So, Mayo, I have some more baseball to talk to you this week about. Oh, no. Not entirely related to baseball, but the revelation came to me at a baseball game. I'll say that. Usually I go to baseball games and I sit in the upper deck just to get whatever cheap ticket I can find because I go to so many games I can't be paying $100 a ticket every game. Last weekend, my Cincinnati Reds were in Baltimore playing the Orioles.
So I said, okay, I'm going to splurge for two games. I'm going to sit behind home play, get some great seats, take some cool pictures, and just vibe, as they say. So I'm sitting behind home plate taking pictures, and Emily's with me, and she took a few pictures, and we're just having a good time. And then we get to the car after the game, and I was like, hey, let's look at our pictures together.
I pulled my phone out thinking, I am the professional iPhone user. My pictures are going to look so much better than Emily's. I know how to use this phone's camera. And I'm looking at her pictures and say, damn, hers are better than mine. Why are hers better than mine? Her color is so much brighter, so much... It just pops more because you have the green. You want a lot of color in these pictures, right? You have the green grass, the perfectly green grass.
The reds are wearing the bright red uniforms. The Orioles are wearing orange uniforms. There's a lot of color. Saturation. Saturation, yeah. And you both have the same phone? Both have 16 Pro Maxes, yes.
so i'm looking to say why what is wrong with my pictures why do they look less saturated just washed out the color is not there the grass looks weird and then the light bulb goes off in my head photographic styles we're using different photographic styles for our pictures my next thought is i'm using the wrong photographic style i ruined these pictures like i didn't have the right settings enabled there's no way to salvage these pictures
I say, Emily, can you send me yours? I want to use yours when I post it on Instagram. I still don't, I like the colors on hers, but I don't think she got the framing just right. You know, she's shooting at like 2.3 X or something. She just like, Oh, She just opens the camera and zooms in. Pinch to zoom. Obviously, I came back from the wedding a couple of weeks ago. So many pictures being taken on phones. Everyone!
They just zoom in and it's always at the wrong, it's always at an off number. It's like, you're not on the 1X camera, you're not on the 2X camera, you're not on the 5X camera, you're just always in between. I'm like... please just take these photos at normal, you know, the round numbers and then we can always crop them afterwards. Yeah.
Just take them at the digital start and then worry about it later. But no one ever does. Everyone just zooms in immediately. No matter how many times I tried to train my family, just press the buttons at the bottom. Everyone pinched to zooms and just goes at a random, you know, fractional amount of zoom. And it's like, oh.
fantastic but yeah i can relate to that one so do you know what i'm forgetting about in my in my frustration with my pictures on the iphone 16 pro max there's a key feature that i'm forgetting exists now oh you can undo it you can change it you can edit photographic styles after the fact i had completely forgotten that this exists and once i remembered i was so happy i was like i can salvage these pictures
because if i use the what is it i think it's amber the amber photographic style and i use it with settings that tyler stallman posted on threads like when the iphone came out last last september And for the most part, they look good. I feel like it kind of gives a nice ambiance to your pictures. The colors seem good, but where it clearly falls down is when you're outside trying to get that saturation.
so with that knowledge in mind that i could go in and edit the photographic styles i went in played around and ultimately just landed on like the standard like apple's default because like these look these pictures look best with the default photographic style and i think that's probably just because apple's
default is saturated very colorful very bright because for most people that's what they want apple's default is like a normalization of all photos everyone takes right and so that's going to be heavily biased towards photos of groups outside, right? Yeah. close-ish to the baseball stadium.
It's just funny. I had completely forgotten that you could edit photographic styles. Because two years ago, you couldn't. If I had taken these pictures with a photographic style on my iPhone 15, I would be screwed. I would be standing there with pictures that I didn't like. because I ended up with a photographic style that didn't match the environment as well as it should have. Because with the 16s, they record more data, so you can...
turn the style off altogether or change it or anything. I mean, the crazy thing is you can take a photo on your phone, send it to my phone, which is an iPhone 14 Pro, and I can edit the photographic style despite my phone not being able to capture the information to make one that can do that. Yeah.
Yeah, or you can do it on a Mac, obviously. You can do it on an iPad. A lot of flexibility there. And to round out the camera discussion, the camera control was not used for any of my pictures or in most pictures. It's just, I wanted to, I tried to like the camera control. I tried to defend the camera control.
But the truth is, all it's good for is opening the camera app. And even then, there's so many other ways to access the camera app, like we talked about before, that you end up just forgetting it exists. disappointing to have a button on your iphone that you don't use but if they let you just set it like another action button do you think you'd use it more just like
And link it to something else. It's not like an icon of a camera on it. Do you know what I mean? They could just make it a second action button, which does something completely random. I don't know. I have the action button now. Go to the ChatGPT app. Oh, you know what I'd probably do is I'd link the camera control to, like, the Ford app so I can quickly, like, unlock my car, start the climate or something. Because Emily has her action button linked to the Tesla app.
Oh, yeah. She doesn't care about having quick access to chat GPT, so it works well for her. But that would definitely be more useful. Yeah, I put my... I don't have a camera control or action button phone for that matter. But I put the bottom right... you know, lock screen control. Oh, yeah. I put that to the home app because Yeah, that's smart. I find...
When I'm taking pictures, I either swipe, you know, do the horizontal swipe on the lock screen, or I'm just, like, by muscle memory unlocking the phone and being on the home screen just clicking on the camera icon, you know? so I didn't really use the lock screen buttons for it. I used the torch one, you know, the torch lock screen control, but the other one I put on the home app, because I'm just toggling the lights off when I'm at home, obviously.
