Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of California's Laguna Seca Raceway, where new Apple CEO John Turnis apparently drives very fast, which is cool. Good for John.
I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay is here. Hi, Nilay.
John Gruber from Daring Fireball, also here.
So, we have to start the show with just the obvious news of the week. John, this is why you're here because of course you're here to talk with us about the succession at Apple. Tim Cook is out. John Turnis is in. Nilay, you and I did a live podcast sort of immediately reacting to this on Tuesday. We've had a couple of days to settle in. We've seen some more reporting. Both executives have talked a little bit. We have some new stuff to talk about. And I also made a list of every product Apple has released under Tim Cook, and we are going to debate his legacy as a product person, which I'm very excited about. But John, I just want to start with you and go back to Monday for me when all of this started to happen. You've been covering sort of the rumors and speculation of the will they, won't they, of this succession plan for a while. I'll ask you the same question I asked Nilay: are you surprised this happened? And were you surprised it happened when it did?
No, but it's a weird feeling where they prepared us, I think, clearly about as much as they possibly could and yet when the news hit the wire at 4:30 Eastern time, it was still like, holy crap, what's going on? Wow, what's going on? Right? And I'm thinking in context to like elections and it's like here in the US we have a system where when the new president gets elected in November they don't get inaugurated until January and there is like the election results might be a surprise to people but then there's like this period where oh you still have the old president and the new president's come right and they're kind of doing that with this like where Tim Cook is still the CEO until the end of August, but we didn't know the difference is we didn't know when election day was going to be, right? And then the UK has a really cool system where they have these parliamentary elections and if there's a new prime minister, they move into 10 Downing Street the next morning, right? And it's like, whoa, where did this happen? And so I'm not surprised, I guess, but it's like we just didn't know when election day was going to be. And then it turned out it was Monday this week. And so it was a little surprising like, oh, they're announcing it now. But what they announced, not surprising at all.
Yeah, I think that's right. Nilay, do you feel any differently now with a few days of hindsight? We were both definitely caught off guard. I just a little bit of inside baseball. My favorite thing that happened here was, Nilay, I was off recording. I think you were doing something for Decoder, right?
I was doing software brain. I was like in the middle.
That episode just came out. It's very good. And when you do that, it's like the only time you're very hard to get in touch with. Because you have to like turn things off to go record audio for a long time. I had to call you and you picked up and you were like I think you think when I call you it's like some horrible emergency is happening.
Always and every single time.
I called and you picked up and you're like hey what's going on and I was like are you recording Decoder and you're like yeah and I was like you should stop because Tim Cook is leaving.
He just goes okay bye and hangs up.
And then immediately started just being useless inside.
And now here we are. Yeah. How do you feel a couple of days later? The one thing that has truly surprised me in the sort of post-announcement period is Tim Cook had to I think they had an event at Apple and he addressed everybody and he I think he realized he had to say out loud I'm healthy and I will be the chairman of the board for a long time. You know because it's Apple because it's Steve Jobs I think like that question was on people's minds given the seeming suddenness of the timing if not the John Turnis of it. So, he did have to say, "I'm very healthy. I'm excited to be the executive chairman of the board for a long time." I think at least until the end of the Trump administration, he has no choice but to be the chairman of the board and just handle that problem. But that's the one thing that it felt like, oh, he had to they were not expecting him to have to clarify it.
So, he had to say that out loud.
Yeah. And I think that comes back to a little bit of a whisper campaign about his health that people and I think I think Mark Gurman and you know Gurman's name will probably come up a couple times in this podcast, but I think Gurman had mentioned it you know that people have noticed that at least one of his hands shakes a little bit and people say I've looked at the video and I don't really see it that you could see his hand shaking in the rather infamous Oval Office event last summer where he gifted the president of the United States a gold Apple trophy that his hand was shaking. People have said that they've noticed it in private and so there you know and I think honestly some of his competitors have sort of added fuel to that whisper campaign that hey he's getting old and
Can I just say old in American public life is not 65.
Not anymore. Totally not anymore. Like there's a pretty yawning gap between 65 and old in American public life. Like Donald Trump is very old. Like Apple I think they have a rule that their board members have to retire at 65.
No, I forget how old because Levinson's like 75 and he's still there and he was the chairman until now.
I forget what the age it's older than 65 I think. But Gore ran up against it. Might be 70. I don't know. And it doesn't say you have to leave. It just means you have to get an exception.
And so I think overall this was from Apple's perspective an enormous comms success. I think whether their plan was exactly the way it should be, I think it went off exactly as they wanted it to come off. And I think one of the things, you know, there's always with a big announcement like this, some kind of huh, we didn't think we had to dot that i or cross that t. And I think the hey is everything okay with Tim healthwise was the one that they just didn't think they even needed to address.
Do you think that's a Steve Jobs thing? Like Nilay, you mentioned that right? Then like obviously the last time a CEO succession at Apple happened was because of Steve Jobs' health. Do you think that's what's on his mind or are people just trying to figure out why is this happening now? Because again, like you and I have talked about this, Nilay, that there was a sense when Trump was elected again that all of the big tech CEOs were now essentially tied to their job through the end of the Trump administration because you just you couldn't it was the devil, you know, right? So I think there was a little bit of surprise that this happened this way and I think the way that Apple is managing it which is to leave Tim Cook as the person who has to in Trump's words kiss Trump's ass.
Yes I know. Isn't it great? I mean there is something great about the fact that Trump put those words out there and we can just say those are his words not ours.
Right. That is fantastic.
