ▶️ Casey numbers will fluctuate based on how Apple's share price performs, but Ternus' compensation likely won't be far off from Cook's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay in recent years as CEO. Cook's new package, though, was highly unusual for a chairman. Art Levinson,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who was non-executive chairman before Cook took the executive version of the role, was paid less than $560,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the company last year. Man, he got played.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but see, here's the thing. If Tim Cook is still having to deal with Donald
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xi Jinping, it's worth it. Like, keep… Keep Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the rest of the company isolated as much as possible from all of these awful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world leaders that Tim Cook has to deal with. Fine. It's worth the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I do feel like this is kind of a, again, a situation that we didn't experience with Steve Jobs because
⏹️ ▶️ John he died. But like, if you are the CEO of Apple for a long period of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple is successful during those times, you attain a certain level of celebrity. Certainly Steve Jobs had
⏹️ ▶️ John tremendous level, obviously, of celebrity. But even Tim Cook, the boring old guy, he was
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Apple for so long that he has a certain amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of cachet as as a minor celebrity in his own right. And, And
⏹️ ▶️ John practically speaking, he has knowledge and experience having run Apple all these years. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if he's not literally leaving the company, which he is not, and you want to keep him
⏹️ ▶️ John around, you can't be like, okay, now that you're not CEO anymore, you're going to get paid by a senior vice president. You're like, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim freaking Cook. If you want me to stay at the company, you're going to pay me like Tim freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook, especially as Mark, especially if I have to do the same BS I was doing before and deal with all the politics
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. Cause, you know, that's a thing that, you know, whatever, whatever. Like he's been doing it and
⏹️ ▶️ John he's, you know, apparently not going to make Ternus do it. And Ternus is probably ill suited to it and whatever. Like it's
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible and we all hate it. But like, if he's going to be there doing that, if you want to keep him around, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay him like this. Now, with Ternus moving to like the big CEO suite thing, like it's
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting that both he and Federighi were like, you know, we're men of the people. We don't go in
⏹️ ▶️ John our fancy offices. I hang out with the rank and file people and stuff like that. And you might think that's
⏹️ ▶️ John like an act or whatever, but like a lot of CEOs do this. Like I don't have a big executive
⏹️ ▶️ John suite. I'm down there in the cubicles alongside with the workers. But my
⏹️ ▶️ John read on Federighi is that's just the kind of person he is. Like it's not an act. You know like you don't do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John you've been doing this act for 20 years. Like it's not an act. That's who he is as a person. He wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to be down there with the rank and file people, getting things done, nerding out, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff. He is still the big, big wig executive and everything, but he wants to do that. And Turnus apparently was like
⏹️ ▶️ John that too. He wanted to be with the hardware team. So I do wonder if Turnus is like, uh i gotta move into the fancy CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John suite because it's expected of me because I'm the CEO of the one of the biggest companies in the world. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John can't be in a cubicle with the team or whatever. They don't even have cubicles, whatever. The weird open seating they have, I have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in the CEO thing. But then Tim Cook gets his own little minor CEO wing because they're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I'm not leaving. They gave me a big pay package and I'm still here to ride this sucker out,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably until Trump is gone, or who knows, maybe even after that. And this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing does make me think about what is the dynamic in the relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I think it's probably healthy based on Ternus' retelling of that story of like, look, Tim Cook doesn't want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this. You know, He left of his own accord. No one forced Tim Cook out. He decided when he wanted to leave.
⏹️ ▶️ John He left on his own terms. Presumably he is doing what he has decided he's going to do. And he wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to hand it over to Ternus. He wants Ternus to be successful. He doesn't want to do everything. He's like, Turnus, you do what you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. You're not me. Play to your strengths. I'll be over here in my supporting role until I feel like not doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. And in the meantime, I don't imagine Tim Cook, you know, coming
⏹️ ▶️ John to meetings and putting his oar in and being like, oh, you know, what about this? What about this, Turnus?
⏹️ ▶️ John What about this? Like, no, he shouldn't even be in the room. He's not like to the extent that they discuss, it'll be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, counseling or like, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have any advice for me? Or what do you think of that? But I'm picturing it mostly as a one-on-one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope that's the case because you can't be a new CEO. Again, I said this all this at the time trend transition. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can't be the new CEO with the old CEO like breathing down your neck, like looking over your shoulder, like you're trying to do your work.
