716: Take the Null

How. Why do you. The first. The first. Are you using Siri AI? I think my answer is like, not really. Like I, I, so far I have not asked it to do anything that I didn't ask my phone to do before Siri AI.

So basically I'm using the same functionality as I used to, but now it's just a little bit slower and ask me more follow up questions. But that's, that's a little bit on me because I should be realizing it can do more than that now and asking it more. And I haven't been. Yeah. I mean, obviously I was snarking a second ago, but I kind of mean it.

Um, I feel like in what, what are we on? 27 to in 27 to the stuff that used to be local and then seemingly wasn't local. Like setting a timer is a great example that up until 27 to was awful.

It was just abysmal, you know, set a timer for two minutes and wait 10, 15 seconds. Sure. Timer set for, you know, two minutes for it or one minute and 40 seconds or whatever. Cause at least it was smart enough to offset itself, but it was real bad. At least it wasn't like, did you say set a timer or bet a limer?

Like, oh, that's baffling. Those responses baffled. They're so it's so far off. Yep. No, that is very true. Um, but no, that got better with 27 to, but in general, I feel like early on, and I'm not the only person who said this, but early on, I felt like, yeah, this is way better.

I'm loving this. It's working so much better, blah, blah, blah. And then it got like real bad. And I think, and maybe this is me just making this up, but I feel like, um, it was around the time that everyone else got access to it, that suddenly things got real crummy.

Um, and then eventually it seems to have gotten a little bit better now, but it's not been all roses and pansies. Now it's also worth noting. I was not on the beta. I don't think I ever ran a beta. And if I did, it was at the, or no, I think I ran, I didn't run anything until the release candidate.

And that was obviously way at the end of the cycle. So a lot of people had really positive things to say during the beta cycle. And I can't speak to that one way or the other. I have had the same types of experience of the Siri AI that I've always had with Siri, which is sometimes it's really useful.

And a lot of times it fails. And the failure rate is high enough now that I'm just, I'm like, I hesitate to ask it anything anymore. So here we are again. Here's, here's some examples of things I've asked it recently that have worked and not worked. Um, I asked it, uh, sometime the other day when I was going to spend a couple of days in Manhattan and I said, what's the weather like between now and Wednesday morning in Manhattan?

And what are the highs and lows mainly in that range? And it gave me a nice clear weather report answer. That was great. I asked it, uh, you know, recently I asked what time is sunrise and it nailed it. Perfect. Although it did say, I said, what time is sunrise at night? And it said today sunrise was at 7 0 5 AM.

It's like, okay, I mean, it's going to be close enough tomorrow, but that's still okay. Whatever. I said, does blue bottle have a larger owning company? And it said, yes. And it gave me the company name and everything. Okay. Okay. Those are good. Two of the best were what kind of recycling is tonight? Because here we have recycling and alternating weeks.

One week is like cardboard and the other week is like bottles and cans. And I have them in my calendar and it figured out and it said, tonight is cardboard recycling. Perfect. Those are great. I add, there was, um, something that, uh, John Gruber gave me the address of a million years ago and I couldn't remember what it was.

And I said, John Gruber told me the address of so-and-so. What is it? And it dug through my messages with John Gruber. And sure enough, there was the message. That's great. Yeah. But I also asked it. There was a, Adam had a friend who was over and she said something really funny and I wrote it down in Fineliner. And Fineliner indexes all of its stuff with Siri.

And I can check. I had like a debug log to see like what did my copy of the app index so I can make sure it's there. And I asked, what was so-and-so's quote in Fineliner? No chance. Didn't, it searched for a while. Couldn't look anywhere. It said, I couldn't find a quote from so-and-so in Finel iner. I checked your messages, emails and notes, but nothing came up.

Which means, sounds like it wasn't indexing. Okay. Whatever. I was walking in the city and there's a, there's a long elevated park called the High Line. It's like an elevator rail platform that's been converted. And there's the best. There's certain, there's, it's like, because it's an elevated platform, there's like staircases every few blocks. And I asked, where is the northernmost entrance to the High Line?

And it thought for a while and it gave me the address of the High Line, like the main middle of it, whatever it was, like not even close. Now that I then proceeded to go ask an AI app this exact same question. Where is the northernmost entrance to the High Line? It got it immediately and told me exactly where it was, like where the staircase was on this street and this street.

Perfect. So I know AI can do this. It just didn't do it. I also, at some point recently, asked, give me directions to Little Island, which is another thing over there in Manhattan. It just spun for a while and then just didn't do anything.

And I'm like, okay, do I ask again? So I tried asking again. It's like, just spun for a while and it said, getting directions to Little Island. And it got me driving directions. Now, I am walking. I had been walking at that point for many blocks. I am clearly walking.

I said, no, no, no. I said, give me walking directions. And it said, getting walking directions to Little Island. And then just didn't respond ever again. Okay. Yesterday, I was on the train platform here in the suburbs and there was something going on that I thought, you know what?

I should probably call the police about this. Oh, that's not good. It was getting, it was not, it didn't seem like an emergency. So I thought, I don't want to dial 911. So I pulled up here and I said, call the Suffolk County police. And I thought for a while and it said, here's the number for the Suffolk County police.

I can't call it for you. Okay. Now it was showing the number in that little blob up top of the live activity area blob. So I'm like, all right, can I just tap the number please? And I tap it and it shows a menu inside the blob that is cl ipped by the blob and tapping the phone number in the menu does not call it.

Cool. The one time you ever wanted those data detectors and they 're not there. Like where it makes every single number anywhere in any Apple OS, it thinks it's a phone number. Yeah. Like it just like, if this was, you know, a more urgent thing, like I thought asking Siri for the number for a local police department would be faster than trying to search the web for it and, you know, find it that way.

Like, nope. Sure. It's just, why, why do I keep doing this? If any of the major AI apps, you know, Claude sponsored this episode, disclaimer, but if Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, if any of them failed as often as Siri does, we would never use it again.

But we tolerate this level of failure from Siri. I don't entirely know why, but I just, I wish Apple would hold themselves to even higher standards for Siri because while Siri AI can do amazing things and sometimes does amazing things, the failure rate is still so high on dumb stuff that should work.

I hope they don't think this is good enough. I hope they, I hope that the high ups at Apple, even though they say how amazing this is, I hope they know it still sucks a lot of the time and that they're working to fix it because it's not good enough. This is your final warning for all of 2026.

This is it. This is that moment. If you're driving, use a signal because you're a grownup and then pull over and go to ATP.fm slash store. If you're walking, check your blind spots and then move to the side of the sidewalk and then go to ATP.fm slash store.

And now is the moment to go ahead and place your orders for Americans. We hope, but do not guarantee that they should be here in time for Christmas for Europeans. All bets are off. I'm so sorry. But anyways, we have a bunch of stuff on offer.

John, I will let you decide if you want to go through a quick nickel tour or if you just want to speed run this. But for real, for real, the store closes this upcoming Sunday with this. This is being recorded on a Wednesday. You probably won't hear it until Thursday or Friday. It is going to be all done on Sunday.

Don't be that person. It happens about 15 times every sale in a, ha ha, guess what I almost did, but I didn't weigh. But don't be the actual person, which happens at least once every sale. Oh no. Oh no. It was me this time.

I'm the one that forgot. ATP.fm slash store. John, how would you like to handle this? Do you want a speed run or do you want to take us on a quick final tour? First, I want to say that the sale ends November 8th. Hopefully you're hearing this episode before November 8th or even if it is November 8th. I think we have until midnight. So get out there and buy the stuff.

I just want to have a couple of updates first. Enough people ordered the A18 Pro shirt that it will be printed. Barely, but still. Hooray! So good. You know, kudos to all the A18 Pro people. Second, the response to the ATP Pride and Trans Pride shirts has been amazing. They're far and away our best sellers.

Obviously, we don't have the final numbers, but like after the sale ends, we'll tally everything up and then we'll announce on the show how much money is being donated to both of these two charities, Trans Lifeline and Transgender Law Center. But I just want to give kudos to everybody, all of our listeners who are overwhelmingly buying these two shirts, which is great.

Not sure when and what the upcoming, like if we do this again, we might put like our, you know, our Pride logos on a different piece of thing. Maybe we'll embroider on something or whatever, but like don't think, oh, they're just going to have these shirts all the time. If you want an ATP Pride or ATP Trans Pride thing, t-shirt, long sleeve shirt, tank top, pullover hoodie, sweatshirt, get it now.

Because like any of our products, I mean, we get we get emails like this all the time, all throughout the entire year. Hey, could you bring back the whatever shirt? Not always. Like, you know, when are you going to sell this thing again ? We might in a couple of years or we might never sell it again. So don't just assume because you see something for sale now that it'll be for sale later.

Get it now if you want it. And that includes the the zip hoodie that can now comes in multiple colors. So if you if you just never wanted a black hoodie or you're sick of black hoodies, try one of the colors. It's not many colors, but there are colors other than black . And then also the polo like the polo is selling pretty br iskly, too.

But again, this may be the last time we ever sell a pole because it's so damn expensive. We're making zero money on it. So there's no charity with a polo. It's just very expensive. So do not wait. Luckily, ATP gift memberships are available all year round. So you can save them as a last minute gift the night before Christmas.

You can, you know, say, oh, no, I don't know how to get this nerd in my life or someone doesn't know what to get me. So you can always do that. But for the merch, November 8th, do not wait. Yeah. And to be clear, we we aren't saying John is not trying to like bring upon artificial scarcity.

We really and truly do not know what will go what will happen in the future with regard to Pride, Trans or really any of these products. And so the safe bet is to just go ahead and order. And generally speaking, we try to do different stuff each sale with the exception of the like bog standard ATP shirt.

Generally, we try to try to mix things up. So if it may end up that we'll do Pride and Trans Pride forever, it may end up that this is a one and done. We genuinely do not know sitting here. So if there's a question, like John said, the other thing we get constantly other than, oh, my gosh, it was me this time is, hey, could you bring back just like John said?

And maybe, but maybe not. One thing I can say, though, is our policy has always been for the for the shirts for the M chips. We basically only do them once. Oh, that's true. Yeah. So like we have the on demand shirts that we have like M1 through whatever, like on demand shirts that are just not as printed as well.

But the good printed versions of any of like the chip shirts, we do them once. So there's never going to be another M5 Ultra shirt or M5 Ultra Interposer shirt because those aren't they're not as a non on demand version. It just comes out when the things come out.

So those I mean, we could obviously change the policy, but we've been consistent since the M1. We sell the shirt, the good versions of the shirts when the chip is new and pretty much never again. Yep. But yeah. So I don't want you to be cross with us if we do end up doing more pride or trans pride shirts in the future.

Are you British? Yeah. This talks to Mike on a podcast too much. I know. It's the bog standard a minute ago, which I absolutely think of as a Britishism. I don't know what's happening over here. But anyway, all we're saying is now is the time you have until this coming Sunday, November 8th at midnight ATP time.

So please, please, please ATP dot FM slash door. All right. Let's talk about this sweet new app that is sweeping the nation. Fine liner. Nick Foster writes in honor of ATP bringing back their best shirt, the Palm graffiti shirt and Marco's new app.

Please enjoy this fine liner profile where every letter is in graffiti. We will have a link in the show notes, which in turn has a picture in it. This is incredible. I love it. And Nick was even kind enough to include, I don't know how you want me to phrase this, Marco, but like a downloadable pack so you can use this yourself.

Yeah, this is incredible. Yeah. So that's what Nick included was the profile export. There it is. Thank you. Because, you know, everything, everything in the file liner is just a database. And so I kind of gave it its own quote document format for exports, which is just a SQLite database. And one of the things you can export besides individual notebooks is your profile, which includes the avatar icons and font.

So that that is the part that Nick exported here, which is great. And I, I loved this so much. This kind of this was not a good thing for me to see when I had like an hour to kill afterwards.

Cause I'm like, Hmm, this gives me some ideas. Now I had already fine liner. As I mentioned, it's, you know, it's a note taking app and I'm not going to spoil too much about it. But the idea is I was trying to figure out like on the lead up to launch, how do I make this useful on an iPhone that does not have pencil support, which is most iPhones except the duo.

So, you know, it's on the iPad. It's very, it's very nice to take notes on fine liner on an iPad. If you have a pencil, cause it's easy to take precise hand written notes on iPhones. That's it's harder to make that useful. And so I added a text tool for iPhones that gives them a full, you know, full blown text box.

You could just type into it. If you happen to have your own custom font established in the app, it will use that. It's wonderful. It'll reflow the text around stuff. If you drag stuff in and out of the text, et cetera. But I was thinking like, are there better ways to input text on devices when you don't have a pencil with you, or if you're on a device that doesn't support the pencil.

And one of the things I thought of was, wouldn't it be funny to put like a graffiti area on the bottom? Just to have, you know, obviously not, that wouldn't be the only way to input text, but that would be like a fun mode. And to, and to kind of like test out, like, how would that feel today?

I actually booted up, like I found one of those Palm OS em ulator websites that you're like, you know, because now everyone's making these amazing emulators of old computing and game hardware that you can just run in your browser. And so I found one of those and booted up Palm OS and like, let me see, like, how is graffiti today?

And like, I have only the fondest memories for all of this. Yeah. But wow, is it slow to answer text? It's horrendous. Like, it would, it would be, it's so much worse than using an onscreen keyboard on a modern touch device.

Like it, there would be no reason for me to ever actually do it besides maybe like a fun April Fool's gag. I'm not sure if that's my style, but it was, it was really fun to play with an old Palm. You know, I virtualized like a Palm 5X, which is my favorite one ever.

And it was, it was so fun to see it. And as I, as I, when I bought one on eBay a couple of years ago to play around with, like, they are really fun to play with for a brief time. But it is kind of like, okay, this was wonderful in the nin eties slash early two thousands when this came out.

But it's, it's not what you want to use now when you have other options. But this was so cool. Like, I love the actual graffiti look. I love all these ridiculous characters and the weird way you had to make certain things, especially like the F and the T.

Like it, I love this so much. Yeah, this is really, really well done. Whatever holding company currently owns the rights to graffiti would probably find you and sue you anyway. Well, I mean, they're so far they're okay with our shirts. Don't tell them. But it's, it's a lot of fun. Shh. Yeah, don't, don't tell BMW or Apple either.

