Episode 997: The end of the Tim Cook era

Tim Cook stepping down

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1:00Welcome to the Macworld Podcast. My name is Michael Simon, and I am joined by senior editor Jason Cross. Good morning. And our producer, who, you know, I realize you're also senior editor, Roman. Yes. I always, I call you producer, but you're only producer in this little window. His day job is senior editor at Macworld. Everyone's a senior editor. We just hand out titles. We're all senior editors. It's not a crack about our age. I was about to say, yeah.

1:31So, that's senior literally and figuratively, kind of, I guess. Well, speak for yourself, Roman. Not quite there yet. It's gray hair. So, anyway. This is episode number 997, which also speaks to our seniority. And today, we're going to talk about Tim Cook. Tim Cook is leaving Apple in a week. Is that right? September 1st. So, his last day is August 31st. Yeah. Yeah. One week.

2:01September 1st, they have a new sheriff in town. New CEO. Yeah, I wonder if they'll, all right, well, let's hold on. We'll get into that during the discussion. Because we have a lot to talk about. We got Apple history, and we'll close with our common corner. Let's just get right into it.

New M6 Mac Mini

2:16Because a couple of hours ago, we got like a bit of a surprise announcement. Yeah. Mark Gurman announced, or reported last night, that Apple was preparing a new Mac Mini with an M6 processor. And then in like 12 hours later, just this morning, it arrived. So, we had thought we got the last products of the Tim Cook era. Back in March, we got the Neo and the MacBook Air. The AirTag 2 came a couple of weeks later.

2:46We just assumed that was it. Yeah. But right under the wire. In a way, it is. These aren't shipping until the end of September. Well. That's a good point. That's a good point. They were announced. Yeah. So, Jason brings up a good point. And that's shipping until the 22nd of September, which is a rare thing for Apple. Yeah. Usually, the announcement is just a week or two before they ship the most. Yeah. This is almost a month. Before we get into that, let's just talk about what it is. So, it's an M6 Mac Mini,

3:16which is the first product with an M6 processor that we've heard rumors about for a little while. Timing is a little early for the M6, but pretty close. It's usually in the fall. And the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, which is, that's pretty delayed. The Mac Studio had an M3 Ultra, never got an M4 Ultra, and now it has an M5 Ultra. Right. All right. Jason, got any quick top of line thoughts?

3:46I mean, these are mostly, these are mostly just chip and chip updates. Yep. And there's, they're not gonna look, they don't look any different or anything like that. Right. They do have like the N1 processors and N1 networking chips in them, so they have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, but we kind of expected that. Right. Prices went up. We expected that. Well, I don't know. Not a crazy amount, but they did go up. I didn't expect the Mac Mini to go up again. Oh, I totally did.

4:16It was $599 in early June for 256 gigs, and there was an M4. Then they took that option away, and they said, all right, you can get the 512 gigabyte model for $799. Right. Right. And M4. Then they raised prices, and they brought back the 256, but raised it to the price that the 512 was. And now, the 256 costs $900.

4:48Yeah. That's a little surprising. I didn't think the price would go again. That's the world we're in, man. I know. That's the world we're in. It's bad. It's gone up 50% in like two months. Yep. RAM is eight times more expensive than it was last year at this time. SSDs are twice as expensive, like flash storage. I mean, it's, yeah. I honestly, they still came in under 1,000, which kind of surprised me. I was just like, I'm bracing myself for the worst.

5:20Okay. Anyway, so we really don't know what the performance improvement is. We know they, on the M6, they went to 12 cores instead of 10. We don't know what the core mix is in terms of big or little cores because they didn't announce. Nobody's got previews of this because they don't ship for a month. Right. We don't have real benchmarks. We just have Apple's weird, like it's four times as fast as its predecessor, but its predecessor is like a three-year-old machine, like with an M3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like the, we don't have like the real information.

5:52Up to four times faster AI performance. Okay, in what? Measure by what? Right, right. 4x faster than what? Like, it's just 4x faster. Just shut up, it's 4x faster. They leaned heavy into the AI angle. Yes. In the press release, which isn't a surprise because that's why all this is happening. Back in like, it was probably like late May, early June, like everyone started buying up Mac minis because they were cheap and they were really good at running these AI agents.

6:22So they, they, then they were sold out and then the RAM started becoming more expensive and then they got rid of options because they couldn't fulfill them. And then the delivery was pushed out by three months and now we have this. M6, 16 gigs of RAM, 256 gigabytes of storage for $899. That is the entry-level desktop Mac, which is a little depressing. Yeah. It's also true that the most recent advances in their chip have leaned heavily into speeding up AI stuff.

6:54Some of these are things that showed up in the A series like last year or the year before and they're reaching the M series now, like enhancements to the CPU cores to do better AI matrix processing. The neural accelerators, that stuff, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, what they call neural accelerators is like sort of a matrix math co-processor, like being in the CPU that's coming on to here. So it's just like, that's where the big speed ups are going to show up because they're adding more to the chips to make those things go fast.

7:25But we don't really know how much faster because we're just getting apples fuzzy. We're not even getting one of their like terrible graphs with no labels on the axis. Right. We're just getting like four times faster and I don't know what to do with that. Yeah. So we'll, and it's going to be a little while before we find out because like you said, none of these things ship till the 22nd. So, I mean, they're probably great. It's depressing about what's happening with pricing on everything these days.

7:56Yeah. It's hard to think, it's hard to, it's hard to look at it and just go like, yeah, you should buy one. Like, because I feel like you should just, anybody who can wait should wait until more. Until when? Like we don't even know. They're saying this could last until 2028, maybe longer. Yeah. Oh, sure. But like you just, I mean, wait for the M7 generation. Just, I feel like there's the pressure to upgrade has got to be less when the upgrade prices are so expensive now.

8:26Yeah. Um, so yeah, the M6 is. Same with the Max Studio, which I like, you know, and the, the Ultra is, God, a lot, a lot of memory bandwidth in that Ultra. Sounds great. But. It's also, starts at $5,500 now. Yeah. That's $1,500 more than the M3 Ultra started at, when it was announced. I know. Which is wild. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's going to be a lot faster than the M3 Ultra.

8:57Yeah. We just skipped the whole M4 generation. There were a lot of improvements over those generations. Yep. That never showed up in the Ultra chip. So that's going to be a wicked fast system. But also, like you said, $5,500, starting at $5,500. $5,500. Yeah. There was a time when the, when the Max Studio, the M, the Ultra Max Studio was like, wait, that's not a bad price. So 39, 39.99. Like that's, you know, pretty good.

9:27Now it's like, well, it's almost as much as the Mac Pro was at five. That was five. Maybe it was seven. It was either 6,000 or 7,000. It started out, but like we're, we're in that territory now. Yeah. So it's, it's like these prices just make your head spin.

M6 two-nanometer processor details

9:43The, real quick, Jason, before we get off this, the M6 is the first ever two nanometer processor. And I think I ask you this all the time. Does that matter? And should I care about that? Okay. You, you only care insofar as like, it's, it, it's the thing that allows them to make all these other improvements, having bigger cores and more cash and all these other things that make it go faster. Yeah. It is literally just the sort of the size of the features of the chip.

10:14It's the way I like to describe it is like, like you're looking at a Google maps map of your town, the streets and all the buildings and all the streets that connect all the buildings. And you're zoomed in and the map and the streets are thick. Right. And then if you zoom out a step, you can get more buildings and more streets and all the buildings and streets are skinnier and smaller, you know? And so on the same screen space, you get more stuff because all the connections between them and all the, the things that they're connecting are all smaller.

10:45Right. Okay. That's what this is. This is just stepping down to a smaller, all the features on the chip are smaller. So you can fit more of them in there and it takes less power and all that stuff. It takes less power for each thing. You've got more, you've got more things. So the whole chip will use as much power, but you know. You know? Um, so yeah, it's the thing that allows them to, to make a more powerful processor. Yeah. The, the, the ultra is described as a quad die.

11:16And I don't like, I don't know any of these terms, but it all sounds fancy and this sounds expensive and it sounds powerful. And I'm sure, I'm sure it is. Um, we'll test these things. Maybe, I don't even know. We don't, we might not get the M5 ultra. I don't think Roman's going to go out and buy one. That's for sure. It's not in our budget to, to buy a review unit for that. But like, um, yeah, I don't think we got the, we haven't gotten the ultra. Yeah. Or the two. Um, yeah.

