John Gruber on AI Replacing iPhone in 10 Years, Google vs AI Search in Safari, and Siri at WWDC
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"Your interior decorating tips have always been appreciated, 007."

Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Eddie Cue was in court this week saying in 10 years you might not even need an iPhone and also could be replacing search with AI in Safari. Of course, all the App Store updates and Apple trying to retain control of linking out and developers paying commissions on their apps. And we're going to get to why is you-know-who so bad? Hey, Dingus. And we have a very special guest in today's episode as well. This episode is brought to you exclusively by you, the members who support us directly on YouTube.

I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and joining me, my good friend, Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason? It's great. Excited to be here. I'm excited I don't have to answer the movie quote. That's right, because our very special guest today is John Gruber from Daring Fireball and the talk show. John, thanks so much for joining us this week. Well, I'm happy to be here, and I feel like I'm already stumped because I mean, obviously, it's a James Bond movie, but I don't know which one. I'm not even sure which actor. I

I'm going to guess. So I'll give you that hint. M says the line. M says the line. Your interior decorating tips have always been appreciated. I don't know. I'm going to guess maybe it's the Daniel Craig one when M got the new office that looks like the old office from the 60s and 70s, which would not Skyfall, but the next one.

No, Skyfall is actually it. Okay. You guessed it inadvertently. I think it's the scene when James shows up after everybody believed he was deceased and he shows up in Em's house or apartment or whatever. And she says the line. Oh, so different. Okay. John, thanks so much for joining us. Of course, you being here, we're going to talk a lot about what's going on with Siri and the App Store and things like that and Eddie Q's last statements.

Real quick, we do have some five-star shout-outs when people leave us reviews. So, JMartin2004 from the USA, thanks for that. LetThemCook, ironic name, from Germany, thanks for the five-star review. And J03LD from the USA, thank you all for that. And one other question for you, John, and I promise this will be the last pop quiz. You have mentioned an application or a program that you used to use in your publishing days. And I've always wanted to mention that I have also used it.

And it was one of my first jobs. I was actually designing brochures and I had never heard of this application before. And then I was introduced to it there at that job.

But might you guess what page layout publication application might I be talking about? Quark Express, clearly. Quark Express. And that is the one I used. And mind you, I guess Quark Express is still around. It's still doing things. You can still get it 2025 version. But I used that in 2011, John, in my job. For me, I mean, my time in Quark, well, mid-90s. So it's a lot longer ago.

ago i mean and then i used it through the 2000s but then just sort of did less and less and less print stuff i used to because i knew it so well i would use it instead of a word processor i mean everybody who kind of if you really got into quark so even if i had to write like a letter i would just fire up quark express use quark express that's hilarious yeah it took me a while to get used to it i had never used something like it but you know it had its it had its

Good points. It had its tools. Well, let's get into Eddie Q. Yesterday, Eddie Q was actually in court testifying. This is during the Google Remedies trial. And of course, the court is trying to decide what to do with Google Chrome, maybe even the deal that Google has with Apple, the $20 billion a year. And Eddie Q said some interesting statements that kind of shook Google's stock price and also said some things about the iPhone.

Namely, he said you might not even need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as it sounds. That was a direct quote he said while he was testifying due to AI and the advancement there. He made the comparison to the iPod and saying how Apple killed that off because of the advancement in other technologies. So that was a wild statement. I'll be curious our thoughts on that.

but also that Apple is looking at adding AI search to Safari. So right now in the address bar, you know, you can search and that default is Google. And that's that $20 billion deal. It seems like Eddie Q might be trying to save. And upon that announcement of AI being in Safari, Google definitely took a hit yesterday because obviously that would be a big deal if somehow in Safari, when someone searched, it was an AI search or using an AI tool like perplexity,

rather than Google. And so, yeah, John, I'm curious. I mean, Eddie Q being on the stand yesterday, is this to kind of save this $20 billion search deal that they have with Apple or

Or what is he doing on the stand saying things like this? Hey, I wish that we could watch. Right. Because Eddie, Eddie is always entertaining. I wish we could have seen Schiller when he was testifying in the epic case, too, because I think listening to them or even just listening to them, if it wasn't cameras, I would love to actually hear his testimony. Yeah.

but we only have the quotes to go by. And I think they were only reported by Bloomberg. I mean, it seems to me like when I flashed through tech meme, it seemed like everybody was getting their quotes from Bloomberg sourcing of the quotes. I think the verge is in the courtroom. Oh, okay. So maybe the verge has original quotes too, but original quotes. But I think in this particular case,

I mean, it's always helpful to tell the truth when you're under oath. But I do think that if Apple has an agenda, and I'm not saying that anybody, well, now we can't say that anybody from Apple might ever be accused of perjuring themselves on a witness stand. But I certainly don't think Eddie Q would.

And that's not even what I'm hinting at. But when you have an agenda and you're trying to, you know, comply with being under oath and answer questions that, you know, the questioner might have a different agenda and you're trying to squeeze your answers and what you can recall. Right. Which is the famous out when you're on the witness stand. I don't remember. Right.

you know, you're trying to steer towards your agenda. They're trying to steer you towards their agenda and you meet in the middle. But in this case, I think what he's saying, it's obviously true, right? It is kind of surprising to hear a very high level executive say you might not need an iPhone in 10 years. But at some point in the future, you're not going to need an iPhone, right? I mean, are we going to be using iPhones in 50 years? I mean, that would be

To me, I mean, to me, you know, we're not using computers that vaguely resemble our computers from 50 years ago. Maybe progress will slow, but...

It certainly seems like something, you know, AR glasses, AirPods that actually could do a ton of your compute for you, you know, in your ear. There's all sorts of ways it could go that's not carrying a little book-sized slab of glass in your pocket. I think 10 years from now, we probably will be using iPhones, but I think it's, you know, that's the way tech goes. And

It's definitely, it's always been the case in these antitrust trials against tech companies in particular, where the court system moves slow and they have a more historic view of things.

the law and everything. So nothing moves at the speed of tech in the court world, right? And Microsoft back in the 90s, going back to the 90s again, made all sorts of arguments about that in their antitrust trial about Windows. And a lot of what they said, people, oh, that's BS. A lot of it turned out to be true, right? Like Windows is still around, but Windows is no longer the

majority share operating system people that people use more people use iOS and Android, I think worldwide than use windows because phones are so much more popular than PCs, certainly Android. Oh yeah, for sure. So, you know, it will, you know, so I, I think Q's agenda was to protect these payments, to get them to not say you can't, that you can't,

Paying for default placement, I think that's probably going to be gone. But paying and maybe Safari switches to offer everybody around the world a choice screen for search engine and everybody will then choose Google and Google still – everybody on the choice screen would still be on the hook to pay Apple traffic acquisition costs for the users who choose them and send search traffic to them digitally.

they want to keep that money flowing it's you know it's an enormous amount of money and it's all profit right i mean minus whatever it costs the engineering to keep safari going and webkit which is nothing not nothing but for 20 billion dollars you got to figure that's hot very high 90s profit margin right i do wonder how many would actually choose google in the future too if ai options were there like perplexity or chat gpt i know jason you use

Chat GPT search and others a lot. But what were your thoughts to seeing these quotes from Eddie Q coming out? I feel like Eddie Q is doing a lot of mental gymnastics here to make a point. And it almost feels like the argument he's making would have been the argument that makes sense in the first part of this trial, right? Because he's trying to make the case that AI is a competitor to search. Right.

Right. He's trying to say Google exists in a very competitive market. Therefore, these default placement deals in the traffic acquisition payments, you know, shouldn't be taken away. Right. That that because they are so because I think the context was you won't need an iPhone in 10 years because AI is transforming this industry and that those kind of shifts are the types of things that create new levels of competition. Right.

