a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: What's at the Core of the Latest Apple Announcement?

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

with Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) and Steven Sinofksy (@StevenSi) In this hallway-style conversation episode of the a16z Podcast, Benedict Evans and a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky discuss Apple’s September 2018 keynote event and share their thoughts on the new innovations -- and lessons -- that really matter. With something that’s gone from toy to phone to fashion item -- and just pivoted to a health monitor that can literally save lives -- where are we now? How closely aligned is health to the overall value proposition, and what are some of the characteristics of how Apple innovates as a company as a whole... from components and building blocks to how it all comes together? image: Integrated Change/ Flickr(CC 2.0)

Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. In this hallway conversation episode, Benedict Evans and Steven Sinovsky discuss Apple's September 2018 keynote event and share their thoughts on the new innovations and lessons that stick out. What are the changes that really matter? And where are we now with something that's gone from being a toy to a phone to fashion statement and has now pivoted to a health monitor that can actually save lives? How closely aligned is health to the overall value proposition of Apple? And what What are some of the characteristics of how Apple innovates as a company as a whole, from components and building blocks to how it all comes together? So I'm Steven Sinovsky.

I'm Benedict Evans. So yesterday was a pretty exciting day in the world of Apple in the sense that there was an event. And a lot of people showed up at the Steve Jobs Theater and they surprised, surprise, had some new phones for us to talk about. Yes, I'm thinking about translating Californian pretty exciting into English, which would be okay, it was kind of okay. Is that English where all the words are spelled wrong,

like defense and things like that or English? The Apple, every Apple event is we're all tremendously excited. We're super excited. Super excited. Yes, I forgot it. Sorry, right. Well, so the way I kind of think about this is we're now kind of on the upper slopes of the S-cur for smartphones. There was a period when, like, the first smartphones were amazing.

And then there's a period of very, very rapid improvement. The screens get better. The devices get amazing. Every year or every other year, you think, oh, my God, this is so much better than what I've got now. I think we're now kind of at the point where, Most of those easy wins are done. The iPhone X was Apple's implementation of the edge-droid screen. Okay, this is kind of a decent deal.

The iPhone X, S, I still can't say that without smiling, is... We promised ourselves we would not make fun of product naming in this podcast, so that was our joke. We're done now. We're on the upper slopes of the S-curve, and we're looking at incremental improvements of an existing product. And I thought it was kind of interesting to think about, well, how do you manage that segmentation and those channels and the differentiation

and how do you think about that when you don't have like an amazing bomb to set off in the auditorium? But it is, you know, I always have a little bit, mostly because of our difference in background, but like I tend to really have a very strong view of that incremental innovation is Big Bang innovation. It's not, it's just because people really underestimate just how phenomenally hard it is to pull together a plan, to execute on the plan and to get it done. and really boring is difficult boring is insanely difficult to to coin a phrase on purpose that I used it that way and what what Apple is doing is like they are at absolute peak execution of what they're doing at the scale they're doing it at the quality that they're doing it and at the changes each iteration

that that they're doing and what's fascinating like I don't understand why Wall Street doesn't understand this what they're doing is late stage S curve of development better than any other company has ever done it and at the scale. And so there's what they did was not like, oh my God, I have to run out and get it tomorrow, even though, of course, I will do that and many of people listening to this will do that because there were some very, very interesting things in that, like in particular for me, like a new camera is super interesting. And again, just the way they innovate, it's not just a new camera, it's a new camera with

a new software experience with new hardware that they custom design and brought together. But on the other hand, like the most interesting things that they're doing are kind of, to say it crassly, about making money. Yes. Well, there's the kind of, there's, on the one hand, there's the reliability of every year delivering the phone with X fast chips, with X improvement in battery life, and just kind of continuing that iteration of the phones just get better every year.

That's sort of where Detroit is now. The cars keep coming, they keep arriving on schedule, they keep not breaking down, and that's hard. Yeah, and that's sort of what Apple's doing with the iPhone. The phones keep coming, they keep getting better and more reliable, and they keep not breaking, and they keep shipping on time. Yeah, and they ship many, many more of them each time, which is a big deal. The other thing that's sort of fascinating is to look at the pricing

and the kind of the optimization of the portfolio is we've gone from one phone that was $650, $200 after subsidy in the U.S., but it was one $650 phone, and then there's a... Which no one will ever buy, they'll have 0% market share. You're channeling Steve there. A guy named Steve. I'm a guy named Steve too. Then there's the old phone.