11:46So we haven't gotten the ultra, but we have gotten in the past, uh, Mac studio update and we might get the new max. I mean, at this point, that's, that's the one that people are going to buy anyway. Like that's the sweet spot. Anyways, it was, it was an honestly a pretty good machine when they were $2,000 to start. Yeah. Starting price. You could get a, a mini with the pro. Right. And update. It's like storage and Ram and stuff. And you would be right at. Like where the, where the ultra is.

12:16And it gave you so much more. It gave you. Right. CPU. And ports. And it was bigger. Yeah. And it had like an SD. Hey parents. How do you make smarter choices for your kid's college today? That's where Sally can help. With Sally. You can find scholarships, funding options, tools, and guidance all in one place. And if you need a loan, Sally has options for different families and different situations. College is only worth it. College is only worth it. If you do it. Right. So don't just help your kid go,

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13:26So this week in Apple history, we're going to switch things around because it's, it's, it's, it's very much related to the main topic of the show, but I think it's today, right? It was actually yesterday. Okay. The 24th. Yeah.

Steve Jobs and Apple history

13:39So this week in Apple history on August 24th, 2011, 15 years ago, Steve jobs, he stepped down as CEO of Apple. Apple, as everybody knows, he wasn't in the best of health. I'll put it that way. And, uh, Tim cook. That's when he started his tenure as CEO of Apple. Yeah. I didn't realize when they announced Ternus that it was so close to exactly 15 years. As,

14:09um, as CEO. I mean, that's a long time, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that he took over. It doesn't feel that way, but it 15 years is, it's a long time. It's a long time. Um, obviously it was a surprise when they announced it, but it, as Roman said, it wasn't because like, we, we would see Steve jobs at on stage at these keynotes. And every time he was like, wow, he looks like he's withering away to nothing. Like he was so sick. He, he was. Cancer is not,

14:39it's not, it's not good. And, um, famously he avoided all chemotherapy and, and, you know, modern solutions and tried to change his diet. Yeah. At first, you know, he did all that stuff, but he started it all too late. Right. Yeah. Um, so Tim cook was, he was relatively unknown at the time. Like we knew who he was because we work and cover Apple. He was like their main,

15:09uh, uh, uh, like occupations guy. Is that the best? What was his title? He was the operations guy. Operations. That's the, he was an operations guy and he knew how to sort of efficiently get all these things done and scale things up and, and all that. It was at the time, considered a little odd to choose him as the CEO. Yeah. Successing CEO, because everybody's like, well, they're going to stop making cool products. Right. They're,

15:39they're just going to make a bunch of the same old widgets and just like flood the market with them because that's what Tim cook is good at. They didn't, they didn't, it just wasn't clear to people that he could have a sense of, of taste and, you know, vision for products and stuff, you know? Yeah. And at the time Apple was on a generational run. Yeah. The iPod. Yeah. The iPhone, the iMac before that. And just a year earlier, the iPad. So Apple was just firing on all cylinders design and product wise.

16:11Right. And, you know, they announced this guy that has seemingly no input on any of it, but. Right. He was handpicked by Steve jobs. So people were like, all right, we'll, we'll give it a chance. Like, I don't, I don't remember the stock tanking or anything like that. Like it, you know, it was, it was relatively happy with the idea that it's, there's a continuity in place and it's all that stuff. You know, the, the,

16:41the first keynote, Roman, you didn't, did you go to the, this was the, it was the iPhone four S you didn't, you weren't, I think we talked about this when, when they announced his retirement, you, no, I wasn't at that. Okay. So, uh, that, that fall, a couple of weeks later, I guess, um, he, he did the, the iPhone four S event. And I remember they had a little reserved seat. I don't know if you guys remember when they, they would pan into the front, you know, which was obviously a reference to Steve jobs.

17:12Cause he, he didn't, he didn't last much longer. He was, he, after they announced that product. So when, when, when, when Tim cook took over, I mean, we didn't know, but you know, he was probably giving a given a, a prognosis of a couple, couple of weeks, maybe, maybe a few months. So, you know, it's, it's a lot for Tim cook to step in. Apple was rolling the, the, the visionary founder of the company who had led the charge for all of these amazing products is,

17:46is, is not even around to consult. Yeah. And he's given the reins of his company and he has to figure out what to do with it. There are not a lot of companies in the world who, who have a front man that is, whose existence is so obviously associated with the company. Correct. You know, Walt Disney was one. Bill Gates was one. You could say Elon Musk is one. Sure. You know, and,

18:16and Steve jobs was in that sort of rare air. Right. Definitely. You know, we, we talk all the time about how like nobody like name the CEOs of 10 fortune 500 companies. I mean, they're just, people don't know the leadership of these companies. And they didn't before Steve jobs either. The Apple had a million CEOs before he came back and no one knew who any of them. Yeah. We went, they went through rapid fire through some during the years when he was away. Yeah. And before he left, he wasn't CEO. He was not. But he was still the face of the company and associated with the company more than anything else.

18:49Um, companies are so strongly associated with their CEOs. Like Bill Gates left Microsoft. And for years after that, people kept saying like, when they're, when windows would crash, they would go, Bill Gates, stupid windows. It's like, he hasn't been at the company for like five years. What are you doing? Steve Ballmer's the CEO. There's that thing where he, he was, he, he was the company in a lot of ways. Right. And so it was kind of a miracle to, to kind of not just keep the company going,

19:21but keep it growing, keep introducing new products and even increase its cultural relevancy. For sure. And of course it's bottom line and the number of users and all that other stuff to, to keep that stuff ramping up. I mean, Tim Cook's era ramped that stuff up so much. Yeah. The number of Apple users in the world grew like tenfold. Exponentially. Yeah. Crazy. So to keep all that going. Yeah. It was a big deal.

19:51And you know, to Tim's credit, he did not try to emulate Steve Jobs at all. He did his own thing. There's a, there's a famous quote that he likes to talk about when Steve was taught, was giving him the, the, you know, the blessing or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. He said advice for what to do. Right. Do what I would do. Do what you would do or, or it's not quite, it was more eloquent than that, but it was, you know, don't try to think about. Right. Don't, don't try to do what I would do. Do it.

20:21Cause I'm picking you because I trust you. Not that I trust you to copy me. So, you know, Apple has some, some great products, of course, and in Tim Cook's era, but they're, they're, it wasn't like he was trying to create something incredibly Steve Jobsian as he did. Right. Yeah. So, I don't know. Do you want to run down some products, Jason, or like, how do you want to dive into this? I'll do a few. Let's start with, before we get to all the business side of it.

20:52Okay. Let's, let's run through some of the products. Yeah.

Apple Maps and early missteps

20:56It didn't start off well for him because he, that was 2011. Mm-hmm. Apple's worth 350 billion, something like that. Sure. It's on tear. It's growing. The very next year was the big Apple maps debacle. Yeah. They decided like, we're, we're, we're kicking Google maps out of the default thing for this. Right. We're doing our own maps. And it was just a mess. It wasn't good. And it took so many years to even get it serviceable. And then they had to basically completely rebuild it up. Yeah.

21:26From the data up. Yeah. Which a, a huge multi-year project that took forever. So that was kind of rough. It wasn't. It wasn't. You can see the vision there. Yeah. And it kind of speaks to the rest of. But the execution was so bad. Right. It was years. It was a years long screw up. Right. And, and that was the first real major new thing. Under. Yeah. And people loved Google maps. And it's, you could still use it on the iPhone, of course. Right. Um,

21:56when people bought a new iPhone, they got Apple maps. They, they typed in the address and they, I, I, where I ended up three towns over from what I told it to take me because it took me to the wrong place. Like it, it, it happened commonly. It wasn't, uh, for a couple more years before they got their first real big thing. Yeah. Therefore, I, I, I don't remember if they announced it as a one more thing, but, uh,

Apple Watch and AirPods launches

22:23Apple watch. It was, that was the, the first thing under the Tim cook era that was like, this is a big deal and be continued to become a big deal. It was a huge hit. Um, it, you know, like most new hardware, it takes a generation or two to find its footing and really start taking off. It's, it's the number one watch in the world of any kind. Right. It's just massively huge. So that was the, um, just real quick, the September, uh, 2014 iPhone event, it didn't ship until the following year.

22:53It was a one more thing at that, at the 2014, um, iPhone six.