But at the same time, he also said on the stand that searches are down in Safari for the first time in, I think he said, 22 years. Literally, it's the first time we looked in the last quarter and less people were searching in Safari. And so it's weird when you hear these quotes out of context because I don't think there's any scenario where Eddie Q actually believes that in 10 years that people won't be using iPhones. I certainly don't think that anyone higher up in that organization is hoping that that will be the case. Obviously,

they're trying to prepare for that. Like any good business is trying to prepare for the world when you're the most popular consumer product in history is no longer necessary. But I think it's just weird to look behind the curtain. And like John said, we didn't get to hear what he like the whole what was the question? Right? And what was the rest of the conversation? Well, and the other thing too, I'll just say, and I think Eddie's answer reeks of the confidence is that

the senior people at Apple are very, very confident about Apple itself. And in Eddie's, even if he's seriously imagining a world where everybody doesn't carry an iPhone in 10 years or 15 years or wherever that it is,

what we're using is some other Apple device in his imagined world, that it's Apple that will figure out the thing. Cause I think that's why he brought up the iPod, you know, and that it'll be Apple that does to the iPhone, what Apple did to the iPod. They're not going to sit around and let somebody else do it to them. I was going to ask you, John, I was looking at the earnings that came out after our last episode. And of course, six colors, Jason Snell always has a great breakdown, but the pie chart, of course, of where the profit comes from, where the revenue comes from,

almost half iPhone, of course, and that services 28%. That Google deal for $20 billion a year is a significant portion of that, I think. Obviously, in-app purchases also

Apple TV Plus, Apple doesn't break that down, but it's probably much smaller. Does Apple need this $20 billion deal with Google? Is it just that it's nice to have because it's free money? Going forward, does it matter five years from now if it somehow goes away? Well, I think it definitely matters. I did this math at one point. You have the screen in front of you, but what was their profit for last year? I think it's

The $20 billion from Google, if we just call it all profit, which has got to be close, is a surprising percentage of Apple's overall profit. I think it's like 20%. I think they make like $100 billion in profit. And so 20% of their profit comes from that deal, which is wild because they have high margins across the line. You know, they're...

their hardware famously has, you know, very high margins. They don't break them out anymore by product line. So presumably with their overall margins now, like around 40%, their hardware has got to still be around 30%. Right. And that the, all the services stuff has higher margins than, than 40%. Um,

20% of your profit is a big deal. Do they need it? Well, it's only 20% of their profit is the other way to look at it. The thing I keep coming back to with this is I know that the United States, the DOJ is saying that

That there's sort of like a perpetual machine here, like a flywheel. Like Google's the company that everybody knows for search and everybody uses for search. And they're the ones who have the most efficient...

advertising engine for monetizing search. And so they do all the search. They make all the money from the ads for search. And so they have the money to pay Apple and Samsung and Firefox, who I think are the three big ones. Apple's the biggest, and then Samsung's next, and Firefox is in third for these traffic acquisition costs. And that upstarts can't even really get their foot in the door because they can't pay it.

but I don't know. I don't know if that, if it works like that though, because it's not just, Hey, we'll give you 20 billion for next year. That my understanding of the way these work is we'll pay you per search. So if, if Eddie Q is right and searches were down last quarter, then,

That means Apple's money from the traffic acquisition deal is going to start to go down too, right? It's not just like, oh, we'll pay you $22 billion next year to make Google the default. And I guess they did. This came out in the court testimony that at some point over the years that they've negotiated this deal, Apple,

At Google's insistence, it has been in the contract that Google will be the default in Safari. But I don't think that needs to be in the deal. I think if it weren't, Apple would still make Google the default, right? It's what everybody expects. And if they change the default, I mean, just think about this from like being a product manager at Safari. If they were like, okay, we're going to make perplexity the new default search in Google.

Does that mean they're going to change the default search for every Safari user who's using Google right now? Or is there – does Safari have a memory in its preferences? I've never spelunked through the preferences file to see. Did you ever change from Google to Bing and then back to Google and expressed an actual image?

user intention to use Google, or are you just searching all your searches go to Google because you never changed it, which is surely the majority of users, right? The majority of Safari users probably never changed that setting.

But would Apple actually change that under their feet after how many years? You know, there are Safari users who've been using it for 20 years, 15 years on the iPhone. And I know, Jason, we just talked about this before we recorded, but, you know, there were rumors years ago that Apple was going to do its own search engine. One could argue Spotlight tries to do that sometimes, you know, especially on your phone. If you swipe down on the home screen and search for something...

It'll try to just give you results or it'll send you to Wikipedia or whatever. And so I don't think that Apple would put another default without some kind of deal, like being perplexity as a default search engine. I don't think they would do that. Well, I just want to say the other thing I do know, I don't know how much, but I do know I've asked like representatives at DuckDuckGo and I forget who else I've asked, but they

Everybody in that hard-coded list of options in the U.S., it's like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Bing. There might be one more that I'm forgetting. Yahoo is still there. Yahoo is still there. How in the world did I forget Yahoo? But they all have traffic acquisition cost deals with Apple too. So if you're like a diehard Yahoo user and you switch your default in Safari to Yahoo –

Yahoo Groups is my homepage, actually. Yahoo does pay Apple for that. I just think that all of those other search engines combined don't add up too much. But if, in theory, a gazillion users all switch to DuckDuckGo, then DuckDuckGo would make more money from ads and would have more money to pay Apple for traffic acquisition. And that is, as a user, it is very frustrating. And I think one of the...

most indefensible, this is only for the money, things that Apple does is Safari's the only major browser I know of. Maybe the only minor browser. I'm not sure there's another...

mass market regular web browser that does not let the user add their own custom search engines. There is no way in that list to say, you know, oh, choose from Bing, Google, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or add your own at the bottom. Even Chrome lets you add your own custom search engine, which is owned by Google, which is now

now being held as a monopolist. I think even Google, and again, it's sort of the same way that Eddie Q I think is very confident that if we're not using iPhones in 10 years, we're going to be using some other new Apple product. I think Google was like, Hey, this would probably be a bad look for us in the future. Cause you know, we do have a monopoly on search to not allow this. And I think they were like, sure. How many people are going to switch from Google? We know they want to use Google, you know, I'm Jason. I'm curious your thoughts in a second. And also if,

would you switch it to a ChatGPT search by default? Because I know you like using that. I just checked Brave Browser's settings. And like you said, you cannot choose a search engine outside of what is hard-coded in, but you can use Quant.

I've never heard of the Q W a N T is apparently a choice in brave, but I, you know, Jason and I have talked about Google search results, especially in the past year or so. And I've been increasingly disappointed by it. One. Now I get an AI overview nine times out of 10, no matter what I search. Sometimes it's okay. Sometimes I prefer not. And we'll scroll down. But,

But Reddit services answers all the time. I feel like three out of five of the top hits whenever I do a Google search is Reddit. And I've used some AI tools and trying to increasingly use it because I just get better options. I know, Jason, you were just asking questions about Phil Schiller earlier and getting better ones. Jason, would you switch your default from Google to something else? I mean...

No, but what John was saying is interesting because I think about every time I open the Edge browser, it has accidentally switched my default search back to Bing. And it's like, you can go back and change and it's like, we're sorry, there was a problem. We had to re-update your... I'm like, the problem was I switched away from Bing. Let's just be honest about what's actually happening here. But John, I'm curious. It seems like this Google search deal...

If I'm Google, I'm more than happy to take that away, DOJ. Let me just throw this to you as a sacrificial... Because like you said, they're still going to get all that traffic. People are still going to use Google. That deal, I think, is way more important to Apple than it is to Google, which is why they sent Eddie Q to talk about it. Like, please don't do that. Because Apple...

It's really money that is a payment to not build a search engine. Essentially, that's what Google was doing. It's like, we're going to give you this money because otherwise it doesn't make any sense how that works because Google, like if there's no default placement, it's

There's no motivation for Google to pay for it because people will just make it their own default anyway. So the payment is really for Apple to not build a search engine. And that was the whole reason that Apple originally hired John Gianandrea, right? He was ahead of Siri, and part of Siri was going to be to build out... I mean, you search Siri for things, well, at least...

the pre current version of Siri, you'd, you'd get those little lists of like, here's some options on the web. Or if you do the pull down on your iPhone, some of those results are Siri search, right? Like that. So they do have a search engine. Apple's so far behind in that, that it's almost like, no, we were at the point where we have to keep this $20 billion because we, we are the only other company who would be capable of building a search engine to compete because we have the distribution and they're so far behind. But if you're Google, John, like, aren't you like, just take this, don't make us get rid of Chrome. Just take these deals.

Maybe, right? And that's sort of what I guess Eddie Q, and it didn't seem like it came up yesterday. Maybe he's back on the stand today. But part of the, it's almost a perverse outcome if...

