Why did Apple ice out the most famous Apple blogger?

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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we're talking about tech and the business of writing about tech with John Gruber. who makes a living writing about Apple at his Daring Fireball blog. That description of John writing about Apple doesn't really do it justice. He's one of the earliest bloggers. He's been at it for a couple decades.

But more importantly, he is enormously influential when it comes to all things Apple. So today we're going to do two things at once. We're going to get insight from John about Apple's newest software, its approach to AI, the way it works or doesn't work with developers.

And also about just sort of the business of running an old school blog and why it still works for him. Because I think it's kind of interesting. On the one hand, what John does, he's blogging on a free site for a niche audience, is now pretty rare. On the other hand, as we discuss, it's very much of the moment, except now people are doing what he does with subsac-style newsletters, and they're hoping to find paid subscribers. We discuss all this at the end of the conversation.

Anyway, enough preamble. Let's have the actual conversation. Here's me talking to John Gruber.

John, you've been writing Daring Fireball forever in internet terms. 2002, is that right? That's correct. August 2002. Is your day job, right? This is what you do for a living. You write about Apple. That is, well, I never think of it that way. And it's especially founding in 2002. It was an era when everything was Mac whatever, Mac News, Mac this, Mac that, and let alone Apple this, the Apple that.

It's turned out that way, but I've always thought I'm just writing about what interests me most. And if Apple ever stopped being the most interesting, I would just shift.

Fair enough. I want to talk to you about Apple. I want to talk to you about the business of writing about Apple and what is interesting to you. Let's start with really big picture Apple stuff. Apple just held us developers conference last week, which is in theory. aimed at developers, has practically become sort of an Apple marketing thing as well.

Apple announced a bunch of new software updates. If you're a normal person who uses an iPhone to text and watch TikTok, maybe play a game, is anything Apple rolled out last week? Is that going to be meaningful to you? prompt you to go buy an iphone no i don't think it was going to make you buy an iphone um but the changes that they make year to year did people definitely notice i mean and they you know last year

they changed the layout of the front page of the Photos app. And it became a bit of a sensation. And to a degree where it... Made me feel weird because I've made a living over decades nitpicking details like that.

It's not that I didn't notice, but I didn't think it was a big deal, but it became like a huge thing on TikTok, you know, like, oh my God, what'd they do to the photos app? For normals, for normal people. Yeah, that normal people felt... discombobulated or lost at the front page of the photos app and unusually for apple this year they announced the next version of the photos app coming in the fall and said some of you told us this year that you missed the tab at the

front level, which was sort of like just a high level tab between your library, which just shows your photos, which is really what people wanted to go back to. And then a tab switch to collections, which is where all these albums are like your friends and your.

handmade albums and all this stuff. So people notice stuff like that. That's one little example. So you're a normal person. You buy a new iPhone next fall or eventually your software is upgraded to the new iOS. What are you going to notice?

I think given last year, people might notice that the photos app kind of defaults back to the way it used to be. There's another big change sort of like that with the phone app where the phone app. hasn't really i mean there's there've been interface style changes you know ios 7 famously i think was 2014 and got rid of all the texture and depth and fake leather and fake metal and just sort of went to

to a look that is held true to this day. People call it flat, whatever. But the actual organization of the phone app has been more or less unchanged since Steve Jobs introduced it.

in january 2007 where you know at the bottom of the phone app you've got favorites recent contacts keypad voicemail as five tabs across the bottom And they are defaulting to a new, I forget what they call it, like a combined view where your recents and your voicemails and I think your favorites are all sort of in one list. that you can scroll i think it sounds like a great idea i've it kind of drives me nutty that the recents and the voicemails

are two different tabs that aren't even next to each other. And they both give you a red badge. So if like you called me and I don't answer, now I've got like two badges. I've got you as a recent and as a voice. I am often confused about that, but I kind of shrug and go, all right, I'll just.

mash some buttons and see what happens there's in my in my social media feeds there's a lot of discussion about something called liquid glass which is sort of uh overall visual refresh and people don't like it because people like to complain about things again do you think a normal person will pick up their phone next fall and go what I'm confused by this yeah I don't think they're going to be confused because I think it is sort of

Like a refresh, not a redesign. Like back in 2014 when Johnny Ive took over UI design, not just physical device industrial design, and they came out with this iOS 7. It was wow. Like they got rid of everything. Everything looked totally different. This just seems like not a new. coat of paint but just sort of upgrading but it's still you know it's like going into a store and they've closed for a while and they've put up new lighting and it looks a lot newer but everything is where it used to be.

So it's shined up and people go, oh, it's different. I can tell a newer phone from an older phone, which may be part of the point. Yeah. And I think they're bringing back some of the fun of interface design that they've sort of been deliberately no fun.

for maybe 10 years like when you you know how like when you're selecting text and you get like a magnifying glass above your finger as you slide it around on the phone to help you see because the text is so tiny and your fingers covering it up now it looks like a drop of water. because it's both magnifying and has like this 3D depth that tapers off at the edges. But as you move your finger like a liquid, this is where the liquid glass comes from, it stretches a bit, you know, like Quicksilver.

And then when you stop moving your finger, it kind of comes back to being a circle. And that's just fun. Sort of like the Terminator 2 metal guy. So the nerds will appreciate it. Normals will or won't care. I think we've covered WWDC now in five minutes. So thank you for that. The other big picture Apple question is there's this sort of snap.

Consensus, conventional wisdom now in tech land and sort of general writing about tech, that Apple is in trouble because of AI, that they are behind in AI, that they are screwed in the AI. Pick whatever version of this you want. that the Googles of the world and obviously the open AIs of the world have made these enormous investments in generational AI. Apple hasn't, so it's starting very far behind and it's in trouble. Do you buy that argument?