23:01I think. Don't remember. Yeah. iPhones at that point from, from the sort of the six, all the way through the eight and everything. And, and we'll get more into later iPhones, like go through the years here. Uh, he was, we're, we're kind of in that thing where, well, it's faster and has a better camera. Like it's just, they were kind of treading water and a little bit, and it was these other things. These were the big deals. So it was the six just to, just to, clarify, which was a little bigger. It was a little, it's a six was a little bit different,

23:31but the ABBA watch was the big thing at that event. I, I still remember when Steve, I mean Steve, when Tim cook came out, you know, they do the one more thing and they show the video and he walked back on stage and he kind of did like one of these. Yeah. Pumped his fits, which was a rare show of emotion for him at the time. Cause you know, this was a big deal. This was, I'm sure took sleepless nights and, and months of planning and intricacies and everything like heat. They wanted to get it right. And you know, for the most part they did with the exception of that solid gold thing that

24:01they did. Yeah. And that was so much of a marketing thing is as an attempt to make a product. It was, yeah. There were products that came out for the first couple of years were all things that were well underway. When yeah, see jobs was still alive. You couldn't really call them a quote, Tim air Tim cook era product. And they were pretty much more of the same. Yeah. That was the first real product that you would say like, this is all Tim cook. This is his baby.

24:31And it's, and it was a big deal. It was a huge. It was, it was. And then it was followed on the very next year. The very next year. I mean, saying that Apple watch came out in 2015, the very next year was AirPods. Another just like, they weren't even ready for what a smash hit. What it was. They couldn't for, for months they were just completely backward. They're like, whoops, we didn't make enough. Like it was, and that was another one. The first time we saw them, it was, there was a, it was a joke.

25:01Cause they would leave little stems in your ear. They had no wires. Yeah. People thought they look goofy and they just took off. And they just took off like almost immediately. Yeah. It was the, the Apple had been the, the white earbuds were such a. They were iconic. Iconic thing that they ran ads that were just like silhouettes with the white earbuds. Totally. And so they looked like that, but like you cut the wires off, right? Right. Well you, I'm looking at you now, you're wearing them now and they look like completely normal. They have much shorter stems these days,

25:32but, but we're so used to seeing them. Yeah. That, and everyone made all these comparisons. Oh, you can get better wireless earbuds. They're not that, but in true Apple fashion, that really wasn't what they were about. They were about, they were good, even if they weren't quote the best, but they were super easy. Like you didn't have to go through the whole Bluetooth pairing process and all that other nonsense and all that other stuff. And of course it's been a super smash hit. Yep. Very next year after that,

26:03iPhone 10.

26:062017. Yeah. So the hits just keep rolling from, from cook. And that was, you know, they also, for people who didn't want to spend a thousand dollars and get on the OLED face ID bandwagon and all that stuff. They still had the iPhone eight that year, which was just the like chip and chip. It's faster and cameras better kind of thing. But we've talked before about all the things iPhone 10 brought. It was, it was a step change for iPhone for the next decade that had like five different technologies that would all define what the iPhone was for the next decade.

26:41And we're, and we're hopefully coming in to the end of that decade and the next one.

Apple Silicon transition

26:47And then the Apple Silicon transition was probably the next, it's not one product, but it, it, it's a, it's a huge decision. It's a huge decision. The execution was amazing. Yeah. Any chip. I mean, Apple had done it before, changed chip architectures, which is never easy to do. But now Apple is basically taking it all on themselves. They're saying, all right, we're getting rid of all of Intel. We're doing it all on our own. And we have no one to blame,

27:17but ourselves. Like they never blamed Intel, but it was an excuse for why things were maybe a slower than you wanted them to be, or why design was a certain way. They took it under, they, they, they took control of, of the, of the chip inside the Mac to basically allow designs like the Mac studio that they couldn't do with Intel. Yeah. That they felt like Intel's roadmap just doesn't do what we need, want it to do. Plus after years of making their own iPhone chips,

27:48they had gotten really good at it. Yeah. They had, and they owned all the pieces of the IP they needed to do, to do the CPU and the GPU and all these other memory media encoders and all the other stuff. And that's also, Tim Cook's responsible for a lot of that. So the, the first Apple chip was in 2010, right before Tim cook over. So Tim took over. So, you know, Steve jobs obviously had a kind of major hand in the, in the first one that was in the iPad and the iPhone four. But after that,

28:19as it grew and it's certainly all the other little chips it does and the app and the, the S one and the Apple watch and the M one and the Mac, like that's all, you know, Tim cooks tutelage vision. I don't know, but I, but he was there. That was, yeah, he was there for it. Uh, you can argue that, um, Ternus who's about to come in and the, uh, what's, I can't remember the other, the guy who they always show in the lab. And Johnny, how do you, how do you pronounce his name?

28:49It's like an R and a J. I think it's Saroji. Saroji. They always say, and here's Johnny with more. Uh, like, like he's the genius behind all that stuff. Um, and he, he's done a, he's done a great job. Yeah. But Tim has to like allow the division to go. Like he has to make the decision. Yeah. We're going all in on these chips. We're doing this. Yeah. Yeah. There were the last time Apple changed architectures, there were fewer than a 10th of the,

29:19as many people who've had a Mac. Like it was, now they have so many more customers and so much more software, the compatibility, like they had compatibility problems before and they warned everybody this was going to happen, but like, you're going to need a new Mac and a new Mac OS, and it's not going to run some of your older stuff and blah, blah. This stuff was like, it was, I've never seen such a smooth transition. Yeah. For like a major architectural change. Yep. Uh, so, and yeah, the compatibility story was great about as good as anyone could hope

29:51for. The transition happened about as fast as they said, they're like, this is a two year thing. It's going to start in some products and step through our whole product roadmap. And it did like, yeah, they, they just nailed that. And it's been, everyone was chasing it. The second they released the M one in that, what was an, uh, it was a Mac book air that looked like the old Mac. Right. They basically just took the old chassis and just shoved the M one.

30:21Yeah. It even had the same size battery and everything, but that really let everybody compare battery life, old versus new performance, old versus new, all that other stuff. And then they were looking at windows laptops. Those guys were embarrassed by it. They were just absolutely looking at it going just like, Oh my God, what are we going to do? This is faster. The battery lasts twice as long. We are nowhere close. It was a full on panic from AMD and Intel to try to make laptop chips that were as good as the M one. Right.

30:51So yeah. And in many ways, they still are trying to catch up. Five years later, Roman's headline for the Mac book air M. Oh no, no. Jason, this is your headline. Oh, and absolutely stunning debut for Apple Silicon on a Mac. And that, you know, really sums it up. It was stunning. Like we knew it was going to be faster. And, you know, they didn't make like, usually these types of developments, they, they, they coordinate with design. So you get a new design and then the pet,

31:22the chip is better. This was just like, Hey, we're shipping you the same damn computer that we did, but just wait till you turn this thing on. Yeah. And it was like, it blew our minds how much faster these things were overnight. It wasn't, and it wasn't just that it was faster. It was faster and the battery lasts way longer. Right. But they didn't give you a, they didn't trick you and give you a bigger battery. And so, you know, yeah. Like you said, we all knew that the developer units that it went out, which were Mac minis with an a 12 X or something in it.

31:52Yeah. Benchmarks kind of leaked out and stuff. And everybody's like, you know what? This makes a pretty decent system. This is going to be okay. And then the actual M one shipped and we, and everyone, it was just like, I can't believe. Right. You know? So. I mean, there's still like, you could buy an M one today and it would still be pretty damn good. Depending on what you want to do with it, it could still be pretty good. Well that they're selling the, the Mac book near with the, with an a series processor, which is not that far off from an M one.

32:24And you know, it's, it's, it's decent for 600 bucks. That's kind of all that other than the things I would just wrap up into services, which you call a product, but whether it's Apple music, Apple music, which also, they didn't have, there were no services when, when Tim cook there was over. Yeah. They did things like dot at me. And you know, they always dip their toe in those things, but, but Tim cook, I,

32:54did they buy beats before Steve Jobs died or determine they were going to? I don't think so. I don't think it was right after, but let me look. But Apple music was 2015, Apple pay 2014, TV. Beats was, um, 20, May of 2014. So it was after 2014. So it was a couple of years, several years after, um, jobs had had passed. So that might've been all cooks doing there. That may not even have been discussed when Steve Jobs was alive, but so like,

33:24you know, they bought beats not to get the headphones, but to get the streaming service that beats had and all of the things. And they turned that into Apple music year before that, they'd launched Apple pay Apple TV plus launched in 2019. You know, uh, the, they're, they're full of all these things. Now I cloud plus, and they bundled them all together into Apple one and all this, you know, Apple fitness plus, some are better hits than others,

33:54but a massive recurring revenue stream, not to mention. Yeah. You know, so that was, that, that was all Tim cooks. Yep. Thing. And, and we kind of call that all one product, I guess, you know, just like this whole like services push where we're going to give people. Yeah. The expansion of the ecosystem, however you want to say it, but yeah. Yeah. Since, since I guess the, the Apple Silicon transition,

34:24it's hard to point to any one product and say, this was a really big deal. It's the last few years have not been a great, um, run for Tim cook. And that's right. I mean, the max are obviously good and the iPhones are, are good, but you're right. They're all kind of variations on a theme. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely been incremental improvements. They're not getting bad, but there hasn't been like the big, the big sunny spot on the thing.

