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my iPhone does not work I'm sorry I'm just going to say it okay I don't know what happened in you upgraded your
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software is what happened you're on iOS 18 it doesn't I after three years I upgraded to the newest phone I upgraded
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to the newest OS the phone doesn't work meaning like to call people I can't call
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my wife anymore I can't call my kids anymore the phone bricks constantly my photos app doesn't work it is just
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really bad and I think for a company of this scale I don't understand how it does not go through a more complicated
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test harness that catches all of this I'm not trying to complain but because I know it's hard for them and I know it's
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complicated and but it's really bad you're not the only person people are freaking out about the infras changes on
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photos crashing is a major thing and apple intelligence just doesn't work so it does seem Keith that Apple has gotten
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off their game of making Polish stuff to race to try and I guess catch up to their perception of you know AI being a
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disruptive Force at the interface level I.E your phone or desktop what what are your thoughts on uh this new story about
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them doing more chips they've obviously had great success with the processors and phones and now the M4 incredible if
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you haven't tried the Mac Mini best computer for the dollar in the world right now but what are your thoughts on
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Apple so the most important thing about Apple is to remember it's vertically integrated and vertically integrated
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companies when you construct them properly have a competitive advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a
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decade 20 30 40 50 years and so chips classic illustration go all the way down to the metal in build a chip that's
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perfect for your desired interface your desired use cases your desired UI and nobody's G to be able to compete with
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you and if you have the resources that you know because you need balance sheet resources to go the chip Direction um it
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just gives you another five to 10 year sort of competitive advantage and so I love vertically integrated companies uh
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you know I posted a pin tweet I think it's still my pin tweet about vertically integrate is the solution to the best
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possible companies uh but it's very difficult you need different teams with different skill sets and you need
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probably more money truthly more Capital but Apple's just going to keep going down the vertical integration software
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Hardware you know all day long and there's nobody else who does hardware and software together in the planet
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which is kind of shocking in some ways is there a worldclass company a company that's world class that's both software
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and Hardware other than yeah maybe Invidia well may not really could they do a world class UI you know maybe maybe
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there's a foundation you have to have a different Vision maybe a different team not clear Tesla's close I guess I'd say
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the software's good if you Define software as it touches a consumer Tesla Apple in some ways
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Google maybe meta with the meta glasses trying trying attempting you can't see Nvidia because I think Nvidia
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touches the consumer through an app that then sits on top of Cuda which I think is that's a brilliant strategy for them
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but it's be apple then Tesla and then a long tail of people right any point app has a lot of competitive advantages that
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they you know been actually leveraging for about 15 years now and even back then Steve there's some old great Steve
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videos I I'll see if I can find you a clip where he talks about this very intentionally from the 1990s you know he
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came back to Apple he said we're doing vertical integration basically using those words of software and hardware and
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there going to be nobody else that can compete with us I think it's in an interview he did in it's published in uh
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in the company of giants I believe and he's perfect on point he just followed that strategy for you know the next 25
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years now you're seeing some of the manifestations though of a competitive strategy that gives you incredible
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advantages is you get very sloppy in other places especially over time because you have such great competitive
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modes that you don't have to compete at The Cutting Edge of this like the photos
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app is completely unusable I'm the biggest apple Fanboy in the world like I I I remember interviewing once with a
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job for Tim Cook and I walked in and I said he's like why you know why are you interested and I said well you know I
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own every skew of every product you've ever produced except I don't have every color of each you know iPod and he was
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like blown away and but now like my photos app is completely unusable so I totally understand you know off the
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frustration and they they're showing like the Decay function you know culturally and otherwise that eventually
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somebody will figure out an angle to rip them out yeah I'll tell you we talked about dictators at the beginning of this
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shth and obviously this is your real house as a dictator yourself is you know there has to be a constant fear that
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some a-hole is going to come to your office and be like what did you do to the photos app and that fear does not
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exist inside of Apple it's not like the mobile me you ever hear the mobile me story
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where he brought the mobile me team in he said how is mobile me supposed to work they said well it's supposed to