Then there's the current phone plus last year's phone is $100 or $200 cheaper. And then you've got multiple memory sizes as well. And now we've got two previous year models. And they've dumped last year's model, which I think they only did once. They did with the original. They haven't done a long time. They did it with five. And they tried the five C, which didn't work.

now we have two new iPhone model flagship iPhones in different sizes so they've gone back to have multiple sizes then there's another slightly cheaper one which uses a different display technology because the cutting edge display technology is too expensive to do in those kind of volumes as well they've got six colors and multiple memory sizes so you kind of count up all the scoos they're going to have plus the scoes for different regions plus the multiple sim thing for China

they're going to have like 50 scoos as opposed to one And that's just super important for people to really internalize because it's very easy if you're sitting at the event and everybody's like, oh my God, I can't tell the difference between these or I want this feature, but I want it in the $499 phone or whatever, which is that... I want the big size, but I want it in the yellow color. Right, right. And the thing is, is that you don't sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of anything with one unit. And people really always get this confused, like, that you, oh, you have to have so many skews. Because, you know, my whole career, we used to fight against

having lots of different ways to buy a word processor. But when you're selling at massive scale, you do have a very complex product line just by definition. And again, it's one of these things that Apple is really mastering, like is executing masterfully. And yesterday, I just saw so many negative comments about this lineup. It's so complicated. The thing that happens is you just, you never see all of them at once. Like when you go into Walmart, there's not going to be a $1,500 phone staring at you. And I suspect that even when you go into the Apple store, you're not really going to see the low-end ones that are, you're not going to be able to buy them. They'll send you to another channel place. And you're not going to see ads that,

like, the way you would see in a Dell PC ad that just shows all the price points available. 15, 15 products. You know, or the HP Pavilion, QR2, Core, I7, 3XI, you know, all, like, and then compare it to the XZ and the XK, and you're supposed to figure this out. They, they do, This is part of their execution is to have this complexity, maximize their revenue from it, but not surface it to the average consumer, who turns out to not really care. And my favorite indication of not surfacing it to consumers

is like when you're at a party and you're talking to somebody and they say, which phone do you have? They just say the big one or the iPhone. They literally can't tell you which model. In fact, I just tried to send an old phone to a friend and I was sitting there with a magnifying glass trying to read the laser etched number on the back to figure out which one it was.

Because they don't care. They know you don't care. You're going to buy a phone when you're going to buy a phone. I mean, there's also sort of an optimization, sort of techie point. There's an optimization in here because the iPhone 10 and now the iPhone 11 is, or the 10S. 10 S is OLED.

And then, but they've not been, the OLED is a cutting-edge screen, so they've not been able to get it down to the lower price point, so they're making a sort of a fill-in with an LCD. Which actually, I think, is, again, now imagine... This is optimization. Right, it's optimization, but imagine now you're an Android vendor, and now where's your flagship phone compete on price?

Because this new LED one in the middle is actually quite the sandwich problem for a Samsung or an LG trying to insert a phone. Yeah, because it's bigger than the X. It's bigger and the price, yet cheaper. And so it's actually really, really hard for them to deal with this. It is a little bit hard to tell people which one to buy, of course. I mean, the camera is actually the easier distinction.

Right. And also the screens will, you know, screens people, you can see the difference. So if you actually do see them side by side, you'll see the value, which then back to the Android thing, it's going to force them, like I suspect we'll start to see higher-priced lower-end phones like being dug out of the parts bins from the Android vendors in order to sort of match that channel approach. But the Android vendors face this problem, which is they're competing with all the other Android vendors at the same time, which generally is pulling the price down, and they can't maintain it. And so it's fairly

complex what's going on here. Well, there's a fascinating dynamic, which is you have these range of mid-priced Chinese manufacturers who have kind of a semi-premium brand at a mid-priced like $4,500, $300,000 range. Which people were quick to point out all have all the same features as the 10X. The point is those, of course, what those are doing is they're killing a high-end Android.