Yeah. But speaking of shirts, the graffiti shirt, I think this is the second time we've ever sold it and it probably won't be back for years. So if you want one, get it. Yeah. But also I, I will just give a quick update on Fineliner while we are on the topic. It's going very well so far. Thank you to everybody for all the very kind words and a lot of, you know, getting a lot of replies on social media, getting a lot of nice emails.

It seems to be, it's not like exploding in popularity yet. It's having, you know, a relatively like casual start, I would say. It's, it's not like, you know, it's not setting the world on fire yet, but I'm kind of, I'm, what I'm hoping for is organic growth and spreading.

And so, Hey, if you like it, spread it. Thank you. And for everyone else, just thank you. I appreciate you using it. And it is, it's going very well so far. I have a question for you out of curiosity. I don't mean for this to sound like a gotcha. So if it does, I apologize.

Why are you using overcast as the business account and not setting up like a bespoke business account for each of your apps? And the reason I ask this is because last I remember thinking about this, which admittedly was years ago. It was very, very difficult to like unravel a Apple developer account such that you could sell just one of the apps within the account.

And the rule of thumb many years ago was to make an account per app. So this way, if you ever sold the app, you would just sell the entire account. And that was that. So I'm just curious why overcast radio LLC and not something else. The main reason why, so first of all, like what you were just saying about like the difficulty of transferring apps, um, that has gotten more capable and easier over time.

I'm sure there are still pains in the butt about it or limitations about it, but like it used to be like, you know , like if you ever touched on iCloud, it would not, you'd never go to transfer an app. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I think that, I don't think that's true anymore. I could be wrong. I don't, I don't think so. But at this point I realized like no one's coming around buying my apps.

Yeah. It's these, these are my apps. They're going to stay in my app. And like if somebody wants to, you know, give me a hundred million dollars for an app, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. I don't think it's going to happen personally, but you know , anyway. So the reason I, it was kind of part of my, my year of efficiency, uh, theme this year that as I was, as I was, um , preparing to launch unforgettable, I faced the same dilemma.

Like, do I launch it under overcast radio LLC with my over cast developer account? Do I start a new LLC with a new developer account? Like, do you know, what do I do there? And as part of the year of efficiency, um, I, I went through the process of having overcast, uh, having, having the LLC take an S election on the taxes.

Uh, which, um, everyone seemed to think I was allowed to do given the conditions of it. And it added some complexity. I have, I have like a payroll provider that I pay myself through now and stuff. So there's some complexity, but it saves a lot in, in tax able income. And so the question arose like, okay, when unfretful was going to launch, should that just be part of that same entity to take advantage of that?

And all of the other kind of established infrastructure I have around overcast radio LLC being an entity with a developer account that makes apps. And I decided to just do it because the advantages of setting it up separately were reasonably small and unlikely .

And the advantages of rolling it all in, it turns out to be huge because I've done it the other way. I've had, you know, like I had, I used to have my full city account that had its own apps on it. Um, like that was like my fire island driving app. I had it over there like it was just kind of a pain to have everything be separate. And when it's on one developer account and one LLC, so much stuff just becomes simpler, easier, more efficient.

Things like, you know, I only have to have one app figures account. Then that covers all the apps. You know, I only have to like, when I have relationships set up with like, you know, invoicing systems for hosting providers or like I, you know, I hired, uh, you know, designers and stuff.

Like I already have everything set up for that. And the bank accounts are set up and the credit card is set up and everything's already set up. The hosting accounts are set up. The domain registration, like everything is all set up for that. And it just made it a lot easier to just have it combined into one.

So overcast radio LLC, while it is not the best name for an entity that contains these three completely unrelated apps, it does make a lot of sense. Logistically speaking and tax wise and legally and financially and everything else. And no one cares what the company name is anyway.

We are sponsored this week by granola. Let me tell you something. It is long documented on the show that my memory is trash. And this has pretty much always been the case. As I get ever older, it gets ever worse. That's just the way of the world.

And if you're in a situation like me where you have anything less than photographic memory, then you might want to have really robust notes for your work meetings. And if you want that, then it'd be great to have some sort of tool on your side to help you take those notes.

Well, granola is an AI powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful. It captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out made easy to find. Let me build on that a little bit. Structured notes, you say, Casey? Why, yes. This looks a whole heck of a lot like Markdown to me.

And that's what we like to see. So I did a call with Syracuse a couple of months ago to try this out. And it genuinely went really well. Granola took some really robust notes. Not too much, just the right amount. It's very Goldilocks, and I mean that in a complimentary way. And what's great is for each of the line items that you see , you can drill in and get a transcript summary.

And then it will also pull out poll quotes of exactly who said what with speaker attribution, who said what in the exact words they use that led them to the summary that then led them to the line item. It's really, really well done. And it's really great if you're like me and you want to be present in the moment and not worry about taking notes, but also not lose track of action items after the fact.

It really did work spectacularly well. And I was really, really pleased with it. So once you try it on a first meeting, it is hard to go without. You can try Granola totally free. Head to granola.ai.atp. That's G-R-A-N-O-L-A dot A-I slash A-T-P.

All caps on the A-T-P. I'm not sure if it matters, but let's play it safe. To get your time back, go to granola.ai slash A-T-P and try it on your next call. Thank you to Granola for sponsoring the show. All right, let's talk MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR display.

And Allison writes, I got super excited when I heard you say that the 14-inch ProLED MacBook Pro is two-tenths of an inch thinner, but it's two-hundredths of an inch thinner. And, John, you added in our internal show notes, the 14- inch is a half millimeter thinner, and the 16-inch is 0.8 millimeters thinner.

So there you go. Our bad. Yeah, I just wrote the wrong number in the notes last time. I guess I missed the zero, and I just read the wrong number . So my bad. It is not as much thinner as you would hope. But it is actually half a pound lighter. Oh, by the way, regarding the ProLED XDR MacBook Pro, what a long name.

I don't understand. Why didn't they just... I know they wanted a separate name because they still have the other ones, and that's fine. Why didn't they just call it the MacBook Pro XDR? Yeah, yeah. Anyway. ProLED, Marco. I know I'll get used to it.

Don't forget about display. What do you mean XDR? With. I don't know what that means. You have to tell me it's display. You have to include the with. Anyway. But I actually canceled and reordered it because, again, year of efficiency. Two things that helped a lot. Number one, New York has a sales tax exemption for computers that you buy if they're primarily used to make software available for sale.

And I qualify for that. So I got tax-free on that. And then also, after, you know, when, John, you asked me during the show last week, oh, what am I doing with the old one? And I said, oh, I'll probably, you know, trade it in or sell it, whatever. Well, after the show, I typed in the serial number into Apple's trade-in thing.

And it offered like $3,600. And I was like, whoa, that's more than I expected. But it had like a glitch in the form. It wouldn't give me a gift card. It said like, you know, that much trade-in or null gift card.

Okay. Take the null. Take the null. Yeah. What is that? Apply it to any price and it becomes null. Who knows? Better than Nan. True. Anyway, so I was like, oh, but if I reorder it, it lets me apply it to the current order.

And I checked prices on eBay for the same configuration. What, you know, and obviously you don't look at listing prices. You look at sold items. And the sold items prices were like $3,100 to $3,900. And Apple offered $3,650. I'll take it.

So we'll see how that turns out. You know, I haven't gotten the machine yet. So I haven't sent this one back yet. And they haven't accepted the trade-in and whatever else. But I would say if you are, you know, thinking about upgrading and going through this process, check Apple's trade-in values.

It was a very pleasant surprise how high that was. Moving right along, a friend of the show, Guy Rambo, points out with a screenshot that touchscreen MacBook Pros have a toggle to completely disable the touchscreen. In the same Cardner chat that I bring up many times, one of the three of us in there is, well, two of us are the same age.

One of them is a few years younger than myself. And the other one, well, at least younger in body, but very much old in spirit. And he was whining and moaning about, oh, I don't want this . I don't want this. It better be able to be turned off. Well, if you are old in spirit, if not in body, and you want to turn off your touchscreen, I have great news for you.

As Guy pointed out, there is a, I think it's an accessibility option in touch called ignore touch gestures. And with the subtitle ignores gestures when using touch displays in sidecar. And there is an on-off toggle right there. Additionally, John, you made another discovery.

I saw a couple of people report on this, that apparently you can set it up so that pinch to zoom acts like like control mouse wheel or like a control two finger swipe. Like in other words, pinching anywhere on the screen will do the zoom thing for accessibility, which is nice as opposed to like zooming within like the preview app or whatever.

So for people who do want to touch the screen, that might be more convenient than the, you know, control two finger swipe or whatever you've been doing. Yeah, I use that all the time when I don't have contacts in and it is very helpful. And I could see pinch to zoom or pinch to, you know, full screen zoom, whatever you want to call it being really helpful.

Coming back to Guy Rambo, the glowing Apple logo on the new MacBook Pro models is controllable by software. It has a 25 Hertz PWM frequency and per device calibration. Core brightness, which is the name of the framework, I guess, implements automatic brightness and controls the relationship between display and logo brightness.

One interesting tidbit, the brightness of the logo is adjusted differently depending on the enclosure color. Nice. So that bodes well for being able to control that using whatever private APIs that he's discovered. All right. With regard to keyboard marks on the screen, Keith Huss writes the, this, and we'll link it, microfiber keyboard dust cover has totally saved me from oily keyboard impressions on my 2026 MacBook Pro.

It's a correctly sized, super thin microfiber cloth that you just close up in your laptop over the keyboard. They also offer size for the 14 inch MacBook Pro. And it's something like $2 on AliExpress. So not bad. I always get paranoid about putting anything on the, putting anything inside the clamshell of the laptop and closing it because there's, there's so low tolerances.

I'm afraid is this going to crack something or do something weird? But apparently Keith has had good luck with it. Yeah. I've seen people use these for years. I've never been tempted to use one, but I ordered one when I saw the message. I'm like, no, I, cause I, the imprints are pretty rough on my, my 14 inch nanotexture.

And like, that's what I ordered another 14 inch with nanote xture. I'm like, okay. I think, uh, I think the time has come for me to try this method. All right. Uh, there is some dissension in the ranks. John, I can introduce this if you'd like, but I feel like it might be best if you take us through this.

Yeah. I wish I had known about this last episode because it would have really, uh, colored my comments on the new MacBook Pro with ProLed XDR display. Uh, but, um, yeah. So Jeff writes on the new MacBook Pro ProLed, the bottom corners of the screen are rounded.

AppKit prefers to keep your window corners concentric with the display instead of clipping them for content inside the window. You can use APIs like NS view layout region, UI view layout region, geometry proxy, container corner insets and corner container corner, uh, offset to easily constrain your layout against the changing radius.

And there is a video linked. We will link the Jeff's posts and the video. Uh, I would encourage both of you to look at the video if you have not, but, and while I explain what's going on here. So what Jeff is saying is that, um, the screen, the physical screen on the ProLed MacBook Pros have rounded corners on the top and the bottom time was when Apple made screens that were rectangular and then they started rounding the top corners on the laptops.

And that was not great, but there was some precedent because back from the original Macintosh on the original Macintosh had a nine inch CRT and it was rectangular. Okay. Um, but the menu bar had black pixels in the upper left and upper right corners that made the menu bar look like it had rounded top corners.

It didn't. The screen was just not drawing those. It was a monochrome display, right? So it was a white menu bar and they just didn't light up those pixels. If you played a full screen game or whatever, of course it would use those pixels. But when the menu bar was visible, it rounded them. And that's kind of what Apple was doing with rounding the corners of the display. Although the radius was much bigger in the modern age, but Apple wasn't just not drawing the pixels there.

They would either not include those pixels in the screen or cover them with parts of the bezel or whatever. So you could never put a pixel in the corner of the screen because there was no corner. They rounded the top and bottom corners. And I didn't like that, but you know, the menu bar is up there anyway.

And guys, so if you, if you play full screen video, you're going to miss the corners. It's annoying, but whatever. Now they rounded the bottom corners. Now they've gone too far, too far. It's so terrible. Again, the physical screen does not have pixels. Like you can't see them. If they're there, they're covered.

Maybe they're not there entirely. They've rounded the top and bottom corners of the screen on the ProLid laptops. And it's not a small corner radius. It's pretty big. You have to watch this video because the problem is, let's say you have a window that has like they show like a sidebar with like a filter at the bottom of the sidebar where you can type things in to filter the sidebar or something.

And, you know, there's a corner radius on the window because Mac OS 27 windows do have a rounded corner. But that corner radius is not as big as the physical corner radius on the screen. So if you take that window and move it down to the lower left corner, it's like, oh, we're about to clip your UI because some part of your UI now is going to be hidden in the pixels that we refuse to sell you in the corner of your screen.

And they're like, oh, don't worry. We've updated AppKit and UIKit and all these other things so that your app can detect when that's happening and squirm the damn controls away from the corner and also make the corner radius of the window bigger as it approaches the corner so it can nestle into the corner and shove the text field over also that UI isn't clipped.

Or they could just make a rectangular screen to show rectangular content on their rectangular laptops. This is so incredibly dumb. It just it boggles my mind. Someone thought this was a good idea. And then someone said, but but but what about when people they're not going to be able to see stuff there?

What if they have it like? Oh, don't worry. I've got a solution. The solution was not this is a terrible idea. We should never do this like, no, we can make the framework provide API. So the UI will squirm out of the way and the corners of the window will get rounder. But only one of the corners, I think. I don't know. Maybe there's all of them. I can't tell. The corner will get rounder and the text field will move out of the way.

Someone should have stopped this and raised their hand and say, what? What are we doing here? Like, what is the purpose of screen? What? Why do screens exist? What? What are they there for? Are they there to show us the content that's on our computer? Are they there to look cute? And which has higher priority?

So incredibly dumb. Obviously, you can connect an external display. Who knows? Maybe their external displays are going to have tennis ball sized rounded corners. And anytime you bring UI up near, it'll morph the sides of the windows. So everything squishes over. So they can have big round corners on their $6,000 Protus Play XDRs if they ever make another one.

I am incredibly angry about this. This is so dumb and is also yet another reason for me to hate laptops. And I will link again in the show notes. We'll link again in the show notes to Martin Vichari's post about Reimard's, Cervas's post about rounded corners and how bad they are and how they steal space.

And are stupid. It's like, at what cost rounded corners? And the cost is incredibly high all throughout the UI, not just the corners. Everywhere it's high. But like, oh, but I just like it. It's cuter. And they were too rounded in Tahoe. Now they're less in Golden Gate. So I'm OK with it. But now they're coming for the screen. Please, just read these articles if you think rounded corners aren't a big deal.