That is journalistically honest now. I can say kiss his ass because
That's what's happening. We all know it. Everyone knows it. I mean again I think that is just a huge part of the role. Like I do not envy Tim Cook's responsibility to manage a thing that is the global economy. Like it just looks like fractally looks like the global economy. You have software in the United States. You've got chips in Taiwan. You've got hardware in China that is moving to like it's the economy. It's just one of the biggest companies that does anything ever. And if the iPhone doesn't ship on time, maybe the global economy suffers. Like you can see it.
And so he has to go be a politician. And I even that Trump Truth Social post, which is bananas if you look at it.
I'm saying American public life is very old. You look at that, you're like, "Wow, he just voice memoed that thing to hell and back and didn't give a shit." Trump can't meet a new guy. Like it has to still be Tim Cook who calls him. It cannot be John Turnis being like, I need a tariff exception on this narrow class of goods that is necessary for the next MacBook. Like that's just not gonna happen. So I think that role is very important. I was actually when he said to Apple employees, I'm going to be here for a long time. The question in my mind is does that end when there's another president or does he mean a long time?
I'm pretty sure Arthur Levinson is 75.
Oh, I looked it up. Sorry, I was wrong. The rule is 75. It's not 65. The rule is 75 and they extended it for a handful of their directors.
Right. And I think Levinson is 75.
Yep. And they extended it for him.
Yeah. And so even without getting an extension, I think Tim Cook could stay on the board at least for another 10 years. And I kind of think that's probably the plan. I mean, and I guess we'll see how this plays out, right? I think they kind of knew when Steve Jobs in 2011 when he stepped down as CEO and said, you know, that day has come. I always said that I would step aside if I couldn't do the job, well, that day has come. And it was like 43 days later, he was dead. I mean, so
It was probably pretty clear that him staying as chairman of the board wasn't going to be a long time even when they announced that. But let's just say something had happened and he had somehow in 2011 managed to stay ahead of the cancer for another year or two. He would have been a pretty influential chairman of the board at Apple, right, for however long he was around.
How much of a role like what exactly I mean we know this geopolitical not just Trump but you know China I guess everything else you know that Cook is still going to have his plate
But we don't know what kind of a role he's going to play in any other
Non-obvious decisions that perk up percolate up to the top of the heap.
I mean, there's a saying, I forget who said it about the White House, but I know I was watching Bill Maher last week and Rahm Emanuel was on and he was the chief of staff for Obama and had been in the White House before and his description of it was basically the only thing that comes to the Oval Office are problems because if it's not a problem, somebody deals with it before it gets to the president. That's it. It's just four years or eight years of just dealing with problems. That's it. And I think a CEO's office is kind of like that too, right? If it's not a problem or a debate, why in the world is the CEO dealing with it? And are some of these things still going to go to Tim Cook too? How much, you know, I don't think so. I think if anything, because I think Tim Cook knows what it's like to have a level of responsibility with somebody over his shoulder because he was doing it with Steve Jobs. So, I don't think he would do this. I don't think he would. I think if he wanted to still be making the decisions and wasn't giving the true authority of the CEO office to Turnis, he wouldn't be doing this right now.
The thing I've been thinking about a lot is the Disney succession.
At the beginning of the pandemic when Bob Iger quote unquote left and turned over the company to Bob Chapek and then by all accounts spent all of his time systematically undermining and sabotaging everything Bob Chapek was trying to do. I would say there's nothing about Tim Cook that suggests he would do that. And there's nothing about the way this process has been run that suggests this was anything but Tim Cook's idea that like and I think to a large extent like you mentioned this being a huge PR win. I think the way that this has sort of hit the world as smoothly as it has.
Unbelievable win from Apple's perspective. Like the stock market didn't freak out. There was this sense of like okay we're going to give Tim Cook his flowers but also isn't it cool that a product guy is going to be in charge again? Everybody managed to immediately be excited about the new guy without there being any kind of referendum on the Tim Cook legacy. Like it's just in the sort of public
I disagree with that a little bit.
You don't think so? Okay.
I disagree with that a little bit. And not to hype my other show, but you know I spend a lot of time asking CEOs what kind of decisions they make and how they make them.
And all of them want to pretend that the only thing they do is solve problems. And all of them want to pretend that they've empowered their teams and you know I shouldn't even be making decisions. Like if you just like take the just start of a Decoder interview with a CEO, they're all like I don't do anything around here, you know? Like I'm just slapping babies. Like who knows? But like the reality is
That's the phrase, by the way, just slapping babies.
It's slapping faces, kissing babies.
Slapping babies. That's good.
Just out here slapping babies.
You can tell I pay a lot of attention during the CEO interviews on Decoder.
But the reality is they're making hard decisions about priorities and trade-offs. Like that is actually the job. And that is actually the problem that any company, even a company as laden with resources as Apple. And a joke I've been telling for years now is I've never even asked to interview Tim Cook on Decoder because you can just imagine how he will answer all of the questions.
You can imagine you're like what's a big problem you have? And he's like the problem the products are too great. Like I don't need to do it. And I think this is the moment where there is enough pressure on whether Tim Cook can invent the next generation of products
That oh it's going to be very exciting that the product guy is in charge while the person who manages Xi Jinping and Donald Trump is still there and if there's a blip in the supply chain he can swoop back in but actually what we need to do is look at the threat from the next generation of conversational interfaces dead in the eye and figure out what to do with it is a big problem and the person making the trade-offs should be as deep in that problem as they can be. And I think if there's a referendum on Cook, it's that he was never so deep in the products he could make those trade-offs. I'm looking at your list of products and they're all pretty good, but like they never figured out what to do with a car. They just spent however many billions of dollars letting Jony Ive think like I will reinvent the car. And anybody who's deep in cars is like the bestselling cars in America are midsize crossover SUVs. Do you want Jony Ive to design the Toyota RAV4? Like that's your market.
