The Vergecast - Jony Ive leaving Apple, iPadOS public beta, and Bill Gates’ greatest mistake

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

Public betas for iPadOS, iOS 13, and macOS Catalina are available now so Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discuss the updates from using the software themselves. Also, It was announced during this recording that Apple’s chief design officer Jony Ive will depart the company later this year — the crew reacts. Other topics this week include Bill Gates discussing Microsoft losing to Android, a new Raspberry Pi, and updates on Foxconn's factory in Wisconsin.  Stories discussed this week: Jony Ive leaving Apple after nearly 30 years to start new design firmiPadOS public beta preview: worthy of the new nameiOS 13 hands-on: dark mode, Apple Maps, Reminders, and moreiOS 13’s best upgrade is in your car macOS Catalina first look: goodbye, iTunes; hello, iPad apps on Mac$35 Raspberry Pi 4 announced with 4K support and up to 4GB of RAMJony Ive leaving Apple after nearly 30 years to start new design firmBill Gates says his ‘greatest mistake ever’ was Microsoft losing to AndroidOne year after Trump's Foxconn groundbreaking, there is almost nothing to show for it Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Andrew, we need to pause this, and everyone needs to go read the story that Johnny Ive

is forming an independent design company. He's leaving the company, and then Apple will become one of his clients. What? Hello, and welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Empire. Is that a good one? I'm going to be honest with the listeners.

We re-recorded the beginning of the show. So I'm Nelai. It's Dieter. Yep. It's Paul. Hello. We were halfway. This is true.

This is a true story. We were halfway through the Vergecast. We were about to take our first break. We were like done. Yeah. Huge news broke, literally in the middle of our recording, which is that Johnny Ive is leaving Apple. That's Sir Jonathan Ive.

It's Sir, Sir Jayive, is leaving Apple. He's taking Mark Newsom with him, who is a very famous designer that he hired to work at Apple. They're starting a new company called Love From, which will be based in California. Quote, unquote, for now. For now. Yeah. And Apple will be one of their first and major exclusive clients. Yeah.

So we realized we had to stop the show and start over because there's no way we can put out a Vergecast this week. It doesn't lead with Johnny I of leaving Apple because that is just massive news. So we're going to talk about that right now, but I'm just going to be very honest with you. Then we're going to stop talking about it. And then you're going to listen to us to us talk about iOS 13 and the iPad and Mac OS Catalina. and we didn't know that Johnny I was leaving when we were talking about that stuff. So it might be a little strange.

I think it'll be fine, though. I will say, Nilai, you know that I don't typically blow smoke up your butt, but really enjoyed the Kera Convo. I felt like it was a really good summary of the overall situation that had all the right specifics and all the right context then. So I definitely encourage people to check that out. It is true. Paul does not often pay me compliments.

So I appreciate that. If you didn't listen to, Kara Swisher was on the interview episode on Tuesday. Kara's always fun to talk to because she does not take shit from anyone. Like, just doesn't. So it was really fun to try to articulate, I think, what we've been seeing for the past few weeks and get her perspective on it. She obviously knows everybody. So you haven't listened to, go listen to it. But let's talk.

Johnny Ive. So rumors of I've leaving Apple have floated around for years and years and years. Yeah, there was a whole thing. Like he was disconnected. He wasn't paying attention. He was spending all his time in London and he's actually not really working at Apple at all. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm still here. But then, like, I saw him at the last Apple event at WWDC and he's like explaining the Mac Pro to Tim Cook and the design of it.

And it's, does Tim Cook need this display? Do you guys not hang out and talk? It was very confusing. Also, the pivot to where he was just design in a broader sense, which also included software. Right. So I've, just a little bit of history here. I've famously was already at Apple when Steve Jobs came back. He had been in another firm called Tangerine.

He came to work at Apple because he thought it was inspiring. Jobs came back. He saw the talent radiating off of Johnny Ive. They obviously had their incredible collaboration over the years. The IMac, the iPod, the phone. Ive was very front and center at that moment in Apple. Every time there'd be a new product, it would be a Johnny Ive video. He would say aluminum.

It was great. We all loved it. But those two were very, very close collaborators. Jobs sadly dies. And immediately the sort of rumbles of, can Tim Cook keep this executive team together? Can you keep everybody happy? Can they write? All of those questions happened.

This is a long time ago now, but all those questions happened. There have been rumors just over the years that I've was bored, that he wanted to do different things. He got the title of chief design officer at Apple. So now he oversaw all design, including. software and most importantly including architecture. So he was instrumental in the spaceship campus and the stores and sort of the experience of Apple. He was no longer just like the next iMac is has spots, which was like a thing that he

did with Steve Jobs. He has a bunch of designers working under him. He hired Mark Newsom. The watch came out. That was very much an IVE project. But these rumbles have been there for such a long time, particularly that he wants to move his family back to England because that's where. I don't know if you know this, Johnny Abb is not for America, he's from England.

I don't know if the accent for the pronunciation of aluminum gave it away. Or the knighthood, all clues if he hadn't put it together. So now it's happened. It's absolutely massive. I don't think there's any understating it. I think I have some big, I would say it's sad. Like it's bittersweet. Like he's a character in the story of this company.

Yeah. But he says, I don't know how much to believe it, that he's going to keep. working with Apple as a client in his new firm. Yeah, he says that there's like a bunch of stuff that they've continued, they've been working on for a number of years and he's going to continue to work on them. But he also has personal passions that he wants to work on outside of Apple now. Do you think he's going to start a clothing line like Kanye? Oh, my God.

I was going to say, do you think he's going to design a Porsche hard drive case? Oh, yeah. I mean, like, is this new thing going to be frog design? Dieter, you just did a whole piece with frog design. Yeah, yeah. Can other companies hire, Johnny Ive to make stuff that compete with Apple? Like, can Sony show up and be like, can you just help us?

We've always needed to help. Can you help us? I mean, he was already doing like random side projects, just not like corporate gigs, right? So he would only, the only reason he'd need to leave would be to work less with Apple, basically, right? Or to do more corporate gigs, right? Because it's not like he couldn't do random passion projects. Well, I mean, to be honest, he doesn't have to do anything ever again for the rest of his life. Yeah, right.

Because he puts spots on an iMac. He did a lot of things. But, like, he is a knight. Right. He's friends with Bono. He's extraordinarily wealthy. And he designed the iPhone. Like, if you, that's your resume, you're like, yeah, I don't want to go to meetings anymore.

Like, that's what I would say. Like, I'm just never, I'm literally never going into a conference room again in my life. It's never going to happen. You can't have me. Yeah. Right. I'm only going to, I don't know, sculpt with clay. Like, you could just make that call.

I don't know that I would personally sculpt with Clay but I'm just trying to imagine how Johnny have things. I'm only going to use a CNC machine for art. Yeah. Do you think he has a person? Anyway, the point being Apple's design has been remarkably consistent for a long time.

I think iOS 7 was the big hiccup and they've walked it back a lot since then. Yeah. But there are a lot of easy pot shots you could take at Johnny I. In some ways, maybe they're not pot shots if you look at the arc of the thoughtfulness of the design.

I mean, we talk about the keyboard on the MacBook Pros. We could talk about charging the original Apple Pencil by having it stick out the side of the iPad. We could talk about charging the Magic Mouse by you can't stick on a lightning underneath it. There are a lot of like, oh, yeah, ha ha that you could do. I'm actually a little bit torn because on the one hand, he designed the iPhone and like the iMac and like the most iconic computers of the past 30 years. But does that mean that these other things are not misses? iOS 7 is included in that list. So iOS 7 was famously they got rid of Scott Forstall, who was the software architect, partner

to Steve Jobs with iOS, who made everything skeuomorphic. I've hated that stuff. He took over. iOS 7 went super flat. It was legitimately hard to use because it looked, it just like didn't give you any visual affordances of what was going on. They have largely left that behind, right? You just look at the evolution to iOS 13 now.

there's a lot more texture and depth and gradient and shadow in iOS again. But that was his first big, I'm in charge of software now moment. Yeah. It was obviously his first one. So that side's gotten a little bit better. The hardware design stuff, right, there's been stories forever. Apple design is, we've published them. Yeah.

