John Gruber on AI Replacing iPhone in 10 Years, Google vs AI Search in Safari, and Siri at WWDC
Download MP3Your interior decorating tips have always been appreciated, double o seven. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Eddie q was in court this week saying in ten years, you might not even need an I iPhone and also could be replacing search with AI in Safari. Of course, all the App Store updates and Apple trying to retain control of linking out and developers paying commissions on their apps. And we're gonna get to why is You Know Who so bad?
Stephen Robles:Hey, Dingus. And we have a very special guest in today's episode as well. This episode is brought to you exclusively by you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me, my good friend, Jason Aitin. How's it going, Jason?
Jason Aten:It's great. Excited to be here. I'm excited I don't have to answer the movie quote.
Stephen Robles:That's right. Because our very special guest today is John Gruber from Daring Fireball in the Talk Show. John, thanks so much for joining us this week.
John Gruber:Well, I'm happy to be here, and I feel like I'm already stumped because I mean, obviously, it's a James Bond movie, but I don't know which one. I'm gonna I'm not even sure which actor. I'm gonna guess.
Stephen Robles:And so it's I'll give you that hint. M says the line. M says the line, your interior decorating tips have always been appreciated.
John Gruber:I don't know. I'm gonna guess maybe it's the Daniel Craig one when
Stephen Robles:Yes. Yes. Yes. Got the
John Gruber:new office that looks like the old office from the sixties and seventies, which would not Skyfall, but the next one.
Stephen Robles:No. You were Skyfall is actually it.
John Gruber:Okay.
Stephen Robles:You guessed it inadvertently. I think it's the scene when James shows up after everybody believed he was deceased, and he shows up in M's house or apartment or whatever. Ah. And she says the line. So
John Gruber:Oh, so different.
Stephen Robles:Think that
John Gruber:our Okay. Okay.
Stephen Robles:John, thanks so much for joining us. Of course, you being here, we're gonna talk a lot about what's going on with Siri and the App Store and things like that and Eddie Q's last statements. Real quick, we do have some five star shout outs when people leave us reviews. So j martin two thousand four from The USA, thanks for that. Let them cook, ironic name, from Germany, thanks for the five star review.
Stephen Robles:And j o three l d from The USA, thank you all for that. And one, one other question for you, John, and I promise this will be the last pop quiz. You have mentioned a, application or a program that you used to use in your publishing days. And, I've always wanted to mention that I have also used it. And it was one of my first jobs.
Stephen Robles:I was actually designing brochures, and I had never heard of this application before. And then I was introduced to it there at that job. But might you guess what page layout publication application might I be talking about?
John Gruber:QuarkXPress, clearly.
Stephen Robles:QuarkXPress. And that is the one I used. And mind you, I guess QuarkXPress is still around. It's still doing things. You can still get it 2025 version, but I used that in 2011, John, in my job.
John Gruber:For me, I've I mean, my my time in Quark well, mid nineties. It so it's a lot longer ago. I mean and then I used it through the February, but then just sort of did less and less and less print stuff. I used to because I knew it so well, I would use it instead of a word processor. I mean, everybody who kinda, if you really got into Quark.
John Gruber:So even if I had to write like a letter, I would just fire up QuarkXPress.
Stephen Robles:Use QuarkXPress. That's hilarious. Yeah. It took me a while to get used to it. I had never used something like it, but, you know, it had its it had its good points.
Stephen Robles:It had its tools. Let's get into Eddie q. Yesterday, Eddie q was actually in court testifying. This is during the Google remedies trial. And, of course, the court is trying to decide what to do with Google Chrome, maybe even the deal that Google has with Apple, the $20,000,000,000 a year.
Stephen Robles:And Eddie Q said some interesting statements that kind of shook Google's stock price and also said some things about the iPhone. Namely, he said you might not even need an iPhone ten years from now, as crazy as it sounds. That was a direct quote he said while he was testifying due to AI and the advancement there. He made the comparison to the iPod and saying how Apple killed that off because of the advancement in other technologies. So that was a wild statement.
Stephen Robles:I'll be curious our thoughts on that. But also that Apple is looking at adding AI search to Safari. So right now in the address bar, you know, you can search and that default is Google, and that's that $20,000,000,000 deal that it seems like ADQ might be trying to save. And upon that announcement of AI being in Safari, Google definitely took a hit yesterday because, obviously, that would be a big deal if somehow in Safari when someone searched, it was an AI search or using an AI tool like Perplexity rather than Google. And so yeah.
Stephen Robles:John, I'm curious. I mean, Eddie q being on the stand yesterday, is this to kind of save this $20,000,000,000 search deal that they have with Apple? Or what is he doing on the stand saying things like this?
John Gruber:A, I wish that we could watch. Right?
Stephen Robles:Because Eddie Absolutely.
John Gruber:Eddie is always entertaining. I I wish we could have seen Schiller when he was testifying in the Epic case too because I think listening to them or even just listening to them if it wasn't cameras. I would love to actually hear his testimony, but we only have the quotes to go by. And I think they were only reported by Bloomberg. I mean, it seems to me like when I flashed through Techmeme, it seemed like everybody was getting their quotes from Bloomberg sourcing of the quotes.
John Gruber:I
Stephen Robles:think the verge is in the courtroom.
John Gruber:Oh, okay. So maybe the verge has original courts too, but original quotes. But I think in this particular case, I mean, it's always helpful to tell the truth when you're under oath, but I do think I do think that if Apple has an agenda and I'm not saying that anybody well, now we can't say that anybody from Apple might ever be accused of perjuring themselves on a witness stand, but I certainly don't think Eddie q would. And that's not even what I'm hinting at. But when you you have an agenda and you're trying to, you know, comply with being under oath and answer questions that, you know, the questioner might have a different agenda and you're trying to squeeze your answers and what you can recall, right, which is the famous out when you're on the witness stand.
John Gruber:I don't remember. To you know, you're you're trying to steer in towards your agenda. They're trying to steer you towards their agenda, and you meet in the middle. But in this case, I think what he's saying, it's obviously true. Right?
John Gruber:It is kind of surprising to hear a very high level executive say you might not need an iPhone in ten years. But at some point in the future, you're not gonna need an iPhone. Right? I mean, are we going to be using iPhones in fifty years? I I mean, that would be flabbergasting to me.
John Gruber:I mean, to me, you know, we're not using computers that vaguely resemble our computers from fifty years ago. Maybe progress will slow, but it certainly seems like something, you know, AR glasses, AirPods that actually could do a ton of your compute for you, you know, in your ear. I don't there's all sorts of ways it could go that's not carrying a little book sized slab of glass in your pocket. I think ten years from now we probably will be using iPhones, but I think it's, you know, it that's the way tech goes. And it's definitely it's always been the case in these antitrust trust trial trials against tech companies in particular where the court system moves slow and they have a more historic view of the law and everything.
John Gruber:So it it nothing moves at the speed of tech in the court world. Right? And Microsoft back in the nineties, going back to the nineties again, made all sorts of arguments about that in their antitrust trial about Windows. And a lot of what they said, people oh, that's BS. A lot of it turned out to be true.
John Gruber:Right? Like, is still around, but Windows is no longer the majority share operating system people that people use. More people use iOS and Android, I think, worldwide than use Windows because phones are so much more popular than PCs. Certainly, Android.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah. For sure.
John Gruber:So, you know, it will you know, so I I think Q's agenda was to protect these payments to get them to not say you can't that get paying for default placement. I think that's probably going to be gone. But paying and maybe Safari switches to offer everybody around the world a choice screen for search engine and everybody will then choose Google and Google still everybody on the choice screen would still be on the hook to pay Apple traffic acquisition costs for the users who choose them and send search traffic to them. They wanna keep that money flowing. It's a you know, it's an enormous amount of money, and it's all profit.
John Gruber:Right? I mean, minus whatever it costs the engineering to keep Safari going in WebKit, which is not not nothing. But for $20,000,000,000, you gotta figure that's very high nineties profit margin.
Stephen Robles:Right. I I do wonder how many would actually choose Google in the future too if AI options were there, like Perplexity or ChatGPT. I know, Jason, you use ChatGPT search. I know there's a lot, but what were your thoughts to seeing these quotes from Eddie Q coming out?
Jason Aten:I feel like Eddie Q is doing a lot of mental gymnastics here to make a point, and it almost feels like the argument he's making would have been the argument that makes sense in the first part of this trial. Right? Because he's trying to make the case that AI is a competitor to search. Right? He's trying to say Google exists in a very competitive market.
Jason Aten:Therefore, these default placement deals and the traffic acquisition payments, you know, fit shouldn't be taken away. Right? That that because they are so because I think the context was you won't need an iPhone in ten years because AI is transforming this industry and that those kind of shifts are the types of things that create new levels of competition. And but at the same time, he also said on the stand that searches are down in Safari for the first time in, think, is it twenty two years? Like, literally, it's the first time we looked in last quarter and less people were searching in Safar in, yeah, in Safari.
Jason Aten:And so he's he's it's weird when you hear these quotes out of context because I don't think there's any scenario where Eddie q actually believes that in ten years that people won't be using iPhones. I certainly don't think that anyone higher up in that organization is hoping that that will be the case. Obviously, they're trying to prepare for that. Like, any good business is trying to prepare for the world when you're the most popular consumer product in history is no longer necessary. But I it's it's I think it's just weird to look behind the curtain.