The new Ferrari looks sick.
He designed a Toyota RAV4. Like that thing looks more like a RAV4 than it should, right? Because that's the market for that kind of car. That I think is the referendum on Tim Cook is that the products all got incrementally better. To some extent, they are all just extensions of the iPhone, but there's not the step change that reflects a vision of the future. John, I know you kind of disagree with this, but that would be my look back. Oh, this company got way bigger in a way that almost no one else could have done, but there was never a step change.
I want to get into the specific products, but John, I do want to know your thoughts on that because I also suspect you disagree.
Yeah, but I disagree in a way that we're never going to settle it. And it's a wonderful podcast discussion point because you can't really disprove it. You'd have to go back in time and reroll the universe with different decisions. But I think one of them is that the iPhone is especially particularly not just because Apple made it but it's the whole business Apple has been in since 1977. Famous you know as we all know 50 years ago making personal computers and even Apple didn't know it that that was the end point. The end point was a personal computer, something akin to the size of a wallet or a deck of cards that you could put in your pocket, in your purse, and that would have a wireless networking connection to a network that connects you to anybody around the world, right? And I know that sounds a little like, yeah, duh, that's what a phone is, but like in the early 80s, that sounds super sci-fi. And that's really what it took. And Ben Thompson and I say this over and over again on our podcast Dithering that it's really kind of a waste of the term that we started calling computers personal computers back in the late 70s and early 80s when the real personal computer was the smartphone. That's really when it became personal for everybody in the world.
And you know and calling the Macintosh the computer for the rest of us. It was the computer for more of us, but the iPhone was the computer for the rest of us. And it's just so And then ever since then, everything that's come out since, it's like, well, but it's not the smartphone, it's not the iPhone, it's not the smartphone. Well, there's no it's going to be a while, maybe a very long time, maybe after all of our careers before something really supplants the smartphone just because it's the end point of a certain progression and you can see the progression from 1976-77 to the iPhone and then you can see why it kind of stopped there and that you end up with things like in Tim Cook's portfolio the Apple Watch and AirPods which connect to guess what they connect to your iPhone which is in your pocket. Like what else is going to come up like that? There is nowhere else to go. You can't make it smaller. People, it turns out people, you know, even when they tried to make it a little smaller or at least back the way it used to be with the iPhone 12 and 13 minis, people didn't want to buy them. Like they've kind of figured out, they tried it. They actually tried the experiment like what if we went back a little smaller and like people didn't buy them. And it's like, okay, we know what size phones people want. Here they are, and we know what they want. They want better cameras and nicer screens, and they want longer battery life, and that's it.
No. So, I agree with that fully. I think my hottest take is there's not another thing after the smartphone. I don't think we're all going to run around wearing glasses in that way.
But I think to Cook's credit, and this is where it's so different than Sculley. I think Sculley was a good CEO of Apple and as the three of us talked about with the original Macintosh episode of The Vergecast. He was a good CEO overall, but I think he never got it out of his mind that the Mac was Steve Jobs's thing and Steve Jobs is gone and everybody thought he was gone forever from Apple and Sculley needed his thing and his thing was going to be the Newton.
And the fact that the Newton didn't really have much of a connection to the Macintosh at all. I mean, I know there's, you know, there was like a Newton connection kit and you could kind of sync some things, but for the most part, you would go out, you could go to a conference and enter all these contacts in your Newton and then come back and then it was like, are they on your Mac? No. And it's like, what? And it but it's like he wanted the thing that would be this was John Sculley's thing. And Tim Cook never had that ego of like I want to make my iPhone. He seemed to enter if anything let Jony Ive entertain his own version of that too much. I think a bunch of the product strange things inside of Apple including the car which I think is the closest thing to sort of a failed lark of an experiment seems by and large to have been Tim Cook giving Jony Ive too much rope to chase his own vision and ideas.
I agree with that. It's also like John is saying like everything is just fine gradations and agreement here. It's great for a podcast but
When they set out to do the car there was a lot of reporting that they kind of did the Google exercise of what market is big enough to move the needle for Apple. Yeah. And the two were healthcare and cars
And they've gotten they've done healthcare. I think Tim Cook is happy to say that his biggest legacy at Apple is health. I don't know they've done healthcare in a way that moves the needle. They've sold a lot of Apple watches, but they've entered that market. They are a fixture in that market. They're doing what they do there. The car again, I think it was in that sort of like Google exercise of we're going to launch a thing, and if it's not as big as Google search, we're going to kill it,
I think what Apple historically has been best at is they launch a thing, they see what's there, and then John, this is your famous story. They just roll. They just continually iterate until the thing is great because it's the thing they wanted from the beginning. And you just don't see a lot of that in new categories with Apple. I think the last time we did a podcast together, John, you were talking about the Vision Pro. Like a big question I have is whether John Turnis wants to iterate the Vision Pro
Because a VR headset might just have a limit. It might that might just be all anyone can ever do with VR headsets and all of that time might be better spent elsewhere and maybe you can't iterate it into a great product or it has to become AR glasses which is actually a totally different product and I think there's a lot of those questions inside of Apple's product lineup right now where it's like this is about as good as it can get what's where are the new ideas that are green shoots that need to come up and you just didn't see a lot of those in the Cook era outside of maybe I think it might just be the Vision Pro.
On the other hand, it's not like he missed anything. Like this to me is one of the things that I think goes back to John what you were saying about the smartphone is while everyone else flailed around uncontrollably trying to find the thing after the smartphone.