34:55And in fact, there's been some problems and that kind of transitions me into like, well, what, what bad products did Tim cook? Yeah. We already talked about Apple maps. Cause that was the first thing, but there were a number of flops, missteps. I don't know when you want to call it. Mazda has been named consumer reports, safest new car brand. It starts with our approach. Every Mazda comes standard with proactive safety features.

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35:56Book direct at choicehotels.com. When I think of flop, I think of a, of a product that was supposed to be a huge hit. And it wasn't right. And I don't know if any of these fall into that category in the sense that I think Tim cook understood. So you're going to talk about vision pro, I assume an apple intelligence. That's one. Yeah. So I think he understood. That yes, it's an apple product and people are going to judge it as such,

36:28but this is not going to be an iPhone. This is not going to be an. Sure. But even so, I think it was, well, we'll get to vision pro. That's later, later down the year, but there were. All right. They're not all things that were like, this is going to be huge. And then it flopped. There were, there were just some missteps. Like missteps. I'm, I'm with you. Like Apple maps was probably the one you can say was a flop. They, can you be blamed for that? Cause that was pretty close. Yeah. That was a year after he took over.

36:58That was, you know, that was all under in the going. He could have said this isn't, but it was his job to look at it and say, this isn't ready yet. He did write a nice letter apologizing for it. Like that. That's your cue. That's how, you know, it was a screw up. Right. Another one was like the butterfly keyboard thing. Like there were lawsuits and stuff like the whole, that was several years of, they changed the best keyboard on, on any laptop anywhere. Yeah. To save a fraction of a millimeter.

37:29And then brought it back five or seven years later. Yeah. They brought it back with a different name, but it's really the same thing. Um, and it was so bad that there were like, you know, lawsuits and stuff about it. Right. It was, it was a, that was a screw up. And then suddenly you could say, remember air power. Like, whoops. Yeah. Like we're going to announce something. We're going to say, this is, we're going to show it on stage. We're going to say, this is shipping in the spring. And then two years later, they meekly said, actually, we're just not going to do that at all.

37:59I'm not even sure what happened there because. I know. Like, why are we previewing a, a charging pad? It wasn't that great. It was okay. It was just, it was mad. It was out there already, but they made this big deal out of it with this cool name. And you could put it anywhere. And your, your watch got like, who cares? Like that whole thing was that I'll give you that. That's a flop. Because. That was a total. To make a big deal out of something. So, so, so minuscule in my mind and then not ship it at all.

38:30You know, and I, I think during that event, when they showed it off, I don't think they made that big, a deal of it. I mean, but I think it was a smaller part. I think it became bigger because the spring came and they didn't ship it. And they were quiet about it. And people started asking them and they said, no, no, we're still working on it. Uh, it's coming. And then that fall and no, no, it's still coming. And then it took two years. It took till like 2019 or something for them to go. So 2018 was when it was supposed to release.

39:02So it was previewed in 2017, which was the iPhone 10 event. Yep. Yep. So they attached it to that. So they, they attached it to the iPhone for obvious reasons. Cause like that's also when they do AirPods and watch. Right. So it was like, and here's a charger for those things. It's coming in the spring. Yep. Isn't it neat? You can put your stuff anywhere. Uh, but then not only did it not ship, but they kind of kept saying they were working on it. And then it was 2019. They finally just admitted this is never going to ship. Right.

39:32So like, that was a, that was a very un Apple like thing to go announcing something.

Apple Intelligence delays

39:38And then we saw that echo again with Apple intelligence where, Yeah. You know, quote, Apple intelligence shipped with writing tools and stuff like that. But all the new series stuff, they showed it off. They made commercials for consumers. They ran commercials. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. They ran commercials on TV. That was, that was nutty because as they were running them, it wasn't like, it wasn't part of the phone. Even the little, the little animation wasn't part of the,

40:09was the part of the OS yet. And I don't know who, I mean, yeah, obviously it falls on Tim cookies in charge, but somebody should have raised their hand and be like, Hey, we can't run these because the features not live yet. Yeah. There was like a little fine text at the bottom. Yeah. But it was coming in and it's like, yeah, you really can't, you can't do this. Um, we, we, we technically still haven't gotten that stuff yet. It's right. It's coming. Uh,

40:39we presumably with iOS 27, uh, if it ships on time, which we think it will, but it, that stuff was two years ago. We still haven't gotten that commercial with, um, uh, Ramsey. Ramsey. Ramsey. We still haven't gotten those features yet. It still can't do that. No, that's, that's, that's wild. Yeah. And, and you're getting all that and more in iOS 27 finally. Yes. Yes. Uh, when we start talking about all the business stuff,

41:09we can talk about some of the stuff he missed. Um, but that's definitely part of it. Yeah. That's a blemish. The other big product that I got that before we get to vision pro was, um, Apple car, the product, everybody, they never, they smartly never announced it. Yeah. They never said anything about that. Right. But they literally spent billions of dollars and hired thousands of engineers working on the worst kept secret in the world. Uh, and that was just,

41:40I mean, just an amazing expense. And, and God, I think they, that project ran for six or seven, eight years, uh, and kept growing. And there were more and more people. They had a whole building full of people working on project Titan, you know? Yeah. Uh, and, and to, to expend all that money and hire all those people and do all that stuff and just kind of, then just go like, we're just never going to do this. Like, and they salvaged everything they could from it. And there were a lot of good things that came out of it in terms of like

42:11sort of AI and ship design and stuff like that. But that's a big investment and a really big project to take on. And then just kind of never ship anything, just kill it. Yeah. Like years and years. And, and from what I've read at some point, that project had between two and 5,000 people on it. Probably. Yeah. Have that scope and just make that much of a wrong call. Now it may ultimately have been the right call.

42:42Right. Never to ship anything. It, it, it could have better to, to cut your losses than to ship something not good. And that could have been the case. Right. And we also don't know what. It was recently reported that the new Siri AI was kind of born out of that project. We got, we got, we got, we got, we've got, and we've got, we got the door so I understand it. We got, we got CarPlay. A lot of the neural engine chip in the iPhone X came out of the hardware work they did

43:13for computer vision for the car. There were things, right? It's not like all of that was lost. But still, there was a multi-billion dollar, thousands of employee project that was just a wrong call.

43:30So I don't know, you can't call it a flop if it never shipped or anything. Right. I don't know if the normal, Apple user, the non-diehard fan, even knows that project existed. Yeah, they were smart to sort of never confirm it, never say anything.

Vision Pro impressions

43:50And then, of course, we get to Vision Pro. And Vision Pro is sort of the most recent, that product's just a couple years old now. And that's a product that it's okay, but it's certainly, obviously they never expected it to be huge at the price that it is and all that stuff. But I think they probably certainly marketed it as the future of computing. I'm not sure it isn't still. So you just sent me, so we have one for the office that Jason's had for a couple years.

44:21And he literally just sent it. I just got it last night because on Friday, Apple, Friday Night Baseball is going to broadcast its first immersive VR game. And I'm a baseball fan, so I wanted to check it out. So he sent me this big giant box that was huge on my doorstep. My wife's like, what is that? New toaster oven, man. Yeah, yeah. So I literally tried it out. It was the first time I was able to use it without having a very canned demo.

44:52And a couple of things stood out. One, the hardware is gorgeous. Like it is such a intricately, beautifully designed piece of technology. It is a little bit heavy and you can, you know, like there's some eye strain involved and all the normal things that accompany VR. But it's incredibly impressive how well it works. The eye tracking, the gesture tracking,

45:22it is the resolution or lack of a better word, whatever that looks like. It's a tremendous device. I wouldn't buy one. I wouldn't tell someone to buy one. It's, you know, it's probably not too expensive for what it is, but it's too expensive because it's, you know, it's $4. You know, the bigger thing is like my son was using it to watch. He was watching basketball highlights in VR. He's like, wow, this is the coolest thing ever. What else can I do? I'm like, I don't know.