If I had a camera control slash action button, I'd probably put one of them on the home app, because I use that quite a lot. That's a good one too. I know, because you can get, I obviously have the Control Center page set up for it, which you do use on occasion, but when you just get in the file out of your pocket to do something really quickly, it's kind of more annoying to... Swipe down, then change page and control centre.
and then do it from there because also you're not going to have every single control from your home available in the control center page right so sometimes you just want to know i just want to go to the home app and be able to do everything uh quickly so yeah that's why i have my lock screen button signed to anyway So let's change the topic and talk about Siri again.
New report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, and he explains that Mike Rockwell, the current head of Siri, who reports to Craig Federighi now. So that's where we left off. Mike Rockwell is in charge of Siri Engineering, and he reports to Craig Federighi. Erman says that Rockwell is replacing much of Ciri's leadership with his lieutenants from the Vision Pro Software Group. He's also restructuring teams related to speech, understanding, performance and user experience.
So everything, everything, the Siri team is being rebuilt from the ground up, just like Siri itself should be. The couple of names, I won't read through all, because Gurman has a lot of specific names in his report, and I won't read through all of them, but a couple of ones that stood out to me, and Gurman's description of these people stood out to me. Nate Bergman and Tom Duffy, who are both veteran software engineering managers, and they will join the Siri team to run underlying architecture.
Rockwell believes that these two people will lead to, quote, world-class and scalable technology. Duffy, this stood out to me, previously oversaw fundamental elements of the iPhone software experience as part of a group known as CoreOS. That's what I kind of failed to consider in my first read through Gurman's story, is that a lot of these people who worked on Vision Pro
have been at Apple for a very long time. They did not join Apple just to work on Vision Pro. They've worked on the iPhone, they've worked on the Mac, they've worked on the Apple Watch. They've just been pulled from team to team as Apple enters a new product category or focuses heavily on one platform or another for a specific year. So this is Apple just moving some of what they think is their best talent.
to the area of the company that needs the most help. And that kind of negates the whole argument, the whole obvious joke you can make that they're taking. The team from Vision Pro, which has not been a commercial success, and putting them on to Siri, which has also not been a commercial success or a success in any way, shape, or form. These people are very talented and have had their hands on a lot of platforms inside Apple.
that have been successes. And they were on the team that got Vision Pro out the door, which as we talked about before, is a feat in and of itself to ship an entirely new product category inside Apple. Yeah, and what series always struggled from is internal prioritization. And so...
If Rockwell is shaking up every part of the Serie leadership team, you have to expect that it's going to have a big consequence on the... eventual new Siri product you know like this is the best news ever because you could easily put someone new in charge and we've had it before where Siri got knocked around to the Federer-Igge group to the G&G group you know under ADQ originally and
It seemed like the leadership never really took the reins and forced it to actually make it better in a meaningful way. Rockwell. He's definitely trying, right? He's only got the job like a month ago and now he's already changed everybody who's in charge of it. And he's got Apple's top talent in the company, you know, looking at this stuff.
So I think this is really positive outlook. Obviously, you know, products are complicated and building things is more than just getting the best people in the world in there because John G. Andrews is clearly the best people in the world in the field, but he just, you know, different. requirements, assign different attitudes or behaviours. They're very complicated things to make products that scale to billions of users.
But I feel like Rockwell is really coming in here all guns blazing. And it's increased my hopes a lot because it's more than just a superficial change of the person at the top, you know, like he's actually going in there and being like, right, you're good at making user experience. You're good at making scalable systems. You're going to do this. You're going to do this. Apple as a company has always had top talent. But they've never really assigned that top talent to Siri.
I think at their cost, even before the LM revolution, they never gave it enough attention when it was becoming such a central tenet of all their new computing platforms, going back to easy, like, the apple watch right and then airpods and everything else that came that came from it like the apple watch kick-started a thing where voice was a huge central component of that product
but they never really gave it more attention. The most effort Apple gave cereal was in the first three years, and then they kind of just... Went in a steady state of doing nothing for a while. Not that it was like... I guess Siri's never been so bad at everything. There's some areas I feel like it's been pretty good at, including smart home control.
everything that's been bad at it's never really got better at right so like when i use siri at the moment you kind of know which domains of question you can ask it and get a decent answer to or it can do your job sending a message asking the weather home smart home control right Other stuff, which you are inviting the user to try when you just have an open-ended system and now you even have an open-ended text box because they invite you to type to Siri, right?
The whole world class of everything you can think of to talk to, Siri falls down dramatically compared to what people now expect from LLMs like ChatGPT and stuff where you can put any sort of question to ChatGPT and get some sort of answer out of it. Siri just can't do that. and it's never been able to do that, and they've never really tried to make it better on most of the domains that it could theoretically do, even before LLMs gave a clear path to make it better. This feels like...
Now they're actually going to do the thing. I feel like if Rockwell was in charge of Siri in 2015 when he took over the Vision Pro, he could have made Siri way better. And that's before LM's were even a thing, right? Like, there's been always... There's been always... improvements that they could have mined to make their voice assistant more faster, more reliable, answer more types of questions that they never really took seriously.
And now it seems like they've got someone in charge who is taking it seriously and can actually take advantage of the cutting edge. state-of-the-art technology which is generative LLM models that can actually power a modern assistant experience. And it goes back to something we talked about a couple weeks ago, too, where Rockwell has been that vocal critic of Siri internally. He seems to have been one of the few people.
really speaking his mind about how bad he thought Siri was. And that's because its shortcomings were getting in the way of the development of Vision Pro. So this is something he's been thinking about and watching from the outside for so long to where now he gets put in this position a month ago. And like you said, he's hit the ground running. Rearranging leadership has Craig Federighi above him now.