And so you've got this sort of mix where Apple has got, as it might be, two-thirds to three-quarters of the high-end space. And then there's a kind of a ferocious war for the rest of the market. A ferocious war with prices dropping. And this is literally the dynamic that why there are no really, really good expensive PCs. Because no matter what an HP or a Dell or a Novo come out with that's expensive,

they have to pull it down, the price down, in order to gain market share. And meanwhile, the people who want an expensive high-end premium PC are probably going to buy a Mac. And then you get into this whole, oh my God, the Mac CPU is old, except that whole ecosystem isn't moving, so it's not really necessary to have the latest and greatest because there just hasn't been any advantage. And so it really just points out that as you mature on the S-curve, and the most interesting thing as you mature on the S-curve

is that generally what happens is companies go through massive turmoil and they change their executive staff and they bring in people who are willing to figure out how to charge your existing customers more money and milk the company. And yet Apple is sort of doing this by nature, and this is not new. When Steve Jobs was running iPods,

this is precisely how iPods ran. The old one would become, the new one would come out, the old one would become a cheaper one. They're cheaper to make, they're cheaper to distribute, and you just keep going, lather rinse, repeat.

And it's a revenue maximizer while you have a differentiated brand, a great channel to sell things through, and customers that are super loyal, which, by the way, the very first point that Tim made in the presentation was that they have 98% satisfaction with their products.

Yep. They're optimizing. I'm more bullish that I think that this is just what a business does for 90% of its calendar time in existence. I think there's a sort of, there's a desire for a shiny new thing, and there's not a shiny new thing with the iPhone. And in fact, sitting in the event yesterday, it was actually quite difficult to tell which of the new event, which of the things they were saying about the iPhone 10S were actually new, which of them they were saying, had previously said about the previous one. Which is, you know, like if you take long-term industries,

like when a new car comes out every year, like they tell you it still gets you from point A to point B, but now better. And they always tell you it's slightly more reliable, and there's a history in that. But let's take a different... The fascinating I was going to say, under the hood, it's the chip team.

It's unbelievable. And you see that in the watch as well. I'm looking at my notes from yesterday, and I just started writing down the numbers, and then the slide popped up. But this, you know, 7 nanometer. First, it's called the 812 bionic, which to this day, I can't believe they have the ability to use the word bionic

because I thought that was a trademark and that Isaac Asimov owned it or something. Plus, I feel it's like a 70s TV show. Well, it is a 70s. Yeah, I'm certainly familiar. I'm glad that you got it on BBC 4, or whichever BBC it was. But like 7 nanometers, you know, it's a 6-core CPU with actually two kinds of cores, which is super interesting. Four-core GPU, this 8-core, quote, neural core, which is basically a TPU.

A TPU or FPGA or something. none of us know what it really is, 6.9 billion transistors and 5 trillion of some sort of operations per second. And you just like, there's nothing. And then just to be fair, everybody's like, oh, but what about Huawei Kieran and what about the latest Snapdragon? Those are going to ship, and they have two problems. They're going to ship after the iPhone, which is going to be available in like 10 days or whatever. And they're going to be on Android phones that have no Android optimized for anything that they do that they do so you won't even know and someone will run some synthetic graphics benchmark and whatever which apple doesn't care about at all like that

i'm sure they don't even run them and and so they are like apple is like the leading chip maker right now which is so weird to think about the fun thing was it's what is it 4.9 something how many how many transistors is it now it's how many transistors six uh yeah so i i i can't 4.9 billion, I think, was the number. 6.9 billion. So I forget exactly what the number was, but a while ago I went and got the stats for the render farm that Pixar used to generate the original toy story.

Oh, right, right, right. And it's like this many sunworks, like how many hundred sunwork stations with how many spark chips, okay, well, let me look up the specs for those spark chips. And it came out as it might be, I can't now remember if it was either one or two billion transistors. Yeah, like Avatar was like 2,500 Pentium PCs. Yeah, exactly.