Like credit to Apple for just continuing to look around and be like, "Oh, we're the smartphone company. That's sick." And just not do anything except continue to entrench around the smartphone. And like is there something that they you know someone is doing that they I don't know but right now there is no evidence that Tim Cook missed anything. And I think that to me is like the thing about his product legacy that is probably the most positive
Including AI. We should put that on the list. Including AI.
Yeah. I mean there is like this is an interesting time for this to be happening because I would say if there is going to be some brand new hardware AI is the best shot we've had to find it in a while. But that said, the single best AI device anyone owns right now is their smartphone. And I think that's going to be the case for some time.
Or a Mac Mini. Like those are your two choices.
Or a Mac Mini, which you can't even find anymore.
I'll disagree with you there, though. I will disagree with you there, where I do think as I sit here and think, well, okay, I wrote a rather first take on the Cook era. And I've been thinking, and I'm not trying to find the, you know, well, you got to have a list of pros and a list of cons. What are the cons? The car is a good one because it was a lot of money, but I still think it's maybe overall, even with $10 billion spent, it was like a kind of feather in his cap that he was like, you know what, I don't care if we spent 10 billion. This isn't worth shipping.
At least he didn't rename the company after it and then screw that up horribly.
The one that I think sticks out is AI. And I think you have to go back to before the whole LLM moment and just look at Siri and that there was a time like it was like Steve Jobs's last obsession. He was the one who spearheaded there was the famous story that just came out recently where
Yeah. Said that he met Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs was pretty interested in Siri and he wanted to buy it and he said nah I don't think I want to sell. And then Steve Jobs called him 50 days in a row. And for 50 days in a row, he's like, "Oh, Christ, it's Steve again." Well, but it's Steve Jobs. I'm going to answer the phone. And for 50 days, Steve Jobs called him up and said, "I want to buy the company. What do I, you know?" And then eventually he's like, "All right, fine." And he sold the company. And there was a time when you could say Apple was the leading AI company in the world. And I know as crazy as that sounds today because everybody just universally says well of all the big tech companies their own homegrown AI technology is by far the furthest behind which is true but there was a time 2011 when they were clearly ahead of everybody else and for a couple of years after that they were pressing that lead and I think Steve Jobs was clear and maybe Forstall I don't know you know in the way that Forstall was aligned with Steve Jobs in terms of the way they saw these platforms evolving. But they, you know, Cook to adjudicate a clash of personalities that he could not keep aligned the way that Steve Jobs could. He had to make choices as to who was going to go and who was going to stay and they couldn't all stay. And Forstall was the guy to go. He just dunked on Forstall again, by the way. Again, at the employee event, he was like, "What's my biggest mistake?" It was Apple Maps, but we fixed it. And it's like, "Oh, by firing Scott Forstall." Like you pinned it on Scott Forstall and
I don't think so. I'm going to say that that's one my understanding of that whole thing was that Forstall and Maps was unrelated to Forstall's departure. It's people have hung on to it because of the timing because Maps came out the same year and I think there was some dispute over who should apologize for what. But I think Apple Maps could have debuted 10 times better and Forstall was still gone at the same time.
Interesting. It was because I think fundamentally my understanding I don't know if there were others but Jony Ive wouldn't take meetings with Forstall anymore
He would not sit in a room with him and I don't know that Jony Ive said it's either him or me but I think it more or less came down to that and I don't think the other people at that level the level of having their picture on the Apple senior leadership web page I don't know that there was anybody else who got along with Forstall
Other than Steve Jobs. I'm definitely enjoying in the course of Apple 50 then Cook leaving you know all these executives are posting pictures of them being young with like the original iMac and you're like wow a lot of things happened between then and now with like just the four people in this picture like a lot of things have happened yeah
And I don't think it had anything to do with it but I think when Forstall was pushed out of the company the company was left with senior leadership nobody was left who thought Siri is the future of the company you know or the future of technology this sort of interface and it just sort of fell by the wayside. And actually got worse. It really did. People forget how much more useful Siri was around 2013 or so than it eventually got. It actually got worse.
And you know you look back at some of the comments from or the you know it wasn't all on the record. It was mostly people secondhand about but what Steve Jobs spent most of 2011 focused on his last year was Siri that and he was like this is the next thing like he'd shipped the iPhone and then he came back from a medical leave and focused 2009 on creating the iPad which came out in 2010 and by 2011 he was like okay that's done he could you know not that they were done iterating on it but the new thing for Apple was going to be a you know the talking to your computer and doing things in an agent-like way. And we talk about agent agent agent now. But part of the stuff that Siri could do around like 2013 was like get you movie tickets and stuff. It was a partnership with Fandango and it had like a really cool pre-iOS 7 you know skeuomorphic interface but you could like say to Siri that you want to go see the new Avengers movie and it would be like here here's a Showtime near you. Do you want two tickets? And you'd say yes. And then you'd have them. I mean that was 13 years ago and they just completely lost that under Cook. So I think that needs to be I think that's worth breaking in to say I don't know. I think that was a big swing and a miss.
That is fair. I think yeah the whole question of there was that first era where everybody had a bunch of correct ideas about what voice was going to be. I mean because you can tell a very similar story about the Alexa team at the beginning and the Google Assistant team at the beginning and like everybody kind of intuitively saw the future and then for some combination of business reasons and technology reasons and focus reasons all bailed on it until they lost to ChatGPT and then panicked and came back
And but they're all back now. I will point out that when you say business reasons the way they have solved their business problems now is they're like "Screw you. We're not paying. We're just going to horsepower away into clicking around your website without permission." And that like I don't know if any of those companies would have done that at that time but that is what they're all doing now.