⏹️ ▶️ John and Tim Cook is behind you going, oh, what do you think about dotting that I? What about crossing that T? It's like, Tim, could you
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to your wing? Like, I'm trying to be CEO. Like, I don't think that's happening, but it is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John that that like, that that's the, that's the situation they're in where they essentially end up, they mint
⏹️ ▶️ John celebrity CEOs. If you are a successful CEO of Apple, you will attain celebrity. You will attain knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John and power. And if you don't fully 100% leave or die, if you stay at the company,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you're like this celebrity in residence for however
⏹️ ▶️ John long you feel like being that. And apparently you also get paid $45 million in stock. Nice gig
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can get it, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don't know. I remain hopeful about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having Ternus at the helm. I think there's certainly plenty of things to worry about. We would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least slightly remiss to not mention the absolutely astonishing election
⏹️ ▶️ Casey results from yesterday as we record this. And here again, I remain hopeful. There's a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work to be done with regard to the absolutely ridiculous government that we currently have. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully, this is a positive sign and things will happen. Similarly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we have every reason to be hopeful right now with regard to Ternus and his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach to running Apple. And hopefully it will continue to get better and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. But there's a lot of work to be done. And we'll see if Ternus and everyone else at Apple does it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know. I think there's a lot we could be pessimistic about in both cases. But I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently and personally really, really, really hopeful and enthusiastic in both,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both with regard to fixing our absolutely broken government and fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a occasionally broken Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was a little bit more hopeful before I learned about the lower rounded corners on the new MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my gosh, Josh. Because that was
⏹️ ▶️ John Ternus. Like he was head of hardware when that product was designed and implemented. And And this is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the blind spot that I'm afraid he has, which is that he doesn't know what good you know, design is when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to like the operation of not, not just like as a physical object and a beautiful piece of sculpture and like
⏹️ ▶️ John the circuitry and everything, but just that like that you should never do this. This is a bad, dumb decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the same way all the bad, dumb decisions in Tahoe, like like Alan Dye had to go, or in my opinion, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that he just made bad decisions and made bad software. This is a bad hardware decision and it was done under his watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, he should know that's bad. He should know it's bad and he should fix it. But it's like, it's not like someone else's
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. He, he, that, he owns that. He was head of hardware when that product was designed and implemented. No one else was forcing him
⏹️ ▶️ John to make those damn rounded corners at the bottom. He did it himself. I know I'm attaching way too much to that, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey exactly what my
⏹️ ▶️ John fear is. It's exactly what my fear is. is like, this is the exact blind spot. And, And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it annoys me so much is this has historically been a traditional strength of Apple, that they know what
⏹️ ▶️ John good design is. And, And we talk, you know, it's the reason he's CEO is because they do so well
⏹️ ▶️ John with the hardware as hardware objects and as implementations like the low power
⏹️ ▶️ John SOCs with amazing, you know, performance, incredible reliability. Every year they make a
⏹️ ▶️ John really good iPhone and they ship millions and millions of them and they're good products year after year. It's like, it's amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But there's more to the products than the hardware. And this is, this is my main concern. And at this point, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to go on except for bad decisions that were made under when Tim Cook was CEO. I'm not going to blame Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John for the rounded corners. I'm mostly blaming Ternus. But But now we have things to watch because like I said at the
⏹️ ▶️ John top of this, we do not get and never will get that speech of Ternus's bold new vision for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John All we can do is just watch what the company does over the next several years and then
⏹️ ▶️ John back solve. But I thought this set of rumors about so what supposedly people are
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking inside Apple was a, it's all we get. And so it was least worth discussion. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we can, I'm sure we will revisit this after Ternus' first full year or maybe his second
⏹️ ▶️ John full year. I'm willing to give him a lot of runway to figure it out and to transition and to fully take on this
⏹️ ▶️ John new stuff and maybe to wait for Tim Cook to leave in a couple of years. But I do think he has his
⏹️ ▶️ John work cut out for him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I am encouraged because it seems like he is engaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with products already within the company so much more than Tim Cook did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know, I should be
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yes. That Tim Cook didn't engage at that level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's true because when he did engage, it was terrible. But and look, Tim Cook, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for much of Tim Cook's reign, I guess, he was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the company needed. Like he was really good at stabilizing things and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scaling things and making everything just flow better and work better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way more profitable. And he was very good at a lot of that stuff. I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company needs now, after a pretty long time of that, is a product-engaged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person, like a product-engaged leader. And from everything we've seen so far, Turnus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very engaged with the products. Like Tim Cook, I don't know if he ever used a computer, but Turnus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously loves technology in a way that Tim Cook, I don't know that we ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw that from him. You know, I think Tim Cook liked optimizing the systems around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him and doing his work and doing a good job of the things he cared about. It just doesn't seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers were something he really cared that much about. Whereas Turnus, that's very clearly not the case. Turnus very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly loves computers, loves Apple's products, loves phones. Like He's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really into that stuff. And I think he's, you know, he's in the same way that Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had downsides, so will Turnus. But for this era of Apple, I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really need is a product CEO. And it does look like they finally have that