Apple design is super weird and lazy now. So maybe some fresh faces, some, you know, lack of respect for tradition, all that stuff is going to be very good for the company. one imagines that that's years away, right? Yeah, it's going to take a minute. The iPhone 10 design is going to be the iPhone design for quite some time. Yeah. Hopefully there's like a new MacBook design.

Right? That would be great. They obviously just did a new Mac Pro design. So hopefully there's other products sort of in the cycle that are going to change. But it's still like this has been one of the most consistent companies and consistent sets of executive leadership in the entire industry. I don't think there's any discounting the fact that this is a massive change. Also, Tim Cook has to replace him.

Yeah. So who are the two executives? There's two executives that are going to report to Jeff Williams. Yeah, so the new plan here is Evans Hanky, who's a vice president of industrial design, and Alan Dye, who is the vice president of human interface design, are going to report to Jeff Williams, who is the COO at Apple. And so they have been on Apple's design team for a really long time. And so they're sort of they're taking over those two things.

So it sounds like they might be splitting a little bit software and hardware. Although saying human interface design industrial design are like, you know, software and hardware is an oversimplification by quite a bit. Yeah, but I mean, that's also huge, right? They're reporting not to the CEO. They're reporting to the operations guy. Apple SubiCon is being promoted another 24 year. veteran of Apple is being promoted to SVP of operations. So you see Jeff Williams,

world will get a little bit bigger. If you watch Apple Keynotes, you actually know Jeff Williams is. He always does the watch stuff, but he's also the CEO of the company. But remember, when Jobs died in his book, he's like, I set up the company so no one can screw with design. I set up the company so Johnny Ive is in charge of what the products are. It's a product forward company. Now design is not at the CEO level.

It's two people under the CEOO. like org charts are boring and this is ridiculous like it's an orchart but like keep in mind the soul of apple is design first and their big famous designer again who is a knight is leaving i like i think it's a good i kind of think it's a good thing yeah i the charging the apple pencil and charging the magic mouse are really sticking out to me right now like literally and figuratively you know it's just like i think i've had a little little bit enough of that brand of Apple. And I mean, yeah, the lamp, the IMAC lamp, the cube. There's, it's really end of an era. It's wild. The thing that I have been thinking about, as we've been talking here, is Apple's design, especially in hardware, but a little bit in software, although they've dialed it back,

has become more austere over the years, over like the last five, ten years. And the thing that brought Apple back from the market. brink was playfulness, like that original iMac, the idea of having the iMac, the new iMac be on a funny little lamp stand. There was an approachability and a lightheartedness to their designs. The eyebook was huge for that, like the weird clamshell, like literally a clam. With a handle? Yeah. I would love to see a little bit of that playfulness come back. Or just a little bit, I don't know, it's, again, it's a cheap shot to say pretension, because I don't think that's quite right. But it's not.

Not totally wrong. Austere is, I think, the word. That's been way too austere. A steer is a good word. Severe is another good word. Yeah. Right? I mean, a lot of these designs are, they're very cold.

I mean, I think with the phone to make sense, like, they know people put phones in cases. You're going to personalize it. They know, I mean, they sell however many watch bands. So they have some element of it, but the playfulness and sort of expressiveness of their product design has definitely just sort of coalesced on, yep, it's a blank slab. of metal, and this is what you get. You also can't change the default apps, and you're locked into our products and services because we're a services company. Like, it's, like, the whole thing is, like, it's, it's very perfect, which, you know, is Apple's brand, but I think they've lost sort of

a human element over time. It's just real. There's also a giant notch in the front of the phone. I don't know if you're aware. I think. See, it's absolutely huge news. He's obviously starting this new firm. Apple plans its products years and years ahead. So I don't anticipate we're going to see any massive changes. Software does change a little bit faster,

so we might see some changes on the software UI front. But there's continuity of that leadership there too. I just think we're, he says it's a natural and gentle moment to leave. I don't know what a gentle moment to leave is. But maybe he's like the spaceship has done. It has landed. Yeah.

All the furniture has moved in. You know, I'm done. I've parked my car. And I'll now zoom off into the sunset. It is remarkable that he's also taking Mark Newsom with him, which is less sort of headline news. But that was a big, famous, is this the person who's going to replace you higher? And it seems like that's in go. No.

The thing I'll be curious to see, like, Eve Behar designs a bunch of random gadgets to the point where it's almost like, not a joke, but become like, Oh, yeah, here we go. Another company that got eBayah to design their hard drive enclosure or their wacky smartwatch or whatever it is. I mean, is Johnny I've got to go like full Eve Behar and just like design

random kickstarters? I mean, the answer has to be no, right? He's going to design luxury products. Again, he's a knight. He's best friends with Bono. Yeah. I'm assuming he owns a castle. Probably.

He's a billionaire. Because he designed the iPhone. Right. I'm guessing when like the the Jucero folks show up. He's like, I'm not, I'm not doing this. Right? I don't think so nice.

I think everybody has a price. I think Jucero is the right price. I mean, why else start a firm? That's the thing. Like, if he said, I'm going to go to my home in England and sculpt clay, I'd be like, whatever. But he's starting a firm. There's going to be a price. There is a number of, I'll ensure he will also have a high.

bar of things that he finds interesting, but I feel like there will be a price. And you can get the Johnny Ive juicer. Yeah, the I've arrow. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, like, that's obviously going to be the thing. He's not a very public person.

He doesn't go on stage at these events. He doesn't talk. I doubt that even the Apple products that he continues to work on will make any mention of the fact that his firm worked on them. The way that Eve Behar, like literally startups hire at Youve Behar so they can email us saying Eve Bayhar design this. Yep. Right, which is like a little mark of quality, or at least like, someone thought through this design.

We're not going to send you like a breadboard in a wooden box. It's called the Jucero. I don't know. We'll see. I get the sense that this is like a he's out. It's like a real he's out moment. And this is just a staging ground for him to continue to work on those projects and hang out and, you know, have an office and write off whatever he has to write off. Because it's like a tax thing.

I get it. It's like. He and Mark Muser, I'm like, well, what if we want to buy really expensive chairs and look at him? Well, we'll just write them off to this business. Isn't that how businesses work? I don't know. It's been a while since I ran this one. Okay.

So we've talked about that. If you're in your car, just pull over and just honestly think about the number of products in your life. They were either directly designed by or heavily influenced by this one person. It is almost every single phone, right? He pushed the industry forward for phones. Almost every single laptop looks like the MacBook Air. Yep. Like some of them so much so that they might as well just be MacBook Airs.

That's Johnny Eye. Like you are surrounded by this person's influence. And now, as far as we can tell, he's running some sort of tax scam with his buddy, Mark. I'm kidding. I'm absolutely good. Almost every product that we encounter has been influenced AirPods, right? There's still his responsibility. the spaceship itself.

Like this influence is gigantic. So take a minute to just ponder that. We'll see what happens next. I mean, there's a September event. We're going to get some hardware out of it, right? Notably, most of your car not designed by Johnny. Yeah. He did design a car.

Yeah, it was. It was some little weird silver car. Because, of course, it was. Yeah. I mean, Apple designing a car was a thing. I mean, they just bought a little car startup, right? So maybe that's what he's going to work on. But just think about it.

Like, we don't know what's going to happen next. Well, all we know is that he's leaving you starting this new firm. But it's a pretty remarkable thing. Okay. We're going to take a break. Everybody process. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about iPadOS and all the other stuff that's going on.