I think that there's a chance that they could be. But I think even given the... almost breathtaking speed with which ai is moving right i think most people listening to your show probably never heard of llms until like three or three years ago right you know it was like late 2023 I think when chat GPT really exploded and now it's everywhere, right? I mean, it's everybody knows what they are. Everybody's at least tried them. I think there's a chance that that sort of technology.

leads to new classes of devices that aren't these phones and laptops, that we just carry something with us and just talk to a thing or something. But we are, even at this speed, we are years away from replacing the devices we know with some sort of new form of devices. And OpenAI to skip ahead, right? They are working with Johnny Ive to develop some kind of new wonder product.

Possibly. Who knows what will actually come of it. But the messaging from them so far is this actually won't replace your phone. You'll still have a phone. Right. That's been their messaging. To that point, I think it's a very interesting way of framing it, that it won't replace your phone in the same way that your phone didn't replace your laptop.

It's so easy to get caught up when a new thing comes up, you know, and the phone is obviously the biggest thing that's happened until AI two, three years ago, right? The phone was just a huge sea change. Everybody has a phone. gobs of money. It's made Apple the richest company in the world. But Apple still also makes gobs of money selling laptops, right? I'm recording this show with you right now on a laptop. I don't know how I would do my job without a laptop.

I mean, technically I can do it from the phone, but it feels like, I don't know, like trying to eat a steak with chopsticks and no knife. And so the Apple play, and I've talked to Ben Thompson about this, who you also record with. It seemed like last year was we own these phones that billions of people use.

We're going to have some AI features. We're going to talk about that in a second. But the main idea was if you want to use chat GPT or anything else, use our phone to use them. And by the way, you have to because you.

have to get online. And so you're going to use a device and that's our play. And we'll figure out how to monetize it and everything else as we go. But basically our AI strategy is when you use AI, you're going to use an iPhone to get there. Yeah. And I think last year's WWDC, where they spent 40 out of 100 minutes talking about and announcing this Apple intelligence umbrella brand.

I think that's where Apple itself got caught up in the hype of, hey, we need to act. We need to present ourselves as though we're at the forefront of this whole thing, as opposed to, no, the main thing.

apple does is make these devices and these platforms for these devices and just show that these are existing platforms are the best ways to use ai from whoever and apple's done that over the years many times i mean if you go back far enough that the I really do believe that the thing that kept Apple alive in the 90s before the reunification with Steve Jobs and when they bought next.

was the desktop publishing industry because the whole industry ran on max and even though adobe during the 90s when like windows 95 came out and even before that but especially with windows 95

started making versions of Photoshop and Illustrator for Windows and they were compatible and they used the same. But I worked in the graphic design industry at the time and everybody ran on Macs. And when you'd be at like the print shop with like your zip disc with a... print job to go and some other client would come in and they had one that was a windows file that the guys at the print shop would like roll their eyes and they'd be like oh boy here we go

Apple didn't make any of that stuff. They didn't make the apps. They didn't make Photoshop. They didn't make Illustrator. They didn't make QuarkXPress. They didn't make the printers anymore. They kind of got out of the printer business. But the whole industry ran on Macs.

You know, people do all sorts of stuff. There are people who live in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel and do that sort of stuff, or they use Google Docs instead in a browser tab. And tons of those people do their work eight hours a day. every day on Macs or they do it on, you know, they do all sorts of stuff on iPhones. You know, Slack is a big deal. People's entire companies run on Slack or Slack like.

products like microsoft teams and stuff apple doesn't make anything like that they don't make anything that helps a big company or a small team collaborate together but they make the products that people use when they use them This idea that you have to do everything, it's inevitable when a company gets successful. Every single company that becomes like a top 10.

you know, Fortune 10 company in the computer industry. Why don't you have this service? Why don't you have that service? Eventually succumbs to, hey, why don't we have all of the services and we'll make all the money? And it never works out. So.

Related to that, you mentioned Apple talked about Apple intelligence. The thing that everyone was excited about, everyone's takeaway was this. This premise that they rolled out where, hey, Siri, when is my mom's flight arriving? And then Syria not only tells you when the flight is arriving because they've.

They've sifted through your email and your calendar. They make other recommendations about how long it's going to take you to the airport and what you could do afterwards. And it seemed like, oh, this seems really interesting if they can deliver it. There was a question about what would, you know, the concern was.

Not will the product not exist, but will it work well enough with errors and hallucinations? But that never materialized. They again announced that last year, put out ads for it. And then in March, you wrote a blog post called. something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. Want to top line the argument you made there? I think the gist of it is just sort of looking back at last year's WWDC, and it wasn't just that.

one announcement. I know in his interview with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal last week at WWDC, Craig Federighi Apples, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, emphasized that in a hundred minute... keynote presentation the siri part was four minutes and it's a very very odd way of describing it makes no sense at all and the part that didn't ship was two out of the four minutes or something like that and i think you know

It was the main takeaway from what they announced, was we're going to do this, and this is the cool takeaway feature, the kind of thing you would tell someone who doesn't care about tech, but owns an iPhone, this is what they'll care about. It's sort of like saying that when you watch the...

Oscars, the Best Picture winner is only four minutes. And, hey, it's a four-hour broadcast. It's on all night, you know. By the way, you've said this. I'll say it again. Joanna Stern's interview is well worth watching. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube. It's like 22 minutes. It was incredible. Really, really great interview. But anyway, the gist of my argument, and it was, if anything, more critical of myself than of Apple. But basically, that...

Once Apple made this announcement this March that these features weren't shipping, it was sort of a big deal because Apple has, and I know if people sort of blur all big tech together, you lose the distinction. When you're in it, you really do see these very, very different personalities of each of the companies. Name your big tech companies however you want, five, six, seven of them.