⏹️ ▶️ John When you say that, though, I think product CEO and I think hardware product CEO, because I wonder if when I see him visiting
⏹️ ▶️ John products, I wonder if the screens are turned on at all. And like the thing, this German article gets into this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John for the stuff that he is not good at, like the Tim Cook stuff, he's got the COO. He's
⏹️ ▶️ John got the CFO. Those people were there under Tim Cook. Like I feel like that's covered. Like those
⏹️ ▶️ John people were surely guiding those departments even when Tim Cook was CEO. And so I have confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John that they know what they're doing and can continue Apple's historical
⏹️ ▶️ John strength in their supply chain management operations and manufacturing millions of things. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the topic of design, which was touched on, there is a leadership void there that is
⏹️ ▶️ John being filled by LeMay and Molly Anderson. So I see like there's some hope there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the software topic, leadership hasn't changed. Federighi is still there. And whatever problems
⏹️ ▶️ John existed under Tim Cook, Turnus isn't addressing it, doesn't have the
⏹️ ▶️ John skill set, and isn't changing anything about it. So I don't have confidence that that is going to get any better,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though he's the new CEO. Like that's why I keep calling out the gap because I'm not worried about operations because Turnus
⏹️ ▶️ John is in operations. I'm not worried about hardware because Turnus isn't in charge of hardware anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I'm less worried about design because I feel like there's already been a little bit of a turnaround there with the new leadership. And I'm not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this is all Federighi's fault. Maybe it's the case that Federighi was being told to do
⏹️ ▶️ John things with priorities that you know, tied his hands behind his back and made him ship things before they were ready or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, but this is, this is a, this is the thing I'm going to be watching. I'm Maybe I'm more,
⏹️ ▶️ John now that I've talked about this, maybe I'm more worried about this in the App Store thing. Cause honestly, like we're all being squeezed so much in the app store already. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John How much worse can it get? But the software can definitely get a lot worse. So I'm watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I think it is it is not inconspicuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Craig Federighi has not been promoted to a higher title.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Where can he go from where he
⏹️ ▶️ John is? He's the head of all software. He's not going to be CEO, so that's it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He wasn't made chief anything, though. There's now like a chief of hardware, and there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no chief of software. Well, the chief of hardware is a keep Suruji at Apple title. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't… It's hard to say there's any kind of confidence,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just, if you like kind of read the tea leaves a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Craig Federighi era is near its end. I don't know how soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I'd be shocked if he was still in his role in four years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't agree with that at all. Somebody remind us. Somebody take that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Somebody put in a reminder. Why don't you
⏹️ ▶️ John write it down the calendar because I'm not willing to bet on that? But here's the thing about Federighi, His strengths have he's
⏹️ ▶️ John never been the user interface guy. Like he's a software guy in the sense of like the nitty-gritty
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of software. And my impression is that to the extent that he has failed at
⏹️ ▶️ John low level software stuff, it has been mostly forces outside his own control in terms of when things
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be shipped and, you know, bad decisions made. Like, you know, the whole AI thing can't pin on him
⏹️ ▶️ John because Tim Cook hired the, what's his name from Google and tasked him with
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this stuff and took it all away from Federighi and said, we've hired a Google guy and he's going to do it all. And don't you worry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Federighi had to come in and clean up the mess later. And so I don't blame him for that. Like, I know a lot of people blame Federigi for
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but I never picture him as like, oh, I know what user interfaces should look like. And the problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ John who has had that job? When I've had it, it was bad because he was bad at software. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John Dai had it and it was bad because he was bad at software. And now LeMay's got it. And maybe that's the solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it's just like, I don't, you know, when Steve Jobs was there, he was
⏹️ ▶️ John it basically. He, you know, and he made bad decisions too, but at least he had good taste. And we have like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know what the gap is. Like, there's never been a celebrity named C-level executive who we
⏹️ ▶️ John can say that person is responsible for the past few decades of Apple software being good. because honestly, of the past
⏹️ ▶️ John few decades, Apple software has not been hot. It's not been that good,
⏹️ ▶️ John The the heyday of how great it was and how, you know, and and to be fair, the software and the duo was
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. So talent still exists for doing that. Like, you know, again, within
⏹️ ▶️ John the constraints of the hardware, which is a whole other thing, but like, I don't think anyone says, hey, could you think of a better way
⏹️ ▶️ John to design the software that is on the duo given that you can't change the physical form factor? I think they knocked it out of the park.