Jason Aten:And like John said, we didn't get to hear what he like, the whole what was the question? Right? And what was the rest of the conversation?
John Gruber:Well and the other thing too, I'll just say, and I think Eddie's answer reeks of the confidence is that the senior people at Apple are very, very confident about Apple itself. And in Eddie's even if he's seriously imagining a world where everybody doesn't carry an iPhone in ten years or fifteen years or wherever that it is, what we're using is some other Apple device
Jason Aten:Yeah.
John Gruber:In his imagined world. That it's Apple that will figure out the thing. Because I think that's why he brought up the iPod, you know Right. And that it'll be Apple that does to the iPhone what Apple did to the iPod. They're not gonna sit around and let somebody else do it to them.
Stephen Robles:I was gonna ask you, John. I was looking at the earnings that came out after our last episode. And, course, six colors, Jason Snell always has a great breakdown. But the pie chart, of course, of where the profit comes from, where the revenue comes from, almost half iPhone, of course. And that services, 28%.
Stephen Robles:That Google deal for $20,000,000,000 a year is a significant portion of that, I think. Obviously, in app purchases also. Apple TV plus, you know, Apple doesn't break that down, but it's probably much smaller. Do you think does Apple need this $20,000,000,000 deal with Google? Is it just that it would be it's nice to have because it's free money?
Stephen Robles:What do you like, going forward, do does it matter if, you know, five years from now if it somehow goes away?
John Gruber:Well, I think it definitely matter. I mean, what I I did this math at one point. I don't know. You you have the screen in front of you. But what was their profit for last year?
John Gruber:I think it's the 20,000,000,000 from Google, if we just call it all profit, which has gotta be close
Stephen Robles:Right.
John Gruber:Is a surprising percentage of Apple's overall profit. I think it's, you know, like 20. I think they make, like, a hundred
Stephen Robles:Right.
John Gruber:Billion in profit. And so 20% of their profit comes from that deal, which is
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. Wild
John Gruber:because they have high margins across the line. You know, their their their their hardware famously has, you know, very high margins. They don't break them out anymore by product line. So presumably with their overall margins now, like, around 40%, their hardware's gotta still be around 30%. Right?
John Gruber:And that the all the services stuff has higher margins than than 40. That's 20% of your profit is a big deal. Do they need it? Well, you know, it's only 20% of their profit is the other way to look at it. I the thing I keep coming back to with this is I know that the The United States, the DOJ is saying that it that they're sort of like a perpetual machine here, like a flywheel.
John Gruber:Like, Google's the company that everybody knows for search and everybody uses for search. And they're they're the ones who who have the most efficient advertising engine for monetizing search. And so they do all the search. They make all the money from the ads for search, and so they have the money to pay Apple and Samsung and Firefox who I think are the three big ones. Apple's the biggest and then Samsung's next and Firefox is in third for these traffic acquisition costs.
John Gruber:And that upstarts can't even really get their foot in the door because they can't pay it, but I don't know. I don't know if that if it works like that though because it's not just, hey, we'll give you 20,000,000,000 for next year. The my understanding of the way these work is we'll pay you per search. So if if Eddie q is right and searches were down last quarter, that means Apple's money from the traffic acquisition deal is going to start to go down too. Right?
John Gruber:It's it's not just like, oh, we'll pay you $22,000,000,000 next year to make Google the default. And I guess they did. This came out in the court testimony that at some point over the years that they've negotiated this deal, it Google at Google's insistence, it has been in the contract that Google will be the default in Safari. But I don't think that needs to be in the deal. I think if it weren't, Apple would still make Google the default.
John Gruber:Right? It's what everybody expects. And if they change the default I mean, just think about this from, like, being a product manager at Safari. If they're like, okay, we're gonna make perplexity the new default search in Google. Does that mean they're gonna change the default search for every Safari user who's using Google right now?
John Gruber:Or or is there does does Safari have a memory in its preferences? I've never spelunked through the preferences file to see, did you ever change from Google to Bing and then back to Google and expressed an actual user intention to use Google, or are you just searching all your searches go to Google because you never changed it, which is surely the majority of users. Right? The majority of Safari users have probably never changed that setting. Right.
John Gruber:But would Apple actually change that under their feet after how many years? You know? A lot you know, there are Safari users who've been using it for twenty years, fifteen years on the iPhone.
Stephen Robles:And I know Jason, we just talked about this before we recorded, but, you know, there were rumors years ago that Apple was gonna do its own search engine. One could argue Spotlight tries to do that sometimes, you know, especially on your phone. If you swipe down on the home screen and search for something, it'll try to just give you results, or it'll send you to Wikipedia or whatever. And so I don't think that Apple would put another default without some kind of deal, like being perplexity as a default search engine. I don't think they would do that.
John Gruber:Well, I just wanna say the other thing I do know, I don't know how much, but I do know. I've asked, like, representatives at DuckDuckGo, and I forget who else I've asked. But everybody in that hard coded list of options in The US, it's like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Bing. There might be one more that I'm forgetting.
Stephen Robles:But Yahoo is Yahoo still there?
Jason Aten:Yeah. Yahoo
Stephen Robles:is still there. Everything.
John Gruber:How would how in the world did I forget Yahoo? But they all have traffic acquisition cost deals with Apple too. So if you pick if you're, like, a diehard Yahoo user and you switch your default in Safari to Yahoo,
Stephen Robles:Yahoo Yahoo Groups is my homepage, actually.
John Gruber:Yahoo does pay Apple for that. I just think that all of those other search engines combined don't add up too much. But if in theory, a gazillion users all switch to DuckDuckGo, then DuckDuckGo would make more money from ads and would have more money to pay Apple for traffic acquisition. You know? I I Right.
John Gruber:I I that is as a user, it is very frustrating. And I think one of the most indefensible, this is only for the money things that Apple does is Safari is the only major browser I know of. Maybe the only minor browser. I'm not sure there's another mass market regular web browser that does not let the user add their own custom search engines. There is no way in that list to say, you know, oh, choose from Bing, Google, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or add your own at the bottom.
John Gruber:Even Chrome lets you add your own custom search engine, is owned by Google, which is now being held as a monopolist. I think even Google and again, it's sort the same way that Eddie q, I think, is very confident that if we're not using iPhones in ten years, we're gonna be using some other new Apple product. I think Google was like, a, this would probably be a bad look for us in the future because, you know, we do have a monopoly on search to not allow this. And I think they were like, sure. How many people are are gonna switch from Google?
John Gruber:We know they wanna use Google.
Stephen Robles:You know? I'm Jason, I'm curious your thoughts in a second. And also, would you switch it to a ChatGPT search by default? Because I know you like using that. I just checked Brave browser settings.
Stephen Robles:And like you said, you cannot choose a search engine outside of what is hard coded in, but, you can use Quant. I've never heard of that. Q w a n t is apparently a choice, in Brave. But, you know, Jason and I have talked about Google search results, especially in the past year or so, and I've been increasingly disappointed by it. One, now I get an AI overview nine times out of 10 no matter what I search.
Stephen Robles:Sometimes it's okay. Sometimes I I prefer not and will scroll down. But Reddit, services answers all the time. Like, I like three out of five of the top hits whenever I do a Google search is Reddit. And I've used some AI tools and trying to increasingly use it because I just get better options.
Stephen Robles:I know, Jason, you were just asking questions about Phil Schiller earlier and getting better ones. Would you, Jason, would you switch your default from Google to something else?
Jason Aten:I mean, no. But I wait. But I want like, John what John was saying is interesting because I think about every time I open the Edge browser, it has accidentally switched to my default search back to Bing. Like, and it's like, can go back and change, and it's like, we're sorry. There was a problem.
Jason Aten:We had to reupdate your I'm like, the problem was I switched away from Bing. Like, let's just be honest about what's actually happening here. But, John, I'm curious. It seems like this Google search deal if I'm Google, I'm more than happy to, like, take that away, DOJ. Let me just throw this to you as a sacrificial because there's like you said, they're still gonna get all that traffic.
Jason Aten:People are still gonna use Google. That deal, I think, is way more important to Apple than it is to Google, which is why they said that EQ to talk about it. Like, please don't do that. Because Apple, like, it's really money that is a payment to not build a search engine. Essentially, that's what Google was doing.
Jason Aten:It's like, we're gonna give you this money. Because otherwise, doesn't make any sense how that works because Google like, if there's no default placement, there's no motivation for Google to pay for it because people will just make it the their own default anyway. So the the payment is really for Apple to not build the search engine. But we're kind and that was the whole reason that Apple originally hired John Jan Andrea. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, was he was ahead of Siri, and part of Siri was going to be to build out I mean, you you search Siri for things. Well, at least the precurrent version of Siri. You'd you'd get those little list of, like, here's some options on the web. Or if you do the pull down on your iPhone, some of those results are Siri search. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, the so they do have a search engine. Apple's so far behind in that that it's almost like, no. We we're at the point where we have to keep this $20,000,000,000 because we we are the only other company who would be capable of building a search engine to compete because we have the distribution, and they're so far behind. But if you're Google John, like, aren't you like, just take this. Don't make us get rid of Chrome.