Yeah. All right we should move on from this but I do I made a roughly chronological list of all of the major products launched under Tim Cook. And I just want to read it to both of you and I want you to react cuz I thought it was really interesting actually just seeing all of this in one place. He was appointed CEO in 2011 but I'm only giving him credit for products starting in 2012. And all caveats apply. Everything's a team whatever. He's the CEO. If we're giving Steve Jobs credit for all the stuff they did before we're giving Tim Cook credit for all the stuff they did after. So here's the list. It was the iPhone 5 and everything after the iPad 3 and everything after the iPad mini and the iPad Pro Apple Maps buying Beats which I think like half counts but was a meaningful thing that Apple did. There was the iMac redesign the slim unibody iMac and every iMac after. There was the Apple Watch the Apple Pencil Apple Pay Apple TV the streaming service and most of the boxes but not all of the boxes. The 12-inch MacBook the whole AirPods line AirPods AirPods Pro AirPods Max HomePod and HomePod Mini the Apple Card the Trash Can Mac Pro bunch of keyboards and accessories AirTags the polishing cloth the most important thing Apple has ever launched in history. So there's Tim Cook's legacy. The Mac Studio the Pro Display and Studio Display other various monitors. The Vision Pro. Honorable mentions to MagSafe and the M series chips both of which are not like individual products but matter to a lot of stuff Apple does. And the MacBook Neo which almost was the last thing that was shipped under the Tim Cook administration. Instead it is the terrible AirPods Max 2. But we're going to I'm going to give it to him as in an honorary way as the MacBook Neo. I look at that list and there's a couple of like slam dunk huge hits right? Like the Apple Watch was a giant victory. The AirPods is a giant victory. There's a couple of like stinkers and then there's a lot of stuff. I don't know how what does that list make of what do either of you make of that list?
I can break that into levels of Jony Ive out-of-controlness.
Like that's one way you could sort this. Like how out of control was Jony Ive? And you're like the Touch Bar existed for too many years. And that's just the answer to that question.
There's a little bit of how much of the ghost of Steve Jobs are we fighting? I think the Trash Can Mac Pro is like the ultimate ghost of Steve Jobs. That's Phil Schiller saying can't innovate my ass.
On stage. Like there's a little bit of that you could break it down into. And then without question there's before the M series chips and after. And you can see the M series chips came out and Apple silicon was the thing. And then all of their product road maps just coalesced. They're like "Oh we can do anything we want." And that I think provided them like just opportunity but also focus in like the same breath.
I will just say I like Nilay's summation there but I will just say since you brought to mind my this is how Apple rolls. That's the problem with the Touch Bar. The problem with the Touch Bar was that they never the last Touch Bar they made was exactly the same as the first one they made except maybe they remember they added back a hardware escape key. Like everybody was
Probably because of you. That might have been like directly your fault. Okay,
But that was not the you know that was not the problem with the Touch Bar. I think the overall idea I think still resonates which is wait a minute. Hey a series of F1 F2 F3 up to F12 keys at the top of the keyboard. Isn't that like right out of
Like, uh, Unix in 1975? Why do we have these F keys? Why, you know, we have, you know, and it comes back to Steve Jobs's great explanation of why the iPhone didn't have hardware keys. We know how to solve this. It's software, right? Why don't we have software? People love their, uh, Steam Decks, right? Where you have like a little thing with dynamic screens for the buttons. There's, there is something there of having something dynamic above the letters and numbers keys. The first Touch Bar wasn't it. And they never, they never iterated on it. I don't know. I, I, and I kind of feel like that's one of those things where if it was a good enough idea to ship, it was a good enough idea for somebody to come back and say, 'Okay, we swung and missed on the first one. Let's come out with a second one.' Right.
John, I love that you and I both think the Touch Bar could have been great. I really do believe that. I really do. And I also think that having a bunch of fiddly little buttons and that the solution to let's make it useful to people is we'll just print a bunch of hardwired things. Screen brightness, Exposé, I'm looking at mine, microphone on, off.
All of those icons on top of the actual F key buttons on all Apple keyboards ever since they scrapped the Touch Bar and before the Touch Bar is exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about. Why the iPhone doesn't have a bunch of friggin' hardware buttons because once you put the icon on the button, it's set in stone.
You're both so wrong about this. I don't know what you're talking as a person who has a Stream Deck and thinks it rules. Putting the buttons back on the keyboard was the best decision because you have a big screen.
It was better than the Touch Bar as we knew it, but the potential for something good there. Maybe something that would have needed a different name than Touch Bar because the first one was such a dud, but something dynamic, something could be done there and still might be done there. I don't know. Something.
I think we should sell tickets to a straight-up Touch Bar debate. Like one hour, no holds barred. People would come.
I'm so down. I could do this for the rest of the show. I think it's rather cookie and not know like the worst solution is that they shipped one that, that very few people liked as it was, kept it for too long and never iterated it.
And it was the same with the butterfly keyboard.
Yeah, there's a lot of this in, in, in this list, right, where it's like they, they fired off one idea that they thought was the future. They kind of didn't know where to go and they, they just held on to it. And that's kind of what I mean about the Johnny Ive of uncontrolledness. He, he is, you can see it. He's like, 'I got it right. What do you mean I have to change it?' Like, of course, the phone should be too thin. They were like, 'What if we gave you a butterfly keyboard that was slightly better?' And everybody's like, 'Still bad.' And they're like, 'This one?' They're like, 'Nope, still bad.' The Touch Bar, everybody was just like, 'What is this for? Why can't I press the escape key?' And Apple just goes, 'Never mind. We're done.'