45:53Yeah. Like that's the problem. You can watch other things in VR. Like that's kind of. Like I did, Roman, I did a very briefly this morning, I did a Mac virtual display and it's really cool. It's really cool. I don't know if I would sit there all day and use it. It is slick as a heck to look, glance over at your open MacBook and have a little, and a little bubble floats above it in the air that says like connect and then you just get it, that max screen in VR.

46:24Like that's neat. It doesn't help me get anything done faster or easier, sadly. It's definitely not faster. As cool as it is. If anything, it's slower. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, as a consumption device, as a VR, it's really nice and all that. But I think even Apple expected to have better, cheaper, whatever, versions by now. Sure. To have the software further along than it is by now. To have the ecosystem of developers making stuff for it

46:54further than it is by now. I think you're right about that. And the speed at which these things are happening is, I mean, it's still not good. Even the rumor mills, just like, look, they've given up and they're going with smart glasses. Like it's not, I think there, at the time, there were a lot of these sort of little smart glass things, things like Google's, what was the Google glass, right? Which was not a VR anything. It was like a smart display. Like, you know, a lot of the rest of the industry

47:24was starting from there and saying, this is going to grow into augmented reality glasses. And Apple kind of said, no, we're going to start with like the finished end, like augmented reality as a VR camera-based thing. And then we're going to move it down the stack. And it hasn't moved down the stack at all. And it looks like they feel like they made the wrong call. And it's like, no, we should have started with the smart glasses thing and gone up. And now that's what they're going to do. There's scrap it all, smart glasses, AI, smart glasses. Yeah.

47:55And like I said, there's a ton of technology there that just blows your mind with how well it works. But I don't, like, I don't know how they would ever incorporate that into something like this, like a, like a pair of glasses anytime before like 2050. Like it's heavy, it's hot, it's gigantic. Like, I don't think there's any way to do it. It's tethered to a battery puck. Like the battery's not even in it. Like it's, it's crazy how much tech is in it.

48:26But, and you know, as a flop, I think this probably is the closest thing to it, even though it's amazing. But when Apple releases something like this, it gets a monster amount of attention. And Tim Cook has to understand that. And then people go to try it out and they're like, wow, this is really cool. How much is it? What can it do? And then the people who did buy one, there's no trade-in for a newer one. Like you haven't gotten anything in the way of like a, like a, like a substantial update

48:57to what it can do. So you spent 3,500 bucks on this thing and you weren't even really rewarded as being an early adopter. there's so many, there's been so many great sort of vision OS software updates, but nothing that fundamentally addresses the issue of yeah, but I'm not getting anything done with this better or faster than I was on day one. Right. It's a party trick. It's cool. Yeah. And if you're like a surgeon doing orthoscopic surgery or whatever

49:28and stuff like that, like, okay, this is really amazing and cool for you. But if you're a normal person, it's just not helping you get any of your product. The way I like to say to imagine is like, if I went to Apple Park and I went into the big spaceship and I'm walking around and I'm looking at all the Apple employees working, would they all be wearing Vision Pro? I wonder. Not all of them. Would anybody be wearing one? Yeah. Almost no. You go in the Vision Pro group and there would be, but not all the rest of the employees. if it increased

49:59productivity any percent, like five percent, it would be a no-brainer to equip every Apple employee. I wonder if Tim Cook wears it in his office. He says he uses every Apple product every day and the way he uses that and he said this is he watches new shows and stuff like Apple TV shows and the VR stuff laying back in bed and I'm like, well, that's cool and all that, but you're the CEO of Apple.

50:29That's not, like, other people like to watch shows with others. I don't like, like, you get it so solitary, like, so, I mean, yeah, it's incredible watching a movie on that giant virtual screen and all, that's really cool if you like to watch movies by yourself. I don't know. So, yeah, I would, it's hard not to call that a flop. but irrespective of what the quality level of it is and just like, it just hasn't progressed.

51:00The progression rate of Vision Pro is just not. When it came out, I went to my local Apple store to get a demo because they used to do that and maybe they still do, I don't know. And the demo that I got that day, which was over two years ago, is not all that different than the demo I gave my son last night. Like, try this video and check this thing out because I don't know what else I could do. Yeah. They've changed so many little things about the gestures and about how some of these things work and stuff, but I'm still dragging around flat windows the

51:30size of big whiteboards to do stuff that are effectively iPad apps. And that's not the AR, VR experience I imagined in my brain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they probably should have never released it to the public and just kept it as like a surgeon thing. And they go, you can get this, but you have to contact us through our special phone number and we'll get you. Keep it as an Apple store demo if you want to see what the future of whatever looks like, spatial

52:01computing looks like. There's Apple, I mean, Apple, Microsoft did that with their headset, their HoloLens. The original HoloLens was like a consumer thing, but then like for HoloLens two or three or whatever it was, that just was just a business to business industry thing and they sold it in the thousands to like car manufacturers who would just have like virtual instructions for people on the line and stuff with all this other, and that would have been a better, but that's not really the business Apple's in.

52:32The business stuff? Yeah, let's keep going. The business side of Tim Cook I think is what sets him apart more so than any other CEO Apple's especially Steve Jobs. And this stuff really is less about a particular point in time because it's not a product launch. It's about the entire years, right? So nobody can argue that he hasn't grown Apple as much or more than Steve Jobs ever did in the same period of time. I mean, monetarily, way more. Well, as a percentage

53:03basis, I haven't looked it up, but he grew Apple from $350 billion to they kissed $4 trillion at some point recently. They kissed $5 trillion. Didn't they kiss $5 trillion? Am I wrong? Maybe you're right. I might be pushing it too far ahead. They were like the second $4 trillion.

53:22No, they're at $4.5. It was $5. They briefly touched $5 trillion. All right. I looked it up and it's like if you invested $1,000 in Apple when Tim Cook became CEO, you'd have like $23,000 now, $24,000 now. That's a good return,

Cook's financial growth and supply chain

53:40right?

53:42Plus like $1,500 worth of dividends for every, you know. So, you know, for $15,000, I think his annual percentage growth rate over his $15,000, averaged out over his $15,000 is about 24% a year. Okay. Nobody, like any Fortune 500 companies should be so lucky. That's incredible. Like to have an average 15-year growth rate of 24% a year, it's nuts.

54:13It's awesome. Particularly when you're as big as they are. Like you didn't take it over as a fledgling little company. Yeah, I mean, they were still, I mean, they were a tenth the size then. Right, but they were still massive at the time. But they were still pretty big. Yeah. iPhone was big, not as big, but like, yeah, I mean, Apple Watch,

54:35and a lot of that came down to this sort of double-edged sword of Tim Cook's like change of the supply chain of how they make things and his working together with all the companies that make all the parts that go into an iPhone or an iPad. Which we said earlier, like this was, this is his genius. It was when he started that. That's why he was hired. He really made that super, super efficient.

55:07And he got really, really good deals and prices from everybody. And he managed to make products that were, I don't want to say cheap, they weren't, but they weren't, obviously weren't out of touch for people because they have a billion customers. And maintain a huge margin at the same time. Right. But the double-edged sword of that is they got over-reliant on a very optimized supply chain that the second there becomes like trouble with China, they're screwed. They're like, oh crap, we make

55:38everything there. Quick, make some stuff in India. Like, oh no, what are we going to do? But they did pivot and kind of, or he did, he managed that. They're working on the pivoting. They're in the middle of a multi-year pivoting process. Without having a supply crunch of their own doing, without raising prices of their own doing. Like, they did where they were, or he is, slash, were able to manage that as best as they could for a company of

56:09this size. Yeah. There's, we just talked about the new Mac Mini, that's being made in Texas, or being assembled in Texas. A lot of the parts come from all over the place.