He's really been able to do all of the things I'm sure he's been thinking about doing for years at this point and now has the agency to go and do it. Yeah, and maybe there's been people in the serial group for a long time being like, look, we just need these engineers, this resources, this server capacity and this amount of money and we can make this way better. But that never got to the top of the chain, right?
Now you've got Rockwell there and he seems to have basically free reign to get whatever resources necessary to... get this thing on a better path and I'm really curious to see like you know how last week we spoke about the story where Mastry was curtailing the budget and stuff where
Apparently the Siri team wanted X budget, Cook approved it, but then mainstream was like, well, you can have less budget and just be more efficient. I'd be really curious to see if in the upcoming investor call, which is on the 1st of May, I think.
whether they talk about that in CapEx, because arguably they could do with a lot more server capacity and gpu capacity right so it'd be interesting to see if it made this and like and we're estimating that we're now forecasting to spend x on capital expenditure
Because that would actually be the first public acknowledgement that they've actually changed tack a little bit. So that would be something to look out for. In terms of when all of this Rockwell era series stuff actually comes to shipping. It's still going to take a little while, I think. I think at best, it's going to be iOS 19.
Right. Don't expect much in the iOS 18 cycle. At the very least, you're waiting until iOS 19. And I think German's even indicated that much of the better changes might even be an iOS 20 kind of thing. um so a year two years because it seems like they're kind of starting from scratch right like rock was coming is doing a whole new foundation is what i kind of gleaned from this and you can't make that
It just takes a while to get that going and get that up to speed. So at best, maybe iOS 19, but maybe more likely even the very end of iOS 19, like 19.4 or something, or iOS 20. So we've got a little while yet, but so far I'd say all the signs are pointing in the right direction of this actually being a meaningful improvement. And on the Maestri GPU stuff that we talked about last week, I did notice this week that the New York Times updated their story. I don't know if you saw this, but...
Oh, I didn't say that. Midway through the story, it says after this article was published, Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said the company had fulfilled Mr. Gene Andres' budget request for GPUs over time rather than all at once. She said Mr. Maestri had never asked the team to make its chips more efficient.
Pretty big update to the story if you want to take Apple PR at its word. Yes, I guess that is quite an incisive comment that the NYT made that now Apple is... quite staunchly rejected because you don't see them do that very often right now direct and saying this is just straight wrong and it's kind of i thought it was a bit weird a bit i don't know bury the lead a little bit for the new york times not to add like a dedicated update at the top or the bottom of the story
because you have to go back and reread the whole thing to find that that was inserted right in the middle, randomly. Yeah. They definitely passed me by, so thank you for bringing that up, because it kind of defends both Maestri and Gianandre. Yeah, right. Whereas before it was... kind of almost better for Apple to leave it as it was because it kind of put some of the blame on the person who's now not there anymore. True, yeah. I mean...
Make sure he is still there in a smaller capacity, but he's not on the leadership page anymore, right? Because someone else took over Kevin Perea. In charge of real estate, I think. Yeah, now he runs the buildings.
But at least before, it kind of gave a scapegoat for someone who wasn't actually in charge anymore. So for them to come out and defend it like that, I think, speaks quite highly. I mean, I understand why they felt the need to do so, just because it creates such a discrepancy of power if you have the CFO.
overruling the CEO on something like that. But yeah, it would have been, it is an easy, Maestri is an easy person to point the finger at. But Apple didn't want to do that for whatever reason. See, I'm excited for the new Siri, Revolution. I think we're going to have to wait a while for it to already come out. Yeah, you said probably nothing in iOS 18. I think absolutely nothing in iOS 18.
Well, the only reason I put probably was because that same NYT article said that they were going to do personal contacts in the fall, right? Well, that would be iOS 19, though, wouldn't it? iOS 19.1.2. Right, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, when I said 18 before, I think I meant 19. Yeah, so I think iOS 19.0, nothing of substance than 19.1, 19.2. I think...
Either of those updates will almost certainly include the App Intense stuff. The personal context stuff is what I'm still wishy-washy on. Yeah, that might be the iOS 20. And of course whatever improvements are coming that we don't know about right now, those are probably even further off.
Yeah, because I think we're kind of expecting Rockwell to make Siri more like a conversational LLM style. I feel like a good goal would live for them to get rid of the weird stopgap where... 25% requests get shouted off to ChatGPT for an answer, you know, and make everything just like seamless and unified. And yeah, I don't know why I said iOS 18 before, because that's the current version. I'm in the iOS 19, which is announced in June. Yeah, but probably not until iOS 20, which is 2026.
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It's time to celebrate a big anniversary, Mayo. The 10-year anniversary of the 12-inch MacBook. April 2015, Apple released the best MacBook it's ever made, the 12-inch MacBook. single port on the side Super slim, super light. Something that Apple should bring back, I'd say. Yeah, that was a nice laptop.
It was a nice form factor of a laptop with a pretty poor chip inside it. And a pretty dicey keyboard. Oh, yeah. Oh, I forgot that was the first butterfly keyboard generation. Yeah. Although back then, the... controversy was less about the reliability and just more about people didn't like the low travel of it. Zero travel of it on that first 12-inch match.
The complaints about reliability kind of didn't start to the MacBook Pro, I think, from memory, which was another year on. I don't know if they just didn't sell enough of the 12-inch MacBook or it just wasn't a problem on that particular model as much, but... I remember people being mad that there's basically no travel, but the reliability problems with dust and ingress didn't really come up until the pros adopted it.
But that's not the actual anniversary we're here to celebrate. 10 years of the Apple Watch, a far more important, a far bigger anniversary. Which shit, well, like a week after the 12-inch MacBook. Yeah, because they didn't want the 12-inch MacBook to... cover up the huge success of the Apple Watch, because they knew the 12-inch MacBook would be the bigger product, clearly.