If the DOJ gets its way and Google's not allowed to pay for these deals, period, because they've been found to be an illegal monopoly. So not just default, but they can't pay for traffic acquisition costs to Apple or Samsung or Firefox or anybody.

Then what does Apple do? Do the, I mean, then Apple's in the position of, well, do we still keep Google in this list? And like I said, all the other browsers in the list, like Ecosia and DuckDuckGo, they pay Apple to be there per search, you know, by the usage. Is Apple going to keep Google there, even though they don't make any money from it and they know most people are going to use it or do they take them out? But that would be bizarre to Safari users, not only to change the default, but to remove Google as an option in Safari. That's,

That's kind of bananas. But then if they keep them there and the same overall, you know, 90% of Safari users or whatever keep using Google...

Then Google keeps the $20 billion that they would have paid Apple for the traffic acquisition costs. And Apple loses $20 billion in profit and Google gains $20 billion in profit. I mean, and going back to Steven of what will users do if they're prompted with a choice screen? I think we can, you know, the EU has sort of run that experiment for us. And it doesn't seem to me like Google has lost any significant share of search in the EU where...

The major platforms like the gatekeeping ones under the DMA have to provide a choice screen of listing all the search engines. So I think if they weren't allowed to pay for traffic acquisition costs, I don't know that they would lose share, certainly not in the near term.

And then they would keep all the money. Right. Yeah. Do you think, do you think John, like, is this the point where Apple's like, yeah, we have to build our own search product that we can use for our users. I mean, that's a lot more expensive than the free $20 billion a year, obviously. But like at some point that, that even if they get this Apple intelligence thing, right, that's still the glaring hole in the middle of it is like, you can't use this for this sort of thing. I'm going to guess no. And yeah,

And I think reading between the lines, what Eddie Q was saying yesterday is, hey, there's a bunch of big new upstarts and they'll just pay us instead. You know, perplexity or anthropic or, again, could still be... You know, he's talking about AI, but it could be Google AI instead of Google Search, you know, that's in there. And these companies have lots of money and they're growing in popularity and, you know, they'll pay us instead. I think the reason Apple probably...

isn't seriously thinking about doing its own search engine is that for a general web search engine, people expect to get all results, right? Including for adult content, including for gambling, you know, anything that Apple may not want to associate their brand with. And I think...

We can see it with the chat GPT integration with Siri over the last year, you know, and I've written about this. I'm sure everybody's sort of experienced, but I've written about it, written in whole articles about how you can going through Siri and saying, Hey, Dingus, ask chat GPT to answer this question.

And you get, hmm, that's not that great an answer. And then you go to the ChatGPT app and ask the exact same question and you get a much better answer. And it's like, well, how in the world, when Siri is using ChatGPT, does it give you a clearly inferior answer that often takes longer than just asking ChatGPT directly? And I think...

I'm pretty sure the answer is A. Well, there's two answers. At a technical level, Apple's not really just driving the ChatGPT app. They're using the APIs from OpenAI. They're not really using ChatGPT. They're using OpenAI APIs, and that's a different interface than what ChatGPT itself exposes through its app.

But I think the main thing is that Apple is inserting itself in the middle there to sort of G and PG rate the content and the answers, you know, that make sure that the query isn't something Apple doesn't want its own product Siri to be involved with and make sure the answer from chat GPT isn't something that Apple doesn't want to put its own interface to present to the user.

I don't think they want to be involved in that. But web search is a thing where you need and expect to get answers to any and all questions. So I kind of feel like Apple's looking at this as who will we partner with, not what will we build ourselves. But I don't know, because maybe they'll take that Tim Cook doctrine of we need to own and control the core technologies that are important to us. Maybe they'll decide this is a core technology and...

We can't look, look what happened when we trusted the partnership to Google. We lost the money through a court case that we, we weren't even a defendant in. Do you have any last thoughts, Jason? Well, I did only because John just served it up so perfectly. You were supposed to ask him a question and you just kind of, you misquoted Tim Cook. I felt bad. I was pop quizzing him so much at the beginning. The actual quote is to own and control the primary technology. Hence the name of this podcast.

Yes, that is where we got it. Ah! Ah! I didn't know that. Sorry. No other thoughts about that, but thank you for serving that one up so nicely, John. Yeah, very nice. Serendipity. So speaking of maybe Apple losing money, let's go to the App Store and everything that's been going on there because...

Apple is fighting the contempt order, of course, that happened last week. And a bunch of apps are jumping on being able to link out from their app. And Apple is, of course, trying to stop all of that.

which the judge was pretty ticked. I don't foresee it. Well, we'll see what happens. But just to give a few examples, after the contempt order last week, Amazon now added a get book button in the iOS app. So now finally you can actually buy quote unquote, buy a book in the Kindle app, at least through the web browser. Spotify added a button to sign up for their subscriptions in the iOS app. So all of this very like just days after the court order actually went through and

And one of the ones that I mentioned last week, but I think a Patreon with its iPhone app, which is a big deal again, because that's lots of creators using a platform or direct patronage like we do through memberful, but not having to have pay that cut is a big deal. And so I wanted to, to go back to this mostly because, uh, John, you've had obviously a very long history with Apple. And I, I went through the contempt order to read some of the pull quotes, uh,

specifically of events between Phil Schiller and then Tim Cook, Luca Maestri, and Alex Roman. And we touched on it last week and we mentioned it, but there was the internal discussion about the 27% commission, doing that when someone clicks in an app but buys in the web, that Apple was still collecting that 27% commission. And I believe in the last dithering episode with you and Ben Thompson, I think even you admitted that 27% was a little ridiculous.

And Phil Schiller literally said that as well. And so if you look in the contempt order, it's like 100 something pages, but you can just command F and just search for Phil Schiller and you get a goldmine of quotes. And one of the quotes from the contempt order was in an email, Mr. Schiller relayed that with respect to the proposal for a 27% commission for 24 hours, Phil Schiller said, quote, I've already explained my many issues with the commission concept and that

and that clearly I am not on team commission fee. Direct from Phil Schiller. And then one other quote, this is from the contempt order, it says, as Mr. Schiller was not advocating for a commission and Mr. Maestri was fully advocating for the lucrative approach, Mr. Cook was the tiebreaker. So between Maestri, Schiller, Cook was the tiebreaker. Commissions would be collected on a seven-day window, even if those subsequent purchases on a developer's website were made on a device other than the user's iPhone.

which is wild. So I mentioned this last week, and John, I'm just curious, just if you were a fly on the wall, if you could pontificate maybe how this went, but it feels like to me, you had Luca Maestri and Alex Roman as the money guys pushing for this 27% commission.

Tim Cook, he's CEO now, but I guess in my mind, being the tiebreaker, as the contempt order says, it feels like he leaned money side. And the one maybe voice of reason was Phil Schiller. I'm curious, obviously you, you probably know them on a personal level, but what do you, is Phil Schiller just have a better handle on where this would have been going? Or is it just a, a general care for developers and wanting to have the best setup for them? Like,

What do you think happened in these weird interactions? I go back to an email that came out, I think, in the first round of the Epic Apple case for 2021. And it was a Shiller email from back, I'm going to say like 2010 or 2011 or so.

And Schiller had proposed inside Apple that once the run rate, Apple's take from the App Store, once it reached a billion annually, which I guess was already heading there around 2010, 2011, that once it hit a billion, maybe they should cap it there and then start lowering the commission rate, go to –

85, 15 or 80, 20 first. And then if it still gets to a billion, you know, keep lowering it, you know, that Apple would just make a billion dollars a year from the app store and then lower the rate.

And it's not that Phil Schiller is anti-capitalist, right? And it's not like Phil Schiller is, you know, does Phil Schiller think Apple should make a hefty profit and have high revenues? Yeah, I think Phil Schiller definitely does that. I think, you know, his decades leading their product marketing and probably, you know, being at the point of assigning the prices to their hardware products and stuff. He's on team profit if we're going to pick teams within Apple, right?