Who cares? It's just an aesthetic thing. It's not. It physically reduces the space you have to see content on your screen. In every window, in every toolbar, in every sidebar, and now in the entire screen. I'm very angry about this. I had no idea. So dumb.

So dumb. Honestly, like, why do they have to round them so much that it matters? Like, the simple solution here is just have the standard window corner radius be small enough that it could fit like a small thing in the corner.

But like, no, when you're laying out content in a window, you're never putting controls or text labels at the very, very first pixel. Like, near any edge. You're always spacing it in by at least five to 20 pixels or points.

You could, and like a CAD app that has like a bar along the bottom with lots of things. You could put it in a totally lower left corner. But I will point out. But nobody would do that. You would always set it in by at least like five or 10 points. At least. Like, again, some apps really want to use every inch of the screen, especially like really technical apps that don't care how they look like a CAD app or 3D app with a million text fields everywhere.

But I will point out, remember, these are the OLED MacBook Pros. One of the strengths is OLED is that you can turn off pixels and they're totally black. So guess what? Just make the screen have all the pixels. And if you want rounded corners, fine, don't light up those pixels. But, oh, if you have a problem, the solution is, oh, in this instance, we have to light up the pixels because you shoved the window in the corner.

Like, what? You can have your cake and eat it too. You won't even be able to tell that the pixels are there because you just turned them off, right? There's no reason to physically not include those pixels on this incredibly expensive display. Do what the original Mac did. Include the pixels. Just don't light them up and it will be invisible because it's black.

So dumb. All right. Before John completely finishes crashing out, let's move on to the iPhone Duo. I feel like we talked about this at least in passing last episode, but the iPhone Duo will welcome you if you purchase it from an Apple store. And I think only in the U.S.

And we had talked about, I'd seen a couple of reports of this flow by online. I did order one from an Apple store, picked it up in an Apple store. I was the first person, I'm pretty sure, to pick it up in my Apple store. This did not happen for me. I'd seen, and I don't have a source for this, but I'd seen somebody say that they were asked if they wanted it, wanted this personalization to happen.

And they had to wait like five minutes for, you know, magic to happen with that toast thing, whatever it's called, that magical box. The pizza oven. That's what I wanted to come up with. But anyways, Luke Milani's video has an example of this, and we'll put a link in the show notes, a timestamp link in the show notes.

So you can see this. But sure enough, in cursive, it says, you know, while it's opened, hello, Luke. And I kind of wish that this had happened for me just because I think it's fun. But yeah, apparently not 100% execute. They don't execute 100% of the time. Yeah, I think it is that like the, you know, the little to aster pizza oven where you put it in or whatever.

You would think like, oh, they'll just put it on a server somewhere. And, you know, they don't need to put it in a pizza oven. They'll just give you the box. And when you open it up, it'll connect to the server and find out who you are. But at this point, when you just open it up, it doesn't even have a network connection. So we can't look it up on this. This is like literally the first thing that you see before it connects to Wi-Fi, before it connects to cellular, before anything, just took it out of the box.

So it has to be some kind of thing that they, you know, use their little, we can reprogram your device while it's in the box. And they just, you know, put it in your name or whatever. It's cool. Yeah, I think it's a fun little tweak. I have not seen it on either of the two duos I've unboxed.

But I also get the impression that Apple retail is, you know, struggling to keep up, I'd say, with the realities of the duo launch. Like, it's been a lot for them. Because, of course, like, you know, the stock is, you know, very, very small volume.

People are very highly demanding. And people are still lining up outside Apple stores every single day trying to get duos, mostly because there's a huge market for resale. But also, like, I was in the city yesterday, and I saw two duos in use by real people in the wild, which is now tied for how many times I've seen the iPhone Air used by real people in the wild.

But, like, you know, real people are also, it isn't all just being resold. Real people are actually using it for themselves also. And there's just no supply. So, like, I've heard from the retail people that, like, you know, basically everyone, you know, we mentioned last week that I was using, I mentioned I was using one of those, like, stock tracking sites to alert me when they came in stock.

Well, everyone's doing that. And people are using AI agents to, like, buy them for them as quickly as possible when they do come in, like, the moment they come in stock. So, like, I found, I learned the answer to, I mentioned last episode that when I tried to pick up, when I picked up the two terabyte model that I, the only one I could get, I asked if I could, if I could change the payment method to my business credit card.

See, also a year of efficiency. And, and, and I was told then that they couldn't. Well, I found out from some birdies why they couldn't. So, the way their system would work, it's already paid for when you go to pick it up. And so, they would have to process it as a return and then have me rebuy it.

But the moment it's scanned in as a return, it goes back into available inventory for the store. And then someone else could grab it online. And they would because they have AI bots running and monitoring websites and everything. And so, like, they, they, they would not have a way to guarantee that they could resell the same one back to me a moment later because somebody else would probably grab it in the meantime.

So, that's the reality of what, like, the kind of conditions and, like, speeds and everything that Apple retail is dealing with right now. So, I'm guessing, like, once this all calms down, which could be weeks or months away, then I'm guessing they're going to have more time to, like, apply these custom izations and things like that.

That, you know, that might be different and better than. For now, I, I wouldn't expect this to be a common occurrence. Donald Decodes is apparently a YouTube channel. And they have a good explanation behind the nanotexture layer on the iPhone Duo.

We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, they did a really good job of, like, explaining slowly and very carefully why does this layer exist? How is this particular one designed? And how does it do the job that it does? And how is it different than other things? Really good video. Highly recommend it. Yep, it was very good. Then we have to bring up, I think we, again, made passing mention of this last episode, but now we need to really properly dig in.

Crackgate, or whatever you'd like to call it. Andy Anako, on the 24th of October, this is the day after release, if I'm not mistaken, writes, Check out the newly minted iPhone Duo subreddit. It's filled with posts from Happy Day One owners, as well as ones from people whose screens broke almost instantly. These busted duos are all broken in the same way, vertically along the crease, with a thick horizontal bar about two-fifths of the way up on the right-hand side.

Doesn't this consistency imply an underlying design or manufacturing defect? Yes. Yes, it does. Jay Peters at The Verge, two days later on the 26th. Here's Apple's full statement from Apple's Alex Kirschner. The response to iPhone Duo from early users has been incredibly positive, and we're seeing exciting things from developers who are rapidly updating their apps to take advantage of its unique form factor.

We are aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units. If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement. The statement was fine, and this type of thing.

I know people are mad. They're like, oh, there's a problem, and Apple's not doing it. They're going to, like, if your thing breaks on the day you buy it, Apple's just going to replace it for free. Like, this is not, if they start doing this right after all your AppleCare runs out, then that's a big thing, and we need to make a big stink. But right now, I feel like it's just, it's a bummer, and it 's sucky, and Apple's going to have to eat the cost of it or whatever.

But as an owner, it's mostly just like, oh, I got unlucky, and I got one of the bad ones. But you're going to get a new phone. Well, see, the problem, okay, so first of all, all of these problems are exacerbated by the shortages. Because these stores can't keep a lot of spare stock because they have no stock.

So, yeah, you're, like, you know, obviously, if this happens to your phone, Apple's going to take care of you. But you still have to, you know, either return it by mail or go to the store and wait for a new one. And if you go to the store, they might not have one that day or that week to give you.

Yeah, no, it is a bummer. I'm not saying it's not a bad thing that happens to you. But, like, all these stories, people bring out the pitch for us, and they're like, Apple knows about this and is denying it and is refusing to repair it. It's like none of that is happening. It's a bummer, and, you know, it's bad that, like, Apple's first phone has a problem. It doesn't surprise me, though. Like, honestly, it's a very difficult, complicated, fragile thing, and Apple's going to screw it up on their first time out.

Yeah, and here's the thing. I don't think the evidence that we have so far shows that it is an inherent flaw to the design. It looks like, you know, based on people who have figured out, like, there's, like, there's one part inside the hinge that seems like it has a weak point and cracks at a certain point.

But that seems like it could easily, it could either be easily, like, tweaked halfway through the build of this product or something. Or it seemed like it was just literally, like, a bad run of that part that has a weakness in it from a bad manufacturing run or something. Because it's not happening to every duo.

You know, the reviewers that, you know, put them in bending machines thousands of times, like, it never happened to them. So, obviously, it isn't happening to all of them. That being said, it is obviously a significant issue. But, again, what does that mean? Does it mean 5% of them fail? That's a lot in terms of absolute numbers.

But does it mean the one that you personally have will fail in this way? Probably not. But that is still a big issue for Apple. And they do have to and will be dealing with it. And when they say a small number, that is PR speak. That is standard procedure. You always say it's a small number.

That doesn't mean it's a small number. But it, again, probably anecdotally, it is probably at least a reasonably small percentage. So, this is a bigger problem than they are saying in all likelihood. But it is not the biggest problem in the world. And it does seem like it is not a guarantee that every duo will break this way.

But we will see. And, again, all of these problems are exacerbated by the short supply. Once the supply gets better, maybe they can, you know, maybe they iron out some of the manufacturing issues that might be causing this flaw to happen.

Maybe, you know, obviously repairs and replacements would get easier to do and faster to do. So, that will kind of heal all wounds, like, as volume goes up. I would expect this is probably going to be widespread enough that I bet it gets one of those extended warranty coverage things they do.

Where, like, they'll just cover it for free past AppleCare for a couple of years. Like, it seems like it's that scale of problem. So, again, not every unit, but it's certainly a lot of them . So, you know, stay tuned for that. Like, in one year from now, when all of their stock Apple Care plans expire, I bet this issue still gets fixed for free.

Yeah, we'll see if it ends up being a manufacturing defect or design defect or whatever. But that's the thing to worry about. Not happening. Anything that happens, like, on the first batch that they made on, like, day one or whatever. Like, you figure they'll address that. The problem is a year from now. If screens are breaking like this a year from now, now you have a serious problem.

Now you need one of those programs. Now there's a class action lawsuit. Like, that's where things get serious. But day one, the first one's off the assembly line. It doesn't surprise me that there's a problem. And Apple's never going to tell you what the percentage is. They're not going to tell you. No, of course not. So, that's all. You'll find that out in the class action lawsuit. But, like, I guarantee you it's higher than they're trying to make us think.

But it's lower than it being the end of the world. But I do think this will end with that outcome. I think it will have a class action lawsuit. I think it will have an extended service bulletin or whatever those are called. Like, I think those things will happen. But for a given iPhone Duo owner, we don't know, like, how likely is it that your phone will break in this way at some point?

It doesn't seem like it's super high right now. Well, there's some complications that we'll get to in a second. But first, for one person who did try to figure out what the problem was, or has a theory anyway. Right. So, Terrence O'Brien at The Verge writes, YouTuber Curious Haggy was able to reproduce the cracked screen during some durability testing of the iPhone Duo.

We'll put a link to that YouTube video in the show notes. And that's the one where it's like, this is where they're all breaking. The line is only the same place. Mine broke in the same way. I opened it up. I looked underneath the part where that line was. And lo and behold, a piece of the hinge cracked. And it just was free-flowing and loose.

It must have cracked and flung itself up against the back of the screen, which hits it in exactly that spot. And it's like, okay, I believe that's how their phone broke . Because there's literally a broken piece of metal right under the part of the screen that broke. A, that metal shouldn't be broken. And B, smoking gun, it's right underneath the place where the screen got damaged.

But does that mean that's how they all have broken? Because I haven't seen the other ones opened up. So, it's a good theory. But there's more to it. Now we get to our friend, I don't know what this person's name is. Is his name actually Jerry? I don't actually know. I believe there was a recent video where he said his name isn't actually Jerry.

And Jerry was like a relative, like his grandfather or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. M, K, B, H, D referred to him by name. I don't remember what it was, though. Maybe it was Zach or something. Anyway. So, this is JerryRigEverything, and there's a timestamp link in the show notes. But, quote unquote, Jerry peeled off the matte layer on top of the screen and shows he has two duos side by side, one with the covering and one without.

And you can see the difference. I understand people who are worked up about how muted the colors are on the inner screen and so on and so forth. But for me, as someone who does use this phone outdoors, including in strong sunlight, that and I'm not as discer ning as like, I don't know, with John Syracuse, for example.

I don't mind the matte screen. And, in fact, I think I prefer having this because it's so much more useful outdoors in sunlight. So, for my personal taste, I vastly prefer the way it is, the way it looks with the matte layer on top. But I absolutely concede and can see that the color reproduction is definitely better without that matte layer on top of it.

Yeah. There's a different background behind these two, so it kind of messes it up. But, yeah. Like, if you like the shiny one, you could, in theory, take off the matte thing. But keep in mind that the matte thing isn't just doing light diffusion. It's also literally protecting the screen. It's another layer of protection. So, it serves that function as well. So, I would not recommend this.

And, also, I think this is the same video. Or, maybe it was one of the other reviews that explained, like, you can't put this, you know, when Apple replaces this, they have to do it with, like, you know, fraction of a fraction of a millimeter precision. Because of the way that, like, when you fold it, the layers slide past each other slightly.

And it's not the type of thing where you can say, ah, this is close enough. Because you literally fold it in half. So, please don't try this at home. But that's this whole challenge. I rig everything. He destroys phones. Like, that's the deal. Yeah. That's a task best left to YouTubers. Not us. Yes. All right.

Also, from that video, do not get sand in your duo. JerryRigEverything puts a pile of sand on the duo and it would no longer close or open all the way due to sand getting in the hinge. I feel like there was another video that you linked in here . It's probably right below it in the notes. Okay. There you go.

Thank you. Where this is also spoken about. Sorry. I watched a lot of YouTube videos this morning that John had come up with. So, they all kind of blurred together. But anyways. Yeah. Sand or other small pieces of dust. Like, on paper, the duo should be able to keep it out given the IP67 rating.

68. 68. Thank you. But in reality, it seems perhaps a little less cut and dry. So, that's the thing with the rating. So, the second video is from iFixit. iFixit did, like, the fine neon dust. We'll have timestamp links to both the JerryRigEverythingS and and the iFixit neon dust.

And JerryRig is just destroying stuff and seeing how it works. And then iFixit, like, opened it up and just a forensic of, like, it's, like, very brightly colored dust. You can see where it went and where it didn't go. And here's the deal, according to iFixit, their examination of it.

It seems like, and this is a real kind of, like, loophole that Apple should address at some point, that the rating, IP68 or whatever it is, is about water and dust ingress into the part where the computer lives.