Good, great. I feel like John and I were in a briefing where the big update to the butterfly keyboard was that it added a rubber membrane to it.
To keep like one speck of dust from destroying the whole thing, which Casey Johnson had pointed out.
That was the problem. And it was like, 'Are you guys sure a rubber membrane is going to solve it?' And they're like, 'We are pretty sure that that's going to solve it.' And I remember that that was the off-the-record Apple. It was like, 'We are pretty sure.' They weren't like, 'Take it to the bank.' And it was like, you know, it's, it's like the, uh, the Ron Howard narrator, you know, they were not sure.
Um, so I think we've successfully established that however you feel about the Touch Bar is how you feel about Tim Cook's legacy as a whole.
Yes. No, but I do think, I do think there is that, it exemplifies a difference in the, the Cook versus Jobs mentalities where Jobs, Tim Cook seemingly never had his pants on fire about something, right? It's like he was always calm, cool, and collected. And he did get everything more, much more organized and much more scheduled. Everything is annual. Both the hardware and software now are annual almost across the board. Um, and Apple's schedule was, you know, effectively erratic under Steve Jobs because his attention, you know, there was the very famous early in the iPhone where they were like, 'Hey, we knew we told you we were going to come out with a new version of Mac OS 10 in June. Well, it's going to come out at the end of the year because we've taken all the engineers off it to ship a new update to iOS software.' And it's, it's that important that we do it. And that was that. And it's like, okay, you know, but Apple doesn't do stuff like that anymore, right? But sometimes that was actually called for. It was like, I think Steve Jobs would have looked at this, look at this, and just printed out a bunch of, uh, things like, here, here's Joanna Stern, uh, making fun of our keyboard. You know, like, this is hilarious. Well, guess what? We're the butt of the joke. How are we shipping this? Fix it right now, tomorrow. You know, and I don't think that happened with the butterfly keyboards. I mean, they did fix it eventually, but I feel like it went through too many revisions and it was too much trust in the, basically my understanding is sort of the, the obvious that the people who, the engineers who came up with the butterfly keyboard in the first place got like three swings at it, you know, like, okay, we got it this time. Okay, we didn't get it that time. Give us a third try. All right, we got a third try. And each of those tries was like a year plus of MacBook devices that had those keyboards. So you've got like three or four years of these keyboards in practice. And I don't think that that was a three strikes and you're out situation. That was more like a one strike and you're out situation. Like, the keyboard needs to work on a freaking laptop. I mean, that is not a controversial statement.
Yeah. And everybody knew from the very beginning.
Yeah. So, I think this is like another interesting sort of moment in the, in the Cook era because this is also the point where they believed that the iPad would take over everything. So, the idea that the Mac had a weird bad keyboard was not the biggest problem in the world because of course the iPad's going to eat everything. This is also the period where they, they kept trying to kill the MacBook Air and they couldn't because people kept buying it like over and over and over again. And that, like, eventually they could not just horsepower people into believing that the iPad was the future of all computing, which is not on your list here, but it is like a thesis of Apple in the Cook era that just came to an end with the resurgence of the Mac. Like, I think I said it on the show last week, the hottest gadget in the world right now is the MacBook Neo, which is an iPhone chip that just runs a real operating system. That's all, that's all it is. And it is easily, we can't write enough about the MacBook Neo on The Verge. Like, every single story is explosively popular. And it's like, yeah, you just, I think John, you called iOS a baby OS the other day.
They just put a real OS on an iPhone chip and everyone's like, 'I love it. The best thing that's ever happened.'
All right, let me throw this out there. I've been thinking about that this week and I, I love your segue because I do think you're exactly right that the MacBook keyboards were literally stinking, just they were the worst keyboards anybody's ever shipped in a mainstream laptop for years, was seen as less of a crisis than it should have been because it coincides with an era at Apple where they were like, 'Yeah, but the iPad's going to take over all this eventually anyway.' I really do think, I really do think that was the sentiment within the company. Not universally for sure. I think internally there was, it was one of the moments of highest debate and the most divisive factions within the company. But the ones that had the political clout were the ones that espoused that viewpoint. And I'll come back to the misbegotten thinking there. But how did that get rectified? It does kind of correlate to Apple Silicon on a Mac, but if you actually look at it, it really kind of correlates to the rise of John Turnis within the company. And I really do think that Turnis was on, for lack of a better word, our side of that debate. And I think Cook recognizes that. And I think that's why Cook is so fond of him and thinks that he's the one to fix this. That Turnis internally was the one who is like, this is madness. We cannot, the Macintosh is not being replaced by these tablets. You know, look at the stuff that the Mac does and why we need it. We need to make the Mac better than ever, not let it drift off. I mean, I think that's been a huge part of John Turnis' rise within the company. And I think that the, hey, everything kind of got better over the last, you know, like from 2018 onward, that's the rise of John Turnis within the company.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that is the, the people who look at this and say this is a died-in-the-wool product person who is now going to be overseeing all of this thing again. I think that is the cleanest sign of hope, right? Is that every, every product we've seen John Turnis be part of has gotten better under his watch. Did you read the, there's a journal sort of profile of Turnis in The Transition and the lead was something along the lines of John Turnis had a problem and it was he needed to chip bump the Mac Mini but he couldn't let Johnny Ive get involved because it would get bogged down in like redesigns and he's like, no, it's just a new chip, like, don't, don't worry about it. And eventually that the Mac Mini with a chip bump shipped and it's like, that's a lot of politics for a chip bump. Yep. And if that's where Apple was at that time and he was able to do that, then it kind of supports what John is saying. Like, he was able to keep the trains on the track, make the computers better without getting bogged down into what seemed like from the outside even pretty intense politics. Walt Mossberg used to call them the fashion people.