Jason Aten:Just take these deals.
John Gruber:Maybe. Right? And that's sort of what I guess Eddie q and it didn't seem like it came up yesterday. Maybe he's back on the stand today. But part of the it's almost a perverse outcome if if the DOJ gets its way and Google's not allowed to pay for these deals period because they've been found to be an illegal monopolist.
John Gruber:So not just default, but they can't pay for traffic acquisition costs to Apple or Samsung or Firefox or anybody. Then what does Apple do? Do the I mean, then Apple's in the position of, well, do we still keep Google in this list? And like I said, all the other browsers in the list like Ecosia and DuckDuckGo, they pay Apple to be there per search, you know, by the usage. Is Apple going to keep Google there even though they don't make any money from it and they know most people are going to use it or do they take them out?
John Gruber:But that would be bizarre to Safari users, not only to change the default, but to remove Google as an option in Safari. That's kind of bananas. But then if they keep them there and the same overall, you know, 90% of Safari users or whatever keep using Google, then Google keeps the $20,000,000,000 that they would have paid Apple for the traffic acquisition cost. And Apple loses 20,000,000,000 in profit and Google gains 20,000,000,000 in profit. I mean and going back to Steven of what will users do if they're prompted with a choice screen.
John Gruber:I think we can you know, the EU has sort of run that experiment for us, and it doesn't seem to me like Google has lost any significant share of search in in in The EU where the major platforms like the gatekeeping ones, you know, under the DMA have to provide a choice screen of listing all the search engines. So, you know, I I think if they weren't allowed to pay for traffic acquisition costs, I don't know that they would lose share, certainly not in the near term, and then they would keep all the money. Right.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. You think do you
Jason Aten:think, John, like, is this the point where Apple's like, yeah. We have to build our own search product that we can use for our users? I mean, that's a lot more expensive than the free $20,000,000,000 a year, obviously. But, like, at some point, that that even if they get this Apple intelligence thing right, that's still the glaring hole in the middle of it. It's like you can't use this for this sort of thing.
John Gruber:I'm gonna guess no. And and I think reading between the lines, what Eddie q was saying yesterday is, hey. There's a bunch of big new upstarts and they'll just pay us instead. You know, perplexity or anthropic or again, could still be you know, he's talking about AI, but it could be Google AI instead of Google search, you know, that's in there. And these companies have lots of money and they're growing in popularity and, you know, they'll pay us instead.
John Gruber:I think the reason Apple probably isn't seriously thinking about doing its own search engine is that for a general web search engine, people expect to get all results. Right? Including for adult content, including for gambling, you know, you know, anything that Apple may not want to associate their brand with. And I think we can see it with the ChatGPT integration with Siri over the last year. You know?
John Gruber:And I've written about this. I'm sure everybody's sort of experienced, but I've written about it written in whole articles about how you can going through Siri and saying, hey, Dingus, ask ChatGPT to answer this question. And you get, that's not that great an answer. And then you go to the ChatGPT app and ask the exact same question and you get a much better answer. And it's like, well, how in the world when Siri is using ChatGPT, does it give you a clearly inferior answer that often takes longer than just asking ChatGPT directly?
John Gruber:And I think I'm pretty sure the answer is a well, there's two answers. At a technical level, Apple's not really just driving the ChatGPT app. They're using the a APIs from OpenAI. They're not really using ChatGPT. They're using OpenAI APIs, and that's a different interface than what ChatGPT itself exposes through its app.
John Gruber:But I think the main thing is that Apple is inserting itself in the middle there to sort of g and p g rate the content and the answers, you know, that make sure that the query isn't something Apple doesn't want its own product Siri to be involved with and make sure the answer from ChatGPT isn't something that Apple doesn't wanna put its own interface to present to the user. I don't think they wanna be involved in that. But web search is a thing where you, you know, you need and expect to get answers to any and all questions. So I kind of feel like Apple's looking at this as who will we partner with, not what will we build ourselves. But I don't know because maybe they'll they'll take that Tim Cook doctrine of we need to own and control the core technologies, you know, that are important to us.
John Gruber:Maybe they'll decide this is a core technology and we can't look look what happened when we trusted the partnership to Google. We lost the money through a court case that we we weren't even a defendant in.
Stephen Robles:Do have any last thoughts, Jason?
Jason Aten:Well, I do. Only because John just served it up so perfectly. You were supposed to ask him a question.
Stephen Robles:Oh, I know.
Jason Aten:And you just kinda you misquoted Tim Cook.
Stephen Robles:I felt bad. I was pop quizzing him so much at the beginning.
Jason Aten:The actual quote is to own and control the primary technology, hence the name of this podcast.
Stephen Robles:Yes. That is where we got it.
John Gruber:Ah. Ah. I didn't know that. Sorry.
Jason Aten:So no other thoughts about that, but thank you for serving that one up so nicely, John.
John Gruber:Yeah. Very nice. Serendipity. Oh.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. So speaking of maybe Apple losing money, let's go to the App Store and everything that's been going on there because Apple is fighting the contempt order, of course, that happened last week. And a bunch of apps are jumping on being able to link out from their app. And Apple is, of course, trying to stop all of that, which the judge was pretty ticked. I don't foresee it.
Stephen Robles:Well, we'll see what happens. But just to give a few examples, after the contempt order last week, Amazon now added a Get Book button in the iOS app. So now finally, you can actually buy, quote, unquote, buy a book in the Kindle app, at least through the web browser. Spotify added a button to sign up for their subscriptions in the iOS app. So all of this very like, just days after the court order actually went through.
Stephen Robles:And one of the ones that I mentioned last week, but I think Patreon with its iPhone app, which is a big deal again because that's lots of creators using a platform or direct patronage like we do through Memberful, but not having to have pay that cut is a big deal. And so I wanted to to go back to this mostly because, John, you've had obviously a very long history with Apple. And I I went through the contempt order to read some of the poll quotes, specifically of events between Phil Schiller and then Tim Cook, Luca Maestri, and Alex Roman. And we touched on it last week, and we mentioned it. But, you know, there was the internal discussion about the 27% commission doing that when someone clicks in an app but buys in the web that Apple is still collecting that 27% commission.
Stephen Robles:And I believe in the last dithering episode with you and Ben Thompson, I think even you admitted that 27% was a little ridiculous. And, Phil Schiller literally said that as well. And so if you look in the contempt order, it's like a hundred something pages. But you can just command f and just search for Phil Schiller, and you get a gold mine of quotes. And one of the quotes from the contempt order was, in an email, mister Schiller relayed that with respect to the proposal for a 27% commission for twenty four hours.
Stephen Robles:Phil Schiller said, quote, I have already explained my many issues with the commission concept and that clearly I am not on team commission fee. Direct from Phil Schiller. And then one other quote, this is from the contempt order. It says, as mister Schiller was not advocating for a commission and mister Maestri was fully advocating for the lucrative approach, mister Cook was the tiebreaker. So between Maestri, Schiller, Cook was the tiebreaker.
Stephen Robles:Commissions would be collected on a seven day window even if those subsequent purchases on a developer's website were made on a device other than the user's iPhone, which is wild. So I mentioned this last week. And, John, I'm just curious just if you were a fly on the wall, if you could pontificate maybe how this went. But it feels like to me, you had Luca Maestri and Alex Roman as the money guys pushing for this 27% commission. Tim Cook, he's CEO now.
Stephen Robles:But I guess in my mind, being the tiebreaker, as the contempt order says, it feels like he leaned money side. And the one maybe voice of reason was Phil Schiller. I'm curious. Obviously, you you probably know them on a personal level. But what what do you is Phil Schiller just have a better handle on where this would have been going?
Stephen Robles:Or is it just a a general care for developers and wanting to have the best setup for them. Like, what do you think happened in these weird interactions?
John Gruber:I go back to an email that came out, I think, in the first round of the epic Apple case, for 2021, and it was a Schiller email from back I'm gonna say, like, 2010 or or 2011 or so. And Schiller had proposed inside Apple that once the run rate Apple's take from the App Store, once it reached a billion annually, which I guess was already heading there around 2010, '20 '11, that once it hit a billion, maybe they should cap it there and then start lowering the commission rate. You know? Go to eighty five fifteen or or eighty twenty first. And then if it could still gets to a billion, you know, keep lowering it.
John Gruber:You know? That Apple would just make a billion dollars a year from the App Store and then lower the rate. And it's not that Phil Schiller is anti capitalist. Right? And it's not like Phil Schiller is you know, does does Phil Schiller think Apple should make a a hefty profit and have high revenues?
John Gruber:So, yeah, I think Phil Schiller definitely knows that. I think, you know, his decades leading their product marketing and probably, you know, being at the point of assigning the prices to their hardware products and stuff. He's he's on team profit if we're gonna pick teams within Apple. I just think though that Phil Schiller has always because he he still is. This is why I think he's running the App Store.