I just think, though, that Phil Schiller has always – because he still is. This is why I think he's running the App Store. But going back further, the developer relations team within Apple always eventually ran up the chain to Phil Schiller before it got to Steve Jobs.

you know, that Schiller reported the jobs, but the whole developer relations team reported to Schiller, you know, WWDC was always in still is a Phil Schiller production. And he, he knows, I think he's on team, you know, again, I think picking teams, he's on team third party developer and he knows that,

that that is a virtuous circle for Apple, that having developers who are successful and thriving and happy to be building software for Apple's products using Apple's proprietary APIs, you know, making iPhone apps that are very native iPhone apps and that take advantage of features that only exist on iOS or only exist on the Mac or

or use iCloud syncing to make everything secure, to sort of lock everything so that when apps use iCloud for sync, the developer can't access the data. And so users can trust that. Phil Schiller can use an app like that and know, hey, I'm using a third-party app and I'm Phil Schiller, but I know it's using iCloud sync, so I know they're not snooping in the data.

And to keep that going, you want to keep developers happy. And developers very, very clearly have grown increasingly unhappy developing for Apple's products over the years. And I think Schiller, not that he saw it coming, but I think he was thinking as far back as 2010 when it wasn't regulatory or antitrust pressure, but technology.

just this is the Apple way of doing this. Let's keep these developers cheering and happy when they show up at WWDC. And one way to do that would be to lower the commission. And on this new proposal, I think it's, I think Schiller just knew that,

That it wasn't really, you know, this 27% and track them across the web. They knew that nobody was going to do it, right? It wasn't that they thought they were going to collect 27% from purchases users made when they left apps and maybe even are using other devices. They just concocted a scheme that was so...

ridiculous that the rate was so high that the tracking requirements are so obtuse. There was stuff in there where you had to open your accounting books to Apple so they could account and double check that you're not booking... Cheating them.

Yeah, cheating them. The most profitable company in the world. And wasn't there a report just last week where somebody figured out that there were only like 34 apps in the whole app store that ever used the link out policy? I mean, I know that sounds like a ridiculously low number, but just anecdotally, have you guys ever run into one? I think the nature of our racket is we try...

More apps than typical users, right? New apps, you get like an email from somebody like, hey, I have a new app. And a lot of times I'm like, hey, I'll at least try it. I try a lot of new apps. And I'm like, most of them don't stick. I have never seen an app use that link out feature.

never i don't know i mean i guess and so i think that's and i think gonzalez rogers rogers the judge she more or less called them out on that not that this is ridiculous and you're taking too much money she more or less called them out on you can cut you backwards engineered a scheme that you knew no one would use right and honestly i think whole app store thing does apple bring value by the app store and making it easier for developers to distribute internationally payments and all that kind of stuff and and i'll

And I'll just use an example as this podcast, because we offer a paid membership directly through Apple Podcasts, where we pay Apple a commission on that, just like an app developer would. And we also offer it outside. Like you can literally, we link out in the show notes in Apple Podcasts. You can click a button and go over to Memberful and sign up. And for this podcast and previous shows that I've done that same setup, we have two times more people paying

paying us directly through Apple Podcasts than we do for Memberful. And I think there is value there because that basically frictionless process of someone being able to give us money is well worth it. And it's a pain in the neck to have to upload subscriber audio to Apple Podcasts and manage this kind of like dual feed thing. They also strip out our chapters. And so, but I deal with all that because...

They have two times more conversions and way more people can sign up. And plus international is way easier. So there is value to the app store. And it seems like, I don't know, like Apple doesn't want to compete there. And so they just make it a commission everywhere. But I think there, there, there's value and they could compete if they really wanted to. Yeah. And John, you were talking about that email and I thought one of the,

I remember reading that when it came out in the case. And I think it was like Phil Schiller was forwarding a CNBC article that was talking about the growth of the app store. And one of his lines in there was basically like, if the app store is generating a billion dollars already in profit, we should just continue to lower the rate so that it always just makes a billion dollars in profit. Like it's like, that's enough. We made a billion dollars in profit. Let's just do that every year. And I mean, at this point, that percentage would be like a third of a percent, right? Because of how much the total revenue is. But it feels like somewhere along the way,

Apple started to feel like if we do that, then developers can take advantage of us. And there's this, and you've taught, I've heard you talk before about like the period of time when Apple was beholden to Microsoft into Adobe. Right. And Phil Schiller was, I think back at Apple when Steve jobs was standing on the stage at the Mac world expo with the big,

Bill Gates is above him. You know, we're investing money in it. And Apple didn't want to be in that situation anymore. But I feel kind of like what has happened to Apple in the app store. This is the best analogy I can think of. I'm a dad. I have four kids.

And well, backing up, I remember like in middle school and high school, there's these two guys that always just drove me nuts. Like I was probably smarter than them. They were way better at sports than I was. I was just, you know, I was on plenty of sports teams. I was firmly middle of the pack. That's fine. These guys were not. And they just like gave me a hard time all the way through middle school and high school. And I hated middle school and high school. And now I have three kids who are in middle school and high school, one who's younger. And sometimes they'll do things to make me very, very angry, right? That happens as a dad.

And sometimes as a dad, when you get super angry, you just totally lose perspective. And you start to take out your anger on your other children who had nothing to do with it. And there's times when my wife is like, dude, why are you so mad at number four? It was number two that gave you the sass or whatever. And I really feel like there is this ingrown culture of we're not going to get taken advantage of. And so when Tim Cook sees Tim Sweeney

who is definitely not the hero in this story, but he's like the perfect example of the worst person you know makes a good point, which is like maybe the app store has a problem kind of thing. And he like trolled them so hard that they were so mad they were not going to give him even an inch of

that that led them to contempt of court, right? It's like, they're the parent who's so angry at child number two, they're taking it out because here's the thing, like the developers that we all know, like Casey Liss, David Smith, Mark, they are not Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Sweeney, right? Jeff Bezos in, in, in the Kindle bookstore. And yet I feel like Apple has transferred that rage towards, we're not going to get taken advantage of and created policies that have just completely squandered their relationship with

with all of these other developers. And it is so interesting to just think that like, there was a point in time when Phil Schiller's perspective was like, maybe, maybe a billion is enough. Like in someone along the line was like, actually, but that would be letting developers take advantage of us. Yeah. There, there is a sense of entitlement, right? That it would, that a lot of Apple executives seem to have where they truly believe that, that what they've built with iOS is,

and the app store and the number of people who download and use apps, you know, through the app store compared to how many people download and installed apps on PCs, including Macs before, before the app store. Um,

that this is so useful and so innovative from them that they really are entitled to their 30 slash 15% cut. It is theirs. And it's like unshakable for them to come away from it. And I think, again, I can't speak for Phil Schiller, but I think he comes from this era of thinking of Apple's relationship with all third-party developers, all of them as a partnership. And yes, yes.

he would like, he remembers when Apple was the lower hand in the partnership and he would like to have the upper hand, but I don't think Phil Schiller would have ever imagined, you know, looking at other, even the biggest software businesses. And we mentioned Adobe and Microsoft who were two of the biggest software companies on the Apple platform in the nineties and are two of the biggest companies making software for Apple's platforms today. So,

I don't think Phil Schiller looks at that and thinks Apple should be getting about 30% of their revenue from the software on the platform. You know, it just isn't how it works, you know? Uh, but I think, uh,

Tim and Luca were looking at it as, yeah, yeah, we do deserve that. Well, I wanted to move before to Apple Intelligence and we're nearing WWDC. It's just now a few weeks away and there were obviously announcements at last WWDC that didn't come to fruition, obviously around Apple Intelligence. And because we have you, John Gruber, wanted to play some clips from your show and get your thoughts on what happened between those moments of you having great

Craig Federighi and John Gianandrea on stage and Greg Jaszowiak and to where we are today and what might we see them do this dub dub as either like re-announce things or what were they doing so I just want to play two quick clips again this is from the talk show at WWDC last year this first one you had just said let me give you a new slogan we're serious this time about Siri and you did that joke

And then this was John's response. I think when I started working with the Siri team, the first instruction I gave them was failure is not an option because a lot of people use Siri a lot of the time. And as it's got better over the years, people just, we see in our data that people just use it more. It's gotten better over the years. Let me do some here. How many days has it been since January 1st? Let's

Let's see if Siri can answer it. No, kicked over to ChatGPT because HeyDingus doesn't know. It can't count the days. And so I don't know what's happened there, but one quick clip. And this is, again, talking about the correcting your request and Siri understanding. You know, this was one of the features that was announced at DubDub saying, you know, if you start saying something and then correct yourself, HeyDingus should be able to understand that and work it out.