He's like, 'The fashion people are running Apple now. I've bought 500 MacBook Airs to keep, to keep myself away from the fashion people.' And that is all those decks are cleared.
John, I'm kind of wondering, you know, David and I have made it very clear how we feel about Alan leaving Apple in the state of liquid glass and all this stuff. Those decks have been cleared too, right? Apple design is very different. Johnny Shrewi is the chief hardware officer now. How are you seeing the future of design under Turnis?
Uh, we don't know. Uh, I'm optimistic. Um, and I do think in addition to the reliability of the hardware being better than the software, I think it's less debatable that the design of the hardware is superior to the design of the software. And after Johnny Ive left, they were very explicit about the fact that Johnny Ive wasn't being replaced by a new chief design officer and that the roles of software and hardware design were separate, you know, and that, uh, Alan Dy was brought in for software specifically. And there's no hint, no suggestion on off the record, any role in any keynote that suggests that Alan Dy ever had anything to do with any hardware ever whatsoever. Um, and I think you see post Johnny Ive this very clear fork in the road where their hardware is, if anything, better designed than ever and the software is clearly worse designed, right? It really is. I mean, and I remember when I was, I'm still not done with it, but when I was really on like an extended weeks-long bender writing about Tahoe, Mac OS Tahoe in particular, not liquid glass overall, which I, I actually am kind of a fan of on the phone, kind of ambivalent about on Apple TV and iPad and absolutely despise Mac OS Tahoe. I don't think it's liquid glass. I think it is just a complete ignorance of what the, all the, all the nuances that the Mac needs to embrace. Um, I, I can't help but think though that somebody who's overseen hardware that's only gotten better since Johnny Ive left and, and in the same direction is a very good person to oversee design going forward software-wise and sort of bring that back in alignment. And the thing that when I was, where I was going with that vendor is I looked back at like screenshots from Mac OS 10 or Mac OS whatever the name was at the time about 10 years ago, like right before they hired Johnny Ive on 2014, 2015. And not only is it gorgeous, it's not gorgeous. It's, it doesn't look retro at all. It looks like they could just ship that OS right now and it would look perfect for 2026. Wouldn't look 10 years old. Wouldn't look dated. Wouldn't look out of place with the way iPhones look right now. It would just look like, yeah, that's what Apple's desktop computer OS should look like. You know, it wasn't the skeuomorphic stuff. It was, it was a look and feel that looked connected to the Mac's past, looked completely aware of all of the subtle nuances of human-computer interaction for desktop computer interfaces and looked very Appley and it's all squandered over the last 10 years.
Yeah, there was that period where they, they took all the color out of Aqua and made everything smoother and it was like perfect.
Yeah. Right. And it, it was very connected to liquid glass because it was still was liquid like Aqua, like Aqua the interface was supposed to be lickable and so they, they desaturated it. I could go on about this forever. I think their mistake was they, they believe all the new customers are iPhone customers and an iPhone customer who picks up a Mac has to be like, I know exactly how to use this and that just doesn't need to be true. Like, people are a little bit smarter than you give them credit for.
Because it looks vaguely similar in terms of the style of the controls doesn't mean they know how to use it.
We'll see. The touch, the touchscreen MacBook that is rumored is going to be a real test in all this. And potentially, I mean, there's a fascinating run of hardware coming, right? Because it's the, the touchscreen MacBook has been rumored to be coming soon. Uh, there is a 20th anniversary iPhone theoretically. I mean, it is coming next year. It will be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Apple loves an anniversary. What will they do there? Um, there's just been a lot of questions like you said, Nilay, about what the Vision Pro is going to be. So there's a lot of moments here where it's like, okay, actually Apple is going to sort of put a bunch of forks in the road all at once about what it thinks about hardware. And it's, I, the, then the, the like first 18 months of Turnis' reign as CEO, which aren't even really his fault, are going to be fascinating. Like, he's going to have to launch a lot of things that he either loves or hates and we're, we're going to see what happens. Um, but all right, we, we should take a break. Um, Nilay, you and I actually have some breaking news to talk about. But John, you can go. You've got other stuff to do. You have to go be mad about Tahoe.
I look forward to it. And we will be selling tickets to the great Touch Bar debate.
Also, John, it's so important that you don't stop being mad about Tahoe. No, you can't. None of us can stop being mad about Tahoe until Apple fixes it.
Well, speaking of pants on fire, I feel like my pants have got to be on fire between now and WWDC just to get it all off my chest because it's, who knows what's going to happen there. But, you know, I, I would love it if all of my, the things that are igniting my pants are addressed, but just in case they are, I need to get them off my chest before they are.
Yeah. Well, yeah. If, if you get a bunch of new things to light your pants on fire, you, you need time for new things to be.
This is just like the, like there's an Apple memo going out about this podcast. Like to John Turnis, read John Pants Ignition. It's just a bullet list.
All right, we should take a break. John, thank you for being here as always. Go read Daring Fireball. Go listen to The Talk Show. John, we'll see you soon. We'll take a break.
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All right, we're back. So, Nilay, while we've been recording, um, a, a story that has kind of been burbling all week, burbled in a bigger way. Um, so we should talk about it.