Apple Watch was announced in September 2014, shipped April 24th, 2015. Did you buy, I'm assuming you bought the first Apple Watch. i had it on day one me too i got the 40 what is what was it 42 millimeter stainless steel with the leather whatever leather loop oh you you got fancy from the off fancy from the get-go I guess my Apple Watch history is a bit messy because I bought it on day one.
But when I bought it in spring of 2015, I was in high school. I was a junior in high school. And the rules around wearing an Apple Watch during class were a bit murky at best. You kind of got some funny looks. People wondered if you were like cheating on things.
And people were always asking you about it because obviously it was not a mainstream product at that point, right? There were not a lot of high schoolers walking around with an Apple Watch on their wrist. I mean, watches weren't very popular for young people. So I remember buying the stainless steel version and I told my mom about it and she was like, oh, you got the Apple Watch. That's cool. How much was it? I was like, well, it starts at. What is it? $399? $350. $350.
But I got the stainless steel version. She said, oh, that sounds fancy. So what was that, about $400? And I was like, uh, I think it was like $700. Yeah, that's kind of $400. Yeah, $400 sounds good. So yeah, I went fancy from the start. I'm assuming you did not. No, I bought the Apple Watch Sport, as it was called at the time. 38 millimeter. Oh, so you've been small from the start. Yeah, my wrist is too small. I remember...
Day one, opening the Apple Watch and both being incredibly impressed at the design, the form factor, having a screen, a touchscreen so small. and then kind of i guess reality hit me a bit where you realized quickly just how limited that first apple watch was i remember downloading the MLB app, because they were there on day one with a dedicated app for Apple Watch. Like MLB usually is. MLB is generally a good store of Apple's platforms. And you would open the MLB app on Apple Watch.
And basically, at least as far as I can remember, all you would see was like plain text of the score of a game. No further details, no like... Real-time updating, just plain text of the score of the game. And maybe plain text. And it was slow because the app was basically loading on the phone and just sending the result to the watch and it took forever. Because on that first Apple Watch, it was so apparent.
that all I was doing was mirroring stuff from the iPhone, which in a lot of situations made it quicker just to pull your iPhone out of your pocket. And like, if you just want to check the weather or check your email or something, it was so much quicker just to pull your iPhone out of your pocket than use the wall. Yeah, for any app that wasn't like an Apple app, it was... Just always relying from the phone.
The only apps I can recall in the first one feeling somewhat responsive was like Activity, the Workout app, and then maybe the Messages app, maybe. But even the Messages app, despite being a native app, was pretty slow on that first watch. Even the weather took forever to load on the first watch. It was a very constrained platform. So you don't really use your first Apple Watch? Not particularly. I wore it off and on. I would wear it. There's no compelling reason for me to like...
take the leap and wear it every day. And I don't think that really changed until the series 2 in 2016. At that point, I was in college. It was a bit more socially acceptable to wear an Apple Watch. More people had them at that point. It still wasn't super widespread. I don't think it really became quote-unquote mainstream or widespread until the Series 3 the following year.
but the series 2 wasn't big enough update and righted enough wrongs for me to make the effort to wear it every day to charge it every day because it was so To add a device that you had to charge every day and that sometimes, even if you put it on at 8 a.m., wouldn't last until the end of the day, that was just such a big hurdle to get over. So there had to be enough benefits for you to want to make the lifestyle change to charge it every day.
and with the series 2 i think they did tick a lot of those boxes for me it had the brighter display had better battery life the performance was like Because that was the S2 chip, I guess. And it was actually noticeably better. You could do things like check the weather, check messages. check a baseball score, and feel like it was quicker than pulling your phone out of your pocket, which I don't think was true until the series two. Well, somehow, I survived on the series original.
Until the series 4. Until the series 4. Yeah. Yeah. I pushed it. but i remember i i all the things you say about the first watch completely true but i think i wore it every day i don't think i um I don't think there were many times when I didn't wear it. I just got in the routine of charging at night. I never use it for sleep tracking stuff, right? So I'd wear it for thingy. And I guess back then I was doing less workouts and stuff, which really killed the battery. Yep.
So I'd just kind of wear it. It would track my, like, calories and steps and stuff. And I just kind of used it as that, plus notifications, really, is what I used it for. I mean, even today, that's kind of what my main thing I used the watch for, and I just found enough value out of it to keep wearing it. But the first one was just so slow. It didn't happen- It was kind of that thing where like,
At the time, it didn't feel as bad, but as soon as you think about it in hindsight, it was just awful. Everything was just so bad. Nowadays, I can use my Apple Watch to check the weather and do some other stuff and use Siri. Even Siri on the original Apple Watch.
not talking about performance of Siri, but just, like, pressing the button to invoke it, and it would, like, load, and then it would wait, and then you'd talk, and then it would, you know, like, it was so, everything just had this massive multi-second delays on stuff. But I still kind of felt like it was worthwhile enough to me that I did wear it basically every day.
I think at the time with the first Apple Watch 2, it did so much. And at the time, it was kind of cool. It was like, oh, it can do X, Y, and Z. It can do all of this stuff. But as time progressed, and also looking back at it in hindsight, you realized, yes, it could do so much. but it couldn't do anything great except for the activity rings. That's the one thing that they nailed from the get-go. And I was reading through the original Apple Watch press release from September 2014.
And there's all kinds of stuff. They know at that point they have to explain the digital crown. They have to explain the Taptic Engine. They explain all of that. They explain that it's the world's most accurate time piece. which is still just such a weird oh yeah that was their favourite phrase it was always like he's accurate to 50 milliseconds okay the activity ring stuff is what they nailed from day one and I don't think they knew it at the time I think it was
Something that they were proud of, but it's the second-to-last paragraph in the press release. I don't think they knew just how much of, A, a brand the Activity Ring system would become, and B, just how eventually it would become. The feature of the Apple Watch. Yeah, they kind of nailed it, because the Mind 3 activity rings are still the same to this day, you know? You've got move, you've got... exercise and you've got standing up.