John Gruber:And but going back further, the developer relations team within Apple always eventually ran up the chain to Phil Schiller before it got to Steve Jobs. You know, that Schiller reported to Jobs, but the whole developer relations team reported to Schiller. You know, WWDC was always and still is a Phil Schiller production. And he he knows I think he's on team you know, again, I think picking teams. He's on team third party developer, and he knows that that is a virtuous circle for Apple that having developers who are successful and thriving and happy to be building software for Apple's products using Apple's proprietary APIs, you know, making iPhone apps that are very native iPhone apps and that take advantage of features that only exist on iOS or only exist on the Mac or, you know, use the you know, use iCloud syncing to make everything secure, to sort of lock everything so that, you know, when apps use iCloud for sync, the developer can't access the data.
John Gruber:And so users can trust that. Phil Schiller can use an app like that and know, hey. I'm using a third party app and I'm Phil Schiller, but I know it's using iCloud sync so I know they're not snooping in the data. And to keep that going, you want to keep developers happy and developers very, very clearly have grown increasingly unhappy developing for Apple's products over the years. And I think Schiller, not that he saw it coming, but I think he was, you know, thinking as far back as 2010 when it wasn't regulatory or antitrust pressure, but just this is the Apple way of doing this.
John Gruber:Let's keep these developers cheering and happy when they show up at WWDC, and one way to do that would be to lower the commission. And on this new proposal, I think it's I think Schiller just knew that it wasn't really you know, this 27% and track them across the web, they they knew that nobody was going to do it. Right? It wasn't that they thought they were going to collect 27% from purchases users made when they left apps and maybe even are using other devices. They just concocted a scheme that was so ridiculous that the rate was so high that the tracking requirements are so obtuse.
John Gruber:There were there was stuff in there where you had to open your your accounting books to Apple so they could account, you know, and double check that you're not, like, not booking
Stephen Robles:Cheating them.
John Gruber:Yeah. Cheating them.
Stephen Robles:The most profitable company in the world.
John Gruber:And wasn't there a report that just last week where somebody figured out that there were only, like, 34 apps in the whole App Store that ever used the link out policy? I mean, I know that sounds like a ridiculously low low number, but just anecdotally, have you guys ever run into one? I you know, I think the nature of our racket is we try more apps than typical users. Right? New apps, you get like an email from somebody like, hey.
John Gruber:I have a new app. And a lot of times, I'm like, hey. I'll at least try it. I try a lot of new apps. And, you know, I'm like, you know, most of them don't stick.
John Gruber:I have never seen an app use that link out feature. Never.
Stephen Robles:I don't know. I mean, I guess And so
John Gruber:I think that's and I think Gonzales Rogers Rogers, the judge, she more or less called them out on that. Not that this is ridiculous and you're taking too much money. She more or less called them out on you can cut you backwards engineered a scheme that you knew no one would use. Right.
Stephen Robles:And and, honestly, I think whole App Store thing, does Apple bring value by the App Store and making it easier for developers to distribute internationally, payments and all that kind of stuff? And and I'll just use an example as this podcast because we offer a paid membership directly through Apple Podcasts where we pay Apple a commission on that just like an app developer would. And we also offer it outside. Like, we you can literally we link out in the show notes in Apple Podcasts. You can click a button and go over to Memberful and sign up.
Stephen Robles:And for this podcast and previous shows that I've done that same setup, we have two times more people paying us directly through Apple Podcasts than we do for Memberful. And I think there is value there because that basically frictionless process of someone being able to give us money is well worth it. And it's a pain in the neck to have to upload subscriber audio to Apple Podcasts and manage this kind of like dual feed thing. They also strip out our chapters. And so but I deal with all that because they have two times more conversions and way more people can sign up.
Stephen Robles:And plus international is way easier. So there is value to the App Store. And it seems like, I don't know, like Apple doesn't want to compete there, and so they just make it a commission everywhere. But I think there there there's value, and they could compete if they really wanted to.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And, John, you were talking about that email, I thought one of the I remember reading that when it came out in the case. And I think it was, like, Phil Schiller was forwarding a CNBC article that was talking about the growth of the App Store. And one of his lines in there was basically, like, if the App Store is generating a billion dollars already in profit, we should just continue to lower the rate so that it always just makes a billion dollars in profit. Like, it's like, that's enough.
Jason Aten:We made a billion dollars in profit. Let's just do that every year. And event I mean, at this point, that percentage would be, like, a third of a percent, right, because of how much the total revenue is. But it feels like somewhere along the way, Apple started to feel like if we do that, then developers can take advantage of us. And there's this and you you've I've heard you talk before about, like, the period of time when Apple was beholden to Microsoft and to Adobe.
Jason Aten:Right? And Phil Schiller was, I think, back at Apple when Steve Jobs was standing on the stage at the Macworld Expo with a big, Bill Gates is above him, you know, we're investing money in it. And Apple didn't wanna be in that situation anymore, but I feel kinda like what has happened to Apple in the App Store. This is the best analogy I can think of. I'm I'm a dad.
Jason Aten:I have four kids. And well, backing up, I remember, like, in middle school and high school, there's these two guys that always just drove me nuts. Like, I was probably smarter than them. They were way better at sports than I was. I was just you know, I was on plenty of sports teams.
Jason Aten:I was firmly middle of the pack. That's fine. These guys were not, and they just, like, gave me a hard time all the way through middle school and high school, and I hated middle school and high school. And now I have three kids who are in middle school and high school, one who's younger, and sometimes they'll do things to make me very, very angry. Right?
Jason Aten:That happens as a dad. And sometimes as a dad, when you get super angry, you just totally lose perspective. And you start to take out your anger on your other children who had nothing to do with it. And there's times when my wife is like, dude, why are you so mad at number four? It was number two Yeah.
Jason Aten:That gave you the sass or whatever. And I really feel like there's there's this ingrown culture of we're not gonna get taken advantage of. And so when Tim Cook sees Tim Sweeney, who is definitely not the hero in this story, but he's, like, the perfect example of the worst person you know makes a good point, which is, like, maybe the App Store has a problem kind of thing. And and he, like, trolled them so hard that they were so mad they were not going to give him even an inch that that led them to contempt of court. Right?
Jason Aten:It's like they're the parent who's so angry at child number two, they're taking it out because here's the thing. Like, the developers that we all know, like Casey Liss, David Smith, Mark, they are not Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Sweeney. Right? Jeff Bezos in in in the Kindle bookstore. And yet I feel like Apple has transferred that rage towards we're not gonna get taken advantage of and created policies that have just completely squandered their relationship with all of these other developers.
Jason Aten:It is so interesting to just think that, like, there was a point in time when Phil Schiller's perspective was, like, maybe maybe a billion is enough. Like, and someone along the line was, like, actually but that would be letting developers take advantage of us.
John Gruber:Yeah. Yeah. There there is a sense of entitlement, right, that with that a lot of Apple executives seem to have where they truly believe that that what they've built with iOS and the App Store and the number of people who download and use apps, you know, through the App Store compared to how many people download and installed apps on PCs, including Macs before before the App Store, that this is so useful and so, you know, innovative from them that they really are entitled to their 30 slash 15% cut. It is theirs, and it's, like, unshakable for them to come away from it. And I think, again, I can't speak for Phil Schiller, but I think he comes from this era of thinking of Apple's relationship with all third party developers, all of them as a partnership.
John Gruber:And, yes, he would like he remembers when Apple was the the lower hand in the partnership, and he would like to have the upper hand. But I don't think Phil Schiller would have ever imagined, you know, looking at other even the biggest software businesses. And we mentioned Adobe and Microsoft who were two of the biggest software companies on the Apple platform in the nineties and are two of the biggest companies making software for Apple's platforms today. I don't think Phil Schiller looks into that and thinks Apple should be getting about 30% of their revenue from the software on the platform. You know?
John Gruber:It just isn't how it works. You know? But I think that Tim and Luca were looking at it as yeah. Yeah. We do deserve that.
Stephen Robles:Well, I wanted to to move before, to Apple Intelligence, and we're nearing WWDC. It's just now a few weeks away, and there were obviously announcements at last WWDC that didn't come to fruition, obviously, around Apple Intelligence. And because we have you, John Gruber, wanted to play some clips from your show and get your thoughts on what happened between those moments of you having Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea on stage and Greg Jasowiak into where we are today. And what might we see them do this dub dub as either, like, reannounce things, or or what were they doing? So I just wanna play two quick clips.
Stephen Robles:Again, this is from the talk show at WWDC last year. This first one, you had just said, let me give you a new slogan. We're serious this time about Siri. And you you did that joke, and then this was John's response.
John Giannandrea:I think when I started working with the Siri team, the first instruction I gave them was failure is not an option. Yeah. Because a lot of people use Siri a lot of the time. And as it's got better over the years, people just we see in our data that people just use it more.
Stephen Robles:It's gotten better over the years. Let me do some here. How many days has it been since January 1? Let's see if Siri can answer it. No.
Stephen Robles:Kicked over to ChatGPT because HayDing is doesn't know. It doesn't know. It can't count the days. And so I I don't know what's happened there. But one other quick clip.
Stephen Robles:And this is, again, talking about the correcting your request and Siri understanding. This was one of the features that was announced at Dub Dub saying, if you start saying something and then correct yourself, hey, Dingus should be able to understand that and work it out. And so here's John on that.