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Like I said, the Johnny I have news broke in the middle of us recording. the verge cast. So we'd already had an entire conversation about iPadOS. We'd already talked a little bit about iOS 13. We'd gotten deep in the weeds on how CarPlay works. So listen to that. And then when you hear me say the magic word, Catalina, you'll know that we just picked it up. It'll be, it's going to be seen this. It's going to be magic. You said it like five times before the actual thing. This isn't going to work. It's totally going to work. Okay. Here we go. This is a big week. There's not one, not two, but five Apple OSs is in beta or something like that.

It's an insane number of... It's five. It's five. It's crazy. Yeah. I kept forgetting about one of them. I'm like, oh, we got them. No, we don't.

There's one more. Damn it. Wait, can I try iPad? Yeah. IOS. Yeah. WatchOS. Uh-huh.

MacOS. Uh-huh. Car? No. Car talk. No. TVOS. TVOS.

There it is. Yeah. Car play is not an OS. Car plays an... We're going to get to it. Car plays an extension of iOS. Apple did buy a small self-driving car company this week. Yeah.

The company was like, they were like one week away from going out of business. And then Apple was like, what if we buy you? Well, there had even been a rumor that like Apple was going to, and then they decided, nah, we don't need you. We'll just let you die. They're like, we're going to die. And Apple's like, okay, fine, we'll buy you. That's some brutal negotiating from Tim Cook.

He's like, stare into your mortality. And then you will know if I will buy you. But yeah, so Car Talk coming soon from Apple. Anyway, a bunch of new OSs is we got to go through all there in public beta. We can talk about them a lot more freely. Dieter made some videos. Chris Welch made some videos. We made a bunch of videos.

I made an iOS video. So lots to talk about there. Google continues its new comm strategy of just having Rick Osterlo say what they're doing months before they do it, even if what they're doing is not doing anything. So that's pretty good. So we've got to talk about what is going on with Google and tablets. There's a rumor of a Microsoft Surface that can run Android apps. That actually flows right into Bill Gates, just lamenting the fact that Microsoft didn't do Android, which I think is really interesting. We've got to talk about that.

I'm going to say this. The day you're listening to this Friday, you're in your car. This is the one-year anniversary of Trump breaking ground at the Foxxon factory. So I just want to, we're just going to end on that moment. The high note? It's a high note. Anyway, let's start with Apple's flurry of operating systems. So, Deere, you are running iPadOS.

Not as I speak to you on my current machine. Your current machine, which is a Mac laptop with, I believe, a frozen touchbar. That is correct. Yes. It's on Mojave, though. It's not running Catalina. So, yeah, iPadOS, the big deal was they changed the name. And, Neelai, I know you had a lot of feelings about them changing the name.

And I think they were right to change the name. I think this deserves to be called iPadOS instead of iOS. I think they're being very, what's the... They're of two minds. about what this name change means. So to us, when we were speaking to the Apple people at WWDC, they're like, it's not a big change. We're just changing the name.

It's still iOS. All the features are going to go back and forth. It's really sharing the same stuff. And then in public, they're like, it's more than a name change. It's the future of computing. And I don't think they've decided where on that spectrum the name change actually lies. I would prefer it to be way more on the, it's really different. It's its own thing.

against its own team. That's where it's needed to go for some time. But when we talk to them at WWDC, they're like, it's just marketing. We're just, you know, it seems nice. Having used it, where do you think it lies? I think it lies in between those two polls, I guess. I'll cop out and say that.

There are things you can do on iPad OS that you just can't do on the iPhone, specifically like the multitasking stuff. But like all the files app stuff, like everything there actually does work on the iPhone. But the multitasking specifically to have like a little iPhone in the slide over that you just like have a bunch of apps just hanging out over there is what makes it feel different. So like you've got your split screen apps or whatever. And then you've just got a whole bunch of like stuff that is just hanging out ready to look at and swipe away if you don't want it over on the side.

That is radically different in terms of my day to day use than what was there before. That sounds like I'm overstating it. But it really is convenient to have a stack of like little things that you want. like the messages app and your RSS readers so you don't look at it too much and Twitter so you don't look at it too much and I don't know maybe Slack or something just hanging out over there and you can bring them in quick and get rid of them quick it's like having an iPhone sitting next to your iPad only it's on your iPad. Is it actually like an iPhone? Because it, you know, it superficially looks. It's got the bar at the bottom the whole thing. It very superficially looks like a little iPhone. Does it work like a little iPhone? Do you mean like does it make calls? Yeah. Can you? Can you? No, like does it? There's still iPad apps are just smaller. You know what I mean? Like the muscle memory that you've developed navigating around iPhones, can you use that

for the one third of your screen that is a little iPhone? You can, you can, like, swipe on the bottom to switch through things or you can swipe up to, like, fan out the things on it. But, like, you say that they're iPad apps on the iPhone, but, like, all iPad apps are iPhone apps, just redesigned for larger screens. Right. Right. So, like, yeah.

So do they revert to the iPhone? UI, like, is there a back gesture and all that stuff? Yeah, it's all there. That's nuts. It's like a little... Well, the back gesture's tough, but yeah, you know, you can kind of get it on the edge. The... Wait, you gave two very different responses to that very same thing.

I don't know what you're asking. Like, is it really like an iPhone? What is an iPhone? What is an OS? Like, wow, data. We're like, we're one minute and 43 seconds in this conversation and what is an iPhone? Well, right. I don't know what you're asking. So longstanding ChromeOS, longstanding dream.

We're going to have a little Android app. This didn't work for them. But we're going to have little Android apps in the corner. It's like we're going to run phone apps in the middle of this more desktop operating system. Right. Does this popover system in the iPad feel like you've got a bunch of iPad apps taking advantage of the full surface area of display? And now you've got a little baby iPhone over here running iPhone apps. Or is it more like just a shrunk down?

You know what I mean? Like does it feel like having a little phone in the corner? It feels like having a little phone in the corner, except that those apps are just iPad apps, shrunk it down in the iPhone form factor. So if you want to, like, grab the little bar at the top and pull it down and make it a full split screen and have it become a full-size iPad app, you can. So it's a little bit of the best of both worlds, except that Apple added a whole bunch of stuff that we wanted in order to have better multitasking.

So multiple windows out of a single app, you know, just like having a bunch of stuff sitting in the slideover. That's all great. they don't know what they're doing because if you command tab over to an app you just don't know what's going to launch if you had an app and slide over and you try to open it it'll pull open the slide over if you have an app open

but if you're on the home screen you try and open the app then it'll just open up full screen you kind of never really know what's going to happen when you tap on an app icon well that's the future of computing surprise and delight Well, that's always been something with Mac

where they kind of order the spaces sort of based on like a recency. Yeah. And so, but I'm curious, and I need to spend some time with it, but like I'm curious of what I'll land with. Because I can imagine there seems like there'd be two different ways to use an iPad.

You could have a bunch of different spaces for different scenarios. Or you could say, this space is my home and I will manage, you know, I will swap between the iPhone apps, and I will swap between the main app. And we're abusing this concept of iPhone apps.

I know they're not really iPhone apps. But, you know, I will manage what's on the sidebar. I will manage what's floating. I will manage the main screen because I'm going to live in this space. Rather than I'm going to switch between different spaces that are each suited for a different work. So part of the problem is we don't know what the metaphor is for how you operate these windows, right? when there's just a full screen metaphor, which is what you've got on an iPhone and, you know, on the iPad a little bit,

it was basically like you'd go into the multi-look view and you would see everything that's like in order of recency, right? You would just go back in time, what's the last app you opened? The one before that, the one before that, slide over back in time until you find the thing that you want, tap it, and then it opens back up and then it comes to the top of the stack, right? Yeah. The iPad mixes those metaphors because in some ways it's a spatial metaphor like a desktop.