And you know one thing that watchOS 3 added, which corresponded to the Series 2, which is when I started wearing the Apple Watch every day, it added the activity sharing system. And once you add that level of competition... I think it just makes it so much more enticing to her every day. I remember me and Zach in particular, before WatchOS 3, we would just send each other screenshots of activity, and that's like, whatever.
But with watchOS 3, you could just see each other's activity throughout the day. That was such an upgrade. That was such a cool way to make the Apple Watch social in a way that it hadn't been before. Scribble
Apple Watch S3, I remember. Because that's why I didn't use messages on the original Apple Watch, because you always had to dictate, because voice was the only option for input. And back then, the voice dictation was a lot worse, so it would get it wrong a lot more often. It would take a long time. These days, the voice situation is a lot better. It even puts the automatic punctuation in for you. Incredibly wild.
And if you're in a busy environment or a noisy environment, you can do the scribble. And now they even have a full keyboard layout. But I remember using the Apple Watch a lot more when they had scribble because I would then use it for messages and just... Because you don't use it for long messages, but when your phone's in your pocket, someone says something to you or not respond with basically one word and maybe a smiley face, and Scribble is more than enough for that.
Yes, that accelerated my usage of it a lot. the health stuff in particular i think is such a such a tentpole it's the thing that's had the most impact on both me personally and societally over the years i think it my health my physical fitness and stuff has like everybody i think has kind of ebbed and flowed over the years
But I was thinking about it this morning. I think I can confidently say that I am in better physical shape now in a world with the Apple Watch than I would have been without the Apple Watch. And that doesn't mean that I... close my rings every day or I'm doing 90 minutes of workouts a day. It just means I'm keeping a closer eye on everything. I'm keeping a closer eye on my step count. The stand ring gets made fun of a lot for whatever reason. It's just like the thing people like to poke at.
but it actually does motivate me not to just sit there for six hours and binge watch TV without getting up to at least do something, without getting up to take the dogs outside or just kind of take a minute to walk around. The stand ring is effective for what it's meant to do. But there's also something that they didn't address until this year with watchOS 11, which is the inability to have the flexibility around the ring system.
So like at the height of my fitness journey, which was 2019-ish, when I started doing CrossFit every day. I became so obsessed with keeping my move streak and filling my rings every day to the point where it eventually A. led to injury and B. led to just burnout because there was no way to lower. or to take a rest day and maintain your move goal, maintain your strength.
You can pose your strike. Yeah, it just, it lacked that last little bit. And that's something that I was so happy to see with watchOS 11 this year. It's the first material change to that ring system. The Apple Watch launched, probably. Yeah. Yeah, unless you count Fitness Plus, which is kind of... It doesn't count. But it does use the rings, right? It does. It does integrate well with the rings, yeah.
And the other thing I want to shout out for the Apple Watch, actually, that I do use a lot, and from the very beginning, Apple Pay. Oh, yeah. Yep. Pay my wrist. all the time that's why that's my de facto paper method now when i'm out about and i remember doing with the first apple watch and people look at you really weird um but 10 years on People get it. You don't even have to explain it.
And the other thing I used the watch for, even back to the original one, when I'm in London and I don't know where I am, and I get off the train and I want to walk somewhere, I always feel... There's a lot of phone theft in London and people just run around on motorbikes and just whip your phone out of your hand if you're not careful.
So what I like to do is I get out of the train network from the underground. I'll set my route to the... destination as walking directions and then I leave my phone in my pocket and I just rely on the watch for navigation and something they added even the original watch was it does the little different haptic taps depending where you got to turn left or right
Some percentage of the journey don't need to look at the screen. You can just carry on walking down the road and it will give you a tap in decent time. And you know if you're going left or right at the end of the junction. So that's something I've used.
when i have to travel and go into cities and stuff i use that all the time um because i don't like running around my phone in my hand regardless plus the theft factor is like a thing on the top of it so the watch really should keep your phone in your pocket and you can just get them the map up on the watch and
navigate with that with the tap gestures and something it was more recent but whenever they did the redesign on watchOS like 678 they like changed the navigation on the watch to make it a much more usable thing in terms of showing your next direction with a glance at the screen. I think it also helped that the screen just got bigger in size, right? With the original Apple Watch, it was more like
You couldn't really see the map on the operating system app. It was just like the directions, like turn left, turn right. The more recent Apple Watches. You can see the full res map. And then if you scroll the crown, you can see the turn-by-turn direction in each case. So they've made that experience.
back there every single year. The thing with the Apple Watch health stuff, to go back to that, is the Apple calls it the guardian angel angle where it's always watching you it's always monitoring things about you and we've seen so many stories over the years of the apple watch alerting people to afib alerting them to their heart rate being too fast too slow the fall detection the crash
crash detection stuff. All of that, I think, on the surface can easily seem like marketing spin. And Apple does capitalize on it. They do tap into it for their marketing and their promotion. But all of those stories are real. All of those things actually happen to people. I know people, I know my dad got alerted to the fact that he has AFib thanks to his Apple Watch. I think we all know people who... That stuff has helped and they have either told people about health problems that they have.
or giving people enough insight into their health to say if you don't do this, you might end up having these health problems, right? I think when you look back at the Apple Watch, that's probably the biggest impact it's had on society is that health stuff.
And I think of all the things that Tim Cook has said, because he doesn't say much. Like, he's a very reserved person. He's very PR trained. And this is a very PR answer, to be fair. So if he came up to it, credit to him or to the PR person who came up to it. credited them, but he says that Apple's greatest contribution to society will be in healthcare. And I'm starting to lean towards the argument that they've already made that contribution with the Apple Watch.