Not the hinge. Because the dust didn't get into the place where the SOC is . The place where the RAM is. The place where, you know, dust and water didn't get into those areas. But it 100% got into the hinge. That's why I was so shocked when they gave this rating. Because, like, how are they sealing the hinge?

Because the screen, like, floats over this empty chasm. And I'm like, oh, maybe there's just, like, a sealed area below where the, like, where the screen loops into there. So it doesn't, you know, like, maybe they sealed that up. Nope. That's where the hinge lives. Sand can 100% get in there.

And when it does get in there, say goodbye to your hinge. Like, the phone wouldn't even close anymore. Because the sand was in there crunching and crunching away. And this is part of the thing of, like, lots of people put lots of grit in the hinge. And then they would try to open it. And it's like, it won't even open all the way. It won't even go flat.

And they'll just, like, I'm going to force it because I'm a YouTuber. I'm going to force it. And they force it. And you know what happens? The hinge breaks and pokes the screen. So now, a year from now, when someone says, look, I have the line on my screen. It's just like those day one people. Their thing broke when they took it out of the box. I have the same thing. It's obviously a manufacturing defect.

Is it? Or did you get one piece of sand under that part of the hinge and then force it open? And that one piece of sand caused that little thing to snap ? I'm not saying, the people whose things broke out of the box, that's a manufacturing defect or something or a design flaw. But a year later, if you get sand and grit into your hinge and you force it open and then your hinge cracks and then it hits your screen and breaks it in the same place, that I feel like is not really, you know, it's not the same problem as the other thing.

Like, Apple should still replace it under AppleCare if you still have it or whatever. But, like, it's not a, well, I know the class action lawsuit works out. Is it a design flaw? Because this is true of all the folding phones, basically. If you get sand in the hinge, it's game over. So do not take your iPhone Duo to the beach.

Just don't do it. Like, it doesn't take a lot of sand to render this inoper able. And it's not like you can open it up and just, I'll just blow it out like a Nintendo cartridge and it will be fine. No. Like, it's a very delicate piece of machinery. And although they sealed up the two halves, the two halves are waterproof and dustproof.

The hinge is not part of the two halves and it is absolutely not dustproof. So do not get fine particulates anywhere near that hinge. You will be sad. Yeah. And I think, like, and look, I'm not saying that Apple should design this to tolerate YouTubers pouring sand into it.

They're obviously doing a significant stress test. But I think this is worth thinking about. Like, you know, are you the kind of person that has to frequently clean a bunch of dust out of the port from the bottom of your phone? Is there sand in the pocket of your jacket where you put your phone? Right. Or just like, like, how often do you have to, like, clean dust from around your phone from your pocket or whatever storage situation you have?

Are you frequently having to, like, you know, clean under the case ridges of your case or whatever? Like, again, putting stuff out of the port, pulling stuff out of the speaker holes. Like, if you operate your phone in conditions or store your phone in conditions where you're going to have a lot of lint and dust and sand possibly, like, yeah, the Duo and any foldable is probably not a great choice for you.

Or at least you should probably get Apple care for the duration of the time that you're going to have it. But it looks like, you know, look, Apple has done an adm irable job sealing it up from the elements reasonably. But you have to still keep in mind it is still a folding phone in the same way that, like, even if they do a really great job, you know, if they do like a MacBook Pro and they try to seal it up from any kind of, you know, small ingresses, it's like it's still a laptop.

Laptops inherently have a bunch of entry points and are inherently very sensitive to certain types of things like dust and liquids where your phone is more easily sealed up. Well, a foldable phone is going to be less inherently seal able and inherently water and dust proof than a regular slab phone.

That's always going to be the case because it has this incredibly intricate moving hinge that is constantly being open and closed throughout usage of the phone. So they could seal a laptop because I think the laptop's hinge is sealable. But the way the screen folds into a little empty area on phones, currently no one has come up with a way to either see because you have two choices.

You can seal that, which Apple has chose not to do or try to do. Or you can make the mechanism tolerate, you know, tolerate dust coming into it, like some way to like get the dust out and let it like make all the gaps big enough that everything falls through it and doesn't get caught within it.

And with current screen technology sealing, it seems to be impossible. But laptops could be sealed if Apple really wanted to, because I think that the hinge on laptops is the type of thing like, you know, it's not there 's no like OLED screen looping itself in and filling a cavity and like a double edge hinge like the hinge inside.

This is so complicated. Look at the hinge on a MacBook Pro. It's simple and there's you could easily make that so no dust can get in there. And even if some does get in there, it's not going to break anything. So like but yeah, no one no one has any idea how to do with folding. And Apple's big achievement here is, hey, the two halves of the phone are sealed.

Nothing's going to get in there. But my folding phone is useless to me if I can't fold it or unfold it because the hinge is hosed. Yep. Right. So just to recap, like JerryRigEverything's video and then iFixit also puts some extremely fine dust in a baggie and shakes the duo in a baggie and shakes it all up.

And it's also. And then they opened it up and say, found say, where did that dust go? And the answer is it all went in the hinge. Yep. Yeah, of course. And not in the other parts. Like they opened up the other halves and like it didn't get in here, but it did get in the hinge. We are sponsored this episode by Claude.

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Thank you so much to Claude for sponsoring our show. Basic Apple guy writes something that I did not notice, but I find fascinating. The iPhone Duo lists two batteries in the battery health thing in settings.

I'm looking at mine right now. And yeah, they look identical, same maximum capacity, same cycle count, same manufacture date, same first use. But sure enough, there's battery one and battery two. And they're two different sizes. They don't show that on the screen, but they are two different, very differently sized batteries.

Steven Robles points out something that I've discovered probably since we last recorded. But I'm glad that I think John put this in the show notes because I would have forgotten to bring it up. iPhone mirroring absolutely works on the Duo, but just the outer screen. And as far as Steven and I can tell, there's no way to open it, if you will, to the inner screen, which is fine.

But a bummer. And I hope that gets better over time. Sam Shepard writes, they wrote directly to us, I believe. But I'd seen this floating around in a couple of places. And it is brilliant. And I've tried it. And it works. Sam Shepard is unlocking the iPhone Duo with kind of his like index finger first or zero with the first knuckle area.

It's very hard to paint a word picture about this. But imagine if you're looking at your palm and you're going from the place where your index finger meets your palm to the first hinge, the first kn uckle. That's what Sam registered with Face ID. And I've since done as well. And it's not foolproof, but it works pretty well.

And Sam has a really good and very short video on Mastodon where he talks about what he's done and shows a demonstration of it. This gets my, to use a Merlinism, official okie-dokie. This was a great idea and it's working pretty well for me. I think this is lowering your security because there's just not as many lines and swirls on that part of your finger.

There's some, but not enough that I feel like that. I think that's drastically reducing the security. It's like when people register like their dog's nose or their cat's paw on Touch ID when it first came out. Like you can do it, but I don't necessarily recommend this. And I put Sam Shepard's thing in here because I think he was the very first person I saw do this before all the other later articles.

So I want to give credit where credit is due. And there's a picture in his post and you can see, you know , how he, I, I circled it in red in our show notes, but you'll see it. I think it's like a video. It's a, you just grab the phone around there and you push that pad of your finger against Touch ID and it unlocks. But go look at that pad on your finger right now.

And then look at your fingertip and compare the complexity and number of ridges and swirls. I feel like this is a secure downgrade. Well, you might be right. I think Apple giving us like a little bit of security down grade opting in. Like I, it's a tricky question.

Like, should they allow us to have lower security on our devices? It's like, you can get me to answer that question both ways depending on what day you ask me. Right. It's a tough decision. You know, one thing you could potentially argue is like, well, wouldn't this phone be better?

And maybe something also like an iPad non-pro, like an iPad mini. Wouldn't these be better with some kind of camera-based face ID option? That you could say, all right, well, for basic unlocking, let me just use the front camera if you don't have face ID hardware and just try to recognize me and maybe don't let me make purchases that way or access sensitive data like on, you know, unlocking a password app or, you know, your secure notes.

I think as the iPhone line goes on, if they continue to have the duo and it continues to succeed, which seems likely, they're always going to have the challenge of where to put face ID hardware in this. Like, do you put only one on the outside? Do you put two entire sets of it, one on the outside and one on the inside, so it can work the same way in both?

I think that, and, you know, that's obviously a physical space problem. It's a looking through the screen problem and it's a cost problem. So there's multiple large problems to try to do that. So there's going to be, I think, persistent demand in the iPhone ecosystem for some alternative to touch ID, but where face ID in its full form can't or won't reasonably fit.

So I think they will probably be pushed by market demand to address this problem in some way. And so, again, maybe that way is kind of what they're doing with Home View. Remember Home View? That, like, they have, like, this just camera-based face recognition and it does provide, like, a lower level of security that gives you access to some things, but doesn't give you access to everything without a higher level.

That's an added level of complexity where, is my phone completely unlocked or partially unlocked? I really don't think they're going to do that. I think Apple's current solution is Apple Watch Unlock, which they love because it makes you buy another Apple device. And they're like, we already have a solution to this. It's called Unlock with your Apple Watch and it's very secure. Yeah, but a lot of iPhone owners don't also own Apple Watch es.

And then they use Touch ID and then they train it on their cat's nose and lower their security. Right. Or, well, and also, but you can also make an argument that, like, when all these mechanisms inevitably fail, which, look, both Touch ID and Face ID fail all the time and require you to enter your passcode all the time.

What happens? People have low security passcodes. It's like, they eventually just give up and make their pass code 1212. And that's, like, you look around at, like, what do regular people do? It's that. It is the phone equivalent of sticking a Post-it note with your computer password that your network admins made you, you know, made you set on the monitor or under the keyboard tray or something.

Because, you know, like, security can only be so inconvenient or complicated before people will just route around it. So if the system is so cumbersome and annoying and limited that people are just having to enter their passcode 20 times a day and having the passcode possibly be simpler to make that easier, and that just increases the odds of other people guessing or shoulder surfing it, that's not actually serving security.

So it is – it's a very tricky question. But I think, you know, obviously the easier you can make good security, the better. And these things are always in tension. But I do think the answer here is probably going to be they probably need some kind of visual camera-based face ID alternative for people who choose it.

But I think if they did that, I think they'd make it unlock it fully. Like, they don't make – if you make your code 1111, they unlock the phone fully, man. Like, that's – there is no, like, lower security mode where it's like, okay, you have a garbage passcode, so you 're not really unlocking everything. You can't purchase with it. Your pass – your iCloud keychain is unlocked.

Nope. If you make that your passcode, it will unlock everything just like it has always done. So I think that's their way of kind of leading up to the user. It's like if you want to make 1111 your passcode, good luck out there. Yeah, but, like, that's not an amazing outcome for anybody.

Like, if what you need to do to make your phone convenient for you to use is to make your passcode 1111 because either touch ID is too slow or fails all the time or you're trying to use face ID in challenging situations such as outdoors, that's not actually serving anybody's security.

And that just becomes security theater at that point. It's like, oh, great, I'll jump through all these hoops, you know, that Apple is making me jump through, you know, because I haven't entered my code. And then, like, okay, well, my code is 1111 because I have to enter it five times a day and it's really annoying. I know.

But, like, the camera-based ones, it's a real problem. Like, that's why they make the home view so incredibly limited because someone can just print a picture of you from the internet and hold it up in front of the phone and they don't want to go that far. Like, the real question is, like, what's a threat model? If someone steals my phone, can they unlock it? Well, if they shoulder shift the code, I'm screwed even if my code is really complicated.

So that's bad. Well, but look at Android phones. Most Android phones do camera-based Face ID and it's not, like, look, it used to be really bad. No one's stealing those. That's true. But it used to be really bad when they first did it. But, like, it is more secure now than it used to be. It's less secure than Touch ID, I feel like.

Maybe. But, again, like, maybe for a lot of people that would be fine. It's certainly better than 1111. Yeah. I think Apple just needs to make the Face ID hardware smaller and cheaper and put it in Macs for crying out loud. So that's the path they're traveling. Hopefully this will be a transient problem where it's like, remember when Face ID couldn't fit in our devices and now it's so thin it's in everything?

That's where we need to go. One last piece of iPhone Duo and actually just follow-up in general. Reachability is coming to the Duo in 27.3. As per Julie Clover at Mac Rumors, reachability can be enabled in Settings, Accessibility, Touch, Reachability. It is on by default after updating to the iOS 27.3 beta.

When the iPhone Duo is closed, a short swipe left on the left edge or a short swipe right on the right edge will shift the outer display's content left or right. And there's a couple of images in that article. Is this the first time reachability has gone left to right instead of top to bottom? I believe so.

I mean, the Duo has a lot of things where the first time something is on the left or right instead of the top or bottom. We are sponsored this week by Tailscale. Let me throw a hypothetical at you. Suppose you're the kind of person that would listen to a podcast called the Accidental Tech Podcast.

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Let's talk topics. And we probably only have one kind of interrelated topic for tonight. And that is, we're going to start with Phil Schiller's long exit and kind of some rumors about Ternus' plans for Apple. This is from early September.

And Mark Gurman writes, Phil Schiller's exit is notable. The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple events. The App Store portion alone generates an estimated $30 billion a year. Schiller is 66 years old and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement. But there's a bit more to the story, I'm told.

Ternus' services chief at EQ want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it's something he wanted no part of.

Let the record show that Phil Schiller is the only active Apple executive to come on the show and is clearly the best one of them all. Obviously. Well, so here's the thing. This is the umbrella topic that we're talking about here is what kind of CEO will John Ternus be?

This was, I think, from like not before he took over, but like right when he did or whatever. And it's it's Gurman. So his sources are usually real. But on the other hand, it is kind of like. Rumors from inside the company, you know, who someone who claims to know the mind of Phil Schiller.

It's like it's supposedly this is a thing that Ternus and EQ want. And supposedly part of Schiller doesn't want it. And he's leaving and you connect the dots and it's like, well, he doesn't want any part of that. And it's just it's, you know, there are many logical leaps leading to this story of like, you know, Ternus and Q want to do this thing.

And Schiller, because he's a good person, doesn't. And so he's leaving. And I'm not sure I buy that story. But as one of the first sort of inside scoop story from someone who normally has, you know, actual real inside sco ops from Apple. Having it say, hey, your new CEO that you're all excited about, you know, one of the things that he wants to do.

Squeeze more money out of the app store. Talk about the thing you do not want to hear. You're like, no, no, no, John, that's not you're supposed to. We're you're new and you're supposed to fix things.