John Giannandrea:So one of the things that we showed at WWDC was an example of you correcting yourself and saying two different things and the new models figuring out which thing you meant. And so the good news is that the technology of language models is getting dramatically better and is less likely to make these fragile mistakes.
Stephen Robles:So I recently did a video comparing Perplexity's app and its new integrations with the iPhone and the HeyDingus specifically. And just the ability to parse an email, like splitting the subject and body, HeyDingus basically put the entire email in the subject line like you might have a family or relative do when they send you an email. And so here we are a year later. There's the whole email in the subject line, which is super cool. But anyway, that was a year ago, basically, Dub Dub.
Stephen Robles:And obviously, they announced that some features weren't coming. I'm just wondering, you were on stage with them there during the live talk show. When they were talking about Apple Intelligence, the semantic index they talked about on your show, did they know then that it wasn't going to happen this year? Like, what what was going through their minds?
John Gruber:So if there's anything I've written about in recent weeks that I feel like I haven't been clear enough on is I definitely think they thought they could ship it. Now did did all three of them believe that equally? You know, Federighi, Jaws, and JG? I I don't know. Right?
John Gruber:And what I really don't. Like, it's not like, oh, backstage, you know, Federighi would say to me, you know, I don't know about this. I don't know if we're gonna make this in a year. No. Of course not.
John Gruber:He's not gonna say that even off the record. Right? They're all team players and they're all behind it. But clearly, they wouldn't have announced it if they didn't think it was more likely than not at least that they would chip. And I do think, you know, if there are people who've taken away from my recent writing like the big one, the something's rotten in the state of Cupertino that that I was implying that they knew at last WWDC that this wasn't gonna happen by next year.
John Gruber:Well, no. That's ridiculous because, you know, I mean, why would they I mean, that would be insane, and they're not insane. And the other thing we all know about Apple executives is they've all been there for a long time, most of them. And they're, you know, they're all there for their careers. It's not like they're fly by night executives and, you know, next year, Federighi is gonna be working at OpenAI and Jaws is gonna be doing product marketing for Samsung or something like that.
John Gruber:No. Of course not. They're gonna be there to answer for this. So they thought they could do it. But I'd I question well, I question announcing it though.
John Gruber:Right? Like because even if they thought that they could do it, why not just save the announcement for later in the year, like at the iPhone event in September if they thought they were going to get closer. And I've gotten some emails and feedback from readers, you know, a lot of times, you know, it's it's getting older and more people of my generation have left Apple, but, you know and, you know, it's just the nature of working at Apple that people who are currently working at Apple off, you know, just tend not to talk to anybody in the media even off the record. But people who've left and retired feel a little bit freer to talk off the record. And a couple of ex Apple people made the same point just by coincidence, but they all made the same point that in the Steve Jobs era, Steve would deliberately always be thinking two or three months ahead thinking, what are we gonna have to announce two or three months from now?
John Gruber:I you know, that it's you know, there's a Mac world, there's WWDC, There's hey. You know, and and and things in the Steve Jobs era were way less annual. Right? Like, you know, sometimes there'd be two years between updates to the iBook or, you know, the MacBook or whatever. But they'd be like, well, we've got this thing in the pipeline and he'd be thinking, okay.
John Gruber:We could announce that in March. We have we won't have an you know, we'll do Macworld in January and then March we'll do this just to, you know, keep you know, have something to announce throughout the year. And Apple does do product announcements throughout the year, but they tend to only be hardware. Right? And so why not break something like these more advanced Siri features off and save them for later in the year.
John Gruber:And then when later in the year happened and they still, I'm sure, internally, were more worried, like, hey. I don't know if we're gonna be able to ship these things. Well, then they they're not on the hook for them. They haven't made a TV commercial that features that yet, or they haven't aired the commercial yet. And just, you know, keep waiting until it okay.
John Gruber:We feel like we're, like, three months away from being able to ship this. Okay. Let's announce it now. But I I do think they thought they could ship it, you know, early this year. But I think for the nature of this AI stuff, when you feel like you're seven or eight months away, there's way more uncertainty in those seven or eight months given the nature of AI technology than there is in most technology.
John Gruber:I think other features that Apple is used to shipping just, you know, I I don't know, a new API for widgets. Right? You know, the whole widgets on the desktop thing. You know? At some point, the team was probably like, yeah.
John Gruber:I you know, I think, you know, we're looking like seven, eight months out. You know? And I feel like that was probably a good estimate. With AI, it's too much uncertainty. And maybe that's one way that Apple got tripped up here by not being extensively experienced with LLM technology that they vastly underestimated the that uncertainty that's just seems to be baked into it.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Exactly. And I do wonder the the comparison of what you think of this. I think of Apple Maps, when that first launched. And, obviously, it it was an app that opened on your iPhone, but it was it was terribly broken for a long time.
Stephen Robles:And now now we are many years later, and there's actually almost an affinity for Apple Maps. I see on social media, even on TikTok, how people will compare Apple Maps and Google Maps, and they prefer the design of Apple Maps, and they say it works well. And so we've come a long way from when it first launched and and it was broken. Now that Apple Maps launch, there was a casualty, you could say. Maybe it was Scott Forstall among other reasons.
Stephen Robles:And now we have Apple Intelligence with John Gianandrea and the team movements. But I'm curious, do you think this Apple intelligence is maybe closer to the Apple Maps where it's now a rough launch, but years from now, it's going to improve and then we'll just forget about it and people will just appreciate it? Or is something else gonna happen?
John Gruber:That's a good question. I think one of the differences is and one of the things that made the Apple Maps debut so contentious is it was a immediate regression for users. Right? And just to quickly summarize, the original Maps app on the iPhone was powered by Google Maps, and it was a partnership. It wasn't an app made by Google.
John Gruber:It was an Apple app using Google APIs, and they had a partnership for the details, but it didn't include turn by turn directions. That was, you know, it it I know it sounds ridiculous, but it wasn't really a feature on phones you had
Stephen Robles:to have. Just assisted GPS too? Like, didn't have Yeah. For a while.
John Gruber:Right? It didn't have GPS. It was, like, triangulating between cell phone towers and stuff. But the actual maps themselves were not vector maps, and meaning they're not scalable graphics. They were bitmap graphics.
John Gruber:So when you were zoomed out and you could see the whole state of California, you had a certain map tile. And then you'd zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and it would have to download new map tiles to get bitmaps. So they wanted vector maps instead of bitmap maps, and they wanted turn by turn directions, but they didn't have a deal from Google for that. And Google was holding out over them. Well, we want, you know, users to be able to sign into their Google account.
John Gruber:We wanna track their location. And Apple was like, we're we don't you know, Apple was between a rock and a hard place. Google wanted terms that Apple didn't wanna give them for privacy and location data, but Apple needed the better maps and the turn by turn directions. And I think Google it was like a poker game. And Google thought they're gonna fold because they need turn by turn directions in these maps.
John Gruber:And Apple was and and Google, I'm sure, knew that that they were working on their own internal maps product, but that it was way behind. And they're like, they're not gonna ship that. Well, guess what? Apple went with we're we'll just ship it, you know, and and grind, you know, grind out for a decade to come to improve it. The difference with Siri is Siri has never really worked well.
John Gruber:Right? I mean, so like, it I it has regressed in weird ways. I think it used to be able to answer questions like how many days has it been since January 1?
Stephen Robles:It literally has. I used to ask that iOS 17, and it would give me an answer, no ChatGPT integration. I don't know what happened.
John Gruber:Last weekend, I you know, I'm like a not a big horse racing fan, but I'll watch the Kentucky Derby, and it was what was it? Saturday or Sunday. And I was like, I you know, it's like eleven in the morning. I knew it was on later, and I I just I'm not a big enough fan. I was like, is it on at, four or is it, like, six?
John Gruber:When is it? So I asked Siri, what time is the Kentucky Derby? And Siri's answer was it's it the Kentucky Derby the hundred fifty first Kentucky Derby is today, May 3. And then, you know, and I did the thing where you can continue the conversation. And I said, yeah.
John Gruber:But what time does the race start? And Siri answered, the hundred and fifty first Kentucky Derby is today, Saturday, May 3. And then I asked ChatGPT, and ChatGPT actually didn't give me the time first. I and then I said it it gave me the day and said it's run-in the afternoon. And I said, well, what time?
John Gruber:And it said it usually starts about 06:45. And I and then I figured it out that there really isn't like a set time because it you know, some some years it's 06:40, some years it's 06:50 because it depends how many of the other races before the derby take place. But I got you know, my second crack at the question to chat GPT answered it. So I think Siri used to be able to answer questions like that better. I really do.
John Gruber:But nobody's ever think nobody is thinking, boy, Siri used to be good, and now it stinks. Right? They're not they're not they haven't done anything that's really messed up what used to work well. Some minor regressions and they're these new ambitious features don't really work, but they're not taking it away. But the danger Apple faces on this is people are getting really hooked on using ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or these other systems for these things.
John Gruber:And even if they catch up, are you know, why why would they go back to Siri if it's just to catch up? You know, Siri would have to to get somebody to switch. You really do have to offer more or less like a 10 times better product. You like, you know, you if if you make a word processor, you know, and you want people to switch to your word processor, your your upstart word processor has to be 10 times better in at least certain ways. Right?