We know that they have bigger ambitions in healthcare. with like this ai doctor thing supposedly in the works they tried to start their own clinics but that failed But if you just look at the health stuff of the Apple Watch and you look at the impact it's had on people, I don't think it's a reach to say that that has helped more people than just about anything Apple has done.
Yeah, if they want to push that to be wholly true, they definitely need to step over the... the bridge of actually giving people like recommendations and like advice and not just like stats right which is kind of where the ai doctor thing is leaning on um but you can definitely see see the direction i mean i remember when i got covid in 22
I can't remember, I think it was post-vaccine at that time, maybe post the first vaccine. Oh yeah, I would think so. All this stuff blends together now, yeah. But I didn't get it like, I didn't get like super bad symptoms, so I just had like the bad cold, you know, kind of thing. But you were isolating or whatever and like staying away from people. And it just went on for like two weeks. And halfway through, I was like, this is really, you know, this is like, geez, it's taken a while.
but what you could track on the watch was obviously it's always tracking your wrestling heart rate and you could very easily see on the heart rate graph like here's where I got COVID because it really spiked and then gradually over these two weeks the wrestling heart rate would just go back down to normal.
And I just remember thinking, yeah, the watch is doing something cool for me here. Overall, though, do you think the Apple Watch has turned into something that is a hit? Do you think it's a... Is it Apple's biggest... product since the iPhone? That's a hard question. Yeah. AirPods are kind of bigger. AirPods are bigger, but have they? Would the world be significantly worse off if people just had to use standard Bluetooth headphones or plug a cable into their phones to listen to music?
I think if you look at the overall package of a product and the overall feature set, then the Apple Watch has to be in that spot. Yeah, it's definitely close. I do hear from a lot of regular people that... like it kind of like
They have an Apple Watch, but they wouldn't care so much if they didn't have one. Do you know what I mean? I do hear that sentiment around. It's not like the Apple Watch has become an essential part of... society but on the other hand they've sold millions and millions and you see them everywhere so they are super popular but I do feel some people who get them and they're like they don't know what to do with them um I guess and
Some of that comes to the fact that if you get one and the out-of-the-box default settings just flood your notifications and flood your stuff, you really have to invest in it and curate what's coming to the watch and what isn't to really, I feel like, get the most value out of it. And... IOS, WatchOS doesn't really help you on that basis.
That's where I'm hoping they kind of go. You know, like the reduced interruptions focus mode on the iPhone would be great on the Apple Watch as like a default setting for like, you know, prioritizing notifications and the prior notification stuff. So maybe they're heading more in that direction, trying to make it more of like an active assistant. Whereas...
I feel like if I hadn't changed from the default settings, I would enjoy the Apple Watch a lot less. But as it stands, I've basically curated it. If something taps me on the watch, it's super important. And then anything else just goes to the phone. And ever since I've got the watch, the phone's always on silent mode, right? So for 10 years now, my phone is basically silent and only ever vibrates.
I also have the Apple Watch muted, so it only ever vibrates, but it's just, you know, it's enough of a tap to alert me to it, right? I never miss a notification that's actually important. So I think the original Apple Watch when it came out got really bad reviews. If you look back, you know, the reviews are pretty negative on like the version gadget and stuff. But 10 years on, yes, they did.
tweak the narrative, they did tweak their position in the product, but the core tenants, like that original Ampoch presentation, it was what? It was like communication, fitness, and notifications. And I still kind of feel like that rings true today. I use it most for messages the health app, the activity app, the fitness app, the workout app. and notifications. And that's kind of what they pitched it as.
But then they also were like, here's everything else you can do, including like draw pictures of fish and send them to your friend and, you know, send your heartbeat and all that. All that stuff kind of fell away. Yeah. But the core essence of the product still kind of remains and sustains to this day. plus Apple Pay which I use all the time. I think if I look at what I use, the Apple Watch for most, it's the fitness, it's the activity rings.
It's messages, like you kind of said, notifications to a certain degree because I do have them very, very pared down on the watch and on my phone too. That's something I've done a lot in the past couple of years is if I'm not in quote unquote like work hours.
The only people who are getting through to me are Emily and, like, my sisters and my dad. That's all. Like, I have notifications on my iPhone and, as a bi-product on my watch, so reined in. So, like you said, if I get a notification, I know it's important.
The addition of cellular was a big one and it does allow me to both leave the house without my iPhone and leave it behind and go on a walk and kind of have a certain level of disconnect from the world but also still be reachable and also if something happens still have the ability to contact help.
But I absolutely think the Apple Watch has had the biggest impact of any Apple product since the iPhone. I think AirPods are great, and I think AirPods have the ability to get better, better with some of the health features that have been rumored for them, some of the camera stuff that's been rumored. but in terms of overall impact and overall just being a well-rounded product with the iteration over the years to both the software and the hardware.
the apple watches as easily that product in apple's lineup yeah because it's also a more of a unique product category because Apple was always selling headphones, but now they sell really nice wireless ones. They were never selling watches before or anything that you wore on yourself. And so they kind of established that in a big, big way.
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That's StoryWorth. Right now, save $10 on your first purchase when you go to storyworth.com slash 9to5mac. That's storyworth.com slash 9to5mac to save $10 on your first purchase. Thanks to StoryWorth for sponsoring. Let's go back to our friends in the European Union. The Digital Markets Act, they have announced the first set of fines under the DMA. Apple has been hit with a 500 million euro fine.
which equates to, I think, right around $570 million. The biggest issue the EC, the European Commission, takes with Apple's compliance or lack of compliance under the DMA is its anti-steering rules. The EU says that developers should be able to inform customers free of charge of alternative offers outside the app store steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases and that apple fails to comply with this
The commission orders Apple to remove the technical and commercial restrictions on steering outside of the App Store. This one feels relatively straightforward. If you look at Apple's attempts to comply with the DMA. This is one of the areas where it really does feel like, what's the word? Malicious compliance, I think.