56:22So, it's like there is more sort of diversity in the supply and manufacturing side than there was. But they kind of got over relied on one place and one time and one. Yeah. I mean, they weren't the only one, but yeah. Sure. Definitely not. And, you know, he did overlook a lot of, you know, cultural stuff and, you know, worker, the way workers were treated. There was a lot of, I don't know if that was Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or if it

56:52overlapped, but there was a lot of criticism from activists and, you know, people who championed global rights that Apple was complicit in, you know, allowing all this stuff to happen without, like, turning blind to it. Yeah. And to take, to kind of have Apple's back on this one, part of, they would argue, we demanded of our suppliers higher,

57:22like, better pay, better worker conditions and stuff, than all of our competitors. And we kept pushing them to do more, like, as a requirement of being able to do business with Apple. So as Apple grew and it became more valuable to have that Apple contract, the, like, what's the name, not FlexCon, why does my brain say FlexCon? But that's the FoxCon, the guys who were making the thing, you know, giving them

57:53better working conditions and more time and stuff like that. They were bad compared to what it is in the U.S., but Apple's the one who made them better. They were worse before Apple got in there and then they started to make it better. That's what Apple would claim and there's some truth to that. So I think both things are true. Sure. Some bad there, some good there. Battery gate happened under Cook. That was an issue. Which was somewhat misunderstood and overblown,

58:23but yes. Yeah, but they lost a lawsuit about it. I mean, they had to give people a bunch of refunds and all of that. I don't know if you had this on your list, Jason, but the San Bernardino case that kind of kicked off all of this privacy stuff with the iPhone being uncrackable and there's no back door.

Privacy stance and San Bernardino

58:49That was in 2016. That's a great segue into idea I was going to talk about part of his business thing was like wearing company values on your sleeve. The two biggest ones being environmental values, right? I mean, huge parts of product launches talking about sustainability and net zero energy use. even today at the end of the Mac Studio and Mac Mini thing, they have a paragraph about carbon, whatever.

59:20Yeah, carbon neutrality and all this stuff. They're really pushing forward on that and privacy as a core value. We don't have the keys to your encrypted data. We can't look at it even if somebody tells us to, even if we get a court order. We can't get into your phone. We can't unlock your phone. That San Bernardino thing was a huge thing because they're like, Apple, why don't you unlock their phone? And they're like, we can't. And they're like, but you could write new firmware for the phone that

59:51allows you to unlock it. And they're like, but that's a key for anybody. Like, that's for anybody on any phone. And we're not going to compromise literally every iPhone on earth like that. Tim Cook took a pretty controversial stand at the time against the U.S. government and said, because this was a case where it was an accused terrorist who, I think he, did he kill people or he shot people? I don't remember what the exact thing.

1:00:22Yeah, it was something that happened. So, and, you know, people were very much like, you know, this guy is a, send him to jail. And the FBI was like, listen, we have to get into his phone to find out who he's connected to. And Apple was like, no, we're not letting, we're not going to make software to do that. And then the FBI ended up doing it anyway, without Apple's help. But, you know, Apple, Tim Cook, whoever you want to blame, really put themselves out there as the bad guy. It did not help that it was misrepresented in the media, deliberately by law

1:00:53enforcement, as Apple won't unlock this phone. And Apple did not push back and say, they're not asking us to unlock this phone. And they did unlock certain parts of it. Like, they gave them what they had, which was an iMessage and it wasn't right. Yeah, it's not the phone at all that they unlocked. There was, this was before the new architecture for iCloud, that, where things are encrypted a certain way, where they can, with a court order, unencrypt

1:01:23people's iCloud data and supply that to things. They can't do that with the new architecture now, I don't want to get into all that, but like, they have done that plenty of times back then, and they did that. Here's all his iCloud data, but they're like, no, we need the stuff that's on his phone. And Apple did not very clearly express that the government is not asking us to unlock his phone. They're asking us to write software that can work on any iPhone that will allow them to unlock any iPhone.

1:01:54And they promised Pinky Swear that they're just going to use it for this, and it will never get into the hand of a bad guy, and it will never be sold by a disgruntled employee to bad actors or anything. Yeah, just absolutely insane. On February 16, 2016, Tim Cook posted a message, which is still on Apple's website, about all of this. And he did, so under the subheading, the threat to data security, he writes, someone argued that building a backdrop for their iPhone is a

1:02:25simple, clean-cut solution, but it ignores both the basics of digital security and its significance of what the government is demanding in this case. The government suggests this tool could only be used once on one phone, but that's simply not true. That is a flag to say, hey, we are on your side, and we don't care who we fight, we are protecting our customers, even against our own government. Yeah, it was a big deal for them to do that. It was unpopular and made to be

1:02:56unpopular, like the government was really playing on, and a lot of the news media was playing on that. So yeah, that was a big deal, and in retrospect, I think it's probably pretty easy to say that Apple was in the right. Not only did the government not need them to write a crack for all iPhones, but it would have been a disaster if they did. And now there's lockdown mode, and there's all these different modes that you can use to lock down your iPhone completely, yeah. And it's one of the reasons why they sell so many of them. And even just the

1:03:27iCloud stuff is much better secured now where they can't get into that. And that features a lot into the AI era, and I think I'll just, since we're running out of time, I'm just going to end on, that was kind of the other big screw-up from a company policy management side for them, is that they had this big lead with Siri for so long. He came in with the 4S, he came in to the start of Siri, right? Like, the Tim Cook era was the era of Siri being this amazing thing

1:03:57that defined the iPhone, and they let it stagnate, they let everyone blow past them and pass them by. They missed the boat on generative AI, and they've been paying catch-up ever since, and they're only kind of, maybe next month with the release of the 27 updates, catching up, sort of, kind of. The last five years has been really bad for that. Siri has been kind of a joke for a while. Yeah, absolutely, and I think it kind of speaks to Tim Cook's

1:04:27generosity and just his respect for the company, that he is basically letting that be his legacy. I messed up, and John Ternus is now going to be the hero, the savior, if it works, of AI. Like, he's going to get all that credit. They're going to launch several really interesting new products in the first six months of John Ternus' career, and new operating system updates that finally make Siri

1:04:57good. Like, I've been using it a lot lately, and I'm like, you know what? The number of times where I'm just like, you know what, I think I'll try that with the new Siri, and it's good. You know, it's funny, back to that Vision Pro real quick, I let my wife try it last night, and so I had gone through all the training stuff, so she just put it on, and she didn't know really, and I was trying to explain, but I can't see, so it was hard, and like, a little thing came up, the little Siri thing came up, it said Siri's was ready, I guess it was downloading, and

1:05:28she asked, like, hey, how do I do this? And it was like, hey, look here, this will pop up, and then click your pants, like, it gave her the specific instructions, and it knew what it was asking, and you know, yeah, I think Siri from here on out, or from next month out, is going to be something that people, it isn't a punchline anymore, but people actually use to get things done. There are a number of ways in which it isn't up to where like Gemini and stuff are, but just in terms of being a

1:05:58good phone assistant, it is so much better, it is such, so, like you said, not a punchline, but boy, they let a massive lead in, like, your phone assistant AI thing just, like, go. And I still remember, like, it was like, wait, I can ask if I need an umbrella, and it knows? Just imagine if the thousands of people and billions of dollars that Apple spent on Apple Car were instead spent on, like, AI, like, what a leader it would be. I mean, I don't

1:06:29know if that's an instead thing, I think they were, I think they spent quite a bit of money, but probably more recently, I see what you're saying, if they had done it. Right, and they were doing a lot on computer vision and stuff, but I mean, this whole generative AI stuff and this whole assistance that you talk to and everything, like, if they had invested more of that into this burgeoning new type of transformer model AI stuff, they would be so much further ahead. Now, of course, that's hindsight,

1:06:59that's 20-20, I don't run a multi-billion dollar company. That's all right, everybody hates those companies, too, so I think it's better this way. Yeah, but would you hate Apple if Apple did it Apple's way? Like, I don't know. Like, the reason people hate those companies may be a little different. Probably. I'm just saying, like, boy, he sure spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of people's time and talent on something that never shipped and then let this other thing go completely full behind. Yeah, and we would talk about

1:07:30the car and be like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if Apple just drove out a car and it's like, we knew that was never going to happen. Like, they were never going to sell a car. It would have been like $180,000 by the time they were done developing it and it's just that's not, it just would never have worked. They're not Tesla, although there's a rumor that Steve Jobs tried to buy Tesla way back in the day. Yeah, the rumor is they were going to buy Tesla for the IP in the factories because the car project

1:08:01went on so long that it went from we'll build the car to we'll partner with someone to build the car to all this other stuff. Um, and Elon said, okay, but I get to be CEO of the combined company. Like, I'll do it if I'm CEO. And Cook said, are you high? Like, absolutely not. Yeah.

1:08:23Yeah, it's going to be, it's, we've talked about this before. It's rare that a company this big and this successful and, and, and is not undergoing a scandal or doesn't have, um, a CEO that's, you know, near death. Yes. Yeah. Transitions like this. Exceedingly rare. You've got a company whose CEO is, it's one of those rare companies where you know who the CEO is. People know like he's well, he's well liked, you know, he's well liked and he's

1:08:54stepping down without a personal or social scandal or a business scandal. Like he's, he tanked the company like he's leaving on a high note, man, that never happens. Just those things together never, never happen.