And so here's John on that. So one of the things that we showed at WWDC was an example of you correcting yourself and saying two different things and the new models figuring out which thing you meant. And so the good news is that the technology of language models is getting dramatically better and is less likely to make these fragile mistakes. So I recently did a video comparing Perplexity's app and its new integrations with the iPhone and the Hey Dingus specifically.

And just the ability to parse an email, like splitting the subject and body. Hey, Dingus basically put the entire email in the subject line. Like you might have a family relative do when they send you an email. And so here we are a year later, there's the whole email in the subject line, which is, you know, super cool. But anyway, it's that was a year ago.

basically a dub dub and obviously they announced that some features weren't coming i'm just wondering you were on stage with them there during the live talk show when they were talking about apple intelligence the semantic index they talked about on your show did they know then that it wasn't going to happen this year like what what was going through their minds so i

If there's anything I've written about in recent weeks that I feel like I haven't been clear enough on is I definitely think they thought they could ship it. Now, did all three of them believe that equally? You know, Federighi, Jaws, and JG? I don't know, right? And I really don't. It's not like, oh, backstage, Federighi would say to me,

I don't know about this. I don't know if we're going to make this in a year. No, of course not. He's not going to say that even off the record, right? They're all team players and they're all behind it. But clearly they wouldn't have announced it if they didn't think it was more likely than not, at least, that they would chip. And I do think if there are people who've taken away from...

my recent writing, like the big one, the something's rotten in the state of Cupertino that, that I was implying that they knew at last WWDC that this wasn't going to happen by next year. Well, no, that's ridiculous because, you know, I mean,

I mean, why would they? I mean, that would be insane. And they're not insane. And the other thing we all know about Apple executives is they've all been there for a long time, most of them. And they're all there for their careers. It's not like they're fly-by-night executives and next year Federighi's going to be working at OpenAI and JAWS is going to be doing product marketing for Samsung or something like that. No, of course not. They're going to be there to answer for this. So they thought they could do it. But I...

I question, well, I question announcing it though, right? Like, cause even if they thought that they could do it, why not just save the announcement for later in the year? Like at the iPhone event in September, if they thought they were going to get closer, um,

And I've gotten some emails and feedback from readers. A lot of times, it's getting older and more people of my generation have left Apple. And it's just the nature of working at Apple that people who are currently working at Apple just tend not to talk to anybody in the media, even off the record. But people who've left and retired,

feel a little bit freer to talk off the record. And a couple of ex Apple people made the same point just by coincidence, but they all made the same point that in the Steve jobs era, Steve, uh,

would deliberately always be thinking two or three months ahead thinking, what are we going to have to announce two or three months from now? I, you know, it's, you know, there's a Mac world, there's WWDC, there's, Hey, you know, and, and, and things in the Steve jobs era were way less annual, right? Like, you know, sometimes there'd be two years between updates to the iBook or, you know, the Mac book or whatever. Um,

but they'd be like, well, we've got this thing in the pipeline and he'd be thinking, okay, we could announce that in March. We have, we'll have an, you know, we'll do Mac world in January and then March we'll do this just to, you know, keep, you know, have something to announce throughout the year. And Apple does do product announcements throughout the year, but they tend to only be hardware. Right. And so why not break something like these more advanced Siri features off and, and,

them for later in the year. And then when later in the year happened and they still, I'm sure internally were more worried, like, Hey, I don't know if we're going to be able to ship these things.

Well, then they're not on the hook for them. They haven't made a TV commercial that features that yet. Or they haven't aired the commercial yet. And just keep waiting until it... Okay, we feel like we're three months away from being able to ship this. Okay, let's announce it now. But I do think they thought they could ship it early this year. But I think...

For the nature of this AI stuff, when you feel like you're seven or eight months away, there's way more uncertainty in those seven or eight months, given the nature of AI technology than there is in most technology. I think other features that Apple is used to shipping, just, you know, I don't know, a new API for widgets, right?

You know, the whole widgets on the desktop thing. You know, at some point, the team was probably like, yeah, you know, I think, you know, we're looking like seven, eight months out, you know, and I feel like that was probably a good estimate. With AI, it's too much uncertainty. And maybe that's one way that Apple got tripped up here by not being extensively experienced with LLM technology that they vastly underestimated that uncertainty that just seems to be baked into it.

Yeah, exactly. And I do wonder the comparison, what you think of this. I think of Apple Maps when that first launched. And obviously it was an app that opened on your iPhone, but it was terribly broken for a long time. And now we are many years later and there's actually almost an affinity for Apple Maps. I see on social media, even on TikTok, how people will compare Apple Maps and Google Maps and they prefer the design of Apple Maps and they say it works well.

And so we've come a long way from when it first launched and it was broken. Now that Apple Maps launch, there was a casualty, you could say, maybe it was Scott Forstall among other reasons. And now we have Apple Intelligence with John Gianandrea and the team movements. But I'm curious, do you think this Apple Intelligence is maybe closer to the Apple Maps where it's now a rough launch?

But years from now, it's going to improve and then we'll just forget about it and people will just appreciate it? Or is something else going to happen? That's a good question. I think one of the differences is, and one of the things that made the Apple Maps debut so contentious...

is it was an immediate regression for users, right? And just to quickly summarize, the original Maps app on the iPhone was powered by Google Maps, and it was a partnership. It wasn't an app made by Google. It was an Apple app using Google APIs, and they had a partnership for the details, but it didn't include turn-by-turn directions. That was, you know, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it wasn't really a feature on phones. You had to have like... Wasn't it just assisted GPS too? Like it didn't have... Yeah, for a while.

right. It didn't have GPS and it was like triangulating between cell phone towers and stuff, but the actual maps themselves were not vector maps and meaning they're not scalable graphics. They were bitmap graphics. So when you were zoomed out and you could see the whole state of California, uh,

you had a certain map tile. And then you'd zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, and it would have to download new map tiles to get bitmaps. So they wanted vector maps instead of bitmap maps, and they wanted turn-by-turn directions. But they didn't have a deal from Google for that. And Google was holding out over them with...

well, we want users to be able to sign into their Google account. We want to track their location. And Apple was like, we don't, you know, Apple was between a rock and a hard place. Google wanted terms that Apple didn't want to give them for privacy and location data, but Apple needed the

better maps and the turn by turn directions. And I think Google, it was like a poker game and Google thought they're going to fold because they need turn by turn directions in these maps. And Apple was, and, and Google, I'm sure knew that they were working on their own internal maps product, but that it was way behind. And they're like, they're not going to ship that. Well, guess what? Apple went with, we're, we'll just ship it, you know, and, and grind, you know, grind out for a decade to come to improve it.

The difference with Siri is Siri has never really worked well, right? I mean, so, like, it has regressed in weird ways. I think it used to be able to answer questions like, how many days has it been since January 1st? It literally has. I used to ask that iOS 17, and it would give me an answer, no chat GPT integration. I don't know what happened.

last weekend, I, you know, I'm like a, not a big horse racing fan, but I'll watch the Kentucky Derby. And it was, what was it, Saturday or Sunday? And I was like, I knew, you know, it was like 11 in the morning. I knew it was on later. And I just, I'm not a big enough fan. I was like, is it on at like four or is it like six? When is it? So I asked Siri, what time is the Kentucky Derby? And Siri's answer was it's today, the Kentucky Derby, the 151st Kentucky Derby is today, May 3rd.

And then, you know, and I did the thing where you can continue the conversation. And I said, yeah, but what time does the race start? And Siri answered, the 151st Kentucky Derby is today, Saturday, May 3rd. And then I asked ChatGPT. And ChatGPT actually didn't give me the time first. And then I said...

it gave me the day and said, it's run in the afternoon. And I said, well, what time? And it said, it usually starts about six 45. And I, and then I figured it out that there really isn't like a set time. Cause it, you know, some, some years at six 40, some years at six 50, cause it depends how many of the other races before the Derby take place. But I got, you know, my second crack at the question to chat GPT answered it. So,

So I think Siri used to be able to answer questions like that better. I really do. But nobody's ever think nobody is thinking, boy, Siri used to be good and now it stinks, right? They're not, they're not, they haven't done anything that's really messed up what used to work well. Some minor regressions and they're these new ambitious features don't really work, but they're not taking it away. But the danger Apple faces on this is,

is people are getting really hooked on using chat GPT or perplexity or cloud or these other systems for these things. And even if they catch up, why would they go back to Siri if it's just to catch up? Siri would have to get somebody to switch

you really do have to offer more or less like a 10 times better product. Like, you know, if you make a word processor and, you know, and you want people to switch to your word processor, your upstart word processor has to be 10 times better in at least certain ways, right? And, you know, what are the odds that Siri could catch up? Well, that should be possible. But what are the odds that Siri is going to pull ahead and get people to go back?