This window's over here on the left. This window's over here on the right. This window is behind those other windows. This window's on the other screen over to the right of the screen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it also still has the recency metaphor. When you swipe up, it's like here's one space I use, the one before that, the one before that, the one before that, and back in time. And so when you command tab into something or you have multiple windows from a single app, the system doesn't know or it's incoherent between, are we dealing with a most recently used? metaphor or are we dealing with a spatial metaphor?

Do they call them spaces? Yes. Because what this reminds me of is the thing on the Mac spaces and expose and all that window management that layered on that no one really used. Yep. I use it every day all the time. You're the biggest nerd I know. Congratulations.

You're in a space. You want me to move? I'll move to a different space. You want to be on desktop too? That's what you get. Paul, are you supposed to be running like desktop Linux? What are you doing right now? But like they didn't, they like underutilized it because.

are so hard to understand. Yeah. Isn't this computer supposed to be the easy one? It is the easy one as long as you don't try and do too much. And then as soon as you try to do too much, it becomes the harder one.

Yeah, that's truly the iPad story. But I'm not giving out a final judgment on that because it is technically beta, and they could theoretically, like, clean that up a little bit before the official release. I have a tiny glimmer of faith. Either way, there are fewer things that you can't do.

No matter how hard they are, there are fewer things that you just can't at all do. Yeah. Can you just tell you what the most important thing? What happens when you plug in a thumb drive? Does it work? It works. And you can unplug it without having to unmount it.

The future is finally here. And you unplug it. All it was a $1,200 tablet with a supercomputer processor, and you can finally don't have to eject a thumb drive from an app. Well, what they had to do was they rewrote the USB stack to basically be more like discrete APIs of what USB is allowed to do. instead of being a thing that's plugged directly into, I don't know, the kernel. So the way they say it is they put USB into user space.

And so, like, there are certain discrete things that it's allowed to do, like present files to an app or to the files app or do, you know, like the various different camera protocols that work over USB. And so they're adding those, like, one by one, sort of like APIs that you hand out to a developer rather than just saying, yep, anything USB can do in a Mac you can do on an iPad, because they're trying to be a little bit more secure than that. Yeah.

Have any of the apps been updated to directly address USB? Not any that I've used now. I think that's going to be a big turn. That's going to make this really useful, right? I mean, what is the thing I want most? I want to import photos to Lightroom without round-shipping new files. Like, we just call Adobe. Does anybody have Adobe's phone number?

Send it to me. I mean, I probably have Adobe's phone number four. Domi has Adobe's phone number. We'll do some, we'll do the work that we're, you know, paid to do. and we'll know when like we'll be updated. Have you tried the mouse stuff? Just like I turned it on and like, yep, there it is and turned it off. Tom Warren wrote a pretty good piece about it.

Oh, no, I'm sorry. Sam Biford wrote a pretty good piece about it. There are lots of people that are really into it just because it lets you have a desktop set up. But it's very clear that Apple is putting as many barriers between you and having a mouse-controlled iPad as possible. And I kind of respect it. Because one of the things that killed Windows tablets

and Windows tablet apps is everyone could just fall back on making old-style Windows apps with mouse pointers and tiny little-ass buttons because that's what the majority of people used and wanted. And so they just kept doing that. And so no one made the new style apps. And so Apple being pretty obstinate about making sure that the iPad stays touch, at least for now,

makes it more likely that they're going to get more apps that are properly designed for the iPad in this windowing system. Okay. Okay. So here's a million dollar question. The one in your piece previewing iPadOS. Is it iPadOS 13? We're like completely through the looking glass with Apple names. Yeah, it's iPadOS. I hate you. iPadOs. Does it have a number? Sure. Who cares? Because it's actually the iPad OS 1. And it's like watch OS 5. It's TVOS 3. No, they're going to stop doing version numbers. You know, like they're certain things where they won't let you use the word the. in front of it, you know? Like, it's not the iPhone, it's just iPhone. Yeah.

They still let you have version numbers for iPhone, but eventually they make those go away. Every now and then they release an iPad and they're like, it's the iPad. We're like, is it the iPad 4? No, no, it's the iPad. That's what they're doing with iPad OS. It's just iPad OS, man. No articles, no numbers. It just exists like a platonic ideal outside the cave.

It's always been iPad OS. Yeah, it's never not. They didn't actually make this name change. There's no confusion there at all. It's actually when they named it when I released it. Can I just one more thing real quick, and now we've got to be on the other stuff. The desktop version of Safari, the desktop class browser, is not. Really?

I mean, it is. They did a very good job making things work that didn't work before. And it does, in fact, because it tells sites that it's the Mac version of Safari, it does in fact serve the desktop version of homepages by default. but there are certain times where like that stack of all right we get the desktop version of the page it expects a mouse pointer iPad is going to tell it that it's a mouse pointer but really it's touch and we've created a translation layer in between there are certain times where that just doesn't quite work it works for the really obvious stuff that we all check like i don't know google docs but like for example our content management system chorus works incredibly well on the iPad had before iPad OS.

With iPad OS, I actually have to request the mobile site to get it to work because in that desktop translation that it's doing, it gets a little twitchy and certain things don't work and you like can't scroll and like strange things happen. So it's great that Apple did it because it shows that they're willing to compromise and make clutches to make their computers better. But it is at the end of the day a bit of a cludge. And I'm not as mad about it as I expected because even if it was the full-on desktop version of Safari, websites expect mousees and scrolling in a way that isn't exactly the same thing as touch.

And so I don't know what other solution they had for this. There was always going to have to be a touch translation layer for the web. And sometimes that's just going to get twitchy and that's just how it has to be. Yeah. It seems like a massive philosophical debate too, right? It's like not great to lie about your user agent when you're asking for a website. They're lying. It's like a thing they're doing.

They're saying that this is a Mac. Is it lying? I don't know. Yeah. We've already asked what a phone is. What is a lie? iPadOS is based on iOS, which is based on the kernel from Mac OS. So technically deep down, it's a Mac, right?

Every single web browser for all time claim to be Mozilla. Yeah. I guess the question of what is the nature of a lie on the web is just like extremely up for grabs. But they can't say it's an iPad. That's the real problem. Because then people will give them weirdo iPad versions of websites. Right. And those versions are bad.

Yep. I mean, that fundamentally problem is people made bad iPad websites. So now they have to lie about being a Mac. I do think it's interesting specifically, like you're talking about, like, so you're saying Google Docs works pretty well? It works pretty well. Not perfect, but pretty well. The instrumented rich text editor component of websites is one of the most. complicated, like, layout and JavaScript, like, parts of itty website.

Yeah. Because it's just a very difficult problem. So I am guessing that will also improve just in a general sense as, like, more modern versions of that component are included in web pages. Maybe there will be less weirdness to translate. I mean, also, I really think Apple views Safari and the web is a backstop, right? They've done this thing. But what they really want is for Google to make a good Google Docs app for the iPad.

And one of the most important changes we haven't talked about is Apple is going to require that iPad apps that are on the iPad support this at least resizable Windows system, if not also multiple windows. But definitely like the resizable window system is going to be a requirement. So apps aren't just taking over your whole screen because they don't know that they're on an iPad or are bad at being an iPad app. Yeah. And Google actually updated Google Doc. to work with the multiple window thing. So like, or not multiple window, but like the resizable window at least, like relatively recently, but it still sucks for comments.

So I still have to use the web. There's one thing they need to fix in this app. Like all of the AI and data collection that Google does, they can't detect that millions of people hate this stupid app on the iPad. Like somewhere shouldn't an algorithm be like Sundar? Google can't make websites that don't work in Chrome. What are you asking for? Wait, wait, wait.

That's not a can't. That's not that they can't. It's that they know that they don't have to and they won't. So, Deere, here's a big question. You actually refused. It was like the first line of your piece. I will not address whether this can replace a laptop. But here we are in this safe space of an audio environment

listened to by hundreds of thousands of people. Can I replace your laptop? Here's an analogy. There's trucks and there's cars. I hate this analogy so much. Why? Because the Ford F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle in America for like 45 years. People want trucks.