1:09:11And I'm sure it happens a lot with CEOs who nobody knows who they are. Right. And smaller companies and, you know, we'll have a lot to say about Ternus. Well, I think the world is going to get to meet him in a couple of weeks because I bet most people don't even really know what he looks like, but he'll be the face of the iPhone event and he'll be the face of the iPhone folder, iPhone ultra, whatever it's called. And, um, you know, he, like I, I talked about this a couple minutes ago, like Tim Cook is being very generous here. He could have waited till December and

1:09:41gotten all that accolade for the folding. He's like, you know what? I'm, I'm going to leave that to, to, to, to John. That's, that's your, the beginning of your legacy will be the most exciting iPhone in like 10 years. So, you know, it's, it's, it's an exciting time. I'm sure John Ternus has a lot of sleepless nights ahead of him. It's not going to be easy. That touchscreen max also. So we didn't get into like the whole regulatory battles that, that Tim Cook has found itself and boiled in over, you know, uh, the app

1:10:12store and monopolies and all this other stuff and the EU battles and all this other stuff. And Ternus is going to inherit all that. He's also going to launch cool folding phone, max with touchscreens, all this home stuff. Like there's a new Siri, like he gets to be, uh, you know, if, if, if he's a failure, it's definitely not going to be because he inherited a bad position. Right. He's inheriting the best possible position. Right. I mean, it's, it's,

1:10:43you always say you want to go to a place when they're at the bottom and bring them up. So Ternus, it's, it's to keep that plane flying high. Yeah. It ain't going to be easy, but Tim Cook's still going to be around. He's still going to be on the board and he'll be still be there for consulting and, you know, whatever else Ternus needs him for. But, um, you know, the, the Tim Cook era, we were talking about this before the show started. There's an argument to be made, Roman, I'm sorry. We're like, Oh, an hour 11. That's not so bad.

1:11:14Um, we were talking before the show started that, you know, there's an argument to be made that Tim Cook is the best CEO. That Apple ever had. And that includes Steve Jobs. Uh, there, you could make that argument. Uh, I think a lot of people would say that couldn't have happened without Steve Jobs. Like he built the company and the culture and the product culture and everything that Tim Cook kept running with. You know, I think Tim Cook would agree with that.

1:11:45You would agree with that. So, you know, which one is more important and stuff, but just in terms of like delivering killer products and growing it, but people always forget how many bad products came out during Steve Jobs era and design flops and stuff like that. That damn puck mouse is number one. That damn puck mouse for, for start. Yeah. Yeah, no, right. There were plenty of mistakes in the Steve Jobs era, but there, you know, that's part of it. Like you learn from your mistakes, you move on, you don't replicate them. Like, you know, you

1:12:16have to make mistakes to grow. Congratulations, Tim Cook. Yeah, congratulations. Enjoy your retirement. Enjoy your retirement. He was obviously not perfect, and I don't think anybody, I don't think anybody taking the risks necessary to run a great company is going to end up being perfect. They're going to, you're going to, having some Apple car wrong calls, right? But, but I think he ran a company of this size and scope and

1:12:47influence about as well as anybody could. Like, it's hard to imagine somebody else would have just been that right that often, done that good a job that often. With tons of attention and tons of scrutiny. Yeah. And as you say, all these little people taking shots at you, I mean, I don't know how many lawsuits Apple has to fend off every day, probably at least several. It ain't easy. It ain't easy. And he seems to have done it and kept his, his core values intact.

1:13:19You know, you can talk to some of the stuff he's done, but. We could all sit there and say we would have, we'd run Apple a little differently, and I think in retrospect, he probably would say, well, sure, that was a wrong call, but at the time, it didn't seem like it. Sure. So. It's funny, he's a remarkably personal, private person in his personal life. I don't know anything about. Yeah. His life. And that's certainly by design. Yeah. I'm sure, I'm sure there's a number of people whose job it is to keep people out of

1:13:51his personal life. It's not easy in this, when you, when you own a company that, with that sells connected devices with cameras, it's not, it's not easy, but he's done it. Anyway. Um, yeah, it's going to be fun next couple of weeks to see what Ternus does. And I didn't meet him, but I was, I listened to him speak for a couple minutes and I, and I saw him interacting with the room back in March and he's a very likable, very affable guy. Yeah. So he's got that, he's got that. He has a personality. Yeah, he sure does. So, and he's, he's about

1:14:23to, his first real, you know, run in the show, ringleader running the show is going to be the most, kind of the most exciting iPhone event in how many years? It's years. Yeah. So since iPhone 10, I guess, so nine years. Yeah. Very exciting.

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1:15:15It sounds like a Ford Super Duty towing up to 40,000 pounds before the sun comes up. It sounds like a Ford Mustang doing what a Mustang does. Ford, J.D. Power's number one in initial quality among mainstream brands. Ready, set, board. When properly equipped, max towing varies based on cargo, vehicle configuration, accessories, and number of passengers. For J.D. Power 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study Award information, visit JDPower.com slash awards. Awards based on 2026 model year. Newer models may be shown. Let's move on to, oh, we

1:15:47did history. Let's move on to- The whole show is history segment.

1:15:55So we got Common Corner and then we're out of here. Okay. So, yeah. Time for Comic Corner. A little shifting of gears here with Comic Corner. This Comic Corner is all

Apple TV pricing and streaming gaps

1:16:04about Apple TV. Wait, hold on. Cool. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I have one from today. We might as well use it. Okay. I got to find it, though.

1:16:13Is it an Apple TV comment? It's not. It's a Mac Mini comment. Okay.

1:16:21Let's do one of the other ones while you find it. Yeah, you could do that. So let's, okay, so a couple comments about Apple TV. The first is about the Apple TV box. We posted an article about how difficult it is to justify its recent price hike. And TikToker, Chris Carly, he had a link the response to our article that he posted on Threads. So a TikToker who posted on Threads replied to one of our Threads. We have a link to Carly's post in our show

1:16:51notes if you want to see it, because I'm not going to read the whole thing. This is the gist of what he said. He said, in Apple TV's case, RAM and storage make up a large portion of the product's price. It doesn't have an expensive display or camera module to mask the component costs. As a result, if the RAM and storage rise in cost, it's a much larger impact on the overall cost of the product, so it makes perfect sense why the Apple TV would see such a large percentage change in

1:17:22price with the increased price of RAM and storage. Guys, have any thoughts on that? I agree intellectually. I don't agree in spirit. I think part of the problem with Apple TV is that the box is overpowered for what you really use it for. It doesn't need all this RAM and storage. Apple wants it to be this thing that runs apps and plays games and does all these things. It only really needs to run streaming apps. It could be a much more

1:17:53lightweight box, and it isn't. It could just be... This could be 4 gigs of RAM, 16 gigs of storage thing that just... All the apps are just streaming video apps, and that would be great. I wonder if... So there's a new one coming out, allegedly, in a couple weeks that is going to be able to do the new Siri stuff, so presumably have twice as much RAM or more RAM. I wonder if they raised the price on the old one

1:18:23so that when they would have raised the price on the new one, it doesn't hit as hard. Could be, yeah. So I understand what he's saying, what Carly's saying, yes, the RAM is an outsized proportion of the total component cost. RAM and a flash storage, yeah. It's still a three- to four-year-old device that you just upped by 60%. That's the bigger issue, is that it's old. And it was already more expensive than its contemporaries. True. Like, it's already more expensive than every other TV streaming box in the

1:18:54world. Right. And they just made it 60%. Twice. And that's what the... So they cut the price of that thing. And we were like, oh, look, it's $129, I don't know, whatever it was. And it still was way more expensive than like a 4K Amazon box or a Chromecast or whatever. Right. Any of those things. Yes, it is better. Roku. I will tell you that Apple TV 4K, that box, is the best streaming box I have ever used. I don't know if I spent $250 on it. Yeah. I don't know. That's hard to swallow.

1:19:25It is. And the other things it does as a home hub, the processing that it does as a home hub, is so invisible to users that you don't understand, well, that's why it needs to be so expensive. Like, it's... Right. Yeah. So it's hard to swallow. Yeah. He's right, but it... I guess my response to that is, he's right, but it doesn't matter. Right. That's how I feel, too. It's like, you're absolutely right, and it doesn't matter. I found my comment, and it's related to pricing stuff. So this goes, so this

1:19:55is on Blue Sky. Jason, you'll be happy. You like Blue Sky.