I don't know. I mean, what does Apple, what advantage does Apple have? Well, they do have their own dedicated button on the phone, right? I mean, that is not nothing. You can make the action button chat GPT now. Right. I wonder if inside Apple, they're like, oh man, why did we give developers the button? But talking about the advantage...

The semantic index would have been the advantage. Right. You know, that's the one thing. Well, it's still coming supposedly. Right. So that's what I'm curious your thoughts and Jason, I'll ask you first.

Coming at WWDC, do we think they're just going to rehash some announcements? I mean, they never really address something that didn't happen. You know, we never heard about air power after the fact. And I think the touch bar, I don't even know if they ever mentioned that it went away. They just said we have a new keyboard. And so, Jason, do you think they're going to address anything about Apple intelligence today?

like from this previous year or are they just going to announce new features that may or may not come this year what do you think and then you i think it's a guarantee that they're going to have to talk about it in some way because i mean i've been on mac briefings and they spend 20 minutes talking about apple intelligence because we all know what the new mac like it's it's an it's a macbook air with an m4 instead of an m3 you know the details but let's talk about writing tools it's like right hang on but i so i think they have to talk about it i think what's interesting about it is that and i'm

I'm going to answer your question, but I'm also just curious what you both think about this because the whole Apple Maps discussion is really interesting because at the time, it was obvious that you should have turn-by-turn directions on a device you could carry with you anywhere because the alternatives were like you buy a TomTom or whatever those things. And they couldn't get it from Google Maps, so they had to build it. But Google Maps didn't even...

They released turn-by-turn directions on Android like three years before they did it on the iPhone. And so Apple could go ahead and do it because they had nothing to lose. And there was no other smartphones really competing with them. That's not the landscape that they're in today. They put chat GPT on the phone. They did it. And also, you can just get the app. So they're in a very different situation. And it feels... I'm looking for my palm pre just to talk about competition. But I feel like...

With Siri, like my kids, we have some Alexa devices, we have some Google devices, and we have HomePods in our house. And John, the running joke that Steven and I have is anytime somebody gets HomePods or whatever or sets up a Mac, I tell them, you should turn off the listen for Siri wake word on everything except for your watch. Like that's the only thing you should ever talk to Siri for because the only thing it's useful for is setting alarms and reminders. Like that's the only thing you should use Siri for. Anything else, you should buy a different device.

And I almost wonder if Apple should have been like, you know what, Apple intelligence, we're going to do what every other company is doing. Like I just had a briefing with Netflix this week because they're integrating generative AI into the search features on the iPhone app. And they're just sending the stuff to ChatGPT. Like it's open AI. Like they have a part...

They're not trying, they're not stupid. They're not like, we're going to try to build this from the ground up zero. Like I think that there are benefits that Apple will be able to provide that no other provider can do. Right. Like all of the semantic index stuff, all of the contextual aware stuff, they don't want to give that to anyone else. But in the meantime, wouldn't it have been better to just be like, we're going to make the experience of talking to your phone better by just hooking into those APIs and just letting chat GPT answer them or like,

Because they're in a very different situation. They're trying to do the maps thing, but they're in a very different situation. Here's your competition, by the way. This is the Palm 3-2. Oh, yeah.

There it is. You really did have it handy. I did, I did. It was right here. John, the number of defunct devices that Steven has on his desk at any time, they ask him about his Humane AI pin, his Rabid R1. I bought that little dock where you can supposedly hack it to work again, but I haven't gotten the dock to work. But I got the Rabid R1 too. But anyway, yeah, go ahead, John. What are we going to see at DubDub? I like Jason's answer a lot. And I think this is where Jaws and Team...

earn their pay is how do they craft a narrative that at superficially feels like they've given sufficient time to Apple intelligence and what's new in Apple intelligence without ever really talking about the features that they had to postpone, uh, in March that aren't coming until next year again. Um,

And I think they can do it. I would anticipate. I mean, and this is one of those things. And we'll see. I mean, people often bring this up that, you know, Apple's, hey, we only do major changes once a year. It's sort of out of sync with the rest of the way the iterative software market works, where features just roll out. Especially LLMs. That's Apple's. Every other day, somebody has a new LLM. Yeah.

Well, and I think with the underlying LLM, that can just improve at any time. But like, for example, I don't think, I think writing tools for the last year were a fine 1.0 implementation of writing tools, but I don't really think they crack the nut. I don't think they're great. I don't use them much. And I really only use them to force myself to use them like, hey, I should try this more so that, you know, maybe I want to write an article about

why I don't like writing tools. So I would anticipate that they will vastly improve the interface to writing tools that is available to all third party apps, right? This is Apple at its best, where it's not just you have to use Apple Mail or Apple Notes or Pages to get writing tools because these are Apple apps.

all third party apps have access to these APIs. You know, and there was a story a couple of weeks ago where somebody noticed that meta's apps are deliberately not using them, right? It's a choice they made that they're not using them. Um, so I would anticipate they'll have a lot of features like that to show off, um,

I would love it. Jason, I'm sure that you're sick of this, like in the briefings, like, Hey, here's a new M4. I was maybe not in your briefing, but I got the same, you know, Pat demo, but showing me for the seventh time for the seventh Apple hardware product, uh,

image playground and acting it in, in a little demo, like, Oh, I'm going to send out an invitation to you know, my, my niece is having a birthday party and let's make an image and image playground. And then I'll drag it over here into mail and, and et cetera. And it's like, nobody does that. Nobody who uses AI to generate images is using image playground. My profile picture, honestly, I mean, that was spot on.

Or if they are, it's only because they're mistaken about what the best available tools are. But maybe they've got something up their sleeves, some kind of new app that they can show that actually will work and is ready to be demoed. I think they're going to just conveniently omit those features.

more personalized Siri features that are based on the semantic index. The other thing I hope before I don't want to leave the sunset is I really hope they look at the semantic index as a

a third party opportunity, you know, that yes, Apple's tools will be built into it, but that they will build this in a way that your privacy is protected and you will, you know, it's same way with your location, right? It's not like only, and that, that is literally one of the most private things that your iPhone offers is exactly where you are in the world at any time. And Apple, I think has done a very good job of, of,

offering controls where you must grant an app explicit permission to have your privacy, your location. You can grant it for one day and you can go into settings, privacy, location and ungrant it at any time. I think they should do the semantic index like that and let you decide which apps you would like to give access. So if you want the perplexity app to have access to the semantic index on your phone, they should...

That's where Apple is at their best, is making APIs that make that possible so that the app is...

is like yeah we can build something awesome with this but that the user has complete control over which apps have that access and they can revoke it at any time i really hope that they're not looking at it as something that oh we'll keep this to ourselves and only our ai will have access to it well that was what was amazing about the perplexity app update because they're using the hooks that are already there and so like if you go to the privacy and security settings on your phone you

You can go to Apple Music and the Perplexity app is right there and it's going to use that plus all these other things.

you know, apps can already access your calendars, your contacts, your location, like you were saying, HomeKit, you can give it access to that. So Perplexity could, you know, but in theory, control your HomeKit home right now, if you give it access to your home data in the privacy settings. I think the one issue is messages, because that's going to be the most used app on most people's phones. That's going to be the biggest source of information that's timely. You know, even the demo they did at DubDub last year of like, oh, can I make it to

the airport to pick this person up and then also to the school play. The only way that the semantic index knows that is because you have text messages between you and these other people. And that's the one place I don't think Apple would give messages access to a third party. That's also something I would probably not be inclined to do to enable that toggle. But I think without that, a third party can't be as deeply integrated and provide as good of an assistance as Apple

Siri will be able to do if it can do it one day. Well, I say let you decide though, right? And lots of people might decide, I don't want to give any of these AI things my messages, but I think if you want to, you should be allowed to, and then you should be able to revoke it. Right, exactly. Which I love like the limited contacts feature. I think that was iOS 17 where you can now say, don't access all my contacts, just access these few dozen and same with photos. And I do that with most apps now. Don't access my full photo library. I'll pick and choose which photos you can access and

because I'm just uploading a profile picture or whatever. All right. I want to get to a little bit of personal tech. John, I'm going to ask you kind of your general thoughts about AI in the future, because I have a specific story that just came out and it's personal to me because I knew the person and then we're going to, it's a little morbid. And so Jason's then going to take us up with our F1 Lego story in a second, because he was here in Miami last weekend.