John Gruber:And I you know, what are the odds that Siri could catch up? Well, that should be possible. But what are the odds that Siri is going to pull ahead and get people to go back? I don't know. I mean, what does Apple what advantage does Apple have?
John Gruber:Well, they do have their own dedicated button on the phone. Right? I mean, that
Stephen Robles:is not nothing. You can make the action button chatty p t now.
John Gruber:Right. I wonder if if inside Apple, they're like, oh, man. Why did we give developers the button?
Stephen Robles:But, you know, talking about the advantage, the semantic index would have been the advantage.
John Gruber:Right.
Stephen Robles:You know, that's the one thing like And it's yeah. Go
John Gruber:ahead. Well, it's still coming supposedly. Right? So Well,
Stephen Robles:and that's why I'm curious your thoughts. And, Jason, I'll ask you first. Coming at WWDC, do we think they're just going to rehash some announcements? Some I mean, I they never really address something that didn't happen. You know, we never heard about air power after the fact.
Stephen Robles:And we I think the touch bar, I don't even know if they ever mentioned that it went away. They just said we have a new keyboard. And so, Jason, do you think they're gonna address anything about Apple Intelligence, like, from this previous year, or are they just gonna announce new features that may or may not come this year? What do you think? And then you what is like?
Stephen Robles:I think it's
Jason Aten:a guarantee that they're going to have to talk about it in some way because, I mean, I've been on Mac briefings, and they spend twenty minutes talking about Apple Intelligence because we all know what the new Mac like, it's it's an it's an MacBook Air with an m four instead of an m three. You know the details, but let's talk about writing tools. It's like, wait. Hang on. But so I think they have to talk about it.
Jason Aten:I think what's interesting about it is that and I'm I'm answer I'm gonna answer your question, but I'm also just curious what you both think about this because, the whole Apple Mats discussion is really interesting because at the time, it was obvious that you should have turn by turn directions on a device you could carry with you anywhere because the alternatives were, like, you buy a TomTom or one of those whatever those things. And they couldn't get it from Google Maps, they had to build it. But Google Maps didn't even like, they they released turn by turn directions on Android, like, three years before they did it on the iPhone. And so the Apple could go ahead and do it because they had nothing to lose. Like, there was and there was no other smartphones really competing with them.
Jason Aten:We're that's not the landscape that they're in today. Right? Like, they put ChatTPT on the phone. Like, they did it, and, also, you can just get the app. So they they're in a very different situation, and it feel
Stephen Robles:I'm looking for my Palm Pre just to talk about competition.
Jason Aten:But it feel like like with Siri, like, kids, we have some Alexa devices. We have some Google devices, and we have HomePods in our house. And, John, the running joke that Steven and I have is anytime somebody gets HomePods or whatever or sets up a Mac, I tell them, you should turn off the listen for Siri wake word on everything except for your watch. Like, that's the only thing you should ever talk to Siri for because the only thing it's useful for is setting alarms and reminders. Like, that's the only thing you should use Siri for.
Jason Aten:Anything else, you should buy a different device. And I almost wonder if Apple should have been like, you know what? Apple Intelligence, we're gonna do what every other every other company is doing. Like, I just had a briefing with Netflix this week because they're they're integrating generative AI into the search features on the iPhone app, and they're just sending the stuff to ChatGPT. Like, it's OpenAI.
Jason Aten:Like, they have a they're not trying they're not stupid. They're not like, we're gonna try to build this from the ground up zero. Like, I think that there are benefits that Apple will be able to provide that no other provider can do. Right? Like, all of the semantic index stuff, all of the contextual aware stuff, they don't wanna give that to anyone else.
Jason Aten:But in the meantime, wouldn't it have been better to just be like, we're gonna make the experience of talking to your phone better by just hooking into those APIs and just letting ChatGPT answer them? Or, like, because they're in a very different sit they're trying to do the maps thing, but they're in a very different situation.
Stephen Robles:Here's your competition, by the way. This is the the Palm
Jason Aten:three two.
Stephen Robles:Oh, there it is.
John Gruber:You really did have it handy.
Stephen Robles:I did. I did. It was right here.
Jason Aten:John, the number of defunct devices that Steven has on his desk at any time, ask him about his human eye. IPad, his
Stephen Robles:rabbit I bought that little dock where you can supposedly hack it to work again, but haven't gotten the dock to work. But I got the rabbit arm one too anyway. But, anyway, yeah, go ahead, John. What are we gonna see at DubDev?
John Gruber:I I I I like Jason's answer a lot, and I think this is where Jaws and team earn their pay is how do they craft a narrative that at superficially feels like they've given sufficient time to Apple Intelligence and what's new in Apple Intelligence without ever really talking about the features that they had to postpone in March that aren't coming until next year again. And I think they can do it. I would anticipate I mean, and this is one of those things and we'll see. I mean, people often bring this up that, you know, Apple's, hey. We only do major changes once a year.
John Gruber:It's sort of out of sync with the rest of the way the iterative software market works where features just roll out.
Jason Aten:But especially LLMs. Every other day Yeah. Somebody has a new LLM.
John Gruber:Well and I think with the underlying LLM, that can just improve at any time. Yep. But, like, for example, I don't think I think writing tools for the last year were a fine one point o implementation of writing tools. But I don't really think they crack the nut. I don't think they're great.
John Gruber:I don't use them Right. Much. And I really only use them to force myself to use them like, hey, I should try this more so that, you know, maybe I wanna write an article about why I don't like writing tools. So I would anticipate that they will vastly improve the interface to writing tools. That is available to all third party apps.
John Gruber:Right? This is Apple at its best where it's not just you have to use Apple Mail or Apple Notes or Pages to get writing tools because these are Apple apps. All third party apps have access to these APIs. You know? And there was a story a couple weeks ago where somebody noticed that Meta's apps are deliberately not using them.
John Gruber:Right? It's a choice they made that they're not using them. So I would anticipate they'll have a lot of features like that to show off. I would love it. Jason, I'm sure that you're sick of this, like, in the briefings.
John Gruber:Like, hey. Here's a new m four. I I was in maybe not in your briefing, but I got the same, you know, pat demo. But showing me for the seventh time for the seventh Apple hardware product image playground and acting it it in in a little demo like, oh, I'm gonna send out an invitation to, you know, my my niece is having a birthday party and let's make an image, an image playground, and then I'll drag it over here into mail and and etcetera etcetera. And it's like nobody does that.
John Gruber:Nobody who uses AI to generate images is using image playground.
Stephen Robles:Or not putting that as my profile picture, honestly. I mean, I thought that was spot on. Or
John Gruber:if if they are, it's only because they're mistaken about what the best available tools are. But, you know, maybe they've got something up their sleeves, some kind of new app that they can show that actually will work and is ready to be demoed. You know? I I think they're going to just conveniently omit those more personalized Siri features that are based on the Symantec Index. The other thing I hope before I I don't wanna leave this sunset is I really hope they look at the Symantec Index as a third party opportunity.
John Gruber:You know? That, yes, Apple's tools will be built into it, but that they will build this in a way that your your privacy is protected and you will you know, it's same way with your location. Right? It's not like only and that that is literally one of the most private things that your iPhone offers is exactly where you are in the world at any time. And Apple, I think, has done a very good job of offering controls where you must grant an app explicit permission to have your privacy.
John Gruber:You can your location, you can grant it for one day, and you can go into settings, privacy, location, and ungrant it at any time. I think they should do the semantic index like that and let you decide which apps you would like to give access. So if you want the Perplexity app to have access to the semantic index on your phone, they should app that's where Apple is at their best is making APIs that make that possible so that the app is like, yeah, we can build something awesome with this, but that the user has complete control over which apps have that access and they can revoke it at any time. I really hope that they're not looking at it as something that, oh, we'll keep this to ourselves and only our AI will have access to it.
Stephen Robles:Well, that was what was amazing about the Perplexity app update because they're using the hooks that are already there. And so if you go to the privacy and security settings on your phone, you can go to Apple Music, and the Perplexity app is right there, and it's gonna use that, plus all these other things. Apps can already access your calendars, your contacts, your location, like you were saying. HomeKit, you can give it access to that. So Perplexity could, in theory, control your HomeKit home right now if you give it access to your home data in the privacy settings.
Stephen Robles:I think the one issue is messages because that's gonna be the most used app on most people's phones. That's going to be the biggest source of information that's timely. Even the demo they did at Dub Dub last year of like, oh, can I make it to the airport to pick this person up and then also to the school play? The only way that the semantic index knows that is because you have text messages between you and these other people. And that's the one place I don't think Apple would give messages access to a third party.
Stephen Robles:That's also something I would probably not be inclined to do to enable that toggle. But I think without that, a third party can't be as deeply integrated and provide as good of an assistance as Siri will be able to do if it can do it one day.
John Gruber:Well, I say let you decide, though. Right? And lots of people might decide. I don't wanna give any of these AI things my messages. But I think if you want to, you should be allowed to.
John Gruber:And then you should be able to revoke it.
Stephen Robles:Right. Exactly. Which I love, like, the limited contacts feature. I think that was iOS 17 where you can now say, don't access all my contacts. Just access these few dozen.