⏹️ ▶️ John So talent still exists for that, but there's not, there's not a C-level executive name who will like
⏹️ ▶️ John point to that person and say, they're why Apple software is amazing because it's not amazing and there is no person
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. And I just hope, I mean, maybe it'll be Steve LeMay someday or whatever, but like it's not Federigi. It's not
⏹️ ▶️ John Turnus. And it definitely wasn't Ive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, just looking at apple.com slash leadership, the very top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tier is Turnus, CEO, Eddie Q, senior vice president, Craig federighi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey president. josh Jaws, senior vice president. Yeah, uh jennifer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news said senior vice president. Dear Joe Bryan, senior vice president. The only chiefs are CFO,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey COO, and suruji does have hardware officer. But I concur with John on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. That was, we've got to give him throw him a bone, otherwise he's going to bounce. And I don't think federighi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in need of that kind of a, I don't know what word I'm looking for, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John he doesn't want it.
⏹️ ▶️ John He wants to have his desk with everybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. He can't
⏹️ ▶️ John be promoted unless he becomes CEO, and that didn't happen. So this is it for him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn't agree more. And I don't think he's upset by that personally. Like I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no way of knowing, but the vibe I get, especially talking to the handful of people I know in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and in software at Apple, I don't get the vibe that he is like clawing his way into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chief software, you know, chief software officer or what have you. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think from everything I can tell, he's pretty content where he is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he's such a nerd's nerd and he's not like he has he doesn't have delusions of grandeur
⏹️ ▶️ John that he has the greater vision for Apple user interface across all its products. Like that's not his thing at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so and it needs to be somebody's thing, but it's never been his. And we can blame him for like unreliability of
⏹️ ▶️ John the software that shipped and stuff like that and bugs that don't get fixed. But I don't blame him for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't blame him for Tahoe, man. Like it's not on him. I We don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ John From the outside, it's hard to know who's responsible. We just know the products they ship, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe my impression of him is wrong. Who knows? Maybe there I know we, the reason I bring this up is there are a lot of Federighi
⏹️ ▶️ John detractors out there and they all write to us and say, why don't you say how bad Federighi is? And for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's because I don't actually think he's bad. He's just narrowly focused and limited.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think he knows that he's narrowly focused and limited. And I don't think it's his job to
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure Apple's user interface is good across the whole company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Claude, Tailscale, and Granola.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we also get discounts on merchandise as members. So if you go to atp.fm slash store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really want to do that like now. Anyway, this week on overtime, we'll be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some fun fan-made tools for ATP and our listeners. Join to listen, atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thank you, everybody, so much, and we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco, Armen, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-Syracuse. Accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Living with the Duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have two iPhone duos now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have a quad. now i just i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey put them next to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh No, it's the it's the iphone ultra um i I was able to snag a right-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. I got the 256 uh today. So I have returned the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two terabyte monster um And I have finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved into it as my phone. like I didn't want to do that with the other one because I'm like, I really want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return this. while I still can, if I can save 1200 uh 1400 after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tax i think but anyway um so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I finally moved into it as my phone. And i I only have a few hours of using it as my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. I think I might hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but I i want to give it some time. how How are you with yours so far after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more time, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think everything I said last week sticks. I don't, I wouldn't say I've had really many epiphanies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than I would like to reiterate that I was devastated to lose Face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it's been fine. Like, I would still prefer Face ID, but it's been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it's been fine with Apple Watch Unlock. It's been, or it's been even good with Apple Watch Unlock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With just Touch ID, it's been fine. But I always have an Apple Watch on, so it's not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really been an issue. The one thing that is really starting to drive me nuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not enough that I plan to switch back to my 17 Pro as my daily driver, but it's driving me nuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cameras. The cameras are legitimately not great. And I don't understand how anyone survived with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPhone air. I really don't. And i mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also true. Um, I desperately miss the eight X. like I was at Declan's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey football practice this this evening. And I would have loved to have been able to zoom more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than two X Would have been great, but I can't. Um, I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really am having fun with this, though. I really enjoy it. I do not feel the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outer screen is a complete waste like so many people seem to. um, I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flipping back and forth between in and out, but I would but I would say easily half, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as three quarters of my use of the phone is on the outer screen. uh, So far, I really like it. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to, I want to say it was Connected, where um, Mike and Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were talking about using their duos and how they felt it was extremely conspicuous. And they were like, I'm putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey words in their mouth, but the takeaway I had was that they were like uncomfortable or embarrassed to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, particularly in like open mode. And I, I do not care. I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care at all. Like I was way more uh, nervous about using AirPods when they were brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I am using this. Like I do not care. And nobody seems to very much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care either. I don't know if that's because I don't live in a big metropolitan area or or maybe people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people I'm around all know I'm a freaking dork, but one way or another, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I haven't had any of the issues with that, with regard to like embarrassment or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or maybe I'm just getting older and more comfortable in my in my own skin. Who knows? Um, But in any case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plan to stick with this as my daily driver. However, I think there are definitely going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be times, for example, I don't know, if I go to a concert sometime this month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one right out of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom, Uh, there's going to be times that I will probably dual wield and I will probably bring both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the duo for the camera, for excuse me, for the phone bits, and because that's the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one with like a cellular connection. But I, my current thinking is I will also bring my 17 Pro for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purposes of using the camera. I don't plan to do that generally speaking, but in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, where I won't have Erin next to me, where I can just steal her phone, that is probably going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think, I mean, again, just trying it for a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I really don't like Touch ID, and I think I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't like the way it dynamics, like the pocket dynamics of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn't bother me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, I'm kind of hating the pocket dynamics, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will see. I want to try to live with it for at least a few days before before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I give up. I mean, I'm keeping it regardless because it is a very important test device for me now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do also, I would feel that embarrassment factor. Like, like I don't think I'm going to want to open it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for a little while in public until, you know, give it like a few weeks so that most people have already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen them around. you know, like That's going to be a short-lived problem, but it is in the short term,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the very short term, I think it is going to affect me a little bit. But I think ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I don't, I don't think I'm going to stick with it. But I am very glad to be trying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing is like the app situation really is still as bad as everyone says. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, you know, As I was setting up apps on the new phone today, I'm like installing like, you know, like the app for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my car and you know, the app for like my, like the, the, the train app for the Long Island Railroad and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, it's none of those apps are updated. None of them. They all show in like the, the little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, floating black box in the middle of the screen. Like, It's going to be a while before those things are updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that's only really bad when you're on the inner screen, right? When you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outer screen, it's mostly fine. And the other thing I would say, to go back just a half step,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ask of you, which I have no leverage, and so you can completely ignore me, and that's perfectly reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But my ask of you is, I would say give it at least a week, preferably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two weeks of being your carry phone. And I don't have a calendar in front of me, and I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have travel coming up roughly in that timeframe. So I wouldn't fault you if you didn't want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use this while you travel, although I would also argue it might be the perfect time to bring it, but that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John neither here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor there. But I would say give it at least one full week and preferably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two full weeks so you can really properly live with it for a while and see what you think more than just a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. Because I think if you get through a whole week, my understanding of your weeks is that by and large, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly repeatable, fairly understandable. That's not the word I'm looking for, but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I'm driving at, right? Like if you go through a full week, I think you'll probably get 80% of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your like final answer. But I would argue, give it a second week. You know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treat yourself as having your own two-week return policy. Obviously, you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not literally returning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but before you return to the 17 or 18 or whatever you would be going back to, I would encourage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two weeks and I beg of you one week just to see what a full week with this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like. And then again, after a week, but at most two weeks, I think you're absolutely going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know