But this story just came out. It's actually in the Apple News Today podcast this morning, if you listen to that. But this is someone I actually knew personally growing up. And he was in a road rage incident about four years ago, was unfortunately murdered at that. And the court case was this past week. And in the court case, his family, his name was Christopher. He was the one, he's deceased now.

The family actually created an AI video of him, his person, and his voice, and it was an impact statement. This is actually the video that they played in court, and this impact video was a message to both the court and to the defendant, and the state was seeking nine and a half years for manslaughter in

And the judge in his rule in their ruling said they actually gave 10 and a half years. So raise the sentence and directly quoted that this video was a part of, of their decision-making. And so Apple news said it. And in this article that this might be the first time, definitely in Arizona judicial history and possibly nationwide where AI content, namely an AI video about a deceased person is used in court to

and then actually might have swayed the outcome. And this also reminds me, if listeners and viewers remember, Joanna Stern did an amazing video. This was four years ago, but her video in the Wall Street Journal about how tech and AI can bring loved ones back to life. And she talked about stories of training voice so you can basically chat with the deceased loved ones using like your Amazon Echo.

and things like that. And I just thought about that and knowing all the implications of AI, you know, meta saying you're going to look at AI content in Facebook because that's what people want and just the speed at which these things are developing. I was just curious, John, your just overall thoughts about AI, you know, the speed at which it's going, what it means for the future and like overall, over under, like optimistic, pessimistic,

I was just curious. Wow, that's... It's a big question. I know. I'm very surprised that that was permitted in court. Same. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's grounds, you know, good grounds for an appeal. But it's always weird when major technological shifts happen, right? Like, you know, at some point...

You know, 100 years ago, there had never been video played in a courtroom. You know, it was just testimony, you know, like, did you see it? And what did you see? What do you recall seeing? And then at some point, there's cameras, you know, and there's like, hey, we've just got a video camera that's pointing out at the street, and it has footage of what happened, you

Can we play it to the jury? And up until that point, all any jury and any traffic incident, you know, had ever done is hear human testimony from a person in the room on the stand sworn in saying what they saw. And now you can see video. And at this point, you know, we're you know, we're like, well, of course, you should let them see the video because the video is actually better proof than human memory. Right.

I feel like the problem with this is it's sort of going back the other way, right? Like this isn't like the actual guy's statement from the great beyond it. It is imagined. And to be clear, the, his sister wrote the statement and then they had the AI generated in his voice and,

which again, clearly not his statement. Right. But I can see how it's, you know, emotionally resonant, you know, I mean, it obviously affected the judge who you expect to be a little cold. Um, I, I don't know. I, I, I guess, I guess the best thing I can say in that, that story exemplifies it is I expect to be surprised all the time, endlessly for years to come with the use cases that come out of this, you know, that, uh, you know,

The only thing I'm predicting is that it is unpredictable what people will use to do this, right? It's, you know... Have you experienced, and we talked about this last week, I was actually deepfaked in a TikTok where someone must have trained some AI on my videos, and there's a TikTok of me talking. It was not me. I did not record it. And it is clearly a deepfake, but it has like hundreds of thousands of views, and it's

Some people might be fooled into that. I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but for me, it felt pretty violating. And also like, shoot, someone can make me look like I'm saying something now while I'm live. And that's unfortunate. Voice is, again, you can...

deepfake that very much. You know, I actually have an 11 Labs AI voice trained for me if I ever wanted to use it. And it's pretty compelling. I play it for family and friends and they, some of them can't tell the difference. What, how would you feel? Like, I mean, you have hours of your voice recorded. It could easily be trained on an AI. Like how did, what would you feel if you heard a podcast that was supposedly John Gruber, but is AI? Yeah.

I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. Right. Or, you know, like, Hey, look at this surprising thing Gruber said on his, you know, in the middle of his last two hour podcast. And here's me saying something totally that I didn't say.

violated, I guess, you know, and at some point, you know, it's good. I feel good that I have my own website that people know is mine where I couldn't issue, you know, I can say, Hey, if something like that happened, that's not me, that's fake. And I have a reputation and built up credibility that I can say that wasn't me. I didn't say that, or that video is not real and, and stand behind that. But that's,

that's just circumstance of me having done this for 20 some years already. Right. I worry about like my son's generation, like people who young people who are just coming up and they're building their reputation. And what happens if something like, you know, somebody gets deep faked and they don't have any credibility or renown at the time to say, you know, and it's just like that line about the,

the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots tied. You know, it's already gone viral. Um,

uh what you know what happens if like the the hawk to a girl it didn't actually say that on video and it was just a deep fake of her who nobody knew and you know and all of a sudden she's like raising her hand like uh that's me in the video but i did i didn't say that uh it's going to happen i'm a little surprised i don't know about you guys i'm surprised that ai hasn't

attacked us with spam yet. I don't seem to get more spam email than I used to. It doesn't seem to be more. I mean, I definitely get some. It seems like a lot of my PR mail reeks to me of AI writing.

I feel like whenever I open Facebook, my eyeballs are attacked by AI-generated images, but I think that's about it. But, you know, and I'm not getting iMessage spam or much, you know, and it seems like a lot of the stuff I do get, like, on WhatsApp doesn't seem like it's coming from AI. It seems like it's, like, humans trying to catfish me. But there's not a lot. But I'm surprised we're not getting more of it. And...

you know, I think Facebook itself is the first platform where the actual imagery that people are seeing is just, they're just inundated with it. Right. Um, what happens when more and more of that happens? You know, I, I don't really want to see it. I don't really like looking at pictures. I like reading social media for the most part. Um,

So I don't know what happens when the abundance of AI content generation and you can make it so fast and that you can try to customize everybody's thing because you

It's so much faster. I, it was just a handful of years ago in the early days of this, where somebody made a video of Steve jobs, his voice saying something. And it was like at the cutting edge and it didn't quite sound right. I was like, ah, that's not really right. And, uh,

And I challenged Joe Rogan, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And I challenged the guy to make him, uh, if this is real, and I wasn't sure how real it was. And I was like, well, make a clip of Steve jobs calling me or something like that. And he was like here. And it was like on Twitter. And he was like, here you go. And it was Steve jobs saying, yeah, John Gruber, the guy who writes daring fireball. Is it Jeff? And I was like, Ooh, that's, and I was like, Oh, I'm wrong about what's technically possible because that sure sounds like it. Uh,

I think we're going to, you know, we're just going to have to really, we're going to go through, I guess what it comes down to is we as a society and as individuals are going to have to really reevaluate how we feel about seeing video and hearing audio of people, right? Because it's really been...

Just go back. But like with the eight years ago or however long ago, the Access Hollywood tape of Trump, you know, talking about grabbing women and you can do what you want with them. We just believed that that was real. I mean, then, you know, you had to decide, do I still want to vote for the guy or not? But when videos like that become as easy to produce as just tapping the red button on the

on the camera app on your phone and it's just as easy to make a fake one as it is to shoot a real one, we're going to have to really reevaluate whether the things that people say, here's a real clip of a famous person doing something awful or embarrassing or whatever,

We're just going to have to instantly be defensive and think that's not real. Whereas right now our default is, oh, that's real. That's, you know, that's, this is a scandal. Pictures or it didn't happen was the saying. Jason, I want to hear your thoughts on it and then for you to take us out into the F1 story after this. But I do want to, I just want to show my deep fake real quick. This was, um, okay. This was my deep fake on Tik TOK.

And unfortunately it was, you know, it's me. And you've misspelled part burn. This is early days in Steven's career. He's gotten better. I didn't use writing tools to proofread that. But, you know, it's, if you look closely enough, it's, it's weird. Like you can see around my mouth, like this looks weird. That doesn't look right.

