What happened to Apple!? Here's why iOS 18.2 is BROKEN!

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 software is what happened you're on iOS 18 it doesn't I after three years I upgraded to the newest phone I upgraded to the newest OS the phone doesn't work meaning like to call people I can't call my wife anymore I can't call my kids anymore the phone bricks constantly my photos app doesn't work it is just really bad and I think for a company of this scale I don't understand how it does not go through a more complicated 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

complicated and but it's really bad you're not the only person people are freaking out about the infras changes on photos crashing is a major thing and apple intelligence just doesn't work so it does seem Keith that Apple has gotten 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 disruptive Force at the interface level I.E your phone or desktop what what are your thoughts on uh this new story about them doing more chips they've obviously had great success with the processors and phones and now the M4 incredible if you haven't tried the Mac Mini best computer for the dollar in the world right now but what are your thoughts on

Apple so the most important thing about Apple is to remember it's vertically integrated and vertically integrated companies when you construct them properly have a competitive advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a 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 perfect for your desired interface your desired use cases your desired UI and nobody's G to be able to compete with you and if you have the resources that you know because you need balance sheet resources to go the chip Direction um it just gives you another five to 10 year sort of competitive advantage and so I love vertically integrated companies uh

you know I posted a pin tweet I think it's still my pin tweet about vertically integrate is the solution to the best possible companies uh but it's very difficult you need different teams with different skill sets and you need probably more money truthly more Capital but Apple's just going to keep going down the vertical integration software Hardware you know all day long and there's nobody else who does hardware and software together in the planet which is kind of shocking in some ways is there a worldclass company a company that's world class that's both software and Hardware other than yeah maybe Invidia well may not really could they do a world class UI you know maybe maybe

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 the software's good if you Define software as it touches a consumer Tesla Apple in some ways Google maybe meta with the meta glasses trying trying attempting you can't see Nvidia because I think Nvidia touches the consumer through an app that then sits on top of Cuda which I think is that's a brilliant strategy for them 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 they you know been actually leveraging for about 15 years now and even back then Steve there's some old great Steve

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 came back to Apple he said we're doing vertical integration basically using those words of software and hardware and 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 in the company of giants I believe and he's perfect on point he just followed that strategy for you know the next 25 years now you're seeing some of the manifestations though of a competitive strategy that gives you incredible advantages is you get very sloppy in other places especially over time because you have such great competitive

modes that you don't have to compete at The Cutting Edge of this like the photos app is completely unusable I'm the biggest apple Fanboy in the world like I I I remember interviewing once with a 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 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 like blown away and but now like my photos app is completely unusable so I totally understand you know off the frustration and they they're showing like the Decay function you know culturally and otherwise that eventually

somebody will figure out an angle to rip them out yeah I'll tell you we talked about dictators at the beginning of this shth and obviously this is your real house as a dictator yourself is you know there has to be a constant fear that 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 exist inside of Apple it's not like the mobile me you ever hear the mobile me story where he brought the mobile me team in he said how is mobile me supposed to work they said well it's supposed to back up everything you buy your new phone you get everything you never have to worry about losing a f slammed his

hand down and said well why the F doesn't work that way fired the person brought the next person and and said now 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 obviously Steve Jobs not there to terrorize people well I don't think you look you don't need to necessarily terrorize people but I do think you have to go through uat so I think it's pretty reasonable when you have a large footprint of consumers using an app to go through user acceptance testing is like first base and typically what happens is you can do a process of a few months where several hundred thousand

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 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 phone doesn't work so there are just core structural issues with this operating system now that makes the Iphone maybe 10 10 to 30% less usable and that's really frustrating the command center you know when you pull up your little Command Center to change the brightness and the your airpods it's 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

inference to figure out that when you constantly run your phone at a certain level of brightness you should just allow the phone to be at a certain level of brightness stop changing the damn brightness why does it re like I mean this is not this is not complicated software engineering guys no but this is my point there's no Arbiter of taste 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 great if you have it but there's only so many people on the planet that are going 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

right data is something that's approachable and leverageable because Apple has like this the an I using data to measure success with a user experience to measure whatever success if you subtract taste even by a bit you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use and so you 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 the rails so Keith do you think that you think that what happened is like when Steve Jobs isn't there and Johnny IV isn't there there's still a bunch of folks that probably think they have taste but the real taste folks left and

there's really no scaffolding left to the scaffolding you had at Facebook meta obviously or that Google uses would catch some of the stuff without a doubt like no doubt about it you know that users are less thrilled and they use things less and you'd fix it and maybe even you take that too t extreme you never develop taste like I could argue that about Google or meta they don't really have taste but like yeah you could AR You could argue the paradigms 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 going to catch this Stu and I think there's only like how many people in the world really have Cutting Edge

technology user experience taste I don't know too many I would fun them right awayes might have it it's an incredible 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 in the day but actually we had so much scaffolding around data probably because intuitively we knew that that was way more reliable for us it's more predictable scale it's certainly more right like take Steve out you don't need a dictator but you do need a taste and taste is Artistic the same thing Venture like you know like scaling Venture funds is really really challenging because early stage investing is more like taste than data driven and later stage you can

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 teams they just happened at Stanford when Jim Harbaugh left it took years for the Decay function for like the next coaching regime to show they were completely incompetent like the next year they're pretty good next year they lost one more game they should have next year they lost two more games they should up blah blah and then eventually they became like horrible and you know there's a Decay function with an organization when you take out the person who is the original thinker or the leader or the dictator whatever and so I think some of

this is showing up now and then you know playing on a field that's not favorable to them which is there are advantages Apple has in AI but there's some significant organization structural disadvantages and that's the field that people are going to be competing on for the next five years from a consumer perspective and they're playing on a field where they don't have all the advantages in their favor yeah