one way or the other. And if the answer is screw this, that's totally reasonable. I could make an argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why the iPhone duo is a piece of crap and nobody should buy it. I currently am still completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enamored with it and amused by it, but I could make the argument either way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The very, very first day is probably the most uncomfortable time because it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I haven't really had a chance yet to love what it brings me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I haven't found anything that's like, oh my God, I love this on the inside screen with the exception of like, you know, running Fineliner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have thought also, like, you know, Fineliner, I have high hopes for this app and I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very proud of it and I'm very happy about it. It is not amazing on regular iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it really is an iPad and Duo app, like ideally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have thought like, I really probably should spend a lot of time with the Duo just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can really live the Fineliner lifestyle for a while and see like, does that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much can I lean into that? And how does that make the app better and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey everything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. yeah. Like I said, I think a week would probably be enough, but I think it would be better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you gave it two weeks. And even if you stop after a week, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encourage you to occasionally use this even as an accessory iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in cases where it could really shine. For example, going to like one of your town
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meetings with the extracurriculars you do over at the beach or bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I don't know, traveling somewhere. Maybe you don't have it as the phone that has cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially, and maybe you just like use the hotspot, but you treat it, you, you imagine it as your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only phone or something along those lines. I think I think that might be informative because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, in the case of like a town meeting or what have you, you could use you know, Fineliner, you could use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all these things. Another thing that I've found with the duo that I don't do often enough, but I'm trying to train myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to our Siri conversation, is going to up with two different apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's not the sort of thing that I would do all the time. And I haven't yet found an occasion where I want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, I forget what they call it, but the lock the two apps together thing where you tap on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann dividing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line between the two of them. But let me tell you, on the occasions I do want to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, oh, is it amazing? It's so nice. It's so incredibly nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, admittedly, I'm talking about five, maybe 10% of my usage of the phone, but golly, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wonderful when I do that? Um, So yeah, so much of this phone I'm still completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in love with and really enamored by, but absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, everything relating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to taking pictures kind of sucks. I hate that when you're using the inner screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a viewfinder, it's opposite what you would expect. And I think Gruber in particular has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, the orientation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because the camera sideways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So if you're holding this, the physical, if you're holding the device in landscape and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're using the camera, the image that you take with the camera is portrait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And from a technical perspective, I understand this, but I hate it. I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And then if you want to take a landscape photograph or video, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rotate the device to portrait. Additionally, while I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally get the idea behind using the device when it's open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to take a selfie, which I do not regularly with like family and friends, like say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we're going out to a meal or something, I've done this with you a handful of times, for goodness sake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Recently, even.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pizza. Always get the bigger pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Always get the bigger pizza. Um, When I do this, like first of all, the, the slide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to switch displays thing, I feel like it works sometimes, like annoyingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infrequently. Maybe that's user error. I don't know. But to switch from the like inner display to the outer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display is the view finder. I find it very rarely works the way it works the first time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then secondly, when you have the phone in um, it opened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and you're trying to look at the rear camera to get a nice selfie, I I'm trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this stupid viewfinder as we're talking and it's freaking impossible. It keeps like acknowledging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with haptics and then just not doing anything. It's very frustrating. But anyways, when you have this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giant slab open, I have yet to crack the code on the right way to hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my hands to not only not drop the giant slab, but perhaps even more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take the damn picture. And again, maybe this is user error. Maybe what I need to do is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grab the screen with my mitts, you know, and just not be so precious about it. But it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly frustrating. So here it is, arguably, this is the best possible way for me to take a selfie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to actually do so is very, very challenging. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything camera related on this phone is driving me up a wall. And that is a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm not trying to like fluff that off or like, I'm not trying to minimize that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than that, which admittedly, again, big deal. Other than that, though, it is an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device that I absolutely adore. And I'm really, really liking it. And I think, unquestionably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I'm going to stick with it for this year. The question that I haven't answered and I won't answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for another 11 months is, what do I do next year? Assuming there is a Duo two, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I do next year? I really and truly I'm not sure. Sitting here now, I think I'd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably stick with the with the folding phone, but I, I have no idea. Ask me again in a year.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the camera thing, like you mentioned that like you understand why it is that way. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the, with the camera hardware that ship with that thing, you have no choice but to
⏹️ ▶️ John be annoying in one of the two things, because either the camera looks wrong when it's closed or the camera looks wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John when it's open, because obviously when it's closed and you hold it in your hand, the camera is in one place and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you open it up and you rotate it. Now that, you know, like, so the solution is square sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John and you crop it, right? But they didn't do that. They have a rectangular sensor and they use the entire rectangular sensor and they need
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the entire rectangular sensor because already the phone, the camera is not that good or not as good as
⏹️ ▶️ John the 18 Pro camera. So you definitely don't want to crop out of that. But that's the only solution with
⏹️ ▶️ John this design, with these cameras in this position and the phone that folds this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only way you can make the camera not quote unquote look wrong in one either folded or
⏹️ ▶️ John unfolded mode is to have a square sensor and crop it as a in a different rectangle each time. And so maybe in
⏹️ ▶️ John the future, like thinking of you like next year, am I going to use the new folding phone? If they have a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor that's big enough to be square and they can crop it, all of a sudden that annoyance goes away. And presumably the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John is also better. If it has face ID, that would also make you happy. Like these are the things that people are going to be measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John with the, you know, the the Duo 2. What have they improved? Not just it's a new SOC, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, did they put a square sensor on the camera? Are the cameras better? Does it have face ID? And
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, with your embarrassment of opening the thing, I would say that like, definitely at least use the phone until
⏹️ ▶️ John you get over that because like, what the hell is the sense of having a holding phone if you're never going to open it up? Then you're just torturing yourself by having
⏹️ ▶️ John a weird, small, thick phone that you never open. Like that's the whole sale. And on that front, though,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think it's a slam dunk that will make you like it more because what I think about as someone who hasn't carried one of these is
⏹️ ▶️ John I always think about like setting aside the embarrassment, which I think you need to get over just to give it a fair shot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there is some, I don't know, it's like a
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, I don't know how big, some kind of hurdle that you have to overcome to decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it worth me opening the phone? How long, like it signals
⏹️ ▶️ John a longer investment in usage because it's not so fast that you can do it like a like a StarTAC
⏹️ ▶️ John Motorola, You know, it's not so fast that there's no cost to it. You are deciding,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably with two hands, to open the phone. And the idea is
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going to use it for some amount of time that it's worth me opening it and then closing it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And lots of things we do with our phones are like, oh, quick peek, doop, you know, like there's lots of these short interactions
⏹️ ▶️ John where it may be that you feel like, oh, I don't want to bother opening it. And I feel like when you open
⏹️ ▶️ John a folding phone, you're not committing to, but you're predicting
⏹️ ▶️ John that the thing you want to do with your phone is worth the opening and closing time for the advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get with the bigger screen. And that I think, once you get over the, you know, I don't want to open
⏹️ ▶️ John it, that is the determiner of whether you find the phone valuable is like, if every interaction
⏹️ ▶️ John you have, you just feel like, oh, I opened it and I closed it and I, and while it was open, I did something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, there was more overhead in the opening and closing than there was value in the
⏹️ ▶️ John half a second that I looked at the bigger screen. And that's going to make you open it less. And then if it does sort of degenerate
⏹️ ▶️ John down to like, now I'm just using a fat squat phone that I never open, not
⏹️ ▶️ John because I'm embarrassed to open it, but because I don't want to pay the cost of opening and closing
⏹️ ▶️ John unless I'm settling in to read a long article on the train or something. That I feel like is the thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John would be looking for as I was using this is like, how how does the return on investment work out in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of, is it worth, you know, to use sign, everything's a Seinfeld thing. Is this sponge worthy?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this, Is this interaction open the phone worthy? And obviously, if the things, if the apps haven't been updated
⏹️ ▶️ John by the phone, hell no, it's not worth it. Why would I open it up just so I could see the the uh the phone slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger with black, giant black spaces around it or whatever? But that I'll be interested to hear your updates
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. Obviously, Casey feels like he's already getting enough value out of it that he's, you know, it's, it's worth
⏹️ ▶️ John opening. Lots of things in his life are sponge worthy, but Marco, still up for grabs.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, young people don't even get this. is an ancient cultural references that are actually kind of lewd. But anyway,