1:19:59Doug... I don't understand Blue Sky handles, because they're like dots, but it's Doug hyphen E-E-E is, I guess, the guy's name. Just say Doug. It's Doug. Doug on Blue Sky. Okay, Doug.

1:20:11So this was in response to today's story about the M6 Mac Mini, and it says, he says, I used to upgrade to new models when they came out, but the new pricing is putting a stop to that for me. And I think that a lot of people are going to feel that same way. Yeah. When you bought, if you bought a Mac Mini for $599 or $499 on Amazon, if you got it like a Black Friday or something, and now it's almost twice that when you go to upgrade to the M6, that is a tough pill to swallow. And I, you know, just like we were talking about, like,

1:20:42I understand it. Apple is getting hammered as well as everybody else by component costs. And if they kept prices the same, they'd probably get slaughtered in the next quarter because they wouldn't make any money. But it's still, it's, it's really hard to tell someone the same computer that you spent 500 bucks on is now 900 and now it has a new chip and. Yeah. But that's it. The whole, it's, it's been the whole like, well, but it's twice as fast. Okay. But twice as fast and twice

1:21:13as expensive is not how it's supposed to go. Like. Right. If that was the case, we'd be spending $10,000 on our computers. If it went up, if it doubled every time. It's been three years, it's supposed to be twice as fast and the same price. Like that's, that's how these are supposed to happen. So, and, and yeah, like we said, this is not just Apple's problem, but it is Apple's problem. It's not just Apple's problem. Yeah. We'll talk about this. We'll talk about this next week, but I, I shudder to think about the slide that

1:21:43shows the iPhone pricing next month. Yeah, they're, they're not going to give the full price. The full pricing is going to be a footnote and they're going to give that monthly pricing for the new. Yeah. It should be noted that the M6 Mac mini is not eligible for the Apple upgrade thing. Oh, what do they call it? The studio is an upgrade, Apple upgrade. The new. Yeah. The leasing thing. Yeah. The Mac mini is considered an entry level device and it's not

1:22:14part of it. Yeah, that's true. Just like the Neo and everything. Right. Right. Our, our last comment is about Apple TV programming. Specifically, why do we have to wait so dang long between seasons? For example, the next season of Pluribus is coming in 2027. That's maybe 2028. We don't even know. Or 2028. Yeah. Yeah. We're not sure. Possibly, you know, hopefully 2027, but it's more like.

1:22:45The earliest, like, like, like next winter. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what, over two years since the first season. Yeah. And then like severance, they take two years between seasons. Loidian via Blue Sky said, streaming miniseries offerings are less like the Sopranos and more like extended feature films now. Yeah. Production values are better. The writing is better. That's why it's less, that it's less than

1:23:16three years to develop is an accomplishment. I mean, I don't know. I never, I haven't watched the whole Sopranos, but to say that it wasn't good writing, I don't think it's fair. Well, no, no, that's, that's one of the all time grades. I just think the meat, the floor is much higher now. It's, it's prestige TV is much better. I get it. This isn't just for Apple TV. It's all, it seems to be all streaming. Yeah. Yeah.

1:23:46Programming and I think a better example is take example, for example, the Big Bang Theory. Okay. Sure. It's broadcast television. They came out with what? 15, 20 episodes a season every year. Yeah. Usually, usually 20. That's the sort of broadcast TV standard. Yeah. And it's all on one soundstage with a three walls and. Then they announced the fault, the spinoff of a Stuart fails to save the

1:24:17universe. And that was announced like what, two or three years ago. Yeah. It's finally out. Isn't there another one? Isn't there like a Sheldon one or something? There's a, there's a different one. Sheldon. That's a, that's another broadcast TV. Yeah. There's like another one called George and Mackie. I don't know who asked for all these spinoffs of the Big Bang Theory. Yeah. I didn't know there were that many. But those are broadcast television. I've been watching Stuart fails to save the universe. And. Wait, that's related to Big Bang Theory?

1:24:48Yes. That's Stuart. It's that. Yeah. It's the comic book owner. Geez. I had no idea. Yeah. The secondary characters of that show. They made a spinoff. I did not. But it's more cinematic and Big Bang Theory is, you know, it follows the model of broadcast television sitcoms. You know, the writing follows that same structure and everything. It's very formulaic. Whereas Stuart saves the universe. And I'm not endorsing it or anything.

1:25:18I'm just saying it's vastly different. If you watch it, you go, is this, this isn't the same show, is it? It's a very different show. You know, that's an example of how the writing has changed. The production values have changed a lot. Yeah. So that means we have to wait. You know, I wonder if the streaming companies have discovered that the gap is kind of irrelevant, that people don't care whether it takes that long. I kind of think if anything, they're

1:25:49probably finding out. I've just read a couple articles about how streaming companies are kind of upset Netflix is so data driven and stuff like that. And they're, they're looking at their data and they're going like, people aren't tuning in for seasons two and three and whatever of a lot of our shows, even if they were a big hit, there's this big fall off. And it's like, well, yeah, because it was two or three years. And then you change showrunners and nobody wants to watch the fourth season of The Witcher when you change the actor. And it's been three years.

1:26:19Like, it's not right. And it's possible to do these things on a more regular cadence. You brought up The Sopranos, like they had a, every year, like a new season of The Sopranos, you know, and they weren't 20 episodes of three wall, you know, three camera studio set up. They were heavily produced. They were, you know, prestige TV class stuff. But they had a schedule that made that work. Game of Thrones, you know, as, as much as people, there were some gaps and

1:26:50stuff, but they were on a fairly regular cadence with that kind of stuff. So it's true that they've slipped up and, and there's the antidote to that is oddly enough, an Apple TV show. Like I feel one of my favorites of all time, Slow Horses. Slow Horses is like season six or something. Yeah. That one has kept up. It's in fact, it's like every nine months or something. Right. There's a new season. It's, but their seasons are only six episodes. So maybe that's the solution is instead of making every season 10 episodes or something like that, maybe

1:27:22think of a season as 12 episodes and you cut it in half. And those are your two, like a season every nine months or something. And that way you're not two years between 12 episode seasons. Like, you know, they could, they could plan this out a different way and they clearly do on Slow Horses and it totally works. I never feel lost. I'm like, Oh man, there's already another season of Slow Horses coming. Awesome. I love that show. Like my, um, conspiracy theory about all this is that when there's a hit

1:27:54show, these streaming companies like, all right, well, everyone likes this show. So let's wait two years. So they stay subscribed until it comes back. Cause the, the, the idea that people cancel and then, and then real, I don't think most, I think that is that's one of those things that that was the dream of all this stuff, but people aren't doing that. Yeah. That's one of those things that's, it's very online. If you do nothing but read Reddit threads, you're like, Oh, everybody subscribes for a month and watches all their stuff and then cancels like no, no, no, no.

1:28:24Mostly 99% of people just let the subscription run. Unless it goes up like a ton. Yeah. Unless it goes up a ton. And then I just got an email saying Peacock's getting more expensive. I'm like, what do I watch on Peacock? Everything. It's going away. Yeah. Everything that all these services, we're going to get into a whole nother discussion. Yeah. Like they're all like $150 a year now. And it's like, well, I don't watch them that often. Yeah. And that's what we complained about with cable was that I'm paying for 300

1:28:56channels and I watched three. Yep. And they're like, Oh, well, here's all this streaming stuff. Oh, great. And now I'm paying just as much, if not more for that stuff plus separate internet. So anyway, uh, the, I, I agree with this, the, this commenter, he said in the comment that like, there's these like two year gaps and stuff. It doesn't need to be that way. Uh, it, they, they, they, they're like, yeah, the quality's higher and stuff, but I think there's a way to schedule this stuff out where it's not such a

1:29:26gap. I tell you what, that pluribus show, I I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, we're not gonna get on that. It's going to be a whole other show. All right. All right, Roman. We're an hour and a half in. We're not going to get started on what Mike thinks of pluribus. Uh, that does it.

1:29:43Hold on. What episode am I? I still have four in here. $9.97. I tell you. It's up on the top of the screen. I know. It's.

1:29:56You know, I realized I forgot to do this. So I'm not doing that either. All right. Next week, we're going to talk about the iPhone events, which we should have the invitation by then. The preview. Yeah. The preview. Yeah. So join us for that. And, um, Tim Cook, if you're listening to this, congratulations. Enjoy your retirement. Yeah. And, uh, welcome John Ternus. We'll have lots to say about you soon. True. And, uh, we'll see you next week. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

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