If you're really in and paying attention to it, no two of them are alike at all. They are all very different in their own ways. And one of the ways that Apple is different than all the others is they have a sort of ruthless internal culture. of not pre-announcing stuff that's not ready they try to keep everything secret there's you know

People are so intently interested that a lot of the stuff actually leaks, but they never leave. Anybody who thinks they leak any of that deliberately is crazy. They do not. It drives them crazy that everything leaks. or as much leaks as it does. And when they say they are going to ship X in the next year, you've been able to take it to the bank that they're going to ship. They hold something up, say this is how it works, you're going to be able to buy it.

on this date or later this year, and then they deliver that. And it might be late, you know, two, three months late, something like that. And they take that, you know, their pants are on fire when that happens internally. because they feel like they're disappointing and letting people down. But to actually announce...

no, this isn't going to ship. And it wasn't just, oh, it's not going to ship within a year, but it'll come out soon. But they announced in March was it's coming, their words, in the coming year, which they keep using. And I don't know why. Because to me, in plain English, in the coming year means starting from the time those words come out of your mouth, the clock is ticking for 12 months, right? Right now. Like, if I tell you I would like to come back on your show in the coming year...

I would think that means between now and next June 17th. Or you'd say by the end of December. In either case, you'd expect it to show up. But what they mean by in the coming year is in 2026, that the coming year is 2026 and that's when it's coming. I don't know why they don't just say next year. Because that would go back to their policy. And again, another way of phrasing, everybody loves to say under promise and over deliver. But Apple has actually made an entire marketing strategy out of it.

that they under promise and over deliver. And the top line, you asked for the top line takeaway of that. Something is rotten piece. The thing is, is that in hindsight, I look back at what I experienced in the media last year at WWDC and. All the features that I saw demonstrations of firsthand shipped and the features they had to cancel in March, I didn't even see them do a demo of those features. And to me, I'm like, why wasn't that a red flag to me all along? I can't believe that it wasn't.

We'll be right back with John Gruber, but first a word from a sponsor. Put us in a box. go ahead that just gives us something to break out of because the next generation 2025 gmc terrain elevation is raising the standard of what comes standard As far as expectations go, why meet them when you can shatter them? What we choose to challenge, we challenge completely. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more.

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You're critical of yourself, but that's not really why this blog post is a big deal, right? Because you are... And you like Apple. You like Apple products. You've been enthusiastic for the years. Some people snark that you're too pro-Apple, but whatever. You generally are enthusiastic about their stuff. You're often critical, but you're generally enthusiastic. And by the end of the piece, you said this isn't just that they've missed.

a shipping deadline. This is a cultural rock, right? Like your headline. And you say, Tim Cook basically has to come fix this immediately. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then I fear that's all she wrote. The ride is over when mediocrity...

Excuses and bullshit take root. They take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of these things. All right. So on the one hand, you're a blogger. You're blogging who gives a fuck. On the other hand, like a week later, they... announced a reorg. Um, but they seemed to, I'm not saying they did that because you wrote about it, but they definitely paid attention to you. That piece took me a while and my, I'm a very slow writer and.

I cannot tell you how thankful I am that that internal reshuffling happened after my piece and not before. Not because I'm taking credit for it, but because I could have easily, they could have, I think they probably should have done that earlier. Honestly, I think they should have known internally that they had the wrong people in place or that there has to be some accountability for this. But when we zoom out, is this really them not being able to.

Keep up not being able to produce the things they say they want that, you know, they're not creating their own LLM. They're not trying to compete directly with the open AIs of the world and the Googles of the world. And yet they still fail. Is this an indication that there really is a real problem?

there or is actually they just weren't ready and they should have just waited a year before they announced this and had they waited a year and then delivered on the time frame they they predicted this was well be fine i i think it's a sign of a of a real problem in the whole Siri area. And I think that the premise of Apple as a company is actually very simple and it drives some people who don't like their products crazy.

But the basic premise of the company is that if they hire the best engineers and designers who care about the product, whose number one reason for wanting to work there is that they want to make... great art. You know, it's that whole Steve Jobs line from his last two keynotes about Apple existing at the intersection of art and, or the liberal arts and technology.

And that ultimately they must make better products than their competition. They're half for at least some number, you know, everybody's not going to agree because you can't get everybody to agree on anything. But if most people agree that Apple's products are better hardware and they have a better software experience and just look better than the competition and Apple... markets it and lets people know about it, people will buy those products and that's it. They have to be better.

In most ways they are, right? The whole Apple Silicon thing with the Macs have gone under in the last four years. These are like the best laptops in the world and everybody knows it. Even if you don't like using a Mac, if you prefer Windows. it's hard not to acknowledge that in terms of actual computer hardware, that these are vastly superior machines, that they're both faster and longer lasting battery life. They have great displays, blah, blah, blah. Siri has been this glaring exception that

And for a while, people forget this because it's been so long and people are so frustrated with the overall quality of Siri. But when it first came out in 2011 with the iPhone 4S, it was a sensation. because nobody else had anything like it where you just could hold a button on the phone and talk to it and get certain, you know, it did certain things very accurately right from the start. Tell you the weather. Yeah. A couple basics like that.

And by like 2013, there was a brief period where they had some partnerships and they, you know, it wasn't general purpose. Like the whole idea with LLMs is you can do sort of general purpose.

Just go out there and do something for me. You figure it out, Mr. LLM, who's so smart. But they had specific partnerships with, I think, Fandango and OpenTable and maybe some other things. But if you wanted to see a movie... at a fandago affiliated movie theater you could like purchase you know get show times and then purchase tickets all through siri and it had like a beautiful custom interface of that pre-iOS 7.

thing where it looked like Fandango and had rich texture and you didn't have to launch an app. You just did it all through there. You could make open table reservations and then, you know, it was only in North America, maybe just America. And then it just sort of fell by the wayside. And I don't know, by the middle of the 2010s, Siri just sort of frustrated people. And a lot of things have gotten worse over the years. There are commands that you could give to Siri that used to work.

that stopped working, all sorts of goofy, total lack of common sense. I know, I think my friend Neelai Patel from The Verge a couple years ago, he lives somewhere in New York, and he asked for the weather in London. And it gave him London, Ontario. And it's like...