But for someone on their phone scrolling TikTok quickly, it might look like something. And it's my studio. It's everything. And so I did a takedown request. I told TikTok, hey, this is a deepfake. They haven't taken it down yet, but...

yeah it feels so instead he just shows it every week on here to just yeah it's like i've been deep faked everybody i mean on some level it's like to be deep faked it's kind of you know something i might you know i don't know if we'll win a golden globe which that was i wanted to talk about the podcasting about golden globe category it is it's sort of like the the strizant effect like you're making you're making your deep fake he's just leaning into it though he's like guys i've made it i've been deep faked i've been deep faked i'm not gonna do i'm not gonna show it anymore jason i won't

No, I only, I have one closing question for John because your friend Ben was, did that interview with Mark Zuckerberg and, and he made this comment about, and you know, everyone has like three friends and in the future everyone wants more friends. So most of their friends will be AI and that has been, it's gone kind of viral. I think he, I think Zuckerberg actually repeated it on another podcast or something like that in the wall street journal wrote about it. And so when we think about like the future of AI, I don't think there's anybody except for Mark Zuckerberg that thinks that that's

the future we want from ai and it's it's so weird you talk about like people who can't quite be self-aware enough to realize the problems that they've caused and then the solutions that they're presenting are just going to cause new problems it's like you're the you're the social platform that destroyed friendship so you're going to fix it by me making it so we don't i'm just like that kind of thing like do you think that's going to stick or is that like the metaverse which is the thing that they talked about for a while but everyone got over real quick

I, it's a very good question. I thought it was really weird, but I do think though that Zuck believes. Yeah. Right. And the one thing I really, I really enjoyed Ben Thompson's interview with him, but I really felt like, oh, he's being himself here because he's, he can feel like he can nerd out with Ben. And when, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan or Theo, whatever his name is, the cut rate. Yeah. The cut rate, Joe Rogan. He's, he's,

he's taking on a certain persona. And, you know, if you're a billionaire owner of Meta, I mean, I'm not blaming him for being media trained to do that, but it was interesting to hear him be more his natural self. But I thought that was a weird thing to say. But I think it's definitely true

that loneliness is a major problem. It always has been right. It's, it is, it's innate to being a human being that most of us do not want to be alone and we don't want to feel insufficiently surrounded by friends and loved ones. Um,

and it's banned. It's like the internet at first, when it first exploded onto the scene in the nineties, it felt like, Oh my God, this is so great. I'm making friends, not just around the country, but around the world. And all of a sudden, uh,

I'm in a group where all we do is talk about not just Indiana Jones movies, but just Raiders of the Lost Ark. And when people come in and start talking about Temple of Doom, we're like, get out of here. Go to the other group. And I can just have a little club where all we do is talk about my very favorite movie or something like that.

And it just felt like, man, this is just amazing. And it really felt like the internet was only going to make people less lonely. And here we are 30 years later, and it's like, huh, there are other side effects downwind of all of this online connectivity and how it plays out in the real world.

And that part of being a human being, I don't want to get too philosophical here, but part of being a real human being is that we are just sacks of meat with teeth and bones and a wet computer up here behind our foreheads. And we do, we need...

real life interaction. And we are, our, our brains are these machines, these pattern recognition machines that are so acutely aware of,

of who different people are, you know, and knowing, you know, like you, you recognize your parents or your spouse or your children or your best friends instantly, right? You could be in a crowded room and you don't expect to see them. But if you hear a voice that sounds like your son's voice, you're like, is my son here instantly? Right. And it, it,

We were meant to have that. And I feel like the idea that any of that can be replaced with no matter how adept the software gets, it's never going to satisfy those physiological needs we have for interaction. And, and,

encouraging people to go that route or if you're feeling lonely and you feel like you know instead of getting out of the house and doing something and going to a coffee shop or going to a club or going to the gym and seeing if you make friends there going to a basketball game to watch or something like that if you just feel like you know what I need to do is spend more time by myself staring at these screens it's really just gonna make it worse yeah like I feel like and I

You know, it's like, I don't know. It's like sending an alcoholic to work in a liquor store. You know, that's not going to help. Well, and you're right. On a soccer field with 22 high school girls, I can recognize my daughter from 70 yards away by the way she runs. Yeah. By the way she runs. Like, I don't even need to see her number or her face. I know who she is by that. And there is a piece of it that to me feels a little bit about...

It's like what happens when you're the whatever third or fourth richest person in the world and you can't go to the grocery store on your own anymore. You're not surrounded by actual connections. And like no shade to Mark Zuckerberg, real successful, was probably pretty socially awkward to begin with, right? Like didn't have like that kind of close connections, didn't understand how to do that. And now he lives in a bubble and it's like, well, this will be great for everyone. And I'm like, no, I just want to go watch my kid play soccer on the soccer field. Right. And I do think there are certain personality types that –

online socialization is actually more natural to them and more comfortable to them. And in previous decades, before the internet's general availability, those people just lived their whole lives rather...

lonely or maybe they just read books or something like that, and that they are more socially fulfilled now than they would have been previously. But I think that's only for certain personality types and trying to build a mass market, because that's the thing about meta that makes it scary, is that meta's idea of a user base is every single person on the planet. Right. All right, well, Jason, take us up.

You were around a lot of real people last weekend. Tell us about it. Oh, yeah. Well, this is just... Steven gets to talk about being deepfaked. I just get to talk about going to the Miami Grand Prix because... I would have preferred that. You would have rather go to the Miami Grand Prix? To be deepfaked, yeah. Yeah, there were a lot of people there. I think there's like 275,000 people. But the only reason I went is because Lego built these F1 cars and then took them for a lap around the track. You know, they always do... John, are you an F1 fan at all? I know. I like...

No, but I feel like I could be. And I feel like I'm on the cusp. I've watched some of the Netflix show and I'm like, oh, I get why people are into this. This seems really good. And this does seem like the best form of auto racing. Yeah, and I will tell you, I had not paid any attention to Formula One before this. The reason I went is because...

weirdly enough, I've covered a lot of Lego stuff. And so they were inviting some people to cover the story. And I'm like, yeah, I'll go. I'm going to go cover 10 full-size F1 cars driving around the track and stuff. And I will tell you, having gone in person, I'd go back to any F1 race in a heartbeat because it is. It's just such a... It's like the... Well, especially the Grand Prix of Miami. Miami Grand Prix is like the Super Bowl. And because it's Miami, everybody's there, that kind of thing. But this was just fun to see

It's such an interesting brand partnership because to me, the intersection of

lego fans and f1 fans did not seem like they would overlap but it turns out that they really do a lot of it is like you just mentioned drive to survive has like really i think they're on like season eight now or something like that and i told i told steven after the practice day and qualifying on saturday i was like i gotta go back to my room and watch cars or something like no no no you need to go watch the net like drive to survive i'm like oh yeah so i start binge watching some of that and i'm like

I understand what's happening now, but it was the, it was definitely the wildest thing I've ever covered was these 10 full size F1 Lego cars at the Miami grand prix. So was Tim cook at the race? I mean, I don't know. He doesn't usually clear his schedule with me, but if he was, he was, he was, here's the crazy thing. Cause you sent that picture and,

But he did send a tweet that made me think he probably wasn't there. But if he was, that meant he was probably in Cupertino on Friday. We know he was in Omaha because he was at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Warren Buffett made him stand up because he said, I'd like to introduce you to Tim Cook, who has made more money for Berkshire than I ever will. Like just because of his apple steak. And then that means he would have flown to Miami for Sunday. So that's the life of being the CEO of the most valuable company.

company on earth. So you can do that. Well, we're about to do a bonus lightning round and we're going to ask John Gruber about his battery percentage on iPhone, how he orients his Apple pencil on iPad and

and about his MacDoc positioning. If you want to hear that, we'd love if you could support the show. You can support us directly on Apple Podcasts and give Apple a cut of what you are supporting us, or you can support us directly in Memberful. You can go to join.primarytech.fm, and we'd love to have you there. Thanks to everyone who supports the show right now. And if you could leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, we'll give you a shout-out on the show. John Gruber, thanks so much for being here and recording with us. Oh, thanks for having me. And yeah, do it through Apple Podcasts. Help Apple out.

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