This is worse. This is taking a bad thing and making it where I'm at EQ, like whatever. We just like, you know, isn't he adorable? He wants money from services. He loves services and goes to basketball games or whatever. But you're the new CEO. And we didn't like what Tim Cook was doing to the app store . And you come in and the first rumor we read about you is, yeah, the app store.

We can squeeze more out of that. We need additional recurring revenue from the platform. It's like, I hope I mean, the Schiller thing is a sideshow. I don't I think Schiller's retiring because he's he's old and wants to retire. Like and maybe he does or doesn't disagree with this, but he presided over the app store during lots of things that we disagreed with.

And who knows what happens there? So I'm putting Schiller entirely aside. And I'm saying I mostly discount the idea that he's leaving because he disagrees with what Turner wants to do with the app store. I feel like that is not why he's leaving. But who knows? But I desperately want this rumor about what Turner wants to do to the app store to be not true.

I'm willing to believe Eddie Q wants that. I want Turner to say now. Now, Eddie, let's not squeeze the developers even more because they already hate us. Yep. We'll see. I don't love the sign of the sound of this, but we'll see if it's actually true. And this was September. I haven't heard anything about it since.

And if anything, German occasionally gets wrong. It's like, oh, hearsay from inside the company. Who knows who the sources are and what agendas they have? Like, this is not like there's a new product coming in here with specs and we'll know whether it's true. This is like interpersonal drama and the thoughts in the minds of executives. They're never going to say out loud.

But I'm keeping an eye on this. Does Turner start turning the screws on the app store or turning them tighter? Because the screws are already there and they're screwed in pretty tight already. So I'm watching this. I think the only thing that I would maybe be a little optimistic about here is Mark German has really good sources for facts and much spottier sources for reasons and stories.

And interpersonal drama. Yeah. And look, and that stuff's hard to validate even for us after the fact. Like when he says, oh, this product is going to be released . It's going to have a touchscreen, blah, blah, blah. Like we can validate that after the fact. Oh, yeah, he was right. Look, German called that, you know, two years ago or whatever. It's much harder for us to know.

Oh, yeah. German called the fact that this executive fought with that executive or whatever. Like that's that's hard for us to know. And so it's hard to check this. But historically speaking, that kind of stuff seems like it is either never verifiable or turns out to seemingly not be true more often than his predictions about facts.

Well, in this one, what we'll do is just watch what Apple does. Do they turn? Do they squeeze more money out of the App Store? Is that a turnist policy? We're not going to know it today. We're not going to know at the time the rumor comes out in September. But it's a thing we can watch. Yeah. The other thing is like Phil Schiller has been the head of the App Store for most of this time, including all of the really worst of the screw turning years.

Like all those years under Tim Cook that the App Store was like basically going around like scrounging around for everyone's business model saying, hey, you guys, you just launched a new startup and you're not using an app purchase . You got to give us money or you're out. That was all with Phil Schiller presiding over the App Store.

Now, Phil Schiller wasn't and still isn't the CEO. So there's people above him who can overrule him. And we saw in some of those court documents that came out that that seems to have happened at some point for certain decisions around this. But it's we don't know how like if Phil is no longer doing this, are things going to get only worse or might things get better?

Because it might some of the things that we not. This is a lot of mixed verb tenses here. Might some of the things that we didn't like have been Phil 's call and maybe somebody else can change those. And finally, I think my final version of this that is a little optimistic is like.

John Ternus is new to this role. He we don't know that much about him yet, but so far we like what we see. And I think even though like even though I don't think I agree with Tim Cook on a lot of a lot of the actions he took towards the end, especially.

It was obvious that Tim Cook is a pretty smart person who does things in a very considered way. And Tim Cook chose John Ternus. And it seems like a lot of people who we tend to think are pretty smart people who we agree with a lot seem to support John Ternus.

So the people who all work around him seem to think widely that he's a pretty good leader, a pretty good person and pretty capable for this role. So what that shows me is even if he's going into this with an idea like trying to squeeze the app store that we don't think is right.

That tells all of that context suggests to me he could change his mind. Like he we've all had ideas that we change our mind about. Look, I'm I'm an expert in this. Like. I think I think we can give these people more of the benefit of the doubt that they can learn.

They can try things. They can change their mind or fail or change course over time until and unless they show us that they can't or won't . And some people do show us that some people show us that. Oh, wow. The decisions they continue to make in this area. Continued to be terrible like Tim Cook's engagement with Donald Trump.

I think that was horrendous and is horrendous and he never got better at that and still probably still hasn't. So I kind of stopped, you know, hoping for that there. But John Ternus is in many ways. Many of these issues a clean slate.

We don't know how he's going to decide. So even if he said at some point, let's squeeze our money out of the app store. Maybe in a year. He won't think that anymore. We don't know yet. And I'm willing because he is new and seemingly pretty good in a lot of areas.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that, like , this probably isn't the be all end all if it even is true, which itself is a pretty big question mark. This is one of the downsides in the very smooth transition that they're all so happy. And, you know, Apple executives are always saying how proud they are of their beautiful transition from Tim Cook to, you know, because obviously, again, the transition of Steve Jobs dying was not ideal and not on their time scale.

And, you know, it's just a tragedy. Right. And so now it's like, well, now we don't have somebody dying. We can actually plan for this. Let's do it well. But part of that plan and part of the plan of like not sp ooking Wall Street and whatever, like, you know, making it smooth and everything is that it doesn't allow the new incoming CEO to do what new incoming CEOs do in companies that are in trouble.

Because Apple's not in trouble. Right. But if you have a company that's in trouble and you do a CEO transition, always, always, not just privately, but also publicly, the new CEO comes in and says, look, here's what I'm going to do differently. Here's what I here's my vision for Acme Corporation.

They have to because, like, that's their job. It's like, well, the whole point is you want a new person to come in. What is your vision for this company? We're kicking out the old one for whatever reason, probably because the company's in trouble. Tell me it happens all the time with car companies because they're always perpetually in trouble, especially American ones.

It's like, what's your new vision for, you know, General Motors or whatever? And they come in and they present their vision. Ternus is absolutely not doing that because when you're taking over for Apple and Apple is not in trouble, Ternus feels like his job is to not rock the boat.

Everything's fine. It's exactly what Tim Cook had to do, which is like Steve Jobs is gone, but everything's going to be fine. No big changes. Tim Cook didn't come in and say, I have a bold new vision for Apple and it's to make cars like he didn't say that. It would have been a good thing to say. And Ternus did not come in and outline his vision.

And we're so used to seeing that when there's a change in leadership, not just in companies that are in trouble, but like in any kind of like big leadership change, like presumably the new leader is there for a reason. But Apple's idea is like, no, there's just there's just the institution of Apple and a steward who guides the ship.

And there's no difference of opinion or difference of strategy. It's just a smooth thing that, you know, don't worry about who that person is behind the curtain. It's somebody is there in charge, but it's just Apple, you know, just sailing along. And that's not reality, but that's the face they try to give. So with a rumor like this, we can't compare it to remember Ternus's bold new speech on day one where he said his vision for Apple.

No, there was no such thing. He said the same word salad that Tim Cook has been saying for his entire career. We're just like, oh, Apple's great and we're wonderful and it's a great company. And I love it. I love technology. It's like, OK, so in the complete absence of knowing what T ernus's vision for Apple is, unless it happens to be exactly the same as the vision that Tim Cook has been articulating.

All we have are these terrible rumors. And like, I hope to God this one is not true in any way, shape or form. I'm not out here hoping that he like thinks it and changes his mind. I'm hoping he never thought it because, boy, what a wrong headed thing to think. Like what of all the things this if you had to pick what is the worst possible strategy Ternus could pursue when taking over Apple, I would say squeeze the app, squeeze more profit in the app store would be really high on the list.

So I'm just I'm just crossing my fingers. This is just BS. Sure. Hope so. I don't know. I don't I don't love it. But man, the services money is sweet if you ask Apple. So I mean, services like, oh, yeah, by all means, squeeze more money out of services. Just the app stores. I didn't know it's like, well, that's all services is is games in the app.

So I get it. But just like, oh, if you love services revenue, there are lots of places to get services revenue. I'm not against services. I'm like, you know, do services better and get more people to pay for them. And like, I get it. But the app store specifically, that's just like poking a wound. All right, then continuing on, let's talk about a different post from later in September, also from German.

John Ternus is moving to accelerate product development, broaden Apple's range of devices and create a leaner organization with a greater focus on engineering. The early ideas under consideration include relying less on traditional spring and fall product release schedules and eliminating some middle management positions to reduce the layers separating engineers from senior executives.

Ternus has indicated that Apple must introduce products more quickly and become more experimental to remain competitive in the artificial intelligence era. There are cost-cutting efforts in motion. Ternus is also seeking new sources of revenue and ways to generate more money from existing products, especially as growth in the company's services business slows.

Ternus has advocated for a leaner organization for years. While leading hardware engineering, he told employees during an all-hands meeting that Apple should hire fewer people, ask more of its existing engineers, and reduce organizational bloat. During a presentation, he showed a slide charting annual headcount growth and argued that the company should be accomplishing more with fewer employees.

Ternus, services at ADQ, and chief financial officer Kevin Parekh, are also looking for new ways to bolster revenue as growth in Apple's services business decelerates and its app store economics come under pressure. They have discussed launching new services and extracting more revenue from existing products and offerings.

Meanwhile, the cost-cutting will continue. For the company's upcoming swath of holiday parties, some teams have been told they won't be allowed to bring plus ones for the first time in years. Oh, no. Trouble in paradise. Not the plus one. All right, so this is a mixed bag, okay? So this is my summary of this one in the notes is more products, faster, leaner.

So a couple things. The leaner thing. If Ternus was to give a public-facing, you know, I'm a new CEO and here's my vision for Apple, this would be the type of thing you might include. I think our organization has too much bloat.

We need to be leaner like we were back in the old days when we were making, you know, great products. There's too much, too many people, you know, just too many layers, right? That is very often a problem in organizations. And Apple historically has tried not to be that. But any company over time, like you build up layers of management between things and it just makes it harder to like steer the ship.

And usually the best products are done by small teams that are close to the, there's not like 17 layers of management between you and the CEO. Like that's not a form of success. So that's a very cliche kind of like I'm going to come in and clean house and we'll be a leaner organization. But here's the problem with that. Apple's reputation for decades now has been the company that already puts like three people on a team that other companies would put 300 on.

Like that's their whole thing is like, oh, you know, Twitter had like 500 engineers working on like the search box and Apple has like three people working on like this gargantuan new effort. Right. Watch OS. Yeah. Like just there's. But, you know, but like you joke about watch OS and seem like it's a lot of development.

A lot of their big projects have been very small teams. Like that's their whole thing. And maybe it feels like Apple has drifted away from that. But I look at this idea and I'm like, OK, so if there's too many like middle managers and people who aren't contributing, by all means, trim that. But like to make the team smaller, have the teams actually grown to the point where it's a problem?

Or is it like back in the old days, you know, we had two people who made the entire G4 cube, right? I don't I I'm a little bit suspicious of this one because I feel like, yeah, again, I'm I'm not that I have anything against middle managers. But if you have too many of them, if there's like, you know , you have four people doing the actual work and then 17 managers before you get to the CEO, that's not a good org chart.

So that should be changed. I don't know what the state of that is inside Apple. But the team sizes, everything I have heard from inside Apple is the team sizes are not out of control. If anything, everybody feels like they're under resourced, that there's not enough people on their team doing what they're being asked to do.

So I I can put this one kind of in the middle of like, yeah , it sounds like a reasonable thing that a CEO might want to do. It's not ridiculous. But I worry that, again, of all the things that Apple needs , smaller teams on implementing projects is maybe not it. And then the second part of this is more products faster.

And this is a complicated one because I mean, we're just coming off of so many products have been announced just in September and October. Like this show has just been slant. This is the the most Apple new Apple products. I think we've seen released in the shortest period of time in the entire history.

We have done this show. But every single one of these products was planned and scheduled and executed before Ternus was CEO. You know what I mean? Especially the home view, which is like a year old. Right. But on the other hand, he was in charge of hardware that whole time. So is this attributable to Ternus?

It's certainly not attributable to Ternus's new ideas as CEO. But maybe he's taking his ideas from when he was head of hardware and saying, you know what I did when I was head of hardware? We're doing that. But more that is plausible. But it is. So it's hard for me to say, like, oh, he's already doing it .

More products faster. I'm like, well, he wasn't CEO for those, but he was the head of hardware. So I don't know. But like, it seems like you would say he's already delivered on more products faster because, God, we have so many products and they're coming out faster than we could even cover them on this podcast. Is that a good thing for Apple?

It's certainly different. Like this whole thing about like, I don't just want to do it in spring and fall. It takes us too long to make products. That I mostly agree with because, I mean, there's been I've been listening to about to say 20 Max or 20, 20, 20, 20. But I'm designing California. Jason Snell and Mike Hurley's podcast that I was on as a guest on one of their series talking about how long it was.

I mean, obviously, the story is like, you know, the iPod was conceived and shipped within a single calendar year. But lots of products back in those days of like the early 2000s, Apple, with the exception of Mac OS X, were conceived, implemented, executed and shipped on incredibly short timelines.

Whereas now we're like, there's a German rumor of a device that's going to ship in 2029 and maybe it'll slip to 2030. And it's just such a long wait. We wait years and years from the first rumors of the product that eventually it does come out exactly as it was rumored four years ago. And it's like, really?

It took you four years to produce that? Whereas the old Apple would have done that in a year, a year and a half. So I do think there's something to that of like, let's not not every product needs to be this multi-year slog where we just iterate on it forever. Like, get stuff out, try things, be more experimental, ship more stuff, don't feel beholden to these specific schedules .

But on the flip side of that, can you imagine if Apple released products at the rate it has released them in September or October? If it just did this all year long, year after year, it would just be buried in products. But at the same time, I think there is a lot of room for them to speed that up.

Like, we've, you know, as you mentioned, like, we've seen a lot of cases where you see some story come out where like, oh, yeah, they've, they, you know, good example of this would be like, you know, if some like camera AirPods thing comes out, like, or meta glasses. Like, you know, we were all saying a couple years ago, like , wow, they should really get on that.

It seems like it's kind of a growing market. And then they just, and it's like, oh, yeah, they'll, there were rumors like, oh, yeah, they'll have that in, you know, two years from now. What? Like that, it really takes them that long to make that kind of product. And then it doesn't ship and it's delayed for another two years. And we're like, like, that's the worst. Like, they actually ship. You're like, that rumor was true.