There was this period where voice commands, and Siri specifically, and then on to Alexa, but this was going to be sort of the wave of the future, and then everyone got disappointed in that, and no one could really deliver on what was supposed to happen.

And now really the AIs, the open AIs, the chat GPTs of the world are basically starting to deliver on that promise. Right. So there was a period before the LLMs where everybody was frustrated with Siri, but everything else kind of sucked too. And it was worse than it used to be. And why isn't it better? You know, Apple had such a lead. They really did. I mean, and you could say, well, they didn't have a lead on LLM technology, but that's Apple's problem. That's an implementation.

problem. Apple would be the first to tell you that you as a user, you don't have to care what programming language the developers of your apps are using. And, you know, about 10 years ago, Apple invented this new language, Swift, and the Apple people writing.

iPhone apps switched from Objective-C to Swift. Users don't know that, and they're not supposed to know that. Users aren't supposed to know whether you're using LLMs on device or in the cloud or whatever. They just know you're supposed to talk to the... Siri and give it commands and it does what you want. That's it.

How it's implemented is Apple's problem. But then once the LLM explosion happened two, three years ago, all of a sudden there's this other thing that people can look at. Like, hey, I can just talk to this thing in plain language.

it's a real conversation right including using your voice right all of these all of the llm platforms now have like a voice mode where you can just literally you don't have to type yes in a chat you can just talk if you haven't been trying this by the way you really should i've i've played around with it and it is

Much closer to sort of like the aha magic moment of the internet that people realize like, oh, this really could be something I use all the time, not just to cheat on a math test or whatever. And then you go back to Siri and it's ridiculous. It really feels like you're, you know, more than a decade behind. And they came out first.

I know from talking to friends within Apple, there's long, it's not just like a recent thing since they had to cancel these features, but it's long been like a mystery within the company because everybody who works there, at least most of the people I know, know that. that the bar is excellence, or to put it in Steve Jobs' term, insanely great. Everything you do is supposed to be insanely great, and it's held to that bar.

anything that falls short is well how do we get it up to insanely great and people uh you know no matter what team what app what part of the system or which platform you're working on you're Busting your butt, your whole team is working long hours up till releases, like a major release in the fall or to get something out for WWDC.

And your managers are holding everything to this exquisite level of insanely great. And then you look and the Siri team is over there spinning their wheels for 10 years. with a subpar product that everybody knows. Everybody in the company uses it, right? It's not this obscure piece of technology that almost no one uses. It's got like a dedicated button on the phone. I mean, and it stinks.

But you could say in the past, well, that's a Siri problem and it's a feature that doesn't work as well. But again, I'm watching TikTok and texting and I can live without it. And now it looks like a real problem. And it really feels like somehow within Apple up to the highest levels, it was just accepted that, well, Siri's kind of mediocre. And how that became to be accepted, nobody that I know can really.

express understanding of. You write this piece. It is blistering. It's especially blistering coming from you because you are an Apple enthusiast. What's the reaction from Apple after you write that to you? Do they reach out and say, whoa, do they not reach out? They reached out, but my communications over it were mostly private. They were not happy, and they don't think it was fair. And you could see it.

In their interviews that they did do last week at WWDC, where they kept, they're caught up on the implication in my piece that those advanced Siri features. might not have existed at all a year ago. There's a lot of them referencing you without saying your name, but there's a lot of them responding to even in that Joanna Stern interview we were talking about. People call it vaporware. It's not vaporware. They're talking about John Gruber.

Right. I think so, too. And my response to that was that that wasn't really that anybody who came away with that was missing the main point of my piece. I mean, of course, it existed to some degree, but I didn't get to see it. right and that's it's not about me being special just you know dozens and dozens of people in the media last week got to see hands-on demos of every single feature that they unveiled

In hindsight, it was highly unusual that they did not demo these features for us. And I invented this little scale of realness of demos where... Zero is not demonstrating it in person, which is what those advanced Siri features were. One would be when an Apple representative holding the device does the demo and doesn't... take input from you know you're looking over their shoulder but they're doing a canned demo along a prepared path

And it's real code and you get to see it work, but they don't hand it to you at the end and say, here, now you try it with your query, which would be a more real demo. But we didn't get to see that. And that's, to me, should have been a red flag. And that doesn't mean it didn't exist in some form, but...

it clearly didn't exist in a form that they felt comfortable showing. And then the other thing that I pointed out, and I pointed it out again last week, is in their keynote a year ago, when they showed that feature, they didn't keep the camera on the device. They kept cutting away. from it to show the presenter so you don't even see a single take of the feature and again lots of other companies do demos demos like that where they you know sort of faked for the

the commercial, as it were. You know, in the same way that when you see a commercial for a McDonald's hamburger, it's not really a McDonald's hamburger. It's, you know, a set dress piece of food that's made to look good. And in fact, that might not even be ketchup on it. It might be something that looks better than ketchup. on camera, whatever. But your point was, you showed this thing off, you advertised it, you clearly don't have it ready.

Whether or not it technically exists somewhere in Cupertino doesn't matter. It doesn't exist as a functional product, plus it's paperware. Right. And here we are, you know, nine months later, and you're saying it's coming out.

another year later, you know? And so it's not that it wasn't real, but I would say the red flag is, well, who a year ago thought we should bank some of our credibility and put this as like the, one of the tentpole features in this year's keynote that we're promising, you know, that they're very proud to tell you how many people watch, you know, these keynotes.

you know much watched much paid attention to tentpole feature for the upcoming year that they had to cancel and postpone an entire subsequent year and sort of do a as Craig Federighi has called it V2 instead of V1. So you don't want to talk about the content of your conversations with Apple because they're private. Well, let's just say they were unhappy.