Really big trucks. Just like people want gaming PCs. That support, file workflow, and lightroom. It's just the worst metaphor. Lightroom trucks. That's what I want. Like a Ford Raptor that runs Lightroom. Give me that.

The answer is Noah cannot replace your laptop. However, it could now in a way it couldn't before. there's no longer like this philosophical refusal to do the things you want it to do there. It has the capability and it's giving apps permission to do the things that you would want it to do in order to replace your laptop.

It just, now they actually have to make good on those capabilities. And so give it another year because, you know, it's only been around for a decade, Nila. You got to give it more time. All right. I mean, I will say I'm looking at my

iPad more charitably now that this is here. Yeah. It's really buggy, so I haven't put it on, like, the main iPad that I know my wife watches Netflix on. Like, that seems like a dangerous game to play. But I've thought, like, oh, I could, I'd rather have this on a plane than my laptop right now. Yeah, it's pretty buggy. It's better on a plane. I'm using my iPad more now that I have it, which makes me even angrier at the garbage smart keyboard that they made for the new iPad form factor. Yeah. It is not great. It's a good thing they have an open but a total control over their hardware ecosystem so no one can improve it. Yeah. They're like, the connector's open. I'm like, but the MFI program is jail. I know, like it is. All right. There's not much to talk about with the phone as near as I can tell.

Maps are better. Dark mode is fine. We've already talked about the Apple privacy stuff. The reminders app seems really good, but I don't use it because I want cross-platform apps for my primary PIM apps, personal information management apps. Yeah. But yeah, like the thing I'm really curious about is Will. it be faster on older hardware? They say it will be, but we can't know that until the beta's

through because the beta is actually pretty hard on battery life right now and not totally ready. It's usually what happens is like there's a bunch stuff for the iPhone and then the iPad gets a couple of things. And this year that was totally flipped. Yeah. The thing I'm excited about most is car play, which is a little random. Because to get the most out of the new car play features, you also need a new car. I have to say the universe really pointing me at getting a new car. We're going to spend the rest of the Vergecast are shopping for cars? Are you talking about support for dual screen?

Yeah, yeah. So I watched the sort of like WWDC presentation of the new CarPlay features. The interface is revised and better. The interface thing is huge. Yeah, it's a big, big deal. It's much better, and there's safe areas and you can have these.

It supports a regularly sized displays. So car interior is no longer have to be designed around a giant rectangle, which is cool. But I actually didn't quite realize how CarPlay works, And I think it really speaks how powerful the phone is. So it just sends out, you know, it's not just like an external display.

The phone is encoding and sending out like an H264 video stream and then getting back input, which is just not how you think about displays working. And now it can do like three of them across a displays in a car. So you can have a map in your instrument cluster, another carplay, like, Apple Music display. and then something else third entirely happening in your center console. And those are all just encoded H264 video streams. Does this mean more huds? It could.

I think they're just supporting, like, if you've got displays in your car, we can send a video stream to them. I just think it's wild that a phone can drive that many displays and the way it's doing it is by literally just encoding video. Like, it's not... You think that simplifies it for car manufacturers. Like, you don't have to, like, make the thing that works precisely with a thing. Just accept a video stream and you're fine.

Well, yeah, I think they have to send back the, you know, whatever inputs. Sure. But it's just neat. Like, I hadn't thought about it that way. I think Apple's doing a lot of that stuff, right? Like, there's sidecar on the iPad where you can, like, send the Mac display out. And that feels like they're just really good at encoding a display and sending it off. Yeah.

And the funny thing is, I mean, we should actually get into Catalina. But it lives in the same menu as like AirPlay. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And, you know, so I click on it. And I was like, okay, so it's probably not AirPlay, though, right? it's Airplay-esque or something. But when it crashed on me, it also crashed airplay. And so I'm wondering if fundamentally it's just basically built on that same technology,

especially if you use it wirelessly. Yeah, you get a bunch of Apple engineers. Like, look at all the stuff we have. What if we airplay to an iPad and show the touchbar at the bottom? It's like a real Taco Bell assembly line of remixing features to make new products. Yeah. Sidecar is a Gordita. By the way, the touch bar on the bottom of a sidecar means that it's never going away on the laptops.

Ooh, the bringer of bad news. Someone was telling me that the T2 chip can also accelerate hardware encoding on these laptops now. Yeah, I think we're doing. I think fundamentally Apple just wants the keyboard deck to be another iPad. Like, that's their goal. All right, so Paul, you have been running macOS Catalina. Yeah. Do you remember?

That's the callback, bud. I have been running Catalina. Welcome to the real timeline where everything that happens has real consequences. This is where we know that Johnny Ive has left Apple. All right. In this timeline, there is no Johnny Ive. And I am indeed running macOS Catalina, which is, it's not hugely different, right? The big headline stories, they broke up iTunes.

my first experience with Catalina is I wanted to also update my iPad and I wanted to do it the fancy developer way where you download like a backup, right? And you use iTunes to side load it. But there's no iTunes. But then I saw my iPad show up in iTunes. And I was like, whoa, whoa. I guess they thought of this through.

They knew I'd least need access to my iPad for side loading, developer versions of iOS. But then it disappeared and I couldn't find it and I was so confused and then I realized that it's in the finder now, which I had just glossed over that news. And the finder looks like Apple Music, which looks like all of these apps that are sort of, and I don't really know exactly which ones are catalysts, which ones, but they almost all look the same. You got that sidebar on the side and then a bunch of stuff having the middle.

And I just didn't notice the first time I saw my iPad show up that I was looking at Finder, not Apple Music. But anyways, that all worked out. And it's fine. Can I interrupt you for just a second, Paul? Yeah. The claim that all the sidebars look the same is objectively a lie. Like the Daniel Irondildger over at Apple Insider and his big giant Catalina preview

posted a screenshot of all the different versions of a sidebar that you can get in Catalina from the different eras of. of macOS software. And there are five different ways to build a soft, to build a sidebar on the Mac. There's a Catalina way. There's a Catalyst way.

There's a Mojave way. There's the old aluminum way. And then there's like super old ways like lying way back in the day that are still there on first party apps. Yes, that is true. But also if you're not paying very good attention and you're confused, which out of you,

you know, there's just like this vague, I'm running in in dark mode and there's just this vague sense. We're so far past the skeuomorphic world, right? Right? Yeah. And there is a way to make Mac apps. And yes, if you examine the pixels, they look a lot different. If you're not, if you're just in dark mode and just jumping around, these apps tend to look very similar in my experience, which is not bad.

I'm just saying like there is a way to make Mac apps nowadays. The main thing I've noticed running Catalina is that Apple is doing this move. of trying to lock down more of the operating system. And one of the main ways you sense that is whenever you open an app, well, either they say you downloaded this from the internet, are you crazy? And then you go, the system preferences, you say, yes, I do want to open that app. But once you do open an app, the app, it's kind of like the web browser, it asks for privileges.

So like even Apple's own reminders app will ask for access to your location. Or most app want to look at your documents folder for whatever. reason. I love that. And it's really scary because if Apple does it wrong, it breaks all the apps and and like weird workflows you have are totally busted. But that hasn't been my experience. And in exchange, you're getting a lot more safety because random apps can't just look at your documents until you say, yes, they can look at your documents. Have you played with a bunch Catalyst apps? Are you like into them? I'm like Dieter where I don't use, I don't want to get my life locked into Apple Music or

reminders. Like I've checked out. So no, those aren't, those aren't catalysts. So like the Catalyst apps, there's the original four, which are completely unchanged and still God Awful. And then there's Apple Podcasts and Find My, which is still the worst name for an app ever. and they're slightly different and maybe they can use some stuff that regular developers can't use. But I came into this challenging Apple to make as many catalyst apps as possible

and show developers how it's done and how to make good ones. And they just didn't. They're just like, yep, go ahead and do it. Here are some other bad ones and the other ones are still bad. Now, the people in the Mac community are saying, whatever,

we'll get some of those bad apps, but the real news is that Swift UI is coming and there will be a single, UI language that will work across every single Apple device ever made. And so don't worry about Catalyst apps being the future of the Mac. They're just a stopgap until all the cool new Swift UI apps can come. Yeah. Which maybe.