It was four years ago. That was, but it just took them four years to put it out. But it is, you know, I recognize it is a very difficult problem because, first of all, they have high standards and they don't want to ship crap. And we like them for that. But also, when they do ship a product, they need to make it usually in much higher volumes than a lot of the other manufacturers do.

Not the home products. They should do that. Well, that's true. But, and the other thing is, like, you know, if they, if we are telling them they need to release things faster, that does strain things like the software quality, which we don 't want that either. But we are also in an era now where the pace of technological, you know, iteration is pretty fast right now in the industry.

A lot of that's AI driven. A lot of it's not. But things are getting quick, quickly better. Faster. Faster. Faster. Faster. Faster. From everybody. And competition is getting better. Quickly. And, you know, and of course, AI itself. Like, you know, we can't ignore that. That's a huge part of it.

Like, AI, you know, both models and, you know, products and features built around those models are getting better very quickly. And this is a pace that Apple is not accustomed to and has not been able to meet for many, many, many years.

So they do need to speed that kind of stuff up. And it is going to be hard and it is going to be messy and it is going to be imperfect. But just in order to keep leading and being competitive in the industry that they're in, they do have to get a lot faster. And honestly, they do need to get a little bit less careful with the types of products and product risks they're willing to take.

I'm not saying make a bunch of spy glasses for everybody. But I am saying, like, try more things. Tim Cook's Apple was pretty conservative. And that served them well in a number of ways. You know, that's very good financially. It's very good for, like, the stock price.

You know, you can be pretty – it's pretty predictable. Very efficient with inventory and stuff like that. But they didn't take a lot of, like, new swings under Cook. And the ones they did were sometimes really weird, like the car or the Vision Pro.

I mean, they took two big ones. Vision Pro and the car were Tim Cook's two big swings. One of them shipped. One of them didn't. And there's lots of small ones where Tim Cook took a lot of small swings of, like, we're going to invest in a company that makes quartz crystals or micro LED displays. And a lot of those are just, like, fizzled out or whatever.

But they were – it was not the type of thing of, like, I 've got an idea for a product. Let's just ship it and try it. Because, as you pointed out, like, that's not – hasn't been Apple's MO. And also, Apple always somehow convinces themselves, and they're mostly right most of the time, that, like, look, if we make anything, we have to make millions of them.

And so it's harder for them to, like, well, let's just try it and see if people like it. Because if they do and you didn't plan to manufacture 20 million of them, you're screwed, especially in the current, like, environment with, like, parts and everything. So, you know, maybe this is not – timing is not great to be more daring with the things that they ship.

Because when you're Apple – like, that's what people, you know, ding Apple for all this. They're like, oh, look at this. This Android manufacturer, a framework laptop. Why can they do it? And Apple can't. It's like, they're going to sell 100,000 of those. Apple's going to sell 100,000 a day. So, like, it just becomes impossible to – you know, it's a whole different equation of, like, we have to pre-buy all these parts.

We have to manufacture them all. We have to forecast demand. We have to make sure where they were right. It's harder for them – it's harder for a big company to do that. It's one of the disadvantages of being a big company. But we'll see. Like, the HomeView is arguably that. The rumored robotic HomeView is arguably that.

Like, there's lots of products that may actually ship that are weird and may be duds. And, you know, in this recent rash of products, it's been pretty straightforward. It's like, oh, a new laptop, a new Macs.

Like, the HomeView is the weirdest one, and that one was done a year ago. So, I'm not sure what will come with this. But, like, the things I like about it the most are don't be beholden to the strict release schedule that always has to be spring and fall. When it's done, ship it.

You know, if you have an idea, put it out there. And maybe, like, just greenlighting things within the company and being a little bit more daring about that. And not – I think Tim Cook's problem was, you know, he had a little bit of the – everyone was asking him his entire career as CEO.

When's the next big thing? When's the next big thing? And so he felt the need to try to make the next big thing. And it definitely wasn't the car, but that, you know, that was a big thing. It wasn't the next big thing. And then the Vision Pro, which was a big thing. Turned out not to be the next big thing.

But he's always like, we have to make these big bets. And then the times when he didn't where it's like, we'll just make some kind of wireless earbed, whatever. That wireless earbud turned out to be a huge business, and he just side-doored it. Like, no one even thought, like, oh, this is the next big thing. But honestly, it kind of was the next big thing.

AirPods changed the world a lot more than the Apple car and the Vision Pro did. But, like, no one was paying attention to that one. So I'm hoping Ternus is thinking we need to do more things like the AirPods. You know, not a big product. No one's going to put it on the cover of Time magazine.

But actually, if it's successful, it'll be life-changing for a lot of people. All right. This is from a different post in the beginning of October. Also, German. This is quite a bit for me to read, so buckle up. During early conversations about taking the CEO role, Tern us questioned whether he was up to the challenge.

I'm not you, Ternus told Cook. You do so many amazing things. Cook, in his characteristically deadpan tone, replied, I know you're not me. His point was that Ternus needed to be himself. Aside, how do you hear this? How do you hear this? Presumably this conversation was just the two of them.

How does German know that this to be true? It's obviously retold Game of Telephone, but can't you totally hear Tim Cook doing his, like, Tim Cook has his, not his inside voice, but he has, Tim Cook has the voice that he talks to the public with, and then he has the voice that we hear tales of him talking internally in the company with.

And I know you're not me. I see him saying with a totally unsmiling face in his internal company voice. Oh, yeah. In recounting the story to employees, I guess there it is, Ternus describes it as a turning point. What Cook said that, quote, has really resonated and stuck with me, quote, is that he spent his time as CEO where he added, quote, the most value for Apple, Ternus said, and I need to spend my time where I can add the most value for Apple.

That idea, he said, has given Ternus the freedom to approach the role differently. There will be differences in where we spend our time, but the mission, the goals, are the same. Ternus is largely leaving the company's financial operations to Chief Financial Officer Kevin Parekh and its supply chain to Chief Operating Officer Sibit Khan.

Instead, Ternus is spending considerable time with Chief Hardware Officer Johnny Shrugy and Hardware Engineering Leader Tom Mareeb, remaining deeply involved in product engineering. But I'm told he is also devoting substantial attention to another area that has long lacked a single overarching leader, design.

Ternus already had some involvement with the design studio as Apple's head of hardware engineering, given the close coordination required between the two functions. Since becoming CEO, however, he has immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. Several people familiar with the department said he works hands-on in the studio several times a week.

Sometimes visiting multiple times in a single day. One of Ternus' first priorities was to restore the design studio standing within the company. The group had lost numerous employees to Ive's firm, Love From, as well as OpenAI's hardware team and other companies . That contributed to its diminished influence and credibility within Apple.

The departures forced the company to promote junior designers and hire extensively from the outside to replen ish the team's ranks. Many people inside and close to the company believed it should recruit an outside Chief Design Officer to oversee the entire organization, but I'm told no such search is underway. Apple instead made a significant effort during the launch of the iPhone Duo to portray Molly Anderson and Dye's successor, Steve LeMay, as its design leaders.

Ternus posed with Anderson in the new phone, while Anderson and LeMay helped introduce the device in a joint video. So at the time this was written, we hadn't yet had Ternus' first earning call, but on the first earning call, you saw an embodiment of the first part of the thing you just read, which is, you know, Tim Cook was basically saying, look, I spent my time on these particular things because that's my skill set.

You should spend your time on the things that fit your skill set. And so Tim Cook was the operations guy and he would talk about operations stuff on the earnings calls and he knew it backwards and forwards. Like this was his area of expertise. It was what he did as a job before he was CEO. And so there he was on the calls and he would talk about all this stuff.

Ternus on the earning call brought on his CFO and a COO and just deferred to them and they answered all those questions because that's not his deal. That's not his area. Gruber was pointing out in his site that when Jobs was CEO, he didn't even show up for most of the earning calls because it's like, that's not my deal. Talk to the CFO.

They'll explain stuff. He just showed up when he felt like he had something to say . Maybe Ternus feels like he needs to be there again. Like the, oh, there's no CEO. It's just Apple gliding along smoothly. Tim Cook was all the earnings calls. I'll be on all the earnings calls. But honestly, he doesn't really need to. He has to be on this one because it's his first one.

Obviously, you got to show up or whatever. Like I get that. Like if he's just going to defer to the CFO and COO to answer all the questions anyway, after he's after his like, hey, welcome, the new CEO or whatever, like maybe after the first year or so, he can just not show up for them because that's, you know, that's not his strength.

That's not he's not going to be in there like saying, let me tell you how you should manage your inventory or write contracts with suppliers. That's not his thing. Right. So the, you know, with Ternus retelling again, who knows when he's this is third hand, like Ternus says that he talked to Cook and said this.

And we heard what Ternus said from an employee who told German, who, you know, again, game of telephone. But he's basically explaining, you know, I'm not going to be Tim in terms of where I spend my time, but I'll spend my time in other areas. And the second part of this story is German says, guess where he's spending his time. He loves the design studio, just like Steve Jobs used to go down there and play with stuff.

He's down there all the time. And that makes sense because he was the hardware head of hardware. And I'm sure, like I said, he was working with them on designs of the hardware all the time. And that's where he's choosing to spend his time. And when I read this, I'm like, all right, you know, like maybe that is one of his strengths.

It's part of his area of expertise. He probably has a good relationship with Johnny Surugi. He's trying to rebuild the design team. That makes sense. These are all, again, if he was to give a speech about his vision for Apple, he would be saying, I'm going to rebuild the stature of the design team because we've had a lot of people hired away from an open eye.

Like, it's all true. We know it's true. He's not making that speech. We just hear about it through rumors. But that seems like a very sensible thing to do. But when I look at this whole big paragraph, I'm like, all right, you know, this makes sense. But I think I immediately think of something that Marco already mentioned because it's probably already in his mind .

And what I think about is, hey, John, you know, there's another part of products that Apple sells that is really in need of some attention. And it's called software. I know he was the head of hardware. And hardware is great and continues to be great.

And he should work with the industrial design team and work on new great hardware. Great. Thumbs up. It's your strength. You've already been doing a good job at it. Go where your strength is. But every single one of those hardware products has software on it. And the software needs some help in many different ways.

The software interface, the software reliability, just the things that the software does, choices about the software. And I get that's maybe not his strength. But one of the things that I would expect from the fictional never to be given speech about my vision for Apple as the new CEO would be, what is your vision for hardware software integration and where the software should go?

Not that software is out to sea or in a terrible situation. But most of the things these days I have complaints about Apple about are about software. And it reminds me of when Johnny Ive was put in charge of everything. And he was at the time considered to be great at hardware, although he got worse at that when his worst instincts kicked in.

But he didn't know a damn thing about software and made some dumb decisions. And I didn't like it when he was in charge of software. Alan Dye, terrible decisions, made bad software. Dye's gone. Ive is gone. New hardware guy comes in. I've never even seen him mention software.

I'm not sure if he knows his products run software. It's so important to the experience. He just assumes that we'll automatically be there and someone else will worry about it. But that is a key thing. And everyone loves Steve LeMay. And we don't know anything about him other than what he's done. It seems like he's improved macOS, so thumbs up on that.

Like LeMay, kind of the software one. And Molly Anderson's kind of the hardware one. I don't know how they're splitting up the duties there or whatever. But I would love to see something about how Turnus recognizes that software is an important part of Apple products. And that it's in a bad spot right now and needs help.

And, you know, an acknowledgement. Like, do you know what's wrong with Apple software now? Do you know how software is making the hardware look bad? Like Marco just gone talking about Siri AI and all that stuff. Like, you have incredibly capable hardware, incredible hardware devices that are let down by substandard software.

Do you just think, oh, the software is there and it's fine and I can give the talking points on it and say some, you know, thing about how wonderful it is and how much better it is. And how, you know, he's saying all this stuff about Siri AI . But it's like, but no, man, it's just not. It's not good. Like, I don't expect him to know, like, the intricacies of, like, good user interface design and what's wrong with mac OS and the stupid rounded corners and all that other stuff or whatever.

But, like, even just something as simple as your most important product and your headlining features, Siri AI, it 's not good enough. And that should be a fire under your butt. And I don't see a single thing about it in any of these stories. It's like, oh, I'm going to concentrate on design. No, no, Turnus. Design is going okay. Concentrate on software.

Well, maybe design is going okay because he has been present in it, though. Like, the thing is, you know, when you're the CEO of Apple, you can't just focus on any of these things. It's like, yes, he, I think it is good that he is involving himself in design so far that seems to be pretty successful for the product.

And also, he does also need to care about software a lot. Like, that, I don't think, I don't think we can make him, like, say, oh, you know, you shouldn't focus on design because you should be focusing on software. No, he should be focusing on both. I just want to see him go where the fire is. You know what I mean? Like, you know, steady as she goes on the things that are going well.

But, like, again, you know, this is just one story, so we don't know. But, like, if you're saying, what's my vision for Apple? You wouldn't spend a lot of time talking about the things that are already going well. You'd be like, I'm going to continue doing that stuff because it's great. But here's where, like, again, if the new CEO comes in, here's where the problem is. The old CEO, we kicked him out because we had a problem with X.

And now I'm going to come in and I'm going to fix it. Let's say you're a car maker and your cars are unreliable. You're like, reliability is job number one. You're not saying you're not going to make, you know, cool sports cars or you're not going to make the Corvette anymore. It's like Corvette's going great. But, like, reliability is a problem. A new CEO comes in. I'm going to make our cars more reliable.

Right? Because that's where the problem is. It's not like he's going to personally do it. I don't expect him to personally design the software. But he's like, I'm going to rebuild the industrial design team and I'm going to do this. Like, because he's got it. He's directing the company. His vision for the company should be, like, don't squeeze more out of the app store.

Make developers happier and fix the software. But instead, it's like, I just really want to get more into industrial design. Like, again, maybe this is maybe I'm missing and this is really just a story about he's going to spend his time. But I really want to see him say, I recognize where I see the fire.

I see where the fire is. And I'm going to direct the company to put water in that direction while I go over here and play with the industrial design team. That's fine. All right. And then finally, this is yet more from early September from Gurman. As part of the transition, Cook is moving out of his office in Section 7 of Apple Park and handing the space over to the new CEO.