Because right now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the fee, the app store fee for a developer to send people outside and make an external purchase is 17%. Correct. I'm a bit murky. It's been a while since we've talked about that, but yeah. It's hard, or it's easy rather, to see why the European Commission doesn't like that particular aspect of things.
Yeah, I mean, the DMA says free of charge and Apple charges 17% on stuff that's not even being sold in the app itself, right? So that was always a matter of conflict.
17% is, I guess, is from Apple's side better than when you weren't allowed to do it at all, right? Because the original rules were you were just not allowed to tell anybody about anything outside the application in terms of where you can buy stuff. And now it's like, Well, you can, and you can direct people to buy it there, but if you do, you've got to give Apple 17% on the back end.
This was raised last year when they announced these changes, right? We were like, well, the DMA doesn't necessarily say they can get away with this, but this is what Apple's announced. And fast forward a year, Apple hasn't changed their mind. The EU is obviously having conversations with Apple about it and they're not happy. And here's the fine to make them change it. Because I saw some people criticize this as like, oh, it's only 500 million euros. Apple can pay that and get on with a day.
the point is it's 500 million euros right now and if in a month's time apple hasn't changed their tune on their behavior they're going to find them another 500 million euros if not higher so i feel like it's a pretty big fine for
This is the first infraction time, right? There was comparisons to the Netherlands dating app stuff, you remember that? Where for a while the Netherlands was, what, fining them like 50 million euros every month or something because they weren't happy with Apple's rules for that region.
And eventually the 50 million euros stacked up enough that Apple just was like, okay, we're not going to fight with you anymore. We'll give you what you want. And they stopped getting fined. This is 500 million euros. And it could very easily be a billion euros if they don't change their tune, because it's not just the fine, it's also...
a requirement and basically forcing them to change their behaviour, which they'll review in a couple of weeks, in a month. And if the 17% commission is still there, I think he's going to slap them with another $500 million fine. I feel like it's a pretty big deterrent on continued what they would call disobedience with the DMA. And I also, like, as an individual, the idea that Apple can monopolise...
The entirety and the only way that you're allowed to make a purchase is by using the in-app purchase system inside the App Store. It's probably never going to be long-term viable. And so there's always going to be compromise there. Apple didn't really, was pretty inflexible.
And now they've been forced to be as flexible as possible. So they're kind of reaping what they saw on this one, right? Where it's like, maybe if they'd have been slightly more upfront about it a few years ago, they might let people, you know, talk about offers available outside the app and give them a link to it and give them one single website link.
um for free or something um but now they're basically being forced to go open season on it where it's like well We tried to let you handle it, but no. So now that you're cracking down, you've got to give free and open access for people to link elsewhere, which Spotify and Epic and everybody else will love. because they can then link to the website, they can go to the website, make the purchase there, they don't owe Apple a dime.
the customers will be happy. But again, this is only within the European Union, right? So it's not worldwide, but it's a big chunk in terms of population, at least. The $570 million amount, I think why you see people focusing on that. is because under the DMA, what we've said time and time again is that they could fine Apple 10% of its annual worldwide revenue.
And that would have come out to $39.1 billion. So we've come in well, well, well below that. And I think part of that is due to the ongoing... trade war drama stuff between Trump and the rest of the world, even this week with just the $570 million fine announcement. The White House said, this novel form of economic extortion will not be tolerated by the United States. So you have that factor where the EU is clearly trying to balance the trade.
tariff and relationship with the United States. Then we've also heard it was a report in the Financial Times where The current leadership of the European Commission is different than when the DMA started, right? They went through a leadership change in December. And according to the Financial Times, the new commission leadership is focusing more on the compliance of big tech companies with the law rather than on these monstrous, super high fines and the billions of euros.
I don't think they were ever going to get fined 10% of their revenue. I don't think 10% was ever in the cards just because that is insane. But I do think there was a world in which we did see them cross over that $1 billion marker. So that's why we see people focusing on the, not small, but... for Apple relatively inconsequential $570 million fine.
Yeah, I mean, they got fined, what, $2 billion for the Spotify music streaming case from the EU? Mm-hmm. That was only a year and a half ago or something when that concluded. But the 10% thing was always like the upper upper band. It was never going to be that high. I think 500 million euro fine is not...
is enough to get Apple's attention, right? Yes, it's only 0.1% of their... yearly revenue whatever but they're not going to want to take 500 million euro fines every month and so they're going to be forced into change even if they don't like it there's enough for them to be forced to change So then in addition to the anti-steering stuff, you have the third party app marketplace and the European Commission is equally as unhappy with that.
They say Apple is required to allow for the distribution of apps on iOS by means other than through the App Store. So in practical terms, this means that Apple should allow third-party app source on iOS and apps to be downloaded to the iPhone directly from the web. And on the surface, with the alternative app marketplace stuff and the web distribution stuff, it sounds like Apple would be in compliance with that.
The EC says that Apple failed to comply with this obligation in view of the conditions it imposes on app and app store developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels are disincentivized from doing so. as this requires them to opt for business terms that include the core technology fee. Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels.
and Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative distribution channels. That's a reference to the amount of steps you have to go through to approve the security and then go back. But the core technology field is a big part of this too, where it's like,
Yes, you can offer it outside the app store, but you've got to pay big amounts of money to do it. This is where things, like what the European Commission wants Apple to do about the steering stuff is relatively clear, right? What they want them to do about the alternative app distribution stuff is a bit more... Well, if they want free of charge, then...