I'm getting the oppression that Swift UI is a ways out as far as getting like the big, complicated apps being. I do think Catalyst will bring a lot of iPad apps and I'm seeing a ton of that experimentation. But it seems like a lot of the developers I follow have tried out Swift UI. It's really cool. It feels like the future. And then they like run into something that's really hard to do. And like, ah, it's not quite ready.

I think what you and I think you and Deter are saying is the exact same thing. Right. Like they have catalyst. Lots of developers have iPad apps. This is an easy mechanism to just like do that for now. Right. And then the future is, okay, like Swift UI is here. Start playing with it.

You're going to run in some roadblocks. We've got to iterate it. We've got like build big apps in it five years from now. everything will be SWIFUI and we won't be doing this catalyst thing. I think Apple's investment in the team is building this stuff also kind of reflects that. Yeah, but the thing that's really fascinating about that is like Apple has created a experience that they're not putting a ton of work into making good. A software, a catalyst is fundamentally not going to be great on a Mac unless they put a lot more work into making it great themselves and helping developers make it feel more Mac-like. And so they explicitly have this new solution

for getting a bunch of apps on the Mac that is like nerfed basically until the better thing comes, which is a very strange place to be in. I guess it's just a beta life where so many of the Mac apps are so busted that like I'll have a bad experience with a Mac app and I don't want to name names because I am running a beta,

but I'll have a bad experience and like, oh, this is so buggy. You must be one of those Catalyst apps. And then it's not. Not, you know, so like, maybe it's just all so bad right now that I can't even tell, like, what makes catalyst bad. Like, I don't, I noticed it a little mojave, but I guess I'm just not noticing. It's not, they're not setting themselves apart. And because I don't have access to this new glut of developer third party catalyst apps, I don't really know how to identify them.

And what's, what are the pitfalls? Yeah, we'll see. To me, it's the one that always just leaps out is Apple News, right? Yeah. And it's super dumb, but it's, I pay for Apple News. And it is always Vanity Fair. I always want to read something in Vanity Fair. And I go on the web and like, I'm paywalled out, but I pay for Apple News.

And I'm like, I just want to read this over here. And it is impossible. Like, it's like, okay, here's this weird iPad app on my Mac. I'm going to just fight it to read this like 800-word article I wanted to read. It's that stuff. It's just like not complete. It's not part of the system. It's still sitting a little bit farther away from it in a way that it is super annoying.

I think that might get better over time. But right now, that's the one that jumps. And then like the home app, if you ever just use it, which I don't. I don't have a home. Well, I'm going to get you like one smart light bulb. And I'm going to code it to me so I can turn off one light bulb in your house all the time. So I can feel the pain of catalyst. It's a lot.

The home app is in particular. is like, what are we doing here? If you try and set an automation, the date is still the, like, the dial thing that you're supposed to slide up and down, and it's a popover window. And normally on a Mac, when there's a popover window, you can click outside it to make it go away or you can move the popover window around or whatever. And no, you can't because it's basically fundamentally an iPhone app. And so an iPhone app expects there to be one window on top of the other window.

And the only way to go back is to literally hit the back button, which is how it works here. So there's just, there's a bunch of stuff that just doesn't. doesn't feel right. Yeah. Okay. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Paul's going to do his thing.

We're going to talk a little bit about Bill Gates saying his greatest mistake was not making Android or making something that was like Android. And I honestly, I just have to talk about Foxxon for two minutes. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time

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MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, Paul, every week, my man. That's right. You do something. It's the consistency is out of this world. It's called the sweetest pies. we got oh this was big news this week we got a raspberry pie four i mean it's great so one of the

real hot thing there's so many so many wonderful things about the new raspberry pie it is is faster it's got usb three it's got gigabit ethernet it's got dual httmi for actually that's a bad thing that's now doesn't have a regular htm i connector so you got some htemy dangle life um it there's a there's different versions so you can get a 50 $55 one with four gigabytes of RAM, which is awesome. But one of the wonderful things that happened alongside this announcement was this thread on Hacker News. And it's just somebody's like, hey, what do you guys use your raspberry pies for? And it's these testimonials of just like wonderful, beautiful.

It's like this is what you wish technology was every day. It's like one of the top ones is like there's a bus stop across the street from me. And so I put a screen up in my window to tell people what the ETA is of the next bus. That's incredible. Or some guys like my spouse never answers her or never has the ringer on. So I like V like SSH into a raspberry pie to play a loud ring, ring noise to get her attention. So it's just like, yeah. So ask Hacker News.

what do you do with your raspberry pie? It's a thread with over a thousand commas. And it's just beautiful. It is, this is like, it's just an ode to what I like about technology. And anyways, Raspberry Pi 4, very exciting. People are super

into it. Well, and it is one of those things where a lot of people, you end up with a Raspberry pie because you thought you were going to do some projects, but you didn't do projects. But it doesn't, it's never too late. It's never too late to plug in to your Raspberry Pi, pie and plug in the HTML monitor and a mouse and keyboard and learn a little bit about Linux

or go real crazy and like SSH into it. I saw somebody on Twitter talking about, and I don't know if this has anything to do with the new version of iPad OS. The new iPad has USBC, right? And it can support USB on the go. And so you can set up your Raspberry Pi so that it is like a USB on the go device. and then you can SSAH into your Raspberry Pi and power from an iPad using BlinkShel. So you could have a portable Linux development environment.

There's so much wonderful things to do. And it's faster. So many people use Raspberry Pi as media servers and do various network things. And the speed, the improvements that this will have for networking applications are really big. I'm excited. I'm going to get a rise rate high. I'm going to do some coding. Do it.

Learn to code. Perfect, Paul. All right, we got to talk about this Bill Gates thing. Right? Yeah. Bill Gates, giving an interview to a venture capitalist firm, they said, what's your biggest mistake? And he said, mismanaging Microsoft so that it didn't become whatever Android became.

That is just like news on its own, right? Like, Tom Warren wrote that story. He has a lot of great detail. You should read it. There's a lot of great detail in there about, how Microsoft missed the mobile moment, how Windows phone was a mess, how they couldn't decide if they were going to keep going with Windows mobile or do Windows phone the way they did it until it was way too late and they weren't committed and then Android was free and allowed

customization in the way that Windows didn't, they missed it. I think we all agree that you cannot currently buy a phone running at Microsoft operating system because they missed it. And Bill Gates, we had him on the Vergecast a while back. Dude's got a Samsung phone. Running Android. I don't think he loves it. You know, like, he's even saying, like, this was my biggest mistake.

We had this failure. We should have been the thing. And I think he's like, that's $400 billion that would have been transferred from Google to Microsoft if we'd want. He's right, by the way. I think that that is his biggest mistake. Oh, by far. And Microsoft's doing fine. But what jumps out to me, and I wrote a little piece on it this,

week. We keep talking about dominance of platforms and antitrust and regulation and privacy regulation and the tradeoffs in there. And Gates to me just made the case for why we need to think about this stuff differently than we think about every other kind of market. And what he said was these markets are winner take all. They absolutely are. If you have 90% of the apps, it's still complete doom. Right. There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating. system out there. And if you only have 90% the apps, it's complete doom, which is 100% true.