That means Tarnas is moving into the executive suite for the first time. Before being named CEO, he worked alongside the hardware engineering organization in an office away from Apple's center of power. Software chief Craig Federighi, another longtime holdout from the executive wing, remains with his team elsewhere at Apple Park. Tim Cook is getting a new office at Apple's campus, but the biggest indicator that Cook will remain heavily involved is his giant new pay package, which has raised eyebrows among Apple leaders.

For the next year, Cook will get a base salary of $2 million. That's down from the $3 million he had as CEO, a salary that Tarnas now receives. But the $2 million is still twice the typical base salary of senior vice presidents and members of the C-suite. In terms of restricted stock units for 2027, Tarnas was given a target of $55 million on top of the salary and uns pecified bonus, while Cook gets $45 million.

These numbers will fluctuate based on how Apple's share price performs, but Tarnas' compensation likely won't be far off from Cook's pay in recent years as CEO. Cook's new package, though, is highly unusual for a chairman. Art Levinson, who was non-executive chairman before Cook took the executive version of the role, was paid less than $560,000 by the company last year.

Man, he got played. Yeah, but see, here's the thing. If Tim Cook is still having to deal with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, it's worth it. Keep Tarnas and the rest of the company isolated as much as possible from all of these awful world leaders that Tim Cook has to deal with.

Fine. It's worth the money. Well, I do feel like this is kind of, again, a situation that we didn't experience with Steve Jobs because he died. But, like, if you are the CEO of Apple for a long period of time and Apple is successful during those times, you attain a certain level of celebrity.

Certainly, Steve Jobs had a tremendous level, obviously, of celebrity. But even Tim Cook, the boring old guy, he was Tim Apple for so long that he has a certain amount of cachet as a minor celebrity in his own right.

And practically speaking, he has knowledge and experience having run Apple all these years. So if he's not literally leaving the company, which he is not, and you want to keep him around, you can't be like, OK , now that you're not CEO anymore, you're going to get paid by a senior vice president.

You're like, I'm Tim freaking Cook. If you want me to stay at the company, you're going to pay me like Tim freaking Cook, especially as Mark, especially if I have to do the same BS I was doing before and deal with all the policies and stuff. Because, you know, that's the thing that, you know, whatever, whatever, like he's been doing it and he's, you know, apparently not going to make Tarnas do it.

And Tarnas is probably ill suited to it and whatever, like it's terrible and we all hate it. But like if he's going to be there doing that, if you want to keep him around, you have to pay him like this. Now, with Tarnas moving to like the big CEO suite thing, like it's interesting that both he and Federighi were like, you know, we're men of the people.

We don't go in our fancy offices. I hang out with the rank and file people and stuff like that. And you might think that's like an act or whatever, but like a lot of a lot of CEOs do this. Like I don't have a big executive suite. I'm down there in the cubicles alongside with the workers. But I, my read on Federighi is that's just the kind of person he is.

Like it's not an act, you know, like you don't do this. You've been doing this act for 20 years. Like it's not an act. That's who he is as a person. He wants to be down there with the rank and file people getting things done, nerding out, doing all the stuff. He is still the big, big wig executive and everything, but he wants to do that.

And Tarnas apparently was like that too. He wanted to be with the hardware team. So I do wonder if Tarnas is like, oh, I got to move into the fancy CEO suite because it's expected of me because I'm the CEO of the, one of the biggest companies in the world. Like I can't be in a cubicle team or whatever. They don't have cubicles, whatever. They open the weird open seating.

They have, I have to be in the CEO thing. But then Tim Cook gets his own little minor CEO wing because they're like, I'm, I'm not leaving. They, they gave me a big pay package and I'm still here to ride this sucker out, presumably until Trump is gone or who knows, maybe even after that. And this whole thing does make me think about what is the, what is the dynamic in the relationship in there?

I think it's probably healthy based on Tarnas's retelling of that story of like, look, Tim Cook doesn't want to do this. You know, he left, he left of his own accord. No one forced Tim Cook out. He decided when he wanted to leave, he left on his own terms. Presumably he is doing what he has decided he's going to do . And he wants to hand it over to Tarnas.

He wants Tarnas to be successful. He doesn't want to do everything. He's like, Tarnas, you do what you have to do. You're not me. Play to your strengths. I'll be over here in my supporting role until I feel like not doing it anymore. And in the meantime, I don't imagine Tim Cook, you know, coming to meetings and putting his oar in and being like, oh, you know, what about this?

What about this, Tarnas? What about that? Like, no, he shouldn't even be in the room. He's not like to the extent that they discuss it'll be like , you know, counseling or like, do you have any advice for me or what do you think of that? But I picture I'm picturing it mostly as a one on one thing .

I really hope that's the case because you can't be a new CEO. Again, I said this all this at the time transition. You can't be the new CEO with the old CEO, like breathing down your neck, like looking over your shoulder, like you 're trying to do your work. Tim Cook is behind you going, oh, what do you think about dotting that? I about crossing that T.

It's like, Tim, could you go back to your wing? Like, I'm trying to be CEO. Like, I don't think that's happening, but it is interesting that that like that that's the that's the situation they're in where they essentially end up. They mint celebrity CEOs. If you are a successful CEO of Apple, you will attain celebrity.

You will attain knowledge and power. And if you don't fully 100 percent leave or die, if you stay at the company, now you're like this celebrity in residence for however long you feel like being that. And apparently you also get paid 45 million dollars in stock.

Nice gig if you can get it, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I remain hopeful about having turn us at the helm. I think there's certainly plenty of things to worry about. We would be at least slightly remiss to not mention the absolutely astonishing election results from yesterday as we record this.

And here again, I remain hopeful. There's a lot of work to be done with regard to the absolutely ridiculous government that we currently have. But hopefully this is a positive sign and things will happen. Similarly, I feel like we have every reason to be hopeful right now with regard to turn us and his approach to running Apple.

And hopefully it will continue to get better and better. But there's a lot of work to be done. And we'll see if turn us and everyone else at Apple does it . But I don't know. I think there's a lot we could be pessimistic about in both cases. But I am currently and personally really, really, really hopeful and enthusiastic in both with regard to fixing our absolutely broken government and fixing a occasionally broken Apple.

I was a little bit more hopeful before I learned about the lower rounded corners on the new MacBook Pros. Oh, my gosh, John. Because that was turn us. Like he was head of hardware when that product was designed and implemented. And this is exactly the blind spot that I'm afraid he has, which is that he doesn't know what good, you know, design is when it comes to like the operation of not just like as a physical object and a beautiful piece of sculpture and like the circuitry and everything.

But just like that you should never do this. This is a bad, dumb decision, like the same way all the bad , dumb decisions in Tahoe, like like Alan Dye had to go. Or in my opinion, is that he just made bad decisions and made bad software. This is a bad hardware decision. And it was done under his watch. And like he should know that's bad.

He should know it's bad. He should fix it. But it's like it's not like someone else's thing. He he that he owns that. He was head of hardware when that product was designed and implemented. No one else was forcing him to make those damn rounded corners at the bottom. He did it himself. I know I'm attaching way too much to that, but it's exactly what my fear is. It's exactly what my fear is, is like this is the exact blind spot.

And and the reason it annoys me so much is this has historically been a traditional strength of Apple that they know what good design is. And and we talk, you know, it's the reason he's CEO is because they do so well with the hardware. As hardware objects and as implementations like low power SOCs with amazing, you know, performance, incredible reliability.

Every year they make a really good iPhone and they ship millions and millions of them. And they're good products year after year. It's like it's amazing. Right. But there's more to the products than the hardware. And this is this is my main concern. And at this point, we have nothing to go on except for bad decisions that were made under when Tim Cook was CEO. I'm not going to blame Tim Cook for the rounded corners and mostly blame Tarnas.

But but now we have things to watch because, like I said, at the top of this, we do not get and never will get that speech of Tarnas's bold new vision for Apple. All we can do is just watch what the company does over the next several years and then back solve. But I thought this set of rumors about so what supposedly people are thinking inside Apple was a it's all we get.

And so it was at least worth discussion. And we can I'm sure we will revisit this after Tarnas's first full year or maybe his second full year. I'm willing to give him a lot of runway to figure it out and to transition and to fully take on this new stuff and maybe to wait for Tim Cook to leave in a couple of years. But I do think he has his work cut out for him.

I think I am encouraged because it seems like he is engaging with products already within the company so much more than Tim Cook did. And and you know, I'd be thankful for that. Yes, like Tim Cook didn't engage at that level.

Well, that's true. Because when we when he did engage, it was terrible. But and look, Tim Cook, I think for for much of Tim Cook's reign, I guess he was what the company needed. Like he was really good at stabilizing things and scaling things and making everything just flow better and work better and way more profitable.

And he was very good at a lot of that stuff. I think what the company needs now after a pretty long time of that is a product engaged person, like a product engaged leader. And from everything we've seen so far, Tarnas is very engaged with the products like Tim Cook.

I don't know if he ever used a computer, but Tarnas obviously loves technology in a way that Tim Cook. I don't know that we ever saw that from him. You know, I think Tim Cook liked optimizing the systems around him and doing his work and doing a good job of the things he cared about.

It just doesn't seem like computers were something he really cared that much about. Whereas Tarnas, that's very clearly not the case. Tarnas very clearly loves computers, loves Apple's products , loves phones. Like he he's really into that stuff. And I think he's you know, he's in the same way that Tim Cook had downsides.

So will Tarnas. But for this era of Apple, I think what they really need is a product CEO. And it does look like they finally have that again. When you say that, though, I think product CEO and I think hardware product CEO, because I wonder if when I see him visiting products, I wonder if the screens are turned on at all.

And like the thing this German article gets into this is like for the stuff that he is not good at, like the Tim Cook stuff, he's got the COO. He's got the CFO. Those people were there under Tim Cook. Like, I feel like that's covered like those people were surely guiding those departments, even when Tim Cook was CEO.

And so I have confidence that they know what they're doing and can continue Apple's, you know, historical strength in their supply chain management operations and manufacturing millions of things. But on the topic of design, which was touched on, there is a leadership void there that is being filled by LeMay and Molly Anderson.

So I see like there's some hope there. But on the software topic, leadership hasn't changed. Federighi is still there. And whatever problems existed under Tim Cook, Ternus isn't addressing it, doesn't have the skill set and isn't changing anything about it.

So I don't have confidence that that is going to get any better, even though he's the new CEO. Like, that's why I keep pulling calling out the gap, because like I'm not worried about operations because Tern us is in operations. I'm not worried about hardware because Ternus isn't in charge of hardware anymore. Like, and I'm less worried about design because I feel like there's already been a little bit of a turnaround there with the new leadership.

And I'm not saying this is all Federighi's fault. Maybe it's the case that Federighi was being told to do things with priorities that, you know, tied his hands behind his back and made him ship things before they were ready or whatever. Like, but this is this is this is a thing I'm going to be watching.

I'm maybe I'm more now that I've talked about this. Maybe I'm more worried about this in the app store thing, because honestly, like we're all being squeezed so much in the app store already. Like how much worse can it get? But the software can definitely get a lot worse. So I'm watching that. I think it is. It is not inconspicuous how.

Craig Federighi has not been promoted to a higher title. I can go from where he is. He's the head of all software. He's he's not going to be CEO. So that's it. He wasn't he wasn't made chief anything, though. There's there's now like a chief of hardware.

There's no chief of software. I know the chief of hardware is a keep surgery at Apple title. Sure. I don't. It's it's hard to to, you know, say there's any kind of confidence. But I just just if you like kind of read the tea leaves a little bit.

I think the Craig Federighi era is near its end. I don't know how soon, but I'd be shocked if he was still in his role in four years. I don't agree with that at all. Somebody remind us. Somebody take that. Somebody. Why don't you write it down the counter?

Because I'm not willing to bet on that. But here's the thing about Federighi. His strengths have he's never been the user interface guy. Like he's a software guy in the sense of like the nitty gr itty parts of software. And my impression is that to the extent that he has failed at low level software stuff, it has been mostly forces outside his own control in terms of when things have to be shipped.

And, you know, bad decisions made like, you know, the whole AI thing can't pin on him because Tim Cook hired the what's his name from Google and tasked him with doing this stuff and took it all away from Federighi and said, we've hired a Google guy and he's going to do it all. And don't you worry about that. And Federighi had to come in and clean up the mess later.

And so I don't blame him for that. Like I know a lot of people blame Federighi for things, but I never picture him as like, oh, I know what user interfaces should look like. And the problem is who has had that job when I've had it. It was bad because he was bad at software and then Dai had it and it was bad because he was bad at software.

And now LeMay's got it. And maybe that's the solution. But it's just like I don't do. You know, when Steve Jobs was there, he was it basically, you know, and he made bad decisions, too. But at least he had good taste and we had like I don't know what the gap is. Like there's never been a celebrity named C-level executive who we can say that person is responsible for the past few decades of Apple software being good.

Because honestly, of the past few decades, Apple software has not been hot. It's not been that good. Right. The heyday of how great it was and how, you know, and and to be fair, the software and the duo was amazing. So talent still exists for doing that. Like, you know, again, within the constraints of the hardware, which is a whole other thing.

But like, I don't think anyone says, hey, could you think of a better way to design the software that is on the duo, given that you can't change the physical form factor? I think they knocked it out of the park. So talent still exists for that. But there's not there is not a C-level executive name or like point to that person and say they're why Apple software is amazing because it's not amazing.

And there is no person for that. And I just hope, I mean, maybe it'll be Steve LeMay someday or whatever, but like, it's not Federighi. It's not Ternus. And it definitely wasn't Ive. I mean, just looking at apple.com slash leadership, the very top tier is Ternus CEO, Eddie Q, senior vice president , Craig Federighi, senior vice president, Jaws, senior vice president.

Yeah. Jennifer News said senior vice president, Deirdre O'Brien, senior vice president. The only chiefs are CFO, COO, and Suruji does have hardware officer. But I concur with John on this. That was we've got to give him throw him a bone. Otherwise, he's going to bounce.

And I don't think Federighi is in need of that kind of a I don't know what word I'm looking for. But he doesn't want it. He wants to have his desk with everybody else. Yeah, I agree. He can't be promoted unless he becomes CEO. And that didn't happen. So this is it for him. I couldn't agree more. And I don't think he's upset by that personally.

Like, I have no I have no way of knowing. But the vibe I get, especially, you know, talking to the handful of people I know in Apple and in software at Apple, I don't get the vibe that he is like clawing his way into chief software, you know, chief software officer or what have you.