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back up everything you buy your new phone you get everything you never have to worry about losing a f slammed his
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hand down and said well why the F doesn't work that way fired the person brought the next person and and said now
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make it the way he said it's supposed to be game over I don't think Tim Cook's doing that Johnny IV's not there and
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obviously Steve Jobs not there to terrorize people well I don't think you look you don't need to necessarily
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terrorize people but I do think you have to go through uat so I think it's pretty
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reasonable when you have a large footprint of consumers using an app to go through user acceptance testing is
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like first base and typically what happens is you can do a process of a few months where several hundred thousand
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people get it all over the world and as long as you do an okay job of getting a decent distribution of people this would
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have come out but I want to just talk about what Keith said as well it's literally not just photos it's like the
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phone doesn't work so there are just core structural issues with this operating system now
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that makes the Iphone maybe 10 10 to 30% less usable and that's really frustrating the command
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center you know when you pull up your little Command Center to change the brightness and the your airpods it's
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just like what are they doing here I mean by the way so do you need a chip do you need a machine learning chip to do
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inference to figure out that when you constantly run your phone at a certain level of brightness you should just
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allow the phone to be at a certain level of brightness stop changing the damn brightness why does it re like I mean
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this is not this is not complicated software engineering guys no but this is my point there's no Arbiter of taste
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anymore who is the back stop who say no yeah J let me let me pause double click on that for a second so I think taste is
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great if you have it but there's only so many people on the planet that are going
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to have you know Cutting Edge taste and be right if you don't have taste what most tech companies do is they use data
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right data is something that's approachable and leverageable because Apple has like this the an I using data
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to measure success with a user experience to measure whatever success if you subtract taste even by a
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bit you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use and so you
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see the worst of Both Worlds that's a great take that's a great good take Ian just go off the rails right you go off
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the rails so Keith do you think that you think that what happened is like when Steve Jobs isn't there and Johnny IV
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isn't there there's still a bunch of folks that probably think they have taste but the real taste folks left and
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there's really no scaffolding left to the scaffolding you had at Facebook meta obviously or that Google uses would
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catch some of the stuff without a doubt like no doubt about it you know that users are less thrilled and they use
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things less and you'd fix it and maybe even you take that too t extreme you never develop taste like I could argue
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that about Google or meta they don't really have taste but like yeah you could AR You could argue the paradigms
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but fundamentally if you don't have that back stop if the taste sub tracks even 10% not all the way down you're just not
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going to catch this Stu and I think there's only like how many people in the world really have Cutting Edge
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technology user experience taste I don't know too many I would fun them right awayes might have it it's an incredible
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point because I if I'm being really insecure I would want to say oh yeah no we had a lot of taste at Facebook back
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in the day but actually we had so much scaffolding around data probably because intuitively we knew that that was way
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more reliable for us it's more predictable scale it's certainly more right like take Steve out you don't need
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a dictator but you do need a taste and taste is Artistic the same thing Venture like you know like scaling Venture funds
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is really really challenging because early stage investing is more like taste than data driven and later stage you can
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use data and scale it and Scaffolding so I think there's just Fields it's a little bit also you see like the sports
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teams they just happened at Stanford when Jim Harbaugh left it took years for the Decay
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function for like the next coaching regime to show they were completely incompetent like the next year they're
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pretty good next year they lost one more game they should have next year they lost two more games they should up blah
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blah and then eventually they became like horrible and you know there's a Decay function with an organization when
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you take out the person who is the original thinker or the leader or the dictator whatever and so I think some of
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this is showing up now and then you know playing on a field that's not favorable
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to them which is there are advantages Apple has in AI but there's some significant organization
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structural disadvantages and that's the field that people are going to be competing on for the next five years
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from a consumer perspective and they're playing on a field where they don't have
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all the advantages in their favor yeah