Yeah. Externally, one thing I can tell is that you normally interview Craig Federighi or other equally high level Apple executives after WWDC. It's kind of a it's kind of a signal part. It's not officially part of the show. but it kind of is. And they were not on stage with you this year. Nilay Patel from The Verge and Joanna Stern from The Journal were on with you instead. Do you imagine that...

So that's it for you and Apple, that they're not going to come on your shows anymore? Or do you think this is a moment in time and eventually they come back and start talking to you again? I mean, I've been told. Point blank, you know, that that's, you know, that's just a decision for this year. And, you know, it doesn't mean anything about the future. And, you know, I had off the record briefings with Apple executives, obviously not on the record interviews.

So I don't think so. If you are permanently like sort of cut off from their top talent and you can't have those on the record conversations, does that change your work? No, not really. And I've always set things up that way. I've always been incredibly uncomfortable and wary of access. and needing it and that goes to even things like getting review units of the hardware which i'm not set up in any way to monetize in any special way you know like

The sponsorships I sell on Daring Fireball, I don't raise the rate for the week when I have an iPhone review. It doesn't increase that. My live show, the WWDC show that I... held last week with Joanna and Neelai instead of anybody from Apple. It does go on YouTube. It is also a regular episode. You can listen to audio only in my podcast. It doesn't really make...

much more money than a regular episode of my podcast. The theater is very expensive to rent. There's all sorts of other costs and it varies a bit year to year, you know, how much money it brings in. But like this year's show, actually, I think. Actually, I did a little bit better on sponsorships this year than last year. Ticket sales were a little down after I announced there weren't going to be Apple executives, but there were, I don't know, well over 600 attendees.

And the sponsorships did a little better this year than last year. So I haven't done the final accounting because I haven't gotten the final bill from the theater. But I think I actually made a little bit more money this year than last year without them. I've always set things up so that I don't need them. And if they cut me off completely. I'll be fine. And maybe better. Right. I mean, that's the thing about this is that.

And I'm not trying to lack humility here, but I feel them deciding not to do my show this year is a total win for me and was a huge loss for them. Why is it a win for you? I think it asserts my independence. I think the fact that I had a show and it was well attended and the feedback has been...

I mean, we were talking at the beginning or maybe before the show about how people are very honest on the Internet. Trust me, I hear from I hear about every little thing people notice about the show. Somebody pointed out that I need to stop. wagging my leg when I'm on stage so I took a note for next year

And I appreciate it. I'm glad somebody pointed it out. I'm not a natural stage performer in any way. And I only do these live shows once a year, so I don't get to practice very much. So I'm trying. But the overwhelming feedback of the show is, hey, I like this better than the last couple of years of shows with the Apple executives. You look pretty comfortable up there. You know, when you started this.

Apple really limited access to its executives and products to a handful of people. I worked for one of them, Walt Mossberg. And then over the years that opened up, they started letting bloggers in, people like yourself.

In recent years, they've really, really opened up and in a lot of ways moved away from sort of people who traditionally used to cover them and they're really reaching out to influencers and people who just hold up the phone and go, this looks cool. Makes perfect sense for Apple, I think, to...

do that, you think that doesn't affect your business either. The people who come to you, know what your relationship, know your base of knowledge, don't really care whether or not you're getting an on-the-record interview with Craig Federighi. I think so. I mean, I wish that I did. And I watched all the interviews. And unsurprisingly to me, I had a bunch of questions. If I had gotten the usual.

You know, from the last 10 years interview with the top Apple executives, I had questions I would have asked that it doesn't seem like anybody else asked. But overall, I do. I think it asserts my independence. And I think. More than making me look good, I think it makes them look bad. And in my discussions with them about whether they would do the show this year, I kind of made the case, you know, that... If you guys are sick of doing my show.

If you think it's worn thin, it's gotten repetitive. I actually could believe that there were 10 consecutive years where I, the day after WWDC, I had senior Apple, a senior Apple executive or more of them on the show. I could see that argument that it was getting thin.

It was getting repetitive. And my show does not do nearly the sort of traffic on YouTube that really matters to Apple. I mean, last year's show, I think, was 126,000 views. Which, if you asked me when I was younger, if I did a live... audience talk show type thing after WWDC and 126,000 people watched, I'd be like, wow, that sounds like a lot, right? You know, but influencer types on YouTube do, you know, millions of views. And if you want to sell phones, that's where you want to go. Right.

My show has never, ever been mainstream. And it is, you know, it's for appealing to a niche audience. And if Apple sees the need to appeal and communicate and sort of have a chance to speak. more as humans as opposed to machines filled with talking points to that audience, then my show, I think, is a sort of unique venue for that. But my argument was, given everything that's going on...

including between me and Apple with that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino piece. Just the fact that Apple had to delay that, just the other, it's just everything going on right now for Apple. it makes them look defensive i was like i don't think for your sake this is the year to skip my show you know but they did we'll be right back with john gruber but first a word from a sponsor Craftsman days are here at Lowe's with big savings on the tools you need.

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The other thing you've been consistently critical about Apple for some time is the way they interact with developers. And I won't get into all the details. And I had Tim Sweeney come on from Epic to talk about his longstanding. That was a good interview. Yeah, I'm glad he came on. Apple, it seems to me quite clear that their stance towards...

especially when it comes to the app store, specifically the app store, their policy is we're going to run the app store the way we want to run it. We will only change it if we are forced to by courts or a government. And even then.