Like, I really think from everything I can tell, he's pretty content where he is. Yeah, he's such a nerd's nerd. And he's not like he has he doesn't have delusions of grandeur that he has the greater vision for Apple user interface across all its products. Like, that's not his thing at all. And so and it needs to be somebody's thing, but it's never been his.

And we can blame him for like unreliability of the software that shipped and stuff like that and bugs that don't get fixed. But I don't blame him for like I don't blame him for Tahoe, man. Like, it's not on him. I mean, we don't know from the outside. It's hard to know who's responsible. We just know the products they ship, blah, blah, blah.

But yeah, it's maybe my impression of him is wrong. Who knows? Maybe there are. I know we the reason we bring this up is there are a lot of Federighi detractors out there and they all write to us and say, why don't you say how bad Federighi is? And for me, it's because I don't actually think he's bad. He's just narrowly focused and limited.

And I think he knows that he's narrowly focused and limited . And I don't think it's his job to make sure Apple's user interface is good across the whole company. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Claude, Tailscale and Granola. And thanks to our members who support us directly.

You can join us at ATV.FM slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. By the way, we also get discounts on merchandise as members . So if you go to ATP.FM slash store, you really want to do that like now. Anyway, this week on Overtime, we'll be talking about some fun fan-made tools for ATP and our listeners.

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We'll be right back.

So long. Marco, you have two iPhone duos now? Yeah, I have a quad. No, I just put them next to each other. No, it's the iPhone Ultra. I was able to snag. I was able to snag a right-sized one.

I got the 256 today. So I have returned the two terabyte monster. And I have finally moved into it as my phone.

1,400 after tax. 1,400 after tax. 1,400 after tax. But anyway. So I finally moved into it as my phone. And I only have a few hours of using it as my phone so far. I think I might hate it. I think I might hate it.

But I want to give it some time. How are you with yours so far after a little more time, Casey? I think everything I said last week sticks. I wouldn't say I've had really many epiphanies other than I would like to reiterate that I was devastated to lose Face ID.

And it's been fine. Like, I would still prefer Face ID, but it's been fine. Well, it's been fine with Apple Watch Unlock. It's been or it's been even good with Apple Watch Unlock. With just Touch ID, it's been fine. But I always have an Apple Watch on, so it's not really been an issue.

The one thing that is really starting to drive me nuts, not enough that I plan to switch back to my 17 Pro as my daily driver, but it's driving me nuts, the cameras. The cameras are legitimately not great. And I don't understand how anyone survived with an iPhone Air.

I really don't. I mean, to be fair, not many people do. Also fair. Also true. I desperately miss the 8X. Like, I was at Declan's football practice this evening, and I would have loved to have been able to Zoom more than 2X.

Would have been great, but I can't. I really, really, really am having fun with this, though. I really enjoy it. I do not feel the outer screen is a complete waste like so many people seem to. I have been flipping back and forth between in and out, but I would say easily half, maybe as much as three quarters of my use of the phone is on the outer screen.

So far, I really like it. I was listening to, I want to say it was Connected, where Mike and Steven were talking about using their duos and how they felt it was extremely conspicuous. And they were like, I'm putting words in their mouth, but the takeaway I had was that they were like uncomfortable or embarrassed to use it, particularly in like open mode.

And I do not care. I don't care at all. Like, I was way more nervous about using AirPods when they were brand new than I am using this. Like, I do not care. And nobody seems to very much care either. I don't know if that's because I don't live in a big metropolitan area or maybe the people I'm around all know I 'm a freaking dork.

But one way or another, I haven't had any of the issues with that with regard to like embarrassment or anything like that. Or maybe I'm just getting older and more comfortable in my own skin. Who knows? But in any case, I plan to stick with this as my daily driver.

However, I think there are definitely going to be times, for example, I don't know, if I go to a concert sometime this month, just pulling that one right out of my bottom, there's going to be times that I will probably dual-wield. And I will probably bring both the duo for the phone bits, and because that's the only one with like a cellular connection.

But my current thinking is I will also bring my 17 Pro for the purposes of using the camera. I don't plan to do that, generally speaking. But in this case, where I won't have Erin next to me, where I can just steal her phone, that is probably going to be my plan. Yeah, I think, I mean, again, just trying it for a little bit.

I think I really don't like Touch ID, and I think I really don't like the way it dynamics, like the pocket dynamics of it. Oh, interesting. That doesn't bother me at all. So far, I'm kind of hating the pocket dynamics.

But we will see. I want to try to live with it for at least a few days before I give up. I mean, I'm keeping it regardless because it is a very important test device for me now. I do also, I would feel that embarrassment factor.

Like, I don't think I'm going to want to open it up for a little while in public until, you know, give it like a few weeks so that most people have already seen them around, you know. Like, that's going to be a short-lived problem. But it is in the short term, like in the very short term. I think it is going to affect me a little bit.

But I think ultimately, I don't think I'm going to stick with it. But I am very glad to be trying it. The other thing is, like, the app situation really is still as bad as everyone says. Like, you know, as I was setting up apps on the new phone today, I'm, like, installing, like, you know, like the app for my car and, you know, the app for, like, the train app for the Long Island River and stuff like that.

And, like, it's none of those apps are updated. No, they all show in, like, the little, you know, floating black box in the middle of the screen. Like, it's going to be a while before those things are updated. Well, but that's only really bad when you're on the inner screen, right? When you're on the outer screen, it's mostly fine.

And the other thing I would say to go back just a half step , my ask of you, which I have no leverage, and so you can completely ignore me, and that's perfectly reasonable. But my ask of you is, I would say give it at least a week, preferably two weeks, of being your carry phone.

And I don't have a calendar in front of me, and I know that you have travel coming up roughly in that time frame. So I wouldn't fault you if you didn't want to use this while you travel. Although I would also argue it might be the perfect time to bring it, but that's neither here nor there. But I would say give it at least one full week, and preferably two full weeks, so you can really properly live with it for a while and see what you think, more than just a few days.

Because I think if you get through a whole week, my understanding of your weeks is that, by and large, they're fairly repeatable, fairly understandable. That's not the word I'm looking for, but you know what I'm driving at, right? Like, if you go through a full week, I think you'll probably get 80% of your, like, final answer.

But I would argue, give it a second week. You know, basically, treat yourself as having your own two- week return policy. Obviously, you're not literally returning it. But, you know, before you return to the 17 or 18 or whatever you would be going back to, I would encourage two weeks, and I beg of you one week, just to see what a full week with this thing is like.

And then, again, after a week, but at most two weeks, I think you're absolutely going to know one way. The other, and if the answer is screw this, that's totally reasonable. I could make an argument why the iPhone Duo is a piece of crap and nobody should buy it. I currently am still completely enamored with it and amused by it, but I could make the argument either way.

The very, very first day is probably the most uncomfortable time because it's so different. And I haven't really had a chance yet to love what it brings me. Like, I haven't found anything that's like, oh, my God, I love this on the inside screen, with the exception of, like , you know, running Fineliner.

And I have thought also, like, you know, Fineliner, I have high hopes for this app, and I'm very proud of it and I'm very happy about it. It is not amazing on regular iPhones. Like, it really is an iPad and Duo app, like, ideally.

And so I have thought, like, I really probably should spend a lot of time with the Duo just so I can really live the Fineliner lifestyle for a while and see, like, does that, how much can I lean into that? And how does that make the app better and everything?

Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I think a week would probably be enough, but I think it would be better if you gave it two weeks. And even if you stop after a week, I would encourage you to occasionally use this, even as an accessory iPhone, in cases where it could really shine.

For example, going to, like, one of your town meetings with the, you know, extracurriculars you do over at the beach. Or bringing it, I don't know, traveling somewhere. Maybe you don't have it as the phone that has cellular, potentially, and maybe you just, like, use the hotspot.

But you treat it, you imagine it as your only phone or something along those lines. I think that might be informative because, you know, in the case of, like, a town meeting or what have you, you could use, you know, Fineliner. You could use it for all these things. Another thing that I've found with the Duo that I don't do often enough, but I'm trying to train myself, similar to our Siri conversation, is going two up with two different apps.

It's not the sort of thing that I would do all the time. And I haven't yet found an occasion where I want to do the, I forget what they call it, but the lock the two apps together thing where you tap on the dividing line between the two of them. But let me tell you, on the occasions I do want to go two up, oh, is it amazing.

It's so nice. It's so incredibly nice. Now, admittedly, I'm talking about five, maybe 10% of my usage of the phone. But golly, is that wonderful when I do that. So, yeah, so much of this phone I'm still completely in love with and really enamored by.

But absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, everything relating to taking pictures kind of sucks. I hate that when you're using the inner screen as a view finder, it's opposite what you would expect. And I think Gruber in particular has been talking about this. Yeah, the orientation is because the camera is sideways.

Right. So, if you're holding the device in landscape and you're using the camera, the image that you take with the camera is portrait. And from a technical perspective, I understand this, but I hate it.

I absolutely hate it. And then if you want to take a landscape photograph or video, you have to rotate the device to portrait. Additionally, while I totally get the idea behind using the device when it's open in order to take a selfie, which I do not irregularly with like family and friends.

Like, say, we're going out to a meal or something. I've done this with you a handful of times, for goodness sake. Recently, even. Yeah, with pizza. Exactly. The big pizza. Always get the bigger pizza. Always get the bigger pizza. When I do this. When I do this, like, first of all, the slide to switch displays thing, I feel like it works sometimes.

Like, annoyingly, infrequently. Maybe that's user error. I don't know. But to switch from the, like, inner display to the outer display is the viewfinder. I find it very rarely works the way it works the first time . And then secondly, when you have the phone in, opened up and you're trying to look at the rear camera to get a nice selfie.

I mean, I'm trying to do this stupid viewfinder as we're talking. And it's freaking impossible. It keeps, like, acknowledging it with haptics and then just not doing anything. Very frustrating. But anyways, when you have this giant slab open, I have yet to crack the code on the right way to hold my hands to not only not drop the giant slab, but perhaps even more importantly, take the damn picture.

And again, maybe this is user error. Maybe what I need to do is just grab the screen with my mitts, you know, and just not be so precious about it. But it's incredibly frustrating. So here it is. Arguably, this is the best possible way for me to take a selfie. And to actually do so is very, very challenging.

And so everything camera-related on this phone is driving me up a wall. And that is a big deal. I'm not trying to, like, fluff that off or, like, I'm not trying to minimize that. But other than that, which admittedly, again, big deal.

Other than that, though, it is an incredible device that I absolutely adore. And I'm really, really liking it. And I think, unquestionably, I think I'm going to stick with it for this year. The question that I haven't answered and I won't answer for another 11 months is, what do I do next year?

Assuming there is a Duo 2. You know, what do I do next year? I really and truly am not sure. Sitting here now, I think I'd probably stick with the folding phone. But I have no idea. Ask me again in a year. On the camera thing, like, you mentioned that, like, you understand why it is that way.

Unfortunately, with the camera hardware that's shipped with that thing, you have no choice but to be annoying in one of the two things. Because either the camera looks wrong when it's closed or the camera looks wrong when it's open. Because, obviously, when it's closed and you hold it in your hand, the camera is in one place.

And then you open it up and you rotate it. Now, you know, like, so the solution is square sensor and you crop it, right? But they didn't do that. They have a rectangular sensor and they use the entire rectangular sensor. And they need to use the entire rectangular sensor because already the camera is not that good or not as good as the 18 Pro camera.

So you definitely don't want to crop out of that. But that's the only solution. With this design, with these cameras in this position and the phone that folds this way, the only way you can make the camera not, quote, unquote, look wrong in one either folded or unfolded mode is to have a square sensor and crop it in a different rectangle each time.

And so maybe in the future, like thinking of you, like next year, am I going to use the new folding phone? If they have a bigger sensor that's big enough to be square and they can crop it, all of a sudden that annoyance goes away and presumably the camera is also better. If it has face ID, that would also make you happy. Like these are the things that people are going to be measuring with the, you know, the Duo 2.

What have they improved? Not just it's a new SoC, but like did they put a square sensor on the camera? Are the cameras better? Does it have face ID? And Marco, with your embarrassment of opening the thing, I would say that like definitely at least use the phone until you get over that. Because like what the hell is the sense of having a holding phone if you're never going to open it up?

Then you're just torturing yourself by having a weird, small, thick phone that you never open. Like that's the whole sale. And on that front, though, I don't think it's a slam dunk that will make you like it more. Because what I think about as someone who hasn't carried one of these is I always think about like setting aside the embarrassment, which I think you need to get over just to give it a fair shot.

Like there is some, I don't know. It's like a tiny, I don't know how big, some kind of hurdle that you have to overcome to decide, is it worth me opening the phone?

How long, like it signals a longer investment in usage because it's not so fast that you can do it like a, like a StarTac Motorola, you know, it's not so fast that there's no cost to it. You are deciding probably with two hands to open the phone.

And the idea is I'm going to use it for some amount of time that it's worth me opening it and then closing it again. And lots of things we do with our phones are like, oh, quick peek, ba-doop, you know, like there's lots of these short interactions where it may be that you feel like, oh, I don't want to bother opening it.

And I feel like when you open a folding phone, you're not committing to, but you're predicting that the thing you want to do with your phone is worth the opening and closing time for the advantages that you get with the bigger screen . And that I think once you get over the, you know, I don't want to open it, that is the determiner of whether you find the phone valuable is like if every interaction you have, you just feel like, oh, I opened it and I closed it.

And I, and while it was open, I did something. But honestly, there was more overhead in the opening and closing than there was value in the half a second that I looked at the bigger screen. Right. And that's going to make you open it less. And then if it does sort of degenerate down to like, now I 'm just using a fat squat phone that I never open, not because I'm embarrassed to open it, but because I don't want to pay the cost of opening and closing unless I'm settling in to read a long article on the train or something.

That I feel like is the thing I would be looking for as I was using this is like, how, how does the return on investment work out in terms of, is it worth the, you know, so you signed, everything's a Seinfeld thing. Is this sponge worthy? Yeah. Is this, is this interaction open the phone worthy?

And obviously if the things, if the apps haven't been updated on the phone, hell no, it's not worth it. Why would I open it up just so I could see the, the, uh, the phone slightly bigger with black giant black spaces around it or whatever. But that I'll be interested to hear your updates on that. Obviously Casey feels like he's already getting enough value out of it that he's, you know, it's, it's worth opening.

Lots of things in his life are sponge worthy, but Marco still up for grabs. No, young people don't even get this. This is an ancient cultural references that are actually kind of lewd, but anyway, Google it kids.