And then he went on to set, because it happened. There are actually not any other non-apple operator. There's Tyson. There's Kios. But that's like a totally different category. And there's, you know, Chinese risks on Android. But in America and Europe,

there's Android and iOS. And then a bunch of third party. What's the phrase I'm using? Also Rands. A bunch of L also Rands. And then he says, it's not true for other markets. If you're in like the services business, this isn't true. But it's absolutely true for platforms, that they are win or take all. And it just made me think if Bill Gates is so aware that Microsoft didn't win because it's a winner take all market.

And Microsoft, I don't know if you guys remember this, famously was like paying its own engineers to make apps to fill the gaps, was paying third parties to make like Instagram clones. Right. They were trying to flood their own ecosystem. Remember when we gave ecosystem scores and people would like, we'd get like death threats because we're like the windows from ecosystem isn't very good. Yes. Yes. Okay, they couldn't.

Oh, man. Even with all of their money and all of their power, they could not make that ecosystem good because they were in second place. Was it all timing or was, were there also like you mentioned like, you know, Windows phone was not as customizable, right? it wasn't as amenable to, you know, weird carrier apps and the gross sort of deals that that dominated Android early on, right? Like the, you know, like me and my best friend, Sprint, have skinned the hell out of this operating system. Yeah.

You know, but it's cheap. And we made a phone for you. Do you want it? And some people did. And Android succeeded. Like, was there something to that? Because I love that austere, minimal, like, sort of revolutionary UI of Windows phone. But it seemed like it really did not help app developers stand out, and it didn't help

phone manufacturers stand out. That's exactly right. I think there's a million ways that, look, we were just talking about Johnny Ivan, iOS 7. In many ways, iOS 7 was a response to Windows phone, right? They made it totally flat. They made it totally. It was called Metro and then modern, right? They made it modern.

Yeah. Look, they made a bunch of business mistakes. They made a bunch of product mistakes. They were a little bit late. Then they bought Nokia for some reason. Like, they didn't do a good job. I don't even, but I think the argument is, even if they had been perfect, there wouldn't have been a third contender, right?

The market is winner take all. So maybe they might have won, but then Android wouldn't have succeeded. Or Android won and then Windows 1 couldn't succeed. Even if they had executed well, there still would have been only one winner. That's his point. Yeah, there's not three. It's not, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop. is what he's saying.

Sorry, Paul. Although, you know, get a raspberry pie. Learn to code. Get a raspberry pie. Anyhow, my point is, when you hear Bill Gates say it's winner take all, even we, we couldn't create a third option. It's either you're it or you're not. When you look around the industry and you see monopolies and duopolis all over the place,

there's Uber and Lyft, there's not a third one, there's Google search, not really a second one. There's a lot of third ones with Uber and Lyft. Yeah, but they're all bleeding money and crashing. I live in New York City. There were a lot of third ones for a minute. It's Uber and Lyft, right? Like, that's it. Like, Juno is not doing it.

They just burned a lot of money and died. Right? And when we cover it, you just see it. You aggregate the demand. You get the people. And then your ability to get people to switch to a third one is very, very low. And Lyft until Uber had its extraordinarily bad run of, basically being jerks.

That's where the lift bump came from. They were on their way to not even being in second place. What do we talk about all the time? Content moderation. Why are YouTubers so mad at YouTube? Because they don't have anywhere to go. It's a monopoly for both their services

and for audience demand. So you see those winner-take-all markets over and over again. And you see Bill Gates saying, like, it absolutely is winner-take-all. I feel like you are making the argument for, okay, well, if we cannot trust the market to reflect the demand of consumers. We can't trust consumers can send a signal by shifting their

dollars. Then the market needs to be constrained in some other way. And that to me is like the thing. Like, platform economies are so different. They're so, so different than I'm going to go and buy laundry detergent and have 50 options and those companies can compete. I'm going to pick what restaurant to go to and those are competitive because they're a little bit fungible. So how this got solved last time was there was something called Netscape. and then Microsoft was evil assholes. And they did so many mean, bad, horrible things. And they got the whole world running IE6.

And then thank goodness for another, turns out to be relatively amoral corporation, Google showed up. And they built Chrome. And then Chrome is really sort of the new IE6 in some ways. But we have this interesting vibrancy where we have Firefox is still around. Safari has a real important role. And then because Chrome is open source, you end up with a lot of different, I mean, you almost have sort of like the Android scenario.

I feel like you're missing a big chunk of that narrative, which is that the United States government sued Microsoft for illegally bundling IE6 with Windows, creating, Years of scrutiny. Bill Gates even said it here. There was an antitrust lawsuit and some other things that created the opportunity for Google to rise. Right. Like Microsoft couldn't really use the same playbook this time. Right. They were under scrutiny. And so the argument, and I think this is going to be in the history of business academia, in the history of business journalism, in the history of business scholarship, this debate is going to rage forever. Right. But the sort of conventional wisdom is, even though we didn't break Microsoft up, the scrutiny, the public exposure of how ruthless they were being, the suggestion that you could be too ruthless, stop them, like stopped some of the anti-competitive behavior. And they entered into a consent agreement with the Justice Department, all the stuff. And they said they would stop. And that created the conditions by which Google could be on Windows computers, not blocked by IE6, but they weren't going to do all this stuff. and that's why you have a Google, right? And if they had been able to just bundle IE6

and then set IE6 to be the default to Bing, they could have just kept on rolling and rolling and rolling because Bill Gates wasn't like going to forget how to be ruthless, right? He wasn't going to just take his eye off the ball, but the Justice Department made them stop. And I think some people would argue that, you know, we had Brad Smith on the show ages ago.

There was literally the first interview that we did on the interview episode. And he was like, nah, kind of. I mean, it was annoying. And then you have a bunch of like literally the New York Times has a piece looking back at the Microsoft antitrust experiment from people who are there. That's week. Steve Lour, I think, wrote it. And like the conclusion of like professors, other smart people is, yeah, that's really, that happened. That's what happened.

There was antitrust action. We didn't break up Microsoft, but it created the conditions for there to be competition. I think aside from that discussion or in addition to that discussion, I have a theory of the way technology of all. where it's in a walled garden while you're deciding what's correct, what you need, what are the minimum correct features, right? And walled gardens are expensive to build, and so they need these sort of high returns. And then there's the after the walled garden where you've figured out the functionality that you need, and now you can afford or somebody else can afford to make the open source version. I have a theory, and I feel like we are going to get close to there. I, I, I, I,

I feel like in five years, there will be a very good, viable, open source, usable phone operating system. I don't think this has to be forever. That's my theory based on this. You start with Waldgardens and then you open up from there. But I definitely don't have anything to argue against the fact that Microsoft got stopped in its tracks as far as it. It sure did. I think rolling is a good term.

Yeah. Yeah, the point that I want to make is, I mean, Paul, you and I have argued about this for years now. I think what is just really crystallized for me, and the reason I wrote the piece I wrote this week, because Bill Gates said what he said, that's not new information that it's a winner-to-take-all market. I mean, that's the heart of the argument we've been having for however long. I just think we're at a point where other people, policymakers, regulators, consumers, everybody's starting to realize, oh, the platform. economy is different, meaningfully different than the rest of the economy, right? That we, when you buy a Ford, you can just say, like, I hate this Ford and leave. And you don't have to buy a new watch and your chat bubbles don't turn green.

Right. And, like, you don't lose access to all the TV shows you ever bought. Like, there's not this huge network of, right? Like, that's crazy. And that's where we are with these platform companies. Like, you're not leaving a product. You're leaving your network of millions of other people. You're leaving the accrued value of every bit of data Google has ever collected about what search result you might want.