We've talked a lot about the sort of rebooting of the Xbox team, new leadership, Phil Spencer retired, uh, Asha Sharma is now in charge of all of Microsoft's gaming stuff. We've been talking about Microsoft's attempt to get Xbox stuff onto phones for years, and there have been lawsuits about it. Uh, there was a memo today from Asha Sharma basically, uh, I would, I would call it like trying to reboot and reestablish what Microsoft is doing. And the, the sort of news here is that it is no longer being called Microsoft gaming. It's just being called Xbox. Like, we, we've been wondering whether there was a future for the Xbox brand going forward, which is in a pretty meaningful way the only consumer brand at Microsoft. But now it appears they are doubling back down on Xbox as a thing and as a culture. You both just read this Asha Sharma sent to the team. What do you think?
So I appreciate that she is a new CEO. She has to make some change. She has to break with the past.
Rebranding the whole thing as Xbox is a big deal, right? They're, they're trying to get back to gamers that this memo starts with players are frustrated. We're doing a bunch of stuff wrong. She's trying to break with the Spencer era.
I think the plan outlined in this memo is the exact same plan. Maybe that's just because it's a quick read, but the heart of this plan is Xbox will be where the world plays and creates. We will build a global platform that connects players and creators everywhere. Console is a foundation. You can play where you want. Your games, progress, friends, and identity stay with you across console, PC, mobile, and cloud. Aside from console is the foundation. That is the same plan as Xbox everywhere, which was Phil Spencer's plan. Yes, it, it is just the same plan. And the thing that frustrated that plan was not execution. I think there was a lot of execution that frustrated that plan. The thing that most of all frustrated that plan was they could not get Xbox on your phone. And Epic and Apple are suing each other and there's lawsuits. Microsoft just filed an amicus brief in the Epic v. Google case trying to get an Xbox store onto Android phones in, in ways that don't involve paying taxes to Google. I just, it's the same plan. Do you see a meaningful difference here?
Not really. I think one of the things that is clearly happening under this new regime is they're trying to make the thing make more sense to people, right? And I think you look at what Microsoft's gaming things have become and like there's, you can play some games in some places and some games in all places, but not all games in all places. And then there's Xbox Game Pass and there's cloud gaming and there's, there's just, there's too many things. And so I think to me that there is something actually significant about this idea of like we, we are Xbox, we are returning to being Xbox. My assumption would be we're going to start to see fewer things with fewer names. And that actually what they're going to do is try to turn that whole thing you just described where essentially you can play anything anywhere and it all moves and feels seamless, which I think is like transparently the correct idea, right? Like just in a vacuum, can you pull it off is one question, but like is that what gamers want? They want to be able to play their games in all of the places all of the time. Yes, of course. That is the correct outcome of how Microsoft's gaming ambitions should go. And so I think this sense of like we need to simplify what we offer and to whom and in what way is right. Um, again, that is not a vastly different idea than what Phil Spencer has been talking about for a long time. It just has fewer names and that's something like, it's, I, that's genuinely, you deserve credit inside of a big organization for going for fewer names. It's like, that's a victory.
But I think it's true that you, you look at all of this and, and one of the things she has clearly identified is, uh, gamers don't understand what their Xbox is for and what is an Xbox, right? Like the, the whole everything's an Xbox I think has backfired so spectacularly. It is like inside of everything that Asha Sharma is now doing.
But what is different about everything is an Xbox and you can find Xbox everywhere you are. Xbox will be a global platform that connects players and creators everywhere. You can play where you want and your games, progress, friends, and identity stay with you across console. I get that is a much tighter definition and maybe that's all you need to do. And again, the whole memo is a break with a past, which maybe that team desperately needs. I'm just saying that was Xbox everywhere. If you were to just walk up to any Xbox player and say, 'What do you think Xbox Everywhere means?' They'd be like, 'I can play Xbox on my phone.' Like, they would just say the thing that it's supposed to mean. And it's true in the Spencer era they got totally sideways. They're like, Candy Crush is an Xbox. Like, I don't know what that is at all.
Well, and they, they got so over their skis buying games that I think it, it reshaped everything that they were trying to do, right? And then it becomes an, okay, we have to start putting Xbox games on PlayStation because we have to figure out how to make money from these games. And so it's like, okay, if, if what you actually want to do is bet on Xbox, you stop doing things like that, right? And you, you start to say, okay, we are going to build an ecosystem. And I think they continue to believe they can build that system not around a console but around Game Pass. Like, I think ultimately my, my galaxy brand theory here would be that the center of Xbox is Game Pass and that's why they continue to fight for, we want to be able to do this mobile store. It's why they continue to like, you know, get involved in these lawsuits. And, uh, they said something about you, we, uh, in the memo it says, 'We will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI and share more as we learn and decide.' Exclusivity, windowing, and AI is like a wild trio of things to name.
It's just stuff gamers hate. We will re-evaluate our, our approach to things gamers hate.
Yeah. What is true is I think Xbox is beyond the idea that the Xbox is a console that you have in your living room. Like, I think, I think Microsoft has been past that for a while. Maybe to its detriment because fundamentally for most people your game system is the thing in your living room that you play games on. But they're, they're making this big bet and I think they're just trying to make it more clearly.
Yeah. Because also like just the fact that you can play some Xbox games on a PC and you can play some PC games on a PC, but it is like more or less unknowable what you can actually play where is just like they've just lost the plot on this. And to me it's like, okay, we need to center on our thing is Xbox, not PlayStation. Like, and that's, that's what this says to me.
There's a line in here I want to quote. Uh, here it is. We have to be honest about where we are. Where a challenger in meeting this moment will require pace, energy, and a level of self-critique that should feel uncomfortable. So that's, I think that's just a culture change. He's just announcing a culture change.
Where, and you know, Phil Spencer used to say it in a way that was used to justify like the Activision Blizzard. He'd be like, 'We're number three. I have to spend $10 billion.'
She's like, 'We're number three. We have to like be better than number two and number one.'