Stephen Robles:And same with photos. And I do that with most apps now. Don't access my full photo library. I'll pick and choose which photos you can access because I'm just uploading a profile picture or whatever. All right.
Stephen Robles:I wanna get to a little bit of personal tech. John, I'm gonna ask you kind of your general thoughts about AI in the future because I have a specific story that just came out. And it's personal to me because I knew the person. And then we're gonna it's it's a little morbid. And so Jason's then gonna take us up with our f one Lego story in a second because he was here in Miami last weekend.
Stephen Robles:But this story just came out. It's actually in the Apple News Today podcast this morning, if you listen to that. But this is someone I actually knew personally growing up. And he was in a road rage incident about four years ago, was unfortunately murdered at that, and the court case was this past week. And in the court case, his family his name was Christopher.
Stephen Robles:He was the one he's deceased now. The family actually created an AI video of him, his person, and his voice, and it was an impact statement. This is actually the video that they played in court. And this impact video was a message to both the court and to the defendant. And the state was seeking nine and a half years for manslaughter.
Stephen Robles:And the judge in his rule in the ruling said they actually gave ten and a half years, so raised the sentence and directly quoted that this video was a part of of their decision making. And so Apple News said it and in this article that this might be the first time, definitely in Arizona judicial history and possibly nationwide, where AI content, namely an AI video about a deceased person, is used in court and then actually might have swayed the outcome. And this also reminds me, if listeners and viewers remember, Joanna Stern did an amazing video. This was four years ago, but her video in The Wall Street Journal about how tech and AI can bring loved ones back to life. And she talked about stories of training voice so you can basically chat with the deceased loved ones using your Amazon Echo and things like that.
Stephen Robles:And I just thought about that and knowing all the implications of AI, meta saying you're gonna look at AI content in Facebook because that's what people want, and just the speed at which these things are developing. I was just curious, John, your just overall thoughts about AI, you know, the speed of which it's going, what it means for the future, and, like, overall over under, like, optimistic, pessimistic. I was just curious.
John Gruber:Wow. That's
Stephen Robles:It's a big question.
John Gruber:I know. I I'm very surprised that that was permitted in court, and I Same. Wouldn't be surprised if it's grounds you know, good grounds for an appeal, but it's always weird when major technological shifts happen. Right? Like, you know, at some point, you know, a hundred years ago, there had never been video played in a courtroom.
John Gruber:You know? It was just testimony. You know? Like, did you see it? And what did you see?
John Gruber:What do you recall seeing? And then at some point, there's cameras, you know, and there's like, hey. We've just got a video camera that's pointing out at the street, and it has footage of what happened. Can we play it to the jury? And up until that point, all any jury in any traffic incident, you know, had ever done is hear human testimony from a person in the room on the stand sworn in saying what they saw.
John Gruber:And now you can see video. And at this point, you know, we're, you know, we're like, well, of course, you should let them see the video because the video is actually better proof than human memory. I feel like the problem with this is it's sort of going back the other way. Right? Like, this isn't like the actual guy's statement from the great beyond.
John Gruber:It it is imagined.
Stephen Robles:And to be clear, sister wrote the statement, and then they had the AI generated in his voice, which, again, clearly not his statement.
John Gruber:Right. I can see how it's, you know, emotionally resonant. You know? I mean, it obviously affected the judge who you expect to be a little cold hearted. Yeah.
John Gruber:I I don't know. I I I guess I guess the best thing I can say and that that story exemplifies it is I expect to be surprised all the time, endlessly for years to come with the use cases that come out of this. You know, that, you know, that the only thing I I'm predicting is that it is unpredictable what people will use to do this. Right? It's you know?
Stephen Robles:Have you have you experienced and we talked about this last week. I was actually deepfaked, in a TikTok where someone must have trained some AI on my videos. And there's a TikTok of me talking. It was not me. I did not record it.
Stephen Robles:And it is clearly a deepfake, but it has hundreds of thousands of views. And some people might be fooled into that. I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but for me, it felt pretty violating. And also, shoot, someone can make me look like I'm saying something now while I'm live. And that's unfortunate.
Stephen Robles:Voice is again, you can deepfake that very much. You know, I actually have an Eleven Labs AI voice trained for me if I ever wanted to use it. And it's pretty compelling. I play for family and friends, and they some of them can't tell the difference. What how would you feel?
Stephen Robles:Like, I mean, you have hours of your voice recorded. It could easily be trained on an AI. Like, how did well, what would you feel if you heard a podcast that was supposedly John Gruber but is AI?
John Gruber:I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. Right? Or, you know, like, hey. Look at this surprising thing Gruber said on his you know, in the middle of his last two hour podcast, and here's me saying something totally that I didn't say. Violated, I guess, you know, and and at some point, you know, I it it's good.
John Gruber:I feel good that I have my own website that people know is mine where I couldn't know, I can say, hey. If something like that happened, that's not me. That's fake. And I have a reputation and built up credibility that I can say that wasn't me. I didn't say that or that video is not real and and stand behind that.
John Gruber:But that's that's just circumstance of me having done this for twenty some years already. Right? I I worry about, like, my son's generation, like, people who young people who are just coming up, and they're building their reputation. And what happens if something like, you know, somebody gets deepfaked and they don't have any credibility or renown at the time to say, you know and and it's just like that line about the the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots tied. You know?
John Gruber:It's already gone viral. Mhmm. What, you know, what happens if, like, the the Haktua girl didn't actually say that on video, and it was just a deep fake of her who nobody knew. And, you know, and all of a sudden she's like raising her hand like, that's me in the video, but I did I didn't say that. Right.
John Gruber:I it's going to happen. I'm a little surprised. I don't know about you guys. I'm surprised that AI hasn't attacked us with spam yet. I don't seem to get more spam email than I used to.
John Gruber:It doesn't seem to be more I mean, I definitely some. It seems like a lot of my PR mail is reeks to me of AI writing. I feel
Stephen Robles:like whenever I open Facebook, my eyeballs are attacked by AI generated images, but I think that's
John Gruber:not it. But, like, you know and I'm not getting iMessage spam or much, you know, and it seems like a lot of the stuff I do get, like, on WhatsApp isn't doesn't seem like it's coming from AI. It seems like it's like humans trying to catfish me. But there's not a lot but I'm surprised we're not getting more of it. And, you know, I think Facebook itself is the first platform where the actual imagery that people are seeing is just they're just inundated with it.
John Gruber:Right? What happens when more and more of that happens? You know, I I don't really want to see it. I don't really like looking at pictures. I like reading social media for the most part.
John Gruber:So I don't know. I what happens when the abundance of AI content generation and that you can make it so fast and that you can try to customize everybody's thing because it's so much faster. I it was just a handful of years ago in the early days of this where somebody made a video of Steve Jobs' voice saying something, and it was, like, at the cutting edge. And it didn't quite sound right. I was like, that's not really right.
John Gruber:And and I You're only one with Joe Rogan. Right? Yeah. I think so. Yeah.
John Gruber:And I challenged the guy to make him if this is real and I wasn't sure how real it was. And I was like, well, make a clip of Steve Jobs calling me it's or something like that. And he was like, here and it was like on Twitter, and he was like, here you go. And it was Steve Jobs saying, yeah, John Gruber, the guy who writes Daring Fireball is a Jack. And I was like, oh, that's and I was like, oh, I'm wrong about what's technically possible because that sure sounds like it.
John Gruber:I I think we're gonna you know, we're we're just going to have to really we're gonna go through I I I guess what it comes down to is we as a society and as individuals are going to have to really reevaluate how we feel about seeing video and hearing audio of people. Right? Because it's really been just to go back. But, like,
Stephen Robles:with
John Gruber:the the eight years ago or however long ago, the Access Hollywood tape of Trump, you know, talking about grabbing women and you can do what you want with them. We just believed that that was real. I mean, then, you know, you had to decide. Do I still wanna vote for the guy or not? But when videos like that become as easy to produce as just tapping the red button on the on on this the camera app on your phone, and it's just as easy to make a fake one as it is to shoot a real one, we're gonna have to really reevaluate whether the things that people say, here's a real clip of a famous person doing something awful or embarrassing or whatever.
John Gruber:We're just gonna have to instantly be defensive and think that's not real. Whereas right now, our default is, oh, that's real. That's you know, that's this is a scandal.
Stephen Robles:Pictures or it didn't happen was the saying. Jason, I wanna hear your thoughts on it and then for you to take us out into the f one story after this. But I do wanna I just wanna show my deepfake real quick. This was Okay. This was my deepfake on TikTok.
Stephen Robles:And unfortunately, was, you know, it's me. Bruce. It's
John Gruber:And you misspelled part burn.
Jason Aten:This is early days in Steven's career. He's gotten better.
Stephen Robles:I didn't use writing tools to proofread that. But if you look closely enough, it's weird. You can see around my mouth, this looks weird. It doesn't look right. But for someone on their phone scrolling TikTok quickly, may might, you know, look like something.
Stephen Robles:And it's my studio. It's it's everything. And so I did a takedown request. I told TikTok, hey. This is the deepfake.
Stephen Robles:They haven't taken it down yet, but, yeah, it feels weird.
Jason Aten:So instead he just shows it every week on here to just because it's badge of honor. It's like a deepfake to everybody.