When a court or government orders us to change it, we will drag our feet and appeal that as long as we can. And it's very clear that we want to run this as long as we can the way we want to run it, because that will make us billions of dollars every day, week, month that we do it. more money essentially we're going to treat developers

the way that Walmart treats wholesalers that want to use its access, or frankly, the way that Apple treats people in its supply chain, right? We're going to squeeze you as hard as we can. You need us more than we need. If Apple continues to treat developers that way, because you guys will always say, well, if you do that, if you keep treating us this way, something dire will happen.

But if you're Apple, you might go, I don't think any. I think, again, you need us more than we need you. And if you don't like the rules of the road, that's too bad. But we think you're going to play along. Am I missing something there?

No, and I think developers see it that way. Developers more and more see it that they feel like they're being treated the way Apple treats its suppliers. And I think where there's a mismatch is that inside Apple, the people who actually... deal with the suppliers have you read patrick mcgee's apple in china patrick on the show all right so

Just a fantastic book. Ben Thompson called it the best Apple book ever. I don't know about that, but it's up there. I think you have to let a book settle in before you say that.

After I interviewed Patrick, he said, what I'm really hoping is for John Gruber to say this book is great. So there you go. It is great. But when you read that book, among the many things you can take away from it is you do learn how Apple... treats its suppliers in the supply chain and i think that people at apple would say oh man if you think we're playing hardball with our developers on the app store you don't know anything about how we treat our suppliers in china

right like so they see that they are nowhere near as hard on developers as they are on their suppliers and they think you know it is somewhere in a middle zone but there's And I think Apple does, at the highest level, they do have a sense of, hey, we built this amazing thing. We built the Disneyland of computer platforms, you know, this iPhone.

the app store's trustworthiness and sort of, hey, if you want to get an app, you know where to go, you go to the app store. We built an economy and they put out a press release nearly in front of WWDC most years saying, here's how much money the app store...

has generated. Here's how much money developers have received from the app store. And by the way, in the overwhelming majority of the cases, there's no fee at all. They're just taking the money, blah, blah, blah. The point is like, but we built this for you. Yeah. They really do feel entitled to their cut of the revenue. They really feel like this. They deserve it, that they've earned it. But my response to that is it doesn't matter. Even if Solomon. could be heralded and, you know...

some sort of deity who everybody agrees has a universal sense of justice could look at the situation and say, you know what, Apple's right. They do deserve 30% of these transactions. That's actually fair in a universal sense. I don't think that's true, actually. I think the rate is high and hasn't really adjusted with the times since 2008 when the App Store came. But even if you could, you know, declare that's true, it is still a big problem that developers...

feel slighted and feel like they're getting a bad deal. If you're Apple, you're like, you could stamp your feet. We'd like it if you were nicer and we'll put up press releases to try to make you happier. But like, honestly, why does it matter? You still need to use our iPhone.

Well, and I think it goes back to what I said earlier about just making these great devices and platforms to use AI, that Apple, it is too, it's a... beneficial cycle to have developers want to make unique software for Apple's platforms and to use the features and the APIs that are unique to Apple's platform, the stuff that WWDC is all about for developers.

It helps Apple when there are apps and services that either work better or only work on Apple devices. And it's a reason it makes customers, hey, I don't want to leave the iPhone because look at these apps like... Ivory, the Mastodon client, you know, that only exists on the iPhone. It's not a cross-platform app. And I love that app. I don't want to switch to an Android phone and lose that app. And X, Y, and Z, these other apps that don't exist. Or apps that do exist, but they're better.

on Apple devices, right? ChatGPT works everywhere, but OpenAI makes a really good Mac app for ChatGPT. It's really, it's so much better. It's the main reason I use ChatGPT over any of the other services. And it does all sorts of really cool, unique Macs.

stuff, like where if the window behind you is a programming text editor like BBEdit or Xcode, it'll say, do you want me to connect this chat to your BBEdit window and help you with the program that you're writing or your Xcode window? Those things keep users... using it. It's a cycle, right? And then when it's time to buy a new thing, it helps Apple to have developers want to build for their platforms. And it hurts when they don't. But they develop.

at its core because it's the dominant platform, right? So here we can move from the theoretical, right? Apple Vision Pro announced two years ago, debuted about a year and a half ago, is a dud. right, is not working. It also does not have very many apps that are built for it, which is a little surprising because you figured, oh, Apple would have preceded it with really cool apps, but they didn't. And they sort of expected developers to build for it.

And one argument says, and I think you've made this argument, one of the reasons people aren't building for Apple Vision Pro is because developers are unhappy with Apple and they're less willing to extend themselves. And that kind of makes sense. But I also think, boy, if people were. buying Apple Vision Pros in any kind of meaningful numbers, developers would build for it. It is, you know, it's a classic chicken and the egg.

Catch-22, right? The developers don't want to build for a platform if there aren't a lot of users, and you're not going to get a lot of users if there's not a lot of software. So how do you ever get past it? How does any platform ever take off? And one of the ways that that happens is developer enthusiasm for the platform. And we definitely saw it with the iPhone, right? And it's easy to think that the iPhone was

something akin to what it is today when it debuted, but it wasn't. It was U.S. only, only on one carrier AT&T. Steve Jobs' goal in... I think he said it in January 2007, or at least he did when they announced the phone and it actually was coming out in June 2007, was they wanted to sell 10 million units by the end of 2008 or something like that, which would have given them 1% of the...

market. That was their goal for the first year and a half. And they hit it. They sold, I don't know, somewhere in the low teens, millions. That's like a joke now, right? There's over a billion iPhones in use. It's totally different. But when the App Store debuted, there were so many apps right out of the gate because all of these developers who'd been writing Mac software for years and really like the Mac APIs, the Cocoa programming frameworks.