But the point is, so the entire Pixar Rendell Farm to make Toy Story, which actually doesn't look that high-res today, but it's still amazing. But it was, as it might be, a third of one new iPhone. And yes, it's not comparable, and there's different, the transistors are being used for different things, et cetera, et cetera. But it gives you a sense of what Moore's Law was done in the last 25 years, which is that, you know, this multi-million dollar render farm is now an iPhone. So, you know, that, I'm just, again, one of just, like, the camera stuff, people are really going to notice and you're going to start to see these. Now, I will say, like, many of the other camera innovations, like, sort of haven't appeared very broadly. Like, I almost never see a time lapse. You never see, you never see slow-mo, really, unless it's like a kitten jumping or running.

Also, some of this stuff, I mean, I think we talked about the sort of flattening S-cur for smartphones. I think that the two places where you can actually feel the difference of battery life in camera. Yeah. I think battery life has now, for me, got to the point that it really does last all day reliably. Yeah. Particularly with the iPhone 10, it's reached a point where I never worry about it running out during the day. I mean, other people have different experience.

But battery life, you would still notice if it lasted all day and it wasn't before. The camera is the other place where you will actually be able to tell a difference. I think the chip speed is increasingly difficult to say this is faster than it was last year. And the one area, I think, you know, when they say that they made face ID faster, I bet we'll all notice that. Yes. Because you use it, and like for all of the things that people said, it's not going to work, blah, blah.

It was actually been as close to flawless as you can get. And now it's just going to be the way that the thumbprint advanced. But I think in general, the camera is the thing. Because the camera, you take a picture in the dark, it's still not perfect. You take a picture of your kid jumping into the pool. Yes, Apple and Google and Huawei and Samsung show you the one where it came out, but there's always like three where it didn't come out. Right, right, right.

And so that stuff, I think, you will still continue to see improvement. Of course, this is the thing that Apple were talking about, but Google talk about a lot as well, is it's no longer actually the camera module. It's everything. It's the GPU and the CPU and the CPU. the machine learning software and everything else that's being done in and this is this notion of you know photography is just on this computational photography is just this massive change in what's going on but I want to just now touch on where I think that there was just a lot

of innovation and it's also a fascinating story in the evolution of the product which is in the watch yes like when the watch first came out we both were very excited and very bullish on it and we spent a lot of energy with people like sort of saying oh what's the use case yeah this makes no sense. It's just a gimmick. And here we are now. They made something that is literally life-saving. Why would you not buy this for your parents? Or if you're just me and you're just a worry ward, buy it for yourself. But the interesting thing is, to me, is first go back to that original positioning where people, you know, to... They're definitely iterated on what is it. It's not just how does it work. It's also what is it for. And, you know, people,

really, just like all this stuff we talk about all the time, like everybody's like, it's a toy. And here we are now with a thing that is literally a phone. You can really use it to use it as a phone, which was a wild, in the future, it'll be a hands-free phone. So it

with AirPods now becomes the phone. But it's really pivoted in a sense, using Arlingo to a health monitor. Yes. It was fashion. And the fashion stuff is still there. It has to look good. Yeah. Which is mostly the Android one's It does look good, but it's not, that's not, it's not going to be on the cover of Vogue this year.

Yeah, and, you know, they got rid of the expensive, super ridiculous, expensive one. But this notion that how closely aligned health is with the overall value proposition of Apple, to me is very interesting, because nothing is more personal, more private, and requiring more security than health. Yes. And I always think about, like, wow, like other platforms don't really stand for privacy. and boy, would you be reluctant to use health information on those? It's been interesting watching Apple's positioning around health because there was a point where you kind of looked to this and you thought, well, I understand what they mean,

but it does sound a bit like Blackberry's saying you need a keyboard. Right. And obviously they've benefited from all the news flow that's happened in the last kind of Euro tour around Facebook and YouTube and so on, which they couldn't have planned for. And of course, you could be cynical and say, well, they don't have an ad business. So it's easy for them to talk about privacy.