The Core Technology Fiesta guy. But they don't explicitly say free of charge. Correct. They kind of just say we don't like the Core Technology Fiesta as it is today and we also don't like all these eligibility requirements. or passing the ball back to you and saying to go figure it out. It's because the anti-steering staff has already passed the preliminary view. That was ruled, like...
last year, about a year ago, and then Apple's given time to respond, and then obviously there were some backdoor dealings, and then the outcome was they were not happy, so they got slapped with a fine. This is like, for the third-party distribution stuff, it's a it's a step earlier right so the EU's not like inclined to say everything out in public I think they have like
So you have to assume they're talking to Apple behind the scenes in a bit more detail about what they want to see and there's a bit more clarity there. They don't give everything in the press release. But, talking about the fine not being small or big, the fine only applies to the anti-steering stuff. In another year, they could come with a fine for the third-party app store distribution stuff as well, if they want to.
So you could have another $500 million or more just in fines for that. So the fines rack up if you don't change your ways, right? But yeah, the strictest interpretation of the DMA, everything is meant to be done free of charge. So if that's what they're stickling over, then the core technology fee is not in compliance. But we have to wait longer to see what the resolution is there. Because obviously Apple wants to get some money for the other hand.
Whether they'd be allowed to or not is a different question, but they spent the time and effort to make this free structure, including the core technology fee and everything else that goes along with it. So they at least thought they'd be allowed to do it. The EU's like, preliminarily, no. So now Apple can form a reply, they can change policy if they want to, and then the EU will respond in full matter in the coming months. And Apple responded to this in a statement that I found via CNN.
They said this is yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple and forcing it to give away its technology for free. Apple said, we have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the commission continues to move the goalposts every step of the way. They did get one bit of good news, though, because the changes around default apps
So you remember there was a thing about, oh, you couldn't uninstall the Safari and you couldn't uninstall the camera app and all that stuff. And then default app settings for messaging and phone calls and maps and navigation.
and the default web browser choice screen thing. So like in the EU, when you launch the iPhone, it says, do you want to use Safari or do you use these other ten browsers and it has that screen you have to explicitly pick one and move on and then it reminds you every now and again about the choice all of that stuff
the EU is happy with. So on that one, the case is closed officially. User choice obligations, they were happy with Apple's implementation of that. So I guess they've... close the book on one small section of Apple's compliance. But that was never really the mainline stuff that Apple wasn't concerned about, right? It was always going to be more of the App Store stuff. The usatory stuff was always kind of secondary and a bit of a distraction, really.
but I guess that's some small conceit where they can at least say, yeah, we did comply, look at this, you're happy with this. Obviously, the overarching, the bigger stuff is where the money's made, and that's still under contention.
Because it's been a couple of days since this phone came out and we haven't heard them say, well now we're removing the 17% commission on purchases made outside of the App Store. So we're still kind of in the holding pattern of waiting to see how they will... not get another 500 million euro fine on the anti-steering stuff. They have 60 days, I think, to respond and make a change, I believe is what the...
the European Commission's announcement said. So you have to imagine that inside Apple, they've been preparing for this. They've known that this is coming, even throughout developing all of these changes that they've made so far. They have a plan B. They have a plan C. And if this happens, then we do this. If that happens, then we do that. They know what they're going to do. It's just a question of... announcing it, implementing it and getting approval from the European Commission.
Because I think about the web distribution thing. That was clearly something that Apple, they didn't show that card on their first attempt to comply with the DMA. They came out later and said, okay, we'll do web distribution. You've got to pay the core technology fee still, but you can do, you don't have to be inside a third-party app marketplace. I don't know what happens next here but it's clear that this is far from over.
I don't think we're going to see material changes to what has happened so far. Maybe with the core technology fee stuff, what they do is Make it so only the developer of the app marketplace has to pay the fee the first time the app marketplace is downloaded, but individual apps inside the app marketplace don't pay the fee.
But the DMAs mainly protect the third-party marketplaces too, so they could still say the core technology fee is unfair on that. It's just how far they want to enforce the wording and where is the middle ground between what Apple has announced and what the EC wants them to announce. What if you look at anti-steering?
the middle ground is not good enough right yeah because yeah apple made changes for anti-steering quite significant changes to anti-steering and the eu's not happy with it so they got the fine and they wanted to make more changes so
If they enforce that one as wholeheartedly, it doesn't matter what the middle ground is. It basically just means you've got to do everything and let everybody have a free throw. When it's really, like the EU is a big market, but it's not as big as China or the US, right? The big implications of this stuff is it all comes in and then a few more months go by and the US is like...
We want that over here too. Why can't we have third-party marketplaces for free or anti-steering for free? That's when it really hurts Apple's financials. When it's just the EU, it doesn't matter so much. But when that's then used as a template for the entire world, then the App Store Commission is undermined. Which I can't remember if we talked about it on the show, but there was the push in Brazil, I think, for...
Apple to do this exact same thing, pointing to the fact that they've already done all of this in the European Union. and they haven't shown a material impact to their business. Yeah, and there's murmurs about it being replicated in the UK as well. The US, I guess they've got the DOJ complaint, right? which includes the App Store. To a certain degree, yes. To a certain degree, but it wasn't the focus of the DOJ. And the administration might be...
Not wanting to come down hard on big tech at them, but again, unclear. It's all murky and fuzzy, and these things are not just short-term issues. These are long-term issues. The DMA is not going to disappear. So even if you want to wait another five years for different people to be in charge, in the US, then they might immediately go, well, now it's time to copy and paste what the EU's done. And that duty services revenue really gets undermined.
All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback at happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And, Mayo, what about you? At BZMA. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.