I found that the iPhone version of that, it was, you know, a cut down version of the Mac APIs. They were right at home, very familiar, and they were making apps right out of the gate. That wasn't the amount of developer effort that went into the app store. in 2008, 2009, was not commensurate with the size of the iPhone user base. It was outsized. But it made...

the platform all that more appealing to the people who were still using dumb phones or still using a Blackberry or whatever it was that they were like, I don't know about this. And most tellings now of the iPhone story, the iPhone itself was. big important thing when it debuted in 2007 and it is the app store and people taking advantage of the app store that really helped make the thing a Colossus. And I don't think if there were

much measurably stronger developer enthusiasm for Vision OS over the last year. That's the software for the Apple Vision Pro. Right. I don't think the sales would be that different today. Apple knew this. However disappointing Apple Vision Pro sales are compared to what Apple's high-end estimate, they're not that far off. You know, it's not the sales. It's that no one who has an Apple Vision Pro uses it. I'm sure there are people who will listen.

and write in and say they use it. But the people I know who own them, sometimes they're partners with Apple. They're like, it is in a dust drawer. I have not used it since it came out. And... I do think there is a comparison to the original Mac from 1984, which was super expensive. If you do the inflation adjustment, a $2,500 Mac in 1984 costs over $7,000 today. So it's...

Twice the cost of the Vision Pro. Super expensive. Wasn't compatible with any existing software because all existing software for the Apple II, for DOS, for everything else was a command, you know, a text-based interface where you'd type the name of a program and it would... print characters on your screen. And the Mac, you know, right from the start, looked like this and didn't even have a mode to run software like that. There was no terminal app on the Mac.

By choice, they wanted to force developers to do this. And the Mac didn't really take off until like the late 80s. That's when the desktop publishing revolution happened. But in those intervening years, there were so many developers writing apps sort of in relative.

obscurity i mean the original mac sold so poorly and so under hit apple's internal estimates that it effectively was the impetus for running steve jobs out of the company i mean it was really his personality but It gave the people like Scully, you know, the then CEO who were having personality.

conflicts with him surprise it gave them a foundation to say here's a fact that we can take to the board he made this thing he sunk all this money into it and it's not selling but in those intervening years there was so much developer enthusiasm that by 1986, 1987, there was like a wealth of really rich, great apps for the Mac so that when the popularity started happening, those apps were there. And I don't think we're seeing that with Vision.

vision os in the same way do you think apple can turn that around and either the apple vision pro sort of as they've brought it out, you know, maybe they'll change the specs on it, that there's some version of that that takes hold? Or do you think in the end, this is going to have been a really expensive R&D project?

elements of Apple Vision Pro are going to manifest in other tech, and that's going to be the net result of this. No, I think the platform has legs. The ultimate hardware might end up being... very very different you know it might be more like eyeglasses that you see through that have a partial heads-up display that that shows on the lenses and i don't know how many years away that is

But it's sort of like, you know, the original Mac in 1984. I forget how much it weighed, but it had a handle. So the idea was you could take it around with you, but it had a nine inch black and white screen. And the form factor people really want is... Obviously, a laptop. Most people I know who use a Mac, the only computer they've ever used is a laptop. Maybe in some contexts, an iMac.

or something. But for the most part, most people I know, the only computer they have is a laptop. That's the format they want, which doesn't even need a handle to carry it around. But they want something... that's like two pounds that you can fold up and put in a bag and walk around with. And the Mac wasn't that for 15 years until the power books came out in the late nineties. I think vision.

Vision is like that, too, where they've they even called it Vision Pro to start. It's like it's their way of saying this isn't for everybody yet. But the tech is going to show up somewhere down the line. Right. But they're trying. And it was, of all of their platforms, I would say the one that year over year, last week at this year's WWDC, showed the most year over year improvements just on the platform itself, it was Vision.

full steam ahead on building out that platform. And I think they're just trying to get the whole software side of it built up into an ecosystem so that when hardware that people would actually want to use, some kind of lightweight glasses with a, you know, that you, I don't know, something far more affordable and lighter weight and more comfortable than what they can make today is available.

that they're already there with this platform. Standard thing I say whenever I mention Apple Vision Pro is if you have not played with an Apple Vision Pro, go to the Apple store. You can book it online. It's free, half an hour. There is no wait because no one else wants to do this. They will give you a guided tour of the tech.

It's wild. It's any normal person would go, this is really, I don't know what I'll do with this, but it's really cool. Yeah, it's cool. I know this sounds like hyperbole, but it is cooler than most attractions at like Disney World. Yeah, yeah.

And free. Go do that. This is a media and tech podcast, mostly talking about tech. One last media question for you here. There's a lot of enthusiasm around, we'll just call it sub-stacking right now because they've sort of branded email newsletters with a subscription. When you hear the Substack founders talk about it, they say, we wanted to bring blogging back.

They're basically talking about you. We want to bring blogging back to the internet we're doing in this new format. You know, the differences between blogging and sub-stacking, right, is sub-stacking is meant to be a sort of a paid newsletter subscription, blogging generally free.

like you, ad supported, like you. Still, a lot of people doing the same thing, writing about things they are interested in and trying to find a niche audience that will pay attention to them. Long-winded way of saying, as you're watching. A lot of people embrace substackism. Any words of advice for people who are taking this up and want to write enthusiastically about things with some frequency? Well, I wrote about substack in particular, I think in December.

And I, to me, Substack sets off all sorts of red flags to me. And every time somebody high profile. joins, Substack in particular, as opposed to starting a Substack-like site on any, there's a dozen different platforms that can kind of do the same thing as Substack, like Ghost, I know, I think is open source. But there's a... The Beehive and a bunch of others. I see Substack as a trap. I think that Substack in particular puts their brand first and they say they don't.

But every substack I look at looks like a substack. There's some that are doing some custom stuff that you would be surprised. But for the most part, they look very substacky. And they want you to come to their app and they want to create their own social network. They're quite clear about that. Right. And I think that's all red flags. If you want to be independent for the long haul, you don't want to have your blogs tied to a specific social network like Substacks.