But however it is that you've got there, that kind of piece of strategic positioning has worked out very well for them because you would trust it with this kind of information where you might not trust a product from Google or from Facebook. And I think the other thing, of course, I have in the back of my mind thinking of looking at the chips,

in particular, is thinking about glasses. Yes. And so, you know, we're investors in Magic Leap. Magic Leap have shipped their first product, which is a developer kit, which is, you know, it's expensive and it's not a consumer product yet. There's an awful lot of smoke signals that Apple is working on something similar

and the work that they've done around kind of miniaturization and integration in the watch and waterproofing and everything else in the watches. And the rotational and... Yeah, all the motion sensors, everything else. That's clearly relevant to the watch. The AR kit stuff that they're pushing, which doesn't really make a huge amount of sense on a phone,

makes a lot more sense on when you're wearing a pair of glasses and, of course, the privacy. Because the kind of slightly not obvious thing about a pair of AR glasses is it's got a little cluster of cameras in it watching everything because that's how it works. That's how it maps the room, And that's how it knows who you are and shows your LinkedIn profile over your head. That's how it remembers that poster that I saw for a concert two weeks ago.

And like, what was it? Oh, yeah, it was that. You've got a little demon sitting on your ear watching everything. Right. Or you're in a store and you want to do price comparison and shopping and things like that. And you don't want to send what you're looking at to every store in the world. To Google or Facebook. But Apple is kind of carefully positioning themselves such that you would be comfortable with Apple having that kind of thing.

And that's a, like in the terms of how Apple does innovation, one of the things that always surprises people is they think of something as a big bang when it comes out but all they did was integrate n years of prior work and so they are a very long-term company like how they did Apple Pay by starting with Thumbprint

and working their way through and eventually it's just Apple Pay is a fascinating lesson because I think that the same work is at play for how they're going to do AR and glasses even though we don't know anything about where they're heading. Well it's very obvious at the watch and on the one hand an AR kit on the other hand

a building blocks for glasses and the contactless stuff maybe and, you know, there's a whole bunch of pieces that they're getting to work separately. I mean, I think I actually read a post about this a few years ago, but like the kind of one of the common buzzwords in the valley is minimum viable product. Right. I think Apple doesn't do minimum viable products. What they do is they create building blocks. Right.

So they create the touch ID and they create AR kit. Which starts with keychain. Like touch ID started with keychain and it keeps going. And some of these, of course, are brilliant. long-term, you know, what you would say. Some of them are actually brilliant plans. Some of them, some of them are just clever reuse of technology. Yeah, some of them. Well, we've got this thing. We could do that with it. It's your Dr. Evil plan. They never actually had the plan to do the glasses. They just realized, though, we could do that. But because of the way Apple works, what I think

is fascinating is, first, they're not out there when they have keychain and saying, stay tuned in six years when we do payment. And then they're also, when they do payment, they don't just announce, by the way, these are all the components and aren't we clever? And this is Apple's focus on the here and the now. And they, to me, they're planning when it all does come together very much resembles sort of landing a person on the moon, though obviously not in scale and complexity, in that they're like, congratulate us. We over it around the earth. And it turns out when you talk to the NASA people, that was like a hugely important thing on its own. Like in fact, if they had stopped then, they still would have achieved a lot of science. And that

to me is like thumbprint and logging on. Like that was a big, useful thing. So there's an analogy here that the way Napoleon fought his. campaigns was he had these sort of, he did, he had these huge armies because it was a little conscripted citizens. And so instead of having like 500,000 men all marching in one place, which of course would be impossible to supply and control and everything, you have separate army corps that are spread over front of like 50 miles. And that gives you enormous, him enormous flexibility because you can say, well, go there and go there and go there and then go and do this and go and do that. And they can kind of all coalesce and come together at the decisive

moment. And one of the ways I've heard people at Apple talk about the company is that they, yes, there's a plan, so there's a car project and there's a glasses project, of course there's and there's other projects as well. But it's also that you create capabilities and then you use those capabilities. And this is again back to Apple being organized in the management lingo as a functional

organization rather than by product silos. So even though there might be the phone group, in fact they're generally organized as a giant team of electrical engineers or a giant team of software engineers and then they work together. And so they get career paths for people. And I feel like that's

always where big companies fall down is they think they need an NBA running a P&L for something. And so that speaks to... Because the problem is if they had an iPad group and an iPhone group and a watch group, then who would be doing the glasses? They'd have to take people off those groups. Well, and worse than that, they'd have to be going to that group, would have to go to the watch group and ask for features in the watch code. And the watch people would be like, you understand we have like a Q3 deliverable