Stephen Robles:I mean, on some level, it's like to be deepfake, that's kinda, you know, something. A you know, I don't know if we'll win a Golden Globe, which that was wanted to talk about podcasting in that Golden Globe category.
John Gruber:It is it's sort of like the the Streisand effect. Like,
Jason Aten:you're making you're making your deepfake. He's just leaning into it, though. He's like, guys, I I've made it. I've been deepfaked.
Stephen Robles:I've been deepfaked. I'm not gonna do I'm not gonna show it anymore, Jesus. I won't show it.
Jason Aten:No. I only I have one closing question for John because, your friend Ben was did that interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and and he made this comment about and, you know, everyone has, like, three friends, and in the future, everyone wants more friends, so most of their friends will be AI, and that has been it's gone kinda viral. I think he I think Zuckerberg actually repeated it on another podcast or something like that, and the Wall Street Journal wrote about it. And so when we think about, like, the future of AI, I don't think there's anybody except for Mark Zuckerberg that thinks that that's the future we want from AI, and it's it's so weird. You talk about, like, people who can't quite be self aware enough to realize the problems that they've caused, and then the solutions that they're presenting are just gonna cause new problems.
Jason Aten:It's like, you're the you're the social platform that destroyed friendship. So you're going to fix it by me making it so we don't I'm just like, that kind of thing, like, do you think that's gonna stick, or is that, like, the metaverse, which is a thing that they talked about for a while, but everyone got over real quick?
John Gruber:I it's a very good question. I thought it was really weird, but I do think though that Zuck believes it. Yeah. Right? And the one thing I really the over I I really enjoyed Ben Thompson's interview with him, but I really felt like, oh, he's being himself here because he's he can feel like he can nerd out with Ben.
John Gruber:And when when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan or Theo, whatever his name is, the cut Yeah. The cut rate Joe Rogan. He's he's he's taking on a certain persona. And, you know, if you're a billionaire owner of of Meta, I mean, I'm not blaming him for being media trained to do that, but it was interesting to hear him be more his natural self, but I thought that was a weird thing to say. But I I think it's definitely true that loneliness is a major problem.
John Gruber:It always has been. Right? It's it is it's innate to being a human being that most of us do not want to be alone, and we don't want to feel insufficiently surrounded by friends and loved ones. And it's man, it's like the Internet at first, when it first exploded onto the scene in the nineties, it felt like, oh my god. This is so great.
John Gruber:I'm making friends not just around the country, but around the world. And all of a sudden, you know, I'm I'm in a group where all we do is talk about not just Indiana Jones movies, but just Raiders of the Lost Ark. And and when people come in and start talking about Temple of Doom, we're like, get out of here. Go to go to the other group. And I can just have a little club where all we do is talk about my very favorite movie or something like that.
John Gruber:And it just felt like, man, this is just amazing. And it really felt like the Internet was only gonna make people less lonely.
Jason Aten:Mhmm.
John Gruber:Alright? And here we are thirty thirty years later, and it's like, There's there are other side effects downwind of all of this online connectivity and how it plays out in the real world. And that part of being a human being I I I don't wanna get too philosophical here, but part of being a real human being is that we are just sacks of meat with teeth and bones and wet computer up here behind our foreheads. And we do we need real life interaction. And we are our our brains are these machines, these pattern recognition machines that are so acutely aware of who different people are, you know, and knowing, you know, like, you you recognize your parents or your spouse or your children or your best friends instantly.
John Gruber:Right? You could be in a crowded room and you don't expect to see them, but if you hear a voice that sounds like your son's voice, you're like, is my son here? Instantly. Right? And it it it we were meant to have that.
John Gruber:And I feel like the idea that any of that can be replaced with no matter how adept the software gets, it's never going to satisfy those physiological needs we have for interaction. Right. And encouraging people to go that route. Or if you're feeling lonely and you feel like, you know, instead of getting out of the house and doing something and going to a coffee shop or going to a club or going to the gym and seeing if you make friends there or going to a a basketball game to watch or something like that. If you just feel like, you know what I need to do is spend more time by myself staring at these screens.
John Gruber:It's really just gonna make it worse. Yeah. Like, I feel like and, you know, it's like I don't know. It's like sending an alcoholic to work in a liquor store. I I I you know, it's it that's not gonna help.
John Gruber:Yeah. You know?
Jason Aten:Well, and you're right. I I on a soccer field with 22 high school girls, I can recognize my daughter from 70 yards away by the way she runs. Yeah. By the way she runs. Like, I don't even need to see her number or her face.
Jason Aten:I know who she is by that. And there is a piece of it that to me feels a little bit about it's like what happens when you're the, whatever, third or fourth richest person in the world and you can't go to the grocery store on your own anymore. You're never you're not surrounded by actual connections. And, like, no shade to Mark Zuckerberg. Real successful.
Jason Aten:Was probably pretty socially awkward to begin with. Right? Like, didn't have, like, that kind of close connections. Didn't understand how to do that. And now he lives in a bubble, and it's like, well, this will be great for everyone.
Jason Aten:And I'm like, no. I just wanna go watch my kid play soccer on the soccer field. I
John Gruber:right. And I do think there are certain personality types that that online socialization is actually more natural to them and more comfortable to them. And in previous decades before the Internet's general availability, those people just live their whole lives rather lonely or, you know, maybe they just read books or something like that, you know, and that they are more socially fulfilled now than they would have been previously. But I think that's only for certain personality types and trying to build a mass market. Because that's the thing about Meta that makes it scary is that Meta's idea of a user base is every single person on the planet.
John Gruber:Right?
Stephen Robles:Well, Jason, take us up. You were around a lot of real people last weekend. Tell us about it.
Jason Aten:Oh, yeah. Well, this is just Steven gets to talk about being deepfaked. I just get to talk about going to the Miami Grand Prix because I
Stephen Robles:would have preferred that.
Jason Aten:You would have rather go to Miami Grand Prix.
Stephen Robles:Defaked it.
Jason Aten:Yeah. There were a lot of people there. There was I think there's, like, 275,000 people, but the only reason I went is because, Lego built these f one cars and then took them for a lap around the Wow. Around the track. You know, they always do John, are you an f one fan at all?
Jason Aten:I know. I like
John Gruber:no. But I feel like I could be. And I feel like I'm on the cusp. I've watched some of the Netflix show, and I'm like, oh, I get why people are into this. This seems really good.
John Gruber:And it see this does seem like the best form of auto
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:And I will tell you, I I had not paid any attention to Formula one before this. I have the reason I went is because, weirdly enough, I've covered a lot of LEGO stuff. And so they they they were inviting some people to to cover the story. I'm like, yeah. I'll go.
Jason Aten:I'm gonna go cover 10 full size f one cars driving around the track and stuff. And I and I tell you, having gone in person, like, I'd go back to any f one race in a heartbeat because it is. It's just such a it's like this well, especially the Grand Prix of Miami. Miami Grand Prix is like the Super Bowl. There's and I mean, because it's Miami.
Jason Aten:Like, everybody's there, that kind of thing. So but that this was just fun to see. Like, it's such an interesting brand partnership because to me, like, the intersection of LEGO fans and f one fans did not seem like they would overlap, but it turns out that they really do. A lot of it is, like, you just mentioned drive to survive has, like, really I think they're on, like, season eight now or something like that. And I I told I told Steven after the practice day and qualifying on Saturday, I was like, I gotta go back to my room and watch cars or something.
Jason Aten:They're like, no. No. No. You need to go watch the net like, drive to survive. I'm like, oh, yeah.
Jason Aten:So I start binge watching some of that, and I'm like, I understand what's happening now. But it was the it was definitely the wildest thing I've ever covered was these 10 full size f one Lego cars at the, Miami Grand Prix.
Stephen Robles:So Was Tim Cook at the race?
Jason Aten:I mean Is he legit? I don't know. He doesn't usually clear his schedule with me. But if he was, he was he was here's the crazy thing. Because you sent that picture, but he did send a tweet that made me think he probably wasn't there.
Jason Aten:But if he was, that meant he was probably in Cupertino on Friday. We know he was in Omaha because he was at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Right. Warren Buffett made him stand up because he said, I'd like to introduce you to Tim Cook who has made more money for Berkshire than I ever will, like, just because of his apple stake. And then that means he would have flown to Miami for Sunday.
Jason Aten:So that that's the life of of being the being the CEO of the most valuable company on earth. So
Stephen Robles:You can do that. Well, we're about to do a a bonus lightning round, and, we're gonna ask John Gruber about his battery percentage on iPhone, how he orients his Apple Pencil on iPad, and about his Mac dock positioning. If you wanna hear that, we'd love if you can support the show. You can support us directly on Apple Podcast and give Apple a cut of what you are supporting us, or you can support us directly in Memberful. You can go to join.primarytech.fm, and we'd love to have you there.
Stephen Robles:Thanks to everyone who supports the show right now. And if you could leave us a five star rating and review an Apple podcast, we'll give you a shout out on the show. John Gruber, thanks so much for for being here and recording this.
John Gruber:Oh, thanks for having me. And, yeah, do do it through Apple Podcasts. Help out the
Stephen Robles:Apple app. Brand.
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