So like when Paul Krugman left the New York Times and he's writing so his writing is so much freer and looser and better. Now that he's agreed. Agreed. It's hard to find. I, I find, but, um, the way that, that the times again, I would talk about this somewhere else. Well, I used to know there was a new Paul Krugman thing. Cause I'd look at the front page of the times and they would highlight it. And now I don't know it, but when I find it, I'm like, Oh, this is really refreshing writing.

And he wrote about the problems he's had with the editing process over the last few years. And you could see it in hindsight, that they just sort of took all the piss and vinegar out of his writing.

But I wish that it was somewhere where it was just paulkrugman.com, not paulkrugman.com. So you're talking about the mechanics and the terms of service and the business proposition of Substack. And in theory, you can do all that somewhere else, like you said, like GhostBehind. Yeah, and I think the world...

be better if more people did and it was just one of many. I feel like they are trying to build what they're eventually going to slow boil frog into a walled garden. But separate from the substance... brand in terms of service. What do you think of the Paul Krugman's Terry Moran got fired from ABC last week and today he's got 100,000 people on his sub stack. Just as you're watching people sort of re-embrace the idea of being sort of solo.

publishers writing about stuff they care about or think that they care about. What do you, what do you make of that movement? I think it's great. And I think it is in hindsight. It's very surprising to me. When I got started, we said 2002, it helped that my background in college coming out of the 90s, I have a computer science degree. I know how to program. I was working as a freelance web developer.

using my graphic design background combined with my computer science to actually build and launch websites in the late 90s, early 2000s. So being able, if you look at a lot of the... bloggers of the early 2000s. They were people like me who had those sort of skills. Jason Kotke, still going strong, had those skills where you could, you know, you kind of needed how to like run an Apache web server to do this.

And I thought, oh, well, this is going to get easier. And things like blogger appeared very shortly after that, where you just go to Google, sign in with your Google account. I have a blogger blog. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is definitely, you know, I wasn't like. thinking, oh, you need my skill set. I was like, this is just something that got me doing this a few years ahead of time compared to where everybody else would be. But I was like, this will be the future of a lot of media.

It kind of went away, I think. And I think Twitter really heard it. I think those peak years of Twitter, 2010, 11, 12, 13, really a lot of people who should have been putting their efforts into writing on their blogs were just tweeting. And it was so much easier. And you got more of an immediate, like, you know, measure in seconds feedback loop. And I think it's great to see things returning to that. I also think a big part of the appeal of the whole sub stack.

You know, your blog is also a newsletter. A huge part of that, I think it is, and I don't think enough people comment on it, is that the web, when you're reading most... Most websites now, you are bombarded with paywalls. You're signed out. Even if you do subscribe, you find yourself signed out, and now you've got to sign in again. And if it is free, they're... badgering you with pop-ups that cover the article that say please sign up for our newsletter please do this please do that reading

So many websites in a web browser is such an unpleasant experience. And if you sign up and you say, give me your email, confirm it. And now in the morning, you've got your cup of coffee and you go look at your email and, oh. You know, here's a newsletter from Peter Kafka. Oh, and what do you do? You just sit here and hit the space bar and you can just read it right down and nothing covers the text of the article. It is a better reading experience. And that's.

That was sort of the whole idea of blogging in the first place is just, hey, I'm going to write this. And if you would do me the privilege of reading it, please, here it is. Read it. I'm going to make it as readable as possible. And I think that the whole newsletter. rejuvenation. Who thought email was going to come back in a big way as a source of media? But it really has. And I think...

The experience of it. Once you're signed up for a newsletter, you get every issue. It shows up and you just hit spacebar or just scroll on the trackpad or on your phone, just swipe and you just read and you don't have to tap through anything. You don't have to hide anything. You don't have to install extensions. to block the ads. You just scroll and read, and it's so much more pleasant.

I'm hung up on the words themselves. And this is my last question for you. I wonder how you feel about audience capture, right? Like I asked you, I described you as an Apple blogger. You said I'm not really an Apple blogger, right? About things that are interesting to me. They happen to be about Apple. If one day... You woke up and go, I am just sick of...

I don't care about this stuff. With the enthusiasm that I used to have, what I'm really into now is indie film. I'm going to write about indie film because I'm newly passionate about it. How do you think about sort of what your audience expectations are, what your... Implicit contract with your audiences to give them something they're expecting versus something you want to do. That's a great question. It's very hard for me to explain, and it feels like it's like a Jedi thing, where I have a...

sense, like I can use the force and I have, you know, I don't have like a big, I don't have a community forum. I don't have comments on my site. I get email from readers. They sometimes reply to me on social media, but not a lot. So I kind of just have to infer what my audience wants. And unerringly over the entire two decades of my career writing at Daring Fireball.

It seems like when I just write about what I really feel driven to write about, that's what people want to read. And if that breaks down, I'm probably in trouble because I don't know what else to do. That I just follow, ooh, I really want to write about blank. And I feel like this is going to be a big one. You know, this will be a multi-thousand word, you know, sort of flagship article. That's just worked out for me.

That if I really want to write it, my audience wants to read it. Great way to leave it, man. John Gruber during Fireball, available for free still on the internet. Thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure.

Thanks again to John Gruber. Love having me on the show. I've done it a few times before. If you're really into this kind of stuff, you should go back and find the back issues. They're good. What do we call an old podcast? An old podcast? Anyway, you can find them all. They're on this feed. I think the first one we did was 2016.

Thanks to Travis Larchuk for producing and editing this episode. Thanks to our advertisers. Bring it to you for free, just like Derek Fireball. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you next week. For enriching conversations that challenge your views, tune into the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast. Join Diane Grissel, a perception analyst and hypnotherapist, as she delves into the minds of her guests.

Each episode is packed with unexpected insights and explores beliefs, assumptions, and the endless possibilities that come with age. Subscribe to the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast. Tune in now.