and we can't do this. Similarly, by organizing this way, they're able to like make big... changes like say we're focused on health now and they can do the health across the whole software stack and they can use all the way from their secure enclave through health and through all these parts that are on the phone and really deliver this capability. One thing I wanted to touch on that I think people were really quick to point out was like which I just think was not really fair or right which was oh yeah this is great that you're doing something for health and then they sort of channeled Facebook a little bit and said yeah but it's you know call me when you're

doing something for health that doesn't cost $500. And I I think like everything starts off expensive, like literally everything. Yeah, well, the watch and the cheapest watch now is, what, $250? Yeah, but to me, like, what this says is like, well, yes, the first up, like people with good jobs are going to be able to go buy these watches for people that will benefit the most and we'll have them. But all of a sudden now, there's going to be a whole industry that's like, wow, that giant thing, like the size of a cereal box that monitored your heart rate might not be the best way to solve. this problem. And it will benefit from the technology but also just the appearance of this product in the market.

And these things will all of a sudden change and there'll be much smaller bands they'll be dedicated, special purpose ones using this similar kind of approach because it will be waking up the industry to we don't have to do things this way. So the cheapest iPhone is I think, well so the iPhone

XR which is the LCD one is 799 I thought. Yeah, it's 750 I think. Yeah. So it's still more expensive than the original iPhone even though this is a cheap one. But you can get an Android phone for $30 today. Right. Not $30 with subsidy in contract.

$30 cash in a market in rural Uganda. You can buy an Android phone for this. Yeah, my second phone is the cheap Nokia Android one that just came out. Yeah, but that's like 150. But you can get a... 109. I paid on eBay. You can get a cheap Android phone for well under $50 now.

And so that technology is just, which is why there's now 3.5 billion people on Earth who have a small phone. And so technology just gets diffused. and so I think that like this you know if there was a big boom I think it was the big boom explosion kind of release it was really

in like altering the landscape of health monitoring that's going to happen and they've clearly signal and now it's just all of a sudden you're just going to go okay now what's the next condition disease telemetry from the human body

that we're going to need to go and measure and they're on a treadmill it's also worth noting that we were hearing rumors about health stuff before the watch launched which was what three years ago yeah yeah and so they've clearly there's stuff and there's patience in there and the willingness to sit and wait.

And so the last thing I would say is I just feel like what's happening to Apple right now is at a scale that you just it's unprecedented in many different ways and people go oh but Android is even bigger and Android is bigger but it's not happening at that scale. It's not command and controlled. It's not integrated.

It is messy the way that PCs were messy. And so that's why it's able to scale like that. That messiness is the asset that enables that. But to me, what's so interesting is that this puts them in this position to really just add something and change a whole industry

but also not have to worry about, like, where's the next customer going to come from? Like, there used to be this old saying when I was Microsoft called Share is Air. And it drove every level of behavior from the top down, which was, like, you can't do anything if you

don't have market share. And what's interesting is that's sort of like the one thing Apple doesn't ever worry about. Yes. They do have a billion users or billion active devices. Now they have like a billion active users. And so like that's, you know, I think that many people like go like wow, Wall Street doesn't really understand Apple still. And in fact, what was interesting was during the day yesterday, the stock price was dropping because of some weird, someone had a spreadsheet model about ASPs and didn't understand it. And today it's up like a bunch because it sank in that what they did was really a brilliant revenue maximizing play.

And what I believe is that there was just a lot more technology innovation in there than those people are giving them credit for, or that the Android ecosystem is realizing, wow, integration matters. Well, the fun thing, it's always a challenge for the one-time equity analyst to sort of partial defense. How do you build a DCF that includes a section entitled product that will exist, but I don't know what it is? Yeah.

How do you value that? How do you forecast if you could, you can't say there won't be any product, you also can't forecast cash flows from it, at least not with a straight face. Yeah. So it was a big day. There was a lot of other stuff. The big lesson I do think that people should definitely walk away from as founders

is to, again, remember that it's not just the shiny product, but boy, managing distribution, managing pricing, understanding how you bring things to market and do so is as much about innovation as like what code and what technology you write. Yep, great. Thanks. Thank you, everybody.