And you cannot pay your way into that. You cannot pay your way into a complete app ecosystem that just accrues over time and then you have this huge monopoly. And I think that, I think everyone's just starting to get it. You cannot start a competitor to Uber right now. You just can't. And that's why there aren't any. right? Like, it seems very natural. Like, I'm going to start a new ride-hailing startup, and we're going to differentiate it, and all the cars are going to be red, because that's what we think consumers want. That's what the data shows us consumers want. You could not make that happen. And one of the reasons that people have been talking about antitrust so much instead of just regulating is look at Google, for example. You cannot start a competing search engine. You cannot start a competing phone platform. You cannot start a competing ad network. You know, like that list.

is growing of the things that Google just utterly dominates and it's not worth your time to try and compete with. Yeah. As a business. Yeah, you can start another search engine. It's just, I don't think you're going to be very successful as a business. I mean, I really do have actually really high expectations for what open source is building right now, what people are building for themselves with, you know, with open source technology.

A lot of it is open sourced by these. these companies themselves, you know, these companies build interesting technology and to continue to attract good developers, they feel like it's mandatory to open source a lot of their technology. And that technology, the hard to build stuff of a lot of these platforms is now free to use and will eventually be cobbled together into competent, useful products, I think. I hope so. I just think that you got to eat. Right.

Some people are going to do that, and maybe they'll just have enough money to do it on a volunteer basis. But right now, you've got to go to work and make money and feed yourself. And, like, if you can't build a search engine that makes money, the chances of it happening are very low. And it doesn't seem like many people can build it. Microsoft runs a search engine. They're a big company. They have a lot of money. They have the ability to collect a lot of data.

They have the ability to set it to be the default in wind. It is still not a good competitor to go. The thing is, I think this whole, this whole mindset, this winner take all mindset, like the mindset. I don't think it's a mindset. I think it's a fact. There's a fact, but there's also, you can set up your company in such a way that it's like, my company is designed so that my users have a great time when they pay for my product, and they suffer when they don't.

They can't watch the television shows anymore. You know, like all the, their chat bubbles change colors. You know, I need, it's not just enough that the platform, like, concept seems built around this idea. It's not just enough to offer a good thing to people. You also have to harm them if they leave you. Yeah. I mean, but I think that's like, I think that's just part of it. I don't think there's not a way, and that's what I mean by like, Wintertaic, like, I don't think there's a way for me as a consumer to send a signal to Apple that I think other watches should work with iOS.

How can I do that? Right? Like, I can't. There's nothing for me to buy that says, hey, you should make it so other watches can send eye messages and when I pair it with my phone. There's literally no way for me as an individual consumer to send that signal. So there's definitely no way I could not buy the watch. That's what I can do.

There's no way for me to send Apple a signal, hey, I value a headphone jack more than I value secure and encrypted messaging platforms. that's an insane choice. I mean, I think this is our choice with a lot of these platforms. They've offered us a lot of these free products that we were on platforms. Like, hey, look at this. This is free. And we realize very much later that it wasn't free.

Yeah, but I'm saying there's no way for me to vote with my dollars. There just isn't. Other than not buying things. Right. That is the way to vote with your dollars. But my market alternative is bad. Not getting the Apple thing. mean you automatically get what you want. It just means that Apple suffers. Right. And I don't

think that you can make them suffer an aggregate, right? Like if it's so hard for me, a very informed consumer to say, hey, I would prefer to use another watch with my phone. So I'm going to go ahead and leave this entire ecosystem and go to the platform that enables different kinds of accessories to work where I can get a phone with the headphone jack. That's a very difficult choice for me and I completely understand the tradeoffs I'm making and I still don't get end to end encrypted chat right like no there's no way the market as a whole is going to send an effective signal to Apple well and that's what these companies rely on they rely on us to be lazy and weak and therefore they can dictate our life choices to us so Paul I think we've arrived at the same place

if it's so hard to vote with your dollars then you might have to vote with your vote and that's all I'm getting at right if it's so difficult to send the market a signal by just spending money on the thing you want. So the thing you want gets better and the competitor understands that that's the reason you're leaving, then it's probably appropriate for some other corrective force in the market. Like, for example, an antitrust against an antitrust use in Microsoft that paves the way for Google to enter. That is one way to solve. I just think that in the long run, all the good things that we get with technology will be hard won.

I don't think the best thing that I ever get with technology will be the thing. that was like a five second download in like three swipes, you know? Like the best thing I get with technology will be something that I coded myself, you know, something I worked for, something that was difficult and challenging. Yeah, that's probably true as well. Everybody buy a raspberry pie. Send that signal to the market. All right, we've gone away over time.

I just want to give one update. It's coming out on Friday. This day, this moment that this podcast is coming out, is the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump going to my hometown, picking up a gold shovel. sticking it into the dirt in my hometown, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. I'm so glad it was a gold shovel. Of course it was. Yeah, that's really something.

And saying the factory that Foxcon is building here will be the eighth wonder of the world. It is now one year later. I will confidently report to you that the eighth wonder of the world has not been constructed in Racine, Wisconsin. Josh Jess has a big piece, a timeline. This thing has shrunk in size so much from eighth wonder the world to make. Maybe we're assembling servers and automotive components. I will tell you this. Foxxon has still not told us what the AI AK5G ecosystem is.

Neely, I wanted to on this special occasion, I want to provide you with an update. You have seen, well, there's, you know, the display port 2.0 spec was announced. Yeah, yeah. Which supports up to 16K. And so I think this new factory that will definitely arrive soon. It's going to make display port cables. Well, no, no, no, no. It used to be AI 8K plus 5G, but, you know, tech moves on.

Yeah. Now, there is a new buzzword that I have just discovered. Oh, God. A.I.O.T. Right? Like AI plus IOT. So. And then Trump, your favorite shovel man, has introduced the concept of 6G. So this factory may very well bring us the first. A.O.T. 16K plus 6G.

It's possible. That was just a journey, Paul. How long have you been preparing that? Yeah, it's a good troll. By the way, the AIT just leaks your security cam credentials automatically. That's all that happens there. I don't think so. I think they're going to end up building like little screens for car displays. But go read the story. Obviously, we've been tracking it forever. They have never issued us a correction.

We're like three months in now. They've never issued us a correction for our reports. The buildings they bought are empty, even they promised us one. They did file some plans for the facility they're building in Mount Pleasant. The plans include a description of the Japanese gardens are going to have, the meditation area, the gardens out front. But they don't include, we asked some consultants to look at this for us, some analysts. They said there's no fab.

like there's no LCD fab outlined in this plan. So it looks like it's just going to be an assembly factory. But read Josh's piece. It's just a timeline of how we've gone from eighth wonder of the world. And it's just scaled down. Like month after month, they have scaled down. Actually, and there was a report in the Thurisene Journal Times today that maybe the factory is even a bit more delayed than previously estimated.

But read Josh's piece. I just want to keep everyone's focus on Foxcon, I can. Not selfishly because it is my hometown, but I think that deal is so emblematic of how we're building stuff lately. Also, AK plus 5G. Or as Paul said, the Aioti-T-16K-6G. It's the worst. All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast. A big thanks to our producer, Andrew Marino, for figuring out how to edit this one. It was all over the place this week. And a sincere goodbye to Johnny Ive, who's going to party in a boat with Bono. with his perfect phone with no ports.

You know, he's gone. Yeah. It's no screen. It's just a block of aluminum. It protects your privacy perfectly. All right, that's a very fast. You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless.

Dieter's a back lawn. Paul's a future Paul. Let us know what you want to talk about next week. Just give us some feedback. We'd love it. Rate us and review us on Apple Podcast. That's where the producers ask me, because that's, I know,

that's the monopoly provider of podcasts in those days. Let's be honest. And please listen to our, why just push that button. It was their big death online. Wrap up. They did celebrity death Twitter as the worst Twitter. I was trolled in this episode, which I'm not happy about, but I'm telling you so you can go listen to it.

I think Caitlin made a lot of fun of me in this episode. That's fine. It's fine. I'm totally okay with it. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Karen and Scott Galloway. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's all in the Vox Media Podcast Network.

That's it. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Paul. Aluminium.